Pepys in the Garden Burying his Cheese

You are digging a shallow grave, the size of a child; your fingers rasp dry earth which clots under your fingernails. No: you have a trowel. A shovel? You are a manservant, a boy, digging in the sweltering darkness, the smoke flooding your eyes and making you cough in a way which hurts. Your hands are accustomed to labour and do not bleed.

Perhaps not. Your hands are soft: a clerk’s; they blister and swell; bubbles of fluid fill on your palms and burst; the sweat stings the raw pink patches where the handle of the shovel has rubbed the skin away. You are frightened. Your wife watches from the window with one hand pressed to her mouth; perhaps she is praying. She does not move when you straighten up, digging your knuckles into the small of your back, aching, and meet her eyes through the heat-rippled glass. Where is the boy? Packing, maybe. In your chamber, preparing your trunk, piling shirts and breeches haphazardly on the bed, mixing yours with your wife’s (you will give him a beating for this later); or else taking time his time, folding each neatly so the sleeves meet, in half and half again with hands which do not shake, too young to understand but old enough to be afraid. He cracks the window to see you at work in the garden and the heat hits him like an oven. Does he hate you? He feels the rod on his buttocks; the weals there which will be raised again, in the country, when it is over. He loves you, perhaps.

You don’t hear the window opening, or see his white face: you are bent over the shovel, the sweat running down, digging.

You will remember this, later. You will wake up in the night, in soaked linen, shivering, with an inferno ripping across the skyline of your dreams. You will wake your wife, and she will ask what you were dreaming about; you tell her fire, and she asks if you mean Hell. You say nothing. She falls asleep again, and you lie awake, staring at the bulge of the canopy above you, rising and falling like breath in the dark. In the morning, you will take physic for your fever, and the cold sweat which has not receded with the day. You have already forgotten the dream.

You dig and dig. It is only a small hole, but the earth is baked hard as a biscuit; the blade of your shovel scrapes rock, again and again, until your arms are water. Your wife has gone from the window. You have not thought about the boy or his sister–you have forgotten he has a sister–since you started digging.

You kneel and brush, pointlessly, some clots of earth from the pit. The sky is hot and red, glowing. There is an acrid stink of burning. The noise of the fire is dreadful. No: it is quite silent, apart from the movement in the street, beyond the wall; human sounds of terror and panic, horses screaming, wheels on cobblestones, someone crying somewhere–a child, maybe. Are you listening? You are kneeling beside the hole. There is a wax-wrapped package on the ground beside you, which you pick up: it is slippery in your hands, from the sweat and blood.

You place it in the pit. It looks ridiculous, absurd. You start to sweep the dirt over it to avoid thinking about what you are doing, which does not work. You are frightened; you feel sick. You cough and spit dark phlegm, from the smoke. The package disappears by degrees into the earth. Tomorrow you will be far away. It will take a week for the blisters on your palms to heal. You will have callouses until November.