Читать книгу Cherry & Violet: A Tale of the Great Plague онлайн

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Among such surroundings we picture Cherry doing her simple duties, tending her mother, thinking somewhat primly of her vivacious neighbour Violet, fancying she has lost her heart for ever to poor Mark, and then waking to a heroine’s work in the horrors of the Plague, and finding through that her own bright reward.

“The Plague growing on us,” says Pepys, and of remedies “some saying one thing, and some another.” So it begins in May, and by the first week of June, “much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that to my remembrance I ever saw.” Ten days later, and as he goes in a hackney coach from the Lord Treasurer’s, his coachman is struck of a sudden “very sick and almost blind”—and journey by coach becomes “a very dangerous passage nowadays.” So it comes till there are seven hundred dying in a week, and “it was a sad noise to hear our bell to toll and ring so often either for death or burials.”