London (120 page)

The fire was coming so close that he could not stand the heat. He backed away, wondering if by some miracle she might come running out.

The mayor was relieved of his responsibility for fire control on Monday morning. The wind was strong; but the fire was so large now that it seemed to create winds of its own. Not only was it being blown right along the riverbank westward towards Blackfriars, but it was marching north, almost as fast, up the slope of the eastern hill. Early in the morning, soon after Julius had supervised the third cartload of possessions to leave the house and told his family to make themselves ready for a return to Bocton, he heard the good news that the king’s brother James, the Duke of York, had arrived in the city with a body of troops. James was a solid fellow, a naval man. Perhaps he could restore order.

Sure enough, as soon as he went out, he saw the duke’s handsome figure directing his men at the bottom of Watling Street. They were about to blow up half a dozen houses with gunpowder. He went to pay his respects.

“If we enlarge this street,” James explained to him, “perhaps we can make a firebreak.” They retreated a short way and took cover. There was a huge boom. “And now, Sir Julius,” the duke asked smilingly, “are you helping us?”

A few moments later, to his great surprise, Julius found himself with a leather helmet on his head and a fire-axe in his hand, working alongside the duke and a dozen others similarly clad, pulling down walls and timbers to make the firebreak. It was hard work and he might have been glad to stop when, glancing at another man who had just started to work beside him, he realized that there was something familiar about the big, swarthy fellow; and a moment later, with a little rush of joy and excitement, he saw that it was the king.

“Should Your Majesty be doing this?” he asked.

“Preserving my kingdom, Sir Julius!” The monarch grinned. “You know how I try to hang on to it.”

The firebreak did not work, even so. The fire’s impetus was so strong that, an hour later, it leaped the gap.

It was on Tuesday morning that the most awesome event took place. O Be Joyful watched it from the bottom of Ludgate Hill.

His own house had gone on Monday afternoon. As arranged, he had taken his little family up to Shoreditch and then remained there. News had come all the time. In the evening he heard that the Royal Exchange was in flames; at dawn he knew that St Mary-le-Bow was no more. A little later he had decided to go and see for himself. Walking down to the city gates, however, he found his way blocked. The troops would not let anyone enter. “It’s a furnace,” they told him. The open ground at Moorfields had been turned into a huge encampment for dispossessed people. He had made his way round the old walls, past Smithfield where another little camp had formed by the gates of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and so had come to Ludgate. There was a crowd of people there. He saw good Doctor Meredith who had stayed behind in the plague amongst them. All had their eyes turned up the hill, awestruck.

For St Paul’s was burning down. The huge, grey barn whose long line had hung over the city for almost six centuries; the dark old house of God which had stood sentinel on its western hill since the days of the Normans, enduring storm, lightning and the ravages of time; ancient St Paul’s was slowly crumbling before their eyes. He watched it for over an hour.

He had turned and was walking out along Fleet Street. As he was approaching the Temple, he saw a group of youths. They had backed a young fellow against a wall. It looked as if they meant to harm him. He heard one of them cry: “String him up.”

For a moment he hesitated. They were only youths, but there were a dozen of them and they looked sturdy. He crossed the street to avoid them and proceeded towards the Temple. He heard the young fellow cry out. And then stopped, ashamed.

He still had not told his family exactly what had happened to Martha. From the moment when he had backed up the burning street, he had told himself that there was nothing he could have done. So powerful was his need for this to be true that he had even managed to sleep a whole night believing it. He had still comforted himself with the belief on his way down to the city and all the way to Ludgate. But there he had seen Meredith.

Doctor Meredith, son of the preacher; Meredith who had, unlike most of his profession, stayed in London through the plague, risking his life, no doubt, scores of times. Meredith who, with no claims to any religious calling, had shown himself, in his quiet way, to be stout-hearted.

And what was he? Like an arrow penetrating armour, the question had struck through O Be Joyful’s defences, causing him a spasm of pain. Faint-hearted. Even if Martha could not have been saved, had he really tried? Hadn’t he lost courage when he ran down those stairs? And now it suddenly occurred to him: if you walk by on the other side, you prove your guilt. He turned back, and a moment later was confronting the youths.

