Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Copyright © Andrew Taylor 2016

Andrew Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Cover design by Dominic Forbes © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover shows The Great Fire of London 1666 (woodcut), English School, (17th century) © Museum of London, UK /Bridgeman Images

Prelims show ‘A map of the area of London affected by the Great Fire of London in 1666’ © The British Library

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical fact, are the work of the author’s imagination.

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Source ISBN: 9780008119096

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2016 ISBN: 9780008119065

Version: 2018-09-21

Dedication

For Caroline, as always

Map

Praise for The Ashes of London:

‘One of the most reliably enjoyable of historical novelists … Taylor demonstrates his usual command of plot and historical background’

Sunday Times

‘Finely wrought and solidly researched. The novel’s plot is fiendishly complex’

Sunday Telegraph

‘In this elegant, engrossing novel set during an extraordinary period, Taylor skilfully presents a London in which so many must still pay the price for the Civil War and the murder of King Charles I’

Sunday Express

‘An atmospheric and compelling tale for tumultuous times’

The Times, Summer Books

‘The author conveys the confusion and uncertainty of the times in a pacy story of Charles II’s desire for vengeance, the struggle to rebuild a stricken city and the hunt for a murderer’

Daily Mail

‘A complex weave of history and mystery and the first of a new series from Andrew Taylor’

The i

‘Thrilling … gripping, fast-moving and credible … it’s a well-constructed political thriller with moments of horror, admirable and enjoyable. Taylor has done his research so thoroughly as to be unobtrusive’

Spectator

‘The description of London in 1666, as the Great Fire is at last dying down, is unforgettable’

Literary Review

‘The Ashes of London is a chilling murder mystery and an equally transporting historical novel. A genuine pleasure from start to finish’

Peter Swanson, author of A Kind Worth Killing

Praise for Andrew Taylor:

‘Taylor’s mastery of plot and character show to great effect in a story that has a depth few other historical crime novels can match’

Sunday Times

‘Effortlessly authentic … gripping … moving and believable. An excellent work’

C. J. Sansom

‘As a writer, Taylor wears his learning lightly and shares with Hilary Mantel the capacity to take the reader directly into a vanished world’

TLS

‘The most consummate writer of historical fiction today. He achieves to perfection the crucial balance between the mystery to be solved and the historical context surrounding it’

The Times

‘Andrew Taylor has been quietly producing superb historical fiction since long before Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker wins bestowed literary respectability on the genre’

Daily Telegraph

‘If you liked C. J. Sansom, or Hilary Mantel, you’ll love Andrew Taylor’

Peter James

‘Taylor is as good at this period as C. J. Sansom is at Tudor England, and like him pulls off novels that work both as literary fiction and detective stories’

Independent

‘Hugely entertaining, beguiling and atmospheric’

Observer

‘Andrew Taylor is one of the most imaginative historical novelists writing today’

Globe and Mail

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Praise for The Ashes of London

Praise for Andrew Taylor

Author’s Note

Part I: Ashes and Fire – 4–8 September 1666

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part II: Ashes and Water – 6 September–31 October 1666

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Part III: Ashes and Earth – 28 October–10 November 1666

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Part IV: Ashes and Air – 11 November–16 December 1666

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Exclusive extract of The Fire Court

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

On 1 September 1666, London was the third largest city in the European world, after Paris and Constantinople. Estimates vary but its population probably amounted to around 300–400,000 people.

The city had three great centres of political power, strung along the north bank of the Thames – just as they are today. The wealth of the merchant classes was concentrated in the walled medieval City between the Tower in the east and St Paul’s Cathedral in the west. A mile further upstream, beyond Charing Cross, was the sprawling Tudor and Stuart palace of Whitehall; this was the King’s principal London residence and the heart of the government’s executive powers. Beyond that lay Westminster, where Parliament sat in a former royal palace.

The river linked these centres of power and offered the easiest way to travel from one to the other. Around them, the suburbs expanded steadily. London Bridge – at this time, the only bridge below Kingston, ten miles upstream – linked the City to Southwark, itself as large as many seventeenth-century cities, on the south bank of the Thames. The river was also the main artery for trade, both domestic and foreign.

Charles II regained his throne in 1660 amid scenes of almost universal jubilation. In the previous twenty years, hundreds of thousands had died in the Civil War between Crown and Parliament, including Charles’s own father, executed with a nice sense of symbolism in front of his own Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace. Afterwards, sustained by the army, Oliver Cromwell ruled the country with ruthless and bloody efficiency. When Cromwell died in 1658, however, the Commonwealth rapidly crumbled, and a restored monarchy seemed the only practicable way to heal the country’s divisions.

Six years later, the jubilation had subsided. The King’s profligate court horrified and angered his more sober subjects. Religion was a constant source of conflict – the Anglican establishment, restored with the King, nursed a deep distrust of the dissenting Protestants who had formed the core of Cromwell’s support. Both parties loathed the Catholics, who in popular imagination were associated with conspiracies at home and implacable, devious malignity abroad. The government was chronically short of money, which hampered its policies at every turn. To make matters worse, the plague struck repeatedly at the capital – in 1665, its most virulent outbreak, the mortality rate was an extraordinary one in five.

Still, somehow, London grew and prospered. Then, on 2 September 1666, the Great Fire began to burn in a baker’s shop in Pudding Lane, deep within the densely populated heart of the old City.

CHAPTER ONE

THE NOISE WAS the worst. Not the crackling of the flames, not the explosions and the clatter of falling buildings, not the shouting and the endless beating of drums and the groans and cries of the crowd: it was the howling of the fire. It roared its rage. It was the voice of the Great Beast itself.

Part of the nave roof fell in. The sound stunned the crowd into a brief silence.

Otherwise I shouldn’t have heard the whimpering at my elbow. It came from a boy in a ragged shirt who had just pushed his way through the mass of people. He was swaying, on the brink of collapse.

I poked his arm. ‘Hey. You.’

The lad’s head jerked up. His eyes were wide and unfocused. He made a movement as if to run away but we were hemmed in on every side. Half of London, from the King and the Duke of York downwards, had turned out to watch the death throes of St Paul’s.

‘Are you all right?’

The boy was still unsteady. I took his arm to support him. He snatched it away. He hunched his shoulders and tried to burrow between the people in front.

‘For God’s sake,’ I said. ‘Stand back. You’ll fry if you get closer.’

He wriggled to the other side of the woman next to him. The three of us were in a row, staring between the shoulders and elbows of the men in front.

The largest part of the crowd, including the royal party, was in the churchyard north-east of the cathedral. But the boy and I were in Ludgate Street, west of the portico. I was on my way to Whitehall – indeed, I should have been there an hour ago, for I had been summoned by Master Williamson, who was not a man to keep waiting.

But how could a man tear himself away from this spectacle? It was beyond imagination, beyond belief.

We were safe enough here at present, as long as we kept our distance. Some of the buildings between us and St Paul’s had been demolished in the hope of making a firebreak, which gave us a view up the hill to the cathedral. But I wasn’t sure how long we could stay. The heat and the smoke were already searing my lungs and making it hard to breathe.

Though the fire had now leapt the Fleet Ditch to the north and to the south, Fleet Street itself was still clear, at least for the moment, so there was no danger of it cutting off our retreat. The flames were travelling at about thirty yards an hour, much the same rate as they had since the fire started early on Sunday morning. But you could never tell. The wind might change again. Sparks might carry a hundred yards or more and find something else to act as kindling. The fire followed its own logic, not man’s.

Streams of molten metal were now oozing between the pillars of the portico and down the steps of the cathedral. It was a thick silver liquid, glinting with gold and orange and all the colours of hell: it was the overflow of the lead pouring from the burning roof to the floor of the nave.

Even the rats were running away. They streaked over the cobbles in waves of fiery fur, for some of them had already caught fire. Others were too old or too frail or too young even to flee, and they were baked alive in the heat. I watched three rats trapped in the silver rain, where they struggled and squealed and shrivelled and died.

Despite the lateness of the hour, despite the pall of smoke that blanketed the city, it was as bright as midday. By this stage – eight or nine o’clock on Tuesday evening – the cathedral glowed from within like an enormous lantern. It dominated its surroundings even in destruction.

I glanced to the left, beyond the woman beside me to the upturned face of the boy. The glare made him look less than human: it drained the life away and reduced him to a sharp but flattened representation, like a head stamped on a coin.

There was always a fascination about a fire, but this one elbowed aside all the others. I had been watching the city burn since Sunday morning. I had known London for as long as I had known anything. In a sense I was seeing my own history going up in smoke.

To my surprise, it was oddly exhilarating. Part of me was enjoying the spectacle. Another part thought: And now everything must change.

No one had really believed that the flames would reach the cathedral. St Paul’s was commonly held to be impregnable. Squatting on its hill, it towered over the City and suburbs as it had for centuries. It was huge – nearly six hundred feet long. The spire had fallen in the old Queen’s time, and it had never been replaced. The tower remained, however, and even the body of the church, from the new portico in the west to the pinnacled choir in the east, was more than a hundred feet above the ground. The walls were so massive that nothing could penetrate them.

Besides, everyone said that the Divine Hand was protecting St Paul’s, for the fire had had ample opportunity to attack it. Its school, just to the east, had already been consumed, along with its great libraries; I had spent much of my youth there, and I did not much mourn its loss. But, until this evening, the flames had swirled around the church itself, leaving it untouched. St Paul’s, they said, had always been more than a church, more than a cathedral: it stood for London itself. It was the soul of the city. It was invulnerable.

I was wearing my second-best cloak, which I had taken the precaution of soaking in the Thames before coming here. I had learned the hard way that any protection from the heat and the fumes was better than none, and a cloak could hardly make me hotter than I already was.

An almighty roar burst from within the building. A gout of fire gushed upwards above the choir. Flames spurted through the window openings. Hot air surged towards the watching people. The crowd fell back.

‘Oh dear God,’ the boy said in a high, agonized voice. ‘The crypt’s gone up.’

One of the men in front threw down his hat and stamped on it. He flung out his arms and howled. His friends tried to restrain him. It was Maycock, the printer.

It’s an ill wind, I thought. At least that will please Master Williamson.

Maycock and many of his fellows had stored their more valuable books, papers and cases of type in the crypt of the cathedral, St Faith’s, which served as their parish church. They had left nothing to chance: they had barred the doors with locks and bolts; they stopped up every opening that might possibly admit a spark or a draught. Even if the church tumbled about their heads, they thought, their books in St Faith’s would be safe below ground for all eternity.

But they and everyone else had reckoned without the strong, capricious wind. It had set fire to goods in the churchyard. It had blown sparks from there, and from burning buildings nearby, onto the roof of the choir. The roof had been under repair for months – so exposed timbers covered places where the lead had been damaged, and these had been baked by the bone-dry summer. The sparks danced towards them, and in that hot air it was not long before the first flames appeared.

The wind fanned the flames, which ignited the network of beams supporting the roof. Seasoned oak burned almost as hot as sea coal. The heat had ruptured the vault beneath and the great stones had tumbled down into the choir and the nave. The inside of the building had been full of wooden scaffolding, which had acted as kindling. In a matter of minutes, the whole interior was alight.

Somehow the fire had reached the crypt. The rain of falling stones from the vault must have punctured the floor of the choir. The books and paper stored below in St Faith’s had exploded in a gush of flame.

Already the temperature where we were standing was increasing.

The woman beside me stirred. ‘Pray God no one’s in there still.’ Her voice was so close to my ear that I felt her breath on my skin.

It was surely impossible to survive the heat inside the cathedral. It was bad enough out here, and it was getting worse. Anyone inside must be dead or dying, like the rats.

Maycock the printer collapsed. His friends seized his limbs and dragged him away. Their going left the boy, the woman and me in the front rank of the crowd.

‘Look! Look – the roof!’

She flung out her arm and pointed. Her face glowed as if she had seen a vision of eternity. I followed the line of her finger. From where we were standing, we could see the south-west corner of the cathedral, where the little church of St Gregory nestled against the nave.

The roof fell in with a rumble that was audible above the crackle of the fire. There was a high, wordless cry.

The boy broke away from the crowd and ran towards St Paul’s.

I shouted at him to stop. The fire swallowed the sound. I swore and went after him. The heat battered me. I smelled singeing hair and charred flesh. My lungs were on fire.

The boy had his arms outstretched – towards the cathedral? Towards something or someone inside?

My legs were longer than his. After twenty or thirty yards, I seized his shoulder and spun him round, knocking his hat off. I wrapped my right arm around him and dragged him backwards.

He struggled. I tightened my grip. He hacked at my shins. I cuffed him hard about the head, which quieted him for a moment.

Sparks showered over us, driven by the savage wind that was driving the fire itself. Both of us were 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.

CHAPTER TWO

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.’ I glanced over my shoulder. Even here, such talk was dangerous as well as foolish, especially for a man like my father whose liberty hung by a thread. ‘It isn’t snow. It’s only paper.’

‘Paper? Nonsense. Paper is white. Paper doesn’t fall from the air.’

‘It’s been burned. The stationers stored their paper and many of their books in the crypt at St Paul’s. But the Fire found a way to it, and now the wind brings these fragments even here.’

‘Snow,’ the old man muttered. ‘Black snow. It’s another sign.’

‘Paper, sir. Not snow.’ I heard the exasperation in my voice and wished I had said nothing. I sensed rather than saw the dismay in my father’s face, for signs of anger or irritation upset the old man, sometimes to the point of tears. 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.

CHAPTER THREE

THE PALACE OF Whitehall sprawled along the river to the south of Charing Cross. It was a warren of buildings, old and new, covering more than twenty acres. It had a population larger than that of most villages.

There was no panic here, but there were signs of unusual activity. In the Great Court, workmen were loading wagons with goods, which would be removed to the safety of Windsor if the Fire spread further west.

I enquired after my patron, and learned that he was in his private office in Scotland Yard, an adjacent complex of buildings which lay on the northern side of the palace. Master Williamson also worked in far grander lodgings overlooking the Privy Garden; but when his business was shabby and private he walked across to Scotland Yard and conducted it in the appropriate surroundings.

Williamson was engaged, so I was forced to kick my heels in the outer office used by clerks and messengers. One of the clerks was making a fair copy of a report on the Fire for the London Gazette. Among his other responsibilities, Williamson edited the newspaper and ensured that its contents were as agreeable as possible to the government.

He himself ushered out his visitor, a portly, middle-aged gentleman with a wart on the left-hand side of his chin. The stranger’s eyes lingered on me for a moment as he passed by.

Williamson, still wreathed in smiles, beckoned me. ‘At last,’ he said, the good humour dropping like a falling curtain from his face. ‘Why didn’t you wait on me yesterday evening?’

