LIKE MOST OTHER PEOPLE, Eliza had never in her life been more than a stone’s throw away from an open flame. Wherever she was, there was always something burning: a cooking-fire, a candle, a pipe-bowl of tobacco or bhang, incense, a torch, a lanthorn. These were tame fires. Everyone knew that fire could go wild. Eliza had seen the aftermath of such fires in Constantinople, in the countryside of Hungary, where much had been burned as it was attacked by Ottomans or defended by Christians, and in Bohemia, which was studded with old forts and castles that had been put to the torch during the Thirty Years’ War. But she had never actually seen a fire grow from a tame spark to a feral conflagration until a couple of years ago, in Amsterdam, when a Mobb of Orangist patriots had gathered before the house of a Mr. Sluys, who had lately been exposed as a traitor to the Dutch Republic, and burned the place to the ground. They had done this by hurling torches in through windows. The house had been abandoned a few minutes earlier by Mr. Sluys and his household, who had not had time to board the place up. For several minutes, very little had seemed to happen, and the crowd had only become more agitated—the feeble and steady flickering of the torches, slowly dying on the floors of dark rooms, drove them into a kind of frenzy. But then a sudden sunrise of yellow light shone from an upstairs window, where a curtain or something had caught fire. This had probably saved the lives of several in the Mobb who had been so desperate to see the house come down that they would have jumped in through the shattered windows to attack it with their bare hands. After that, the fire built steadily for a few minutes, spreading from room to room. This was absorbing to watch, but not especially remarkable. It was even tedious, after a while. But at some point the fire had vaulted over some invisible threshold and simply exploded, over the course of a few heartbeats, into a monstrous thing that wore the envelope of the house as a suit of ill-fitting clothes. It sucked in so much air that it howled, and snatched wigs and caps from the heads of bystanders. Burning timbers shot up in the air like meteors. Vortices of white flame formed, fought, joined, and were swallowed. The ground hummed. Rivers of molten lead—for the house was full of it—spilled out onto the street and traced glowing nets in the crevices between the ashlars, fading from yellow to orange to red as they cooled. For a few moments it seemed that the fire might spread to engulf all Amsterdam in another minute, and all of the Dutch Republic the minute after that. But it had been contained between the thick masonry firewalls to either side. Pent up, it was almost more terrible than it would have been free, for all of its intensity was concentrated between those walls, instead of being allowed to spread and dissipate.