All night, and into the morning, we pulled down houses along Watling Street and Distaff Lane, trying to create a large enough firebreak in front of the cathedral. Exhausted men snatched a few minutes of sleep when and where they could, often on the bare ground. And all the while, a stream of people and carts passed us, fleeing the ruins of the City and the vast bow of fire that still advanced across London, with no sign of abating. Some folk cried that they had already moved their goods two or three times, as each supposed place of safety, well to the west of the blaze, was engulfed in its turn as the relentless flames advanced. And now it was day-in-night, just as it had been night-in-day when the smoke blotted out the September sun. Midnight was as bright as any summer’s noontime. It was hot, and breathing was difficult. I had been in western Africa, during my command of the Seraph, and I had served many months in the Mediterranean Sea, so I knew such conditions well enough. Several times that night, as my senses twisted around due to lack of sleep, I thought myself back off the coast of Algiers, or far up the Gambia River.
There were endless reports of the progress of the Fire, through the Monday and into Tuesday. The Guildhall had perished. Cheapside, the greatest highway in London, was ablaze, Lombard Street already gone. Bankers by the score were said to be ruined, and some men smiled at this. But only the very rich could now afford to hire carts in London. What had cost ten shillings three days before now fetched a price of fifty pounds, the carters seizing the opportunity of a lifetime with both avaricious hands. Although its eastward advance was much slower, into the teeth of the gale, the fire was said to be only two or three hundred yards short of the Tower, and that meant the Navy Office, the ordnance store, and the Smithfield victualling yard, were all under immediate threat. If they burned, our fleet could not keep the sea. I thought of ordering my men there, to do what we could in the east, but we would never be able to work our way through the stationary rivers of humanity trying to escape down every road, lane and alleyway heading north or west. And in my heart, I knew I had to stay within range of Ravensden House, in case the fire threatened it. Threatened my brother, my wife, and my unborn child.
And all the while, a constant backdrop, there were the shouts, at once angry and terrified.
‘The French are landed at Dover! Beaufort is marching on London at this very minute!’
‘Seize the Dutch! Hang every last one of ’em!’
‘A Papist’s throwing fireballs into an apothecary’s in Leadenhall! Constables!’
‘God’s righteous judgement upon a sinful nation for bringing back the fornicator Charles Stuart.’
‘I tell you, a dozen French Jesuits were seen in Pudding Lane as the fire began!’
‘Don’t trust the Life Guards – they answer to the Papist Duke of York!’
I tried to shut my mind to it all. Cornelia and Captain Ollivier had escaped the wrath of the mob, if only barely, but how many innocents were being assaulted – perhaps murdered – all across London, simply because they were born Dutch or French? And knowing the indiscriminate rage of the English all too well, I wondered how many Germans and Swedes were being mistaken for Dutch, or Spaniards and Portuguese for French.
Instead, I applied myself to the handle of a water pump, directing a jet onto a blazing house at the Saint Maudlin’s end of the Old Change. Martin Lanherne and a party of Sceptres were with me, Francis having gone to see if he could save something from Saint Margaret Moses on Pissing Lane, where his mother had been baptised, before the church was consumed by the flames. Every bone in my body ached. My right arm was numb with pain from the knife wound. I longed for sleep. Yet somehow, I kept myself working the pump, the only way by which I could drive out the images in my head. The fires of London, and of Brandaris, and of the ships in the Vlie, all merging into one, spreading across the map of Europe, then burning the entire world.
I was barely aware of the tall man at my shoulder, or of his companion, standing to his left.
‘We will relieve you here, Sir Matthew Quinton,’ said the tall man, whose dark face framed the most impossibly ugly nose. ‘You look as though you could do with a pot of ale and a wash. And sleep. London will not burn any more or less quickly if the heir to Ravensden dozes for an hour.’
My mind was so far gone, I was hallucinating. That could be the only explanation for it. It was simply impossible for both the King of England and the Duke of York to be standing before me, stripped to their shirts, covered in dirt, faces blackened by soot, prising my hands from the handle, laying their own upon it, and beginning to pump as if possessed.
‘Y- your Majesty – your Royal Highness –’
‘Go, Matt,’ said the King. ‘Go and rest, in God’s name, in the knowledge that we have agreed to execute your proposal to halt the fire.’
Lanherne led me away.
‘Seems the two of them have been all over the City,’ he said. ‘Helping with the pumps and the water buckets, encouraging the firefighters, giving orders to pull down buildings. God save them both.’
Like almost every man of Cornwall, Martin Lanherne was a staunch royalist. In his case, the wounds he had taken in Grenville’s famous western army bore ample testimony of his devotion to the cause of the Stuarts.
‘But my place is still at the pump.’
‘Not when you’ve had a royal order it isn’t, Sir Matthew. Would you have me commit treason, rather than make sure you do as the King has commanded you?’
That was how I came to be sleeping on a pallet in a deserted coaching inn by Saint Augustine Watling Street. And that was where I was woken, after what seemed to be barely a moment’s slumber, by Francis Gale.
‘The fire’s across the Fleet River, Matthew,’ he said. ‘Dorset House is ablaze. It’s advancing on the Temple.’
I was on my feet in an instant. From the Temple, it was only a stone’s throw to Ravensden House.
West through Paul’s churchyard, where fire flakes were falling by the score; then through the throng clogging Ludgate, to behold the terrible sight beyond it. The fire was across the Fleet, all right, advancing much more quickly near the Thames, where there were still wharves and flammable cargoes aplenty to fuel it. Not only was Dorset House in flames: so, too, were Blackfriars, Bridewell prison, and Saint Bride’s Church. It was only a matter of time before it crossed Water Lane into Whitefriars, which bordered the Temple; and Ravensden House was just beyond the Temple. But it was not only my family’s London home that was under threat. If the east wind continued to blow, and the fire continued to rage unchecked through the Liberties beyond London’s walls, then it would inevitably reach the King’s palace at Whitehall, and then to Westminster, where Parliament and the Abbey would surely burn. Old Fawkes was surely grinning in his grave.
At Ravensden House, all was confusion. That much, at least, was apparent from the scene in the entrance hall behind Phineas Musk: paintings, boxes and sacks piled up, ready to be moved; Youngest Barcock and Cornelia’s maid scurrying hither and thither.
‘She’s packing,’ said Musk. ‘Like it’s for an expedition to the Indies, and she has half a year to prepare for it.’
‘And the Earl?’
‘Won’t move. Says there’s plenty of time, and where would he go? If he was still as ill as he was, we could move him and he’d barely notice. But he’s well enough to be a true Quinton.’
‘That being?’
‘Stubborn beyond measure, Sir Matthew. Begging pardon.’
I found my wife in our bedchamber, attempting, unaided, to manhandle the portrait of my father from the wall. I rushed forward and took the weight.
‘Matthew!’ she said, surprised, and took hold of my waist affectionately. I lifted the bandage around her head to examine the wound on her forehead: a vicious bruise was developing around the gash.
‘You should not be doing this,’ I said. ‘You should have called for Musk, or Youngest Barcock.’
She ignored my words, stepped away, and just stared at me. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror by the side of our bed, and realised why. My skin and hair were blackened and burnt, my arm heavily bandaged. I looked as though I had been in a ten-hour fight with an Algerine corsair.
‘And you should not be doing that, husband,’ she said, coming back to me and taking me in her arms. ‘You cannot save all of London as you saved me, Matthew Quinton. London would not be worth the losing of you.’
I wept then, long and hard. Wept for the fallen city and all that had perished in the flames, wept for my guilt and my sin, wept for our unborn child, wept for the dear, precious, fragile creature who was my wife.
At length, after many endearments, I left Cornelia and went to the Earl’s chamber. My brother was propped up on his bed, evidently conversing in French with Captain Ollivier.
‘My Lord,’ I said. ‘Captain.’
The Breton bowed his head.
‘You will have much to discuss,’ he said. ‘I will leave you.’
‘My thanks, Captain,’ I said. ‘I pray you, sir, assist Reverend Gale in watching over Lady Quinton. Make certain she does not overtask herself.’
‘I will do my utmost, Sir Matthew, but your wife has a strong will. If she wishes to overtask herself, I fear there will be very little I or anyone else can do to prevent it.’
With that, he left Charles and I alone.
‘More than fifty livery halls gone, Musk tells me,’ said the Earl of Ravensden. ‘Perhaps eighty churches or more, Saint Paul’s set to follow them in short order. Countless thousands of homes burned, and heaven knows what a loss to the Exchequer. If it was the Horsemen, Matt, they could hardly have galloped more rampantly, or to better effect.’
‘It could not have been…’ I began, but I knew I could not even convince myself of the argument.
We had destroyed the Horsemen aboard the Milkmaid. But had we only come upon them after they undertook their business in Pudding Lane?
‘It does not matter whether they did or not. Even here, up so high and behind shutters, I can hear the shouts in the street. As far as the common sort are concerned, Papists began the fire, and I doubt if anything will shift them from that belief – not even in the lifetime of your child-to-be, I suspect. Whereas you and I know that, if it was begun deliberately, but the Horsemen had no part in it, then it is much more likely to have been by a Dutchman, enraged by what you did to them.’ This was discoimfiting. It came too close to the guilty thoughts of my own sin that I had harboured since we burned the Vlie. I turned my eyes to the floor. ‘The people will want a scapegoat, and they will want a sacrifice. Cornelia and Captain Ollivier might have fitted the bill, had not you and My Lord Craven intervened. Perhaps, for all we know, they’ve already strung up a few poor French or Dutch. But Parliament will want an enquiry, have no doubt. I imagine Venner will be hot on the matter.’ Our brother-in-law, Sir Venner Garvey, Member of Parliament for Rievaulx, was a former Roundhead of the most serpentine kind. ‘And the people won’t be silent until they’ve had a hanging or two – or, better still, a hanging, drawing and quartering for treason. Nothing like the sight of entrails to satisfy a mob’s lust for vengeance.’
Charles paused, and took a series of long but broken breaths. I stepped toward him, to see if I could somehow make him more comfortable, but he raised his hand and continued.
‘Which, of course, is as it should be. Better that than the alternative.’
‘Alternative, brother?’
‘If it festers, with no enquiry and no guilty party, or at least no scapegoat – then the people will do what they always do in such cases. They will blame the government. Half of England is convinced that the Duke of York is a secret Papist, the other half that the King is, too. And Kings and the City of London have rarely seen eye to eye, certainly in my lifetime. So we don’t want a new-born phoenix of civil war rising out of the ashes of London, Matt. This fire must be proved beyond doubt to have been an accident, or be proved beyond doubt to be the work of someone who cannot possibly cast suspicion upon the King and the Duke.’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I had not realised I was again in the presence of Lord Percival.’ He smiled, then coughed long and hard. ‘But before the noble lord considers such matters of state, he should ponder the more urgent matter in hand. Which is to say, the means of getting you out of this house before the fire consumes you.’
Francis Gale returned that afternoon, having spent long hours ministering to the thousands of fearful souls packed into Smithfield. Together with Musk, we strapped my brother onto a narrow pallet, manhandled him to the head of the stairs, and realised at once that it would be impossible to get him down the narrow stairway, with its many sharp turns. My grandfather had once considered a scheme to rebuild this end of the house, and to put in a broad, open staircase; but as with so many of his grand projects, it had never come to fruition.
‘Leave me,’ said Charles. ‘I may be dead next week in any case, or next month. It will be no great loss if I leave the world a little early, consumed by flame.’
‘By God’s divine providence, very few seem to have died in this calamity,’ said Francis. ‘How will history make sense of it, if one of the only casualties of this great fire was the tenth Earl of Ravensden?’
‘None will die here,’ I said, ‘least of all you, My Lord. Be thankful that your brother found himself a captain in the Navy Royal.’
I sent for the seamen I had despatched to defend Ravensden House, realising with some astonishment that I had done so only a day earlier. Time played strange tricks during the fire of London: each hour was at once a century and a minute, each day an eternity and a moment.
I told the men what I had in mind. They understood at once, and went off to search the kitchen, stables and other outbuildings. Within a half-hour they were back with an assortment of timbers and ropes, even an entire block from a ship’s rigging, which somehow must have found its way to the house in my grandfather’s day. By the end of a further half-hour, the window of the Earl’s bedroom had been taken out, and a respectable, if miniature, pair of sheerlegs protruded from Ravensden House. We tested the device by lowering my sea-chest, which was significantly heavier than my brother; it reached the ground in the Strand without any mishap.
‘I concede the point you have often made to me,’ said Charles, as we attached the ropes to his pallet, ‘that the English seaman is a fellow of infinite resource. And by that, brother, I include yourself.’
Musk and I went down to the street, and I barked orders as the Earl of Ravensden was swung out of the window, then lowered gently toward the ground.
‘Steady, there! Give – give – give – hold! Too fast, men! Slower! Now – give – give – belay!’
Even with the flames burning well beyond the Fleet Conduit, and the road jammed with carts heading west, quite a crowd of onlookers formed around us to witness the curious spectacle of a peer of the realm being treated in such an undignified, but effective, manner.
Finally the pallet nestled comfortably on the cart that Phineas Musk had somehow obtained earlier that afternoon. I did not enquire how, exactly, he had managed to do so, for carts were more valuable than the jewels in the coronation crown, that day in London.
Charles Quinton looked a little pale, but otherwise none the worse for wear.
‘I have flown,’ he said. ‘Tristram will be infinitely jealous.’
Cornelia emerged from the house, attended by her maid, and came over to me.
‘You’ll take no more risks, husband?’ she said.
I do not know why she asked; she knew that was a promise I could never give.
‘I will do my utmost to save the house,’ I said. ‘This is where you will give birth to our child, my love.’
‘A child may be born in a ditch, just as well as in an Earl’s house. Or in a manger in a stable, as the case of Our Lord proved. What the child needs most is its father.’
