Chapter Seventeen #2
Alone in his study, he unlocked the cabinet in which he hid his father’s rum.
He had stopped drinking it thirty years ago, when he and Lolly had turned Northfield Hall into an estate which lived off its own produce, but he was a known monster now, and so he might as well revel in his hypocrisy.
The first sip burned his throat—he was accustomed to home-brewed wines and ales—but the second one cleansed him, and by the third, he felt almost cheerful at the idea of ridding himself of pretenses.
Why should he contort himself into a good person he clearly was not?
From Martha’s desk—his secretary’s desk, that was—he removed all the notes she had made for him about previous drafts.
Selecting the one on which she had written Legacy to family, Martin sauntered over to the hearth and fed the paper to the fire.
The flames, which had been smoldering on their coals, leapt at the kindling, curling the paper into hot orange licks within seconds.
Removing the metal fire screen for better access, he picked up the next piece of paper—part of an early draft containing instructions to his children on how to use the money he designated for them—and touched it to the flames. In an instant, it, too, was ashes.
Strange, how satisfying it was to watch his ideas destroyed.
Martin took a burning sip of rum and threw in another note.
Its flame was desultory and quick. Martin wanted something more dramatic.
He took a sheaf of six papers and lit them in the fire.
They lasted longer, twitching this way and that as the heat ripped them in two.
Martin liked that; he added the whole remaining stack of drafts next and watched his words disappear.
Almost dancing with glee, Martin swigged rum as he pulled out more papers from the desk Martha had used: copies of correspondence he had sent that he would never need to reference, letters he had received from complete strangers whom he had no intention of helping, solicitations from merchants with whom he had no interest in doing business.
With each paper added to the fire, he treated himself to a sip of rum.
There went his misplaced promises; here disappeared any notion that he was a man whom others should admire.
When he finished with these papers and when he finished with the rum, he would emerge the truest version of himself: a Martin who was concerned only with what brought him satisfaction.
He ran out of papers from the secretary’s desk, and so he turned to his own.
He could not throw away records of the estate, nor correspondence regarding Parliament, but here—here was a note he had written to Martha, before Maulvi had died!
Not so much a note as a poem, and not so much a poem as drivel; even sober Martin had known better than to show it to her.
He carried it to the fire. For good measure, he poured rum on the flames to make them leap.
What a fool he was. What a self-important idiot.
What a useless piece of fluff. After all this time, had he abolished slavery?
Had he reformed Parliament to truly represent the people of Britain?
Even his successes this past session were too little too late, written in the blood of people already hung, already transported, or—like Martha’s poor son—already buried at a crossroads.
He turned his back to the fire to find more kindling. He would have to find something other than paper soon, for there wasn’t much else he could afford to lose. His hand landed on Martha’s glove in his pocket—but no, that he wouldn’t burn.
He seized the letter Max had sent to tell Martin that Ellen was safely home. Hurling it into the hearth, Martin threw more rum after it, yearning for the beautiful blue that came from flames so hot and intense that they broke free from the color of fire.
They broke free. From color—and from the hearth.
They roared forward, catching the fringe of the carpet that protected the hardwood floor.
Martin rushed to stamp them out; now the fire leapt to the low-hanging tail of his jacket.
A heat he had never before known breathed against his skin.
Panicking, he twisted out of the coat, letting it fall to the ground, to escape the blaze.
But as it fell, it spread its flame to the upholstered chair, and the embers in the carpet grew courageous and began to spread.
Martin reached for the bucket of sand kept by the hearth to bank the fire. But the air was fast filling with smoke, and the sand did nothing as he threw it on the paper-and-rum-fueled coal. He had no choice to scream “Water!” and “Fire!” and then he had no choice but to race from the room.
“Fire!” he screamed again. He couldn’t remember what time of day it was, whether the servants would be sleeping in the attics. He seized the grandfather clock in the foyer and shook it until its bells rang in an eerie clamor. Running to the back corridor, he shouted, “Fire!”
