coughing. A sliver of flame danced on the front of the boy’s shirt. I swatted it with my hand, but another appeared on the loose sleeve. At last he woke to the danger he was in and cried out. I tore off my cloak and wrapped his thin body in it to smother the flames.
The crowd parted as I dragged him away from the heat. I pulled him into the partial shelter of a mounting block outside a shuttered tavern on the City side of Ludgate. I slapped his face, first one cheek and then the other.
He opened his eyes. He brushed the cloak away and bared his teeth like an angry cat.
‘God’s blood,’ I said. ‘You little fool. You could have killed us both.’
The boy scrambled up and peered towards St Paul’s.
‘There’s nothing you can do,’ I said, shouting to make myself heard above the roar of the fire and the crashes from the disintegrating building. ‘Nothing any of us can do.’
He fell back against the mounting block. His eyes were closed. Maybe he had fainted again. I peeled the cloak away and sat him on the step. The shirt was no longer smouldering, though the neck was ripped.
The boy was still coughing, but less violently than before. Even here, some way from the fire, it was as bright as midday, albeit the sort of flickering, orange brightness you would expect when Armageddon was raging and the end of the world was nigh.
For the first time, I saw him clearly. I saw a black smudge of soot or dirt on the thin neck. I saw the gaping shirt and the hollow below the collarbones. I saw the sheen of sweat on his chest, coloured by the fiery glow in the air.
And I saw two perfectly rounded breasts.
I blinked. St Paul’s burned, the crowd jostled and the air was full of sounds of explosions, roaring flames and collapsing buildings. But in that moment all I saw was the boy.
The boy?
I pulled aside the neck of the shirt.
No, this wasn’t a boy. It wasn’t a girl, either. From the waist up at least, it was a young woman.
Her eyes were open and staring into mine. I let the shirt drop. She stood up. The top of her head was below my shoulder. She snatched up my cloak to protect her modesty. Despite the crowd we might have been alone, for everyone was looking towards St Paul’s.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
She didn’t sound like a beggar or a woman of the streets. She sounded like the lady of the house addressing her maid. A lady who wasn’t in a good temper, and a maid who had committed some gross error.
‘What do you think?’ I said. ‘Saving your life.’
As if to prove my point, there was a sharp crack from the cathedral and a fragment of the portico’s pediment fell with a crash that shook the ground. The blocks of stone fragmented into a cloud of rubble and dust.
‘Where are you from?’ I said. ‘Who are you? And why are you—’
She began to move away.
‘Stop – that’s my cloak.’
I lunged at her hand and pulled her back. She raised my hand towards her lips. For one mad moment I thought she was about to kiss it. An expression of gratitude for saving her life.
I glimpsed the whiteness of her teeth. She bit the back of my hand, just behind the lowest knuckle of the forefinger. The teeth dug deep and jarred against tendon and bone.
I screamed and released her.
She ran through the crowd on Ludgate Hill with my cloak floating about her shoulders. I stood there, watching her and nursing my hand. I was desperately thirsty. My head ached.
During the Fire, I saw much that seemed against custom and nature, against reason and Divine ordinance, much that seemed to foreshadow still greater disasters yet to come. Monstra, as the scholars called such things, meaning wonders or prodigies or evil omens. The destruction of St Paul’s was one of them.
But when I fell asleep that night, I did not dream of flames and falling buildings. I dreamed of the boy–woman’s face and the wide-open, unfocused eyes.
ASHES AND BLOOD. Night after night.
I was thinking of ashes and blood when I woke from a fitful sleep on the morning after the Fire reached St Paul’s. I knew by the light that it was early, not long after dawn.
Not the hot ashes of the city last night. Not the blood from my hand, after the boy–girl had bitten me.
This blood had been dripping from a head. As for the ashes, they had been cold. A weeping man had rubbed them into his hair.
All this had given me nightmares when I was child, and for months I used to wake screaming, night after night. My mother, usually the mildest and most obedient of wives, had berated my father for allowing her son to see such things.
‘Will they do it to me one day?’ I had asked my mother. Night after night.
Now, on a summer morning years later, I heard a ripple of song from a blackbird. The bed creaked as my father shifted his weight.
‘James?’ he said in the thin, dry voice of his old age. These days he slept badly and rose early, complaining of bad dreams. ‘James? Are you awake yet? Why’s it so hot? Let’s walk in the garden. It will be cooler there.’
Even here, on the outskirts of Chelsea, the sky was grey with ash, the rising sun reduced to a smear of orange. The air was already warm. It smelled of cinders.
After I had dressed, I removed the bandage from my left hand. The bleeding had stopped but the wound throbbed painfully. I rewrapped the bandage and helped my father down the narrow stairs, hoping we would not wake the Ralstons.
We walked in the orchard, with my father leaning on my right arm. The trees were heavy with fruit – apples, pears and plums mainly, but also damsons, walnuts and a medlar. The dew was still on the grass.
My father shuffled along. ‘Why is it so black?’
‘It’s the Fire, sir. All the smoke.’
Frowning, he turned his face up to the sky. ‘But it’s snowing.’
The wind had moderated a little overnight and had shifted from the east to the south. The air was full of dark flakes, fluttering and turning like drunken dancers.
‘Black snow,’ he said and, though the morning was already so warm, he shivered.
‘You grow fanciful, sir.’
‘It’s the end of the world, James. I told you it would be so. It is the wickedness of the court that has brought this upon us. It is written, and it must happen. This year is sixteen hundred and sixty-six. It is a sign.’
‘Hush, Father.’
