Another point of light from the darkness widened into a ball, a plate, then into a cartwheel of fire spinning towards them. Another splatter, this time from above them and sparks came down in a shower.
Batting at her head and shoulders, Makepeace looked up. There was no fire, just the open shutters of her unlighted bedroom breaking the plain gable end of the Meg’s upper storey. It was all right.
It wasn’t. Now there was a pale glow and a movement of shadows in the bedroom where none had been before, as if someone were dancing in it with a candle. ‘Fire,’ she said gently to herself and then shrieked, ‘JOSH!’
Betty was already lumbering into the inn; Makepeace passed her. ‘I’ll get him.’ She’d be faster up the stairs. ‘You get them bloody redcoats.’
It’ll go up, the Meg’ll go up. In this heat …
The boy was asleep on his small bed. She could hear crackling through the partition between this room and hers. As she snatched the child up and took him downstairs she tried to think. What to do? What to do? The end of the jetty was burning but the immediate danger was inside. Water from the kitchen to upstairs? From the harbour and throw it in by a ladder? She carried Josh through the kitchen and dropped him outside in the garden. ‘Stay out the way.’
For a moment she stood where she was, rocking with indecision, but the sight of Tantaquidgeon, stalking past her from the jetty to fetch the ladder and bucket by the privy wall, brought back her senses. She went to the corner of the house and yelled that Josh was safe. One of the soldiers was trying to stamp out the flames on the jetty, she could hear the other, the thirsty one, in the kitchen and found him looking for buckets. She showed him where they were and fell on the pump. He disappeared upstairs with one bucketful, she followed him with another.
Her bed was already a burning ghat. Flames licked the rest of the furniture and ran along the ceiling beams. The room was a copse of fire with new trees springing up every minute. She aimed the water at the bed which gave a futile sizzle and went on burning. Through the blaze she saw Tantaquidgeon at the window, looking down as he waited for another bucket, his face and bare chest glistening tawny against the intense light.
Useless. They needed more buckets, more people.
There was a whumph as another fire-tree exploded into being. She and the soldier ran down for more water, ran up, down, up, getting in each other’s way.
They had to surrender the bedroom and shut its door, trying to stop the flames spreading, but wicked little red hydra-heads came flickering from under it and the corridor began to burn.
In the midst of her panic, she still remembered to pluck the purse off the kitchen mantelshelf as she passed it. Fire wasn’t going to get that.
There were people around now, through smoke and panic she saw faces, some of them dear to her, one very dear, but couldn’t have put a name to any of them. Down to the kitchen again, crowded now, Josh was on the pump, puffing, hanging on the handle to bring it down and reaching up on his little bare toes as it rose again. The bottom of her petticoat was smouldering, somebody picked her up, smothered the skirt against his coat and carried her out to the slipway to dump her in the shallow water at its bottom. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Not at all,’ said Dapifer and went back to the battle.
The sea was cool on her blistered feet and an odd remoteness allowed her to stand in it for a few seconds longer. Very organized, she thought, looking at the Meg. There were figures on the part of the roof ridge that wasn’t burning, a rope had been slung round a chimney to take up buckets provided for it by a chain of people that led down to the slipway beside her. Half the Cut was here: Zeobab, Jack Greenleaf, Mr and Goody Saltonstall, Goody Busgutt, the Baler brothers … Very organized. And – she saw it quite clearly – hopeless as hell.
The most immediate danger to the Meg’s downstairs was the jetty, already half consumed. Tantaquidgeon was attacking the end of it nearest the taproom door with an axe. He freed it and she went to help him push it away with a boathook. It came floating back on the incoming tide, aiming at them and the tavern like an attacking fire-ship.
She pulled the coil of rope that always hung on a hook by the door and between them, she and Tantaquidgeon tied each of its ends round two spars of the jetty, then jumped into the water and towed the juggernaut out a few yards before dragging it sideways so that it was caught in a static corner between the slipway and the next-door wharf with only stone to burn against.
She didn’t wonder how the Indian, with barely any mind of his own, managed to read hers in an emergency; she’d got used to that years ago.
She joined the chain, finding herself next to Dapifer’s Robert on one side and Goody Saltonstall on the other.
Praying Bostonians passed buckets to godamming English soldiers who passed them up to swearing, scorching British sailors who threw their contents on to the common enemy howling back at them. The Roaring Meg herself was on their side: her oak beams had weathered to virtual iron over the years; although fire ran along them, it couldn’t gain purchase, and her passages upstairs were narrow enough and crooked enough to seal off the section above the kitchen from draught so that, while the three bedrooms and meeting-room went up, much of the taproom’s ceiling held, allowing people below to stamp out such roof-shingle as came through in flames.
God was on their side as well; He allowed no wind to fan the fire.
So was poverty; there were no curtains, flounces or stuffed furniture to act as extra tinder, no tapestries, no oil paintings along the passages to become fire-fodder.
A Cockney voice shrieked from a perch on the kitchen chimney: ‘She’s going out, we’re winnin’, the fucker’s going out.’
Next to Makepeace, Goody Saltonstall merely sighed. ‘Never knew a sailor so much as pull on a rope without swearin’.’
Makepeace stared at her, emerging from a tunnel of smoke and noise and bucket-passing that had been without future, an end in itself. She looked up at the sailor on the chimney, then at her misshapen tavern with its black, skeletal, smoking upper ribcage and was washed by a terrible gratitude, not so much for the miracle of its deliverance as for the even greater miracle of human grace by which the deliverance had been effected. She joined the other Puritans on their knees while Mr Saltonstall trumpeted a prayer of thanksgiving before she hobbled to the barrels to dole out ale and rum to her various saviours.
At which point the miracle faded. The people from the Cut melted away; even Goody Saltonstall whose figure was not melting material, disappeared before she could be thanked. Makepeace called, pleading, to Zeobab Fairlee and Jack Greenleaf as they were going out of the door together: ‘It’s on the house.’
Greenleaf shook his head; old Zeobab looked sadly at the rum glass in Makepeace’s hand. ‘Cain’t drink here no more, ‘Peace,’ he said. ‘You let us down.’
She poured bumpers for the servicemen of the British army and navy who sat slumped among the detritus of her taproom. Moonlight, coming through gaps in the ceiling, no longer found reflection in their uniform or even skin: both were dulled to matt black by smoke. Only eyeballs and teeth were white.
She realized the tears trickling down her cheeks would be clearing little paths through the soot on her own face and she smeared them away.
‘Didn’t need to light a fire to welcome us, miss,’ one of the men said. ‘We was warm enough.’
She peered at him. He was holding his hands away from his body. ‘Was that you up on the chimney? Could have killed your fool self.’
He raised scorched eyebrows. ‘Was that a chimbley? Gor damn, thought I was back up the crow’s nest.’
They ain’t so different from us, Makepeace thought as she kissed him. She led them into the kitchen to give them some food and treat their burns. Dapifer was already there. Betty was resetting the collarbone which had been dislocated once more by, he said, ‘carrying lumps of women