by Rose Tremain
On the morning of Monday, I went and looked at the gap. And then I looked up into the air above the fire and saw the blazing debris that was still being hurled upwards and whipped onwards by the wind and I knew then that the flames would cross the gap and come to us.
I returned to the house and told Finn to start packing up his canvases and Frances Elizabeth to bring down her escritoire and beg some room for these things and anything else they wished to save on a neighbour's cart. But they paid me no heed.
"Why has the gap been made if it is not going to protect us?" Finn asked stupidly. I gave him no answer. I went into the parlour, where Frances Elizabeth was calmly stoking her coals as she did every morning, and took up all my surgical instruments and cleaned them and laid them neatly in their case. Into a large box I put all the powders and remedies and lint and bandages that I kept in the house. I took them to Danseuse's stable and strapped them onto her back. Then I returned and dragged from under my bed the sack containing my oboe, my letters from the King and other remains of my "burning coals." Into this sack I put my new clothes and wig – all now blackened with smoke and stained with sweat – and fastened this also to my horse's saddle.
And then I came to Finn and Frances Elizabeth and said: "I am going now to find Margaret, so I shall say goodbye to you."
They both stared at me. "Are you telling us," said Finn, "that you are not coming back?"
"Yes, Finn, I am," I replied, "for there will be no house to come back to."
Moments after I had uttered these words the first sliver of flame fell upon the first house in Cheapside and so the word was carried from house to house, " Cheapside is lost! Save what you can and then go. Go west and go fast, for the speed of the fire is very great."
So then the panic in our house had no equal anywhere in London, Finn and Frances Elizabeth suddenly intent upon saving every last thing in every room. And though I wished to walk away from them, I could not do it, so I fetched my horse and allowed her to be loaded up like a mule with canvases and brushes and cooking pots and sacks of provisions and dresses and I know not what else. Finn would have put his truckle bed onto her if I had not stopped him and Frances Elizabeth her escritoire, because no cart could be found to take them, and even as the fire came closer and closer the two of them held onto these things and refused to be parted from them and when we set off at last, with Danseuse staggering under her heavy load, they attempted to lift them up and carry them and for a long time I heard them behind me, puffing and groaning and saying to each other, "We can do it, we can do it."
We were in a great herd of people and had to keep moving on or have them fall on us and trample us, but for a brief moment I did pause and look back and it was then that I saw that the fire had gone from the top of our house to the bottom and all that still stood was the front door in its frame with the three plaques upon it. The sight of this affected me more than I had anticipated. I had thought myself to be more or less indifferent to the place, but I was not. And I remembered on the same instant that one precious possession of mine had been forgotten and was now burnt to ashes with the house and that was Pearce's copy of De Generatione Animalium, the only remnant of him that I had.
When we came to Lincoln 's Inn Fields, we stopped and sat down there on the dry grass, as did everyone else going out of Cheapside and its lanes and alleys. And by late afternoon a vast multitude of people had come there and for every one of them crying and lamenting there were four or five beginning to laugh and gossip and sing songs and share food around, as if they were on a picnic outing with no cares in the world. From Frances Elizabeth's kitchen seven jars of plums had been saved and some bottles of ginger wine and a white cheese in a bag of muslin, so we supped on these and on other provisions given to us in exchange for them and began to make instantaneous friendships with everyone around us.
The talking and the eating went on far into the night, when the fire once again lit up the whole sky and it was all, in the strangest of ways, an enjoyable thing. Near two or three in the morning, I heard Finn begin to tell everybody round that he was a portrait painter and to offer to paint portraits then and there for twenty-five shillings, notwithstanding the fact that not one person there had any wall on which to hang them. The knowledge that, even in adversity, his commercial heart could now beat so strongly made me smile and I think it was with this smile still upon my face that I fell asleep.
