Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
She moved before the thought finished forming.
There were ten feet between her and the boys, Tidswell’s body filling the center of it, his blade catching the firelight. She closed the distance in three strides her knees should not have managed, stepping between the man and the twins with her arms spread wide and her back to the boys.
Her body—her treacherous, insufficient body—became the only wall that mattered.
Tidswell’s eyes found her, lost somewhere in the past. The words spilling past his lips tangled around a name that was not hers and a love that had never been returned and a grief so old it had calcified into something structural, load-bearing, the thing around which he had built every remaining year.
“Step away.” His voice broke on the second word. “They are hers.”
“They are mine.” She said it without hesitation.
She reached behind her and felt Freddie’s fingers close around her wrist hard enough to bruise, and Charlie’s smaller hand press flat against her spine.
She held them both through touch and the immovable certainty of a body that had decided where it was standing.
“Move aside, or I shall—”
“Then you shall have to cut through me first.” She held his gaze. The smoke thickened between them, the heat pressing upward through the floorboards. “And I will still be holding on when you do.”
Something shifted across his face. Not at her words, not at the blade’s uselessness, but at something beyond her, where the firelight from the square threw its shifting orange glow against the wall.
His mouth opened. The knife dropped to his side as though his arm had forgotten its purpose, his head tilted, and his face softened.
“Theresa,” he whispered.
The blade clattered to the floor. He took a step toward the wall, toward the light, toward whatever he saw there that no one else could see, and his hand reached out, open, helpless, trembling.
Alice did not wait to understand it. She seized both boys and ran.
The corridor had become unrecognizable, smoke rising at chest height, dense and grey-brown, carrying the acrid sweetness of burning plaster. She crouched low with one arm around Freddie and the other around Charlie, and followed the wall beneath her hand until she reached the landing.
The stairs below were engulfed in flame. The lower flight pulsed across the banister and the treads and the carpet runner, and the heat hit her face like an open hand.
She pulled the boys back. Pressed them low against the corridor wall where the air was still breathable. Crouched over them, her arms wrapped around their shoulders, the cotton of her nightgown already warm against her skin.
Freddie’s hand gripped her arm. Charlie’s face pressed into her shoulder. And she held on.
The carriage had not fully stopped when Kenneth hit the cobblestones.
Three streets back, the glow above the roofline had thrown the chimneys and dormer windows into black relief against an orange sky, and the smell had arrived, dense and chemical. Beneath it was a sound his chest recognized before his mind did: the low groan of something collapsing.
Staff clustered on the far side of the square in livery and nightclothes. The fire engine stood at the corner, its crew pumping in grim rhythm, the water arcing toward the upper floors and falling short.
The housekeeper found him before he found her, soot-streaked, her cap gone, her composure gone with it.
“Your Grace. The upper floors, the nursery, the—We could not…” Her voice fractured. “Miss Leyton tried. The corridor was already—”
“Where are they?”
“Still inside, Your Grace.”
Kenneth was running before she finished speaking.
He heard Jonathan behind him, boots on the cobblestones and his name called once, sharp and bitten off, and he heard the housekeeper cry out. Then he heard nothing, because the space where hearing lived had filled with something that occupied his whole body.
The front door hung open. Smoke choked the entrance hall, lit from the upper stairs in shifting orange, and the heat struck his chest at the threshold.
The first flight of stairs held. The second was worse—smoke banked along the ceiling so thickly that the only light came from the fire itself. Kenneth climbed through it with his coat pulled across his mouth, lungs burning, eyes streaming, every breath fought for.
At the upper landing, the corridor stretched before him in smoke and shifting orange, alive with the crack of timber, the hiss of plaster, and the heavy groan of a beam giving way somewhere below.
He called her name, and the smoke swallowed it.
He found them at the juncture between the nursery corridor and the upper stairs.
Alice was crouched against the wall with her back to the fire and her arms locked around both boys, her body curved over them, the cotton of her nightgown dark with soot and damp with sweat, Freddie’s face turned into her side and Charlie’s pressed against her shoulder.
She looked up when his footsteps reached her, soot-streaked, red-eyed, her hair loose across her shoulders. When she saw him, something in her face shifted, settled, held.
“Kenneth,” she croaked.
He crouched before her. His hands found the boys first, rapid, the practised inventory of a father who knew the dimensions of his children better than his own. Freddie’s grip transferred to his coat, desperate. Charlie looked at him with wide green eyes and said nothing.
“Can you stand?” Kenneth asked.
“Yes.”
He gathered both boys, one in each arm, their weights warm and familiar. Alice rose beside him, one hand on the wall, and he saw the way her knees steadied and her shoulders squared.
Quickly, they moved down the corridor, the turn, the second landing where the smoke thinned and the heat loosened. Alice followed with her hand on his shoulder, and the press of her palm against the damp linen of his shirt was incredibly comforting.
The first-floor landing. The stairs down to the entrance hall, still passable, and beyond the open front door, the night and the distant shapes of figures on the pavement.
Something behind his ribs loosened.
Suddenly, he heard a sound on the stairs above.
He turned.
Tidswell had climbed down the last step, his coat charred at one shoulder, his face blackened, his hair singed close on one side, a portrait miniature pressed against his chest with both hands. His eyes moved from Kenneth to Alice to the boys and stayed there, stripped and grieving.
“Alice.” Kenneth did not turn away. “Take the boys. Go.”
Alice hesitated. He felt it in the hand on his shoulder, the fingers tightening once before relaxing.
“Go.”
She took Freddie from his arm and pulled Charlie against her hip, then descended the stairs and crossed the entrance hall and reached the door.
The sound freed him for what was left.
He faced Tidswell.
The flames had pressed closer along the upper banister. Tidswell stood before them, the portrait miniature pressed over his heart, his ruined face almost still.
“Come down.” Kenneth extended his hand. The words left him steady, stripped of fury. “You will answer for what happened tonight, but not like this.”
Tidswell looked at his hand, then past it, at something in the smoke and the firelight that Kenneth could not see.
“She is here.” His voice was quiet and level and completely certain. “She has been here the whole time.” His eyes shone. “I should very much like to stay.”
Kenneth lunged at him, but his hand closed on empty air. Tidswell had already stepped back into the fire.
The ceiling above the landing groaned once, deep in the bones of the house, and the beams gave way in a cascade of timber and flame and plaster that sealed the stairway like a door shut.
The heat drove Kenneth back. Through the roar, he could see nothing of the upper landing but fire.
The man was gone.
Kenneth descended the stairs and staggered through the entrance hall and out the front door into the October night. The air hit his lungs, and he stood on the front steps and breathed.
The square opened before him in lamplight and smoke. Jonathan was there, white-faced, shouting something he could not hear, and beyond him, against the iron railings, Alice stood with a boy in each arm.
Freddie saw him first. The sound that left the child was older than words, the cry of a boy who had spent everything he had on being brave.
Kenneth crossed the distance between them without awareness of his feet or the cobblestones.
When he reached them, he did not pause or speak or do any of the careful, measured things he had spent a lifetime perfecting.
He gathered all three of them into his arms and held on.
Alice’s face pressed into his neck, and her hand gripped the back of his coat. The boys were pressed between them, their small hands clutching at whatever they could reach.
Kenneth held it all: the weight and the warmth and the soot and the trembling and the absolute, ungovernable fact of them alive, here, and his. The walls he had built and fortified for thirty-three years did not hold.
He did not want them to.