Restoration

A great weariness now began to come upon me and I knew that I could not continue with my attempted circumnavigation of the fire. I would return to Cheapside and then begin it again the following day. I put on my coat and untied Danseuse from her post, where she was prancing and sweating with fear, and was about to mount and join the push of carts and people going westwards when one of the women came to me and thanked me for helping them and asked me for my name, 'So that tomorrow I can include it in my list of them I pray for, Sir.'

'Well,' I said, 'my name is Merivel. I am a physician. If Mrs Goffe does not quickly get well, bring her to me.' Then I handed the woman one of the little calling cards with R. Merivel. Physician. Chirurgeon. engraved upon it that I keep in a pouch on Danseuse's saddle. She took it and put it into the pocket of her apron. 'I cannot read, Sir,' she said, 'but I will give the card to Mrs Goffe and she will remember you.'

Chapter Twenty-Five. Margaret Returned to My Mind

Neither Frances Elizabeth nor Finn believed that the fire would travel as far as Cheapside. Between it and the main body of the flames a gap had been made, thirty or forty feet wide, by the hasty pulling down of houses, as instructed by the King, and it was thus that almost everyone living west of this gap imagined themselves to be safe.

On the morning of Monday, I went and looked at the gap. And then I looked up into the air above the fire and saw the blazing debris that was still being hurled upwards and whipped onwards by the wind and I knew then that the flames would cross the gap and come to us.

I returned to the house and told Finn to start packing up his canvases and Frances Elizabeth to bring down her escritoire and beg some room for these things and anything else they wished to save on a neighbour's cart. But they paid me no heed.

'Why has the gap been made if it is not going to protect us?' Finn asked stupidly. I gave him no answer. I went into the parlour, where Frances Elizabeth was calmly stoking her coals as she did every morning, and took up all my surgical instruments and cleaned them and laid them neatly in their case. Into a large box I put all the powders and remedies and lint and bandages that I kept in the house. I took them to Danseuse's stable and strapped them onto her back. Then I returned and dragged from under my bed the sack containing my oboe, my letters from the King and other remains of my 'burning coals.' Into this sack I put my new clothes and wig – all now blackened with smoke and stained with sweat – and fastened this also to my horse's saddle.

And then I came to Finn and Frances Elizabeth and said: 'I am going now to find Margaret, so I shall say goodbye to you.'

They both stared at me. 'Are you telling us,' said Finn, 'that you are not coming back?'

'Yes, Finn, I am,' I replied, 'for there will be no house to come back to.'

Moments after I had uttered these words the first sliver of flame fell upon the first house in Cheapside and so the word was carried from house to house, ' Cheapside is lost! Save what you can and then go. Go west and go fast, for the speed of the fire is very great.'

So then the panic in our house had no equal anywhere in London, Finn and Frances Elizabeth suddenly intent upon saving every last thing in every room. And though I wished to walk away from them, I could not do it, so I fetched my horse and allowed her to be loaded up like a mule with canvases and brushes and cooking pots and sacks of provisions and dresses and I know not what else. Finn would have put his truckle bed onto her if I had not stopped him and Frances Elizabeth her escritoire, because no cart could be found to take them, and even as the fire came closer and closer the two of them held onto these things and refused to be parted from them and when we set off at last, with Danseuse staggering under her heavy load, they attempted to lift them up and carry them and for a long time I heard them behind me, puffing and groaning and saying to each other, 'We can do it, we can do it.'

We were in a great herd of people and had to keep moving on or have them fall on us and trample us, but for a brief moment I did pause and look back and it was then that I saw that the fire had gone from the top of our house to the bottom and all that still stood was the front door in its frame with the three plaques upon it. The sight of this affected me more than I had anticipated. I had thought myself to be more or less indifferent to the place, but I was not. And I remembered on the same instant that one precious possession of mine had been forgotten and was now burnt to ashes with the house and that was Pearce's copy of De Generatione Animalium, the only remnant of him that I had.

When we came to Lincoln 's Inn Fields, we stopped and sat down there on the dry grass, as did everyone else going out of Cheapside and its lanes and alleys. And by late afternoon a vast multitude of people had come there and for every one of them crying and lamenting there were four or five beginning to laugh and gossip and sing songs and share food around, as if they were on a picnic outing with no cares in the world. From Frances Elizabeth's kitchen seven jars of plums had been saved and some bottles of ginger wine and a white cheese in a bag of muslin, so we supped on these and on other provisions given to us in exchange for them and began to make instantaneous friendships with everyone around us.

The talking and the eating went on far into the night, when the fire once again lit up the whole sky and it was all, in the strangest of ways, an enjoyable thing. Near two or three in the morning, I heard Finn begin to tell everybody round that he was a portrait painter and to offer to paint portraits then and there for twenty-five shillings, notwithstanding the fact that not one person there had any wall on which to hang them. The knowledge that, even in adversity, his commercial heart could now beat so strongly made me smile and I think it was with this smile still upon my face that I fell asleep.

I parted from him and Frances Elizabeth the following morning. Neither the escritoire nor the truckle bed had got as far as Lincoln's Inn Fields, so I was now forced to set down on the grass beside them all the things they had loaded onto Danseuse, and the sight of them surrounded by half-finished portraits and copper saucepans and pairs of shoes would have been somewhat sad had it not been for their great cheerfulness. I had anticipated that the loss of the house in Cheapside would put them into despair, but it did not. For what they seemed to have discovered was that it had not only housed them and their little fledgling businesses; it had also harboured their mutual liking and affection. And I was certain, as I left them, that when I found them again it would be in some place together and I imagined them in a low room smelling of oils, lying side by side in bed and doing their sums.

It took me all of the day to skirt round the fire, going as far north as I could to avoid the smoke, but by evening I had reached the Tower and could see from there that the cluster of tall houses among which was the money- lender's house still stood and had not been touched by the fire, so I whispered into the hot air a prayer of gratitude.

When I arrived at the house, it was the money-lender who greeted me and I went with him into his Accounting Room and he showed me some new scales and weights of which he was very proud, 'precision', he said, 'being my great passion, for everything in the world can be weighed and measured in some form, can it not?'

I was about to open my mouth to say that I did not believe that it could be when his wife came into the room carrying Margaret, who was wide awake and not bound all in swaddling as she had been when I had seen her last, but dressed in a pretty bonnet and wrapped in a shawl.

The wet-nurse began to talk about the fire and how she and her husband and all the children had knelt down in a long line and prayed that the direction of the wind would not change. As she recounted this to me, she put Margaret into my arms. This was the first time that I had held her or indeed held any baby at all and I did not know if I should lay her in the crook of my arm or put her little face over my shoulder, or what. So I sat down on the hard chair where the clients of the money-lender sat and laid Margaret on my lap and looked down at her. She had grown very much and her face was as round as the moon. Her eyes, I now realised, were very large and clear and she looked up at me gravely for a while, then began to kick her legs inside the shawl and to blow little frothy bubbles out of her mouth.