Even one as strong in spirit as John Harvard needed the strengthening of a small prayer before he could step into the street in that season of death.

And the sight that greeted him was more fearful than any death cart. It was his father, staggering toward him, eyes wide and glassy, body hunched in pain.

“John!” cried Robert Harvard. “Help me. Help me. I burn.”

“Aye, John. Help him,” growled the gravedigger. “But come not into the street again, ‘cept to bring out your dead. Once the pestilence be on your house, you must stay till it leave. Tis the law.”

John turned quickly from the black-shrouded figure and led his father up the alley.

“Oh, Rob,” cried Katherine as they came in the door, “we are …Good God!”

Robert reached toward her, and a stream of vomit shot from his mouth.

* * *

John Harvard did what he could to comfort his family, then stuffed more rosemary into his nose, said a prayer for strength, and went out again. If the plague was soon to take him, he would see St.

Saviour’s and the face of Rector Morton once more, no matter the laws, for no man-made law would stop what God wished otherwise.

He moved quickly through death-gripped Southwark. The ringing of the bells and the cries of the gravediggers could be heard on every corner, as if this were some black festival. Guards with fearsome pikes and frightened faces stood outside the Globe Theater and the Bear Gardens, both closed to keep people from congregating. Men lay dead in the gutters, their plaguey sores a feast for the rats. In Clink Street, the corpses were piled before the gates of the prison like kitchen slops. But the Winchester geese, the Southwark whores, had all flown, rents to the bishop be damned.

Soon enough, John Harvard arrived at St. Saviour’s. He took a pew in the same small chapel where he had been baptized, and he began to pray.

“Why, John!” cried Rector Nicholas Morton at the sight of him.

“The plague be on your house. You must go home. Tis the law.”

“I come to pray, sir, to understand God’s purpose in sendin’ a plague.”

“You have only to read your Holy Scripture to know.” Morton peered from across the room, as if to make sure that no signs of the infection were yet upon John Harvard. “Why should God treat sinful London different than he treat the Egyptians?”

“But we have not enslaved the Israelites.”

“We have enslaved ourselves, John, to vain amusement, to Whitsuntide revel, to pomp and arrogance that mask corruption. Reason enough to incur God’s displeasure.”

“But my parents? They be good Christians. Why does this happen to them?”

“I know not. Though there be some in the church who would say that your father’s friendship with actors and the like was … was too frivolous.”

“Will Shakespeare worshiped in these very pews, sir. He was a faithful friend.”

“I said some in the church, John. Not all.”

John looked up at the stained-glass windows of the chapel.

“There are some in the church who would say that even the colors in that glass be too frivolous for worship.”

Rector Morton now slipped into the pew, pulled a few sprigs of rosemary from his pocket, and waved them as if to ward off a bad smell. “You aspire to Emmanuel College at Cambridge, do you not, John?”

“Yes, sir.” John took comfort, as always, in the round, solid presence of the rector, despite the waving herbs.

” ‘Tis high ambition for a tradesman’s son to attend any college,” said Morton, “and for certain a college given to producing men who would purify our ritual and bring preciseness to the manners of this world.”

“I’m aware of it, sir, and if this plague pass over me, I’ll shoulder it.”

“And I’ll speak for you.” Morton clasped the boy’s forearm. “But remember … at Emmanuel, men of wisdom see the works of Shakespeare and his ilk as tools of the devil, glorifications of man’s vanity, his passions, his appetites, all the things that lead us toward sin. Do you understand?”

“I believe so, sir.”

“Then turn your mind to higher things. In them will you find the answer to your hardest questions… . Now, a prayer for all the Harvards.”

 

Whatever the prayer, it was not answered.

Just after sundown, a delegation of bishop’s men did as the law prescribed.