Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (25 page)

The wind knocks softly against the studio. Annie straightens up. That is something, too, she thinks. None of the sounds of the world, the smells, the way things feel, make it to the photograph. The photograph is evidence of this world and yet it really doesn’t come from this world at all.

Annie is not sure how long she stands behind the camera, listening to the weather and the creak of the building. Suddenly she remembers Gus waiting in Eldon’s bedroom for her return. He will be getting worried.

Isabelle must be in the darkroom. Annie will walk over there and knock on the door, their signal for Isabelle to finish what she is doing and rejoin the above-ground world.

Tess is crying, down on her knees in front of the drawing-room fireplace. Her tears fall into the ash, become inky black drops on the stone. Tess has again tried to talk to Wilks, to plead for his understanding. All that has happened is that she has heard again how he doesn’t love her, has heard again how he no longer wants to touch her now that she has grown so huge with the pregnancy. He avoids her when-and wherever possible. He has actually said the words,
Don’t come near me.
She said,
I love you,
and he said,
You’re a slut. How could anyone love you?

Tess has been told by Cook to set fires in the drawing room and upstairs in the bedrooms because it is a cold day and the house, drained of heat, is chill and damp. Tess has trouble with the tinder. It’s not catching. She takes some crumpled paper from the wastebasket and throws it on top of the coals. It licks into flame. In her distress Tess neglects to put the screen back in front of the fireplace. As she leaves the room and closes the door one of the fiery balls of paper rolls out onto the rug.

The fire chooses favourites. The tassels of the rug. A shawl draped over the back of a chair. The fire is quick-fingered, touching what it wants so gently at first, saying, Trust me, trust me.

Annie has knocked on the door of the coal cellar and is standing in the stone stairwell, waiting for Isabelle to come out. The entrance to the coal cellar is down a small flight of steps, so that where Annie is standing is partially underground. She can’t see over the structure of the cellar. The rest of the house is far away and invisible. She doesn’t see the fire, but she does hear Tess’s screams, shrill and terrifying.

Annie scrambles up the steps and around the side of the coal cellar. Tess, tearing down the path from the house, runs right into her. She clutches Annie’s cloak. “Help,” she says. “Help.”

“What? What is it?”

Tess’s breath is threadbare. “Fire,” she says, holding tight onto Annie. “The house is on fire.”

“Tess,” says Annie. “Calm down.” She grabs Tess’s face in her hands, so she’s looking straight into Annie’s eyes. “Is Cook out? Is Mr. Dashell?”

“Cook is getting Mr. Dashell. It’s the main house. He’s not in danger. Cook is
outside
,” says Tess, fumbling for the right words to make Annie understand what is happening. “She’s getting Mr. Dashell from outside.”

“Go,” says Annie. “Get Wilks to ride out to the Brooks’ farm for help.”

Tess stumbles off down the path.

“No, wait.” Annie runs after her. “What about the boy? Did he get out?”

“What boy?” says Tess.

Isabelle thought she heard a knock on the darkroom door, but it didn’t happen again, so she thinks she’s mistaken. Then she thinks she hears a scream, but she’s counting off the seconds that the negative needs to be under the developing liquid, and she is relieved when the scream doesn’t recur and she doesn’t have to rush outside to see what is happening. If it is urgent enough, Annie will come and bang on the door to let her know. She doesn’t have to worry.

“Thirty-six, thirty-seven.” She counts out loud and her voice fills the small brick chamber, seals her safely inside this pocket of darkness.

Cook stands in the roses outside Mr. Dashell’s library, banging on the window with her fist. “Fire,” she yells. And then, “Sir.” The thorns are scratching at her legs. She turned her ankle rushing down the path and long needles of pain shoot up it as she stands in the flower bed.

Eldon, sitting at his desk, hears the shouts from far away, as though they’re underwater. He looks up and sees a face at his library window, and then a fist raised and hammering on the leaded glass. It’s Cook. Behind her, smoke trails in wisps above the hedge. His first thought is that the garden is on fire. He doesn’t realize that the smoke has blown over from the main house until he has unlatched the window and sees where it is coming from.