“What has he done?” he asked. The young man himself began to respond, but the youths cut him off.

“He started the Fire of London, sir,” they cried.

Even the day before, the rumours had begun. A fire like this could not be the work of chance. Some said it must be the Dutch. But most – perhaps half the good people of London – had a sounder suspicion by far. “It’s the Catholics,” they said. “Who else would do such a thing?”

“But,” the poor boy cried in his broken English, “I am not Catholic! Am Protestant. Huguenot.”

A Huguenot. Despite Englishmen’s fear of the popish leanings of the Stuarts, to any Protestant living in Catholic France the kingdom of England had seemed a safe haven indeed. Massacred by the thousand by a pious French king in 1572, they had been protected from actual violence for a generation by the Edict of Nantes. But these devout French Calvinists were still subject to constant restrictions, and a modest but steady stream of them had come into England where they had been allowed to worship discreetly. Huguenots, they had come to be called.

The young fellow before him, O Be Joyful guessed, was not more than seventeen. He was a slim, intelligent-looking boy, with fine brown hair, but his most noticeable feature was the pair of spectacles he wore, through which he was peering short-sightedly at his assailants.

“You are Protestant?” Carpenter demanded.

“
Oui
. I swear,” the boy replied.

“But he’s a foreigner. Listen to him,” one of the boys protested. “Let’s give him something to think about.”

O Be Joyful found his courage. Stepping in front of the boy he told them firmly: “I am O Be Joyful Carpenter. My father Gideon fought with Cromwell, and this boy is of our faith. Leave him alone or fight me first.”

He would never be sure what would have happened next if a small patrol of the Duke of York’s men had not ridden into sight from St Clement Danes. Reluctantly the youths went off, and he found himself left alone with the young Huguenot.

“Where do you live?” he asked.

“Down by the Savoy, sir,” the young man replied. There was a little French Protestant community and church there, Carpenter knew. He offered to escort him back.

“You are new here?” he enquired, as they walked.

“I arrived yesterday. To live with my uncle. I am a watchmaker,” the boy volunteered.

“I see. What’s your name?”

“Eugene, sir. Eugene de la Penissière.”

“De la what?” O Be Joyful shook his head. The French name was too much for him. “I’ll never remember that,” he confessed.

“How should I be called, in English, then?” Eugene asked.

“Well,” O Be Joyful considered. The only English word that seemed anything like it was ordinary enough. “I think,” he said, “you’d do better with Penny.”

“Eugene Penny?” The young fellow considered doubtfully. Then his face brightened. “You saved my life, sir. You are a very brave man. If you say I should be called Penny.
Alors
,” he shrugged and smiled. “Penny. And how may I find you, sir, to give you my proper thanks in future?”

“No need. My home’s gone anyway. But my name is O Be Joyful Carpenter. I’m a woodcarver.”

At the Savoy, the two men parted.

“We shall meet again,” Eugene promised him. But just before turning away he said: “Those boys who wanted to kill me. They were not completely foolish.
Non
. For this fire – it was surely the work of Catholics.”

And still the fire raged. St Paul’s was gone, a huge, blackened ruin; the Guildhall, Blackfriars, Ludgate. By late Tuesday and Wednesday it even spread outside the walls, along Holborn and Fleet Street. St Bride’s was gone. Only in the open greens around the Temple did the flames meet a firebreak they could not pass. In the east, a huge break created by the Duke of York saved the Tower of London. With this and a small number of other exceptions, the old medieval city within the walls was entirely lost.

But to two people the plague and the fire brought a more inward crisis. To Doctor Meredith the plague had brought a profound sense of failure. His only role, he freely admitted, had been to comfort the dying. His medicine was useless and he knew it. The quest for medical knowledge would go on but until the time when doctors actually knew something, “I might as well try to save their souls,” he concluded. As he had watched St Paul’s burn from Ludgate he had decided. “I shall take holy orders and become a clergyman, as I first intended.” There was nothing to stop him continuing any medical studies at the same time. There would still, thank God, be the Royal Society.

