The calamity come upon this street was such that I did not feel able to turn my back upon the people's plight. Had I been close to the money-lender's house, I might have done so, but I was still far, far from it and I now understood that my effort to reach Margaret was a futile thing. I had begun it too late. By now, my daughter would either have been saved or have perished in her wooden crib. I could not alter what had already happened. So I decided to dismount. I tied Danseuse to a post and took off my coat and went to give what help I could towards the saving of worldly goods and piling them onto carts and barrows, going into the rooms of strangers and taking up whatever I could carry: chairs and candlesticks and pictures and cushions and piles of bedding and chamber pots and ink-stands and toys.

I was aware, for the first time, of the approaching heat of the fire and stood still for a moment in the street, wiping my brow and watching the roof of the house that was beginning to catch alight. My eye moved downwards, to try to see how and where and how fast the flames traveled, and it was then that I saw, above the door, a sign painted on iron and rattling backwards and forth in the wind: Arthur Goffe Esquire. Milliner and Haberdasher. But this was not all that I noticed. I saw, too, that the door of this house was closed and that it was the only one in the street from which people were not coming and going, hauling clothes and furniture.

And so I threw down whatever I had been holding (and I do not know what it was or whether I broke it when I hurled it away) and ran towards the haberdasher's and beat upon the door and shouted, but heard no answering shout. One other man, then, left the saving of his own goods and saw with me what was happening, that in the very house where the fire had come in people were still sleeping. From his piled-up cart he fetched an axe and gave some blows to the door so mighty that it fell off its hinges. We stepped over it and went in, but found ourselves at once surrounded by pitch smoky blackness, so that, before we had reached the stairs, a foul choking and sickness, caused to us by the smoke, forced us to turn round and come out again into the street.

"Who is in there?" I asked the man, who was spitting into the gutter, "how many people?"

"Only her, Sir."

"Who?"

"Goffe's wife."

"Just her?"

"Yes. The haberdasher's gone to France to buy some special Frenchy thread, or some poxy thing."

"We cannot let her die. We must go in again."

"We can't get to her through that smoke. We shall die ourselves."

"No. We must try again. If someone could bring cloths soaked in water to put round our faces…"

"No, Sir. We cannot do it."

"Bring cloths! Someone find water and a cloth!"

"You'll die, Sir. You'll veritably perish."

"And let us call and shout to her."

"Will do no good. Stone deaf she is."

"Deaf?"

"Stone. As my prick to a Sunday sermon."

So I saw her in my mind, then, lying in her silence, lying neat and straight in her bed as my mother had lain and downstairs in the workroom all the boxes of buttons and cards of lace and drawerfuls of braid waiting to burn…

"Please!" I shouted. "Someone fetch me a wet rag or napkin!"

I do not know who heeded my shout. But, in the next minute, a soaked cloth was put into my hands and without hesitating at all, I tied it round my face and went back into the house at a run and hurled myself at the stairs and then a muffled voice behind me said: "All right, Sir. I'm with you. Try not to breathe."

We groped our way up the staircase. On the landing, a flickering light from the flames now beginning to touch the window revealed us to an open door and lying wedged between it and its frame with her arms outstretched was the body of the haberdasher's wife. We both saw it at the same moment. Without wasting precious breath upon speech, we crawled to it and each took hold of one of the woman's hands and tugged her towards the stairs. Then, my large companion nodded to me to let go the hand that I held, and he stood up and lifted up the haberdasher's wife and put her over his shoulder like a sack and I passed in front of him and guided him down the stairs and out into the street and he carried her thirty paces away from the burning house before he laid her down.

Coughing and retching so violently that a gobful of chicken returned itself from my stomach to this London street, I knelt down by the woman and turned her over on her side until she began to splutter and to draw air into her lungs.

"Alive, Sir, is she?" asked the man.

I nodded. Then I looked down at the face of Mrs Goffe, wife of the milliner and haberdasher, and I saw that the features of it were very pinched and thin with the mouth turned downwards and mean and that she did not resemble in any way either my mother or the woman in Finn's portrait. But it did not matter, for those were the faces that had driven me on.

Two women came out to us. They wrapped Mrs Goffe in a blanket and laid her on a cart piled up with sacks and bedding.

One of them brought water in a bowl and held a ladleful of it to my lips and I drank. The haberdasher's wife did not speak or even cry out as the flames engulfed her house; she only stared and began to chew upon the lace ribbons at her throat. I wondered if this terrible night would send her mad, so that her life had been saved only to be squandered away in a Bedlam.

A great weariness now began to come upon me and I knew that I could not continue with my attempted circumnavigation of the fire. I would return to Cheapside and then begin it again the following day. I put on my coat and untied Danseuse from her post, where she was prancing and sweating with fear, and was about to mount and join the push of carts and people going westwards when one of the women came to me and thanked me for helping them and asked me for my name, "So that tomorrow I can include it in my list of them I pray for, Sir."

"Well," I said, "my name is Merivel. I am a physician. If Mrs Goffe does not quickly get well, bring her to me." Then I handed the woman one of the little calling cards with R. Merivel. Physician. Chirurgeon. engraved upon it that I keep in a pouch on Danseuse's saddle. She took it and put it into the pocket of her apron. "I cannot read, Sir," she said, "but I will give the card to Mrs Goffe and she will remember you."

Chapter Twenty-Five. Margaret Returned to My Mind

Neither Frances Elizabeth nor Finn believed that the fire would travel as far as Cheapside. Between it and the main body of the flames a gap had been made, thirty or forty feet wide, by the hasty pulling down of houses, as instructed by the King, and it was thus that almost everyone living west of this gap imagined themselves to be safe.

On the morning of Monday, I went and looked at the gap. And then I looked up into the air above the fire and saw the blazing debris that was still being hurled upwards and whipped onwards by the wind and I knew then that the flames would cross the gap and come to us.

I returned to the house and told Finn to start packing up his canvases and Frances Elizabeth to bring down her escritoire and beg some room for these things and anything else they wished to save on a neighbour's cart. But they paid me no heed.

"Why has the gap been made if it is not going to protect us?" Finn asked stupidly. I gave him no answer. I went into the parlour, where Frances Elizabeth was calmly stoking her coals as she did every morning, and took up all my surgical instruments and cleaned them and laid them neatly in their case. Into a large box I put all the powders and remedies and lint and bandages that I kept in the house. I took them to Danseuse's stable and strapped them onto her back. Then I returned and dragged from under my bed the sack containing my oboe, my letters from the King and other remains of my "burning coals." Into this sack I put my new clothes and wig – all now blackened with smoke and stained with sweat – and fastened this also to my horse's saddle.