All that remained was a scrap of lace and a single book from the library.

Jennet looked at the two items in her hands. Perhaps she undervalued them with her words. After all, that “scrap” was a piece of precious Dutch lace created by her mother when she was a young girl in Bruges; after marrying the Englishman Tobias Mulley, despite her family’s disapproval, and coming to live in London, it was the same lace she tied around the doorknob of the house on Aldersgate Street to announce Jennet’s birth.

And that book Jennet scrambled to save before the ceiling beams of the library collapsed to crush her in their flaming embrace was the family Bible, containing the births, marriages, and deaths of the entire Mulley family – the Reede family, as was, before a royal decree granted the Mulley lands fifty years back, along with a higher status, a larger income, and the new name. No parish record could ever duplicate the valuable information contained within the Bible’s yellowed vellum pages, let alone the memories attached to the buttery-soft leather binding or worn gilt lettering.

Jennet hugged the massive book to her chest as she eyed the burnt-out hulk before her, the charred timbers and soot-stained bricks all that remained of her childhood home. So much had been lost, and not just those physical items she’d been unable to rescue: the family silverware with its well-worn horn handles, including a prized set of forks; the missal, said to have been given to a Reede ancestress by Blanche of Navarre personally, with its carved and gilded wooded cover, saved from the Catholic purge of the previous century and the fires of zealotry, only to be destroyed by a fire of secularity; the tapestry in the long gallery that once graced the reception room of a bishop’s palace before it was “liberated” during the Civil War, woven of fine, brightly-coloured wool nearly three hundred years ago in Arras, France. But it was the loss of the most recent family heirloom, a family portrait painted by the Flemish painter Jan Cossiers ten years back, which pained Jennet most fiercely. A student of Cornelis de Vos and a master in his own right, Cossiers was also a family friend of Jennet’s mother. So when Cossiers was briefly in London, he remembered his old neighbour Josyna Houfnaghele and graciously consented to paint a portrait of her with her husband and eight-year-old daughter. That portrait had been the only visual reminder of her parents . . . gone now, gone up in smoke and flames, soot and ashes.

Jennet edged closer to the crumbling brick wall, sidling around the clumps of men and women standing in the street. I wonder if we all wear the same expressions of shock and uncertainty, Jennet asked herself. For her part, it was all she could do to keep herself from crying. With the loss of the house, Jennet had truly lost everything. She had nowhere to live and nowhere to go. Josyna’s death shortly after the creation of that family portrait had fractured Tobias’s mind, and as he withdrew into himself, he turned over the care of his vast mercantile business interests to a board of trustees. As well as the care of his only surviving child, Jennet discovered six months later when the three doctors sent by those trustees took her father away to Bedlam and installed a sour-faced governess in his place, over Jennet’s ineffective protests, who most likely reported to the trustees on the girl’s every move.

Her stomach soured with nausea and she stumbled slightly as the blood drained from her head. It was the smell, she decided, the acrid, smokey, muddy smell which clogged the nostrils and stuck to the roof of the mouth making the situation even worse. Thanks to the inefficiency of the firefighters, more water had been tossed onto the ground than onto the buildings; Jennet’s skirt was thick with at least four inches of mud, the same filth that squelched between her toes as it oozed in between the seams of her leather shoes and crawled up her woolen stockings. Feet of clay never felt so real or so heavy. Both body and spirit of Jennet’s felt heavily weighed down at that moment.

Startled out of her daze, she felt a body shove her violently to the side just as part of the front wall from her former home gave way, tumbling to the sodden ground with a cracking groan. She was saved from following the weakened bricks by a strong hand grasping her upper arm.

“You ought not to be here,” the arm’s owner said in a stern voice.

“This is my home,” Jennet said tartly, turning to glare at her ostensible rescuer.

The man glanced at the disintegrated pile of bricks and wood. “Your home no longer, I think.”

His tone of casual disdain caused Jennet’s blood to boil, but before she could form a cutting reply, the well-dressed man continued: “Do I have the pleasure of addressing mistress Jennet Mulley, daughter of Tobias Mulley, formerly of Aldersgate Street?”

Jennet’s brow creased. There was something in his phrasing that sat uneasily with her. Tugging her arm from the man’s grasp, a position she’d been struggling to escape since the moment his hand first made contact, she stepped back slightly. “I am that Jennet Mulley. And you are, Sir?”

Doffing his feathered wide-brimmed hat, he made a leg, causing her to bounce a small curtsy in automatic response. “My name is Sir Godfrey Keayne. I fear I have more bad news to deliver, and my apologies for the timing, but there was no helping it: your father has died in Bedlam this day a week ago. As a member of your father’s board of trustees and his head legal counsel, I have spent this time putting the Mulley estate in order and settling the contents of his will. Do not fear, his burial has been taken care of with all due respect. One of his quests was for you and I to marry since there is no other immediate family to whom you can turn for assistance. Since you are of age, there is no impediment preventing us from marrying as soon as your period of mourning has ended.”

Jennet’s head swam as a surge of bile crept up her throat. None of what this terrible man had just told her made any sense. Her father, dead? And him buried, hurried into the ground before she’d had time to mourn? God’s teeth! Before she’d even been told! And to hear that her father had sold her off to be married to a total stranger against her will, even against her knowledge?

