Rose Tremain - Restoration

"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.

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."

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.