Chapter 26
“Get up!”
It was a shout, coming from far away, but there was nothing distant about the strong arms lifting her, first to semi-standing
and then off her feet completely.
“Hang on,” came the voice again. “Don’t let go. Christ...”
Every breath was a cough now, for both of them, and Jules’s head was spinning as she followed his instruction to wrap her
arms around his neck and hold on. It was too difficult to keep her smarting eyes open, so she closed them, feeling safe. If
she and Roman didn’t make it out of the building, at least they were together. She was content.
They were out in the stairwell now. The smoke was lighter here, swirling as a blessed draft of fresh air was blowing in through
the open fire door and up the stairwell as if it were a chimney.
“Can you stand?” he rasped as they burst out into the fresh night air. Jules had never been so grateful to see the stars.
“I’m fine,” she told him, as her legs took her weight gingerly. She swayed, and his arm wrapped tight around her again.
“Okay now?”
She nodded, wiping her streaming eyes with the back of her hand and trying to force some air into her lungs against the constriction of her chest. Her chest ached as though she were drowning in the tar of a thousand cigarettes.
“Bloody hell,” came a rough Devon accent. “Were you two in there?”
Jules and Roman turned to the fireman and nodded apologetically.
“Any more?”
Roman shook his head. “Only this idiot,” he told him as the unlikely trio walked through the passage to the front of the shop,
where a small crowd had congregated and was being kept back by several burly firemen.
“Are you sure ?” the fireman went on. “It’s important.”
“I’m completely sure,” said Roman firmly. “I checked and locked the building myself less than an hour ago.”
“That’s good, cos I’m not liking the idea of sending any of my lot in there,” remarked the fireman. “You the owner?”
Roman nodded.
“The building’s a goner, I’m afraid,” the fireman went on. “The best we can do is try to stop the spread now.”
Roman put his thumb up, temporarily unable to speak as a coughing fit convulsed him. When he was able to catch his breath,
he turned his attention to Jules. “You bloody idiot,” he yelled. “What the hell do you think you were doing?”
Luckily for her, the shouting brought on more coughing, making a reply unnecessary.
They stood in front of the plate glass window, the inferno within lighting Roman’s soot-streaked face as he glared furiously at her.
The fireman was right. The destruction was total.
Books burned well, it turned out. Jules could see the sweeping oak staircase, now nothing more than a skeleton of glowing embers and blackened timber.
She could feel the heat of the flames scorching the side of her face as she stood, stunned, in her thin pajamas.
The firemen were training their hoses on the roof now, trying to prevent the flames skipping to the building next door.
Gazing greedily at the man she loved, as he glared back at her, a hacking cough making his eyes stream nearly as much as hers
were, Jules felt incredibly alive. Wired. She could feel the ache of the cold pavement on her bare feet, the searing heat
radiating through the window from the fire beyond it; she could hear the shouts of the firemen, the clanking of chains...
and then a sheering, cracking, pinging sound like twigs snapping, gathering in volume, then a bellow: “Stand clear!”
It must have been only microseconds, but, as if in slow motion, Roman’s arms went around her, and he spun her around, throwing
her to the ground. He landed heavily on top of her, forcing the last of the air from her lungs as a whoosh of heat and shards
of glass blew toward them like a lethal hurricane. She put her hand up to her cheek, and it came away with blood on it. She
looked at it blankly and then turned her head to meet Roman’s gaze. He lifted his weight off her and pulled her carefully
to her feet.
“Watch out,” he said. “Don’t move your feet. There’s broken glass.”
He was right, the ground was now strewed with a layer of glass splinters, large and small, as the fire devoured the wooden
frame of the plate glass window that had shattered in the heat, blowing outward onto the street like a hand grenade.
Picking her up carefully in his arms, Roman walked her to the rear of the nearest ambulance and put her down on the tailgate
to submit to the attentions of the two green-clad paramedics standing there.
“Smoke inhalation,” he told the nearest.
“What about you?” asked Jules. “The glass...”
He was turning away from her, looking back at the dying moments of Portneath Books, when she gasped.
His shirt, blackened with soot, was torn in numerous places across his back. It was glistening with a dark fluid that was soaking the tattered fabric.
