Page 137 of The English Wife

“Even better. I have a wonderful one about a prince who turned into a toad. You’ll adore it. It’s very educational.”

Anne and her charge disappeared up the back stair, the nurse following more slowly behind with Sebastian.

“Well?” said Mrs. Gerritt, putting her hands on her hips and surveying the three who remained. “Do you mean to sit here all night? If you’re not going to help, stop cluttering up my kitchen. There’s a fire in the drawing room. I’ll fetch you once I’ve got your rooms ready.”

“I think we’ve been dismissed,” said Burke quietly. He helped Janie up from her chair. “Don’t gawp, Lacey. Come along.”

Giles Lacey glared back over his shoulder as Burke ferried them from the room. “You let your housekeeper speak to you like that?”

“She’s not my housekeeper,” said Janie, feeling very far away from her own body, as though her head were floating disconnected above the floor.

Giles Lacey shook his head and muttered, “I need a drink. Do you have brandy in this godforsaken wasteland?”

Given that the air was blasted with ash and snow, Janie didn’t feel she could contest his description. “There should be a decanter in the dining room.”

“My thanks.” Giles Lacey nodded at Janie and, ignoring Burke, veered off in search of liquid consolation.

“You might do with some of that brandy.” Burke stood aside to let Janie precede him into the drawing room, but she noticed that he stayed close.

Wordlessly, Janie shook her head. “Mrs. Gerritt has left us tea.”

A remedy for any ill. There was a chipped teapot in her grandmother’s pattern on a tray by the fire, five cups, and a large bowl of sugar. No candles had been lit. None were needed. The drawing room faced south, where the bonfire that had once been Bay’s home blazed like a thousand candles, infusing the room with a lurid glare.

Janie crossed to the window. “Will it spread?”

She had never been so conscious of the vulnerability of her surroundings, mere planks and boards separating her from the elements. Rather like reputation, which seemed so strong until it was lost.

“The snow is falling again.” She felt, rather than saw, Burke come to stand beside her. He lowered his head, rubbing his temples. “Christ. I never thought I’d be so glad to see snow. Let’s just hope the wind stays in the other quarter and the snow keeps falling.”

He lifted his head just as Janie turned from the window, and she found herself staring at him, staring at him as if she were memorizing him, every detail unnaturally sharp, from the sheen on his hair, still damp from the snow-water in which he had washed it, to the burn mark by his left brow. He had a sticking plaster on his forehead and another on his cheek, where he had been struck by flying glass. The coat he wore was Janie’s grandfather’s and far too big for him: the front hung loose and the sleeves had been rolled and rolled again. Janie’s grandfather had been a large man, tall and broad, the latter exacerbated by her grandmother’s skill with pastry. He would have made two of Burke.

Janie tried to focus on those sorts of thoughts, on Burke’s rolled sleeves, her grandmother’s pies. It was better than the other images that came up when she closed her eyes: her mother, dissolving into flame. