I went on in a gentler voice, ‘Let me show you.’
I stooped and picked up a fragment of charred paper, the corner of a page with a few printed words still visible on the scorched surface. I handed it to him.
‘See? Paper. Not snow.’
My father took the paper and held it close to his eyes. His lips moved without sound. Even now he could read the smallest print by the dimmest rushlight.
‘What did I tell you?’ he said. ‘The end of the world. It’s another sign. Read it.’
He held out the fragment to me. The paper had come from the bottom of a page, at the right-hand corner. There were five words visible on it, taken from the ends of two lines on the page:
… Time is
… it is done.
‘Well?’ He stretched out his arms to the black flakes swirling in the dark sky. ‘Am I not right, James? The end of the world is nigh, and Jesus will return to reign in majesty over us all. Are you prepared to face your God at His judgement seat?’
‘Yes, Father,’ I said.
Since May, my father and I had lodged in a cottage within the fenced enclosure of a market garden. We shared the house with the gardener, his wife and their maid. On fine days, the old man sat in the garden and shouted and waved his stick at marauding birds and small boys.
Mistress Ralston, the gardener’s wife, was willing enough to take our money, and I made sure that our rent was paid on the nail. She complained about the extra work, though the maid did most of it, and she did not like having my father about the place during the day. She put up with us for the money. Of course, she said, if Master Marwood’s health worsened, that might be another matter. She and Master Ralston could not be expected to nurse the sick.
I had chosen this place when my father was released on my surety, and for three reasons. The country air was healthier. The lodgings were cheap. And, most importantly, the garden was remote enough from London to reduce to insignificance the possibility that someone would recognize him; yet it was not too far for me to go daily to and from London.
My father was a marked man. When the King had been restored, six years earlier, Parliament had passed an Act of Indemnity, which pardoned all who had fought against the Crown in the late insurrection. The only people excepted from this blanket pardon were the Regicides, those who had been directly instrumental in the execution of the King’s father at Whitehall.
My father was covered by the Act, for he had not been named as a Regicide. But he had thrown away the King’s clemency after the Restoration, and by his own choice, and now we suffered the consequences. I loved my father, but sometimes I hated him too.
My mother had hoped I would have a different life. It was she who had cajoled my father into enrolling me at St Paul’s School. She had dreamed that I might become a preacher or a lawyer, a man who worked with his mind and not his hands. But she had died a few years later. My father, whose business was declining, withdrew me from the school and bound me to him as his apprentice. Then came his last act of folly, after the Restoration, and he and I were entirely ruined.
After breakfast, I told him I must go to Whitehall.
‘Ah, Whitehall,’ the old man said, his face brightening. ‘Where they killed the man of blood. Do you remember?’
‘Hush, sir. For God’s sake, hush.’
But I did not go to Whitehall. Not at first.
I had intended to walk there, but the road to Westminster, Whitehall and the City was choked with Londoners fleeing on foot and horseback, in coaches and wagons. With them they carried the elderly and sick; some of the latter showed signs of the plague, which still lingered in the town.
Others were encamped in fields and orchards along the roadside, erecting makeshift tents and shelters or merely sitting and weeping or staring vacantly towards the smoke of the Fire. Shock had made them numb.
It would take me at least an extra hour, I calculated, to fight against the current of people and walk towards London. So I went down to the water and hailed a pair of oars to take me downriver. It was an expense I could ill afford but a necessary one.
The Fire had been good to the watermen, for everyone wanted a craft of any sort to take them and their possessions to safety. They would pay the most inflated fares without a moment’s argument. Overladen craft, large and small, wallowed in the water. The Thames, even this far west, was as busy as Cheapside had been until the Fire had reached it.
But, as with the road, the traffic tended to be away from London. I haggled with the boatman, reasoning that he would prefer to have a boat with a fare in it than one that was empty when he returned to collect more refugees and their possessions.
We made good speed, with both the current and the tide on our side. The Thames was as grey as dirty pewter and littered with charred debris and discarded possessions, particularly furniture. I saw a handsome table, floating downstream, its legs in the air with a gull perched on one of them.
As we neared Whitehall Stairs, I told the waterman not to pull in but to continue downstream as far as St Paul’s. I had a curiosity to see what was left of it. Part of me wondered if the boy–girl would return there, too. Something had drawn her toward the cathedral as the rats were fleeing from it, something so powerful that she had ignored the Fire.
From the river, London was a horrifying sight. Above the town hung a great pall of smoke and ash. Beneath it, the air glowed a deep and sultry red. The sun could not break through, and the city was bathed in unnatural twilight.
From Ludgate to the Tower there seemed nothing left but smouldering devastation. The close-packed houses, built mainly of wood, had melted away, leaving only fragments of blackened stone and brickwork. Even here on the water, with a stiff breeze blowing up the Thames, we felt the heat pulsing from the ruins.
Every now and then the dull crump of an explosion boomed across the water. On the King’s orders, they were blowing up buildings in the path of the flames in the hope of creating firebreaks. There was an explosion somewhere between Fleet Street and the river.
The waterman covered his ears and swore.
‘We can’t pull in, master,’ the waterman said, coughing. ‘God save us, you’ll fry if you go ashore.’
A shower of cinders passed us, some clinging to my sleeve. I brushed them frantically away. ‘What about downstream?’
‘It’s the same all the way down – and hotter than ever – they say it’s the oil burning in the warehouses.’
Without waiting for my order, he pulled away from the north bank and rowed us out to midstream. I stared at St Paul’s. It was still standing, but the roof had gone, and both walls and tower had a jagged, shimmering quality, like outlines seen under flowing water. Columns of smoke rose from still-burning fires within the blackened shell. It wasn’t a church any more. It was more like a giant coal in an oven.
It was impossible that the boy–girl could be within twenty yards of it or more. No living creature could survive that heat.
‘Whitehall,’ I said.
