Also by C. C. Humphreys
The French Executioner
Blood Ties
Vlad: The Last Confession
Absolute Honour
The Hunt of the Unicorn
Jack Absolute: A Novel
A Place Called Armageddon
The Blooding of Jack Absolute
Shakespeare’s Rebel
Plague
As Chris Humphreys
The Fetch
Vendetta
Possession
Copyright © 2016 C.C. Humphreys
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Humphreys, C. C. (Chris C.), author
Fire / C.C. Humphreys.
ISBN 978-0-385-67989-3 (paperback).–ISBN 978-0-385-67990-9 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8565.U5576F57 2016 C813′.6 C2015-906507-0
C2015-906508-9
eBook ISBN 9780385679909
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover images: Figures from Hans Holbein’s Danse Macabre, photograph © Duncan Walker / Getty Images; The Great Fire of London scene © Museum of Fine Arts (Szepmuveszeti) Budapest, Hungary / Bridgeman Images
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v4.1
a
To Simon Trewin
Contents
Cover
Also by C. C. Humphreys
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Dramatis Personae
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1: To Kill a King
Chapter 2: Playhouse Ghosts
Chapter 3: A Death at the Playhouse
Chapter 4: The Tract of Tears
Chapter 5: Prophecies
Part Two
Chapter 6: Siren Calls
Chapter 7: Subterfuges
Chapter 8: The Raid
Chapter 9: A Wedding
Chapter 10: A Reckoning
Chapter 11: The Press
Part Three
Chapter 12: Debts
Chapter 13: Sea Fight
Chapter 14: The Fireship
Chapter 15: The Compter
Chapter 16: Blood
Part Four
Chapter 17: The Great Fire of London
Part Five
Chapter 18: Aftermath
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Further Reading
About the Author
Dramatis Personae
THE THIEF-TAKERS AND FAMILY
Captain William Coke
Dickon
Pitman
Bettina Pitman
Josiah Pitman
Grace, Faith, Benjamin and Eleazar Pitman
Allsop
Friar
Deakins
THE COURT
King Charles II
James, Duke of York
Sir Joseph Williamson, spymaster
THEATRE FOLK
Sarah Chalker
Thomas Betterton
Mary Betterton
Aitcheson, theatre attendant
Hutchins, theatre attendant
THE FIFTH MONARCHISTS
Captain Blood
Thomas Blood, his son
Simeon Critchollow, puppeteer
Daniel
Samuel Tremlett, master builder
Isaiah Hebden
Colonel Rathbone
Colonel Danvers
Chambers
More
Hopkinson
AT SEA
Rear-Admiral Sir George Ayscue
Lieutenant Hardiman
Boatswain
Admiral Robert Holmes
Wilbert Bohun
Squires, gun captain
THE POULTRY COMPTER
Jenny Johnson
Mary Johnson
Jenkins
Baronet de Lacey
Eye-Patch and Son
Wallace, master turnkey
Joan
Midwife
THE FIRE
Salmon, constable
Thomas Farriner, baker
Sir Thomas Bludworth, Lord Mayor of London
Citizens of the City
Samuel Pepys, diarist
James Morrow, headborough
Tom Walker
OTHERS
Woodstrode, barrister
Thom Peterson, landlord
‘Jeremiah’ Peckworth
Aaron Bastable
Mad Moll
French wine merchant
Young Samuel Tremlett
Isaac ben Judah
Rebekah bat Judah
1665. The Great Plague ravages London. One hundred thousand die, horribly.
1666. The plague passes. Citizens resume their lives.
Six years after his restoration to his executed father’s throne, following twelve years of Puritan glumness, King Charles is called ‘the Merry Monarch’ with reason. He carouses, he plays pell-mell, he attends the theatre, he beds his many mistresses. For him, and the very few very rich, 1666 promises to be another year of pleasure.
For most Londoners, though, the year will offer no more than another battle to survive. And for a radical few, it means something else entirely. For 666 is the number of the Beast – when Satan, as foretold in the Books of Revelation and Daniel, will return to battle the armies of Christ at a place called Armageddon; when Jesus will triumph, raising up the Elect – the chosen, living and dead – to dwell forever in the New Jerusalem. However these ‘Saints’ do not simply sit and pray. By their deeds will they end the Fourth Monarchy of Man, and hasten the Fifth Monarchy of Christ.
September. The year of the Beast is three-quarters done and the Devil has not had his due. It has not rained in five months. Warehouses are stuffed with combustibles: coal, hemp, tobacco, brandy, parchment, silks, gunpowder. Each wooden house lights a fire daily, while bathhouses, bakeries and breweries stoke furnaces for their labours.
London is a tinderbox: politically, sexually, religiously – literally. And it is about to burn.
AND WHOSOEVER WAS NOT FOUND WRITTEN IN THE
BOOK OF LIFE WAS CAST INTO THE LAKE OF FIRE.
