Gibbous House 83

Later that evening, in possession of the Earl's bill, we wound the enterprise up in style. Several colleagues of the 'maid's' more customary place of employment were enjoined to attend an evening of libation and dancing. Crabbitt disported himself shamefully with several of these. Arabella invited some blades of her acquaintance, who, naturally, brought along acolytes and parasites in equal measure. Only Whitscrape and I demurred the invitation of friends to celebrate the success of our venture: the lawyer, I presumed, because he saw no profit in it, and I, because there were none to whom I cared to extend an invitation.
The most satisfactory outcome of the evening – though it ended the following morning – was the despoliation of the house in Cadogan Square; it filled my soul to know that I had extended a little more in the way of education to the owner of so many blank-paged books.

Less satisfactory was the scene in East Cheap. The house in which, prior to the gulling of the Earl, Arabella, the child and I had taken the attic rooms, was a blackened gap between the grey teeth of the rest of the terrace. It was smoking still. Several bare-chested men, quite blackened by the smoke, stood exhausted in front of the ashes. There had been no hope, of course, of any timely extinguishing of the inferno. These men were neighbours and relatives of those who had undoubtedly perished. The London Fire Engine Establishment did not venture into East Cheap: for who there would – or could- pay premiums on the least expensive of policies available from such as the East London Fire Insurance and Mutual? Therefore neither the Mutual, nor the the Establishment, had any interest in matters of fire in East Cheap.

Arabella was already pale, fatigued by the attentions of several of her invited blades and not a few of their coterie. She stood motionless before the pyre. I thought she looked at once beautiful and terrifying. Caring not for her clothes or shoes, she ran into the pile of ashes and fell to her hands and knees, scrabbling in the ash. By outrageous fortune her hand clasped around a blackened metal object just as two of the brawny fellows seized her and bore her away. The burns were not serious, merely a reddening of the hands, mostly caused by the heat from her own lucifer box, an item perhaps not suited to the role of demure young lady and, consequent on this, left this past few weeks in the attic rooms with her child -and an equally dead older woman, whose name I do not remember.

I held Arabella close although the stench of burning and smoke was overwhelming...

Indeed, I must surely have been dreaming on the terrace of Gibbous House, since I awoke with a start; a womanish scream - evidently produced by Edgar Allan - pierced the silence. I supposed the scream might either have been as a result of the flames coming from his frock coat, or of Miss Pardoner's stalwart efforts at extinguishing them by beating at them with a no longer white cloth, late of the table's surface.