The Ashes of London. Andrew Taylor

       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