‘I’m sorry, sir. The Fire delayed me and—’

‘Nevertheless, you should have come. And why the devil are you so late this morning?’

Williamson’s Cumbrian accent had become more pronounced. Though he had lived in the south, and among gentlemen in the main, for nearly twenty years, his native vowels broadened when he was irritated or under pressure.

‘The refugees blocked the road, sir.’

‘Then you should have started earlier. I needed you here.’ He waved at the clerk who was working on the report for the Gazette. ‘That idiot cannot write a fair hand.’

‘Your pardon, sir.’

‘You’ve not been in my employ for long, Marwood,’ he went on. ‘Don’t keep me waiting again, or you will find that I shall contrive to manage without you.’

I bowed and kept silent. Without Williamson’s patronage I would have nothing. And my father would have worse than nothing. Williamson was under-secretary to Lord Arlington, the Secretary of State for the South, and his influence spread throughout the government and far beyond. As for me, I was the least important of Williamson’s clerks, little more than his errand boy.

‘Come in here.’

He led the way into his private office. He said nothing more until I had shut the door.

‘Did you go to St Paul’s last night as I commanded?’

‘Yes, sir. I was there when the crypt went up. The cathedral was beyond rescue within an hour, even if they could have got water to it. The heat was terrible. By the time I left, molten lead was trickling down Ludgate Hill.’

‘Was anyone inside?’

I thought of the boy–girl running towards the building when the Fire was at its hottest. I said, ‘Not as far as I know, sir. Even the rats were running away.’

‘And what were the people in the crowd saying?’

‘About the cause of the Fire?’

‘In particular about the destruction of the cathedral. They say it has angered the King as much as anything these last few days, even the damned Dutch.’

I swallowed. ‘They attribute it to one of two things, sometimes both. The—’

‘Don’t talk in riddles.’

‘I mean, sir, that they say the two causes may be linked. For some say God is showing his displeasure at the wickedness of the court’ – better not to blame our profligate and Papist-leaning King in person, for walls had ears, especially in Whitehall – ‘while others attribute the Fire to the malignancy of our enemies. To the Pope or the French or the Dutch.’

‘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.

CHAPTER FOUR

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 was breathing raggedly, and that she was drenched with sweat. It was hot even in here.

He lowered his voice still further. The flame flickered as he mouthed the words, ‘Did you find him, mistress?’

Tears filled her eyes. She bit her lower lip, drawing blood. ‘No. And St Paul’s is lost. I saw part of the portico fall and crumble into dust.’

‘If Master Lovett was there, he will have escaped.’

‘We must pray he did.’ Her words were pious, but her feelings were more complicated. Was it possible to love her father and fear him at the same time? She owed him her devotion and her duty. But did he not owe her something as well? She wondered why Jem cared for him, the man who had once beaten him so hard that it caused the lameness in his leg.

‘Remember, I cannot be sure it was him I saw this morning.’ Jem brought the light closer to her. ‘Your clothes, mistress. What happened?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Light me upstairs.’

The house was built mainly of stone and brick – a blessing in these times, Master Alderley had said at dinner, though he also urged his family to mark that God tempered the wind to those who took thought for the morrow – and it lay at a safe distance beyond the City wall near Hatton Garden. The place had belonged to the monks in the old days and it had been much altered since then. It was old and rambling, with stairs that spiralled to chambers that were long gone and to great vaulted cellars half-full of rubble.

Jem led the way, holding the lantern high. They mounted a flight of steps and passed through another door.

Claws clattered on stone. The mastiffs met them in the passage. One by one, they pushed their moist muzzles at Cat. They pressed against her, sniffing and licking her outstretched hand, eager for her familiar touch. By day the dogs lived in a special enclosure in the yard, and by night they patrolled the house, yard and the garden.

‘Thunder,’ she whispered into the darkness, ‘Lion, Greedy and Bare-Arse.’

The dogs whined softly with pleasure. Cat drew a deep breath. Now the worst was over, she began to tremble. It was unlikely she would be discovered now. For most of the time, the nightwatchman stayed at the other end of the house, away from the kitchens and close to the study and the cellar that Master Alderley had adapted to be his strong room. The dogs would warn them if he was about, and his lantern and his footsteps came before him when he patrolled the other parts of the building. As for the porter, he slept in the hall, on a mattress laid across the threshold of the front door. He would not move from there until Edward returned.

The passage led to the kitchen wing. They crossed a narrow hall with a row of small, shuttered windows, descended a few steps and turned sharply to their right. Then came a spiral staircase that climbed through the thickness of the wall, lit only by the occasional unglazed openings that gave glimpses of the sullen glow above the burning city. These stairs smelled strongly of the stink of the Fire, unlike the lower regions of the house. They taxed Jem’s strength, for he was short of breath as well as lame.

Cat’s chamber was a small room facing north towards the hills of Highgate. The heavy curtains were drawn across the window, blocking the glare of the Fire, which was visible even on this side of the house.

Jem lit her candle from the flame in the lantern.

‘Why has my father come back?’ she said.

‘He does not confide in me, mistress.’

‘They will kill him if they find them. He must know that.’

He bobbed his head in acknowledgement. She wondered if he knew more than he was saying.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Good night.’

Jem lingered, his face unreadable in the gloom. ‘They say in the kitchen that Sir Denzil will dine here tomorrow.’

She bit hard on her lip. This on top of everything. ‘Is it certain?’

‘Yes. Unless the Fire prevents it.’

‘Go,’ she said. ‘Leave me.’

He turned and hobbled from the room.

Once the door was closed, and she was quite alone at last, she could allow herself to cry.

CHAPTER FIVE

IT WAS A mark of Sir Denzil’s importance that Aunt Olivia sent Ann to help Cat dress for dinner. Cat did not have her own maid to attend her, a fact that underlined her anomalous status in the household.

Ann, Aunt Olivia’s own maid, spent what seemed like hours working on Cat’s appearance. Most importantly, she wound a bandage beneath Cat’s breasts with padding set in it in order to create the impression that Cat had far more of a bosom than God had at present seen fit to provide. Cat was already a woman – she would be eighteen next birthday – but sometimes it seemed to her that she and Aunt Olivia were different creatures from one another.

The maid worked in silence, frowning constantly, and tugging at laces and bandages as if Cat were an inanimate object incapable of feeling pain and discomfort. Afterwards, she showed Cat her reflection in Aunt Olivia’s Venetian mirror. Cat saw a richly dressed doll with slanting eyes and elaborately curled hair.

Ann brought her down to the best parlour. She left Cat stuffed and trussed like a goose for the oven, to wait on the pleasure of Uncle Alderley and Sir Denzil Croughton.

The parlour smelled of fresh herbs with a hint of damp. The dark wood of the floor and the furniture had been waxed to a dull sheen. A Turkey carpet glowed on the table underneath the windows. There was a small fire of logs, despite the unnatural warmth of the season, for the room was chilly even in summer.

She stood by the table and idly turned the pages of a book of airs that lay there, though she could not have sung a note to save her life.

Her mind was elsewhere, wondering whether she could slip outside again tonight, with Jem’s help, and how it might be contrived.

She heard steps on the flags outside the door and shivered with distaste. Her hand froze in the act of turning a page. She knew who was there even before she turned: she would have recognized that slow, heavy step in the middle of a crowd.

‘Catherine, my love,’ said Cousin Edward. The Alderleys never called her Cat.

She turned reluctantly and gave him the curtsy that good manners required.

He bowed in return, but with an element of mockery. ‘Well! You are quite the court beauty today.’ He sucked in his breath to show his appreciation and walked slowly towards her, watching her face. ‘How you have grown!’ He moved his hands, sketching an exaggerated version of her shape. ‘A miracle! Scratch me, my dear, I think this must be the effect of Sir Denzil. The power of his charms is acting on you from afar.’

She closed the book. She said nothing because that was usually wisest with Edward.

‘And what are you reading?’ He stretched out his hand to the book. ‘Ah – studying your music. How delightful. Shall I beg you to sing to the company after dinner? I’m sure Sir Denzil would be enchanted.’

She was tone-deaf, and Edward knew it.

He lowered his head and she smelled the wine on his breath. ‘Of course I myself am already enchanted without the need of song.’

Cat edged away from him. He followed her, penning her close to the table and blocking her retreat. She turned away and affected to stare through the window at the green geometry of the garden and the hot, heavy sky. He was a big man, nearly six foot, and growing fat, for all he was barely five-and-twenty. He looked like a pig, she thought, and had the same voracious appetites. Most of the time he ignored her, which was infinitely better than the times when he baited her instead. Lately, she had been aware of his eyes on her, watching, measuring.

‘This miracle.’ He moistened his lips. ‘This sudden change to your appearance. Why, you are all of a sudden grown so womanly. It is quite remarkable.’

He laid his hand on her shoulder. His touch was warm and slightly moist. He tightened his fingers.

‘Skin and bone, sweet cousin,’ he said. ‘Like a child still. And yet … and yet …’

She pulled away from him.

He brought his head closer to hers, and again she smelled the wine on his breath. ‘I saw you last night.’

Startled, she looked up at his flushed, familiar face.

‘Creeping back to the house,’ he said. ‘You’d been out by yourself, hadn’t you, walking the streets like any tuppenny whore. You little Puritans are all the same, primness and virtue on the outside and the filthiest wickedness within. I saw you from the window of the tavern by the gate. Slipping like a thief into the alley. Who let you in? That crippled knave of yours?’

Cat had hated Edward Alderley for some time now. She was a good hater. She hoarded the hatred as a miser hoards his gold.

The latch rattled on the door. Edward snatched away his hand and stepped back. Cat smoothed her dress and turned to the window. She was breathing rapidly and her skin prickled with sweat.

Olivia came into the room. ‘Let me look at you, child. Now turn to the side.’ She nodded. ‘Good. Your colour is much better than usual, too.’ She turned to Edward. ‘Don’t you agree? Ann has worked wonders.’

He bowed. ‘Indeed, madam. Why, my cousin is quite the little beauty today.’ He smiled at his stepmother. ‘No doubt the work was carried out under your guidance.’

Uncle Alderley came in with Sir Denzil.

The ladies curtsied, and Sir Denzil bowed elaborately, first to Olivia and then to Cat. He was a small man with a lofty periwig and unusually high heels to his shoes.

‘Ah!’ he said in a high, drawling voice, directing his remarks impartially at the space between the two women. ‘A feast of beauty!’ He turned to Master Alderley and touched his lip with his forefinger, an oddly childlike gesture. He wore a diamond ring on the finger. ‘Truly, sir, I am a veritable glutton for beauty.’ He looked directly at Cat for the first time and said without marked enthusiasm, ‘and soon I shall have the pleasure of eating my fill.’

The ungainly compliment fell like a stone in a pool. There was a moment’s silence.

‘Well, sir,’ Aunt Olivia said to her husband. ‘Shall we go in to dinner?’

Power, Cat thought, resides in small things.

If anything confirmed Uncle Alderley’s position in the world, it was the fact that, while the City was burning to ashes on his doorstep, he himself was dining at home quite as if nothing were amiss. The food was as good as ever when he entertained a guest he wished to please, and the servants just as attentive. They used the best cutlery, the two-pronged forks and the knives with rounded handles that fitted snugly in the hand; Aunt Olivia had insisted on having them; they had been imported from Paris at absurd expense.

There was a message here for Sir Denzil Croughton, and perhaps for Master Alderley’s own family as well: the Fire could not destroy Master Alderley or his wealth; he was, under God and the King, invincible.

They dined as usual at midday. There were five of them at table – Master and Mistress Alderley at either end, Cat and the honoured guest side by side, and Edward sitting opposite them. There were four servants waiting at table. To Cat’s surprise, Jem was among them, dressed in an ill-fitting suit of the Alderleys’ black-and-yellow livery.

‘What’s this?’ Master Alderley said, as Jem appeared at his shoulder.

‘Did I not tell you, sir?’ Aunt Olivia said. ‘Layne is nowhere to be found, so we must make shift the best we can with Jem.’

‘What the devil does Layne think he’s about?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know.’

‘I’ll have the fellow whipped when he returns.’

‘Just as you say, sir.’ A good hostess, Olivia noticed that Sir Denzil’s nostrils were twitching. ‘Would you care to try the carp, sir? I made the sauce myself, and I pride myself on my sauces.’

Sir Denzil looks like a fish himself, Cat thought. Quite possibly a carp.

All the dishes had been prepared in their own kitchen, for Aunt Olivia scorned to send out for food; she was far too good a housekeeper. Besides, few cook shops were still open, and the few that remained were inundated with custom.

In Sir Denzil’s honour, there were three courses. To his credit, he responded manfully to the challenge. He dug deep into a fricassee of rabbits and chickens, returned again and again to the carp, ripped chunks from the boiled leg of mutton, and swallowed slice after slice of the side of lamb. The food passed through his mouth so rapidly that he seemed hardly to chew it at all.

‘Is that a lamprey pie?’ he asked Aunt Olivia in a voice that rose almost to a trill. ‘How delightful. Yes, perhaps I will take a little.’

Two pigeons, a dish of anchovies and most of a lobster went the way of everything else. By this time Sir Denzil was slowing down, though he compensated by increasing his consumption of wine, revealing an unusual capacity for canary, of which he must have drunk close to half a gallon. By this stage, his colour was high and there was a certain glassiness in his eye that reminded Cat irresistibly of the carp as it had been when it first arrived in the kitchen.

They drank the health of the King and confusion to his enemies. Prompted delicately by Aunt Olivia, Sir Denzil proposed two toasts, first to his hostess, who smiled graciously and accepted it as her due, and then to Cat, who stared at the table and wished to God she were anywhere else but here.

Sir Denzil crooked his finger at her, and the diamond ring sparkled. ‘You see, my dear, I wear your ring. And I shall send you mine as soon as it has been reset.’

This ring, this token of love, was a polite fiction. Cat had understood from Master Alderley that he himself had provided both rings, for Sir Denzil was short of ready money and tradesmen were not enthusiastic about allowing him credit. The rings were designed to be symbols of the betrothal. Master Alderley had sent this one to Sir Denzil only yesterday.

The conversation was mainly of the Fire, of course, and of the King and the court.

‘There are grounds for hope,’ Sir Denzil informed them, his piping voice muffled by a mouthful of lobster. ‘I heard the King himself say so this morning. If the Duke of York can hold the Fire at Temple Bar, then Whitehall is saved.’

Olivia touched her throat. ‘Are we safe here?’

‘Lord Craven’s men have turned back the flames at Holborn Bridge,’ Master Alderley said.

Sir Denzil waved his fork. ‘You need not trouble yourself in the slightest, madam.’

‘I’m advised that the worst is over,’ Master Alderley said. ‘Even Bludworth has at last begun to pull down houses. Only in Cripplegate, but it’s a start.’

