by Alex Scarrow
My God.
She’d witnessed scenes like these before in news footage from Manhattan: workers in smudged office-white shirts and loosened business ties precariously dangling out of the waffle framework of the World Trade Center. Waving for attention as they became framed, engulfed, overpowered by billowing clouds of grey-black smoke.
All of a sudden this didn’t feel so much like historical sightseeing but the worst kind of awful voyeurism.
She saw a woman finally letting go of a window frame. Dropping four, five storeys plus the height of the bridge itself down into the Thames. In one arm she held a bundle of rags. The other arm flailed to keep herself upright. She disappeared into the water and Maddy didn’t see her emerge.
Another person dropping. A man, his clothes, or perhaps it was his hair, on fire, left behind a drifting vapour trail of smoke. In the air she could smell it – burning fat. Above the cacophony of human voices, the roar and crackle of flames, she could hear the squeal of pigs, the shrieking of other trapped animals. And that’s what she hoped was the source of the odour of cooking flesh. But that was denying the obvious. It was just as likely the smell of humans cooking too. She felt like throwing up.
Her eyes met Liam’s. He’d just seen the same things as her: people desperately leaping for their lives, quite possibly knowing the jump was futile, probably fatal, but unable to withstand the searing heat of the flames a moment longer. He could also smell the same thing; he was wrinkling his nose.
‘I’ve seen enough,’ said Maddy. Her voice was lost in all the noise, but all the same he seemed to understand what she’d just said. He’d seen enough too. This little field trip was a bad idea. Come to think of it – a pretty sick idea actually. That’s what the grimace on Liam’s face was telling her. That he’d come to the same conclusion. Maddy tapped Rashim’s and Sal’s shoulders. They both turned.
‘We’re going back!’
‘OK,’ said Sal. Her face told the others that. That’s it, enough.
‘Rashim? We’re going!’
She turned and led the way westward along the wharves at the river’s edge. Other people were streaming the same way. The fire seemed to have consumed the entire city to the east of London Bridge and, like the herd instinct of wild animals beating a retreat before a raging forest fire, the people all around them sensed this was no longer a place to stand and passively watch events unfold. The flames were coming this way, fanned by a lively, gusting breeze rolling in from the Thames, pulled in by the inferno as it sucked hungrily on fresh oxygen.
Maddy clattered down a flight of rickety stairs to a lower wharf, to their right the open cellar and workshop of a cooper. A craftsman inside was busy packing the most valuable tools of his trade, his wife loading their life’s possessions into barrels that Maddy guessed were going to be dropped into the water and floated across the river. The others right behind her, Maddy fought her way past people trying to clamber down further flights of steps towards the water, where dinghies and lighters bobbed and oarsmen offered their taxi services at grotesquely inflated prices.
She ducked under some beams supporting the shack above and found the small wooden platform came to an end. Ahead was a stepladder that took them back up again to ‘street level’. At the top she was gasping, jostled by people carrying sacks of goods and possessions on their backs. Moving along the river’s edge was effectively an assault course of platforms, steps, ladders, stairways, beams, struts, barrels, loops of hemp rope hanging from beams above, low enough to garrotte the unobservant.
Another five minutes of climbing, clambering, ducking and weaving and they were back up on a cobblestoned quay so congested that people near the edge were in danger of being shunted over the side, down on to the shingle roofs of the riverside shanty town below. Maddy was utterly spent. She doubled over, hands on her knees, and retched.
Liam was beside her, gasping for air himself. ‘Don’t bleedin’ stop!’
‘I … I need … I need to catch my breath!’
Rashim and Sal joined them, the three of them forming a tight knot round Maddy, amid a surging river of people.
‘The fire is moving faster,’ said Rashim. ‘Faster than we are!’
Maddy stood up to look. She nodded. It was. The temperature of the air had risen noticeably. The cautious retreat of the people around them was now beginning to turn into a panicked rout.
