I stood exactly where I was, still not moving. My heart felt like it had just had acid thrown on it. It was burning and raw. Finally, finally, it all caught up with me. My knees gave out, and I sank to the floor. It was cold and hard against my bare skin. I drew my knees up to me and buried my face in them, wondering what I had done. Part of me screamed to go follow him, to beg him to come back, to tell him we could make love and have everything we had ever wanted. Another part, half-reason and half-pride, held me back.
It was that same part that had stopped me from going after Andrew that day back in the garden after we'd fought about the Black Death. I'd let him go and gone out of my way to avoid him after that. When the plague finally came to our town, my bishop was one of the first to leave. I went with him and the rest of our household. Just like in The Masque of the Red Death, there was no true place to hide from sickness. Still, some places were better than others, and my bishop took care to keep to the better places. He survived.
Months went by, and stories and rumors trickled in about the town we'd lived in. By that point, I'd grown weary of Geoffrey and decided it was time for me to move on. I got permission from my archdemon for a transfer to Florence and sneaked out of Geoffrey's house one night to make the long journey. Our old town was along the way, and a week later, I passed through it.
A plague town wasn't quite like what modern people might imagine. It wasn't as though there were piles of bodies lying in the streets or anything. Not always. After all, Europe had survived the Black Death in the end, and civilization had still functioned through the worst of it. Crops were still grown, houses still built, babies still born.
But the town seemed quieter and more melancholy than when I'd lived there. Andrew wasn't at the church when I stopped by, and an old man tending the grounds told me that Andrew was off helping some of his parishioners in one of the poorer districts.
I found him there, inside the home of a brewer. The brewer had a large family—eight children—as well as a couple of brothers living with him. The house was small and cramped and filthy. Everyone in it was sick except for the brewer's wife who wearily tried to help Andrew take care of her family.
'Cecily?' he asked in astonishment when he saw me. He was kneeling by a teenage boy. Something inside my chest blossomed with both joy and relief. Andrew was alive. He'd stayed, fought disease, and won.
I strode forward and knelt beside him. The wife, giving water to a small girl, watched me uneasily. I wasn't in silk or anything, but I was clearly from a different class than theirs, and she didn't entirely know how to treat me.
'You're alive,' I breathed. 'I've been so worried. So worried I'd never see you again.'
He smiled that gentle smile of his, and I saw more lines around his eyes than I'd seen before. 'God didn't want to separate us quite yet,' he said.
I looked down at the boy. I'd figured Andrew was feeding him or something, but I realized then that the priest was actually giving him last rites. The boy wore no shirt, and I could see on his neck and in his armpits the tell-tale dark pustules that had given the plague its name. The plague usually did what it was going to do in about a week, but from his emaciated look, you would have thought he'd been dying for years. His eyes were fever-bright, and I didn't know if he even knew we were there.
Bile rose in my throat, and I averted my eyes. Standing up, I told Andrew, 'I'll let…I'll let you finish this and wait outside.' I left the house, going out to where it was warm and things weren't dying.
A while later, Andrew found me. I didn't ask if the boy was still alive. Instead, I said, 'How many of them live? Out of all the ones you stay and risk your life for, how many of them actually survive?'
He shrugged. 'Three-quarters. Sometimes half, if they're very young or very old.'
'Half,' I repeated flatly. 'That's not very good.'
'If one more person lives because of me, then that's very good.'
I looked at that confident, serene face and sighed. 'You're so damned frustrating.'
He smiled. I sighed again.
'What can I do to help?'
The smile disappeared. 'Don't make light of this, Cecily.'
'I'm not. Tell me what to do.'
And that was how I found myself playing nurse in a small town in backwoods England. Honestly, there wasn't anything glamorous one could do to fight the plague. It was all about basics, keeping the people clean and supplied with as much food and water as they could take in. The rest was in the hands of their immune system and—if you believed Andrew—God. When my patients began declining past the point of no return, I usually stopped helping. I couldn't stand to watch and left them to Andrew and his prayers.
But sometimes I'd see people come back around, people whom I'd given up on, and then I could almost believe there was a higher power at work. At least, I believed that until Andrew got sick.
It started slowly at first, a fever and aches, but we both knew what that meant. He ignored it and kept working until the symptoms began compounding. Finally, he couldn't fight it. Neglecting my other patients, I devoted myself fully to him.
'You should help others,' he told me one day. His skin was pink and blotchy, and he was starting to get the dark spots around his lymph glands. Through all the sickness and fatigue, he was still beautiful to me. 'Don't worry about me.'
'I have to worry about you. No one else is.' It was true. Andrew had helped so many, but no one had come to his side, despite the fact that plague survivors tended not to catch it again.
'It doesn't matter,' Andrew told me, voice frail. 'I'm glad they've survived.'
'You will too,' I said obstinately, even though the signs were starting to suggest otherwise. 'You have to go on so you can keep doing your annoying good works.'
He managed a smile. 'I hope so, but I think my time in this world may be drawing to a close. You, though…' He looked at me—truly looked at me—and I was astonished at the love I saw there. I knew he'd been attracted to me, but I'd never expected this. 'You, Cecily…you won't get sick. You will go on, strong and healthy and beautiful. I can feel it. God loves you.'
'No,' I said sadly. 'God hates me. That's why he lets me keep living.'
'God only gives us tasks he knows we can handle. Here, take this.' He touched the gold cross around his neck, but he was too weak to take it off. 'Take it when I'm gone.'
'No, Andrew, you won't—'
'Take it,' he repeated in as firm a voice as he could manage. 'Take it, and whenever you see it, remember that God loves you and knows that no tragedy you face is ever too much for you to bear. You are strong. You will endure.'
Hot tears spilled down my cheeks. 'You shouldn't have done this,' I told him. 'You shouldn't have helped them. You would've lived if you hadn't.'
He shook his head. 'Yes, but then I wouldn't have been able to live with myself.'
Andrew lingered a few more days after that. I stayed with him, but every moment of it was agony. I hated watching what happened to him and was more convinced than ever that there really was no benevolent power looking after humans.
He died peacefully and quietly, much as he'd lived. Another priest came to administer last rites when it happened, and Andrew's final conscious moments reflected hope and absolute faith in what would come next. I stayed to make sure the funeral arrangements were taken care of, not that there was much fanfare or anything. There were no viewings or fancy funeral halls in those days—at least not for men like him.
I soon left England for the continent, and after a while, the pain of his death began to take on a new form. Oh, I still missed him—still burned and ached and felt like part of me had been ripped away. But added to that, guilt was starting to create a pain of its own. I felt like I should have taken better care of him. I should have insisted on him leaving with me when the plague came. Or maybe I should have gotten my hands dirtier while helping him tend the sick; it might have kept him away from whomever had infected him.
Florence was a beautiful city, on the verge of the Renaissance when I got there. Yet even while living amongst all that splendor and art, Andrew's death tormented me for many years, the pain of guilt and missing him digging into my heart. It never entirely went away, but it did lessen—it just took a really, really long time. As Hugh had said, a long life simply means having more time to mourn.
