Chapter 21
It was on the ceiling when she opened her eyes, orange and moving, and she surfaced out of a dream she would not remember afterward, holding nothing of it but the fear, and then the door came open hard enough to strike the wall.
"Amelia!"
She was upright before she had understood the room. Two maids were already at the wardrobe, and behind them the light caught the faces of two of the footmen and showed her that both of them were frightened.
Her father crossed to the bed. He had not stopped to dress.
"Get up. Now. We are leaving the house."
"What has—"
Something drifted down between them and settled on the counterpane, and she looked at it before she understood it. Soft. Black. Weightless as feather-down.
Ash.
She was out of the bed and across the floor before her father could take hold of her arm.
"Amelia—"
She opened the balcony doors.
The heat came against her face like the open door of a bread oven and she breathed it in before she could stop herself and it went into her chest like something swallowed wrong. She got one hand onto the balustrade. The stone was warm.
Below her, the garden was burning.
Not part of it. The whole of it. The rose beds along the south wall had gone entirely, and the roses were still standing in them — black now, thin as wire, holding their shape the way a burnt page holds its shape until something touches it.
The ivy along the terrace ran with small flames.
And at the far end, past the beds, the tree was alight all the way up, every branch of it, the fire going out along the limbs as though it were following something already drawn there.
She had been standing under that tree eleven days ago.
Amelia's knees went. She did not decide to kneel; she simply arrived there, both hands on the balustrade, her forehead nearly against the stone, and she could not have said afterward whether she made any sound at all.
Behind her the room had filled with noise — her father giving orders, a maid asking a question nobody answered, somebody packing a bag as though a bag would matter tonight.
A hand closed on her arm.
"Do not." Her voice came out wrong, scraped thin by the smoke. She pulled away from him. "Do not touch me."
"Amelia."
"Do not touch me."
She did not look at his face when she said it. She would think about that later, for a long time.
She was aware, distantly, of the lavender she had put in the week before last, four rows of it, along the walk where the heat was worst. She had knelt in that soil with Frederick complaining behind her about the spacing. She could not see the walk at all now.
"Take her out." Her father's voice, above her, hard and level. "Carry her if you must."
The footmen came. They were careful with her, which she resented, and they were stronger than she was, which she resented more, and she fought them the whole way to the stairs and it made no difference whatsoever.
She did not stop looking. Not on the landing.
Not on the stairs. Not when they set her down on the wet grass of the courtyard and let go of her as though she were something that might break if handled further.
She stood where they put her. Barefoot, in her nightdress, the hem of it already grey.
The sky over Ashcombe had gone the color of a low sun that had no business rising for another four hours.
Her father came and stood beside her.
"Amelia. Are you hurt?"
She did not answer.
"Amelia. Speak to me. Please."
She was looking at the far side of the garden, where the smoke went up in columns and tore and closed again, and through one of those tears she saw a man standing at the edge of the light.
He was not moving. His coat hung open and he was close enough that she could see he had not brought anything with him — no bucket, no coat over his arm, nothing. He had simply come, and stopped where the heat stopped him, and now he was looking at her across the whole burning width of it.
Her lips parted. Nothing came.
She took one step, and another, and then the fire went up along the hedge line between them and there was no possibility of a third.
Her father called her name. She did not hear it.
Across the garden a tear ran down Benjamin's cheek and cut a clean line through the soot on his jaw, and he did not lift a hand to it, and he did not look away from her.
It was her father who broke it.
"A line from the well to the eastern wall — buckets, now." His voice went across that courtyard the way she had never once heard it go across a dinner table. "You two, the hedge. Beat it back before it reaches the terrace. Frederick — every man out of the stables, this minute."
They went. Within a few minutes there was a line of them from the well to the wall, buckets going hand to hand and coming back empty, and her father was in the middle of it with his shirtsleeves black to the elbow, saying where and saying now, and not one person in that courtyard thought to ask him anything.
It took the better part of an hour.
