‘It won’t do,’ Williamson said sharply. ‘Do you hear me? The King says it was an accident, pure and simple. The hot, dry summer. The buildings huddled together and dry as kindling. The east wind. An unlucky spark.’
I said nothing, though I thought the King was probably right.
‘Any other explanation must be discouraged.’
The King’s ministers, I thought, were between a rock and a hard place. Either they had merited God’s displeasure through their wickedness or they were so ineffectual that they could not prevent the country’s enemies from striking such a mortal blow at the heart of the kingdom. Either way, the people would blame the Fire on them and on the King and his court. Either way, the panic and disaffection would spread. Better to change the subject.
‘Master Maycock, sir, the printer,’ I said. ‘I saw him yesterday evening at St Paul’s. He was like a man possessed – he had his goods stored in the crypt, and they went up with the rest in the Fire.’
Williamson almost smiled. ‘How very distressing.’
There were only two licensed newspapers in the country, for the government permitted no others. Maycock was responsible for printing Current Intelligence, which was the upstart rival to the London Gazette, the newspaper that Master Williamson ran.
‘If only Maycock had done as Newcomb did, and moved his goods out of the City,’ Williamson said with a touch of smugness. Newcomb was Williamson’s printer.
‘Newcomb’s lost his house, though,’ I said. ‘It was by Baynard’s Castle, and that’s gone.’
‘I know,’ Williamson said in his flat, hard voice. ‘I already have it in hand. I have in mind some premises in the Savoy for him, if all goes well. If God wills it, the next Gazette will be Monday’s. We shall lose an issue but at least that means we shall not be able to publish the City’s Bill of Mortality this week. People will understand that – there’s more important work to do than waste time compiling lists of figures. Besides, I’m told that the death count has been remarkably low. God be thanked.’
I understood Williamson perfectly, or rather I understood what he did not say. There might well have been dozens of deaths, perhaps hundreds, in the areas where the unrecorded poor huddled together near the river, near the warehouses of oil and pitch that burned as hot as hellfire. The Fire had broken out there early on Sunday morning, when half of them would have been in a drunken stupor. Others had died, or would die, from the delayed effects of the Fire – because they were already ill, or old, or very young, and the distress of fleeing from their homes would destroy them.
But it would not serve the King and government to worsen the sense of catastrophe unnecessarily. The London Gazette was usually published twice a week. The missing issue would cloak the absence of a Bill of Mortality for the week of the Fire. In the circumstances, its absence would be unremarkable. The Letter Office – another of Williamson’s responsibilities – had also been destroyed, so even if the Gazette could have been printed, it could not have been distributed through the country.
‘A terrible accident,’ Williamson said. ‘That’s what you say if you hear anyone talking about it. We must make sure nothing in the Gazette or its correspondence suggests otherwise.’ He brought his head close to mine. ‘You’re sharp enough, Marwood, I give you that. But if you keep me waiting again, I’ll make sure you and your father go back to your dunghill.’
As if to lend emphasis to his words, a distant explosion shook the window in its frame.
‘Go back to work,’ he said.
CAT DREW THE grey cloak over her head. The fine wool smelled of the fire, but also something unpleasantly musky and masculine. The face of the thin young man whose cloak she had stolen was vivid in her mind, his skin almost orange in the light of the flames.
She was still breathing hard from running through the streets, from pushing her way through the crowds. She had looked back often as she fled, and sometimes she was sure she glimpsed his face. But, thanks be to God, he wasn’t there any more.
She crouched and tapped on the window shutter.
Three taps. Then a pause. Three more taps.
Light flickered in the crack behind the shutter. The window was no more than eighteen inches wide, and not much taller. The sill was barely six inches above the cobbles. The ground level had crept higher and higher over the centuries.
Something flickered in the crack of light. Three answering taps. Then a pause. Three more taps.
She moved deeper into the alley. It wasn’t dark – even here, beyond the walls. The Doomsday glow filled the narrow space with a murky orange fog that caught at the back of her throat and made her want to retch.
No one had taken refuge here yet. No one human. The mouth of the alley was concealed by an encroaching extension from the shop on the other side of it. Unless you knew it was there, you wouldn’t see it.
But the rats had known where the alley was. They were fleeing the burning city in their hundreds of thousands. She felt movement around her feet and heard a distant squealing.
The ground was paved with uneven flags, which were covered with cinders, scraps of paper and charred fragments of wood and cloth that crunched like black gravel beneath her shoes.
At the end of the alley was a pointed archway recessed in the wall, the stone frame for an oak door studded with nails. She had seen it by daylight: the wood had blackened with age and was as hard as a stone wall.
In the distance came the sound of three explosions. They were blowing up more of the houses in the path of the fire.
There came a faint scraping sound from the other side of the door. Then silence. Then another scrape. No lock, thank God. Only two iron bars, as thick as a man’s arm.
The door swung inwards. A crack of light appeared on the other side, widening with the opening door. She slipped through the gap. Immediately she turned, closed the door and dropped the latch in place.
‘Mistress …’ The whisper was a hiss of air, barely audible.
‘The bars, Jem.’ Cat’s eyes hadn’t adjusted to the gloom yet. ‘Quickly.’
The flame wavered behind the grille of the closed lantern as he placed it on the floor. Shadows fragmented and glided over the wall. The air was foul, for the cesspit of the house on the other side of the alley had leached through the foundations of the wall.
Jem scuttled to the door. Iron grated on stone. He had rubbed grease on the bars to make them move easily and as quietly as possible. She watched, clutching the grey cloak about her throat.
When the door was doubly barred, he turned to face her. She heard his breath, wheezier than usual perhaps because of the smoke. Sometimes his wheezing grew so bad that they thought he would die of it. ‘Scratch me, I wish he would,’ Cousin Edward had said last winter. ‘It’s like listening to a death rattle.’
‘Mistress, what happened?’
She brushed aside the question with one of her own: ‘Where are they?’
‘Madam’s retired. Master’s in the study. Master Edward’s not back yet. The dogs are loose.’
If the dogs were in the house, then the servants had gone to bed too, all but the watchman and the porter.
Jem bent down for the lantern. As he picked it up, the shadows merged and swooped to the vaulted ceiling, sliding over stone ribs and bosses.
Now she was safe, or as safe as she could be for the time being, Cat was aware that she too