‘I fear the Lord Mayor is an old woman, sir,’ Edward said.

‘Very true, sir,’ Sir Denzil said. ‘Only a fool would have failed to realize that creating firebreaks was the only way to hold the fire. Bludworth’s indecision has cost us half the City.’

‘He was afraid he’d be sued by the tenants or the freeholders if he pulled down their houses,’ Master Alderley said. ‘Or both. It comes down to money. It always does.’

‘The City must thank God for the King and the court,’ Sir Denzil said. ‘Without their cool heads and brave deeds, it would have been far worse. That’s the trouble with these aldermen and merchants and so forth. In an emergency, they are no better than children. They cannot even save themselves and their ledgers.’

‘That isn’t true of all of the aldermen,’ Master Alderley said drily. ‘Fortunately.’

The change of tone put Sir Denzil in mind of the company he was in. ‘Of course, sir. And thank God for it. Now if only you, not Bludworth, had been Lord Mayor, it would have been a very different story, I’m sure.’

‘Who would be a Lord Mayor?’ Master Alderley said. ‘It’s a great deal of expense and a man has little return on his investment, as well as much risk. For Bludworth, it will mean ruin.’

‘Will you take a few anchovies, sir?’ Aunt Olivia said, judging that it was time to change the subject. ‘My niece made the sauce according to a French recipe, and I’m sure she would value your opinion.’

Sir Denzil tasted it and nodded. ‘Delicious. Did you know, madam, I have a Frenchman in my kitchen now? I hope you will all dine with me soon. I fancy you will not be disappointed. He has cooked for Monsieur d’Orleans, you know, and several gentlemen have tried to steal him since I brought him over from Paris.’

Cat stole a sideways glance at Sir Denzil. A streak of sauce ran down his chin and onto the collar beneath. He dabbed it with his napkin.

Dinner was nearly over, but no word of the business that had brought Sir Denzil here had passed between him and Master Alderley, apart from the matter of the rings. Cat suspected that the terms of the betrothal between herself and Sir Denzil had not yet been finally agreed, but of course nothing would be discussed at table before the women. But somehow it seemed tacitly accepted that the principle of the thing had been established. She tried to imagine what it would be like to see Sir Denzil consuming food and drink at table every day of their married life. Her imagination baulked.

‘You must ask my cousin Catherine to sing to you after dinner,’ Edward said, leaning over the table towards Sir Denzil.

‘Yes, indeed,’ Sir Denzil said, taking up his glass and frowning into it, as if surprised to find it empty again. ‘I shall be charmed, I’m sure.’

Jem limped forward to refill the glass.

Edward glanced at Cat, smiling, just for a second. ‘One cannot listen to my cousin’s voice and be unmoved.’

Olivia said: ‘What a pity, Sir Denzil, that the pleasure must be postponed for a little while. Master Alderley tells me that you and he must withdraw after dinner.’

Master Alderley grunted.

Olivia leaned towards Sir Denzil, affording him an agreeable prospect of her breasts. ‘And are you considered musical, sir?’

‘Indeed I am, madam. All the Croughtons are.’ He toyed with a spoonful of apple pie. ‘After all, is not music the food of love?’ At this point he realized that it was perhaps impolite of him to stare so long and so fixedly at Mistress Alderley’s bosom while talking of love. He put the spoonful of pie in his mouth and transferred his gaze to Cat.

‘How I long to hear you singing duets,’ Edward said. ‘It will be quite ravishing.’

When at last dinner was over, Master Alderley withdrew to his study with his guest leaning heavily on his arm and humming ‘Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes’. Edward made his excuses to the ladies and left the house.

‘So,’ Olivia said as she led Cat into the parlour. ‘In a while, you will be Lady Croughton.’

‘Must I be, madam?’

‘Yes.’ Olivia sank gracefully into a chair and took up her embroidery. ‘Your uncle has quite made up his mind. Sir Denzil has no money but he has the ear of the King and those about him. But you must not let it worry you. The marriage will not come to pass until the winter. Master Alderley needs a little time to make sense of Sir Denzil’s affairs and deal with the settlements. Sir Denzil is not a man to take liberties beforehand, I think.’ She smiled in a sly way that brought out her resemblance to a cat. ‘And perhaps not even afterwards. The one thing you must do when you are married to Sir Denzil is to feed him well. Take my advice, my dear – a good cook and a well-provided table will save you a world of grief.’

‘But I don’t want to marry him.’

‘You’re not so foolish as to long for love? You’re far too sensible, child. Love and marriage are two quite different things.’

‘I don’t want to marry anyone.’

Olivia stabbed the needle into the silk. ‘You must do as you’re told,’ she said. ‘You cannot stay here for ever, doing nothing but getting your fingers inky and scratching your meaningless lines on scraps of paper.’

‘But they are not meaningless, madam. They are plans – they are designs of buildings that—’

‘Fiddle-Fiddle.’ Aunt Olivia’s temper was rising. ‘It is not an occupation for a lady. Besides, your uncle has been very kind to you in making this arrangement. He wants to see you comfortably settled, as you are his poor sister-in-law’s only child, and you may be in a position to help him and your cousin once you are married. You should remember that it cannot have been easy for him to manage – after all, Sir Denzil knows who your father is. Everyone does.’

CHAPTER SIX

WHEN CAT WAS very little, the Lovetts had a dog. He was a nameless animal of no breeding but infinite patience. The dog reminded her of Jem in more ways than one. One of her earliest memories was of toddling in the garden of their house in Bow Lane, hand in hand with Jem, with the dog on the other side of her.

It was difficult to say exactly what Jem did at Barnabas Place. In the old days, he had worked for her father as a confidential clerk and manservant. When their troubles came, her father had sent him with her to her aunt in Champney. Later Jem had escorted her to Uncle Alderley’s.

Jem had been old even then, but his breathing had been better and his joints not so rusty. He was not valued at Barnabas Place. He slept in the loft above the stables, along with the man who killed rats, emptied slops and did other unpleasant necessities. He ate in the back kitchen and did what he was told to do. Apart from board and lodging he did not receive a wage, though Cat occasionally gave him a few pence or even a shilling or two.

‘It isn’t fair,’ Cat once said to him. ‘You’re always working, always doing something for someone. They should pay you.’

‘The master gives nothing for nothing.’

‘But you give him something.’

‘You don’t understand, mistress. I am nothing. To your uncle, I mean. His worship wouldn’t miss me if I were not here, so why should he pay me? If he thinks about it at all, he knows I will stay whether I’m paid or not, because he knows I have nowhere to go. He pays nothing for nothing. That’s how he’s become rich.’

Early in the evening of the day of the dinner, after Sir Denzil Croughton had been assisted to his coach, Cat went in search of Jem. She found him in the little yard behind the washhouse. He wasn’t wearing the Alderley livery any more. He was in his ordinary clothes and preparing lye, the mixture of ashes and urine that was used for soaking badly soiled laundry. It was a woman’s job usually but the washerwoman had lost the two girls who usually came in to assist her; presumably they and their families were somewhere among the flood of refugees.

The walls of the yard were high, trapping the hot air below the heavy grey sky. The grey was tinged with an orange glow. Even here, the ground was flecked with ashes. Cat watched him at work for a moment before he saw her. He was stirring the mixture in a half-barrel, stooping over his work with the sweat streaking his shirt and running down his arms. His thin grey hair hung limply to his shoulders.

When she called his name, he turned his head. His face was red with heat and exertion, shining with sweat. He stared unsmilingly at her.

Cat wrinkled her nose. ‘Come in here. I can’t talk to you there.’

She turned and went into the barn. She heard his dragging footsteps behind her. She stopped and faced him.

‘How can you bear it?’ She spoke at random, for her head was hurting and she found it hard to gather her thoughts. ‘The smell. The heat.’

He shrugged, and she realized that for him it was not a question worth answering. ‘Is there news of Layne?’ he said.

‘Not that I’ve heard. Why?’

‘Sometimes I wonder about him, mistress.’ He stared at her. ‘He likes to know where you are.’

‘Layne does? Why in God’s name?’

‘I don’t know. But I’ve heard him asking your aunt’s maid, more than once, and I’ve seen him watching you. I think he searched my box the other day, though I can’t be sure. If he did, he might have found—’

‘I can’t worry about Layne now,’ Cat interrupted. ‘I want to go out tonight. I’ll need clothes again.’

Jem shook his head.

‘An old shirt – a pair of breeches. That’s all.’

‘No, mistress.’

‘But there must be something you can find. There’s a chest of rags for the poor, isn’t there? You’ll find something in there, I’m sure. I have a cloak now – the one I found yesterday.’

‘It’s too dangerous.’

‘That’s not for you to decide. Do you need money? Would that make it easier?’

‘I won’t help you.’

‘Why not?’

He looked at her. Their eyes were on a level. ‘Because it’s not safe.’

‘What does it matter?’ she said. ‘I must see my father. They are going to make me marry Sir Denzil. I’d rather die.’

Jem ignored that. ‘I shouldn’t have let you go last night,’ he said. ‘The City is a madhouse on fire.’

She stamped her foot. ‘You’ll find me clothes. And you’ll wait at the door and let me in when I come back.’

‘No.’

‘I command you.’

‘I’m sorry, mistress.’

Cat advanced on him. ‘I can’t do this without you.’

He stood his ground. ‘You won’t know where to begin. He can’t meet you in St Paul’s now.’

‘I’ll find him. In Bow Lane, perhaps.’

‘But there’s nothing left in Bow Lane.’

For a moment she grappled with this idea, that the house where she had grown up no longer existed. ‘Nearby, then.’

‘He could be anywhere, mistress. If he’s still alive.’

‘Of course he’s alive.’ She glared at him. ‘Can you send word to him?’

‘No. He always sends word to me. Safer that way.’

‘How?’

Jem shuffled, easing the weight on his lame leg. ‘I was told not to tell you.’

She scowled at him. ‘My father hasn’t seen me for six years. He forgets I’m not a child any more. So do you, but with less reason.’

He stared at her for a long moment. ‘There’s a man,’ he said at last. ‘He brings me a letter sometimes, or sometimes just a message. And he takes them from me in return. Yesterday he told me that you should go to St Paul’s, that your father would find you there in Paul’s Walk.’

‘Who is this man? Where can you find him?’

‘I don’t know, mistress.’

She glared at him. ‘You must know something.’

He hesitated and then said slowly, ‘He lives somewhere near Cursitor Street. I think he might be a tailor. I saw him sometimes in the old days.’

‘Then I shall go there and look for him. If my father isn’t with him, then perhaps he will know where he is.’

‘I won’t let you,’ Jem said. ‘It would be folly. Let me see if I can find him. Better still, be patient until he sends word.’

‘No. I shall go. You must help me.’

Jem shook his head. ‘It’s too dangerous. If they find your father in London, they will put him on trial for treason. And anyone they find helping him.’

She raised her hand to slap his face. Slowly she lowered it. ‘Why are you being so obstinate, old man? One word from me, and they will turn you out on the street.’

‘Then say it,’ he said. ‘The one word.’

The long evening drew at last to a close.

Uncle Alderley and Cousin Edward had been into the City and then as far west as Whitehall. At supper, they were full of what they had seen. The Fire was diminishing, though it was still burning steadily and there was always the danger it would reach the great powder magazine in the Tower, particularly if the wind veered again. The great exodus from the City had continued. Perhaps seventy or eighty thousand people had fled. They were flooding into the unburned suburbs, to Houndsditch and the Charterhouse, to West Smithfield and Clerkenwell, and even to Hatton Garden, where they were lapping around the walls of Barnabas Place itself.

‘They are like people in a melancholy dream,’ Master Alderley said. ‘They simply cannot understand what has happened.’

The refugees camped wherever they could. The park at Moorfields was packed with them – more than twenty acres of ground covered with a weeping, moaning, sleeping mass of humanity. Some had gone over the river and set up camp in St George’s Fields, where the ground was marshy even in this sweltering summer, and evil humours rose from the ground at night. Others – the more active or the more terrified – had gone further still, to the hills of Islington.

‘God knows where it will end,’ Master Alderley said. ‘Once people leave the City, why should they come back?’

Alarm flared in Olivia’s face. ‘But what shall we do, sir?’

‘You need not worry, my dear. They will always need money wherever they go. I have taken precautions. So we shall do very well, whatever they do with London’s ashes.’

She leaned over the table and patted his hand. ‘You are so wise, sir.’

Master Alderley withdrew his hand at once, for public displays of feeling disturbed him; but he was not displeased with this show of wifely admiration.

‘Is Layne back?’ he demanded.

‘No, sir.’

‘Then we shall have to turn him off. I know you brought Layne into the household, but I cannot have a servant who will not attend to his duty.’

‘It may not be his fault. Perhaps the Fire has delayed him. Perhaps he has had an accident.’

Master Alderley frowned. ‘We shall see. In the meantime, we must find another man to wait at table. I don’t wish to have that cripple again.’

‘No, sir. Of course not.’

‘We saw Sir Denzil,’ Edward said in a moment. ‘He was attending the Duke of York.’ He turned to Cat, which meant that his father and his stepmother could not see his expression. ‘He and I drank to your betrothal, cousin, and to the speedy arrival of an heir to Croughton Hall.’

‘That would suit us all very well,’ Master Alderley said. He gave Cat a rare smile. ‘We shall have you wedded by Christmas and brought to bed of a fine boy by Michaelmas next year.’

‘So be sure to cultivate this French cook of his, cousin,’ Edward murmured, too low for his father to hear. ‘French cooks are always men of infinite subtlety and resource. I am sure Sir Denzil’s will know how to set his master on fire for you.’

After supper, Olivia took Cat up to her own bedchamber to discuss the wedding, its location, who should be invited, and what she and Cat should wear.

Ann came to undress her mistress while they talked. Olivia sat at her dressing table wearing a bedgown of blue silk trimmed with lace, with four candles reflected in the mirror and throwing their murky light on her face. The warm air was heavy with perfume.

The subject was of absorbing interest to Olivia, and the discussion – the first of many, no doubt, she said with a smile – went on for longer than Cat would have believed possible.

Cat’s eyes strayed to the great bed that stood in the shadows, surmounted by a canopy. She imagined Uncle Alderley – so staid, so old, so disgusting – heaving and twisting and grunting there. The thought of it, together with the perfume and the suffocating sense of femininity that seemed to fill the room, made her feel ill.

Olivia did not belong with Uncle Alderley. She could not enjoy his attentions, Cat thought, though in public she behaved with impeccable obedience towards her husband. But Cat had heard their raised voices through closed doors.

Was this what marriage meant? This unnatural union? This heaving and twisting and grunting? A public show of devotion concealing private quarrels and secret lusts?

