The Cheapside Corpse by Susanna Gregory

in?’
    Chaloner rarely took an instant liking to people, as a life in espionage had taught him that this was unwise, but he experienced an immediate partiality for Abner Coo. The surgery was a warm, comfortable place, and exuded the sense that here was somewhere a person could feel safe – as opposed to the lairs of most
medici
, which tended to reek of urine and blood, and made no bones about the fact that terrible things happened in them.
    ‘How may I help you?’ asked Coo, waving Chaloner to a chair before taking the one next to it. This was also in marked contrast to other physicians, who preferred their victims squatting submissively before them on low stools, or better yet, prostrate.
    ‘Your last patient sneezed on me,’ said Chaloner, voicing what was uppermost in his mind.
    ‘The rogue! I told him to wear a scarf. I suppose you are worried about the plague? Many folk are, but I tell them the tale of poor Dick Wheler, who was more frightened of it than the lung-rot that was killing him. But in the end neither claimed his life – he fell victim to an assassin’s blade, and all his apprehension was for nothing. Such is life.’
    ‘I do not suppose you know the assassin’s name, do you?’ asked Chaloner hopefully.
    Coo shook his head. ‘Spymaster Williamson tried to find out, but with no success.’
    ‘The Earl of Clarendon has asked me to investigate Georges DuPont’s death,’ said Chaloner, unreasonably disappointed that a solution for Wheler’s murder was not to be had so easily. ‘And I am told that you tended him before he died. Is it true?’
    Coo sighed and rubbed his eyes. ‘I wondered how long it would be before an envoy from the government arrived. I am afraid that DuPont died of the plague.’
    Chaloner stared at him. ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘Yes. I have never seen a clearer case: swellings in the armpits and groin, high fever, mottled skin, and death within hours.’
    Chaloner edged away. ‘And you tended him? I thought that anyone in contact with a victim was to be sealed up for forty days.’
    ‘That does not apply to me, because I am immune,’ explained the physician. He saw Chaloner’s scepticism. ‘I was in Venice during the last outbreak, and I stayed in the hospital the entire time. I never became ill, despite physicking hundreds of sufferers.’
    Chaloner wondered if he was immune, too, because he had tended his dying family, then looked after servants and neighbours. Nine people had breathed their last in his arms, but he had not suffered so much as a sniffle. ‘Is that possible?’
    Coo shrugged. ‘How else can you explain my continued good health in that place of death? But I have a theory about the plague: it is not propagated by a miasma, which is the current thinking on the matter, but spread by worms so small that they cannot be seen with the naked eye.’
    That notion sent a chill down Chaloner’s spine. How could people fight something they could not see? At least a miasma was visible, especially at night when it rose through the ground as a mist, stealing into houses, shops and churches. Coo’s theory was so unsettling that he did not want to dwell on it, and returned to its victim instead.
    ‘I am told that DuPont became ill in Long Acre, but died in Bearbinder Lane. It is a distance of a mile and a half. Do you know if he walked or had some kind of transport?’
    ‘He walked – and might have infected dozens as he went. But God was watching over us that day, because the disease remains confined to St Giles.’
    ‘Why did he make such a journey, knowing the risk he posed to others? Or did he not understand what was wrong with him?’
    ‘He was perfectly lucid when I broke the news. I left to fetch him some medicine, but he had gone by the time I returned. I was summoned to Bearbinder Lane a few hours later, but the disease was in its final stages and there was nothing more I could do. He died soon after my arrival.’
    ‘Did you seal up the houses he was