With All My Heart by Margaret Campbell Barnes

Author:Margaret Campbell Barnes [Barnes, Margaret Campbell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2016-03-29T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIII

CATHERINE STIRRED from a troubled sleep. The hot dry summer had been singularly trying, with the sadly depleted population still exhausted from last year’s plague and the dull thud of gunfire still to be heard in the Channel. Someone was calling her urgently. Yet when she opened her eyes it was still dark.

“Madame! Can you not smell burning?”

Bemused with sleep, Catherine sat up to find Maria Penalva standing in her nightgown at the foot of the bed with a curtain held back in either thin hand. “Burning?”, she repeated vaguely. “Perhaps the servants have forgotten to damp down the kitchen fires again?”

“My husband is already astir and says it is nothing in the Palace,” Lettice Ormonde, her Comptroller’s wife, assured her. And Lettice, Catherine noticed, was already fully dressed.

“It is coming from the City,” cried Drusilla, the pretty chambermaid, rushing unbidden into the room. “Look, Madame! Please God it be not the Dutch!” And without so much as curtsying or “by your leave” she dragged the heavy velvet hangings apart with strong young arms and pushed open one of the long windows over-looking the river. There was no sound of gunfire, but sure enough, an unmistakable smell of burning was borne in upon the freshening September air and a dull glow made a warm, red oblong of the window.

“It must be a bad fire,” said Catherine, now thoroughly awake. “You know, Lettice, only the other evening the King and that clever Mr. Evelyn of the Royal Society of Science were saying how dangerous your old beamed houses are, all overhanging and huddled together, so that one catches fire from another. Now in Lisbon —”

“It is not just a few houses ablaze, Madame,” interrupted Lettice, returning from the window too shocked by what she had seen to stand on ceremony. “It must be whole streets!” And, as if to confirm her words, when the Queen’s two tiring women came hurrying in there was a clattering of footsteps to be heard on the flagged cloister below their room, while from the river side there arose a cacophony of shouting.

Catherine sprung from her bed to join the others at the open window. Down on the Strand watermen, still struggling into their coats, were hurrying confusedly to shove off their boats, while women’s faces appeared at every casement. And all seemed to be shouting questions at a man and woman rowing frenziedly in the direction of Lambeth, their flimsy craft laden to the gunwale with household goods. “ ’Tis the worst fire ever seen!” screamed the woman, nearly upsetting the boat by clutching at her ill-laden pots and pans.

“Where?” yelled the men on the bank.

“Corner o’ Pudding Lane, it started,” called back the man in midstream. “The King’s baker was getting his ovens hot again after the Sabbath. Got some new fool of a ’prentice, they say. An’ now the whole of Fish Street is ablaze. Fair gutted out, we was —” His voice trailed away in the morning mist as he made for the hospitality of some rustic relative up river.

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