“Quick,” says Cook, not knowing how much longer she’ll be able to remain on her painful ankle. “The house is on fire. Come out the window. Sir,” she says, as an afterthought.

Eldon unlatches his window and swings his leg over the sill. He sees the smoke behind Cook gathering like a storm cloud. “Is everyone out?” he asks.

“Everyone’s out, sir.” Cook puts her hand out for him to grasp as he guides himself over the sill and out of the library, but at that moment Tess rushes round the side of the house.

“She’s gone in,” she says to Cook. “She says there’s a boy in there.”

“The bell-ringer’s son,” says Cook. “I thought they were all down the garden.”

“Who’s gone in?” says Eldon. He is perched on the window sill, one leg out against the wall of the house, one leg still anchored on the floor of the library.

“Annie, sir. Annie’s gone back in,” says Tess.

It is the easiest thing Eldon has ever done. He doesn’t even think about it, just leans his weight back into the room and his leg clears the sill. He lets go of Cook’s hand, and as he moves from the window, listening to their cries of protest, it’s as if they’re at sea, the great smoky spray behind their wrecked ship. It is their drowning cries he hears, as he sails safely past them.

*

Annie comes through the kitchen door. She wets a cloth in the pail of water by the sink and clamps it over her face. The kitchen is clear but there’s a lot of smoke in the main hall, billowing out from the drawing room where the fire must have started. Annie sprints up the staircase, as fast as her heavy cloak will allow.

Gus is standing in the upstairs hall, pressed against a wall. He is not crying or screaming, doesn’t say anything to Annie when she rushes out of the smoke towards him. There are flames trickling down the feathers on his wings. She removes the cloth from her mouth. They stare at each other for the briefest of moments. It is now that Annie feels afraid. When she ran into the house and up the stairs she was so intent on finding the boy that she wasn’t aware of anything else. Now, when she sees how frightened Gus is, she thinks he must be recognizing the same fear in her eyes. He must know how afraid she is, and in that moment, with the smoke blurring around them, Gus reminds Annie of herself as a child in Mrs. Gilbey’s home. How small and scared she must have been.

“Put your arms out,” she says to Gus. He stretches his burning wings so that they stay clear of her clothes and she runs with him like this, down the hallway to Isabelle’s bedroom. The bedroom is at the end of the house. The fire seems to be mainly in the central portion of the building, seems to have burnt through the drawing-room ceiling into part of the upstairs hall. It is not fanning out. They will be safer in Isabelle’s bedroom.

There is smoke in the room, but the window is open. Annie sets Gus down by the door, closes it, then goes over to the bed and hauls the mattress off it. She struggles the mattress through the window and it somersaults to the earth below.

The wings on Gus’s arms are burning. It is too late to try and fumble them off him. It will take too long to undo the leather straps. Annie grabs the boy under the arms again, rushes him over to the window, and then leans with him in her arms over the sill.

“I’ve got you,” she says.

And then she lets him go.

The shape he makes as he’s falling, his fiery wings spread and holding the air, is almost the shape of a country. All jagged on the edges, carved out by the punishing sea.

Annie leans out over the sill and watches the boy fall to safety. Michael, she thinks. Connor. He is her brother and she has saved him and now he can live, again. She has dropped him from the heavens and he flies down to his mortal life.

Angel of Mercy. I have set you down upon the earth.

Annie feels something around her ankles. It’s like a tickle, like a feather that has worked loose from the wings and is brushing up against her legs. She looks down. Her cloak is on fire.

Eldon moves through the corridor outside his library towards the main part of the house. He is moving into the smoke and halfway down the hall his eyes are stinging too much and he can no longer see. He puts his arms out, feeling along the walls to find out where he is. He has never realized how thoroughly he knows this house, how every nick in the wallpaper, every texture of picture frame is a landmark detailing his position. His hands, he thinks, his hands have always made journeys. They have been to many wondrous places. They have traced the skin of Isabelle and felt along the walls of this darkened hallway. They have held the head of a flower filled with rain. If he had been a surveyor, walking through the wilderness, surely he would have been no different. He would have felt distance out,tree by tree, measuring the landscape by feel. Just as now his hands slide over walls, marry the shape of doorframe and lintel.

