Fire, p.1
Fire, page 1
All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.
FIRE
A Felony & Mayhem mystery
PRINTING HISTORY
First UK edition (Constable): 2017
Felony & Mayhem edition: 2023
Copyright © 2017 by L.C. Tyler
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-63194-291-4 (paperback)
978-1-63194-293-8 (ebook)
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging-in-Publication information for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
To the firefighters of London
A LIST OF PERSONS TO BE FOUND IN THIS BOOK
JOHN GREY—Me. The narrator of this sorry tale of deceit and duplicity, a lawyer of several years’ standing but still, for reasons that need not concern us now, willing to undertake dangerous and poorly paid work spying for…
HENRY BENNET, BARON ARLINGTON—Secretary of State for the Southern Department and government spymaster, a man vain enough to wear a glossy cosmetic patch on his nose, responsible for detecting and preventing the treasons of men such as…
MONSIEUR PEIDLOE, ROBERT HUBERT, PETER SMITH AND EBENEZER JONES (some of which names may actually be their real ones) in order to protect the interests of his royal master…
KING CHARLES II—who has been restored to the throne these six years, and whose devotion to duty I am beginning to doubt in view of the time he spends horse racing, yachting and consorting with his various whores (Catholic and Protestant) and in view of his poor choice of advisers, including my Lord Arlington and Arlington’s protégé…
SIR THOMAS CLIFFORD—who does not affect a nose patch of any sort but does own a blond wig, which is almost as ostentatious, though less reprehensible than his adherence to False Popish Doctrines, unlike…
ANTHONY ASHLEY COOPER, LORD ASHLEY—as good and staunch a Protestant as you are likely to meet and, I think, one of the few honest men surrounding the King, as is…
MR JOSEPH WILLIAMSON—Arlington’s wise and little-appreciated deputy, who is second in my trust only to…
WILL ATKINS—my clerk and loyal servant, whose only faults are that he sometimes thinks he is my mother (who is another person entirely) and that he chides me both for my very moderate consumption of wine and for being careless enough never to have married…
AMINTA, LADY POLE—my childhood friend, now a distinguished London poet and playwright and the widow of…
ROGER, VISCOUNT POLE—about whom the only good thing I can say is that he is dead, once secretary to my stepfather…
COLONEL PAYNE—who formerly served under Cromwell and earned in the process enough money to purchase the manor of Clavershall West, which was more than sufficient inducement for…
MISTRESS PAYNE, FORMERLY MISTRESS GREY, THAT IS TO SAY MY ACTUAL MOTHER—to marry him, thus gaining for herself the large house and deer park that she had coveted all her life and which was formerly occupied by…
SIR FELIX CLIFFORD—bankrupt cavalier with no discernible morals, distant kin of Sir Thomas Clifford, father to Aminta, Lady Pole, and very close friend—worryingly close friend—of my mother’s in the year or so before I was born, which is a matter of continuing concern for…
ME, JOHN GREY—whose already troubled sleep will shortly be disturbed by the ringing of bells and the shouts of ‘Fire!’
The icon above says you’re holding a copy of a book in the Felony & Mayhem “Historical” category, which ranges from the ancient world up through the 1940s. If you enjoy this book, you may well like other “Historical” titles from Felony & Mayhem Press.
For more about these books, and other Felony & Mayhem titles, or to place an order, please visit our website at:
www.FelonyAndMayhem.com
Other “Historical” titles from
ANNAMARIA ALFIERI
City of Silver
Strange Gods
MICHELLE BIRKBY
All Roads Lead to Whitechapel
No One Notices the Boys
KENNETH CAMERON
The Frightened Man
The Bohemian Girl
The Second Woman
The Haunted Martyr
The Backward Boy
The Past Master
FIDELIS MORGAN
Unnatural Fire
The Rival Queens
ALEX REEVE
Half Moon Street
The Anarchists’ Club
The Butcher of Berner Street
KATE ROSS
Cut to the Quick
A Broken Vessel
Whom the Gods Love
The Devil in Music
L.C. TYLER
A Cruel Necessity
A Masterpiece of Corruption
The Plague Road
LAURA WILSON
The Lover
The Innocent Spy
An Empty Death
The Wrong Man
A Willing Victim
The Riot
OLGA WOJTAS
Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Golden Samovar
Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Vampire Menace
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Notes and Acknowledgements
Prologue
Dawn broke, just before midnight and much too far to the south. At first it was just a faint pink underscoring of the starry black. Slowly it grew, broader, higher, redder, bleeding up into the sky.
Bateson (it was generally agreed he had never possessed or needed a Christian name) watched and thought it looked promising. Very promising indeed. He rubbed his hands and turned to his newest volunteer.
‘See over there, Jem?’ he said. ‘That’s the first thing that God created, that is. Fire.’
Jem frowned. He made no claim to be a theologian, but he’d once been made to write out the first page of the Bible as a punishment. ‘I thought it was Light that God created first?’
