CHAPTER ELEVEN – LONDON’S BURNING
Stars sparkled in the ink–coloured sky, whilst in the houses around them few candle lights were visible and all was in shadow. Late on that warm night, Septimus and Tom stood in Pudding Lane opposite the front of the bakery, surrounded by half–timbered buildings that rose up all around them: buildings made of wood, twig and thatch, ready for the spark that would kindle disaster. Smoke was already climbing out of a downstairs window and the glow from the beginnings of an inferno cast an orange light into the street: the inferno that would destroy the heart of the medieval city of London and leave it in ashes.
“The family slept upstairs. Their maid was Mary Brown. She probably had her own room, but we have no record of where that is,” Septimus was explaining.
“Only Mary died, right?” Tom said.
“Indeed,” replied Septimus.
“So the others escaped, right?”
“Yes,” answered Septimus, “they could not come down the stairs, so they went out via a high window to the rooftops behind. For some reason, Mary did not. Nothing survived the inferno so they found no body. And stop saying right all the time, it’s annoying.”
“Right … I mean sorry! The point is that they escaped from the top floor. So, we need to get up there,” Tom suggested.
“Yes, but not before the fire is spotted by the occupants; we don’t want to run into them. We might bungle it and the whole family die. We could wipe out hundreds of descendants in one step.”
Tom thought of the idea of his own family being swept into oblivion by something changing history so that they never existed. He shivered. The idea was worse, somehow, than living but then being killed. At least that way someone would remember you. “Seems anything we do could mess things up big time,” he commented.
Septimus appeared to ponder this for a moment whilst nodding his head. Then he shrugged. “Not anything. Time is unpredictable. Say we went back in time and prevented Edison being born ...”
Tom knew about him. He was an American who invented the light bulb. They had read about him in a school project; “The light bulb guy?”
“That’s the man. Well, if he had not existed, any of a dozen men around the world would have developed the same device or something very similar within a decade. The times were right and science had advanced to the point that it was inevitable.”
“Well, from what you are saying then, none of us is important. So it would not matter if we did accidentally wipe out this family and all their descendants,” said Tom, pointing out a flaw in Septimus’ thinking.
“No, that is not what I am saying. What I meant was that history is like a great river surging along. Its force and power is irresistible. Mankind would always have invented fire, learned to write, made machines and explored his world. Nothing could have prevented those things. But even so, sometimes everything hinges on what one person, man or woman, does ...”
Their conversation was interrupted by a shout of alarm from the building they were watching. The baker’s apprentice had spotted the fire and was rushing upstairs to raise the family.
“But right now, everything hinges on what you and I do in the next few moments,” Septimus observed.
Tom nodded and started forward, gathering his energy for moving them about fifteen feet up and across. Just as he was about to do so, Septimus grasped his shoulder and pointed to a window at one end of the top floor. The frightened face of a young woman had appeared at it. For a brief moment, she looked into Tom’s eyes and then turned away and disappeared into the building. Did he hear a male voice calling her name: calling “Mary”? Fleetingly Tom recalled the dream: now was the moment.
“Got it, mate, right let’s go!” Tom grasped Septimus’ hand and Walked them both upwards and forwards. In his mind, he passed through the raging flames that engulfed the ground floor and up to the first floor. There, he and Septimus appeared at the end of the landing. Tom heard voices and turned to see a family group standing facing away from him at the far end. He spun round looking for a hiding place, but then jerked backwards as his companion tugged him by his collar into a room at the front of the house.
“Hush, we must not be found,” Septimus whispered, holding his finger to his lips, “at least, not yet.”
Tom looked about him; they were apparently in the baker’s bedroom. There was a large low bed in the room with a cot at its foot, but otherwise it was pretty bare and Spartan; not even a rug on the bare floorboards. He thought back to his own room full of books, games, clothes and junk and was amazed at how little these folk had.
They heard a clattering on the wooden landing as the family came towards them, then halted at the top of the stairs leading down to the ground floor.
“What do we do?” A woman’s voice; frightened. “We can’t get out. We will all be burned!”
There was the sound of children crying. They were terrified. No wonder, thought Tom – he was too. Then, a young man’s voice shouted out.
“Quick, out the back of my room!” and there were more running footsteps as the family moved away, searching for an escape route.
“Right, come on!” Septimus ordered. They opened the door and went back out onto the landing. At the top of the stairs in the rear wall was a door leading into another room. From it, they could hear the voices of the family. Moving quickly to the door and peeking round it, they could see the children being passed up to a young man who was outside the window, balancing on the roof of the next house in the row. Only then did Tom recall that in his dream Mary had called the young man Jack. The baker and his wife moved past Jack and up onto the roof. As soon as they were safe, he came back to the window and was now encouraging Mary to join him. She stepped forward, but then appeared to lose her nerve and backed away from the window.
At that moment, fire surged up the stairs towards the two Walkers. Septimus cried out, then stumbled and fell hard onto the wooden floor, pulling Tom with him. Weakened by the fire from below, the wooden landing collapsed and they both fell through the hole.