The Revelation of St John the Divine 20:15
PROLOGUE
Fire. Vulnerable as any newborn. Like a child, you give it life, pray that it will thrive and repay your care. Yet how will it survive its first moments in a harsh world?
Take the lit taper from a neighbour. Softly now, softly – even in the few steps to your room, it has so many ways to die. Despite your cupped hand, draughts beset it. It flickers, shreds, re-forms in waves, bends to you as if craving protection, shrinks. You think you’ve lost it, you stop – and it revives, rising straight again, a final boldness. Now you must be quick.
Over the threshold, across to the stub of candle on the mantel, lower flame to wick. So – it catches! Dropping the taper’s end onto a pewter plate, you cross and close the door. The swirl of your motion blows a tiny ember to the floo
r. You do not note its fall. How can it matter anyway when it is all but dead?
The flame lives now in the candle. You could snuff it in a cone of metal, extinguish it with a snap of fingers, destroy it with a breath. Instead, you pause to admire the yellow spear with cobalt at its heart, the burning eye of the wick. It streams high in three slender fingers and you give thanks to God for life renewed, for warmth, for heat. Now you will be fed as you have fed.
You transfer fire to the grate. Kindling catches and flames move upon the small logs you offer it. You bend to add breath. The chimney draw is not enough, so you cover the hearth with a blanket, seal it from the room. Silence – then a whoosh. Through threadbare wool, you see fiery arms reach high. Folding the blanket fast, you smother any new life within it.
Larger logs now – and your tender babe becomes a brawling youth. As it grows, so does its appetite. Soon it is all the fire you need. You swing a pot over the flames and cook your supper.
Heat makes you drowsy. But you know that unattended fires can be dangerous. You add one last, larger piece of wood to see you into the night, put a metal guard before the hearth and sink into your chair.
You doze before the dwindling light. And though some worry tugs at the edge of your mind, you lose it in sleep.
That ember. That tiny ember from the taper. That orphan. Most orphans in this city perish and this one would have too – if it had not fallen first onto a fragment of leaf, shifted onto an edge of rug, finally settled onto a dropped wool stocking. There a little draught reaches it, gently, and the ember glows and grows ever slowly into the night. Until it is hungrier.
Then it moves more quickly. Consuming all that is beside it, it begins on everything beyond. It reaches out to its cousin fire almost faded on the grate. Revives it, becomes one with it. Smoke fills the room. You, the parent before the hearth, are dead before you are consumed.
The window’s lead is melting, its glass is bowing out. Within the plaster walls, horsehairs crisp in filaments of fire. Soon there is nothing left of the room – wood, wool, flesh, all gone. So now, like any living thing, flame has a choice: feed or die.
Across the threshold, a city sleeps.
1
TO KILL A KING
Of all the drunk men in the Seven Stars that noontime, he was undoubtedly the drunkest.
The tavern was one of several close to the law courts but was favoured above others for the quality of its sweet sack, its beef and kidney pudding, and for the several snugs where lawyers could meet their clients or each other in relative privacy. Matters could be discussed with discretion, bribes subtly transferred from cloak to cloak.
The drunkard disturbed their equilibrium. It was not that the legal profession in London was any less inebriated than any other. Indeed, few of them would dream of venturing into the courtroom entirely sober; given that the judge, the juries, most plaintiffs and all defendants were unlikely to be, what would be the purpose? Despite that, most in the tavern comported themselves with decorum, keeping their voices low, their movements minimal.
Unlike the tall man whose long black hair – filigreed with silver and uninhibited by judicial wig or even ribbon – flew around him as he danced to music only he could hear. The man had tried to engage another in his dance, pulling him close, whirling him around again and again before being shoved aside with an oath. Rebuffed, he began to punctuate his jig with short snatches of song, and clapped a-rhythmically along to his stamping.
It was the jarring quality of this last that finally provoked a corpulent barrister named Woodstrode, three bumpers of sack the worse for the morning and so finding it hard to grasp the exact amount he was being offered to lose his case that day, to bellow, ‘Christ’s mercy, Peterson. Throw the bedlamite out!’
Thom Peterson, landlord of the Stars, had been contemplating doing so since the man began his jigging. But the only part of him that was large was his belly; he’d strained his back shifting barrels earlier in the day and he’d dispatched his tapster, Smythe, who enjoyed hurting drunks, to fetch more offal from the Fetter Lane shambles. Still, with the tavern now suddenly quieter and his regular clients regarding him, he knew he must do something.
Stepping from behind the trestle, he warily approached the man who, on the lawyer’s cry, had ceased singing and taken a few unsteady steps back to the crook stool he’d risen from to dance. He swayed above it now and, just as the landlord reached him, flopped onto it.
‘Now, listen to me, you –’ Peterson began.
‘Grash,’ the man slurred.
‘What’s that, fellow?’