The sky was no longer a looming telltale bank of low-hanging smoke, above smouldering thatch roofs; instead, it was now a clearly visible churning wall of flames. Houses that, earlier in the day, had taken half an hour for the fire to catch, get a grip of and consume until they collapsed were now spontaneously igniting ahead of the flames, so hot was the ambient air temperature.
‘Why did we get so close to the fire?’ cried Sal. ‘We’re too close!’
Maddy shook her head. It didn’t make sense. ‘It wasn’t meant to have reached this far yet! I thought we were safe west of the bridge!’
‘Well, we’re not!’ cut in Liam. ‘Come on! We have to keep moving!’ He grabbed her arm, tugging her after him as they moved once more with the flow of people.
All of a sudden, above the screams of panic, the roar of pursuing flames, they heard the unmistakable crack of a single musket shot. The sea of fleeing Londoners stalled.
Ahead of them Maddy could see people had stopped and were backing up. Beyond them was an open space: twenty feet of vacant quayside littered with abandoned carts, bundles of rags and a line of soldiers, the King’s Guard, in dark green tunics and iron breastplates, muskets presented forward.
Another crack of a musket. A warning shot over everyone’s head. A captain of the guard on horseback emerged from behind the line of his men and gestured at the stalled crowd to back up the way they’d come.
‘No further!’ he bellowed as the horse beneath him jittered nervously. ‘You must all withdraw the way you came!’
Angry, anxious voices from the crowd chorused their indignation.
‘Back I say!’ He coaxed his horse towards the people. ‘Back, or make your way down to the river! There are boats, lighters waiting for you! But you cannot take another step this way!’
Liam craned his neck to see better. ‘Why aren’t they letting us through?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Maddy. She turned to look for another direction in which they could head. Behind? No. Back that way they’d face a wall of increasingly unbearable heat; she could already feel it on her cheeks. To their left was the edge of the quay, and beyond it winding stairways and creaking ladders, timber rooftops leading down through the stepped shanty town to the already overcrowded jetties. And right? It was blocked by the stone front wall of a large storehouse. Narrow rat runs either side of it would take them northwards up into the city where the fire was already burning and spreading down towards the river. It seemed they were in a rapidly shrinking pocket, and the only way out was being blocked by these soldiers.
Half a dozen more guardsmen emerged from the large double doors of the storehouse, running swiftly to rejoin the others. One of them said something to the captain. He suddenly reined his horse in.
‘Get back! All of you fools! Get back! On the King’s orders … and for the love of God … you people must GET BACK!’ The captain swung his horse round and spurred it savagely, clattering back towards his men.
Maddy glanced at the storehouse doors, left open. What were they running from? Because they’d just come out fast, running like a raging bull was hot on their heels. It was dark inside the storehouse. She heard the captain bark an order and, with a clattering of plate armour, the rattle of harnesses and buckles, the soldiers lined up across the quayside began to withdraw hastily. Once again, she looked back at the dark interior of the storehouse and saw something fizzing, sparking, flaring across the floor.
Oh my God … is that –?
Chapter 7
1666, London
Liam was lying on his back, his fuzzy, concussed mind recalling a moment of déj
à vu; a moment like now with him lying flat on his back, stunned and winded, and looking up at the dark sky. Last time he’d experienced this, he’d been looking up at a blue sky over the medieval city of Nottingham, arrows silently flitting overhead like summer bees. Now he was seeing a swarm of fireflies lazily dancing down towards him like snowflakes.
Pretty. He grinned groggily.
He lay there for what seemed like ten lazy minutes but, for all he could determine, might have been ten seconds. Smoke billowed across his field of vision and he sensed sluggish movement all around: people like himself knocked flat by something, and now, with their ears ringing, beginning to stir. He eased himself up on to one elbow to look around and take stock.
The crowd he’d been wedged right in the middle of moments ago was gone. In its place was a dust-covered carpet of bodies, some stirring like him; some writhing in agony. Some perfectly still. And, nearer to where the large storehouse had stood moments ago, some in pieces. The storehouse was gone. In its place was a dishevelled mound of stone and wooden beams from which rose wisps of smoke and dust that spiralled up to join a mushroom cloud that was slowly drifting westward.