I parted from him and Frances Elizabeth the following morning. Neither the escritoire nor the truckle bed had got as far as Lincoln's Inn Fields, so I was now forced to set down on the grass beside them all the things they had loaded onto Danseuse, and the sight of them surrounded by half-finished portraits and copper saucepans and pairs of shoes would have been somewhat sad had it not been for their great cheerfulness. I had anticipated that the loss of the house in Cheapside would put them into despair, but it did not. For what they seemed to have discovered was that it had not only housed them and their little fledgling businesses; it had also harboured their mutual liking and affection. And I was certain, as I left them, that when I found them again it would be in some place together and I imagined them in a low room smelling of oils, lying side by side in bed and doing their sums.
It took me all of the day to skirt round the fire, going as far north as I could to avoid the smoke, but by evening I had reached the Tower and could see from there that the cluster of tall houses among which was the money-lender's house still stood and had not been touched by the fire, so I whispered into the hot air a prayer of gratitude.
When I arrived at the house, it was the money-lender who greeted me and I went with him into his Accounting Room and he showed me some new scales and weights of which he was very proud, "precision", he said, "being my great passion, for everything in the world can be weighed and measured in some form, can it not?"
I was about to open my mouth to say that I did not believe that it could be when his wife came into the room carrying Margaret, who was wide awake and not bound all in swaddling as she had been when I had seen her last, but dressed in a pretty bonnet and wrapped in a shawl.
The wet-nurse began to talk about the fire and how she and her husband and all the children had knelt down in a long line and prayed that the direction of the wind would not change. As she recounted this to me, she put Margaret into my arms. This was the first time that I had held her or indeed held any baby at all and I did not know if I should lay her in the crook of my arm or put her little face over my shoulder, or what. So I sat down on the hard chair where the clients of the money-lender sat and laid Margaret on my lap and looked down at her. She had grown very much and her face was as round as the moon. Her eyes, I now realised, were very large and clear and she looked up at me gravely for a while, then began to kick her legs inside the shawl and to blow little frothy bubbles out of her mouth.
"See her hair, Sir?" said the wet-nurse after a while. "Colour of fire, it is." And she bent down and eased back the rim of the bonnet and I saw some soft red curls there. I touched them gently and felt, under my hand, the living warmth of her head.
That night I spent with Rosie Pierpoint.
This being Tuesday and I not coming to her in the afternoon, I flattered myself that she would have become anxious for me, imagining me burnt alive or crushed beneath falling timber. But when she saw me, she seemed neither relieved that I was still living nor even particularly pleased to find me there, but preoccupied only with the film of soot and ash which, having been thrown up into the air, was now falling and settling on everything and turning grey every piece of linen that she washed and ironed.
Her house was stifling. She had closed all her windows and sealed every crack and draught in her efforts to keep out "the poxy grime." "But it still comes there," she said. "No sooner do I hang up a sheet to dry it or spread out a kerchief to press it than it comes there, see?" She held up some items to show me the dirty streaks upon them, then threw them back into the soiled pile and screeched: "How am I to get any work done or make o
ne penny while this goes on? I shall starve, that's what I shall do! I will die a slow death by starving and I would have preferred a quick one in the flames!"
I took her into my arms and tried to quieten and soothe her with kissing and after a while her crossness did begin to wane sufficiently for me to tell her that I had no home or place to sleep any more and that I would pay her a good rent if she would let me stay with her for a time, until I could find some rooms and make yet another new start upon my life.
She pulled away from my embrace and looked at me squarely. She put her hands on her hips.
"For how long?" she asked.
"What?"
"How long will you stay? A week? A month?"
"Well," I said, "I cannot say. It may be difficult to find rooms, for I will not be the only one seeking them."
"Then I must have compensation, Sir Robert."
"Compensation for what?"
She sighed and turned away from me, busying herself with the lighting of a lamp.
"Can you not guess?" she said.
