That night, as the hunter lay in an alcove inside the city wall, his sleep was interrupted by screams of grief and the constant creak of cartwheels as ever more dead were taken out of the city. The next day, he awoke to find a man lying close by, eyes rolled back and skin necrotic. The hunter reached for the man’s money pouch and slipped it inside his own garment. After a moment or two, he withdrew the bag and untied it. Taking out a small golden coin, he placed it in the man’s hand and closed it.

“To pay the sexton.”

Grief followed him on his journey south. The fields around the city remained untended; carthorses waited for orders that never came, and cows grazed with no maids to milk them. Pestilence in St. Albans, in Radlett, in Stanmore. Death on the road and in the fields, a plague like those which afflicted rebel Israel on the wilderness of Sinai; an invisible foe which could not be fought. The priory in Kilburn was set away from the road, but as he passed, a stream of afflicted pilgrims staggered or crawled towards its doors, death behind and ahead of them.

The stench of Lundenwic reached him long before he arrived at the Thames, and he stepped over bodies strewn across the road, some still living. A man reached up his hand from the filth of his pus-soaked rags and the hunter took it, kneeling.

“Take me with you,” he begged, and buried his face in the fetid oil of the man’s hair, weeping.

“Take me with you.”

But no welts infected his white skin. In the months that followed as London’s wretched populace shrank, no constriction tightened his lungs; under his flesh, the dark hue that gave this new and terrible disease its name did not appear. He would live, as he would throughout the plagues that followed. Death could not touch him and he was immune to its attacks. Everyone who he encountered on the road died in the end, and there were none he cared for enough to grieve save the child he never saw, the woman who he had loved, and the man he had been.

A small voice cuts through the ugliness of bus engines and motorbikes. A tiny girl in pigtails and red boots sitting up in a buggy pushed by her father.

“I love you,” she repeats, over and again. “I love you I love you I love you I love you.”

The clown stops to look and listen. The simple joy. The envy he feels for the man who says nothing but continues pushing his daughter past the Cash Converters and the Savers supermarket, towards the theatre. He might once have had a child who might have cooed her adoration for him had he stayed, had he made one better choice. And had he picked death instead of this curse of centuries, had he been roasting in his well-deserved eternity, such would be the torment meted upon him by devils that he would have no space to grieve her.

“I love you I love you I love you I love you.”

The clown blocks his ears and looks away.