Fire (33 page)

The taller man shook his head. ‘The parishes have received the instructions amongst many others and there is yet so much to be done. But the authorities are concerned that when the prisons burned down, most of the prisoners escaped. They will be tracked down. Murderers, thieves –'

‘Debtors,' finished Coke. ‘Well, we shall see now if there is still one debt to honour. At least Isaac has disclaimed his, now he is fully recovered.'

The streets they passed through first had not been touched by
the fire, the cataclysm being evident only in more people being about, with refugees having found shelter where they could. As they proceeded further east, though, the signs were there – in an occasional burnt-out shell where a house had stood before a wind-borne spark had fired it. And as soon as they stepped from under the eaves of narrow Magpie Yard and onto the wider road at its end, a very different sight appeared.

Fetter Lane, running north–south, was the westernmost boundary of the great fire. Behind them, most houses still stood; before them – hardly any did. They all regarded the devastation, and even the chattering children were struck silent. The sight Coke and Sarah had seen from Highgate was even grimmer close to, with smoke still curling from a thousand scorched cellars, and charred timbers leaning together like a fleet wrecked by fireships. Yet not everything was the uniform black of soot. Everywhere, different things had been consumed, leaving their residue – grey from the riven and calcified stones, red from powdered brick. As far as any could see, multi-hued dirt had settled over the city like a thick and filthy blanket. Everywhere, people moved upon it like fleas, seeking, beginning to clear – and to extinguish further flames. The main fire may have been put out, but even within their sight they could see a dozen smaller fires, with men clustered about them.

It was not a wilderness any would choose to walk through. But both men had tried and failed to dissuade their families.

‘Come then,' the big man called and led the way. Their destination wasn't far, though the way to it took time as they had to go around the jumble of the streets, the remains of pulled-down houses, the remnants of lives lived within them. The children fell
upon items with delight – here a scorched poppet, there a partially melted glass figurine – and were commanded to put them down. Another game could not be stopped – the constant dancing that was required to walk over ground still glowing with embers.

Yet when they reached their destination, all fell silent, aware of the attention of the two men upon what was before them, and that of the two women who joined them.

‘Well,' said Coke, unable to say more.

The house he'd bought for Sarah was, like all the others around it, a gutted shell. Most of the brick had withstood the flames, though the back wall had collapsed and the roof joists had burned and fallen in. Because it had been unoccupied, the dirt and soot within was a uniform black: no possessions, no wall hangings, no tapestries had dissolved, no glass lay melted on the floor. But it was a ruin nonetheless.

‘Door arch stands, husband,' said Sarah at his elbow, an eyebrow raised. ‘Do you still wish to carry me over the threshold?'

He was prevented from replying by the children's shrieks. He looked to where they pointed – and indeed a monster did appear to be emerging, as covered with soot as Coke had been only days before.

‘Bastards,' the apparition muttered. ‘Bloody –' The man ceased speaking when he saw them. ‘Your pardon, sirs. Ladies,' he said, taking off his hat which let fall yet more dust as he did. ‘I did not see you there. In sooth, I have little sight for anything but my,' he looked back, ‘disaster.'

‘Yours, sir?' said Coke. ‘How so?'

The man looked to spit, noted the women again, and thought better of it. ‘This house, sir, and the three each side of it – my
father and I built them and they were near complete before the fire. Now –' This time he did not withhold the spit. Wiping his mouth, he continued, ‘The worst of it is that not only did my father die in the flames, they took all our records too.'

For some reason, Pitman felt that the man looked sadder about the latter loss than the former, a feeling confirmed when he murmured a condolence.

‘Aye well, by his belief he is in a far happier place now. His new Jerusalem. For 'e was one of those, whatcha-ma-call-'ems. Saints!' He spat again. ‘But the bastard's gone and left me in his old bloody Jerusalem.'

‘I take it,' said Coke, ‘that you are not of his beliefs?'

‘Nay, despite how often 'e tried to impress them on my arse with a switch. Apologies, ladies,' he said, not looking sorry at all, as the children giggled. ‘But it 'as been a trying time,' he added with a sigh.

‘Sir,' said Coke. ‘I am sorry for your troubles. And I hesitate to add to them. But you are standing in my house.'

‘Yours? Are you –?' he pulled out a small, black leather notebook, ‘Coke? William Coke?'

‘I am.'

‘Ah.' The man scratched at his chin, letting fall more dirt. ‘And I suppose you'll be wanting me to rebuild this for ye?' He swallowed at Coke's silence. ‘Did you pay my father the joist money?'

