The fire of London next engaged her attention. To myself it is the least successful of the models, although I confess to a childish pleasure in watching old St. Paul's and its neighbourhood all aglow, like one of those pictures one sees in the heart of a burning log. I thought, as I looked at it, of the words of a writer of the times, quoted by Walter Thornbury. "It was in the depth and the dead of the night," says the Rev. Samuel Vincent, "when most doors and senses were lockt up in the city, that the fire doth break forth and appear abroad." This is just the thing one would expect of those "penny dreadful" days, and the progress of the ghastly monster is described with a living terror as it "rusheth down the hill (Fish Street Hill) towards the bridge, crosseth Thames Street, invadeth Magnus Church at the bridge foot ... marcheth back towards the city again, and runs along with great noise and violence through Thames Street westward.... Rattle, rattle, rattle, was the noise which the fire struck upon the ear round about, as if there had been a thousand iron chariots beating upon the stones.... You might see in some places whole streets at once in flames, that issued forth as if they had been so many great forges from the opposite windows, which, folding together, were united in one great flame throughout the whole street; and then you might see the houses tumble, tumble, tumble from one end of the street to the other with a great crash, leaving the foundations open to the view of the heavens."
There was nothing half-hearted in the thrills provided for Londoners in those days, and the quaint little toy behind the plate glass revives a ghostly repetition of them to an imaginative spectator. Mrs. D. said she hadn't seen "anythink so pretty for a long time," and I left her glued to the spot while I looked at Frost Fair on the Thames, with the Globe Theatre behind, and sought in vain to find any of to-day in the models of old Cheapside and Charing Cross.
I got Mrs. D. away from the Great Fire with a promise of prison cells and relics of Newgate, and I must admit to a sensation myself when face to face with the door of the condemned cell of Newgate Prison. This particular corner of the Museum makes a bid for popularity with those with a taste for horrors. The prison cells from Neptune Street, in which debtors were confined for indefinite periods for small debts, are an example of old London's cruelty to those of its unfortunate citizens who couldn't pay their way. "Sly House," as the place was called, because of the many who were seen to enter it and never seen to leave it, must have been an object of terror to the impecunious. "Sly House" possessed a subterranean passage to the Tower and the docks, and prisoners were taken thence and embarked on the convict ship Success. The wooden walls are scored with the names of some of those wretched human beings who passed months and years in this living tomb. Apparently, they were not all treated as is the man who lies chained from both wrists in the outer cell. He could not have found temporary diversion from his misery in such a task, but this other sitting at a table in the inner cell might answer to one of those names. It is rather difficult to decipher them in the dim light of the lantern which hangs in a corner of the cell, and as I stooped forward my foot inadvertently came in contact with the foot of the frowsy prisoner seated at the table. For an instant I was conscious of an odd sensation of something like fear: not fear of the poor lay figure, but fear of those dark days which, in some curious fashion, the momentary contact had brought quite close. It was as if I had stroked a stuffed tiger and it had suddenly snarled and showed its teeth! Quite absurd, of course; a touch of Frankenstein, born of my ambition to make the dry bones live.
There is a portrait sketch of Jack Sheppard by Sir James Thornhill in the adjoining room. The audacious young rascal has a curious face in which there is intellect, even soul, and an animal sort of alertness, and the account of his daring escape from Newgate, where he was loaded with irons and chained to a staple in the floor, reads like a page from Dumas. He had, too, the sort of luck that attends heroes in fiction when he found that small nail with which he freed his chain from the floor staple. This done he got up the chimney, broke into a room over the chapel with the aid of another large nail, which was provided by Providence for the purpose, and with the help of an iron spike from the chapel door, hacked a hole in the wall, through which he climbed on to the leads. One holds one's breath when, these obstacles surmounted and liberty almost within his grasp, Jack is confronted with the need of a rope, and goes back to his cell by the way he had come to fetch his blanket! It is not only the courage, but the optimism of the act which strikes one, an optimism which was justified. He got the blanket, made the rope, and with its aid descended to the roof of a turner who lived in a house adjoining the prison. One must bear in mind, too, that Jack was still handicapped by his irons! Picture him, having effected an entrance into the turner's house by means of a garret window, slinking down the stairs, past closed doors which might open any moment to wreck his project at the moment of consummation.
According to that same account of his escape, a woman heard the chink of his irons as he passed one of those doors, and thought it was the cat! Maybe she was sitting by the fire nursing her baby, or reading some tale of adventure, little dreaming that as exciting a story as any in fiction was being enacted at her elbow.
One hears with regret that Jack's liberty was short-lived. Not a week had passed before he was at his old game of burglary, and being captured whilst drunk was once more imprisoned in Newgate, only to leave it this time to be hanged at Tyburn.
Whilst I sought to read the riddle of the young reprobate's strange physiognomy, Mrs. Darling was browsing with dark satisfaction amongst the murder trials and executions. There she stood, spectacles on the tip of her nose, hat perched at a jaunty angle, her lips forming the words of the "Sorrowful Lamentation and last Farewell to the world of four robbers," as she read:—
Four hopeless youth this day I tell
In Newgate dark and drear.
O, hear their last and sad farewell
To part this world of care.
On Tuesday next, that awful day
Which fast approaches nigh,
All in their prime of youthful years
They must prepare to die.
"Ain't it 'eart renderin'!" she exclaimed, as I looked over her shoulder. "I reckon the man who said, 'Wot's got over the devil's back is spent under 'is belly,' wasn't very far wrong neither."
Upstairs we came to a halt before the glass case in which Queen Victoria's historic dresses are placed, beginning with the wedding dress, and continuing with the gowns the Queen had worn at great functions during those first years of her marriage. I invariably spend a few meditative moments before the yellowed satin wedding dress and the white silk which the bride had worn at dinner on that last day of spinsterhood.