I am here.

The main staircase is burning. The banister a shivering ladder of flame. Eldon has pulled himself up the few stairs that are still safe. He is coughing now and having trouble breathing. There’s a pain in his head. He sits down on the bottom stair. Perhaps the back staircase is still functional. He should go into the kitchen and check it. He could get out through the kitchen door if need be. Phelan is probably long gone by now. But he doesn’t move. He has used all his strength to get here and now he’s coughing too much to go any farther. But it is all right, he thinks, sitting on the stair. He has done his best. He has gone back for a member of the expedition. He has been his bravest self.

It has been a long journey. He is finally home.

And as Eldon sits there, for the few moments that he sits there, he feels the air cool around him, until his skin tingles with it. His breath is smoke, rising out of his body. Ash wafts down from the floor above, floats down the emptiness where the staircase used to be, as fine and particulate as snow falling to earth. He is snow, falling to earth.

When Isabelle finally opens the door of the coal cellar and climbs up the few stairs into the garden, it is as if she is climbing up into one of her own photographs. Everything is blurry, out of focus, soft and grey as the inside of a cloud. She walks through the smoke in the slow way one moves inside a dream, noticing things as though she’s drugged or underwater. Smoke, she thinks. It is smoke after all.

When she gets round the side of the coal cellar and can see the burning house, she thinks, Who lived there? as though the fiery ruin is something she has stumbled across, accidentally, on a walk in the woods.

There are men with buckets, and Cook and Tess sitting on the ground by the rose bushes.

The kitchen is still intact. So is the wing with the library. Everything else is a smouldering wall of stone. Isabelle walks closer to the guttering main part of the house. She hears her formal name, distant, as if she is being called back from across a great stretch of water. This is where the stairs were, she thinks. This is where I lived.

She looks down. Her feet are hot from walking on the jumble of stones. There, by the toe of her left boot, is something familiar. She bends down and picks up the glass plate. It is smoky and the glass is warm like skin. When she holds it up to the light she can still make out the image. The head turned towards the camera. The beautiful, ordinary face of Annie Phelan, as Grace, looking out at her.

“Look!” cries a man’s voice behind Isabelle. She turns to the voice. It’s one of the men with the water buckets. He’s pointing to the upstairs of the house. Isabelle looks up. She sees a slow blur riding down the smoke from an upstairs window. An angel. A child. It’s the winged boy, floating down a ladder of air, drifting calmly down to earth.

Eldon is laid out in the library. It is one of the few parts of the house that has remained undamaged and it is the most dignified place to put him until the doctor can get there. He has been heaved up onto the big library table, right on top of a stack of his maps.

Isabelle stands in front of her husband. Most of his clothes have burnt off his body. He still wears the upper portion of his trousers, and one shoe. His hair and beard are gone. Mercifully, one of the men has shut his blackened eyes. The stench of his scorched flesh is so strong that Isabelle will wake for months afterward with the acrid smell of his burnt body occupying her like a ghost.

His skin is black and blistered. Most of his fingernails are missing. “From crawling,” one of the men said. “We found him on his hands and knees. He must have been crawling to the kitchen to try and get out that way.”

Cook has blamed herself. “I had him by the hand,” she said. “I should have been quicker in getting him out that window.”

Isabelle can’t bring herself to touch her husband, to lay a hand on his flesh, black and bubbled like tar. She wants instead to remember the smooth slide of it from before. A long time before. Intact. Beautiful.

It must have hurt so much. She hopes he wasn’t too afraid. She hopes he wasn’t calling for her. If she’d known what was happening she would have gone in after him. But even as she thinks this she knows that this is not the truth.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

They had moved away from each other slowly, almost imperceptibly, like the drift of the continents that he’d told her about once, each year a microscopic shift in attitude and distance. They had married for what they had pretended was love. They had lived in this house. They had buried three infants together, each one marked with a small white stone with a carving of an angel’s wing on it. The unnamed graves said simply,
Infant Son
and
Infant Daughter of Isabelle and Eldon Dashell.
On Rose’s small stone it said,
Our Baby Called Too Soon to Heaven.