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To understand the sheer, combustible absurdity of London in the late summer of 1666, one must first appreciate the state of the English psyche. The nation was exhausted. Having spent the previous decades tearing itself apart in a bloody civil war (where, as we saw in the previous chapter, even mechanical dogs were drafted into the propaganda machine), England had only recently restored its monarchy. King Charles II was on the throne, trying his best to project an image of effortless majesty, but the paint was still fresh and the foundations were shaky. Worse still, the city was only just emerging from the horrific grip of the Great Plague of 1665, an ordeal that had left Londoners paranoid, grieving, and deeply suspicious of their neighbors. It was into this atmosphere of lingering dread and fragile recovery that a modest baker named Thomas Farriner went to bed on the night of Saturday, September 1. Farriner was not a revolutionary, nor was he a foreign spy. He was a simple, hard-working man who operated a bakery on Pudding Lane, a narrow, cobblestone street tucked away near London Bridge. His primary claim to fame was that he served as the official baker to the Royal Navy, turning out dry, durable ship's biscuits designed to survive long voyages. On this particular evening, Farriner had completed his daily work, swept up his workspace, and raked the remaining embers of his great brick oven. Satisfied that the fire was safely extinguished, he climbed the stairs to his living quarters above the shop, where his family and servants were already asleep. It was a routine he had performed thousands of times before. But on this night, a single, stubborn ember refused to die. It lay nestled in the warm ashes, quietly glowing in the dark, waiting for the perfect moment to make history. The Spark on Pudding Lane Sometime around midnight, that solitary ember found its way to a nearby pile of kindling. The wood, dried to a crisp by an unusually hot and arid summer, caught fire instantly. Slowly and silently, the flames crept across the wooden floorboards of the bakery. By two o'clock on Sunday morning, the ground floor of the bakery was a raging furnace. The household was awakened by the choking smell of smoke. Trapped upstairs, Thomas Farriner, his daughter, and a servant realized that the staircase was already engulfed in flames. In a display of desperate agility, they scrambled out of an upper window, clambered across the rooftops of Pudding Lane, and escaped to safety. Unfortunately, their maid was too terrified to make the leap. She remained behind, hesitating at the window, and became the very first victim of what would become known as the Great Fire of London. It is a tragic irony that in a disaster that would destroy the homes of eighty thousand people, the death toll remained remarkably small, yet it began with a single, frightened woman who could not bring herself to walk across a roof. As the flames consumed the bakery, they quickly spilled out into Pudding Lane. Under normal circumstances, a localized fire in London was a common nuisance, easily managed by the local parish watchmen. But the conditions of September 1666 were far from normal. London had suffered a severe drought for nearly ten months. The wooden timbers of the houses, packed tightly together and coated in highly flammable pitch, were as dry as tinder. To make matters worse, Pudding Lane was situated in one of the most crowded, industrialized parts of the city. The neighboring streets were packed with warehouses containing highly combustible