The Red Plague Affair

Interregnum: Londinium, Plagued

First a tickle,

then a choke,

then the red rose

lays a bloke.

The first few cases were ignored. A vast mass seething in rookeries in several districts – the Eastron End, hard by Southwark but not within the confines of the Black Wark, Whitchapel, Spitalfields – swallowed the tiny bits of poison whole, and the drops altered the composition of the ocean. They first complained of a cough, red roses blooming in their cheeks like consumption’s deadly flower – and within hours came the swelling. If the boils burst, blood and sourpink pus exploding as eyelids fluttered over their red-sheened eyes, the sufferer might recover. But if the convulsions started before the boils burst, a winding-sheet was needed.

At first it was called the Johnny-dances, for the convulsions. Then the Red Rose, for the flush in the cheeks, and the Hack, for the thick, chesty coughs. And the sweetbriar sickness, for the sugary smell of the sufferers’ sweat. But after a little while, it was simply known as the Red. You caught the Red, hung the Red, danced the Red.

Ships sailed that eve with weakened, coughing sailors; those who were not buried at sea vanished in teeming ports that soon bloomed with deadly roses on hollow cheeks. The Red was a promiscuous mistress. She hopped the backs of gentlemen and hevvymancers alike, and they danced out their deaths in dosshouses and townhouses. Physickers shook their heads in puzzlement, and were often dead as their patients a day later.

And sorcerers fell ill. Some diseases passed the ætheric brethren by, but the Red was not one. In their bodies the Red made illogical sorcery explode in strange ways – one sprouted pinkish fungal growths, screaming as they ruptured his skin, another’s body turned to a patchwork of red glass as ætheric force and blood twisted together in an oddly beautiful pattern. Usually so fortunate, the ætherically blessed found the Red invariably fatal.

And some whispered it was only fitting.

Where did it come from? None knew. Charms were no good against it, even those who could afford Mending died under the Red’s lash. Some said it was a judgement from on high, others that it was a consequence of Progress and the filthy conditions of the rookeries and slums of every large city, some few that it was an illness from the hot, newly conquered parts of the globe.

Only the dead did not speculate. They mounted in piles, and Londinium for the first time in centuries heard the corpsepickers’ ancient cry during times of disaster: “Bring out your dead!” The stigma of corpsepicking vanished, for their habit of taking valuables from the dead lost its impetus once there was a glut of said rags and shinies in the shops that would take such traffic. Instead, they carted the creaking barrows full of twisted limbs, and their cheery singing, interspersed with deep chest-coughs, was the sound of nightmare angels.

It was a corpsepicker’s duty to sing, while he carted. And on the Red danced, over the bodies of her victims. She bloomed like the reddest rose of the Tuyedor’s device. She grew rank and foul, and there was no cure.