Edward Marston - The Nine Giants

Prompt action slowly won the battle. Having subdued the worst of the flames inside the house, Nicholas was able to kick down the charred remains of the door and get into the street. With a clearer view of the danger, he was able to swish the now steaming tapestry against the front of the building. When a few altruists threw buckets and barrels of water at the house, he was grateful for the soaking that he himself got. It enabled him to withstand the fierce heat and get ever closer to its centre. The tapestry eventually secured victory. Torn beyond belief and blackened beyond recognition, it put out the seat of the fire. Nicholas dropped it wearily to the ground and stamped on it with bare feet to stop it smouldering.

Relief spread as rapidly as the fire itself and a ragged cheer went up. People who had been plucked from their beds by the threat of death now saw some cause for celebration. Those terrified neighbours further along the street who had evacuated their homes completely now began to take their furniture and belongings back inside. New friendships grew out of common adversity. Ear-splitting fear was now replaced by gregarious murmur. The crowd began to disperse until the next emergency.

Anne Hendrik stood panting beside her lodger and tried to regain her breath. She was suffering from the effects of inhaling the smoke, but Nicholas Bracewell was in a far worse state. His breeches were scorched, his feet burnt and his chest a mass of black streaks. Sparks had even had the temerity to singe his beard. His umbered face was running with sweat and crumpled by fatigue but he found the strength to slip an arm around her waist. She leant against him for support and looked up at the ravaged frontage of her house.

‘Thank you!’ she gasped.

‘I could not let my lodging go up in smoke.’

‘You saved our lives, Nick.’

‘God was at our side.’

‘How could the fire have started?’ she said between bouts of coughing. ‘Some careless passer-by?’

‘This was no accident, Anne. I see design at work.’

‘To what end?’

‘Someone here was meant to sleep for ever.’

Anne blanched. ‘An attempt on our lives? Why, sir? Who would want to kill us?’

‘We may not have been the targets,’ said Nicholas as he thought it through. ‘It is possible that the fire was lit for someone else — Hans Kippel.’

It was the first night since her marriage that Matilda Stanford had spent entirely alone. With her husband away in Windsor, she had the bed and bedchamber exclusively to herself and she revelled in the new freedom. At the same time, however, she felt even more isolated. The news about Michael Delahaye had been horrific and she was genuinely distressed but it did not touch her heart directly. She had never known the dashing soldier and could not share the desperate loss felt by others. Suffused with real sympathy, she was also distanced from her husband and her stepson as they mourned the death of a loved one and became embroiled in sorrowful duties. Michael had been very much inside the charmed circle of the family. For all her readiness to join in, Matilda remained firmly on the outside.

What kept her awake was not the thought of a dead body pulled from the clutches of the Thames. It was something quite remote from that and it brought its due measure of guilt and recrimination. Indeed, so troubled did she feel that she got up in the middle of the night and went down to the little chapel to pray for guidance and to see if divine intercession could direct her mind to more seemly matters. Even on her knees, she remained unable to sustain more than a passing sigh for the fate of Michael Delahaye. It was another man who occupied her thoughts, not a rotting corpse in a charnel house but a person of almost superhuman vitality, a master of his art, a romantic figure, an imp of magic, a symbol of hope.

Lawrence Firethorn even infiltrated her prayers. Instead of asking for a blessing on a departed soul, she begged for the opportunity to meet her self-appointed lover. Happiness no longer lay beside a wheezing mercer in a four-poster bed. True joy resided at the Queen’s Head in the formidable person of an actor-manager. In thinking about him at all, she was repudiating the vows taken during holy matrimony. In speculating about the way that their love might be consummated, she was committing a heinous sin. Doing both of these things while kneeling on a hassock before her Maker was nothing short of vile blasphemy but her Christian conscience did no more than bring a blush of shame to her cheeks. Matilda Stanford made a decision that could have dire consequences for her and for her whole marriage.

She would accept the invitation to the play.

First light found Nicholas Bracewell out in the street to assess the damage to the house and to begin running repairs. Word was sent to Nathan Curtis, master carpenter with Westfield’s Men, who lived not far away in St Olave’s Street, and he hastened across with tools and materials. The front of the house would need to be partially rebuilt and completely replastered but the two men patched it up between them and gave its occupants a much-needed feeling of security and reassurance. Curtis was rewarded with a hearty breakfast and a surge of gratitude but he would accept none of the money that Anne Hendrik offered. As a friend and colleague of the book holder, he was only too glad to be able to repay some of the kindness and consideration that Nicholas Bracewell had always shown him. He shambled off home with the warm feeling that he had done his good deed for the day.

Hans Kippel had been kept ignorant of his role as the intended victim of the arson. Shocked by the grisly experience on the Bridge, he had withdrawn into himself again and could not explain the rashness of his conduct. In the wake of the fire, he was even more alarmed and they did not add to his afflictions by subjecting him to any interrogation. Instead, Nicholas Bracewell set out for the Bridge and walked to the little house which had provoked such an intense reaction from the boy.

There was no answer when he knocked on the door but he felt that someone was at home and he persisted with his banging. In the shop next door, an apprentice was letting down the board as a counter and laying out a display of haberdashery for the early customers. Nicholas turned to the lad for information.

‘Who lives in this house?’

‘I do not know, sir.’

‘But they are near neighbours of yours.’

‘They moved in but recently.’

‘Tenants, then? A family?’

‘Two men are all that I have seen.’

‘Can you describe them, lad?’

‘Oh, sir,’ said the boy. ‘I have no time for idle wonder. My master would beat me if I did not attend to the shop out here. It is so busy on the Bridge that I see hundreds of faces by the hour. I cannot pick out two of them just to please a stranger.’

‘Is there nothing you can tell me?’ said Nicholas.

The boy broke off to serve his first customer of the day, explaining that a much greater range of wares lay inside the shop. When the woman had made her purchase and moved on with her husband, the apprentice turned back to Nicholas and gave a gesture of helplessness.

‘I can offer nought but this, sir.’

‘Well?’

‘One of them wears a patch over his eye.’

‘That is small but useful intelligence.’

‘And all that I can furnish.’

‘Save this,’ said Nicholas. ‘Who owns the house?’

‘That I do know, sir.’

‘His name?’

‘Sir Lucas Pugsley.’

The Lord Mayor of London awoke to another day of self-congratulation. After breakfast with his family, he spent time with the Common Clerk who handled all secretarial matters for him, then he devoted an hour to the Recorder. The City Marshal was next, a dignified man of military bearing, whose skill as a horseman — so vital to someone whose job was to ride ahead of the Lord Mayor during all processions to clear the way — had been learnt in a dozen foreign campaigns. Among other things, the Marshal headed the Watch and Ward of the city, rounding up rogues and vagabonds as well as making sure that lepers were ejected outside the walls. Sir Lucas Pugsley loved to feed off the respect and homage of a man who wore such a resplendent uniform and plumed helmet. It increased the fishmonger’s feeling of real power.