‘One and the same, lad,’ said Bateson, extending a large and calloused hand towards the shimmering, rose-coloured streak. ‘Light and fire? One’s every bit as good as the other.’ Jem nodded. Bateson’s word, amongst the firefighters of Clerkenwell, was law—both Civil and Canon. The Bible was mistaken. God had delayed creating light until he’d sorted out fire.
‘They told me how we’d wasted our money,’ Bateson continued. ‘Told me how we’d never have a fire big enough here in Clerkenwell. Men with buckets, they said. And a few brass water squirts. That’s all you need, they said. Plus long hooks to pull down the burning buildings what sadly can’t be saved, even by us. That’s how fires have been fought ever since … ever since there were fires and firefighters like us to fight them. But see that pretty, dancing glow over there …? Now we’ll have a chance to show the lot of them—the Mayor, the aldermen, the magistrates, the King, the Duke of York—we’ll show them just what the Beast can do. My Beast.’
They both turned in respectful silence to the machine beside them, the machine that rose at least a foot above their heads, the epitome of modern, seventeenth-century engineering. There it was with its vast, shining wooden reservoir, its leather hoses, the pair of elegantly curved, brass-bound pumping handles, and the four great iron-shod wheels on which it would, now it had finally been summoned, roll down towards a grateful City.
‘That,’ said Bateson proudly, ‘is progress. That is modernity. That can do the work of sixty ordinary firemen with leather buckets and brass squirts.’
Jem nodded. This assertion too was difficult to contradict. Forty, sixty, a hundred—who could say? The Beast had never been put to the test. They had saddle-soaped the leather, polished the wood, scoured the bright yellow metal, oiled the axles with handfuls of thick, clinging grease—but until tonight it had been a thing to admire and wonder at. Until tonight there had been no fire worthy of it.
Somewhere, not too far off, a muffled church bell had started to toll. It was the call to arms for the remaining Clerkenwell firefighters—those who lived further out in the parish.
Bateson should have been cursing and swearing, demanding to know where the missing men were, threatening to hang the last to arrive, urging them on towards the distant fire that seemed to be growing by the minute. But he was displaying a strange, almost frightening, charity towards them.
‘It must be quite a big one if they’ve called for the Beast,’ said Jem conversationally. ‘I mean, they’ve sent all the way up to Clerkenwell for us to come and help the City volunteers.’
‘City firefighters? Couldn’t piss out a lump of damp coal in a china pot. Of course they’ve sent for us.’
Bateson looked southeastwards again towards the City and shook his head. His countenance was intended to convey wistful sadness but, for all that, inwardly he rejoiced and his heart was exceeding glad.
‘So, should we fill the tank up and go and help them?’ asked J em.
‘Fill it up? Fill it up? You haven’t done this sort of work before, have you?’
‘No, sir,’ said Jem meekly.
‘What sort of work have you done exactly?’
It was the question Jem had learned to dread. It was the question he hoped nobody would ever ask him.
‘Transportation, Mr Bateson, sir,’ he said.
‘Carter?’
‘Yes, sir. Until recently.’
‘Well, that’s useful. Now we’re having to move the Beast. And it must have been pleasant enough work for you. I’ll wager you’ve seen every county in England.’
‘No, sir. Our work was mainly in London.’
‘Still, you were out on the road, meeting all sorts of folk. Gossiping. Telling a merry yarn.’
Actually, thought Jem, he had met only one sort of customer and they hadn’t been very talkative.
‘Yes, Mr Bateson, sir,’ he said, hoping to terminate the conversation without his new employer backing away in abject terror, as people often did when he was more specific about his previous job. He artfully offered Bateson the opportunity to change the subject back to his incompetence—a small price to pay. ‘So we don’t need to fill up with water then?’ he asked.
‘How much do you think that mighty engine weighs when empty?’ asked Bateson.
Jem considered carefully, measuring the great bulk of the wooden cylinder with his eye and converting that stupendous volume into tons and hundredweight and pounds and ounces. ‘A lot?’ he hazarded.
‘Precisely. A lot. And how much do you think it would weigh full of water?’
‘A shit of a lot?’
‘Even more than that, lad. If we had the horses to shift it—and we don’t—the leather harnesses would snap like pack thread as they took the strain.’
Jem whistled between his teeth. ‘So we fill it when we get to the fire, then? Well, there’ll be no shortage of what we need in the City tonight.’ Jem nodded in the direction of the New River Head—Clerkenwell’s famed cistern, into which the New River discharged the health-giving waters of Hertfordshire for the benefit of any Londoner who would pay to avoid drinking the Thames. For over fifty years water had flowed peacefully ’mid verdant fields, all the way along the New River to Clerkenwell, then gushed through the elm pipes that ran ever downwards from the New River Head into the City, splitting over and over again into smaller lead quills that took the water right into people’s homes. Not to a nearby pump but, marvellous to relate, actually into people’s homes. Now, on a Sunday night, the stopcocks controlling the flow would be wide open, and water would be flooding down to London, filling each householder’s own small cistern for the many tasks that would require water on the following morning.
