The Book of Fires

The clouds keep gathering and thickening in the sky, but no rain falls.

‘Mild day it is, for November,’ the other women nod and comment hopefully, as though by that wish alone they can forestall the rain, their heads bobbing and quaking with the roll of the carriage going over the ruts. The unpleasant woman and her daughter break a cake between them on their laps and share it. The daughter chews, dreamily, and I catch the fat woman eyeing the cake, her mouth turned down a little at the corners, as though by rights the cake was hers and they had stolen it from her.

Lettice Talbot yawns and rubs her narrow shoulders. ‘It is not so far now,’ she says to me.

Stretched out on our left we see the marshes. Smelling of low-tide, salty mudflats, these marshes and hamlets seem a desolate beginning to a city. Shabby tufts of reeds and sedges give a green-grey colour to the wet land draining to ditches. I see birds like snipe and red-leg. I see a heron, trailing its untidy legs beneath its flight. We go through another hamlet and mount a rise. The houses are made of brick instead of flint, and many have neat gardens round them. And suddenly, as the road climbs and takes a turn to the right, the city comes into view below us. I am amazed. I stand up unsteadily and try to see ahead of us over the load of the carrier, grasping on to the rail.

‘I can hardly believe it!’ I exclaim aloud, turning to Lettice Talbot.

‘It is nothing more than a great stinking town,’ she says, amused.

‘And that river is the Thames!’ I breathe. Shimmering water like a snaking sea reflects the sky, its surface wrinkled with tiny swarms of boats and ferries. I stand on tiptoe to see more clearly, though the waggon jolts and rocks along. There are so many houses that on the far bank the city is clustered down to the edge of the water. Thorny spires and domes rise up from its mass.

The orange sun flashes on the water.

I am impatient. We enter Southwark, and our progress along the high street is impeded by the crush of traffic around the butchers’ shambles. I see a butcher wipe a bloodied cloth over a cleaver as we pass. I see another butcher pressing his fingers along the length of a dead pig’s spine as he looks for the soft place to put his knife between the bumps. I have never seen such a quantity of meat hanging together at one time; rows of pigs, yards of limp poultry slung from their own tied feet, the head of a calf with its eyes wide open, a brown bucket of livers. One gutter is red with blood where a washing has happened.

‘This is London Bridge! Bridge!’ the driver’s voice shouts at last from the front of the carrier. The other passengers begin to shift and talk in their seats. The fat lady daubs something white from a small pot on to her face. London Bridge is wide and chaotic, like no bridge I have ever seen. It is as broad as a street and lined with shops, and men are working in gangs between the premises amongst piles of rubble, where broken bits of building stick up into the air like blackened ribs. I stare astonished when I see that, in a corner between two walls, an unkempt man has made his habitation. He is squatting before a hearth, feeding a small, fierce fire with sticks. Smoke drifts a thin choking column into the traffic’s path. It smells tarred and bitter, making my eyes sting, and as the carrier passes, the man struggles up abruptly from the flames to turn his head towards us, as though it were his duty to observe all entries to the city. His coat is dark.

Below us the river smells of low-tide weed and mud and foul waste.

The road crackles with the noise of iron wheels turning over cobbles. Traffic knots and unknots itself in all directions. I have never seen so much at once: horses, carts, coaches weighty with passengers, quick squeaking gigs and traps, boys running with sedan chairs on handles, even one man driving two white heedless oxen down the very middle of the street. I am deafened by it and hold on to the side of the carrier as if it were a pitching boat on a rough sea.

Lettice Talbot shouts out the names of streets as we drive on.

‘Fish Hill Street, Gracechurch Street, Cornhill, Poultry,’ she says, above the noise. Cheapside is a broad, fine street lined with shops, where the afternoon light gleams on the glassy fronts, and shoals of people pour in and out. I see the ghoulish whiteness of so many of their faces, and their greyish powdered heads.

‘They wear so many clothes!’ I exclaim to Lettice Talbot.

I am startled by the noise of breaking glass beyond us up the street; there is a roar of drunkenness and the pound of running feet.

‘A hanging,’ she shouts. ‘There was a hanging today. Most of the crowds go off calmly when it is over, but there is always disorder left in the districts along the route, and fights break out in taverns and on street corners. It can be very unruly.’ She turns her head away. ‘The smell of sudden death infects a violent man with bloodlust.’

‘What?’ I say, trying to hear her.

‘Violence!’ she shouts. ‘Make sure you head swiftly to the safety of your relative.’

‘Along what route?’ I ask, trying to get nearer to her so I can catch her words. The carrier lurches. ‘Where is the trouble?’

‘The way the condemned cart goes between Newgate prison and the gallows tree at Tyburn.’

‘ To where?’

‘The gallows tree!’ She laughs merrily. ‘Justice, my sweetheart!’ And I shiver and pull my cloak about me.

We turn into a dingy lane, and draw into the great yard of the Cross Keys Inn. I am alarmed to see so many people jostling to reach the carrier. Lettice Talbot leans forward.

‘Have we arrived?’ I say.

‘Disembark here, Agnes,’ she advises, kindly. ‘This is where I get down.’ I shrink from the idea, wishing I could make myself small as a mouse or sparrow-sized, and go back at once to Sussex on the dusty floor of the carrier under the horsehair seats, by people’s shoes. But of course I cannot, as my journey is the kind of journey that cannot be undone, and so I find myself descending with difficulty over the wheels, and my feet standing on London cobbles, my lungs breathing in the tarry smoke that hangs over the yard. It is as though I were quite another person arriving in another place called London, in a dream. I keep imagining that someone might call out, ‘Cease that, Agnes!’ but of course they do not. I can hardly believe it. I clench my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering in agitation while I wait for my bundle to be untied from the rest of the baggages by the loaders and flung down on to the pavement.