So then I understood. It was not merely the "craze for washing" or the perfuming of pillow cases with lavender that had caused Rosie to prosper. With Pierpoint gone, she had resumed her whore's antics with a ready will and it was the money got in this way that had enabled her to buy capons and cream and all the rich foods she could no longer live without. And I thought how strangely my mind had worked, over the years, with regard to Rosie Pierpoint. I had known from the start that she was a drab and a jade but, whenever I had needed her, I had put this knowledge from me, liking to imagine her on her own, doing her work and eating her meals and rising at dawn to perform her little ablutions that I had once witnessed, and never ever picturing her with other men. It is the same thing, I said to myself, as the story of the Indian Nightingale: I have believed what it pleased me to believe.
I crossed to Rosie and put my hand out and stroked her hair. "Of course," I said, "there will be compensation. But now let us go to bed and love each other and drive from our minds everything but this – even the smut and the soot."
I found two cold, airy rooms above a lute-maker's shop on the south side of the river. The sounds of the lutes came up through the cracks in the floor, stretched and fragile and thin.
Autumn rain fell onto the blackened city and turned the ash to paste and bloated the river so that all the half-burnt wharves fell away and floated on the water to the sea. I looked out of my high windows and tried to rebuild London in my mind as it had been. But I found that I could not remember how it had been, so that it was lost to me entirely and this realisation made me so moody and sad that I fell into the habit once again of staring for very long periods of time at the backs of my hands as if I vainly believed that I, Merivel, could remake the city.
I was not alone in feeling this sadness. For every person that I treated for burns in the months following the fire, another came to me with an ailment he could not name except to call it "a melancholy of all the body and mind." I laid red balsam and barley water on the burns, but I did not know what to lay upon the melancholy. More than once my thoughts returned to Wise Nell and her blood of swallows. In short, I began to wonder whether all cures of sadness do not have within them some element of magic that is beyond my understanding.
Listening to the lute maker, and the skittering of rain on my windows I, one evening, turned my hands round and began to trace the lines on my palms, to see whether I could read a future there, but I could not, for no one had taught me how to interpret the creases. I noticed, however, that the love-line – particularly that of my left hand – divides very soon after starting and becomes two. This discovery not only made me smile, it also encouraged me to believe that other accurate knowledge was indeed written on my hand if only I could read it correctly and so began, in an indolent sort of way, a search for a chiromancer which I soon abandoned, it seeming to be the case that full half of everyone left in London professes and calls himself a chiromancer and for small sums of money will snatch up any hand and claim to see in it some glorious destiny. One told me that I would discover a cure for old age, another that I would be saved from drowning by the eating of a quail pie "because that you inadvertently ate the feathers too, Sir, and so it is they will buoy you up above the waves", and another that I would be remembered for ever for a deed I had not yet done or a journey I had not yet made. I was at first very adept at pretending to believe such predictions, but then this pretence suddenly wearied me and I became indifferent to all versions of my future and able, as the autumn passed and the winter came on, to live each day for itself and not to waste too much time dreaming.
I had no word from the King. I did not expect any, for after the burning of the house in Cheapside he had no immediate means of finding me, no way of knowing, even, that I had not perished in the fire. I could have written to him, but I did not. For it seemed to me, as my fortieth birthday approached, as if I had spent so much of my swiftly passing existence composing letters to the King in my mind that I had run out of words.
And this is what I believed: I believed that if, one day, the King wanted to find me, he would find me. I did not know how. I could not even imagine how. I only knew that he would. And that it would not prove to be very difficult for him, for such is his power that surely no corner of his Kingdom is invisible to him and no person within it beyond his reach?
One day in early spring, being invited to a little supper party by a lawyer I had cured of an ulcer, I took down my navy blue and cream coat (cleaned and restored by Rosie to its former smartness) and the matching silk breeches to put them on. Having no looking glass in my rooms above the lute-maker, I had become somewhat neglectful of my appearance, only now and then catching sight of myself reflected in a window pane. Thus I had not seen what I now saw in putting on my suit: I had grown most peculiarly thin. The waist of the breeches was too large for me by more than two inches, so that the wretched things would not stay up, and, when I put the coat on my back, it hung out from my body like a cape. I pulled up my shirt and regarded my stomach. It appeared shrunken and a little wrinkled and all the moths on it, having lost so much of their territory, were crowded up together in a dense mass.