Only for O Be Joyful Carpenter did the fire bring despair. For after parting from Eugene, he had not returned to his family, but walked about watching the fire; and as he did so, the boy’s words had come back to mock him. “A brave man” indeed. It was no use, he told himself, to pretend that Martha’s death had been inevitable. “I could have brought her down and saved her. Yet by my fear and cowardice I let her burn.” Was he the son of Gideon, the spiritual heir of Martha? No. He was unworthy.

And what of their vision of the shining city? What had become of that now? As the fire made its way along Fleet Street, like some powerful chariot of destruction, its crackles seemed like the grinding of huge wheels upon the road, and their message was terrible yet plain: “All gone. All destroyed. All gone.”

Medical opinion is still divided on why, after the Great Fire, the plague scarcely returned to London again. The causes of the fire similarly remained in dispute. Most Londoners believed it was the Catholics. The view of the Parliamentary Committee called to report on the Great Fire soon afterwards was more measured. The blame, it concluded with great firmness, could not be placed upon any group of men, either foreigners or even Catholics. London’s fire, it stated plainly, was an Act of God. It was God’s Fire.

ST PAUL’S

1675

The sun was catching the southern face of the strange little building on the hill. Eugene Penny waited patiently for the two men to finish their conversation. The building cast a long shadow down the green and silent slope. Far below, the Queen’s House gleamed white by the waterside at Greenwich. He wondered whether Meredith would be up there at night, gazing through the great tube at the stars. He felt a rush of embarrassment when he thought of what he had to tell the kindly clergyman, for he knew that Meredith would tell him he was mad.

Though Richard Meredith saw Eugene waiting for him, he could not easily break away, since he had a problem with Sir Julius Ducket. It was all the more irritating as he had been looking forward to the celebration of the opening of the building.

It had been especially appropriate, Meredith thought, that his friend and fellow member of the Royal Society, Sir Christopher Wren, the astronomer who had so brilliantly turned his mathematical talents to architecture, should have been the one to design the building. For the small brick, octagonal structure that now presided over the slope above Greenwich was the first of its kind in England: it was the Royal Observatory.

Strangely enough, its primary purpose was not to study the stars – though it contained a telescope of course. The main objective, as Meredith had explained to Sir Julius earlier that morning, was entirely practical.

“It’s to help our mariners,” he told him. “A sailor at present, by using a quadrant, can measure the angle of the sun at its zenith, or certain stars, and work out how far north or south he is. But what they do not know,” he continued “is how far they are to east or west – their longitude. Until now, sailors have had to make a rough guess, usually by how many days they have sailed: hardly satisfactory. Yet there is a way of discovering one’s longitude.

“For consider, Sir Julius. Each day, as the Earth makes its way round the sun – as, despite the old objections of the Roman Church we know it does – the Earth also spins. Because of this, as we know, the sun appears over the eastern horizon here in London, for instance, several minutes before it is seen in the west of England.” Indeed, so well aware of this were men that local time was a highly variable affair. Each city normally set its own clocks according to the hours of daylight, so that the western port of Bristol kept a different time from London.

“We calculate that a difference of four minutes represents one degree of longitude; an hour is fifteen degrees. So you see, if a mariner could take his own time, which he can by the sun, he has only to compare it with our time here in London to discover how far east or west of us he is.”

“If he had a clock that kept perfect London time he could do it.”

“Yes. But we haven’t discovered how to build a clock that will keep time like that at sea. However,” Meredith continued, “we can make such accurate tables of the moon’s position against the backdrop of the heavens that, by reading off his sightings in an almanac, a mariner will know what the time is, at a particular moment, in London. By comparing this standard astronomical clock, as it were, with his local time, he’ll be able to know his longitude.”

“Will it take long to complete these tables?”

“Decades, I should guess. It’s a huge task. But that’s what the Royal Observatory is for: to make a great map of all the heavenly bodies and their motions.”