Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
Alice could not recall who had sent for the physician.
Someone among the staff had managed it while the rest of them stood on the far pavement and watched the house burn.
The physician appeared out of the lamplight with his bag and his coat thrown over what was clearly nightclothes, sleep still creased into his face.
Kenneth would not release the boys.
She stood beside him on the pavement, the cold air brushing sweat-damp cotton and soot-streaked arms and the smoke-matted tangle of her hair. She was shaking. A fine persistent tremor that had begun in her hands and traveled to her shoulders and her jaw, which she could not will away.
Kenneth sat on a bench in the garden with Freddie on one knee and Charlie on the other, and the physician crouched before them with his instruments.
Kenneth’s arms did not shift. When the physician asked to examine the boys more closely, Kenneth merely adjusted his hold to allow access.
His body had decided what it was doing and would not be receiving suggestions.
Jonathan stood behind them, his cravat gone. At some point, he had draped a blanket around her shoulders. She had not thanked him for it. She would, when later became something she could manage.
Freddie was talking. He was explaining the fire to the physician, breathless, converting what had happened into a story he could hold in both hands and show to people.
The smoke, the sound of the beams, the room, the man, the knife.
His voice pitched higher each time the physician’s attention moved elsewhere, as though the audience was the purpose and its removal was the threat.
Charlie was silent. His head rested against Kenneth’s shoulder, his eyes were open, and his hand gripped the front of his father’s shirt so tight it did not look like it would relax any time soon.
Alice watched Kenneth’s thumb draw slow circles across Charlie’s back. His jaw was set, the tendons visible along his neck, and something in the rigidity told her the will keeping him upright would hold only if he did not examine it.
His eyes flicked to her. They had been flicking to her every few minutes since she came out of the house, and the look in them was always the same: something ungoverned that stayed a beat longer than necessity required and then pulled away.
She felt the loss of it in her chest each time, as though the fire had burned through something between them without regard for whether either of them was prepared for what lay beneath.
The physician pronounced the boys sound. Smoke, some irritation, nothing that rest and clean air would not mend. Then he turned to Alice. She submitted to his examination and answered his questions without retaining one.
“Rest would serve them all, Your Grace. If there is somewhere nearby…”
“Brook Street.” Kenneth’s voice was hoarse, the smoke having stripped it to a roughness she registered not in her ears but lower, in the hollow at the base of her throat. “I will send word ahead.”
Jonathan was already moving toward the carriage.
Alice did not remember the drive. She remembered Charlie’s temple against her arm and Freddie’s head on her lap, his breathing settling slowly as the boy refuelled in the only way left to him.
The smoke lived in all of them now, in the cotton and the hair and the skin. She remembered Kenneth across from her in the dark carriage, watching the three of them, his face open in a way she had never seen it, as though something behind it had shifted and he could not get it back.
The house on Brook Street was smaller than Bearmoor House. The housekeeper met them at the door, took in the soot and the nightclothes and the sleeping children, and asked nothing.
“The rooms will be ready in ten minutes, Your Grace.” She turned, and the household moved around them quietly, responding to need without requiring it to be explained.
They carried the boys upstairs together.
Neither discussed it. Kenneth held both twins against his chest, one in each arm, their weight familiar.
Alice walked beside him up the narrow stairs and through the unfamiliar corridor.
When he laid the boys on the bed, she was already there, pulling the coverlet up and tucking it beneath their chins.
The gesture required nothing from her except the muscle and the memory.
Freddie’s eyes cracked open. He studied her face, fierce, compiling.
“You are staying,” he said.
“I am staying.”
“Here. Not going somewhere else.”
“I am not going anywhere, Freddie.”
He searched her face a moment longer, measuring her against whatever metric he had devised for the reliability of adult promises, before his eyes closed and his fingers loosened around the hem of her robe. He had decided to trust her, and his decision was final.
Charlie had not spoken. He lay on his side, blanket drawn to his chin, his green eyes open and still.
When Alice smoothed his hair back from his forehead, his hand came up and found her wrist with the light, deliberate pressure of a boy confirming that the hand was real and the person behind it was not going to vanish between one breath and the next.
