‘I am.’
‘Ah.’ The man scratched at his chin, letting fall more dirt. ‘And I suppose you’ll be wanting me to rebuild this for ye?’ He swallowed at Coke’s silence. ‘Did you pay my father the joist money?’
Coke thought of the forty guineas he had not paid because of the conspiracy this man’s father and his saintly friends had caught him in. He thought of the results of that: of the fireship; of Sarah giving birth in the Poultry Compter; all that he could have lost. But he let none of those thoughts show on his face. There was a reason that he usually won at cards. ‘I did indeed.’
Somewhere under the blackness, the man paled. He looked down. ‘I see. Well, the contracts burned, of course, so –’ he muttered, then shook his head and raised it. ‘Nevertheless. I will honour what my father promised you. It may take me a little time –’ He straightened up. ‘But if you will give me that, I will finish the ’ouse for you.’
Coke turned to Sarah. For a moment they just looked at each other. Then she shook her head.
It was what he hoped. Turning back, he said, ‘No, sir. We no longer want it.’
‘I see.’ The man looked dismayed. ‘Then you’ll be wanting your money back. Twenty for the signing, and forty for the joist? I could fight you in court, say you must have this ’ouse or nothing.’ He shrugged. ‘But that was my father’s way, not mine. I’ll pay you back if, again, you will but give me the time.’
Not so long before, and if he’d met the man upon a highway, Coke would have happily taken sixty guineas from him over a gun’s muzzle. But the man was not his father. And, like so many that week in London, he had lost enough. ‘I’ll tell you what, Master Tremlett. When you sell the house again, you may send me twenty guineas back. The other forty – perhaps I will call upon you for that also, someday, when your fortunes are quite re-established.’
‘Sir! Oh, sir!’ the man’s smudged face showed a little white with a smile. ‘That is most ’andsome. Most ’andsome. I can see you are a gentleman.’
‘On occasion.’ He nodded. ‘Good fortune from the rubble, Mr Tremlett.’
As they walked away, Sarah took his arm. ‘ “Most ’andsome”,’ she echoed, in perfect mimicry. ‘And most ’onest too, my ’usband.’
‘Almost,’ laughed Pitman, coming up. ‘Though I admit surprise, Captain. For a highwayman you have some scruples.’
‘Former highwayman. And a family man now. I must set my son an example.’ He reached to run a fingertip down the babe’s forehead, then sighed. ‘Though as a family man I worry how I will provide.’
‘Why, William,’ said Pitman, stopping, ‘we talked of this before. All those prisoners running free? They must be taken again. And I suspect that all their former rewards will be offered, or close to.’ He threw his arms wide. ‘Indeed, I believe we are entering the golden age of thief-taking.’
There was general laughter, while Coke pulled at his moustache. ‘I suppose something good should come out of all we have been through.’
‘Aye.’ The thief-taker smiled. ‘You know what is said: ‘ ’Tis an ill wind that blows nobody some good.’
‘And what book of the Bible is that from?’ asked Sarah.
‘Nay, ’tis only a common proverb,’ said Bettina, taking her husband’s arm. ‘Though you’d think it was scripture, Pitman is so given to quoting it.’
‘Just as long as it is not from Revelation,’ said Captain Coke. He looked beyond them all, to the devastated city. ‘For I think we’ve had quite enough apocalypse. Don’t you?’
Author’s Note
As with my last novel, Plague, about the great pestilence of 1665, so with this one: I only had vague schoolboy knowledge of the Great Fire of London. Research opened my eyes and imagination to the horrors of the cataclysm that swept the city from the early hours of 2nd September 1666 to its conclusion four days later.
London is my city. Son of a Londoner, if I was not myself born there I grew up there. I love it and the longer I am away from it, the more I feel the need to write about it – my last three novels have been set in the city. I know it well – perhaps better than most because after school my ‘gap year’, 1974–5, was spent there as a motorcycle messenger. Based in a Soho that was still very much ‘sin city’, I learned all sorts of interesting things. The naive schoolboy grew up fast. And learning meant getting to know my way about London really well. We were paid per ride, so the faster you could finish one…this led to a deep knowledge of alleys and cut-throughs, not all of them strictly legal. It also led to a lasting distrust of black-cab drivers who appeared hell-bent on eliminating messengers as a species.
