78 • Confusioning illnesses and prescribing treatments for neighbors and friends of the gen-
try, who could easily have afforded a doctor of “physick.” “My mother doth
believe Your Honors study and practice in physicke is above our doctors,” a
worried friend of Lucy’s pleaded. The local physician was “good and profi-
ciente,” she admitted, but none of his pharmaceutical pastes, powders, and
pills had done anything for the suspected palsy. No one but the countess
could put the sick woman and her worried daughter at ease.^5
Jacques chose his words about Jane Clifton’s condition carefully: “She is
very full,” he said of the rash, “but great hopes she may recover.” This was en-
couraging, considering the risks of disfigurement and death from this mal-
ady. But the next lines were not so calming. “Sir Gervas and his family are re-
moved into Holborn,” he said, adding “this [smallpox] and the [common]
feavour are much in towne.” Jacques was admitting that not one, but two dis-
eases had become epidemic in London.
This mention of the common fever’s running rampant in the capital surely
caught the countess’s attention. Fevers, she knew, could progress into spotted
fever and plague. If the pestilence had suddenly returned to London after
several years’ absence, that would explain the precipitous flight of Sir Ger-
vas’s family far better than smallpox, which Jane Clifton had clearly con-
tracted but recovered from quickly with no sign of infecting the rest of the
family. And if it was plague they were running from, High Holborn (just
west of Newgate and home to members of the legal profession and other
substantial citizens) offered a temporary safe haven while Jane regained her
strength and her family prepared to move farther out of harm’s way.
Jacques wrote his letter on April 25 , a Tuesday. For the past fortnight the
searchers in the metropolitan area had been reporting a surge in fatalities
from the simple fever and spotted fever. When the printed Bill of Mortality
came out that Thursday, it listed the two plague fatalities in Saint Giles in
the Fields. Across London Bridge John Allin heard the news before it was
official. Perhaps Gervase Jacques knew in advance from his city contacts or
Lord Loughborough at the royal court.
Two weeks passed before Jacques picked up his pen again.^6 Whitsuntide
was just five days off, and he was full of entertaining news for Lady Lucy and
gossip for Earl Theophilus as titular head of the family. Foreign ambassadors
were filing into Whitehall with their credentials and falling all over them-
selves to impress the king, Jacques chortled. The best court news, however,
was a splendid funeral at the Abbey for the chief justice, Sir Robert Hyde,
who had died suddenly of apoplexy. Jacques described the hundred carriages
bearing bishops, high justices, and peers that had followed red-coated her-