The Ashes of London Read Online Free Page A

Baynard’s Castle, and that’s gone.’
    ‘I know,’ Williamson said in his flat, hard voice. ‘I already have it in hand. I have in mind some premises in the Savoy for him, if all goes well. If God wills it, the next
Gazette
will be Monday’s. We shall lose an issue but at least that means we shall not be able to publish the City’s Bill of Mortality this week. People will understand that – there’s more important work to do than waste time compiling lists of figures. Besides, I’m told that the death count has been remarkably low. God be thanked.’
    I understood Williamson perfectly, or rather I understood what he did not say. There might well have been dozens of deaths, perhaps hundreds, in the areas where the unrecorded poor huddled together near the river, near the warehouses of oil and pitch that burned as hot as hellfire. The Fire had broken out there early on Sunday morning, when half of them would have been in a drunken stupor. Others had died, or would die, from the delayed effects of the Fire – because they were already ill, or old, or very young, and the distress of fleeing from their homes would destroy them.
    But it would not serve the King and government to worsen the sense of catastrophe unnecessarily. The
London Gazette
was usually published twice a week. The missing issue would cloak the absence of a Bill of Mortality for the week of the Fire. In the circumstances, its absence would be unremarkable. The Letter Office – another of Williamson’s responsibilities – had also been destroyed, so even if the
Gazette
could have been printed, it could not have been distributed through the country.
    ‘A terrible accident,’ Williamson said. ‘That’s what you say if you hear anyone talking about it. We must make sure nothing in the
Gazette
or its correspondence suggests otherwise.’ He brought his head close to mine. ‘You’re sharp enough, Marwood, I give you that. But if you keep me waiting again, I’ll make sure you and your father go back to your dunghill.’
    As if to lend emphasis to his words, a distant explosion shook the window in its frame.
    ‘Go back to work,’ he said.

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    C AT DREW THE grey cloak over her head. The fine wool smelled of the fire, but also something unpleasantly musky and masculine. The face of the thin young man whose cloak she had stolen was vivid in her mind, his skin almost orange in the light of the flames.
    She was still breathing hard from running through the streets, from pushing her way through the crowds. She had looked back often as she fled, and sometimes she was sure she glimpsed his face. But, thanks be to God, he wasn’t there any more.
    She crouched and tapped on the window shutter.
    Three taps. Then a pause. Three more taps.
    Light flickered in the crack behind the shutter. The window was no more than eighteen inches wide, and not much taller. The sill was barely six inches above the cobbles. The ground level had crept higher and higher over the centuries.
    Something flickered in the crack of light. Three answering taps. Then a pause. Three more taps.
    She moved deeper into the alley. It wasn’t dark – even here, beyond the walls. The Doomsday glow filled the narrow space with a murky orange fog that caught at the back of her throat and made her want to retch.
    No one had taken refuge here yet. No one human. The mouth of the alley was concealed by an encroaching extension from the shop on the other side of it. Unless you knew it was there, you wouldn’t see it.
    But the rats had known where the alley was. They were fleeing the burning city in their hundreds of thousands. She felt movement around her feet and heard a distant squealing.
    The ground was paved with uneven flags, which were covered with cinders, scraps of paper and charred fragments of wood and cloth that crunched like black gravel beneath her shoes.
    At the end of the alley was a pointed archway recessed in the wall, the stone frame for an oak door studded with