She panted, panic and rage warring within her. She wanted to beat his velvet-clad form, to tear that smug smirk from his face. “This is-What you say is impossible! My father would never consent to these actions!”

“Your father would do what is in your best interests. You have been given too much free rein, to the detriment of your character. Mrs. Coxery was correct in her judgment, referring to you as a ‘hoyden’. These are faults I will remedy once we are married.”

Mrs. Coxery. That ill-natured creature had been a spy. She shook her head and seemed unable to stop. Those words – “once we are married” – echoed in Jennet’s ears until she wondered if she might run mad. Perhaps she, too, would end up in Bedlam. She watched as if from a great distance as Godfrey reached out to grab her again. NO!

“No!” With a squelching thump, Jennet brought her foot down with all her strength onto Godfrey’s shiny, buckled boot. As he howled in pain, she turned and ran, hoping Godfrey was as unfamiliar with these streets as she was as intimate.

Dodging stricken homeowners come back to inspect their losses, the blatantly curious who roamed the streets as though the fire-gutted city was a giant amusement park, and those enterprising businessmen and women who had set up stalls selling food and goods, at outrageously inflated prices, to the masses, Jennet wove through the streets, her memories coming up against the horrific fire damage. Entire neighbourhoods were gone, gutted, left smoking wrecks. Streets that were once flowing thoroughfares were no more, blocked in their entirety by the buildings that had been pulled down in order to “save” them.

Yet even as she ran, Jennet asked herself, where could she go? She had nowhere to go. There was a house somewhere to the west, attached to the Mulley lands on the Welsh border, Shropshire, she thought. But Jennet had never been there and would have no idea where to begin to look for it. Besides, undoubtedly Sir Godfrey Keayne would track her down and reclaim her; he had the appearance of a man who did not give up once presented with such an easily-won prize.

Gasping and mud-spattered, the weighty Bible nearly tearing her arms from their sockets, Jennet was quickly reaching the limits of her endurance as well as her knowledge of street patterns. Resting her back against the wall of an intact alley, she swore she could feel Sir Godfrey breathing down her neck, hear the hooves of his horse – a man like that always had a horse – galloping up to where she stood to pull her bodily into the saddle. Perhaps it was the terror, perhaps it was the last gift from her departed father, but an epiphany struck, she knew how to escape. Tamping down the gleeful laugh threatening to erupt, she glanced around to make sure her surroundings were clear. Once more, she took off running, this time a clear destination in sight.

Through a great deal of silvery-tongued convincing on her part, as well as the passing of a few precious coins from a hidden pocket – monies she’d kept secret from the insidious Mrs. Coxery – Jennet was granted the use of a clerk’s desk at her father’s bank. Briefly, she scrawled a note, gifting the Bible to the next Mulley who made petition for it and could prove lineage, but until that day, that it be held by the bank in trust. Jennet then opened the book and flipped through the Bible’s crackling pages until she came to the family tree. Picking up the quill, to her father’s name she added ‘Died this day, 30 October, 1666’, turning quickly before the tear trembling at her lashes could fall and smudge the ink. But she was not finished. Muttering a whispered prayer at the blasphemy she was about to undertake, she took up more ink and wrote underneath her name, ‘Died this day, 5 September, 1666, in the fire’. So what if Sir Godfrey had seen her and spoken to her? Let him contest that fact after what she planned to do next. Perhaps he would be the one to next see the interiors of Bedlam.

Presenting the Bible and note to the clerk with a plea that they both reach their destination, one John Dobeson, Esq., Jennet fled before her sobs created more questions and led Sir Godfrey straight to her. In Peticote Lane, her bargaining skills once again brought her success. Jennet was able to barter her corset and petticoat, the heavy, silver- and gold-braid embroidery saved from the mud by the front edges of her skirt which had stayed loose and unpinned during the excitement of the morning, for a pair of boy’s breeches and doublet, cap, and a new, sturdier, pair of shoes. Jennet thanked God she’d worn a pair of bodies this morning: retying the short jacket allowed it to pass for a waistcoat underneath the loose doublet and the full skirt she simply wrapped around her thighs before easing into the unfamiliar breeches. The sensation of unskirted legs made her feel naked and uncomfortable, but she pressed on, determined to follow her new destiny. Borrowing the shocked shopwoman’s scissors, Jennet moved to one of the windows and, with a deep breath, made three decisive snips. At her feet lay 18 inches of brunette locks and staring back from the glass was a person Jennet didn’t recognise. Exactly what she desired. She smiled at the woman, who backed away as though Jennet were dangerous. Which perhaps she was.

Two days later, at the Portsmouth dockyard, a bedraggled youth named John Reed signed on as ship’s boy on a vessel from the East India Company. As the ship pulled away from England’s shores, the last remnant of Jennet Mulley was also left behind when one of the crew discovered the strange sight of a voluminous white skirt floating atop the water’s surface. Believing it to be an hallucination, he declined to point out the apparition to his fellow mates. Instead, he rid himself of his nervousness by bellowing at the skinny ship’s boy standing by the railing with a faint smile on his face.