He worked her slipper carefully over her foot and placed it gently on the floor. He stoked the fire and added more wood, then went to the bedroom where he pissed into the chamber pot. He lifted a hand-stitched quilt from the bed and carried it back to the hearth where he lay down beside his wife’s chair and fell asleep.
At half past three that morning, the twenty-first of November, the watch on one of His Majesty’s ships in St. John’s harbour observed long curtains of flame billowing through the windows of a property owned by Messrs. Huie & Reed on Water Street, near Adelaide. The ship’s cannon was fired to alert the town and in the early morning stillness the report echoed back and forth between the surrounding hills, throwing the entire village into a bleary state of confusion and panic, as if the settlement were suddenly under siege. Thousands of people rushed from their houses into the winter night, barefoot and wearing only their nightshirts, many of them carrying crying children and infants into the bitter cold.
There was no wind, but the fire travelled quickly through the closely packed rows of wooden buildings and stores of dry-goods. By the time Buchan reached Water Street, everything east of Adelaide to the boundary of the previous fire was burning and beyond help. He marshalled a group of marines and fishermen and led them west beyond Huie & Reed’s premises. The few remaining fish flakes over the path he ordered torn down. On the roofs of the buildings along the street men had climbed ladders to lay wet blankets or carpets on the shingles. They scrambled back and forth with brooms to sweep away the drifting flankers as they pitched on the roofs. They had no chance, Buchan could see, of saving their homes and businesses. What was needed was a firebreak, an open space the fire wouldn’t be able to cross on a night without wind.
He ordered marines into two houses facing each other across the narrow street, telling them to clear the rooms of anyone still inside. Men with axes and saws severed the main wooden support beams of the building on the south side of the street and a Blue Jacket was sent up a ladder with a hawser, which he secured to the opposite eave. A crowd of several hundred had gathered by then and Buchan ordered as many men as could get a hand in to stand along the free end of the hawser. They lined diagonally down Water Street, almost a hundred strong. Buchan shouted against the roar of the approaching fire as the men came back on the rope. The two-storey structure creaked, tilted sideways like a drunk man trying to rise from a chair, then stumbled into the street, collapsing in a cloud of dust. There was a cheer from the men on the line and from the people watching along the street.
Before the dust had settled a woman came at Buchan, using both her fists to pummel his chest and slap at his face. She was still in her nightclothes, her head covered with a nightcap. A marine ran up behind her and grabbed at her arms. She was yelling incomprehensibly as she struck Buchan and it took several minutes to restrain her. She looked up at the officer from the ground where the marine sat beneath her, pinning her arms to her side. “That was my house, you bastard,” she shouted. “That was my house.”
“I tried to keep hold of her, sir,” the marine explained. “She’s strong as a mule.”
“Get her out of here,” Buchan said.
The hawser was already attached to the second residence and the men were lined along the rope, waiting for the order to heave. The heat of the fire was building in the street behind them, the noise too loud to be heard over. Buchan took a handkerchief from his pocket and held it in the air as if to signal the start of a race. Three times he raised and lowered it as the volunteers leaned back against the weight of the rope, but the house did not budge. More men came forward to grab the hawser after each failure.
“Take it down,” Buchan shouted uselessly. “Take it down!”
The sound of voices reached him then, men on the line chanting a heave-up song from the docks, the words drifting beneath the fire’s racket like smoke. Haul on the bowline, the bugger must come this time, haul on the bowline, haul, boys, haul, the refrain growing stronger as the spectators on the street joined in. When the building suddenly crumpled and fell, men tumbled backwards over each other along the hawser. Another cheer went up as they got back to their feet and slapped the shoulders of those beside them. Buchan moved among the men directing the marines to begin clearing the debris from the lots. It was several minutes before he reached a dark knot huddled over a figure still lying in the street. A large bearded man wearing a patch over his right eye was cradling the head of the fallen man in his lap. He looked up as Buchan pushed near.
“Get him out of the street,” Buchan shouted.
The man with the eye patch shook his head. He said, “He’s gone, sir.”