Prue Phillipson - Hordens of Horden Hall (30 page)

Eunice could find no words to answer her. She was too engrossed in asking questions of herself. Was I foolish to hide round those bales of straw when it would have been so natural to greet my cousin and inquire after his health? Did I never suppose I would be mourned? Was he really heart-broken? So wretched that his mother took him home for country air, a change of scene, to forget all about me, and then he nearly died – which it seems is all my fault?

Celia got to her feet and shook her by the shoulders. “Have I not told you from the beginning that he was smitten by you? And then you go and disappear so he thinks you dead, he and all of us? Look what you’ve put us through by your obstinacy.”

Eunice was only too ready to think the worst of herself. Everything in her time with her father had humbled her but she felt a flame of anger rising up now.

“Yes, Grandmamma, you told me he was smitten as you put it but what evidence did I ever have? You said he would seek me out when he left university. He never did. Some girls get love letters. I didn’t. I was hardly at the fringe of his life whatever you say. So why would I thrust myself forward?” She checked herself. She could see the astonishment in her grandmother’s face at this outburst. “Forgive me, Grandmamma. I am sorry that I let you think me dead but when I ran from Father’s house you were living in the country and I didn’t know where. I had to make a living somehow –”

Celia shook her head. Tears were welling up again. “We should have let you know. Oh it has all been a sad tangle and now if ever you and your cousin meet again your grandfather and I have no dowry to give you so we might as well be burnt in our beds and go to heaven like the old martyrs for there’s nothing left on earth for us now.”

Eunice rose with a smile. “There is, Grandmamma. I am young and strong and can look after you. You have a lovely house here and I am sure the fire will burn out only the small, huddled streets. I will take the tray down to the kitchen to save Betty’s legs.” She paused as she took it up. “Just tell me, you said Daniel was very ill. Is he well now? Have you heard lately from Cousin Arabella? Is he returning to his ship soon?”

“Oh he is well enough I believe but there is no action afoot at present. And she says she will never let him go again. But young men are foolish.
He
is – if he has let you think he doesn’t care for you. You are a good girl I am sure but my sad misguided son was a harsh taskmaster to you. Well, take the tray and I will look in on your poor grandfather till supper time. We have a nurse that the physician sent but she sleeps in the daytime unless I need her. She is a big fat silent woman who’s drinking her way through our beer cellar, but she’s strong. She can lift and turn your grandfather which I can’t. Tell Suzy the chambermaid to make up a bed for you where you please. There are more rooms than we will ever need for I can’t see us ever having visitors again.”

Eunice carried the tray downstairs, every step reminding her of the last time she was in this house and Daniel had followed her down and pleaded with her father for her in the hallway.

Suzy was a pleasant-mannered girl whom she remembered from her last visit.

“I will sleep in the little dressing-room,” she told her, “next to the bedchamber the French young ladies had. Do you remember? Is there still a bed in there?”

“Oh yes, but Mistress will want you to have the grand bedroom I’m sure, now you’ve come back.”

“She said I could choose and I’m not used to grand bedrooms. The little one will be much grander than I have had lately. I’ll help you make the bed up.”

The thought of clean linen sheets and down pillows after the scratchy sacking, the thin mattress, the scampering mice and the draughts of her stable loft, was very alluring. Ah, the temptations of ease and pleasing the flesh, her father would have said. I am afraid Patience Porter was in every way a nobler character than I, she reflected, as she and Suzy prepared the bed. When Suzy came up later with a brass jug of warm water and asked what else she would like she felt she had also left behind the stoical Eunice Horden of her youth.

CHAPTER 21

Eunice stood gazing out of her window trying to decide what time it was. There was a white disk in the dark sky but she could hear the servants getting up. With a sick fear in her stomach she realised that it was actually another fine September morning. The lurid purplish darkness was the pall of smoke that had turned the newly risen sun into a moon. As she looked flakes of burnt paper and cloth floated by on the wind. Down below, the terrace was blackened with ash. So it seemed that no efforts had managed to stop the fire in the night and it must be much closer.

Would she find that the poor little house in which she had lived most of her life had been engulfed? Were they secure here or should they be thinking of moving to safety?

She dressed quickly in her second dress which was as threadbare as the one she had worn yesterday but cleaner.

Running down to the kitchen she found Betty building a fire in the hearth and the man Robert bringing in a bucket of coals so that the oven could be heated for the breakfasts.

“Eh, you’re early, Missy. Master never wants his breakfast before eight and Mistress lies abed till then or later.”

“I will go out and find what the news is about the fire. I’ll be back soon.”

“Take care then. The street’s been full of carts and pack-horses and people with great burdens all night. The noise came up to the front attics and I’ve scarce had a wink of sleep.” He reluctantly opened the back door for her and she scuttled past the coach house and out to the street.

He had not exaggerated. The Strand was like a river clogged with the debris of a flood. To pass in the opposite direction she must squeeze by the walls and hedges and from time to time voices shouted at her.

“You’re going the wrong way, girl.”

“The fire’s coming.”

“Ay, it’s taken half Cheapside already.”

Panic gripped her. Their own little alley between Milk Street and St Lawrence Lane was just off Cheapside to the north. Obstinacy made her push on. If it was creeping from the south-east the fire might not have reached there yet.

When she came in sight of St Paul’s the great bulk of the cathedral was silhouetted against a wall of flame which seemed about to swallow it up.

“How close is it to the other side?” she asked a verger who was trundling a wheel barrow of silver plate out of the west door. She saw he was only one amongst a mass of other staff, from sextons to canons who were carrying out goods to a row of covered carts collected in the precincts.

“Near enough.”

