Chapter 25
Edward discovered the truth by smell before he saw it. The ruined east wing had its own stench, wet ash, charred plaster, that sour tang of soaked tapestries. He had been breathing it all afternoon, shoulders burning from heaving beams with Alistair and the men.
When he stepped through the jagged archway toward what had been the stables, a different note cut through the smoke.
Oil. Not the faint, honest smell of harness grease, nor the heavier reek of lamp oil in a sconce.
This was sharper. Wrong. And beneath it, something else.
A sort of scorched slickness his mind, unhelpfully, supplied a memory for at once.
The charred belly of a ship’s hull, where tar and pitch had burned hot and hard to keep a captured vessel from ever bearing enemy colors.
He stopped just inside the stable doorway, or what remained of it, and let his eyes adjust. The roof here was entirely gone.
Cold, colorless sky showed through a lace of blackened rafters.
Ash drifted in what little wind reached the interior, settling on the wreckage of stalls like grey snow.
The pattern of the burn was clear, once he knew how to look.
The worst of it was low. Not from some spark catching high and racing along rafters, but from the ground up.
The wooden stall fronts nearest the center of the stable were eaten almost completely away, the lower half blackened and bubbled as if something had pooled and then ignited.
Further along, the charring climbed in a V-shape along the wall, a classic run of flame seeking air. He had seen the like before on the Argus, when boarding scuttled prizes. Ships whose captains had set light to them rather than let them fall into enemy hands.
He stepped forward, boots crunching on brittle charcoal. Here and there the damp earth squelched underfoot. The rain since the fire had done its slow work, but not enough to wash away everything.
Near the center of the stable he crouched, resting his fingertips lightly on the ground. The soil was dark and tacky. When he lifted his hand, it glistened faintly. He rubbed finger and thumb together. The residue was sticky even now, despite the water. Oil. A lot of it. Thrown or poured.
He straightened slowly, taking in the stalls again with this new knowledge overlaying the wreckage.
Someone had wanted this to go fast. The horses’ hoofprints were everywhere in the churned yard outside.
But there was a clear direction. They had been turned loose and had fled the fire in a herd.
He turned as footsteps crunched behind him.
Isla hovered in the gap where the stable doors had been, skirts greyed with ash, hair pulled back loosely from a face that looked drawn and smudged. She had shed her travelling cloak somewhere, the smoke had kissed the sleeves of her gown instead.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
He did not soften it. She had seen enough today without lies.
“Bad,” he said. “The structure might be salvaged, with work. The fittings are gone.”
“The horses?” Her voice tightened.
He shook his head. “No sign of them. From the tracks, they broke out and ran. They’re not lying under this.”
She exhaled shakily, some tension easing. “Then we can find them.”
He nodded once, then gestured to the nearest stall. “Before we go chasing ghosts, I need to show you something.”
She came inside, picking her way carefully through the debris.
He watched her, the way she held herself.
The first sight of Strathmore’s wounds had struck her hard; he had seen it on her face as they crested the rise.
But she had not collapsed. She had set her jaw, walked into the ruin, and gone looking for people to help.
That, more than anything, had put the last axe to the rotten beam of doubt in his mind.
“This,” he said, crouching again, “is not an accidental fire.”
She frowned, sinking down beside him without regard for her skirts. “What do you mean?”
He held out his hand, the black smear visible on his fingertips.
“Oil,” he said. “Too much of it. In the wrong place.”
Her brows drew together. “There are lamps in the stable. And … and they grease the harnesses, surely …”
“Yes,” he said. “But not on the earth between stalls. And not so much that the ground holds it even after rain.”
She stood, turning slowly to look at the line of stalls, the splintered beams.
“Look here,” he went on, pointing. “The fire took hardest low down. It climbed. If a lantern had fallen from a hook or a candle tipped, you would see an arc of burning from the point of origin. This …” he indicated the char at the base of the nearest stall front, “…started on the floor. And not in just one place. There are at least three separate patches where oil was poured.”
She stared at him. “You are certain.”
“Yes,” he said. “I have seen men do this to ships. Better to burn them than let the enemy take them. The pattern is the same.”
“For ships,” she said faintly. “Not … homes.”
