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He was aroused by hearing the ringing of a bell, which announced the approach of the dead-cart, and presently afterwards the gloomy vehicle approached from Ludgate-hill, and moved slowly towards the portico of the cathedral, where it halted. A great number of the dead were placed within it, and the driver, ringing his bell, proceeded in the direction of Cheapside.
As he spoke an upper window was opened, and a woman, thrusting forth her head, cried, "Poor Master Sandys has just breathed his last. Come in, Philip, and help me to prepare the body for the dead-cart." "I will be with you in a minute," rejoined the watchman. "You may possibly procure accommodation at the Wheatsheaf at Paddington," he added to Leonard; "it is but a short distance up the road."
It seems, the night before, the dead-cart, as it was called, had been stopped there, and a servant-maid had been brought down to the door dead, and the buriers or bearers, as they were called, put her into the cart, wrapt only in a green rug, and carried her away.
The corpses laid by the roadside waiting for the dead-cart, their glaring eyes turned to heaven, the flies swarming in their mouths, their big-toes tied together with a cotton string, and their skeleton arms folded on their breasts.
She wrung her hands with a sort of cry. "Oh! I know, I know; they have put her in the dead-cart, and buried her in the plague-pit. O my dear, sweet young mistress." "If you had stayed by your dear, sweet young mistress, instead of running screaming away as you did, it might not have happened," said La Masque, in a tone between derision and contempt.
There is no lying in the street at such a time as this; we had as good go into the dead-cart at once. Therefore I say, if we stay here we are sure to die, and if we go away we can but die; I am resolved to be gone. Thomas. You will go away. Whither will you go, and what can you do? I would as willingly go away as you, if I knew whither. But we have no acquaintance, no friends.
"It would have been interesting," Thorndyke remarked as we passed up Aldgate High Street, "to have put one's finger into His Majesty's pituitary fossa after his decease, of course. By the way, here is Harrow Alley; you remember Defoe's description of the dead-cart waiting out here, and the ghastly procession coming down the alley."
In many instances, the people were so distracted with grief and fear that they ran about the house like mad persons, crying and screaming, running in and out of the sick chamber, or sitting there crying helplessly, and refusing to leave the body until it was carried out to the dead-cart.
What is the matter? The person answered, 'What is that to you? Stop the dead-cart. This, it seems, was about one o'clock. Soon after, as the fellow said, he stopped the dead-cart, and then knocked again, but nobody answered.
Every morning those who had died during the night were collected by the prisoners and laid in rows by the prison gate, where, during the day, they were piled upon the dead-cart and borne out to the trenches. There was no hope of relief for the living, and each prisoner looked forward with indifference to his inevitable fate. Above them floated the Rebel flag.
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