He felt a hand on his shoulder shaking him roughly. He turned to see a ghostly, powder-white face. For a moment he didn’t recognize the man. Then he noted the clipped beard, the long dark hair pulled back into a tidy ponytail, now grey with dust.
Rashim was saying something, his mouth flapping, but his voice sounded like it was arriving from afar, down a long pipe. Faint, muffled and lost amid the whining burr of white noise in his ears. Liam guessed what he was shouting. ‘I think I’m OK.’
Rashim was pointing to something. He felt Rashim touch his ear and then presented the tips of his fingers coated with startling, livid red blood. He was shouting something else.
Liam shook his head. ‘I said I’m all right!’ he shouted back. ‘I just can’t hear too well!’
Rashim grabbed his arms and hefted him to his feet. He had a better view of things now. Thirty, forty – maybe more – bodies littered the cobblestones around them. Those that hadn’t been killed or wounded or simply knocked flat on their backs by the blast had retreated. Many of them had leaped over the quayside down on to the shanty buildings and several of those flimsy structures had collapsed under the impact.
‘Where’s Maddy? Sal?’
Rashim shook his head and said something in reply. Gone? Did he just say ‘gone’?
Liam felt the blood drain from his face. Gone, as in dead? He looked around him at the bodies. ‘Where the hell are they?’
Rashim punched his arm to get his attention. ‘I … think … they … ran!’ he mouthed carefully. Liam looked again at those around him. Some of them were now getting to their feet, others unable to. He saw a young man his age sitting up and staring down, wide-eyed and uncomprehending, at a foot-long shard of wood embedded into his chest just below the collarbone. Blood jetted out in lazy arcs on to his lap.
Jay-zus.
A woman nearby or, more precisely, the top half of a woman.
But, and he felt a guilty stab for feeling almost elated with relief, no sign of Sal or Maddy. The shrill ringing in his ears was beginning to subside. He could hear Rashim now.
‘They ran. I think.’
‘Which way?’
‘I don’t know. The blast knocked me over too. I didn’t see which way.’ He looked towards the edge of the quay. ‘Perhaps they went over the side?’ Rashim turned back to him. ‘What now?’
Liam didn’t have the first clue.
‘We can’t stay here! The fire’s approaching.’
The roaring he still had in his ears was, he realized, not the tail end of concussion, but the proximity of the fire front. The riverside building they’d passed, just before the now absent storehouse, a grand three-storey, stone-built merchant’s house, was burning. He could hear glass shattering from the heat, the timbers of the gable roof inside snapping and giving.
Ahead of them he saw the soldiers lining up again. They’d retreated fifty yards further back along the quay and he saw several of them hastily rolling barrels into the open doors of the next building along.
He understood now what they were up to. A firebreak: they were attempting to create a much wider firebreak to contain the fire. The half-measure fire gaps they’d seen being deployed near London Bridge were clearly not enough. More than one building’s worth was needed to save what was left of the city west of this point. But now they were resorting to desperate, more drastic measures to do it: gunpowder instead of fire hooks. And, with the flames advancing so quickly, he suspected the captain and his men were under strict orders not to delay lighting their fuses under any circumstances … even if that meant the deaths of innocent civilians.
‘Liam!’ Rashim grasped his arm. ‘We have to move!’
A portion of an overhanging wall at the front of the merchant’s house collapsed on to the cobblestones below, sending a shower of sparks into the air and unleashing a roiling inferno within the building. Exposed to these closer flames, Liam could feel his face burning from the heat.
‘Over the quay!’ he gasped. ‘That’s the only way!’
Chapter 8
1666, London
They raced towards the edge of the quay, but others nearby had the same idea and a logjam built up round the top of a narrow wooden stairwell that creaked alarmingly under the weight of so many people using it at the same time.
‘Liam!’ barked Rashim. ‘The roof!’
