Restoration

I remained where I was for several minutes, with my thoughts in a most tangled condition. Then I saw all at once what I had to do: I had to reach Margaret. I went down into the courtyard and asked for my horse. While waiting for her to be brought to me, a gust of wind blew off my hat and sent it spinning away into a flower bed. I retrieved it and held it in my hand. Then I mounted Danseuse and rode out of the gates and turned eastwards in the direction of the moneylender's house, which, as far as I had been able to determine from my sighting of the flames, lay in the very heart of the fire.

The wind was indeed fierce and blew into my face and ruffled Danseuse's mane. As we got near to the City, I saw countless pieces of charred matter, lighter than air, being carried on the wind and falling softly like snow all around me. And then I could smell the burning and with every breath seemed to breathe the smell more deeply into me, so that it made me choke and gag and I spat on the cobblestones.

The streets, now, were very packed with people, some moving with me into the stench and the smoke, carrying ladders or hauling handcarts, some in their nightgowns, just standing about in the street and staring, others giving way to fear and calling on God and the King to put out the flames.

I turned northwards up St Anne's Alley. I gauged that westward of London Bridge everything along the river was burning, so that to get to the money-lender's house I would have to skirt right round the fire. But the smoke now began to creep down into the streets like a fog and having turned north, then east, then north again and then east again I found myself in a street I did not recognise and with all sense of direction gone from me.

'Where am I? What street is this?' I asked about me, but no one seemed to hear me or pay me any attention, so all I could do was to press on, turning north, then east, then north again, trying to judge from the smell of the fire whether I was moving round it or still towards it and searching every narrow street for some name or landmark that would tell me where I was.

I was about to make another northward turn when I heard straight ahead of me a great commotion of people and then I saw through the smoke that a single tongue of flame had swept down upon the roof of one of the houses causing a sudden mighty panic with people rushing from doorways into the street and looking up at the flame that was beginning to spread out along the eaves, then running back inside to try to save their children and their possessions before the fire came to them. For they had not expected it so soon. The great front of fire was still many streets away. But some burning thing -a sheet of music, a plumed hat, or I know not what – had come out of the sky and fallen on this one house, and all around me I imagined the fire travelling thus, carried on the wind, on pieces of silk, on love letters, on lace collars, swirling and leaping and floating down at random and immediately catching hold.

The calamity come upon this street was such that I did not feel able to turn my back upon the people's plight. Had I been close to the money-lender's house, I might have done so, but I was still far, far from it and I now understood that my effort to reach Margaret was a futile thing. I had begun it too late. By now, my daughter would either have been saved or have perished in her wooden crib. I could not alter what had already happened. So I decided to dismount. I tied Danseuse to a post and took off my coat and went to give what help I could towards the saving of worldly goods and piling them onto carts and barrows, going into the rooms of strangers and taking up whatever I could carry: chairs and candlesticks and pictures and cushions and piles of bedding and chamber pots and ink-stands and toys.

I was aware, for the first time, of the approaching heat of the fire and stood still for a moment in the street, wiping my brow and watching the roof of the house that was beginning to catch alight. My eye moved downwards, to try to see how and where and how fast the flames traveled, and it was then that I saw, above the door, a sign painted on iron and rattling backwards and forth in the wind: Arthur Goffe Esquire. Milliner and Haberdasher. But this was not all that I noticed. I saw, too, that the door of this house was closed and that it was the only one in the street from which people were not coming and going, hauling clothes and furniture.

And so I threw down whatever I had been holding (and I do not know what it was or whether I broke it when I hurled it away) and ran towards the haberdasher's and beat upon the door and shouted, but heard no answering shout. One other man, then, left the saving of his own goods and saw with me what was happening, that in the very house where the fire had come in people were still sleeping. From his piled-up cart he fetched an axe and gave some blows to the door so mighty that it fell off its hinges. We stepped over it and went in, but found ourselves at once surrounded by pitch smoky blackness, so that, before we had reached the stairs, a foul choking and sickness, caused to us by the smoke, forced us to turn round and come out again into the street.

'Who is in there?' I asked the man, who was spitting into the gutter, 'how many people?'

'Only her, Sir.'

'Who?'

'Goffe's wife.'

'Just her?'

'Yes. The haberdasher's gone to France to buy some special Frenchy thread, or some poxy thing.'

'We cannot let her die. We must go in again.'

'We can't get to her through that smoke. We shall die ourselves.'

'No. We must try again. If someone could bring cloths soaked in water to put round our faces…'

'No, Sir. We cannot do it.'

'Bring cloths! Someone find water and a cloth!'

'You'll die, Sir. You'll veritably perish.'

'And let us call and shout to her.'

'Will do no good. Stone deaf she is.'

'Deaf?'

'Stone. As my prick to a Sunday sermon.'

So I saw her in my mind, then, lying in her silence, lying neat and straight in her bed as my mother had lain and downstairs in the workroom all the boxes of buttons and cards of lace and drawerfuls of braid waiting to burn…

'Please!' I shouted. 'Someone fetch me a wet rag or napkin!'

I do not know who heeded my shout. But, in the next minute, a soaked cloth was put into my hands and without hesitating at all, I tied it round my face and went back into the house at a run and hurled myself at the stairs and then a muffled voice behind me said: 'All right, Sir. I'm with you. Try not to breathe.'

We groped our way up the staircase. On the landing, a flickering light from the flames now beginning to touch the window revealed us to an open door and lying wedged between it and its frame with her arms outstretched was the body of the haberdasher's wife. We both saw it at the same moment. Without wasting precious breath upon speech, we crawled to it and each took hold of one of the woman's hands and tugged her towards the stairs. Then, my large companion nodded to me to let go the hand that I held, and he stood up and lifted up the haberdasher's wife and put her over his shoulder like a sack and I passed in front of him and guided him down the stairs and out into the street and he carried her thirty paces away from the burning house before he laid her down.

Coughing and retching so violently that a gobful of chicken returned itself from my stomach to this London street, I knelt down by the woman and turned her over on her side until she began to splutter and to draw air into her lungs.

'Alive, Sir, is she?' asked the man.

I nodded. Then I looked down at the face of Mrs Goffe, wife of the milliner and haberdasher, and I saw that the features of it were very pinched and thin with the mouth turned downwards and mean and that she did not resemble in any way either my mother or the woman in Finn's portrait. But it did not matter, for those were the faces that had driven me on.

Two women came out to us. They wrapped Mrs Goffe in a blanket and laid her on a cart piled up with sacks and bedding.

One of them brought water in a bowl and held a ladleful of it to my lips and I drank. The haberdasher's wife did not speak or even cry out as the flames engulfed her house; she only stared and began to chew upon the lace ribbons at her throat. I wondered if this terrible night would send her mad, so that her life had been saved only to be squandered away in a Bedlam.