Coke thought of the forty guineas he had not paid because of the conspiracy this man's father and his saintly friends had caught him in. He thought of the results of that: of the fireship; of Sarah giving birth in the Poultry Compter; all that he could have lost.
But he let none of those thoughts show on his face. There was a reason that he usually won at cards. ‘I did indeed.'

Somewhere under the blackness, the man paled. He looked down. ‘I see. Well, the contracts burned, of course, so –' he muttered, then shook his head and raised it. ‘Nevertheless. I will honour what my father promised you. It may take me a little time –' He straightened up. ‘But if you will give me that, I will finish the 'ouse for you.'

Coke turned to Sarah. For a moment they just looked at each other. Then she shook her head.

It was what he hoped. Turning back, he said, ‘No, sir. We no longer want it.'

‘I see.' The man looked dismayed. ‘Then you'll be wanting your money back. Twenty for the signing, and forty for the joist? I could fight you in court, say you must have this 'ouse or nothing.' He shrugged. ‘But that was my father's way, not mine. I'll pay you back if, again, you will but give me the time.'

Not so long before, and if he'd met the man upon a highway, Coke would have happily taken sixty guineas from him over a gun's muzzle. But the man was not his father. And, like so many that week in London, he had lost enough. ‘I'll tell you what, Master Tremlett. When you sell the house again, you may send me twenty guineas back. The other forty – perhaps I will call upon you for that also, someday, when your fortunes are quite re-established.'

‘Sir! Oh, sir!' the man's smudged face showed a little white with a smile. ‘That is most 'andsome. Most 'andsome. I can see you are a gentleman.'

‘On occasion.' He nodded. ‘Good fortune from the rubble, Mr Tremlett.'

As they walked away, Sarah took his arm. ‘ “Most 'andsome”,' she echoed, in perfect mimicry. ‘And most 'onest too, my 'usband.'

‘Almost,' laughed Pitman, coming up. ‘Though I admit surprise, Captain. For a highwayman you have some scruples.'

‘Former highwayman. And a family man now. I must set my son an example.' He reached to run a fingertip down the babe's forehead, then sighed. ‘Though as a family man I worry how I will provide.'

‘Why, William,' said Pitman, stopping, ‘we talked of this before. All those prisoners running free? They must be taken again. And I suspect that all their former rewards will be offered, or close to.' He threw his arms wide. ‘Indeed, I believe we are entering the golden age of thief-taking.'

There was general laughter, while Coke pulled at his moustache. ‘I suppose something good should come out of all we have been through.'

‘Aye.' The thief-taker smiled. ‘You know what is said: ‘ 'Tis an ill wind that blows nobody some good.'

‘And what book of the Bible is that from?' asked Sarah.

‘Nay, 'tis only a common proverb,' said Bettina, taking her husband's arm. ‘Though you'd think it was scripture, Pitman is so given to quoting it.'

‘Just as long as it is not from Revelation,' said Captain Coke. He looked beyond them all, to the devastated city. ‘For I think we've had quite enough apocalypse. Don't you?'

A
s with my last novel,
Plague,
about the great pestilence of 1665, so with this one: I only had vague schoolboy knowledge of the Great Fire of London. Research opened my eyes and imagination to the horrors of the cataclysm that swept the city from the early hours of 2nd September 1666 to its conclusion four days later.

London is my city. Son of a Londoner, if I was not myself born there I grew up there. I love it and the longer I am away from it, the more I feel the need to write about it – my last three novels have been set in the city. I know it well – perhaps better than most because after school my ‘gap year', 1974–5, was spent there as a motorcycle messenger. Based in a Soho that was still very much ‘sin city', I learned all sorts of interesting things. The naive schoolboy grew up fast. And learning meant getting to know my way about London really well. We were paid per ride, so the faster you could finish one…this led to a deep knowledge of alleys and cut-throughs, not all of them strictly legal. It also led to a lasting distrust of black-cab drivers who appeared hell-bent on eliminating messengers as a species.

Somehow I survived. And at the end of 1975, I went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama to train as an actor. First based just off Fleet Street, we then opened what would become the Barbican Arts Centre. So I studied in the very heart of what had been devoured by flames. Alas, I was too up myself as a budding thespian to pay much attention to all the history around me. And though not much remains of Restoration London – destroyed by that fire and by the second ‘Great Fire' of 1940 when Hitler tried to burn the city down – I kick myself now that I didn't spend more time absorbing what survived. But it is still there and gives me every excuse to return and research the city I love.