I kissed her, and again wondered how I had ever been tempted to endanger this – to endanger us – for the charms of Aphra Behn.
As I moved away from Cornelia, I realised that Charles was staring at me: to be precise, giving me the look that only a very much older sibling can bestow upon a very much younger one.
‘This talk of saving the house, Matt. Have you become a Bedlam-man, brother?’
‘Crave pardon, brother?’
‘Perhaps your wits have been unhinged by the roar of one too many broadsides?’
‘My Lord – Charles – what do you…?’
‘The house, Matt. Let us both pray to God in His heaven that the fire consumes this foul abomination, this putrid hovel that disgraces the name and honour of the Quintons. Let the flames devour it, and allow us to build a fine new townhouse, a fitting London home for your child. Don’t waste your efforts – or your powder – on saving Ravensden House, brother.’
‘But…’
I was astonished. Charles Quinton, the most guarded, the most uncommunicative of men, never betrayed the passions that lay within his gaunt, damaged frame. And he had always seemed so content within the strange, rambling warren we were now abandoning.
‘Every Quinton hates it,’ he said. ‘Those who came before us have hated it. All of us, except Grandfather and, for some unaccountable reason, yourself. But let it go, Matt. Take your powder where it might do some good, where it might save some decent houses of honest folk, or a fine church, or something else worth saving. But not this, brother. If this is the last command I ever give you as your Earl, let it be this.’
I stared at him, dumbfounded, but finally nodded my assent.
Then, guarded by Frostick and Gover, and under the somewhat dubious command of Phineas Musk, the cart set off for the quarters that a generous monarch had agreed to provide for the fugitive Quintons within Whitehall Palace. How long they might stay there remained to be seen: that depended upon whether the great fire stopped before Ravensden House, contrary to my brother’s unambiguous wishes, or continued onward to threaten the palace.
Evening.
Francis Gale and I stood in the great hole where my brother’s window had been, looking out upon the terrible spectacle. We could see clear down the Strand and Fleet Street, which now burned nearly as far as Shoe Lane, to the city walls and Ludgate Hill. There, at the top, was Saint Paul’s, but now the roof of the east end and the entire Choir were ablaze, the flames pushing west, toward the tower. Everwhere, mighty sheets of fire turned the night sky into a hellish new day.
‘Truly,’ said Francis, at my side, ‘we are beyond Genesis Nineteen now. Far beyond Sodom and Gomorrah. Alas, my friend, we have lived to witness the truth of Revelation Twenty.’
‘The lake of fire,’ I said. ‘Is this the day of judgement, then, Francis?’
He did not answer me. We watched, spellbound and aghast, as the flames enveloped the cathedral, bursting out on the roof of the tower and the windows, spilling out into the transepts, finally overwhelming the west front, built only thirty years before. The roof collapsed, and parts of the aisle walls with it. I later heard, from those who witnessed it, that the lead on the roof had melted, flowing away in rivers down Ludgate Hill; great gargoyles and other stone ornaments were blown clear like cannonballs.
Then there came the strangest sound I ever heard in my life. A distant, discordant roar, like some giant beast of legend roaring at the enemies who sought to destroy it. A roar that turned, somehow, into a great chord of music, a requiem for old London, a te deum for a new. I realised that what I was hearing could only be the bells, shifted by – what? The movement of the beams from which they hung, or the falling of masonry against them? It was impossible to tell. But however it happened, they rang out the death toll of old Saint Paul’s. Another bell, nearby: that of Saint Dunstan in the West, our own parish church, sounding nine o’clock. I realised with astonishment that it had taken little more than an hour for fire to consume the great cathedral that had stood for a thousand years.
Numbed by the sight before me, I almost missed the thing I should have noticed at once: the first thing any true seaman would have noted. I was not a true seaman; not yet, at any rate. But at last, a firedrop landing on the floor of the bedroom, where Francis hastily stamped upon it, dragged the seaman within me from his hiding place.
‘The wind,’ I said. ‘It’s veering southerly. It’s easing. The wind’s lessening, Francis.’
But it was lessening almost imperceptibly. Only a man who had stood upon many a quarterdeck trying to gauge whether there was, perhaps, just the faintest breath of fresh breeze to fill his sails, would have noticed it at all. The fire was still licking at the precincts of the Temple, and advancing along the north side of Fleet Street. Perhaps the change in the wind would save Whitehall and Westminster, but it still looked set fair to destroy Ravensden. Part of me yet wished to defy my brother, and do everything in my power to save the dear, ramshackle pile in which I stood. But honour and duty directed me otherwise. The Earl of Ravensden had commanded me to save something worthwhile; and, by God, that was exactly what I proposed to do.