Ann left the room to fetch hot water.

‘Well?’ Aunt Alderley said. ‘Is it not exciting? You have so much to look forward to. They say Croughton Hall is very fine.’

Cat sat forward in her chair so she could see the reflection of her aunt’s face wavering in the mirror. ‘Madam,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to be married to Sir Denzil. I mean it. Is there no way—?’

‘But, child, you must let those older and wiser guide you.’

‘He doesn’t please me.’

‘So you’ve said. But it’s nonsense, my dear. Liking will come later, if God wills it, as it does in most marriages. You must not concern yourself about it now. Remember, he has everything to recommend him, including the fact that your uncle is in favour of the match.’

‘But he’s so—’

Aunt Alderley shook her head. ‘Not a word more, my dear. You’re overtired, and this makes you say foolish things. Besides, this horrible Fire has upset us all.’

There was a tap on the door, and Ann entered with a jug of steaming water.

‘We’ll discuss the question of jewellery later,’ her aunt said in a brisk voice. ‘But now, my love, you must go to bed. You have great circles under your eyes. Shall Ann come with you and undress you?’

‘No, madam. But thank you.’

When she was released, Cat climbed the stairs to the floor above the main bedchambers, candle in hand. She had walked this way so often that she could have done it in the dark.

Every now and then she passed a window that gave glimpses of London glowing like a bed of coals in the night. It seemed to her that the fire was less bright than it had been, as if its fury were gradually dying. Occasionally there were muffled explosions. The work of demolition continued.

For an instant, a vision of a new London rose in her mind, growing from this bed of coals: a town of great piazzas and avenues, of lofty churches, and of fine buildings of brick and stone. She would get out her drawing box and her papers when she was safely in her room. She would map an outline of this new and glorious city. The box had been a gift from her other aunt, Great Aunt Eyre; it reminded her of a time when she had been happy.

Cat raised the latch on her door and entered the chamber. Once inside, still with the candle in her hand, she inserted a wooden wedge above the latch so it could not be raised from the outside. She had fashioned the wedge herself, from a splinter of kindling, using a knife she had sent Jem to buy.

She put down the candle on the table under the window and tugged the laces that tied the bodice of her dress.

There was a chuckle behind her. She sucked in her breath and spun round.

‘Pray let me assist you, my sweet.’

Edward was standing almost at her shoulder. For a moment it was as if he had materialized from nothing, like the evil spirit he was. Chasing after that came the realization that he must have been waiting for her in the gap between the side of the big press and the corner of the wall.

He smiled at her. He wore his bedgown of padded silk trimmed with fur. Around his head he had wound a silk kerchief. He looked younger without his periwig, more like a bloated version of the boy he had once been.

The boy who had pulled her hair and put a dead crow in her bed.

‘Go away,’ she said, retreating. ‘I shall scream.’

‘Scream all you like, my love. No one will hear.’

He seized her as he spoke. His left arm circled her head and the hand clamped over her mouth and nostrils as he pulled her towards him. His right arm wrapped itself around her waist.

She struggled for breath. She kicked his shins but her soft indoor shoes made no impression on him.

Her left hand swept over the table and touched the candlestick. She picked it and jabbed the flame of the candle into his cheek. The light died. He swore. His grip tightened.

‘Hellcat,’ he whispered.

Darkness came. And pain.

CHAPTER SEVEN

NOTHING LASTS FOR ever, Cat thought, for was there not always death to make an end of it?

She lay in the darkness. She was on her back still, her legs apart, her dress rucked up, for what was there to be modest about any more? The pain in her body was acute but strangely remote, as if it belonged to someone else, someone she had once known well and now was a stranger.

Sometimes a church clock struck the hour. That was strange too, the very idea that this devastated city still contained churches with clocks and bells that told the time.

Churches among the ashes of the dead.

Gradually other thoughts drifted into her mind. She could go to Aunt Olivia, praying to God she would not find Uncle Alderley tossing on top of her in the canopied bed.

But Olivia would say that those things were only to be expected, that this was what gentlemen always tried to do to pretty maids, and even to less pretty ones. She would say that Cat should have taken better care of herself, and above all she would say that it was Cat’s fault.

It was the way of the world. Men always tried to make love to women. That was what Olivia had said in the spring, when she had turned away a servant who had got herself with child. Cat had argued that the man should bear at least some of the blame.

‘But it was her fault, Catherine,’ Olivia had said, ‘just as it was Eve’s. A woman leads a man into sin, that’s what your uncle says, and of course he is right. The girl should have managed it better, and now she must live with the consequences. And there’s an end to it.’

Would they throw Cat into the streets, a defiled woman to live in the gutter as best she could? Probably not – they would simply pretend it had not happened. Master Alderley had his heart set on her marrying Sir Denzil, and Master Alderley was not a man who changed his mind once it was made up.

Another thought struck her. If she told her uncle and aunt, would they even believe her?

As a child Cat had been thrown from a horse and landed awkwardly on a heap of stones. This had been almost a year before she first had her courses and her body began to change. But after the fall, she had bled from the place where women bleed at that time of the month.

Cat felt herself but could not feel anything except pain. If there were no token of blood to show that she had lost her virginity, then why indeed should they believe her? In that case, it would be her word against Edward’s. Her word was worth nothing. But in his father’s eyes, Edward could do no wrong. She was merely the unwanted niece, a relation by law but not by blood, the child of a man whose name was not mentioned. To the Alderleys, her only value was as something to be traded, bought and sold.

Something to be robbed. Something to be defiled.

Even Jem had abandoned her. He would not help her – besides what could a crippled servant do? He would argue caution in all things, just as the foolish old man always did.

Time passed.

Never forget, never forgive.

Quite suddenly she knew what she would do. The decision arrived ready-made, needing no thought. It was there because nothing else was left to her.

The click of the latch made Cat catch her breath. She opened the door and listened.

The sounds of Barnabas Place settled around her – the creaks, the pattering of rodents, the whispering of draughts. The air was stuffy and still very warm.

She held up the candle, which accentuated the gloom. Her eyes adjusted slowly. This was the darkest hour before dawn. But the Fire still tainted the night sky. An uncurtained window at the end of the landing framed a sullen red glow.

With the bundle under her arm, she stepped from her room and closed the door. She wore her plainest dress. Her shoes were in the bundle, together with a leather bag containing a few small possessions, among them her box of drawing instruments.

Over her shoulders was the grey cloak she had stolen last night from the young man at St Paul’s. She felt a momentary pang of guilt. He had tried to help her, after all – had perhaps saved her life when she had panicked and run towards the cathedral in search of her father. She couldn’t remember much of what he had looked like, apart from the fact that he had been so thin you could see the skull beneath the skin. Also, he had heavy, dark eyebrows that belonged on a larger, older face.

Movement sent spikes of pain deep inside her body. She passed under an archway, turned right and hesitated at the head of the main staircase. Her candle was the only light.

These stairs led down to the balustraded landing, with rugs on the floor and sconces on the polished wood of the panelling, and with ornate plaster mouldings on the ceiling. All the magnificence was invisible.

Olivia’s chamber was down there, with the canopied bedstead. Beside it was Master Alderley’s closet, which had a bed in it, as well as a table, a large inlaid cabinet of Dutch manufacture and a number of presses. The third chamber was empty.

She listened, but all was quiet.

Cat continued down the landing to the archway to the spiral staircase. She found her way by touch, by memory, and by the variations in the darkness of shadows beyond the candlelight. She paused at every step and listened, though she desperately wanted to hurry. This, in reverse, was the route she had used last night, when Jem had brought her up to her chamber.

On the floor below, a door led to the side landing beyond. Unlike the main landing, which was within the shell of what had been the prior’s lodging in the days when the old monks had lived at Barnabas Place, this landing gave access to a different range at right angles to it. Her own chamber was in the upper floor of this building.

The landing took the form of a passage running along its outside wall, with four doors at intervals on the right-hand side. All these doors were closed. She slipped down the passage to the third door. Here she paused, and listened.

The sound of deep, rhythmic snoring reached her. She put down the bundle. She crouched until her cheek touched the ground. A current of air flowed through the gap under the door. But there was no light in the chamber beyond.

Cat stood up, wincing as another spike of pain stabbed her. The other rooms on this landing were unoccupied; they were furnished as bedchambers for the guests that so rarely came. At one time, Edward had slept in the third bedchamber in the main range, but his habit of returning in the early hours, usually drunk, had irritated Master Alderley beyond endurance; and in the end he had ordered his son to move into this wing.

She pushed her hand into her dress and took the knife from her pocket. She raised the latch.

The door opened silently – Olivia would not tolerate a squeaking hinge in any house of hers. The snoring increased in volume. Cat became unpleasantly aware of a fetid smell that reminded her of the wild beasts in the menagerie at the Tower.

Shielding the candle flame, Cat advanced into the darkness beyond. What little light there was showed her the curtains drawn about the bed. It also caught on someone standing beside it in the dark – a dwarf-like man with a great wig; and for a nightmarish instant she thought that Sir Denzil Croughton was waiting for her. The candlestick dipped in her hand, and she almost let it fall. Then reason reasserted herself: what she saw was Edward’s periwig on its stand.

The snoring continued. Cat drew back the curtain and held up the candle so its light shone into the bed.

Edward was lying on his back. For an instant she didn’t recognize him: he had taken off the silk handkerchief he wore at home when he was not wearing his wig. His naked scalp was as bald as a newly peeled potato and not unlike one in shape. He had thrown off the covers in the heat. He wore a white linen nightgown, open at the neck.

The snoring stopped without warning. In the sudden, dreadful silence, Edward was looking at her. She saw his eyes, with twin flames burning in them, one for each pupil, reflecting the candle.

Cat did not think. She jabbed the knife at the nearer eye. The tip snagged for a moment when it touched him, then it dug into the eyeball, which wobbled beneath the pressure like a boiled egg without its shell when you speared it with a knife.

His body bucked in the bed and he let out a scream as high-pitched as a girl’s. His arm swung up towards her. She reared back. The candle tilted in her hand. The flame caught the edge of the bed curtain.

The blood looked black in this light. It gleamed like liquid ebony.

The flame ran up the side of the curtain and gave birth to another flame, and then to a third.

Edward writhed on the mattress, wailing and crying, his hands covering his face.

Cat turned and ran. The candle was in her hand, by some miracle still alight, though the flame was dancing and ducking like a wild thing.

Behind her, the screams continued, the flames rose higher, and the chamber grew brighter and brighter.

‘Mistress …’

She gasped and dropped the bundle.

The whisper came from her left. She heard the laboured breathing mingling with her own. Down here in the cellar, with the stench from the cesspit oozing through the wall, it was very quiet. You could hear and see nothing of what might be going on in the rest of the house. The screams. The flames.

‘Jem.’ She was panting, and the words came singly, in fits and starts. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Waiting for you, mistress.’

He stirred beside her in the darkness. She raised the candle. His pale face was at her elbow.

‘You said you wouldn’t help me,’ she said.

‘I am not here to help.’ His breath wheezed. ‘I feared you would come. I’m here to stop you. Have you not thought? Your father may well be dead.’

She stooped for her bundle. ‘Something’s happened. It changes everything.’

‘Nothing’s changed outside. It’s as dangerous as ever.’

She said bluntly, ‘It’s more dangerous here. Edward took me by force.’

‘Took you …?’

The horror in the old man’s voice gave her a perverse pleasure. She said, ‘He was waiting in my bedchamber tonight. He raped me.’

‘But you’re still a child.’

‘Not any more, you fool,’ she snapped, forgetting in her anger to lower her voice. ‘And so I went to him as he slept and I stabbed him in the eye.’

She felt his hand on her arm. A sob rose from her throat.

‘Is he dead?’ he asked.

‘I hope so.’ She took a deep breath and said in a rush, ‘I must go – go anywhere, anywhere but here.’

‘Then I’ll help you.’

‘There’s nowhere. Nowhere safe.’

‘But there is.’

She turned and blundered against him. His arms went around her. She was trembling but she did not cry.

‘Child,’ he said. ‘Child. You must go alone. I would slow you down. Go to Three Cocks Yard, off the Strand. The house to the left of the sign of the green pestle. Ask for Mistress Martha Noxon. She’s my niece, and they have no knowledge of her here. Give her this, and she will know you. Perhaps your father will find you there.’

Jem pressed something into her hand. It was small and smooth, curved, cold and hard.

‘Put it in your pocket.’ He gave her a little push. ‘And go. Go now.’

Somewhere in the distance was a faint, ragged baying, growing in volume. Thunder, Lion, Greedy and Bare-Arse were giving tongue.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I COULD NOT afford to anger Williamson any more than I had already done. I worked late that day and made sure I was at Whitehall early on the following morning, which was Thursday, the fifth day of the Fire.

The news was good. The wind had slackened and veered north, which made it easier for those fighting the Fire. There were reports that the Duke of York had halted the westward march of the flames at the Temple. God willing, the mansions of the Strand would be spared, and so would Whitehall itself. The fires were still burning vigorously elsewhere, but their relentless advance had been largely stopped.

I was already at work when Williamson came up to the office in Scotland Yard. I knew he was on his way for I had seen him from the window in the court below, deep in conversation with the portly gentleman with the wart on his chin. I expected him to be in a good humour because of the news about the Fire, but his face was grim and preoccupied. As soon as he came in, he called me over, commanding me to bring him the list of fatalities.

He scanned it quickly. ‘Good. No new ones overnight. God has been merciful.’ He lowered his voice. ‘But talking of death, Marwood, there’s one that isn’t recorded here.’

He paused, as if to consider some weighty aspect of the matter far beyond my understanding. I was used to that, for Williamson employed such tactics to build a sense of his own importance – in his own mind, perhaps, as much as in the minds of others.

‘We have a body,’ he said. ‘I think you’d better see it now.’

We clattered down the stone stairs, setting off a crowd of echoes, with Williamson leading the way. On the ground floor, he demanded a lantern from the porter. While we waited he turned to me.

‘A patrol went up to St Paul’s at dawn,’ he said in a low voice. ‘It’s like an oven in there, even now. A beggar told them there was a body in Paul’s Walk. In what’s left of a chantry chapel on the north side.’

‘Where the ballad-seller used to have a stall?’ I asked.

The cathedral’s nave, Paul’s Walk, had become a cross between a market, a public resort and a place of assignation in recent years. The ballad-seller made most of his income from his secondary trade, which was pimping.

Williamson nodded. ‘Two of the guards left their powder behind and went in and pulled him out.’

‘A victim of the Fire, sir?’

‘He’s definitely not the stallholder. And he can’t have been there long. Someone would have noticed him before the Fire.’

‘But why’s he here, sir?’ Surprise stripped the appropriate respect from my voice. ‘At Whitehall?’

