A Murder at Rosamund's Gate by Susanna Calkins

with heaping buckets of waste, instead of throwing everything out the window as servants had been doing for many centuries.
    As she waited, Lucy gazed into the dirty fog. The Fumifugium. She rolled the word around on her tongue, tasting its full acridity. John Evelyn’s word, she heard the master say the other night at supper. The word could only begin to evoke the disgusting cloud of smoke that ever rose from the city’s chimneys and became mired in London’s ever-present fog. All she knew was that the putrid smoke felt like a murderer, stealing among the Londoners, clouding their lungs, taking their breath, and pilfering lives. Or at least that’s what Evelyn had said.
    Finally Bessie came out, her face paling as she caught a whiff of the stench. She plopped down heavily on the stoop, without a word of greeting. Lucy could see sweat beading across her forehead, and her face seemed unnaturally pale and waxy, despite two blotches of red on either cheek. She looked ill.
    Lucy’s mind flashed to something Missus Gray had gossiped about the other day. “Something troublesome is going on, down by Drury Lane. A strange sickness, ‘distemper’ they’re calling it. Bah. Whoever died from distemper?” At the other women’s encouraging clucks, Missus Gray added, “I ask you this: Would that explain the bodies being carted out at night? Would it explain the dogs’ howling?”
    “What say the magistrate, Mary?” Mistress Vane had pressed Cook. “Do you know?”
    Cook and Lucy had exchanged glances. They knew what the magistrate thought, but neither spoke. Several houses in Drury Lane, a few miles away from their home, had been quarantined by a fellow magistrate, but according to Master Hargrave, probably not nearly the number that should have been.
    Indeed, Lucy had heard him tell the mistress, “The Bills of Mortality have been reporting an unprecedented number of deaths in Drury Lane, but there may be many more. The problem is, families are trying to hide their marks of infection from the law and may be dumping bodies in other parts of the city.” Here he had looked sternly around the family, his gaze taking in the servants. “There may well be plague upon us, but it is our duty not to start a panic.”
    Without thinking, Lucy felt Bessie’s head anxiously for fever, but it was cool. “I guess you don’t have the plague.”
    “Plague? What? No. I’m all right.” Bessie wiped her mouth. Glancing down the street, she pointed at a man slowly bringing a cart up the street. “Look, here’s the raker. I’ll be back.”
    Bessie did not come back outside, though. Lucy had to heave the filth from the tubs into the cart by herself. She noted with disgust that the cart was leaking excrement onto the street. “So much for improved city cleanliness,” Lucy commented to no one.
    Returning inside, she found Bessie drinking some water from the kitchen pail. Sweat had drenched the back of her muslin dress. Without saying anything, Bessie left to attend to Mistress Hargrave. Sighing, Lucy poured sand across the stone floor of the kitchen, for Cook had asked her to scour the floor after breakfast.
    *   *   *
    Lucy had finished the floor and started on preparing dinner when Lucas came into the kitchen a short time later, whistling a catchy tune. He plopped himself at the other end of the bench, watching as Lucy pared potatoes with a knife. Peering hopefully into one of the iron bowls cooling on the table, he spoke.
    “Dear Lucy, will you give a poor lad something to eat? Just a small bite?”
    Lucy tossed him a carrot from one of the wood baskets lining the kitchen’s ample shelves. “Here, eat this.”
    Making a face, Lucas nonetheless bit down on the carrot. “I thought you had a heart. I’m beginning to believe you don’t care about me at all. I’ve not had a bite to eat all day.”
    “As I would wager it is just ten in the morning, I feel none too sorry for you or your clamoring belly. Besides, you should