She ran on and came out into Wood Street. That was still untouched but the noise of the fire was now so loud that she desperately wanted to turn tail. Only a longing to see the place before it perished, and perhaps retrieve her father’s Bible as the only memento of him she would ever have, kept her moving fearfully forward.

As she turned into the top of Milk Street she saw a horse and cart come out of their alley. Tom was sitting on the horse and his father and mother were walking by the cart with hands up to the pile of furniture and goods to steady it as the wheels lurched on the cobbles.

Tom had seen her.

“It’s Eunice! It is! Look.”

The scene was so like the last time she had seen them that the terrible day of her father’s death came rushing back.

As she came up to the Fletcher family they all shouted at once.

“We thought you were dead.”

“Where are you going?”

“Don’t go back there!”

She only answered, “Is my house still there?”

“Yes but the fire has reached St Lawrence. It’s leaping houses. It’s not safe.”

She shook her head and darted into the alley. Yes, there were flames in the roofs at the far end. The air was full of flying debris some of it still alight. The sound was like a howling tempest of wind but she could see their tiny house, the sack still hanging in the window. Would the door be nailed up? The heat was now fearsome.

No, the door was ajar. She was inside and dodging round the table which inexplicably was up close to the door. Looking neither to right nor left she scampered up the stairs and turning into her father’s bedroom snatched up the Bible. She kept her eyes from the bed in case his skeleton was lying there. There was a jug with the dried remains of vinegar in it. She took nothing but the Bible and almost fell down the stairs in her haste.

Glancing to her left as she emerged from the alley she saw a house in the tiny passage by which she had escaped the drunken revellers totter in a mass of flame and crash to the ground. Burning timbers shot along nearly to her feet as she raced the other way. Then she heard screams behind her. She stopped and looked back. A woman was emerging from the last house at the corner of their alley. Eunice knew her. She had been denounced many times by her father for being in league with the devil. She told fortunes in a little tent at the market and was reputed to have money hidden in her house. Now she was dragging out a strong box but the house that had just fallen was a flaming mass right in front of her. Eunice looked in horror. The woman turned to run back inside but her own house was now alight, the upper storey so close to the burning ones across the alley that it had caught in a moment. Eunice took two steps in that direction but the narrow way was full of burning debris.

“Dear God,” she prayed, “I am helpless. Please let it be quick.”

It was. Even as she looked the upper storey of the house collapsed and the woman was buried. Eunice heard or imagined she heard screaming and then she was running for her own life, terrified that fire would catch at her skirts. She didn’t stop till she was below the north cathedral wall where she patted her hair and all round her clothes to make sure she was not scorched anywhere. She sank to the ground and covered her eyes from the sight she had just seen.

A man yelled at her, “You could have been killed. More houses are to be pulled down and there isn’t time to wait for fools who have stayed too long. Look there.” She saw a body of workmen running with ladders, axes and grappling irons to a row of houses in Old Change. “It’s not as quick as gunpowder but they hook up on the timber struts and get them down in a jiffy. You don’t want to be underneath when they fall, do you?”

She shook her head and looked up at the cathedral wall. “No fire could touch this place surely?”

“No one believes so for there’s a mass of people bringing their goods inside. But I say the Dutch or the French are spreading the fire. There’s one arm of it heading north to Aldersgate and another west along the river and how could that be if there wasn’t some treachery at work?”

Eunice just shook her head and, clutching the big Bible, hurried on. Her grandmother must be sick with worry for her.

As she emerged into Fleet Street she saw the Fletchers’ cart ahead and Tom looking anxiously round. When he saw her he raised a hand in obvious delight. She stirred herself to wave back. She was sure he had wanted to go back to seek her but his parents would have forbidden him. The likeness to the last disaster was uncanny but the warm affection he showed comforted her a little.

They were not turning into The Strand. She saw them continue from Fleet Street up Drury Lane probably heading for St Giles’ Fields with most of the other fugitives, looking for open areas where they could be safe for a while. They were lucky to have got out in the nick of time but now what would happen to all these refugees she couldn’t imagine, their houses and shops and livelihoods all destroyed.

She turned along The Strand and was surprised to see people here too already bringing out goods from their mansions. One elegant lady was looking up and down the street with her maid and three young children by her all dressed for a journey. Behind the group were piles of roped chests and boxes and the family coach was being brought round from their coach house. They were not going to risk waiting too long to save their wealth like that poor wretch back there.

The lady was grumbling, “We cannot go and leave all this here. Why are the carts not come? I sent for them an hour ago.”

The maid was almost in tears. “Oh my lady, they say there are no more carts to be had if you offer thirty pounds for one. The box of plate could go in the coach with all the clothes. It would stand the jolting.”

“I am not leaving my Delftware or Italian glass to the thieves. We must get a lighter and send the goods by river and the footmen accompanying them must be armed with pistols.”

Eunice heard no more as she walked past, slowed down by the press of people. Her father would have made a sermon out of the incident. Thank God, I am not encumbered by any treasures, she reflected. Now that I have this Bible there is nothing else I value.

When she reached the house she found Celia up and in a state of great anxiety.

“How could you go out, Eunice? The sky is raining fire they say. Neighbours are packing up. The Earl of Branford has gone with his lady. Their coach went by ten minutes ago. Can it be that it will come as far as this?”

“They are tearing down whole streets in its path and there are fire-posts at intervals where officers seem to be deciding on the best strategy. I cannot think they will let it reach here. It is not at St Paul’s yet and surely that will be saved.”

Celia was hardly listening. “How can I move your grandfather? I woke the nurse but she is half drunk. We still have our coach and horses but I know not if we could get him inside. If he was strapped to a mattress Robert and the coachman might be able –” Then she wrung her hands and collapsed on the bottom stair and wept.