The question earned a scowl. The porter brought the lantern. Williamson gestured to me, indicating that I should light the way for him.

We descended by another staircase into the cellarage. I had never been here before – the palace was so vast and so rambling that I knew only a fraction of it, and none of it well. A low passage stretched the length of the range. Small gratings were set high in the left-hand wall to let in a modicum of light and air. On the right was a row of doors, all closed.

Williamson took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door at the far end. We entered a windowless chamber with a low barrel-vault of bricks. It contained no furniture apart from a heavy table in the centre of the room. The cellar smelled strongly of burning, as everywhere did now, as well as of sewage and damp.

On the table lay a large, untidy bundle draped with a sheet.

‘Uncover it,’ Williamson said.

I set down the lantern and obeyed. The man was naked. He was on his side, facing me.

‘God in heaven,’ I said.

He lay awkwardly on the table, for his arms were behind his back, which pushed his shoulders forward and twisted his body to one side. It was as if he had been frozen in the act of trying to roll off the table.

He had matted, shoulder-length hair, which was grey with ash and perhaps with age as well. There wasn’t much flesh on him. His head poked up and forward like the prow of a barge.

‘Who is he, sir?’

‘I don’t know.’

Williamson took up the lantern and directed its light towards the body. The skin was powdered with ash. Seen from close to, it looked yellow beneath the dirt, like parchment. It was shrivelled and blistered. The heat would have done that. The body didn’t stink. But that didn’t necessarily mean the death was recent, I thought, because the heat would have mummified it.

The man’s chin had caught on the table, and his mouth was open, which gave him the air of surprise. His lips were pulled back, exposing the remaining teeth. A bruise on the temple had grazed the skin.

‘Was he naked when he was found?’ I asked, for it seemed to be my place to ask questions.

‘No. His clothes are there.’ Williamson nodded at a bundle on a bench that stood by the wall.

‘Perhaps he was trapped inside when the cathedral caught fire.’

Williamson shrugged. ‘Turn him over,’ he ordered in a casual voice, as if telling me to turn a page or a key.

I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that the soul of the dead man was floating about the roof of the cellar and watching us. I gripped the corpse’s shoulder with one hand and his hip with the other. The flesh was cool and yielded slightly to my touch. It felt like a slab of boiled brawn. I pulled the body towards me, gradually increasing the pressure.

The corpse lacked the rigidity of the recently dead, which made it unnervingly unpredictable. It was also much heavier than I expected. It reached its tipping point and fell with a thump on to its front.

The arms poked up.

‘You see?’ Williamson said softly.

We stood side by side, staring at the hands of the dead man in the light of the lantern. The thumbs were tied together with a length of cord, so tightly tied that they had turned black.

‘Why just the thumbs?’ I said. ‘Why not tie the wrists?’

‘I don’t know. But look there, Marwood. The back of the head.’

There was a small wound in the neck, just below the skull.

‘Stabbed from behind,’ Williamson said. ‘Up into the brain. By someone who knew what he was about.’

I held my peace. So it was murder, that much was clear. The Fire acted as a cover for many crimes, so why not murder among them? What wasn’t clear to me was why Williamson was so interested and, above all, why he had brought me here to see the body.

‘It’s the clothes that matter,’ Williamson said abruptly.

He had wandered over to the bench. He held up a torn shirt, then a coat and a pair of breeches with the same pattern. I joined him. The heat had darkened the material, charring it in places, but it was still possible to make out the broad vertical stripes on the material of both coat and breeches. Black, perhaps, and yellow.

‘A suit of livery?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

A badge was fixed to the collar. Williamson rubbed it with his fingertip. I peered at it. A pelican was feeding her young with flesh plucked from her own breast.

‘He’s one of Henry Alderley’s men,’ Williamson said. ‘The goldsmith – you must know of the man. That’s his device, and his livery. That’s why the body has been brought here. That’s why we must know who killed him. And above all that’s why we must go carefully.’

The King had gone by barge to the Tower, inspecting his ruined capital on the way. From there he intended to ride to Moorfields, to address the crowds of refugees. Master Williamson would have liked to go with him.

Instead, he was obliged to walk to Barnabas Place in Holborn to see Henry Alderley about a dead servant, with me in attendance on him. It was much hotter here, even in the unburned streets, than it had been by the river. In the normal run of things, he would have taken a coach, but the streets were so congested with traffic that this was impracticable. He was not habitually an active man and his face was soon shiny with perspiration.

These were strange times. There had been riots last night, and rumours of food shortages. Foreigners had been attacked on the assumption that they had been responsible for the destruction of London, purely by virtue of their being foreign. The King had summoned the militias of neighbouring counties, ostensibly to help fight the Fire but also to keep order if the riots spiralled out of control.

But even in the middle of this crisis in the nation’s capital, Master Alderley was still a man of importance, not just a goldsmith and an alderman of the City. His wealth was enormous, and the King himself was said to be one of his principal debtors.

So Williamson naturally wished to treat Master Alderley with due respect. But I was puzzled, all the same. Why come himself at a time like this? He was not a justice. He was not a lawyer. He was not a courtier.

Williamson frequently glanced over his shoulder, as if worried that I might slip away, leaving him alone among the refugees and the desolation. This was probably the first time that he had left Whitehall since last week. He must have known in theory what the Fire had done to London, but the reality of it took him by surprise.

We skirted the remains of the City, avoiding the worst of the destruction. He was visibly shocked by what he saw: the smoking ruins, the blackened chimneystacks rearing out of the ashes, and the sluggishly moving crowds of homeless people encumbered with possessions and with the weaker members of their families.

These horrors affected me, too, but I had my own worries to distract me. Williamson had no reason to trust me, let alone like me. I had worked for him only since the beginning of the summer. The connection between us had come about in a most unexpected way, and he could not have welcomed it.

In May, I had petitioned the King for the third time, begging that His Majesty might in his infinite mercy see fit to release my father from the Tower. He had been imprisoned since the suppression of Venner’s Rising in 1661. Though my father had not taken part himself in this abortive attempt to seize London on behalf of King Jesus, he had been a known Fifth Monarchist before the Restoration, and the authorities had seized treasonable correspondence that implicated him in this new rebellion. Since my father was a printer by trade, the conspirators had asked him to print a proclamation announcing the change of monarchy from the terrestrial to the divine. Fool that he was, he had agreed.

The Fifth Monarchists took their beliefs from the second chapter of the Book of Daniel, in which the prophet interpreted King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a great image made of gold, silver, brass, iron and clay. Daniel prophesied on this evidence that four kingdoms would rise: and that then would come a fifth kingdom, which would break into pieces and consume all the others, and that this kingdom would last for ever. My father and his friends had had no doubt whatsoever that this fifth monarchy would be that of King Jesus. To bring this about they had been the implacable foes of the King in the late civil wars, and had done much to bring about the execution of Charles I.

Unfortunately the King’s death had not ushered in the reign of King Jesus after all. Instead it had led to the Commonwealth, which had soon become a military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell, a king in all but name, grew increasingly hostile towards his former allies among the Fifth Monarchists. A year or two after his death, the monarchy was restored amid great popular acclamation in the person of Charles II.

My father had not given up hope, and the burning of London could only encourage this. Despite everything, he was still waiting for the destruction of terrestrial empires, still waiting for King Jesus and the reign of heaven on earth. And I was still trying to keep his mouth shut about it.

The King had not responded to my petition for clemency, which had come as no surprise since he hadn’t responded to the other two. But, ten days later, Master Williamson had written to me and commanded me to wait on him at Scotland Yard.

Yes, he said, His Majesty in his infinite mercy had decided that my father could, on conditions, be released into my custody. The first of these was that he should live in retirement and undertake not to meet those of his former associates still at large. There was no question, of course, of his house, business and possessions being restored to him. The second condition was that I should stand surety for his good conduct.

The third condition was that I should enter the employment of Master Williamson, and undertake any tasks that he might see fit to give me.

When disgrace had fallen on us after Venner’s Rising, I had been nearing the end of my apprenticeship to my father. In other words, I had the knowledge and the skills of the trade. That was one reason why Williamson wanted me to liaise with Master Newcomb, the printer of the Gazette, to make sure that he did not cheat the government.

He had given me other tasks, however, from the very beginning. My years at St Paul’s School had not been altogether wasted – I had an education that most other apprentices lacked. So he set me to copying letters. Taking notes. Running errands. Even talking to people on his behalf, sometimes when he did not wish his interest in them to be known.

But why take me with him now, when he went to call on one of the richest men in the kingdom?

Why me?

CHAPTER NINE

BARNABAS PLACE WAS not far from Holborn Bridge, where my Lord Craven’s men had brought the Fire to heel yesterday. The streets around it were mean, but the house itself was ancient and of considerable size. It also appeared to be built largely of stone, which must be a great comfort (Master Williamson remarked) in these inflammatory times.

I rapped on the great gate with the hilt of my dagger. Williamson stared about him, his mouth twisting with distaste. Refugees had swollen the crowd of beggars and supplicants that usually gathered at a rich man’s gate.

I knocked again. This time a shutter slid back and a porter asked me what we wanted.

‘Master Williamson is here on the King’s business. Tell Master Alderley he is here.’

The porter let us in, shaking his staff at two women, one with a baby wrapped in a shawl, who tried to slip in after us to beg for alms or find shelter. He showed us up a short flight of steps and into an anteroom.

All this was to be expected, but for some reason the porter was not at his ease. His eyes were restless, and he could not wait to leave us alone. After he left the room, we saw him whispering to another servant, and then both men turning to look towards the room where we were.

Moments passed. I stood by an oriel window overlooking a small courtyard. Williamson paced up and down, occasionally pausing to make a pencilled note in his memorandum book. It was strangely quiet after the hubbub of the streets. The thick walls of Barnabas Place made it both a sanctuary and a prison.

‘Why in God’s name is Alderley keeping us waiting?’ Williamson burst out, his Northern accent particularly marked.

‘Something’s going on, sir. Look.’

While I had been at the window, nearly a score of servants had gathered in the yard; they waited, uncharacteristically idle for the time of day, moving restlessly to and fro, and holding short, murmured conversations with each other. There was a furtiveness about their behaviour, and a strange air of uncertainty.

At that moment the door of the anteroom opened and a young lady entered. Williamson and I uncovered and bowed.

‘Mistress Alderley,’ Williamson said. ‘How do you do?’

She curtsied. ‘Master Williamson. I hope I find you in good health?’

Her dark eyes flicked towards me, and I felt an inconvenient jolt of attraction towards her.

‘Sir, my husband begs your indulgence, but he is delayed,’ she went on without waiting for a reply. ‘He will come as soon as he can, I promise. A matter of minutes.’

‘But he’s here?’

She was older than I had first thought, a shapely woman with fine eyes. Her charms were not moving at the same rate as the calendar. She looked tired.

‘Yes, sir, he is,’ she said. ‘And you must pardon the delay. We have had such—’

She was interrupted by another knock at the gate. Murmuring excuses, she slipped from the room in a rustle of silks.

We heard her voice outside, raised in command, and that of the porter and of a stranger. A little later a man clad in black crossed the courtyard under convoy of the porter. They went almost at a run, scattering the servants as they passed.

‘I know that man,’ Williamson said, joining me at the window. ‘It’s Dr Grout, isn’t it?’

‘A physician, sir?’

‘Of course. What did you think I meant? A doctor of theology? He treated my Lady Castlemaine when she had the French pox. She swears by him.’

Mistress Alderley returned. ‘Forgive me, sirs – we are at sixes and sevens.’

‘Someone’s ill?’ There was a hint of panic in Williamson’s voice, for stone walls were not a barrier to all evils, only to some of them. ‘Not the plague, I hope? Not here?’

‘Not that, sir, God be thanked.’ A muscle twitched beneath her left eye. ‘Something worse. My stepson, Edward, was attacked last night. In this very house. In his own bed.’

Williamson sat down suddenly.

‘God’s body, madam. Will he live?’

‘It’s in the hands of God, sir, and Dr Grout’s. Poor Edward was stabbed in the eye. He has burns as well – his bed curtains were set on fire. He lies between life and death.’

‘Have you caught the man who did it?’

‘We believe so.’ Mistress Alderley sat down opposite him and gestured with a hand heavy with rings at the window to the courtyard. ‘It was an old servant, a malcontent. He was roaming the house last night at the time of the attack. My husband will soon have the truth out of him.’

‘Madam,’ Williamson began. ‘There is something Master Alderley must know about another—’

He broke off. There was a commotion in the courtyard below. Two burly servants were manoeuvring an old man out of a narrow doorway sunk below the ground. The captive’s hands were tied in front of him. His face was bloody. His hair lay loose on his shoulders. He wore a shirt and breeches. His feet were bare.

‘He set fire to the house, too,’ Mistress Alderley said. ‘We could have burned to death in our beds.’

The servants pulled the old man up the steps and dragged him across the cobbles to a ring set in the opposite wall. They strapped his wrists to the ring. The younger servant tugged at the buckle to make sure it was secure.

His colleague brought out a trestle, placed it between the old man and the wall, and forced him to his knees. He seized the shirt at the neck and ripped it apart, exposing the victim’s thin, curving back. The vertebrae stood out like a bony saw.

Williamson and Mistress Alderley joined me at the window. No one spoke.

Another man approached the little group in the yard. He wore a dark suit of good quality and looked like a discreetly prosperous merchant. He carried a whip in his hand, from which hung nine tails, each tipped with steel.

‘Who’s this, madam?’ Williamson said.

‘Master Mundy, sir. The steward.’

Both Williamson and Mistress Alderley had automatically lowered their voices.

There was a hush in the yard. Apart from Mundy, no one moved. He took the bound man by his hair and twisted his head so he might see the whip with its dangling tips of steel, so that he might understand that this would be no ordinary whipping.

Mundy released the old man’s head. He stood back and waited.

The seconds stretched out and seemed to grow into minutes. I found I was holding my breath. At last a figure emerged from the shadow of an archway on the far side of the yard. With the exception of the man stretched over the trestle, the servants straightened their bodies and turned towards him.

He was middle aged, tall and spare, dressed with a sober magnificence. He walked to the trestle and stood by it.

The scene in the courtyard now had a theatrical quality – even a religious one, as if some quasi-sacred ritual, sanctified by law and custom, was about to be enacted. Master Alderley was entirely within his rights to take a whip, even a cat o’ nine tails, to a refractory servant, particularly one under suspicion of a grave offence. Was he not master in his own home, where his word was law, just as the King was master in England, and God was the master of all?

But something chilled me in the sight of Alderley on one side of the trestle and Mundy swinging the whip in the other. Their victim, tied like a pig before slaughter, was small, ragged and grey.