The fire gave ground slowly. It went out of the hedge first, then off the terrace, then down out of the tree in pieces, until what was left was not fire but the sound after fire — the hiss where water met hot stone, and the small ticking of things cooling.
The house stood behind it untouched. The garden did not exist.
By the time the last of it was beaten down, the eastern sky had begun, faintly, to grey.
Amelia had not moved from where they set her. She stayed and watched it finish, and she watched the man on the other side of the ruin who had not moved either, the two of them standing in the smoke with the whole width of the burnt ground between them and nothing yet said.
◆◆◆
The great hall of Whitfield Manor had gone quiet, save for the distant hiss of dying embers and the soft clink of buckets being returned to their places. The house smelled of smoke and scorched earth, a smell that would likely never fully leave it.
Amelia sat in the high-backed chair nearest the cold hearth, a shawl someone had draped over her shoulders without her noticing who.
Her hands lay open in her lap, fingers blackened with soot she had not thought to wash away.
She was not crying. She was not speaking.
Her eyes stayed fixed on some point past the far wall, as though the garden were still burning there and she had simply not yet been told it was safe to stop watching it.
The Baron stood near the center of the room, sleeves rolled, his own shirt streaked grey with ash, the household staff gathered in loose, anxious clusters around him — maids, footmen, even the boy from the stables, barefoot and wide-eyed.
"How," the Baron said, his voice low and dangerous, "could this happen?"
Nobody answered.
Then Frederick stepped forward.
He looked older than he had that morning, ash smeared along one temple, his hands still stained from the bucket line.
"It was Mr. Russell who alerted us, my lord."
The Baron turned sharply. "Say that again."
"He knocked at my door himself. I do not know how he came to know of the fire so quickly, nor why he was awake at that hour to notice it at all — but he told me two men had just left his own estate not minutes before, moving in this direction.
" Frederick met the Baron's eyes squarely.
"If he had not come when he did, my lord, I believe this house — and every one of us in it — would be nothing but ash by now. "
The room went very still.
The Baron was silent a long moment, something working behind his eyes that Amelia, distantly, was too far inside her own stillness to notice.
"I must speak with Mr. Maddox," he said finally. "I want to know, plainly, whether this was his doing."
"I will go to the inn at once, my lord."
"Take two men with you. I do not want you going alone, not tonight." The Baron's jaw tightened. "And Frederick — do not accuse him outright. Watch his face when you tell him what has happened. I want to know what he does before he has time to decide what he ought to do."
"Understood, my lord."
Frederick turned and left at once, his footsteps quick across the marble, and the Baron watched him go before his gaze finally settled on his daughter, still frozen in her chair by the dead fire.
He crossed to her slowly.
"Amelia?"
She did not answer. Her eyes had not moved from whatever she was still seeing.
"Amelia, my dear. Look at me!"
Nothing. Not a blink. Not the smallest shift of her hands in her lap.
One of the maids stepped forward, hesitant, reaching for a blanket to add to the shawl already around her shoulders — but Amelia did not seem to feel it settle over her at all.
She sat exactly as she had since they carried her from the garden, as though some part of her had simply refused, entirely, to believe that any of it had actually happened.
The Baron knelt in front of her chair, taking her cold hands gently in his own.
"It is over," he said quietly. "The house still stands. You are safe."
Her lips parted slightly, as if to answer him.
No sound came out at all.
◆◆◆
The heavy doors groaned open.
Boots echoed against marble as Maddox entered, flanked by four of his men. Their coats were unfastened, their manner unhurried — not the arrival of subordinates answering a summons, but men who had chosen, on their own terms, to attend.
The staff drew back into the corners of the room. The hearth stood cold. Amelia had not moved from her chair, her eyes fixed on nothing, present in body only.
The Baron stood at the center of the room, hands clasped behind his back, his mouth drawn tight.
Maddox stopped a few feet from him. "You summoned us."
"I demand an explanation." The Baron's voice was even, though something hard sat beneath it. "My daughter's garden was set ablaze last night. Ground this household has tended for generations. I would like to know what your men know of it."