She held still. His eyes moved across her face and found whatever they were searching for, because his fingers loosened and his breath came out long and slow and the vigilance behind his gaze receded into something willing to let sleep approach.
Kenneth stood at the foot of the bed. She could feel his gaze on the back of her neck.
She stayed with Charlie’s hand on her wrist until his breathing deepened, and then withdrew and pressed her palm against the ache in her lower back, which had begun its accounting of the evening and intended to be thorough.
The housekeeper met them in the corridor and informed them that all the servants at Bearmoor House were accounted for, none injured. Miss Leyton was shaken but unharmed. She had sent word that they all should rest.
Kenneth thanked her, his voice still rough from the smoke, and asked her to have a bath drawn for Alice.
The housekeeper nodded and withdrew, and they were left alone in the dim passage, smelling of smoke and exhaustion and the silence that filled a space after something had been torn open and not yet mended.
“Goodnight,” Alice said.
He looked at her. His mouth opened and closed without sound, and the silence carried more than words would have.
She turned and walked to her room, and his footsteps neither followed nor retreated. She closed the door, put her back against it, and breathed.
The maid had drawn the bath. Steam curled above the copper tub, carrying lavender and something green and herbal, and the room was warm.
Alice stood at the door and felt the full weight of the night arrive: the ache in her knees and her back and the rawness of her throat and the leaden heaviness of her arms, which had held two children against a burning corridor and had not considered letting go.
She unfastened the borrowed robe. The nightgown beneath was stiff with soot and clung to her skin in places that required peeling rather than removing.
The peeling was its own kind of undressing, each layer lifted away, and beneath it her skin was flushed and tender.
Her fingers, steady through smoke and a blade’s reflection and a corridor she would see behind her eyelids for years, were not steady now.
The knock came as her nightgown hit the floor.
She seized the robe and pulled it closed. “Yes?”
The door opened two inches. Kenneth’s face appeared in the gap, his gaze moving from her face to the steam rising behind her to the robe held shut at her throat, and something behind his eyes shifted, the composure cracking where the effort of holding it became visible.
“I can come back in the morning,” he offered.
The sentence carried the shape of every distance he had ever placed between them. But she was tired, tired in her bones and her blood and the place behind her eyes where the will to pretend lived, and she was done pretending.
“Come in,” she said.
He hesitated.
“Sit.” She indicated the chair beside the washstand.
He sat. His elbows went to his knees, and his hands hung between them.
“I told you I would not stand in the corridor again.” He was looking at his hands. “I stood in one tonight. A burning one.”
His thumb pressed against the opposite knuckle, whitening the joint.
“When I found you…” He began, his voice hoarse. “Your back to the fire, the boys beneath you—” He stopped.
His jaw tensed, the motion visible at the hinge. When he continued, the roughness in his voice had thickened into something that was not smoke.
“I have been telling myself I was protecting you.” His eyes lifted to hers.
“But I was protecting myself. From wanting this so badly that the wanting could destroy me the way it destroyed…” He stopped again.
His hands pressed together between his knees, trembling.
“I governed it. I governed everything, and it has made me into my father. My father died in a room he never left, and I will not…” The sentence lost its footing.
He breathed once, roughly, the sound of composure being abandoned rather than lost. “I want mornings, Alice. Arguments. The boys in the garden. A child.”
The word split open in his mouth, and what ran beneath it was the thing she had been reading in his body for months, the thing his voice had never been adequate to carry.
His eyes, when they held hers, were bright in a way she had never seen before, bright with the raw and total fear of a man who had said everything he possessed and was sitting in a chair in a room full of steam, waiting to learn whether everything was enough.
“I know what it cost you when I closed that door.” His voice barely held. “Let me begin again.”
Alice crossed the room and stopped before him. He looked up at her, the angle unfamiliar, the tall broad fact of him compressed into something that required looking up.
She brought her hand to his face and felt the roughness of his jaw beneath her palm and the soot and the warmth of his skin and the fine tremor running through it, the body’s answer to the question the mouth had only just finished asking.
His eyes closed. The breath that left him carried nothing he had ever required of himself.
“Then begin,” she said.