1 February 1691, Tuesday
The first day of February in the Year of Our Lord Sixteen Hundred and Ninety-One is bleak, the sky gray-black, much like London after the Great Fire. I was four years old when the flames torched the city. I recall bits and pieces in the tangles of my childish memories. Father told me afterward the Fire began at the house of baker Thomas Farynor, who lived and worked on Pudding Lane. One forgotten spark, one untended cinder, and all of London was aflame. The inferno jumped joyously from house to house and shop to shop as though it hadn’t a care in the world except to spread itself as far and wide as wood and nature would allow. For two days the City remained in flames. I remember the charred air, the spitting crackles, the screams. People feared burning to death, y