All my novels are very personal to me. My life inevitably creeps in. And I do have one ‘fire' event, one of my earliest and clearest childhood memories: waking up in our house in Los Angeles, joining my mother at a back window. ‘What's that?' I asked, staring up at a huge column of smoke, coiling from the Hollywood Hill. ‘Fire,' she replied. It was the start of the Bel Air Fire of 1961. We were evacuated, excitingly we spent a couple of nights at a motel, and the flames passed within four hundred yards of our house. Hardly Cheapside in 1666 but…

I also included two very personal stories – to do with birth. Sarah saves her baby's life when she recognises that the skin over his face is a ‘caul' – the amniotic sac that sometimes gets stuck over a newborn's face – and rips it off to let him breathe. Just as my grandmother did to save my mother. And Sarah hearing her husband's laugh in her son's first cry? My mother always claimed she knew me straightway because she heard her father's laugh in my initial wail.

Telling the story from multiple viewpoints – heroes and
villains – allowed me to encompass a fairly wide chunk of the Fire's extraordinary detail. And I was most fortunate to find, in a second-hand bookstore in Hampstead and just when I needed it, ‘the' book. There always seems to be one that arrives at the right time, and though I'd read a couple of others, perfectly good in their own way, none came close to the massively detailed handling of the subject I discovered in
The Great Fire of London
by Walter George Bell, first published in 1923. Mr Bell not only gave a superb pre-Fire study of the city, but he also filled the pages with anecdotes and characters, gleaning the best of all the observers at the time, distilling Evelyn and Pepys but above all taking me street by street, church by church, hour by hour through the four days and the aftermath, in prose always clear and witty. And he made me smile often. (‘One mistrusts a versifier,' he said of the dramatic poetry of one fellow on the destruction.)

One fact puzzled him as it does me: the death toll. The official death-roll, in the Bills of Mortality, was six. Six, of which the first and most reported was Thomas Farriner's maid! This seems impossible given the speed and totality of destruction and is disputed by many. It seems more an error in addition, or a deliberate under-reporting. Evelyn certainly disagreed, testifying to the stench of so many bodies coming from the ruins.

One myth that people always bring up when I tell them what I'm writing is: ‘Oh, but the Fire was a good thing in one way because it got rid of the filth that the plague-carrying rats thrived in.' Uh, no. Though black rats love dirt, it was not its absence that diminished them but the growing strength of their cousin, the brown rat. This relative newcomer breeds in a shorter amount of time. It outbred the black, killed them all, replaced them…and
the brown rat doesn't host the plague flea that did the actual infecting. The Stranglers were quite right to celebrate this hitherto unsung hero in their album
Rattus Norvegicus.

Ah, London! Whatever its tribulations in whatever period, it always rebounds, stronger than it was before. And I shall keep returning to it, in body as often as I may, and certainly in my novels.

C. C. Humphreys, July 2016

Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada

A
s ever, so many people have helped hugely in this endeavour. Since
Fire
is a loose sequel to
Plague,
nearly all those I already owe a debt to are still aboard with the publishers on both sides of the pond. In the UK, there's the wonderful team headed by Selina Walker at Century; Georgina Hawtrey-Woore, who became my main editor for reasons explained below; and Kate Raybould, who saw the manuscript through to the conclusion. In Canada, at Doubleday, I am still well taken care of by my publisher Kristin Cochrane, by perspicacious Amy Black and by super publicist Max Arambulo.

I had one sad parting during the process: Nita Pronovost, the editor I so enjoyed working with on
Plague,
decamped to another publisher just after she gave me my first set of notes. I missed her, but benefited hugely from her final thoughts.

My family – wife Aletha and son Reith – were as always most supportive and forgiving of eccentricities. Yelling ‘Fire!' rather than ‘Plague!' in the middle of the night made for a nice change. And this while Aletha was busy opening our new venture: Café
Talia on Salt Spring Island. Yes, on top of plying a quill I can now draw a fine latte. (Though I mainly do the dishes.)

Lastly, I'd especially like to thank the man to whom this book is dedicated, my agent, Simon Trewin of WME. Simon not only handles all the business side with aplomb, allowing me to write for a living, he is also a great brainstormer of ideas.
Plague
and
Fire
would not be here without his sudden flashes of inspiration. I have no doubt he will continue to keep me and mine fed for the foreseeable future – no mean trick in the turbulent world of publishing.

To these, and all my readers who give me such strong feedback, many thanks.