Bateson coughed and, for a moment, looked uncharacteristically embarrassed.
‘Water’s off,’ he said.
‘Off?’ said Jem.
‘What are you? Mr Echo? Yes, it’s off. It’s not running. The pipes are dry. Every blessed one of them.’
‘But …’
‘But why? Is that your next question? The reason, Mr Echo, is that one of the Directors has, in his great wisdom, turned the stopcocks in the pumping house and gone away with the key.’
‘He’s turned it off the same night we have a fire?’
‘Well, to be fair to the man, I doubt if he actually knew there’d be a fire tonight. They’ve sent somebody out to find him and retrieve it. When they do, doubtless we’ll get the taps turned on smartish. In the meantime, the water stays up here in Clerkenwell. Every last drop of it.’
‘So, what are we to do?’
‘Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the City, Jem, but when you get there you’ll see this big wet thing, near a quarter of a mile wide and a couple of hundred miles long. It’s called the Thames and has all the water in it that you’ll need. Not even the Beast can drink the Thames dry.’
‘But …?’ Jem paused and looked at Bateson.
‘But what? Is that your entire question or is there anything to follow?’
‘Sorry, Mr Bateson, I thought you might want to interrupt me again. As is your right. But we’ll need to go all the way down to the river to fill the Beast up.’
‘On the contrary, Jem. Just think. What’s at the end of London Bridge?’
‘An inn?’
‘Yes. But what else?’
‘Houses?’
‘Yes, but what else?
‘Streets?’
‘Yes, but what else?’
‘The heads of traitors on poles?’
‘Who will help us put out the fire?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Just so that London does not burn down before you guess correctly, at the northern end of London Bridge there is a waterwheel. Its purpose is to pump water up into the City, just as the New River brings it down. It doesn’t taste as sweet as New River water, but Thames water’s fine for putting out fires. You just have to dig up a pipe, knock a bloody great hole in it, grab a bucket or two and fill up the tank. Then you put the fire out and wait for the praise that will be rightly yours and mine and all the other volunteer firefighters’. The innkeepers will force you to drink their finest ale and the girls will do anything you ask them to do, and teach you some things you haven’t even thought of, you being still quite young and innocent.’
The educational side of the work was something that Jem had not previously considered.
‘We’d better go then,’ he said. He looked round the as yet empty yard. ‘When the others arrive, of course.’
‘Plenty of time,’ said Bateson, with the strange and wholly unprecedented patience that he had been showing ever since the bells had started ringing. ‘The others have been sent for. They’ll come in their own good time. Ben’s knocking them up, in a polite and considerate way, just in case they haven’t heard the church bells ringing. Plenty of time. Those girls won’t be going anywhere.’
At least he hoped there was plenty of time. Bateson had been eager not to start too soon. If he arrived early then the fire would scarcely have got going—it would be a waste of the Beast’s wondrous capability, a travesty of what its maiden outing should be. Of course, he was equally aware of the dreadful danger of waiting too long: when they got there the fire might have already gone out. The departure time, the speed with which they proceeded—these were important decisions, not to be taken lightly. He looked at the horizon and was dismayed to see that the glow in the sky already seemed, to his expert gaze, to have diminished a little.
‘It’s getting bigger,’ said Jem. ‘That’s for sure.’
Bateson laughed at his new assistant’s inexperience. ‘Trick of the light,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing, that one. The Great Fire of 1666? No such luck.’
The Beast trundled onwards through the dark streets, six horses straining at the shaft, a dozen or so human attendants bearing torches to light its way. Ahead, as if in answer to Bateson’s silent prayers, the red glow was spreading. Definitely spreading. This was a fire worth going to. They pressed forwards, guided by the light in the southeast, and before long they could smell the smoke and hear the sharp cracking as still the distant flames gorged themselves on walls and floors.
There was a steady trickle of traffic heading in the other direction—tired people with smoke-blackened faces, dressed in whatever clothes they had been able to find in the dark, on foot and carrying hastily gathered bundles. From them Bateson learned that the fire was hard by London Bridge. Bateson had studied the combustibility of all parts of the City and knew that the houses down there were wattle-and-daub hovels that would burn like tinder after the long dry summer. The lanes were narrow. The nimble flames would leap from house to house with alarming speed and dexterity.
‘Well, it’s easy enough to tell which way we should go tonight,’ said Walter to Jem, pointing to the glow ahead of them.
Walter was a little more senior, having volunteered to be a fireman a few months before. He’d actually put out a small fire, though not one to which the Beast had been invited.
‘I know the route into the City well enough,’ said Jem unthinkingly. ‘We’re heading straight for London Bridge. I used to come this way a lot at night.’
