Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The smoke found her before the sound did.
It arrived as thickness at the back of her throat, a heaviness in her chest that pulled her from sleep not as waking but as warning, the body’s ancient recognition that the air had changed, moving through her lungs before consciousness had fully assembled itself.
She coughed. The cough pulled her upright in the bed, and the second breath was worse, dense and acrid and carrying beneath its warmth something her mind refused to name.
Then the screaming reached her.
Voices, several, overlapping, rising from the floors below and the corridor beyond her door, stripped of every courtesy.
A woman’s cry broke high and raw above a man shouting instructions she could not discern through the thickening air. She heard the clatter of feet on the stairs, too many and too fast, the sound of a household that had been sleeping minutes ago and was now running.
“Fire! Fire in the house!”
Alice was on her feet before the words had registered properly. She did not recall the motion of standing. She was in the bed, and then she was on the carpet in bare feet and her nightgown.
The smoke was visible now, a grey haze pressing beneath the door, low and steady, spreading across the carpet toward her bare feet. The heat of the floorboards registered against her soles, flat and specific, a thing she would recall later, if later came.
She pressed her palm flat against the door, found it warm but not burning, and pulled it open.
The corridor was a different country. Smoke banked along the ceiling in a dense grey layer, already past the uppermost foot of the doorframes and sinking lower with every breath she took.
The wall sconces had guttered out. The only light came from further down the corridor, a shifting orange glow that pulsed and drew.
The heat reached her face before the rest of the air did, carrying charred wood and hot plaster and something acrid beneath both that her lungs refused before her mind could name it.
A maid appeared from the back stairs, her cap gone, her face smeared with soot, pulling a younger girl by the wrist.
“Your Grace, please.” The maid’s eyes were watery. “The east rooms are gone; you must come. The stairs won’t hold. Please, you must come now…”
“Where are the boys?” Alice asked.
The question came from somewhere below thought. It moved through her, coiled at the base of her spine since the first breath of smoke, waiting for her mind to catch up with what her body already knew.
The maid’s face, soot-streaked and contorted with fear, told her the answer before the words arrived.
“I don’t know, Your Grace. Miss Leyton went to fetch them, but the smoke is thicker in the corridor to the nursery, and she…”
Alice was already moving past her.
The nursery sat at the far end of the upper corridor, past the linen closet and the narrow turn where the passage bent eastward toward the rooms Kenneth had given the boys when they came to London, rooms with blue-papered walls that Freddie found personally offensive and Charlie had declined to complain about because Charlie did not complain about things that could be endured.
She knew the distance. Forty-two steps from her door to theirs, a number she had counted once during the first week, when counting had been the only map she possessed of a house that did not yet feel like hers.
She had never covered them at a run.
The smoke thickened as she turned the corner. She pulled the collar of her nightgown over her mouth and nose, the cotton already damp with her breath. The air through the fabric was marginally breathable, tasting of ash and hot wood.
She pressed one hand to the wall and moved along it, the visibility down to a few feet and the wall the only fixed thing left.
The heat came from below. She could feel it rising through the boards, the fire climbing upward through the bones of the house.
The plaster was warm in some places and cool in others, and the pattern told her which rooms beneath her feet were already burning and which were merely waiting their turn.
She heard them before she saw the door.
Something settled into the pit of her stomach before she understood what she was hearing—Freddie’s voice, high and sharp, carrying the register of a child who had moved past fright into the territory beyond it where everything became very loud and very fast; and beneath it, nearly inaudible, Charlie, whose silence in distress had always carried more weight than his brother’s noise, who had learned young that smallness was safety.
“Let go of me! Let go!”
Freddie.
Alice reached the door. It stood ajar, the gap throwing a blade of orange light across the corridor, and the smoke poured through it in a thin, steady stream that joined the larger body above.
She could hear breathing on the other side that did not belong to the boys, heavier and ragged, stripped bare of composure and past recovering it.
She pushed the door open.
The window threw a lurid, shifting glow across the ceiling and the walls and the small beds and the scattered books and the wooden soldiers on the mantelpiece, all of it rendered in shades of amber and orange that shifted as the flames below pulsed and swayed.
In that unstable light, she saw them.
Freddie was pressed against the far wall between his bed and Charlie’s, his nightshirt twisted where he had been seized and released, his face flushed and furious and streaked with tears he would deny if he survived to deny them.
Charlie was behind him, pushed there by his brother’s arm and held there by his brother’s will.
His green eyes—Theresa’s eyes—were alert.
Between Alice and the boys, his back half-turned to the door and a short-bladed knife catching the firelight in one white-knuckled fist, stood the Baron Tidswell.
Whatever architecture of pleasantness had carried him through drawing rooms and the campaign of practised persistence with which he had sought access to the twins had collapsed entirely.
What remained was wreckage, raw and shaking and openly weeping.
In his other hand, pressed flat against his chest, was Theresa’s portrait miniature.
It caught the firelight, ivory and gold, the size of a sovereign.
“You have her eyes.” His eyes moved past Alice to the boys, wet and wide, and the tenderness in them was worse than the blade. “Both of you. She gave you her eyes, but he never deserved them.” His voice splintered. “I loved her. I would have given her everything.”
The blade trembled in his grip, uncommitted, his hand ahead of whatever resolve the rest of him had yet to find.
Freddie’s eyes found Alice across the room, over Tidswell’s shoulder, and the look in them belonged to no child she had ever known. It was fierce, absolute, already past counting the distance and the danger. His brother was behind him and was staying behind him, and that was the end of the matter.
Alice looked at the blade, at the portrait miniature pressed to Tidswell’s chest, at the two small figures against the far wall.
The smoke thickened around her, and she breathed once through heat and cotton and char.
The word she had not permitted herself, not once through every bedtime story, scraped knee, and small hand reaching for hers, arrived without permission and well past the point of no return.
The boys were hers.