Tom managed to catch hold of a ceiling beam as he fell, leaving him dangling down into the room below. Septimus landed with a crash on top of the baker’s table in the middle of the room on the ground floor. Despite the inferno all around it the table was as yet intact. It was, however, smouldering.
“Septimus!” Tom yelled, but his friend did not respond and appeared to be out cold on the table below. The flames advanced on them both from all sides. Tom tried to Walk, but could not concentrate enough to focus on the Flow of Time. With a growing sense of despair, he felt the heat rise. His hair crackled and his shoes started to smoulder. Below him, one leg of the baker’s table caught fire. The table creaked then, with a snap, the leg gave way and the whole thing collapsed, throwing Septimus’ limp form onto the floor.
There was another roar and from the ends of the room two huge waves of fire swept towards them; at any moment it would surround them. This was it, Tom thought. Who would have reckoned he would die in the Great Fire of London? He braced himself, the muscles in his arm screaming at him to let go of the beam.
“STOP!” yelled a female voice from beside him.
What happened next, Tom would not have believed possible, had he not been hanging there waiting to be incinerated. It was as if someone had pressed the pause on a DVD: the banks of flame just froze. From the roaring further back, it seemed this effect was very local but, for a moment at least, they had a reprieve. What, Tom asked himself, had stopped the flames in that extraordinary way? He looked round and saw that right next to him, kneeling on the landing and peering down through the gap, was Mary Brown. Her face wore an expression of intense concentration. Still gritting her teeth, she slowly turned her head and looked into his eyes.
“Cannot hold it ... much longer,” she finally said, sweat running down her face.
Tom nodded. Explanations could wait until later. So, hanging on with one hand he reached down and pulled the long iron chain out of his belt and threw the
end of it to Mary, who caught it and then stared down at him.
Tom yelled, “Hold this a mo!” and letting go of the beam he dropped down into the room below. The chain had enough slack so Mary could hold one end; the other end with its globe of water was still tucked in Tom’s belt. He felt the searing heat from the wall of flame, halted in its tracks, but beginning to waver. Bending down he grabbed Septimus by the lapel then reached out to the Flow of Time, relieved to feel its presence once again. Just then, Mary, overcome by fumes, gave a grunt and fainted to the floor, the chain still clutched in her hands. At the same moment, the fire surged forward once more, reaching the table, which now erupted into flame.
As Tom pulled all three of them away, the landing above them collapsed and showered the ground with burning rubble. In the nick of time they had gone from the seventeenth century, forward three hundred and fifty years, away from the Great Fire and into the present day.
Tom materialised, smoking and coughing and with his clothes smouldering, onto the floor of Neoptolemas’ office. The old man was as usual sitting behind his desk writing notes on a sheet of paper and was, yet again, taken by surprise. He dropped his pen.
“Good grief, you almost gave me a heart attack!” he said in a faint voice, whilst patting his chest, “... again!”
“Sorry sir!” Tom managed, before slumping down into the chair opposite the Professor. It took him a moment to catch his breath and before he did, the old man was speaking again.
“Not to worry: no harm done – I think,” he said, still patting his chest. “I will have to work out the best spot for you to return to, so you don’t give an old man kittens every time!”
The Professor stood and walked around the desk. “Well now, I see we have our second guest,” he observed, looking down at Septimus and Mary, who were both unconscious on the floor. Mary still held the other end of the chain. The Professor reached forward on his desk and picked up the small bell, which he rang. A moment later, Mr Phelps appeared and immediately set about having the pair moved to rooms above and the doctor called.
By the time they had gone, Tom was beginning to recover and at the Professor’s insistence, was sipping some sweet tea that Phelps had brought in. “So, how is Edward?” Tom asked when the cup was empty.
“More settled, although also more thoughtful. Once he has time to get used to the idea a little, I think he will adapt to our world and who and what he is. For now, he is spending a lot of time in our library. It transpired that he read history at Oxford before joining the army. I think the idea of studying his own time and the years since as if it was a history lesson is helping him cope with the transition. Victorians were, in many ways, rational and open to progress and ideas beyond their experience. It was the age of the Industrial Revolution; they had vision far beyond that of their ancestors ...”
He was interrupted by Mr Phelps, who came to say that Septimus was conscious and insisting he did not need a doctor. A moment later, Septimus himself walked in. He crossed to Tom and patted him on the shoulder.
“Well done, boyo – you saved my bacon. So then, are you beginning to like this life, eh?”
Tom grimaced at that. “Actually, it was Mary who saved both our bacon.
“It was?” Septimus’ eyebrows shot up to his hair line, “How?”
“I’ll tell you later. Look, Septimus, I’m only doing this to rescue these three people, because I know what they felt in those final moments and no one deserves that kind of fear. But all this is dangerous and what is more, my mates think I’m mad. My teachers are giving me bad reports and my parents keep taking me to doctors. Right now, I think I would like to be done with it all. I will wait until I have finished the job and then we’ll see.”
Septimus and Neoptolemas exchanged a meaningful, but silent glance and Septimus cleared his throat.
“Right then, no time like the present: fancy a trip to the 1940s, Tom?”