Somehow I survived. And at the end of 1975, I went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama to train as an actor. First based just off Fleet Street, we then opened what would become the Barbican Arts Centre. So I studied in the very heart of what had been devoured by flames. Alas, I was too up myself as a budding thespian to pay much attention to all the history around me. And though not much remains of Restoration London – destroyed by that fire and by the second ‘Great Fire’ of 1940 when Hitler tried to burn the city down – I kick myself now that I didn’t spend more time absorbing what survived. But it is still there and gives me every excuse to return and research the city I love.
All my novels are very personal to me. My life inevitably creeps in. And I do have one ‘fire’ event, one of my earliest and clearest childhood memories: waking up in our house in Los Angeles, joining my mother at a back window. ‘What’s that?’ I asked, staring up at a huge column of smoke, coiling from the Hollywood Hill. ‘Fire,’ she replied. It was the start of the Bel Air Fire of 1961. We were evacuated, excitingly we spent a couple of nights at a motel, and the flames passed within four hundred yards of our house. Hardly Cheapside in 1666 but…
I also included two very personal stories – to do with birth. Sarah saves her baby’s life when she recognises that the skin over his face is a ‘caul’ – the amniotic sac that sometimes gets stuck over a newborn’s face – and rips it off to let him breathe. Just as my grandmother did to save my mother. And Sarah hearing her husband’s laugh in her son’s first cry? My mother always claimed she knew me straightway because she heard her father’s laugh in my initial wail.
Telling the story from multiple viewpoints – heroes and villains – allowed me to encompass a fairly wide chunk of the Fire’s extraordinary detail. And I was most fortunate to find, in a second-hand bookstore in Hampstead and just when I needed it, ‘the’ book. There always seems to be one that arrives at the right time, and though I’d read a couple of others, perfectly good in their own way, none came close to the massively detailed handling of the subject I discovered in The Great Fire of London by Walter George Bell, first published in 1923. Mr Bell not only gave a superb pre-Fire study of the city, but he also filled the pages with anecdotes and characters, gleaning the best of all the observers at the time, distilling Evelyn and Pepys but above all taking me street by street, church by church, hour by hour through the four days and the aftermath, in prose always clear and witty. And he made me smile often. (‘One mistrusts a versifier,’ he said of the dramatic poetry of one fellow on the destruction.)
One fact puzzled him as it does me: the death toll. The official death-roll, in the Bills of Mortality, was six. Six, of which the first and most reported was Thomas Farriner’s maid! This seems impossible given the speed and totality of destruction and is disputed by many. It seems more an error in addition, or a deliberate under-reporting. Evelyn certainly disagreed, testifying to the stench of so many bodies coming from the ruins.
One myth that people always bring up when I tell them what I’m writing is: ‘Oh, but the Fire was a good thing in one way because it got rid of the filth that the plague-carrying rats thrived in.’ Uh, no. Though black rats love dirt, it was not its absence that diminished them but the growing strength of their cousin, the brown rat. This relative newcomer breeds in a shorter amount of time. It outbred the black, killed them all, replaced t
hem…and the brown rat doesn’t host the plague flea that did the actual infecting. The Stranglers were quite right to celebrate this hitherto unsung hero in their album Rattus Norvegicus.
Ah, London! Whatever its tribulations in whatever period, it always rebounds, stronger than it was before. And I shall keep returning to it, in body as often as I may, and certainly in my novels.
C. C. Humphreys, July 2016
Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada
Acknowledgements
As ever, so many people have helped hugely in this endeavour. Since Fire is a loose sequel to Plague, nearly all those I already owe a debt to are still aboard with the publishers on both sides of the pond. In the UK, there’s the wonderful team headed by Selina Walker at Century; Georgina Hawtrey-Woore, who became my main editor for reasons explained below; and Kate Raybould, who saw the manuscript through to the conclusion. In Canada, at Doubleday, I am still well taken care of by my publisher Kristin Cochrane, by perspicacious Amy Black and by super publicist Max Arambulo.
I had one sad parting during the process: Nita Pronovost, the editor I so enjoyed working with on Plague, decamped to another publisher just after she gave me my first set of notes. I missed her, but benefited hugely from her final thoughts.
My family – wife Aletha and son Reith – were as always most supportive and forgiving of eccentricities. Yelling ‘Fire!’ rather than ‘Plague!’ in the middle of the night made for a nice change. And this while Aletha was busy opening our new venture: Café Talia on Salt Spring Island. Yes, on top of plying a quill I can now draw a fine latte. (Though I mainly do the dishes.)
