Chapter Twenty-Eight
Bess was going out of her mind.
The carriage couldn’t get anywhere near the Haymarket. Evening traffic had clogged the streets all around The Nemesis, a standstill of coachmen and hack drivers shouting themselves hoarse and no one moving an inch.
Jittery with impatience after traveling at breakneck speeds for a day and a half, hours of enforced inactivity with nothing to do but think about how much she needed to get to Nathaniel as quickly as possible, Bess stuck her head out the carriage window to yell up at the driver. “What on earth is the matter?”
Before Gemma’s driver, Thomas, could do more than shrug, the sound of clanging bells answered Bess’s question.
Her blood ran cold.
Everyone knew the dangers of fire in London. The Great Fire had raged through the riverfront slums more than a hundred years previously. These days there were ten fire brigades across the city that would come to put out the blaze—assuming the owner of the building had prepaid their fee—but the sound of the bells still struck terror into the heart of everyone in the city.
Fire was unpredictable. It spread too fast and too well between the tightly packed buildings, and a line of people with buckets stretched from the nearest well to the blaze could only do so much.
“I’m getting out here,” she called up to Thomas, tense fingers fumbling with the door latch. “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”
Over Thomas’s protests that she shouldn’t be on foot in this neighborhood after dark, Bess wrestled her way free of the carriage and landed on legs wobbly after hours of sitting and attempting to sleep on a bench seat.
She ignored the pins and needles prickling at her calves, breaking into as quick a trot as she could manage while weaving in between the darting pedestrians, stuck carts and coaches, and whinnying horses.
The closer she got to The Nemesis, the more panicked and frenetic and crowded the streets became. The flow of people was almost all in one direction—away from The Nemesis—and a nameless dread welled up in her guts, chilling her from the inside out.
Bess began to feel like a trout swimming against the current, fighting and shoving not to be pushed back, out of the Haymarket, and away from her goal.
But she was determined. She had to get to the tavern, she had to know, she had to see…and suddenly, she rounded a corner, bumping shoulders with a fleeing pair of ladies coated in soot and sweat, their hair bedraggled and white rings round their eyes that Bess suddenly realized were the only parts of their faces not streaked with ash. Because they had been wearing masks.
She didn’t even need to ask. They’d been at The Nemesis.
The fire…was at The Nemesis.
The bucket brigade was hard at work, she saw, a line of people passing pails of water hand over hand, to combat the flames. Thank the Lord, there was a fire engine there too, dispensing water in a huge jet from a tank mounted on their horse-drawn wagon.
The Nemesis was on fire.
Bess stopped in the lane, shocked into stillness at the sight of the flames leaping from the upper-story windows, the smoke billowing from the roof in an immense cloud.
She knew at a glance there would be no saving the building—the best the brigade could do at this point would be to keep the fire from spreading to the neighboring structures.
People in those buildings were already in motion, handing their belongings down out of second-floor windows, streaming from their homes in droves, hoping to save themselves and their most precious possessions if the fire should spread.
The scene on the ground was not any less chaotic, a welter of people crying, screaming, calling for help or running to join the bucket line.
Where is he?
Bess felt her lips moving without conscious thought, sending up a prayer that Nathaniel wasn’t here, that he’d gone home to Ashbourn House, that her worst fear would not come true.
If he was here, no doubt he was helping with the endless, backbreaking work of the bucket brigade or ferrying injured strangers to his surgeon for medical aid, but as she frantically searched the darkness for his familiar, tall, broad form, listening out for his deep voice booming directions, taking charge of the rescue effort, despair and hope clawed equally deep lines in her chest.
Face after face, bathed in the orange glow of the flames—but not his face. Shout after yell after cry, hoarse and commanding and pleading—but not his voice.
So many people who needed help, and even more who had come running with no aim other than to offer aid—but she didn’t see Nathaniel anywhere.
Just as her heart began to unclench and Bess thought she might be able to allow herself to believe she’d find Nathaniel asleep in his bed at Ashbourn House, whole and healthy and hopefully glad to see her, she stumbled upon someone she knew.
Even without her mask, Madame Leda was impossible to mistake. The proprietress of the Nemesis stood at the head of the bucket line, directing the efforts of the volunteers with sharp, steely determination and unbowed shoulders. She was a beacon of calm in the chaos, and Bess stumbled up to her, clutching at her hand.
“Madame Leda,” Bess gasped out, abruptly on the verge of tears. “You’re alright!”