Beside the creaking stairwell was the flat timber terrace of a building a twelve-foot drop down from the lip of the quay. Rashim swung his legs over the side and leaped down. Liam joined him a few seconds later, the flimsy planks wobbling unsteadily beneath them.
‘Jay-zus, it feels like it’s ready to give!’
The heat in the air all around them was making the already summer-dry wood even more brittle. In many places scorch marks and small patches of smouldering timber indicated where tufts of burning thatch had landed and started work on the beams and planks. Liam found a ladder leading down inside the wooden shack and led the way.
They emerged on to a plank walkway already swaying under the weight of dozens of other people burdened with leather buckets and cloth sacks of valuables. The walkway – supported on wooden pylons and cross-beams tethered together with hemp rope – sloped downwards, turned left and dipped more steeply, before it evened out and joined a narrow jetty.
As they pushed their way past a man trying to drag a heavy oak casket behind him, they heard an almighty crash from above, and a shower of sparks billowed over the side of the quay, raining down on to the wooden shacks.
They forced their way on to the jetty, a standing space no more than forty feet by fifteen, and already almost completely filled with people, crates, barrels, goats and chickens in wicker baskets. Around the jetty, a dozen vessels of varying sizes were bobbing and swaying as agitated negotiations were conducted across the water, with extortionate ‘rescue fees’ being called out by the boatmen.
Liam could see the boats were all keeping a wary distance from the desperate people on the jetty; the crews were holding oars, clubs and coshes, one of them even had a sabre, ready to fend off a last-minute rush. Looking up behind him, he could see the roof of the shack they had jumped down on to a minute ago was already sprouting yellow flames. The rest of this ramshackle shoreline was going to be on fire within the next ten minutes. There was going to be a last-minute scramble, a point at which those on the jetty weren’t going to care whether they might be coshed, clubbed or hacked at … the heat was going to be too much for them.
They needed to negotiate their way on to one of these boats. Now.
‘Rashim!’ He glanced at his friend’s expensive tailored waistcoat. ‘You look rich, come on!’ He grabbed his arm and shouldered his way through the baying crowd towards the nearest boat, bobbing three yards to the right of the jetty.
He cupped his hands. ‘Hoy! Hoy! Over here!’
/> One of the boatmen looked Liam’s way.
‘I have a gentleman here! A gentleman who needs a boat!’
Heads on the jetty turned towards them. Anxious faces, angry faces.
The man on the prow of the boat craned his neck, got a good look at Rashim and grinned. ‘Aye, there’s space here for a gentleman!’
‘And his servant?’ pleaded Liam.
‘That’s up to the gentleman!’
Rashim followed Liam’s nod. ‘Yes! Of course! Passage for two!’
‘Forty pounds for the both!’
Rashim looked at Liam. ‘We don’t have any –’
‘Jay-zus!’ hissed Liam. ‘Just agree, will you? We’ll worry about that later!’
Rashim turned back to the boatman. ‘It is a deal, sir!’
The man on the prow nodded at Rashim. ‘Throw me ya purse!’
‘No!’ bellowed Rashim indignantly. ‘Absolutely not, sir! I will only pay once we’re aboard!’
The boatman relayed that over his shoulder to another man at the back of the boat who appeared to be the sailor in charge of the small vessel. He craned his neck curiously to get a better look at Rashim then eventually he nodded.
‘You’ll ’ave to swim to us!’ the boatman called out. ‘Ah’ll pull you in!’
Just then they heard an almighty crash. Liam turned and saw the rickety stairwell they’d nearly taken down from the quay collapse in on itself. Forty or fifty people busily picking their way down the uneven plank steps disappeared along with it. The roof of the shack they’d descended was now a crackling inferno. He could feel the heat singeing his hair.
Liam was about to leap into the water when he felt a hand grab his arm roughly. He turned to see a red-haired woman, her crimson face blotched with soot and damp with rivulets of sweat. ‘Take ma baby with you! Please!’