London - Edward Rutherfurd [419]
“You are new here?” he enquired, as they walked.
“I arrived yesterday. To live with my uncle. I am a watchmaker,” the boy volunteered.
“I see. What’s your name?”
“Eugene, sir. Eugene de la Penissière.”
“De la what?” O Be Joyful shook his head. The French name was too much for him. “I’ll never remember that,” he confessed.
“How should I be called, in English, then?” Eugene asked.
“Well,” O Be Joyful considered. The only English word that seemed anything like it was ordinary enough. “I think,” he said, “you’d do better with Penny.”
“Eugene Penny?” The young fellow considered doubtfully. Then his face brightened. “You saved my life, sir. You are a very brave man. If you say I should be called Penny. Alors,” he shrugged and smiled. “Penny. And how may I find you, sir, to give you my proper thanks in future?”
“No need. My home’s gone anyway. But my name is O Be Joyful Carpenter. I’m a woodcarver.”
At the Savoy, the two men parted.
“We shall meet again,” Eugene promised him. But just before turning away he said: “Those boys who wanted to kill me. They were not completely foolish. Non. For this fire – it was surely the work of Catholics.”
And still the fire raged. St Paul’s was gone, a huge, blackened ruin; the Guildhall, Blackfriars, Ludgate. By late Tuesday and Wednesday it even spread outside the walls, along Holborn and Fleet Street. St Bride’s was gone. Only in the open greens around the Temple did the flames meet a firebreak they could not pass. In the east, a huge break created by the Duke of York saved the Tower of London. With this and a small number of other exceptions, the old medieval city within the walls was entirely lost.
But to two people the plague and the fire brought a more inward crisis. To Doctor Meredith the plague had brought a profound sense of failure. His only role, he freely admitted, had been to comfort the dying. His medicine was useless and he knew it. The quest for medical knowledge would go on but until the time when doctors actually knew something, “I might as well try to save their souls,” he concluded. As he had watched St Paul’s burn from Ludgate he had decided. “I shall take holy orders and become a clergyman, as I first intended.” There was nothing to stop him continuing any medical studies at the same time. There would still, thank God, be the Royal Society.
Only for O Be Joyful Carpenter did the fire bring despair. For after parting from Eugene, he had not returned to his family, but walked about watching the fire; and as he did so, the boy’s words had come back to mock him. “A brave man” indeed. It was no use, he told himself, to pretend that Martha’s death had been inevitable. “I could have brought her down and saved her. Yet by my fear and cowardice I let her burn.” Was he the son of Gideon, the spiritual heir of Martha? No. He was unworthy.
And what of their vision of the shining city? What had become of that now? As the fire made its way along Fleet Street, like some powerful chariot of destruction, its crackles seemed like the grinding of huge wheels upon the road, and their message was terrible yet plain: “All gone. All destroyed. All gone.”
Medical opinion is still divided on why, after the Great Fire, the plague scarcely returned to London again. The causes of the fire similarly remained in dispute. Most Londoners believed it was the Catholics. The view of the Parliamentary Committee called to report on the Great Fire soon afterwards was more measured. The blame, it concluded with great firmness, could not be placed upon any group of men, either foreigners or even Catholics. London’s fire, it stated plainly, was an Act of God. It was God’s Fire.
ST PAUL’S
1675
The sun was catching the southern face of the strange little building on the hill. Eugene Penny waited patiently for the two men to finish their conversation. The building cast a long shadow down the green and silent slope. Far below, the Queen’s House gleamed white by the waterside at Greenwich. He wondered whether Meredith would be up there at night, gazing through the great tube at