Alderley’s lips were moving. The window was closed. His words were inaudible in the anteroom above the courtyard.

The steward bowed to his master. In a flurry of movement, he swung the whip high and brought it down on the wall just above the ring to which the victim was tied. Mortar sprayed from the masonry in tiny puffs of dust. The steel tips did not touch him. But the old man bucked against his bonds and tried to rear up.

Williamson watched, his face rapt. ‘You’re sure he assaulted his master’s son?’

‘It’s a certainty, sir.’ Mistress Alderley glanced at him. ‘Besides, if it had been a stranger, the mastiffs would have had him.’

It was not her words that gave me pause. It was something in her voice and in that swift, sideways glance at Williamson’s face.

She wants him to believe what she says, I thought. It’s important to her.

‘Why?’ Williamson said. ‘Why would he commit such a crime against man and God? Was the motive robbery?’

Mistress Alderley was staring out of the window again. ‘He’s an ill-conditioned, awkward fellow, sir, with a head full of wicked notions.’

‘Then why’s he in service here?’

‘He served a connection of my husband’s first wife, a man who took up arms against the King and committed all manner of evil in the late disturbances. Master Alderley only took him in for charity’s sake, for otherwise he would have starved.’ Again that sideways glance at Williamson’s face. ‘And look what his kindness has brought upon us.’

I flinched as the first blow of the whip landed on the old man. The victim screamed, and the sound penetrated the glass of the window. His body lifted and twisted. Spots of blood appeared across his back and side. They coalesced into streaks and then into broadening crimson lines.

Mundy glanced at his master, who nodded. I wished I could look away. But I could not.

The whip fell again, the steel tips of the thongs raking across the skin. It left the victim shuddering, gasping for breath.

A spot of blood touched the sleeve of Alderley’s coat. Mundy waited while his master took out a handkerchief and dabbed at it. Then Alderley stepped back and nodded again to the steward.

The whip fell for the third time.

‘It’s an example for the other servants, too,’ Mistress Alderley said, swallowing hard; perhaps she didn’t like this spectacle any more than I did. ‘Afterwards he will go before a magistrate, of course, but Master Alderley says that none is to be found at present, because of the Fire. They’ve all fled.’

The servant’s back had been reduced to a raw red mess, flecked with white where the bones beneath the skin had been exposed. Alderley held up his hand. Mundy backed away, the whip held over the crook of his arm. The semicircle of watching, murmuring servants retreated, moving away from the steward as if the thing he carried were infectious.

The flogged man was arching his back and gasping for breath. Alderley bent down and said something in his ear. If it earned a reply, it did not satisfy him, for once again he moved away and signalled to Mundy.

‘I wish to God this were not necessary,’ Mistress Alderley said, turning away from the window.

The whip fell for the fourth time.

The body bucked and slumped over the trestle, the head drooping down as if its own weight had become intolerable. The cobbles beneath the body glistened with blood.

It was a body now, I realized, not a man. I felt ashamed and soiled, as if by witnessing what had happened I had somehow condoned it.

Williamson shifted from one foot to the other. ‘It’s a bad business, madam.’

‘Indeed, sir,’ she said softly.

Mundy came forward and bent to examine the mess of blood, tendon and bone stretched across the trestle. He glanced up at his master and gave a tiny shake of the head. A shudder rippled through the watching servants.

Alderley gave the steward an order, dabbed his sleeve again and walked across the courtyard without another glance at the body. He paused beneath the oriel window, looked up and bowed. He passed inside, and a moment later his heavy footsteps sounded outside the door of the antechamber.

He bowed again, without servility, to Master Williamson, acknowledged his wife’s curtsy and, having glanced at me, ignored me altogether.

‘I’m grieved that you saw that,’ he said. ‘My apologies.’

‘My dear.’ Mistress Alderley did not look into his face. ‘Did the wretch confess at last?’

‘Yes,’ Alderley said loudly. ‘At the very end. The damned ingrate – he cheated the gallows. And left my poor son at death’s door.’

‘I must go to Edward,’ said Mistress Alderley. ‘Would you give me leave to withdraw, sir?’

‘Of course. I shall join you as soon as I may.’

I rushed to open the door for her. She fluttered from the room with a swift, assessing glance at me by way of thanks.

‘My wife has told you our troubles, sir?’ Alderley said to Williamson. ‘Dr Grout is with poor Edward now.’

Dr Grout could not say for sure whether or not Edward would recover. At all events he would lose the sight of his right eye. There was the risk of infection, too. His right arm was very badly burned. His pain and distress were terrible to witness. But for the grace of God, the fire in his chamber might have spread further and the entire house would have gone up in flames. They could all have been burned to cinders in their own beds.

Williamson presented his condolences as if they were as cumbersome as a box of stones. His Northern tongue did not slip easily into the flowery speech of the South.

‘Now, sir,’ Master Williamson said. ‘I must not delay you at such a time. But one thing cannot wait.’

I returned to the window, to avoid giving the impression that I was eavesdropping. Blood had pooled around the trestle. The servants had already dragged the old man’s body from the courtyard.

‘Is one of your manservants missing?’

The blood had dried to a rusty red on the cobbles. As I watched, a boy came into the yard with a broom and a bucket. He emptied a silver arc of water over the trestle and the cobbles around it.

‘What?’ Alderley said, frowning. ‘How in the world did you hear that, sir? I take it you mean Layne?’

Below me, a man appeared with four mastiffs on leashes, two to each hand. He paused to say something to the boy. Meanwhile, the dogs lowered their heavy heads and licked the bloody water with enthusiasm.

‘Layne?’ Master Williamson abandoned his attempt to approach the subject delicately. ‘I’ve no idea of his name, sir. All I know is that we have found a man wearing your livery in the ruins of St Paul’s. It pains me to tell you that he was murdered.’

CHAPTER TEN

ON MY SECOND visit to Barnabas Place, two days later, I went alone, trudging through warm ashes among the ruins. The heat was still intense.

There were many other people in this wasteland, some looking for their families or what was left of their homes; others scavenging for valuables. I had heard stories of men who had found artificial mines of metals in this lost city – pools of solidified lead, lumps of iron, even veins of silver and gold. Truly, this was another New World, where a man with few scruples might find riches as well as horrors, privations and sorrows.

‘Not here, sir,’ the porter said when he opened the wicket to me. ‘His worship went to Westminster two hours ago.’

‘Then Mistress Alderley?’ I said, and I felt a faint and foolish current of excitement pass through me. ‘Is she within?’

The porter went to enquire. After a few minutes he returned and showed me into the room with the oriel window through which I had seen a man flogged to death.

Time passed. I had no means of measuring it, but at least half an hour must have passed before I heard the Alderleys’ steward, Master Mundy, ordering that a horse be brought round. A small, richly dressed gentleman crossed the courtyard below, his face concealed by a hat in which were two ostrich feathers; they were dyed purple and bobbed up and down as their owner walked beneath them.

Shortly afterwards, a manservant appeared and conducted me into the body of the house.

‘Who was that below?’ I asked. ‘The gentleman who just left.’

‘Sir Denzil Croughton, sir.’ The man added, with a hint of vicarious pride, ‘His worship’s niece is betrothed to him.’

‘So he’s a regular visitor, then?’

‘She’s away in the country.’ He shot me a glance, and I thought there was an air of caution about him now, as if he had said too much. ‘Sir Denzil calls for news of her, and also to enquire of his worship’s son. This way, sir.’

The servant led me down flagged passages to a richly furnished parlour overlooking a small garden, and told me to wait. I resigned myself to the loss of another half hour but it was only a moment before Mistress Alderley glided into the room, with her own maid behind her.

‘We met on Thursday,’ Mistress Alderley said. ‘I remember – Master Williamson’s clerk. Your name?’

I gave her my best bow. ‘Marwood, madam. James Marwood.’

‘I don’t know when my husband will be back. But perhaps I can help you.’

She sank into a chair and waved to me to sit opposite her. Such remarkable condescension, I thought: was she always like this or was it a show for me?

The maid settled with a pile of mending at the other end of the room. She glanced briefly at me and her face twisted as if she had a mouthful of vinegar.

‘First, madam, Master Williamson commanded me to ask how Master Edward Alderley does.’

‘A little better, thank you. He still lives. Dr Grout is with him now. He says we must thank God the knife did not penetrate the brain.’

I dipped my head in mute gratitude for this mercy. ‘You are as yet no wiser about the reason for the attack?’

‘Our old servant was unhinged, a malcontent with his head full of blasphemous notions. Such madmen are two a penny after the late war. We must try to forget Jem, sir, for we can never understand him.’ She paused and added in a lower voice, ‘We were most grateful for Master Williamson’s kindness in the matter. It was Providence indeed that sent you both to us on that day.’

I admired her delicate way of putting it. Though Alderley had been quite within his rights to beat a servant, particularly on such gross provocation, it was a little unfortunate that the guilty man had actually died under the lash. At least Williamson, a witness of unimpeachable veracity and with useful friends, had been there at the time. He had smoothed away much of the awkwardness with the authorities, pointing out that the culprit had probably died from his illness and old age rather than the beating, and also making the point that his death had been a kindness to the villain himself, for it had saved him from the rigours of imprisonment, a trial and public execution.

‘There was also the other servant who died, madam. At St Paul’s.’

‘Layne?’ She spoke faster and more loudly now, as though this was a subject she preferred to talk about. ‘Yes – what a terrible thing, sir.’ Her voice acquired a touch of emotion that would not have been out of place in a playhouse. ‘Alas! Poor Layne! There was a man who fully repaid our trust. My husband and I were most distressed by his death.’

After the coroner’s inquest, Layne would go quietly to his grave. Alderley had offered to pay for the burial, Williamson had told me, and the thing would be done decently.

‘I suppose it was for the sake of the few pence in his purse?’ Mistress Alderley leaned forward. ‘Have you news of the murderer? Has someone laid information?’

‘I’m sorry, madam. Not that I have heard. The times are so out of joint that nothing is as it should be. But Master Williamson understands your indignation, and he wondered if he might serve you in any way.’

‘How very kind of him.’ Her eyes narrowed, for perhaps she knew that no one offered something for nothing. ‘But surely nothing can be done? Unless a witness comes forward, how could we lay the rogue who killed Layne by the heels?’

‘You may be right.’

‘I wonder if it could have been the lunatic.’ She noticed my puzzled expression. ‘Jem, the man who attacked my stepson. After all, he attempted murder inside this house, so perhaps he had already committed one outside it.’

‘It is a most ingenious suggestion, madam.’ It was a convenient explanation too, and one that would resolve the business without troubling the Alderleys too much. ‘Tell me, pray, who is Layne’s next of kin?’

‘A brother, I believe. He’s in the West Indies, serving as an able seaman on one of the King’s ships. Why?’

‘Are Layne’s belongings still here? His box?’

‘Yes. My husband has taken charge of it until the brother comes home.’

‘Master Williamson wondered whether I might inspect the contents in case there is something to suggest the identity of the assailant. It’s just possible, you see, that the murder was not something that happened by chance.’

‘I believe Master Mundy – our steward, you know – has already gone through the box and made a list of what was in it. Would that do?’

‘It would be better if I saw it myself – no doubt Master Mundy was listing the contents rather than considering their possible significance.’

‘Neatly said, sir.’ She gave me another of those subtly unsettling smiles. ‘You should be a lawyer. But perhaps you are?’

In another life, I might have been. I shrugged the flattery aside with a smile, though I was warmed by it, for flattery rarely came my way. ‘What of the other man’s box?’

‘Jem’s? I think we have it still. I would have burned it but Master Alderley would have none of it. My husband is a stickler for following the due processes of law. There is a niece or a cousin in Oxford, I believe, and he has instructed Master Mundy to write to her.’

‘In that case, perhaps I might see Jem’s box as well.’

‘Of course, sir. Master Mundy shall be your guide.’

She was looking at me as she spoke, and I was looking at her. Suddenly the words dried up. A silence settled between us, as uncomfortable as it was unwanted. I stirred, and the chair beneath me creaked twice. The sound was deafening in the silence.

Mistress Alderley looked away, in the direction of her maid, who still sat with her head bowed, sewing industriously. ‘Ann? Take Master Marwood to Master Mundy. Tell Master Mundy to give our visitor every assistance in his power.’

Master Mundy, a grave man aware of his own importance, led me down to the servants’ part of the house. It was strange to think that, two days earlier, this sober and upright gentleman had beaten an old man to death with a cat o’ nine tails.

‘Was there not a printer in the City named Marwood in the old days?’ Mundy said as they were descending the stairs. ‘A Republican, I think – a Fifth Monarchist?’

‘Perhaps, sir. I cannot say.’

‘I believe he was imprisoned when the King came into his own again. No connection of yours, then?’

‘No, sir. I come from Chelsea.’

I had grown used to deflecting such questions, for Marwood was not a common name. I had Mundy’s measure now. He had the manner of a gentleman but now he worked as a rich man’s steward. There were many such in London – men who had lost their estates and who now clung all the more tenaciously to the airs of their former stations.

I followed the steward to a locked room near the kitchens of Barnabas Place. Here, on slatted shelves, were kept the trunks and boxes of the servants. Mundy indicated two of them on the bottom shelf. They were crudely made from deal boards nailed together, with the corners strengthened with thin strips of metal. Each was about two feet wide, and eighteen inches high and deep.

He left me to lift them onto the table that stood under the small window at the end of the room.

‘I cannot understand why you need to inspect them,’ he said. ‘It is quite unnecessary. I have made full inventories.’

‘I must follow my orders, sir. I am commanded to search them, and I must do as I’m bid.’

A crude letter L had been burned with a poker into the wood beneath the lock of the nearer box. Mundy turned the key in the lock, lifted the lid and stood back.

I examined what was inside. A servant’s box was his private life enclosed in a small space; everything else – his time, his labour, his clothes, his loyalties – belonged to his master; but the box was his. Apart from a few clothes, Layne had possessed a winter cloak, a pair of gilt buckles, a horn mug, a knife with a blade ground almost entirely away, a pipe, a pouch containing a few shreds of dry tobacco and an astrological almanac, printed octavo.

I picked it up and glanced at the title page. ‘Was he a Dissenter?’ I asked.

Mundy drew himself up. ‘Sir, all members of this household attend the Established Church and follow its forms and usages.’

‘How long had he worked for Master Alderley?’

‘Two or three years. Mistress Alderley hired him when her husband was in France.’

‘And you were satisfied with him?’

‘By and large, yes. He was clean and sober in his habits. I would not have suffered him to stay if he had been otherwise.’

‘Was he liked in the household?’

‘I suppose so.’ Mundy shrugged, indicating that such matters were far beneath his exalted sphere. ‘As far as I know.’

‘What was he doing abroad on the Tuesday?’