“You’re bleeding,” she told him. “He’s bleeding,” she exhorted the tired, gray-haired paramedic who was busy clamping an oxygen
mask onto her face and sitting her up on the gurney inside.
The paramedic looked like he had seen it all. He probably had.
“Trip to the hospital for you both, I reckon,” he said, holding out a hand to Roman to usher him up onto the other stretcher.
Roman acceded reluctantly, tearing his eyes away from the terrible scene he was leaving behind.
“I’m so sorry about the shop,” Jules took off her oxygen mask to tell him. She would be heartbroken to lose her precious bookshop.
Hang on—she remembered she was losing her bookshop. And yet she had thrown herself into harm’s way to save the man she was losing it to.
“Put it back on,” he barked, but his expression was gentle as he reached to tenderly place the mask back over her face himself.
“Let’s just concentrate on you, shall we?” said the paramedic, getting him strapped in.
At the hospital, the staff—tactfully reading the room—placed the two of them in adjacent bays, with the curtains open so Jules
could watch anxiously over Roman as a sweet nurse cleaned him up. Luckily most of the glass cuts were superficial, although
his shirt was ruined.
With both of them cleaned and patched, they were then more or less ignored while the accident and emergency team dealt patiently
with the usual Saturday night dramas.
“You’re an idiot for coming in after me,” Roman repeated, his voice rasping.
“Pot, kettle,” Jules shot back.
Roman laughed, which set him off coughing again. “I thought you must be dead,” he said when he had recovered, swallowing hard. “It was the worst moment of my life.”
“Yeah, same,” said Jules, soberly. She reached out, and the two of them linked fingers across the gap between them.
“How did you know I was in there?” she asked.
“I was...” Roman looked awkward. “Well, I was sitting in the car, in the carpark behind the high street, just thinking.
I do that sometimes, when I’ve locked up the shop. Just for a while, before I drive home.” He paused. “Look, it’s going to
sound creepy, but I can see your bedroom window from there and since we’ve been... Well, I just like to know you’re close
by, that’s all.”
Jules smiled softly. “‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks,’” she recited.
“Yeah, whatever.” He grinned, apparently relieved at her acceptance of his faintly stalkerish habits.
Jules didn’t think it was necessary to admit she was in the habit of doing something similar, watching the light in his office
night after night. It didn’t matter now.
“But still—how...?” she went on.
“Oh, okay, so I was sitting in the car, and I heard this pounding, hammering noise. It just isn’t what you expect to hear
at two in the morning.”
“That was me, hammering on your shop door,” said Jules, realizing.
“It sounded like the crack of doom,” he said, “or some kind of police raid.”
“I might have been a bit desperate,” she admitted. On reflection, her hands felt stiff and sore. She hadn’t been aware at
the time.
“So, I came out of the alley into the high street,” he continued.
“Then, when I saw Capelthorne’s door wide open and the fire in Portneath Books, I knew exactly where you’d gone.
It can’t have been more than a couple of minutes at the most, and I remembered you knew about the key to the back entrance. ”
“I’m really sorry,” said Jules, hanging her head.
“Don’t be,” said Roman with infinite gentleness. “I think this has helped us both to understand how we feel.” His thumb strafed
the hand he was still holding. At Jules’s silence, he gave her an inquiring look.
She nodded dumbly. Families, feuds, whether they married, where they lived... none of that mattered anymore. Realizing
that either or both of them could have lost their lives that night made everything else irrelevant. She was with Roman now
and that was that. A feeling of calm, of lightness and rightness, suffused her soul.
“We should go to New York,” he said. “Leave our families to fight each other as much as they like. We could just start again,
you and me. A new dynasty.”
Jules shook her head reluctantly. “I can’t. I’ve got things I have to do here,” she said. “Aunt Flo...”
“I can wait,” he said.
“Oh my God, Aunt Flo!” Jules repeated in a panic. “She’ll wake up and not know where I am!” Jules remembered she had had her
phone in her hand as she ran over to the burning shop, but somehow—probably when she was hammering on the door—she must have
let it drop. Roman, miraculously, still had his, and he calmly arranged for Charlie to go to the shop first thing in the morning
to pass on the news and reassure Flo that all was well.
And then, for a very long time, there was nothing else that needed saying at all. They simply lay in silence, fingers intertwined
across the gap between their beds, preoccupied with their own thoughts.