I sat down upon one of the four chairs with which these rooms are furnished (a chair so delicate and spindly I often wonder whether the lute-maker did not manufacture it himself as a diversion from hollow things) and tried to read my altered appearance, like the reading of a palm, for what it signalled and what it portended. For in the whole of my life I have never been thin. I was a podgy baby, so my mother used to tell me, and the moire suit I wore as a boy was always stretched so tight across my chest that I remember minute buttons exploding from it sometimes when I laughed. Even as a student I was fleshy and by the time of the fifth beginning to this story I was, as you will recall, very comfortingly fat. Now, all the flesh was falling away and every bone in me being slowly unsheathed and made visible. It was impossible not to think of Pearce wasting to stick and sinew inside his clothes, and so as I sat there – a thin man on a thin chair – I began to consider the possibility that I was dying.
I examined my memory for aches and hurts. I listened to my own heartbeat and to the noise of my breathing. I got up and pissed a little into a pot and stared at my urine, looking for cloudiness and beads of blood, then smelled it, like a connoisseur of wine, sniffing for acid and putrefaction. Then, forgetting entirely about the lawyer's supper party, I took off the too-large clothes and lit a quantity of candles and placed them near to the window and so was able to see myself mirrored in it. Anyone on the river looking up would have chanced upon a most hilarious sight: Merivel, as nude as Adam, peering at parts of his anatomy – his tongue, his armpits, his nipples, his nose, his groin and his knees – for signs of swelling or discoloration, shivering a little in the cold March evening and appearing altogether as scrawny and fanatical as the original naked Quaker of the burning coals.
I could find nothing wrong with me. My heart sounded strong,
my body was unmarked, except by its loss of fat and by time itself. I put on my nightshirt and lay down on my narrow bed and thought of everything that had happened to me since the fire and I saw that my life had become a somewhat solitary thing and that within it there was one abnormal phenomenon which was that now and again I would see and hear things that were not there. One of the things I heard was a dog yapping on the stairway. Once, I had been so certain that the creature was there that I had opened my door and expected it to come in wagging its tail, but there was no sign of any dog whatsoever. And the things I saw were no less troubling and inexplicable: I saw, growing on the slimy steps by Southwark Bridge, a clump of primroses which appeared so real to me that I bent down to pick one, but there were no flowers growing there, only a pale yellow handkerchief carelessly dropped by a fop pirouetting into a boat. Another time, I saw in the hand of one of my woman patients a lump of black soap, but when I uncurled her fingers her palm was empty.
I lay and considered what this hallucinatory tendency might portend – whether a weakening of my brain or the unlikely arrival in me of visionary powers. But I could come to no conclusion about it and after a while, with my eyes half open on the flickering candlelight, I fell into a dream of Bidnold, believing myself to be there, lying on the carpet from Chengchow and smelling woodsmoke and sunlight and the perfume of wealthy women. And the whole of this dream was filled with such magic that when I woke from it, to see all the candles dripping grease onto the floor, I did not move one muscle of my body, but only closed my eyes and tried to dream it again.
And after this night, what took hold of me was not any illness or sliding towards death, but a colossal epidemic of dreaming, so that night after night I floated into Bidnold and landed light as a plume and brushed the surfaces of things -the polished tops of tables, the stretched brocade of scarlet sofas, the milky satin of cushions, the tooled leather spines of books, the dented pewter handle of the coal scuttle – and then was carried by the wind out into the sky and hung like a ghost above the park, filling myself with colour so that I became fat with it, with the purple of the beeches and the lush green of the grass. There were no people in these dreams, yet they were dreams of the most sensual kind from which, when the morning came, I did not want to be parted. So I began to prolong them into the day, rising later and later, long after the lute-maker had begun work and the noise on the river had reached to its morning crescendo. I was addicted to them, as to an opiate, and went about my physician's round drugged by the memory of them and by the great quantity of sleep I was inflicting upon myself. I knew that I should be trying to shake off this sickness of dreaming, but I did not seem to have the will to do it.