‘He went out after dinner. The master sent him to Whitehall with a ring he’d had reset for Sir Denzil Croughton.’

I looked up from the book. ‘The gentleman who is betrothed to Master Alderley’s niece?’

‘The ring was a gift from Mistress Lovett to Sir Denzil, a token of their betrothal. In fact I warned Mistress Alderley it might be unwise to trust a servant with such a valuable jewel.’

‘So when Layne didn’t return that evening, you thought he might have run off with it?’

‘Indeed.’ Mundy drew himself up, pursing his lips. ‘A not unreasonable supposition, you must agree.’ His voice was solemn, nasal and monotonous: a voice to drive his listeners either asleep or distracted. ‘But in fact Layne had given it into Sir Denzil’s own hands. Sir Denzil was wearing it when he dined here on Wednesday. And I saw it again on his finger not an hour ago, when he called on Mistress Alderley.’

‘So Layne must have reached Whitehall?’

‘Yes. It was the last time he was seen.’

Until, I thought, his body was found amid the ruins of Bishop Kempe’s chantry chapel in the nave of St Paul’s.

‘It must have been the Catholics,’ Mundy burst out. ‘They need no reason to murder honest Protestants.’

He unlocked the other box, Jem’s. This one too had its owner’s initials burned beneath the lock. I had been a printer’s apprentice once so I knew enough to appreciate well-proportioned letters. These ones were neatly squared and equipped with serifs.

‘Could they read and write?’ I said.

‘These two?’ Mundy shrugged. ‘You can tell by their marks on the boxes. Layne could read, more or less, but he could barely write his own name. Jem could write well enough if he had to, and he could read as well as I can. He’d come down in the world. Because of his wickedness, no doubt.’ The steward raised the lid of the box. ‘He kept a strange collection of rubbish. But it’s only to be expected. The man was strange enough himself.’

On top was laid a shabby serge coat. Beneath it was a small silver cup, a Bible with print so tiny and poorly set as to be almost unreadable, a cracked clay bowl with a ragged ochre line running around the rim, and a child’s doll about five inches long, crudely carved from a single piece of wood. The doll’s face was flat with tiny, blunt features gouged into it. The eyes were black dots. The mouth was a faded red line. It wore a dress of ragged blue cotton.

Mundy poked the cup. ‘This has some value. Jem must have brought it with him from his old place. Or perhaps he had it from his own kin – I heard it said that long ago his father was a clergyman, but they turned him out of his curacy for his godless ways.’

‘Mistress Alderley told me he had once worked for the family of her husband’s first wife.’

‘Indeed. Mistress Lovett’s kin.’ He frowned. ‘Best forgotten.’

‘Why?’ I said.

Mundy put the cup back in the box. ‘Are you finished here, Master Marwood? I have people waiting.’

‘One moment, sir.’

I returned to Layne’s box, partly because I sensed that Mundy was trying to hurry me away. I took up the almanac. I lifted it up to the window and turned the pages against the light, to examine the paper more closely.

As my father’s son, I knew at once that the paper was French, which was normal enough for any book. The watermark, a version of the bunch of grapes, told me that it came from a well-regarded mill in Normandy that used only rags from pure white linen in its manufacture. The type was sharp and clean, probably from a newly cast case of type, and it had been set by a man who knew his business.

The binding told the same story. All in all, this was not a book that you would expect to find in the box of a servant who struggled to write his own name.

I closed the almanac and put it into Layne’s box, tucking it under the cloak. Something stabbed my finger, and I withdrew my hand with a cry of pain.

‘What is it?’ Mundy said.

I squeezed the pad of the index finger on my right hand, and a tiny ball of blood appeared on the tip. ‘Something sharp.’

I licked the blood away and pulled aside the cloak. A batten had been nailed across the bottom of the box, bisecting it from back to front, in order to strengthen it. One of the nail heads stood proud of the wood, and its edge was jagged – and sharp enough to pierce the skin. There were two other battens parallel to it, to the left and the right. It struck me that the central one was made of a different wood from the others. It was newer, coarser grained and slightly thicker. The nail heads attaching it were new and rough, whereas those on the other side were dark with age and deeply embedded into the soft wood.

I knew a little about hiding places. In his prime, my father had been something of a carpenter, like many printers, and sometimes he had had a need to conceal papers and other small objects. I took out my knife and used the blade to lever away the central batten from the base of the box. The nails securing it were much shorter than the size of their heads suggested.

‘Master Marwood! I cannot allow you to damage the property of one of our servants, even if—’

Mundy broke off as, with a twist of the blade, I wrenched up the baton. Beneath it, gouged into the base of the box, was a shallow and irregular depression about four inches long and two inches wide. It contained a piece of paper, folded into a flat package.

I picked it up. The paper was unexpectedly heavy. Something shifted within its folds. A guinea fell out. Then another; then a third, and then three more. I picked one up and held it to the light from the window. The gold shone like a miniature sun. The guinea had been minted this year: 1666.

‘You had better add these to your inventory, sir,’ I said.

I took up the paper, smoothing it out before I rewrapped the gold inside it. There was something written on the inside in a neat, clerkly hand.

Coldridge. PW.

I rubbed the paper between finger and thumb and held it up to the light. Even before I saw part of the bunch of grapes, I knew that it was probably an endpaper torn from the almanac I had just examined.

Six new guineas. An expensive almanac. A servant who had been barely literate at best. Two, neatly written words: Coldridge. PW.

I asked to see Mistress Alderley again before I left Barnabas Place. I was shown into the parlour. She was writing at the long table while her sour-faced maid sewed by the window.

She looked up. ‘Did you find anything?’ she said abruptly.

‘Very little, madam.’ I glanced at the maid, whose head was lowered over her work, and said quietly, ‘Layne had six guineas concealed in a hidden compartment of his box.’

‘What of it? His savings, I suppose.’

Perhaps she was right, I thought, though it was a great deal of money for a servant to have. The guineas had shown no signs of use. Their hiding-place had not been made long ago, for the scars in the wood had not darkened with age.

‘There was something written on the paper that held the guineas.’

She sat up, suddenly alert. ‘Yes? What?’

‘“Coldridge PW”. Does it mean something to you?’

She shook her head, the interest draining from her face. ‘Why should it?’

‘According to Master Mundy, Layne wrote but little and poorly. So perhaps Jem wrote it. But in that case, why was it in Layne’s box?’

I waited but she did not reply.

‘On Thursday you told Master Williamson that Jem once served a connection of your husband’s first wife,’ I said.

She stared at me, as if surprised and even irritated that I should have raised the matter. ‘Yes – he served the father of my husband’s niece, Mistress Catherine Lovett. She’s his niece by marriage, not blood, by the way – the child of his first wife’s brother. Jem served her father, when they lived in Bow Lane off Cheapside. Afterwards he went with Catherine to her aunt’s house, and then he came with her here.’

‘May I speak to Mistress Lovett, in that case?’ I said. ‘As Jem was once a servant of her father’s she may know more about him.’

‘That’s not possible. My niece is away at present, staying with friends in the country. She finds the summer heat intolerable, especially with this Fire, and her uncle decided a change of air would be good for her.’ Mistress Alderley took up her pen and lowered her head over her letter. ‘Perhaps you can ask her about Jem when she returns. Pray remember me to Master Williamson when you see him, and thank him for his kindness to us.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HOT AND FILTHY, Cat had arrived in Three Cocks Yard in the early hours of Thursday, 6 September. The Fire was still raging but the wind had changed, swinging from the east to the south and slackening in force. She was aware of that even as she stumbled through the crowds. During the Fire, everyone was aware of the wind.

She had nothing but the clothes she stood up in, the small bundle she had carried with her, and the object that Jem had pressed into her hand when she fled from Barnabas Place. She was still in pain from Cousin Edward’s attack – a dull, continuous soreness, punctuated by stabs of agony that made her gasp. Her thighs and her arms were tender with bruises.

On any other night, Three Cocks Yard would have been dark and silent at this hour, the houses barred and shuttered. But nothing was normal now. The sky reflected the Fire, casting a lurid glow over the yard. A heavily laden wagon filled half the space.

Mistress Noxon’s house was beside the apothecary’s, which Cat knew by the sign of the pestle swinging in the air above the shop. The front door was standing open. Two porters were manoeuvring a pair of virginals down the steps, with a young gentleman scurrying about them like an agitated terrier.

Behind them, in the hall of the house, was a small, handsome woman of middling height and generous proportions. Unlike the men, she was perfectly calm. In her hand was a sheet of paper.

‘And that’s thirty-five shillings for the dinners ordered in, sir,’ she was saying in a sharp voice that cut through the racket in the yard. ‘If I don’t have it on the nail as well, you’ll have to leave the rest of your furniture to cover what you owe.’

She caught sight of Cat as she was squeezing past the wagon. She motioned her to wait and continued to deal with the young gentleman. A large, red-headed manservant staggered down the stairs with a crate in his arms.

‘Don’t take that out, John, not until he’s paid his reckoning. Leave it in the back of the hall.’

The servant did as he was told. He saw Cat and stared at her.

‘Don’t stand there dreaming,’ the woman snapped. ‘Bring down something else.’

At last, when the young gentleman had paid his bill and left with his wagon, she came down the steps from the front door and beckoned Cat forward.

‘Who are you?’

‘Mistress Noxon?’

She ran her eyes over Cat, taking in the bundle under her arm. ‘Who’s asking?’

‘Jem sent me.’

‘Oh yes? Jem who?’

Cat fumbled in her pocket and brought out the object that Jem had given her. It turned out to be a dark, smooth, flattish stone in the shape of an oval, which might have been picked up on a shingle beach. There was a white line of another mineral embedded in it, orange in this light. It made a wavering M if you had a mind to see one there.

M for Martha? Mistress Noxon took the stone, stared at it for a moment, and slipped it in her own pocket.

‘Mistress Lovett,’ she said softly.

‘Yes.’

‘You need somewhere to lodge.’ It was not a question. ‘How long?’

‘I don’t know.’ Cat swallowed, for her mouth was terribly dry. ‘I have a little money. Not much.’

Mistress Noxon ran her eyes over Cat, inspecting her as if she were a prospective purchase. ‘Mistress Lovett can’t stay here. Nor can any young lady. This is a house where single gentlemen lodge.’

Cat turned to leave by the street door, which still stood open.

‘You don’t have to go,’ Mistress Noxon said. ‘But if you stay, you stay as a servant and you work for your keep.’

‘I’m not afraid of hard work.’

‘You will be by the time I’ve finished with you. Well? Do you stay as a servant or do you go as a lady?’

‘I stay.’

Mistress Noxon folded her arms across her bosom and stared at her. ‘As a servant.’

Cat dipped a curtsy. ‘If it please you, mistress.’

‘Close the door, then, and come down to the kitchen.’ Mistress Noxon led her into the house, calling up to the manservant, telling him to bar the door. In the kitchen, she said, lowering her voice: ‘In this house, your name’s Jane.’

‘Yes, mistress. Has Jem talked of me? Did he say he might send me to you?’

Mistress Noxon brought down the flat of her hand on the table. ‘You’re not to mention him. If you want to stay, you will be Jane and nothing but Jane and you will do as you’re told and not ask foolish questions.’

‘But I should tell you why I—’

‘I don’t want to know,’ Mistress Noxon said. ‘It’s better not.’

The house in Three Cocks Yard had been bought as a speculation by a wealthy Oxford haberdasher. It stood with three neighbours in a flagged court, from which a narrow alley led down to the Strand on the northern side, not far from Temple Bar.

The principal apartments were let to single gentlemen. There were three lodgers. At present, only Master Hakesby was in residence. He was a draughtsman, an elderly man of uncertain temper. He was working on a design with Dr Wren, the architect and mathematician whom the King had appointed as one of his Commissioners for the rebuilding of London, which made him automatically an object of fascination to Cat.

The haberdasher had installed Mistress Martha Noxon as housekeeper. She had formerly been in his service as his wife’s chambermaid and, if Margery’s insinuations were to be believed, as his own paramour. Margery did most of the cooking but Mistress Noxon considered her too slatternly to wait at table. There was also a manservant named John and a ten-year-old boy, who was more trouble than he was worth and slept in a sort of kennel by the kitchen chimneystack.

The servants were told that Jane was a stranger from a village near Oxford, and that she was a remote connection of Mistress Noxon’s. They knew that this was probably a lie, and that the young woman called Jane was a mysterious intruder in their world, but they were too afraid of Mistress Noxon to ask questions or tell tales.

Cat did the work she was given. She kept her mouth shut when she could. When she couldn’t, she roughened her voice and tried to imitate the inflections and turns of phrase that the other servants used. They thought she gave herself airs, but they left her alone for fear of Mistress Noxon. There was even an unexpected pleasure in being Jane, not Cat: in being someone else.

The work was often hard but it was not strange to her. She had been brought up not only to run a household but to do the various tasks, from cooking to cleaning and beyond, that she might set a servant to do; this was good for the soul, for it kept a woman humble, which was pleasing in the eyes of God and man; it was also prudent, for it enabled one better to direct and instruct one’s own servants.

For Cat, what was strange and unpleasant was not so much the work itself but to learn how a servant felt as she scrubbed a floor that belonged to someone else. It was a different feeling from that of someone whose family owned the floor.

When Cat thought about her former life it seemed remote and somehow foreign to her, as if it belonged to a different person. But she was too tired to do much thinking. The work was exhausting, but that was good because sometimes it stopped Cat from remembering what she had done to Edward, what he had done to her, and what her life had now become.

She was so heavy with weariness that she usually fell asleep as soon as she climbed into bed in the attic she shared with Margery. But she had bad dreams, haunted by Cousin Edward, and by the fear that she was carrying his child. On the first night, she woke both herself and Margery with her screams.

Two days after Cat’s arrival, Mistress Noxon summoned her to her little room by the kitchen. The skin around her eyes was pink and puffy.

‘You should know that he’s dead. My uncle.’

‘Oh mistress.’ Cat’s eyes filled with tears. Jem.

‘Tell no one. There will be no mourning. We don’t know him, and we never did. You understand? The man was such a fool. I never met such a one in all my days.’

But Mistress Noxon kept the stone that Jem had sent her by Cat in her pocket, together with her money, her keys, her rings, and other precious things.

Cat wept herself to sleep that night – as quietly as possible, for fear of waking Margery again. Without Jem, she had no one who cared for her unconditionally and completely. Without Jem, she was alone. Unless her father found her.

According to the gossip of servants, if a woman did not take pleasure in an act of copulation, she could not become pregnant by it. Cat did not believe this, not least because she could not understand how any woman could take any pleasure whatsoever from such an assault on her body even if it were not forced on her.

