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the rest of my life, and since she was an island, some amount of sea travel would be required to escape her yet again.
    Though it was amusing and comfortable to hear and speak English again, England was much as I had remembered: cold and wet. The sight of London sank my spirits even further. As I traveled, I had heard that much of London burned on September second: which had been a mere week before I departed Florence, even with the difference in calendars.
    Hearing and seeing are two very different things, though; and I was absolutely stunned at the devastation still in evidence when I arrived almost three months after the event.
    Acres and acres of the city were missing, the buildings reduced to heaps of rubble. I almost expected them to be still smoldering; but no, we were well past that. Despite the missing buildings, or perhaps because of them, the streets were filled with activity. Wagons rumbled by, loaded with debris to be removed, while others arrived with building supplies. Not everything was being replaced immediately, but the sound of saws and hammers was an omnipresent din muffled by the low clouds.
    I wondered how the people who had lost everything were getting on.
    I doubted the King had opened the treasury to feed and house them all.
    Thankfully fewer had been displaced than might have been, due to the plague having paid England a visit this year. The wealthy had escaped the city to avoid the Black Death, and the poor had been decimated by the reaper well before the fire.
    All in all, I saw little of the Restoration flowering of London that others had told me of. It was as drab and dreary as I had left it during the Reformation.
    I had known this great city. Though I had still been little more than a youth, I had frequented London prior to my departure from England, as our family kept a house there and Shane and I had been bored boys with money and arrogance in abundance. We had bemoaned Cromwell’s refusal to allow truly amusing pursuits in the city, such as theater and galleries. Well, at least I had. Shane could not have cared less for those things. He enjoyed gambling and whoring far more than art. Still, even without advertised sources for boyish amusements, we had oft managed to find enough trouble and debauchery to keep ourselves entertained.
    I bought a bay mare of a pleasant disposition and, after wandering a bit, managed to locate the place where I believed our family’s townhouse had stood. Without any remembered landmarks, it took me a good deal of time to locate the street and block. The three-story building was gone, leaving nothing but a rectangle of bricks and foundation stones and the bases of the chimneys. Apparently my father had not yet chosen to rebuild.
    I wondered at that. I could not remember when the House of Lords met and when he would need to stay in town. I could not remember a good many things of that nature. I had never been interested enough in them to commit them to memory.
    I wondered if they were well, my father, mother, and two sisters.
    Had they fallen to the plague? I had written my uncle on occasion, and four times his letters had found me during my travels. The last one had been over a year ago. He had said they were well then, but regarding the devastation I rode through now, I realized how very long ago that was.
    The long road across the Alps and France had awarded me ample time to wonder what I would find here, and what my reception might be.
    My sisters would be nineteen and seventeen years of age. I was not sure of my father’s exact date of birth, but I thought he might be fifty-two. I recalled that he had remarked once that he had been twenty-six, the age I was now, when I was born. That in itself was a disturbing thought. In my mind, he was an old man now, yet what did that make me? I felt I had not aged much at all, even though I knew ten years had passed.
    My second cousin, Jacob Shane, would be twenty-seven now. I could not envision him as such. To me, he