“Yes,” he said again. “Homes, too. If someone wished them gone quickly.”
She looked at the blackened wood as if it might leap up and accuse her.
“Edward,” she said, after a long moment. “What are you saying?”
He did not look away. “I am saying this was set deliberately.”
Her throat worked. “By whom?”
“I do not know,” he said. “Yet.”
Her gaze went instinctively toward the house. To the broken-winged silhouette of Strathmore, to the figures moving in and out of the ruined hall.
“Alistair,” she whispered.
He heard the torn note in her voice and cursed himself inwardly for saying nothing and thus letting her mind leap first to blood.
“I have not said that,” he said at once. “Listen to me.”
She turned back to him, eyes bright in the shadow of the ruined stable.
“I watched you,” he said quietly, “when we came over that hill. I have watched you all afternoon. No one grieves like that for something they meant to see burn.”
She swallowed.
“I know this,” he went on. “I am sure of you.”
She blinked, as if the words were unexpected.
“But I cannot say the same for your brother,” he added, because honesty between them meant all of it, not just the parts that comforted.
Her face tightened. “You think Alistair would set his own house on fire to … what? … get money from you? Force your hand? Extort funds for rebuilding?”
He held her gaze. “I think your brother is desperate. I have seen his accounts. I have watched him drink. I have heard rumors in London that made even other gamblers uneasy. Desperate men do things they would once have called unthinkable.”
She looked back at the charred stalls, teeth pressing into her lower lip.
“Would Alistair risk the staff?” she demanded. “Macrae? The stable boys? Children? He would not.”
“He may have believed he had time,” Edward said. “That he could cry alarm, get people out. Fires are treacherous. They spread faster than a man’s calculations.”
“It is what Glenmore would say,” she said bitterly. “Or your mother.”
“My mother would say far worse,” he said.
She shook her head, taking a step away as if the thought itself smelled foul.
“I do not want to believe it,” she said. “I cannot bear it if it is true. He is foolish. Vain. Short-sighted. But …” She hesitated, then asked, low, “Do you still believe I am in league with him?”
The question was a blade. He deserved the cut.
“No,” he said, with more force than he had used for anything all day. “No, Isla.”
He closed the distance between them, heedless of ash on his boots, and took her face between his hands, soot and all.
“I believed it once,” he said. “When all I had were Deverell’s words and my own fear. I do not now. You could set this whole damned county alight and I would still know the grief on your face was real.”
Her eyes searched his. Whatever she found there seemed to steady her.
“Good,” she whispered. “Because if you had said yes, I might have pushed you into the trough.”
He huffed a breath that might almost have been a laugh.
Ash dusted her cheekbones, a streak of soot ran along the line of her jaw where some beam had brushed against her.
She looked like some warrior stepped out of a ballad, armor smoked but unbroken.
He kissed her anyway. There, in the gutted stable, with the charred bones of stalls around them, he bent and pressed his mouth to hers.
She tasted of smoke and salt and stubbornness.
Her hands, roughened by the day’s work, slid up to his shoulders and clenched, pulling him closer.
For a heartbeat the ruins fell away, there was only the warmth of her, the answering heat in him, the knowledge that they stood together in the wreckage and were not yet broken.
When they parted, their foreheads rested together. His breath came a little short, hers ghosted warm against his lips.
“We will find another explanation,” she said, as if willing it into being. “There must be one.”
“We will look,” he said. “We will ask questions. We will not assume.”
Her hand dropped from his shoulder, curled into a fist. “First, I want my horses.”
He smiled faintly. “I thought you might.”
She stepped back, gathering herself. “They got out. Their tracks were everywhere. They will not have gone far.”
He looked toward the yard, where the muddle of hoofprints led out through the gate and away.
“Very well,” he said. “Let us see where panicked Strathmore horses run.”
They followed the trail at a canter. The marks led over low stone walls, through a gap in a hedge, across a stream where the water had muddied the prints but not erased them completely.
To Edward’s surprise, the trail did not loop back toward Strathmore’s own high pastures, as he might have expected if the horses had simply bolted in panic. It angled north-east.
Isla noticed too. “They are going toward the Blackwood border.”
“Yes,” he said.