He didn’t see anyone. If he was going to stop the fire, he needed to find someone. If he was going to escape the fire, he needed to leave.
Martin ran to the garden drawing room, instead.
He seized the portrait of Lolly from above the mantel; with it under his arm, he picked up the pens Ellen had made for his fortieth birthday, the book of poems Benjamin had presented him, Sophia’s watercolor of the pond, Nate’s letters from the navy, and Caroline’s printed essays.
He raced into the back garden and deposited his treasures beyond the hedge. He shouted again, “Fire!”
This time, when he ran back into Northfield Hall, he found the footmen racing towards the study. “Who is upstairs?” he asked. “Is anyone upstairs?”
They didn’t know. And so Martin ran up the stairs—ignoring the way his lungs wheezed and his heart seized—to the top story.
“Fire! Get out!” He pounded on the walls loud enough to wake the dead.
He opened all the doors to make sure there was no one there—and found one maid for his trouble. “Get out now!”
He could think of a hundred things he wanted to save from his and his children’s bedrooms. But there was no time.
He tripped down the staircase on his way back to the ground floor, catching himself on the banister.
Three footmen were working in a chain to fight the fire now.
It had spread through the door of the study into the back corridor.
Coughing, Martin tried to help the men, but he couldn’t bear the weight of the water buckets.
“Get to safety, sir!” shouted Jacques.
He wanted to protest—wanted to stay—it was his calamity and therefore his to fix. But strong arms seized him from behind and pulled him into the cold December night.
Mr. Chow. “Let us see to the fire, and you stay here.”
“I can’t let you in there,” Martin argued. Chow was at least the same age, and besides, had a family that loved him. “It’s my fire, not yours.”
Chow glared at him. They had met at nighttime, like this, when all Martin could see was the shadows of the other man’s face. Then, Chow had been begging for help. Now, Martin was the desperate one—but so much more undeserving than Chow had ever been.
“Keep my wife safe,” Chow said.
Martin was drunk and weak, and so he had no choice but to accept the order as his friend ran back into Northfield Hall.
The entire back corridor was lit in terrible red flames; the chain of men passing water buckets from the well to the hall kept getting longer, yet the fire kept getting bigger.
The air filled with smoke. Martin wrapped a handkerchief around his mouth and still, he couldn’t help coughing.
“We should take shelter, sir,” Mrs. Chow said. “We can take people into the cottages for the night.”
She was right, though the night hardly felt cold in the face of such a blaze. “Yes,” Martin agreed, “take everyone away. Let them get rest. We will need courage and strength in the morning.”
“And you, sir,” she said. “Come to my cottage. I will make up a bed for you.”
“No, thank you, ma’am.” Martin could not disobey her husband, who had good sense on his side in keeping a feeble old man away from the disaster. But he would not obey her, no matter that the air was smoky and the winter night dangerous. “I must bear witness.”
“When it is over, then,” she said. “When it is over, Caroline will want to know that you stayed with us.”
“For Caroline,” he agreed. Mrs. Chow led the group of house servants down the dark paths leading to cottages that—God willing—would remain safer than the Hall.
Martin remained where he was, just on the far edge of the gravel driveway, and watched his home burn down.
The rooms where he had been born, grown up, and raised his own children.
The remnants of the first baron’s home, built in the Elizabethan era.
The last vestiges of Lolly. The books and records and manifests of his lifetime of efforts.
The paintings he had brought back from his travels; the watercolors his children had painted; the furniture inherited generation by generation.
The flames lasted through the night, their smoke obscuring the stars and the moon.
It was not until dawn that the fire finally drowned under the relentless buckets of water.
At last, the chain of men broke up, each of them falling exhausted onto the frosted grass.
The early morning sunlight illuminated what was left: the skeleton of Northfield Hall, the scars of Northfield Hall, the memory of Northfield Hall.
And Martin saw, at last, his legacy.