Chapter One

Chapter 1

London, September 1666

Four days after the blaze began, consuming half of London and cutting a wide swath from Tower Hill to Fetter Lane, Nell stepped cautiously through the doorway of the tavern into the harsh light of day. For a moment, she lingered on the stone landing that jutted into Lewkenor Lane before stepping down into the tangle of lost souls, prostitutes, piles of garbage, and animal dung, so overpowering that her eyes watered. The canopy of sky remained gray with smoke and obscured the sun. A rash of smaller fires still blazed as the odor of charred wood and burned pitch mixed with the putrid stench of decay. It blew across the city, and would not let go.

The flames had spread as far as Fish Street, and the Thames. The wide, serpentine river, normally dotted with thousands of decorated barges and boats with billowing sails, was still thick with debris and a heavy layer of soot. The ravages of the fire had spared the Cock & Pye, where she rented a garret beneath the eaves, as well as the other timbered and gabled houses around that end of Drury Lane. But the ashes, smuts, and little burned bits of paper still rained down upon the city. They were like feathers, she thought, until they landed, marking everything a desolate gray.

Beneath her feet was a carpet of the same ash, dung, and soot that the wind had carried. Many Londoners, in one devastating evening, and the four days which followed, had lost every worldly good. It seemed unfair that a city should suffer such devastation after the ravaging plague of only a year before. But that was not her problem, then or now. Survival was. She tried not to look at the still smoldering ruins,