Besides, she had seen animals about the business in the farmyard and fields of Coldridge. For females at least, copulation had more to do with grim necessity than pleasure.

The fear that she might be pregnant remained. She could think of nothing worse than carrying Edward’s ill-begotten child. She became even more afraid of this than of being taken up for Edward’s murder.

She had made her calculations. She thought it probable that Edward was still alive. Had he been killed, the news would surely have penetrated even to Three Cocks Yard by now, even to the basement kitchen that was the centre of her life. The Alderleys were such a prominent family that the intelligence would have spread throughout the town faster than the Fire itself.

You could not hide a murder, even in a house like Barnabas Place with high, thick walls, though you could hide lesser crimes. Assault and battery, for example. Or rape.

At the beginning of her fourth week at the beck and call of Mistress Noxon, she had pains in her groin and the blood began to flow. Some men believed that a woman’s monthly courses were full of evil humours, that they blackened sugar, made wine sour and turned pickled meat rancid. Men, Cat thought, were such fools that they would believe anything. Mistress Noxon provided the necessary cloths to deal with the blood, and even an infusion of valerian and fleur-de-luce to ease the pain.

Cat welcomed the discomfort and inconvenience. If she had fallen pregnant, it would have been necessary to find a way to kill the baby.

Gradually, Cat became aware that there was another difficulty in the shape of John, the manservant. He was a tall, broad-shouldered lad, a country boy at heart, with red hair, bright blue eyes and a slab-like face whose colour and approximate shape made Cat think of a leg of mutton before it had gone in the oven. Margery, the cook, thought he was the finest young man that the world, let alone London, had to offer. John had been quite happy to accept this adoration and even to repay it at his convenience with small doses of affection.

But then Cat had come to Three Cocks Yard and, despite her best efforts to be plain Jane, to be colourless and dull in every particular, John found her of absorbing interest. He was not a man to whom words came easily, but he had other ways of making his feelings known. He blushed when she came into the room. He would appear at her shoulder when she was emptying the slops and take the pots from her in his enormous hands. Once, when the kitchen boy showed a tendency to be impudent to her, John clouted his ear with such force that the boy’s feet lost contact with the ground.

One consequence of this undesired and unrequited devotion was that Margery hated Cat.

CHAPTER TWELVE

AT LAST, NEARLY six weeks after the Fire, the rain came.

Cat stood by the attic window of the house and squinted over the surviving rooftops and the jagged outline of the ruins at the stump of St Paul’s tower.

There had been showers since the Fire, and dull days with heavy grey skies, but the heat of summer had mingled with the heat of the Fire and lingered long after it should have ended. This rain was different. It poured from the sky in thick silver rods like water through a colander.

It was much colder, too. That was less welcome. Cat went down the steep stairs, little better than a ladder, to the second floor, and worked her way down to the basement. The kitchen was full of the smell of bread. The baker’s boy had called in her absence.

‘What kept you?’ Mistress Noxon said. ‘Daydreaming again? It won’t do. Not in this house. I had to open the door myself to the boy.’

Cat curtsied and apologized. She had learned humility lately, along with her new name, which she answered to like a dog. A dog called Jane. They had not been easy lessons.

‘Draw the beer now.’

She left Mistress Noxon laying the tray for her to take upstairs. She had often felt the rough edge of Mistress Noxon’s tongue. At first, it had made Cat furious – how dare the woman speak to her in that way, especially when they were alone? Later, she accepted it as necessary.

Her circumstances had changed and so must she. In time, she learned to distinguish when Mistress Noxon was truly angry, when she was irritable for a reason that had nothing to do with Cat, and when her anger was entirely mechanical, administered for Cat’s good, in the same way that Cat’s nurse used to administer a regular purge to her.

She filled the beer jugs from the barrel in the scullery and took them back to the kitchen.

‘Take the tray now. Master Hakesby’s up. The barber’s coming to shave him, and he’ll want his breakfast before that.’

Cat tapped on Master Hakesby’s door, and he told her to enter. He was partly dressed and in his gown, a handkerchief around his shaven head. He was seated at the table by the window and already at work.

‘Put it on the chest,’ he said without looking up. ‘And pour some beer, will you?’

She obeyed and brought the cup over to him. He took it without looking at her. She strained to see what he was working on. There was a small sheet of paper before him. He was using ink but not a ruler or compasses.

This is an idea, Cat thought, something that comes in the night and needs to be pinned down before it vanishes in the daylight.

A cruciform shape. A church, then. An octagon where the four arms meet: probably a great dome, like St Peter’s in Rome. And, from the transepts, curving outer lines stretching to nave and choir, softening the right angles where the transepts meet with the long axis of the church.

Was it St Paul’s? A new St Paul’s?

Master Hakesby took a mouthful of beer. He spilled a few drops on the table and dabbed at it with a handkerchief. He looked up but she didn’t think he saw her, not properly. ‘What is it, Jane?’

‘Nothing, sir.’

‘Then go away.’

The next day, after the great rainstorm, was a Tuesday. In the afternoon, Cat was set to washing and waxing the floor and panelling of the parlour. Mistress Noxon came into the room before the task was half done.

‘You’re to go to St Paul’s,’ she said. ‘For Master Hakesby. It’s urgent.’

Cat stared at her. Since her arrival here she had not gone further than the Strand.

‘There’s no one else to send.’ Mistress Noxon ran her finger along the curved mouldings of the door panels, automatically checking for dust. ‘You know the way?’

Cat nodded. She had grown up in Bow Lane, east of St Paul’s, and the streets from Charing Cross to the Tower had been part of her childhood.

‘John’s in Westminster or I’d send him. Margery gets lost if she pokes her head out of the door. So that leaves you.’ There was no need to add that the kitchen boy couldn’t be sent because he was a halfwit, and Mistress Noxon wouldn’t go herself because it would be beneath her dignity. ‘Besides, it’s time you went further abroad. You need air. You’re as pale as a death’s head.’

‘What am I to do?’

‘Master Hakesby wants a portfolio. It’s the small green one on the table in his chamber.’

‘I know.’ Cat knew everything there was to know about Master Hakesby’s chamber.

‘You’ll find him in Convocation House Yard. Do you know where that is?’

‘Yes, mistress.’

‘Show this paper to the men on the gate, and they will let you in. Give the portfolio into his own hands, mind – he was most particular about that – and take care to keep it clean. Be off with you. And keep it dry. Hold it under your cloak.’

It was still raining, though less heavily than before. Wrapped in the grey cloak she had stolen from the man at St Paul’s, Cat walked through the ruins of London. After Temple Bar and the first few houses of Fleet Street, there was nothing to be seen but devastation.

Even now, six weeks afterwards, London was a desert from the Temple to the Tower. You could see from one end of the City to the other. All that was left of the greatest city in the country, apart from mounds of ash and rubble, were gutted churches and blackened spires, fragments of stone and thickets of unstable chimneystacks. In places the heat had been so intense that stones had calcined and become an unnatural white in colour.

The change in the weather had affected everything, and not on the whole for the better. The rain had turned the pale ashes into a dark grey sludge that clung to your shoes and pattens and stained your clothes. It was growing colder, too. Everyone said it was going to be a bad winter.

Cat crossed the Fleet Ditch, which was choked with sooty debris. Tendrils of smoke rose up from the labyrinth of ruins on either side of Ludgate Hill, for rubbish still smouldered, and fires burned slowly in deep, almost airless cellars.

At Ludgate, the mounting block was still there, marked by the flames, but one of the few features recognizable from before the Fire. She supposed she should feel guilty about the thin young man for repaying his attempt to help her by biting his hand and stealing his cloak; but a sense of guilt was one of the luxuries she could no longer afford.

In a moment Cat reached the spot where she had stood on the night of St Paul’s destruction. Had her father been inside? Had he been among the nameless dead? She wanted to know, one way or the other. Her lack of knowledge unsettled her. Even after he had fled abroad at the Restoration, she had known he was living somewhere beyond the Channel. Occasionally letters from him would come, sent care of an unknown friend and then passed to Jem, who would slip them into her hand.

She paused to look at the ruined portico. By a strange paradox, it had been her father’s pride. He had been a mason by trade. Before the war he had worked on the cathedral under the direction of Master Inigo Jones. True, Master Lovett hated the Church of England and all its works, including St Paul’s. But she had seen him stroke the stones of one of the columns as a man strokes a favourite dog. He had talked, almost against his will, of the novelty and the elegance of the portico’s design.

A porter passed close to her, brushing his hand over her hip. She moved quickly away. In the old days, she had not been a servant and she had never walked alone in the streets. Now she had become a target for passing men of all ages, for their touches, squeezes, attempted kisses and lewd suggestions. She wondered at this, at the curious lack of discrimination that men showed in their lusts.

In Convocation House Yard, a crowd was gawping at the bodies propped against the wall. St Paul’s had given up a number of its dead because of the Fire, for tombs had burst open in the heat and flagstones cracked apart. Some corpses were little more than skeletons. Others were clothed in dried flesh in various stages of decay, a few with fragments of clothing and shrouds clinging to them. The souvenir hunters had been at work, and there were bodies that had lost fingers, toes, hands or feet; one lacked a skull.

Pride of place, according to Mistress Noxon, went to Bishop Braybrooke, who hadn’t been seen in public since 1404. His mummified corpse had tumbled down to St Faith’s in the crypt underneath the choir. Here he was in person, propped on his feet against a blackened wall to await his second resurrection: he was quite intact, with many of his teeth, a red beard and hair, though his skin was like leather.

A fence had been erected in the angle between the cloister containing the ruined Chapter House and the south wall of the nave. Its gate was guarded by a watchman with a large dog. He took Cat’s paper and peered at it, his lips moving. She had already examined it – it was a general pass, signed by Master Frewin, the Chapter Clerk, and was so thumbed and greasy that it had clearly been used many times before.

Even with the pass, however, the watchman did not let her in. He made her state her business and told her to wait. He sent a boy to fetch Master Hakesby. The dog, which was chained to one of the gateposts, strained towards her and forced her to recoil, to the obvious entertainment of its master.

With a sudden stab of loss she thought of the mastiffs she had left behind her. Now Jem was dead, she missed none of the human inhabitants of Barnabas Place, with the possible exception of Aunt Olivia, but she yearned for the dogs, for their protection and their uncritical affection.

Thunder, Lion, Greedy and Bare-Arse. Especially Bare-Arse.

The boy returned. With him came Master Hakesby. He was a tall, shabbily dressed man with his own grey hair. Everything about him was thin, from his long feet to his head, a distorted cylinder of bone perched on narrow shoulders. Cat curtsied. He held out his hand for the portfolio.

‘Come with me,’ he ordered. ‘I may need other drawings as well, and you can fetch them. I shall enquire of Dr Wren when he comes.’

The watchman pulled on the dog’s chain, drawing him to one side so Cat could pass through the gateway. She followed Master Hakesby across a yard that stretched from the outer wall of the cloister towards the west end of the cathedral.

An open tent stood to one side of the yard. Workmen were sorting a miscellany of objects heaped against the wall at the back. Cat glimpsed an iron-bound chest with a curving lid. Propped against it was a marble bust of a periwigged gentleman that could not have been long from the sculptor’s chisel. There was a blackened memorial brass of a dead cleric and a carved throne of painted wood surmounted by an episcopal mitre.

‘Come along,’ Master Hakesby said over his shoulder. ‘Dr Wren is away, but he sent word he will be here at any moment and he wishes to see this most particularly.’

Blocks of stone stood in the open air, some of them carved. It occurred to Cat that, if they did not repair St Paul’s, the ruins would become, if nothing else, a vast quarry.

Master Hakesby led her into a shed, about fifty feet long, which had been built against the exterior of the cloister. Two clerks were standing at a long, high desk and entering items into ledgers that lay open before them. Behind them was a ledge with a jumble of boxes and books on it. At the other end of the shed was a table to which a sloping surface had been attached with iron clamps. Hakesby walked over to it.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ he said, glancing back over his shoulder. ‘Stand over there and dry yourself by the brazier.’

Two plans were laid out on the slope, their corners held down with fragments of fire-burned stone. There were pens and ink laid out beside it, together with the tools of a draughtsman’s trade – compasses and rulers, set squares and dividers, pencils and pens.

Master Hakesby set down the portfolio and examined the contents. Afterwards he returned to his drawing board. She watched him, straining her eyes to see what he was working on. Not St Paul’s, she thought. This was more than any church. She made out lines that crossed each other in a pattern. Not a grid: more complicated than that. Streets? A city? London itself?

Was it his own design or one of Dr Wren’s? Or both? She had heard Master Hakesby say that Wren had too much work to handle all the detail himself, and besides he frittered away too much of his time in Oxford or in meetings at Whitehall or with prospective clients. Master Hakesby was his draughtsman, almost his partner, though the designs were usually in Dr Wren’s name.

The hand holding the pen trembled. Hakesby steadied it with his left hand. He paused, took a deep breath, and continued his work.

Cat was growing uncomfortably hot by the brazier. She loosened the cloak about her shoulders.

At the same moment, Master Hakesby’s hand twitched, seemingly of its own volition. The side of it brushed the inkpot, which toppled over. Ink glided towards the portfolio. He swore. The inkpot rolled over the edge of the table and fell to the floor, leaving a trail of drops to mark its passage.

Cat darted forward. The cloak fell from her shoulders. She scooped up the portfolio and the sheets of paper lying beside it.

Master Hakesby looked at her. His lips worked but no words came out. Cat put the portfolio on a stool and crouched to pick up the inkpot. There was a rag on the table, which she used as best she could to wipe up the spilled ink.

Hakesby was still staring at her.

‘Sir,’ she said, softly so the other men would not hear her. ‘What is it? Are you ill? Shall I—’

‘Be silent.’ His lips twisted into a scowl.

She was looking at the plans, which were similar to each other. ‘It’s London, sir, isn’t it? Or part of it. But – but a different London.’

His eyebrows shot up. ‘How do you know that?’

She nodded at the geometric mass of fortifications in the lower right-hand corner, by the north bank of the river. ‘Because that’s the Tower, sir – it says so. And the Thames, from there to London Bridge, and—’

‘You can read?’

‘Yes, sir, and write a fair hand.’

She had known serving women who could do both, there was no reason why she should not be one of them. She came a step nearer, and still holding the inkpot.

‘But all this is different, sir. The Tower’s not that shape. And that space to the west, where eight roads meet – what is that?’

‘It is a plan of London as it might be. Not London as it is.’

‘Dr Wren’s London?’

‘And mine, as well,’ Master Hakesby said, scowling. ‘Indeed, as much mine as his, if the truth be known. A vision of what this city might be.’

His right hand, which was resting on the table, began to tremble again. He covered it with his left hand, pressing it down. He glanced at Cat and saw the curiosity in her face.

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