Lastly, I’d especially like to thank the man to whom this book is dedicated, my agent, Simon Trewin of WME. Simon not only handles all the business side with aplomb, allowing me to write for a living, he is also a great brainstormer of ideas. Plague and Fire would not be here without his sudden flashes of inspiration. I have no doubt he will continue to keep me and mine fed for the foreseeable future – no mean trick in the turbulent world of publishing.
To these, and all my readers who give me such strong feedback, many thanks.
Further Reading
The good thing about writing books set a year apart is that the background reading is already done. So most of the texts I read for Plague were still useful for Fire. The first three below, especially the wonderful one by Bell, made the difference.
ON THE FIRE:
Bell, Walter George, The Great Fire of London (London: Folio Society, 2003)
Hanrahan, David. C, Colonel Blood (Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd, 2003)
Tinniswood, Adrian, By Permission of Heaven (London: Pimlico; new edition, 2004)
ON LONDON:
Ackroyd, Peter, London: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000)
Hyde, Ralph (ed.), The A to Z of Restoration London (London: London Topographical Society, 1992)
Picard, Liza, Restoration London: Everyday Life in London 1660–1670 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003)
Porter, Stephen, Pepys’s London: Everyday Life in London 1650–1703 (Gloucestershire: Amberley Publishing, 2011)
ON THE TIME PERIOD:
Capp, B.S., The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century EnglishMillenarianism (London: Faber & Faber, 1972)
Friedman, Jerome, Blasphemy, Immorality and Anarchy: The Ranters and the English Revolution (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1987)
Gyford, Phil (ed.), The Diary of Samuel Pepys, www.pepysdiary.com (advertised on the gyford website)
Hill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1972)
Miller, John, The English Civil Wars: Roundheads, Cavaliers and the Execution of a King (London: Constable & Robinson, 2009)
Palmer, Tony, Charles II: Portrait of an Age (West Sussex: Littlehampton Book Services, 1979)
Pennington, Donald and Keith Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-century History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978)
Purkiss, Diane, The English Civil War: A People’s History (London: HarperPress, 2006)
ON THE PLAGUE:
Defoe, Daniel, A Journal of the Plague Year, with notes by Louis Landa and introduction by David Roberts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)
Porter, Stephen, The Great Plague (Gloucestershire: Amberley Publishing, 2009)
ON THE THEATRE:
Etherege, George, The Man of Mode, translated by John Barnard (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2007)
Fisk, Deborah Payne (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Speaight, George, Punch and Judy: A History (West Sussex: Littlehampton Book Services, 1970)
THE BIBLE:
Daniel and The Revelation of St John the Divine. King James Bible. (Nashville: Holman Bible, 1973)
About the Author
CHRIS (C.C.) HUMPHREYS was born in Toronto and grew up in the United Kingdom. He has acted all over the world and appeared on stages ranging from London’s West End to Hollywood’s Twentieth Century Fox.
Humphreys began his writing career as a playwright. His first play, A Cage Without Bars, won the inaugural 24-Hour Playwriting Competition in Vancouver, and was then produced at Performance Works Vancouver, and later at the London fringe theatre, The Finborough. His second, Glimpses of the Moon, was commissioned and then produced by Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary. Humphreys recently adapted his novel Shakespeare’s Rebel for the stage and it was produced at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach Festival in 2015.
The author of ten novels of historical fiction, Humphreys’ books have garnered bestseller status and critical acclaim across North America. The French Executioner was runner up for the CWA Steel Dagger for Thrillers in 2002 and has been optioned for the screen. Humphreys’ books featuring the character Jack Absolute—the James Bond of the 1770s—are entitled Jack Absolute, The Blooding of Jack Absolute and Absolute Honour, the last of which was shortlisted for the 2007 Evergreen Award by the Ontario Library Association. His novel, Vlad, The Last Confession about the real Dracula was an international bestseller. As well as his adult fiction, Humphreys is also the author of several works for young adults: the trilogy of The Runestone Saga, and The Hunt of the Unicorn. In Fall 2016, The Hunt of the Dragon will be published. His books have been translated into more than thirteen languages.
His novel Plague was released by Doubleday Canada in 2014.
Humphreys lives on Salt Spring Island, B.C., with his wife and young son. You can connect with him at www.cchumphreys.com.
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