The Strange Adventures of H by Sarah Burton

Author:Sarah Burton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Legend Press

37

The next morning I awoke to find Godfrey beside me already awake and reading one of my playbooks. He looked over at me and smiled.

“Sleep well?” he asked.

“Yes,” I yawned, “thank you.”

“Dollie… ” he began, as though he were going to ask something I might not like. “You know what we said last night about always continuing very honest one to another?”

“Yes,” I said, dreading what he was going to say.

“Well… ” he said. “Dollie, I have to tell you, dear girl, you ain’t no oil painting in the mornings.”

I jumped out of bed and snatched up my hand mirror and saw a smudged bleary-eyed visage which looked like my own face if it had been left out in the rain for some time.

“Well, if truth be told, you ain’t no bowl of fruit yourself!” I retorted, and threw a pillow at him.

Then I admitted my head ached terribly and we dressed and went down to breakfast. We had no sooner finished than, to our astonishment, Joe was shown into the room.

“Joe!” said I, standing up and preparing to be very angry.

But he threw himself on me saying, “I’m sorry to come but you must come! Everyone is being sent out of Cheapside and Auntie won’t leave the house!”

As it was an emergency Godfrey went to find a coach, and I ran upstairs and slapped on some paint and got my mask, as if I were to go anywhere near Aunt Madge I must be disguised, and snatched up some money from my box. Godfrey’s task was of course fruitless, as there was not a coach to be had in all London over those few days, every wheeled object being in full employment ferrying people and their belongings out of the city; however he had an idea that if we walked to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he had his house, we should have better luck, as the Fields were being used as a depository for people’s possessions, which meant that if full vehicles arrived, empty ones must leave, and this proved to be the case.

When we arrived at the Fields, Godfrey set off to find transport while Joe (and Tobypuss, who was delighted at seeing Joe again and had insisted on accompanying us) and I waited. It was only now that I began to realise the true scale of the calamity. Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people were gathered here, wandering about as if in a daze, their furniture lying in piles about them. It struck me that these were mainly persons of quality, most unfit for any kind of hardship, which seemed to make it worse. Because whereas the plague had mainly done its deadly work amongst the poor of the city, the fire was not so nice in its choice of victims, and the fire had moved so swiftly and indiscriminately that the rich had not had any more chance of fleeing than the poor and, of course, had far more to lose. The vast majority of citizens

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