Lettice Talbot draws me gently aside and speaks low in my ear with a sudden urgency.

‘You cannot trust a soul, Agnes,’ she says. Her eyes are serious and blue in her thin face. A man is thunderously rolling empty barrels out of a hatch and up on to a painted cart. There is a strong smell of stale beer coming up from the cobbles.

‘You should not let your guard down, Agnes. Always presume that there is no one to trust. You must look out for tricks all of the time,’ she whispers, watching my face. ‘People taking advantage.’

‘Tricks,’ I repeat. I am so tired suddenly.

‘You have nowhere to go, do you?’ Lettice says. She is still standing close to me. Fine soft hairs on the side of her cheek are catching the light behind her. And now I see that, although she speaks with such assurance, she must be young, perhaps almost as young as myself, I think.

I shake my head. ‘I do not.’

Lettice Talbot reaches into her bodice and takes out a crumpled little piece of paper that she gives to me. She speaks quickly now.

‘This is the address of my lodging house towards St Giles. Follow these directions, and begin to look for number twelve after the sign of the bootmaker’s shop. The landlady is Mrs Bray, she is a decent woman. Tell her you are one of my acquaintance, no, you are my particular friend, and there will be room for you. Make sure you do that. You must find your own way as I have business to attend to, for the while. If they should ask, be sure to say that you have had the smallpox.’

‘I must find work,’ I say. Lettice Talbot smiles.

‘There will be plenty,’ she reassures me.

‘What kind of work?’ I ask, hopefully. Lettice Talbot looks at me. ‘Priceless,’ she murmurs. ‘Priceless.’ The gem flashes at her neck. ‘You are a darling,’ she says softly, and touches my skin. ‘There is profit to be made from what you are.’ I nod at this, not knowing what she has in mind, but understanding that she knows how to behave in London.

Her teeth are good and wide apart. Her arm is light about my shoulders.

‘We are going to be such friends,’ she says, and squeezes me tight.

‘I have never had a friend, not really,’ I say. ‘Only sisters.’

And so I am persuaded, as I have no other plan, and am tired of thinking. When I have pulled out my homely bundle from the dwindling pile before the tailgate, I turn to Lettice Talbot to bid goodbye to her, but she is gesturing with someone at an upper window of the inn, shaking her head with vehemence, and does not see me waiting. I brush the dirt from the front of my dress with my hand, and when I look back again, she is gone. I cannot see her anywhere.

By the front of the coach when I go to pay my passage I find an argument is underway between the driver and the great-coated man about his fare.

‘I cannot help the nation’s lack of coins!’ the man bawls, puffing with righteousness. ‘Your nuisance shortage then just means your loss, not mine! Here, you’ll take my double-guinea piece and give me change that I am due!’

The coachman’s boy holds out a dirty hand for my own guinea, which he takes and bites. When he holds it up and looks closely at it in the gloom, his face changes and he glances sharply back at me. I am gripped by the idea that he knows it is stolen. How could he know that? He could not. My face goes hot, even though he shrugs and drops the coin into a bag inside his waistcoat and turns to pull the coachman’s terrier away from someone’s legs. The dog barks and strains at the collar, and when I turn to look again, I find the coachman’s boy is standing still and staring after me, as though he has something to say. I hurry off. I cling to my bundle in the crush and leave the yard. And yet, as I reach the gate, instinctively I have another sense of someone watching me, and I look back quickly to the balcony. I cannot see a soul up there, only a movement flickering behind a window, behind the criss-crossed panes of glass, which dips out of sight.

My bundle is an awkward shape to carry.

I start to make my way through the crush of people outside the yard, and hold the thought of the yellow coins protectively inside my head. If I can keep it there without distraction, nothing will happen, I say to myself. It is difficult, like holding a large slippery plate of meat above the clamour of a pack of animals.

The noise of the crowd is huge and judders in my ears, and I find it hard to keep my balance. It is a hundred times worse than any market day or fair that I have been to. Since the child began to grow inside me, odours are so much stronger, and here the street is swimming with stenches that I am fighting to move through without gagging. Stale bodies inside unclean garments press round me giving out foul exhalations as they walk, of sweat, rotting teeth, disease. I have to hold my breath until my lungs are almost bursting, until I am a fair way past a tavern called the Boar’s Head, and on the other side of the street I see a burial ground pierced with the uprights of headstones and memorials, where my feet seem to take me. In its midst stands a towering plane tree, its scaly broad trunk rising firmly between the grassy mounds. The branches are dark with rooks gathering, like a crop of black fruits.

Carrion birds do irk me, I think. Their cawing and rough hacking chat is like the sound of death. Here there are so many rooks that they are like a terrible smoke billowing and settling about the tree. The ground is littered with black feathers, droppings and bits of twigs beneath their nests that cluster on the branches.

I linger here, too long. I read slowly from an engraved tablet at the side of the street. Old Site of St Peter’s, before the Fire, the tablet says. And nearby on the iron railings at the corner of Wood Street I see a likeness of St Peter, whose fingers hold his keys comfortably upon his lap.

It is Lil who is good at the names of saints. She loves to take William on to her knee and make up stories, and her mind wanders easily while she is working. I’ve heard her say that a thief has a fish hook on every finger, because a fish caught by St Peter was found to have a shining piece of money in its mouth. My own thief’s fingers are blue with cold. I blow upon them to warm them with my thief’s breath, and turn my back on the likeness of St Peter with his judgements.