Another unintelligible word came, whispered this time while the drunkard also reached up, took the landlord’s hand, tugged him down until their heads near touched. Peterson, bending to listen and consider how, with his back, he could lift the larger man from his seat and run him out the door, then realised that there was not just flesh between them – there was metal as well. The man was turning his hand slightly, not letting it go, just enough to reveal that the metal was silver, and had His Majesty’s head upon it.
‘Leave me be,’ the man whispered, releasing the coin over, retaining the hand, ‘and I vow I’ll be good.’
Between the half-crown in his palm and the pain in his back, Peterson came to an immediate decision. ‘See that you are, ye dog,’ he declared into the silence that lingered, looking around to add loudly, ‘He sued his wife for criminal conversation – and he lost! I’ve told the poor cuckold he can rest here if he makes not one peep more.’
A few laughs came, along with expressions of wonder – it was rare for a husband to sue a wife for adultery in an adulterous world, rarer still for her to win. Wondering which lucky lawyer it was who had thus triumphed, Woodstrode and the rest turned back to their hushed negotiations. The hum returned to the tavern, the landlord to his trestle, the drunkard to himself. Indeed, the cuckold was now completely, contemptuously, ignored.
Which is just as I want it, thought Captain Coke, as he peered through the falling veil of his hair at the man who’d been his brief and unwilling partner in the dance. Use all your senses, his tutor in crime had told him. The man we seek will be unusual. He will stand out, e’en as he seeks to blend in. Something will distinguish him, give him away. Above all, he’d said, use this. And he’d tapped his nose.
He’d not meant it literally, of course. ‘Sniffing out villainy’ was a phrase as old as villains and those who hunted them. And yet?
Coke inhaled. The air was fragrant with so many things. Smoke overlaid it all – from the hearth, where sweet applewood burned to stave off the chill of this raw April day; from the clay pipes at which every second man puffed. You could tell the quality of the clientele by the quality of what they smoked. In an alehouse in Wapping, the seaman’s rough shag would make all eyes run. However the tobacco in the Seven Stars was finest blended Turkish leaf, purchased on the Haymarket or from Louis on Fleet Street – gentle on nostril, throat and chest.
Deeper, thought Coke, taking another breath which brought…the pungency of kidney from one of the establishment’s famed puddings, an example of which lay open and ravaged on the table to his side, wafting its flavourings over: nutmeg, cinnamon and black pepper. It brought perfume too, for near all men wore it, in different notes. Within his, bought at considerable expense from Maurice of the Strand Arcade, sandalwood predominated – a good, masculine smell, he’d always felt. Other perfumes nearby were not so nice. He smelled rosewater; then bergamot, lavender and lily.
He looked across the tavern again. The man he’d danced with smelled of none of these. Or rather, anything he wore was overlaid with something far stronger.
The scent of terror.
The man was now looking towards him. Muttering, Coke lowered his head into his hands, looked to the floor – and smiled. Though it was half hidden in floor reeds, had been trampled in muck and had a boot heel’s mark obscuring some of the words, the rest of the paper was clear – and told that at two that same afternoon at the
Duke’s Playhouse, not three hundred paces from where he now sat, Thomas Betterton, ‘the prince of players’, would give his Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, for the very first time. And though there was no other name upon the bill, Coke saw one there anyway. For Sarah Chalker, who he hoped one day soon would be Sarah Coke, would be giving her Gertrude.
Smile changed to frown. He wasn’t well read in Shakespeare. But he knew that Gertrude was a widow. And ‘the Widow Chalker’ was what Sarah was called by many. Her husband had been slain, brutally slain, but eight months before. She’d told him that she was reluctant to marry again so soon before she had fully mourned. But Coke feared otherwise: that even though he knew she loved him, he also believed that the child that she carried, that they had created, made her wary of a life with him. He did not blame her – for what prospect was he? How could he provide for her and the babe? What was he, after all? A disinherited knight. A man forced to give up the one trade he had any skill in and exchange it for another which was…what? Sitting in a tavern, sniffing men? Seeking…
‘Do not turn about.’ The voice came low from behind him. ‘Or at least if you do, do so slowly and in your current – and masterly, may I say – personation.’
Coke continued slouching forward for a further half minute. Then, yawning widely, he turned about, laid his head upon the forearms on the table and closed his eyes. He’d seen all he needed.
Pitman was a big man, taller by half a head than himself, and half as broad again. Yet while Coke had jigged, the man had contrived to cross a crowded tavern and insert his large self into the corner of the settle unobserved. This quiet way of being there and yet not seeming to be was just one of several skills that Pitman had been trying to teach his new partner, which the thief-taker alluded to now.
‘I see you took my advice about hiding in plain sight,’ he said. He tamped then lit his pipe from the table’s candle, exhaling a plume of smoke – shag, Coke thought, coughing, the man had low tastes in some things – to add to the fug. ‘Well done, William.’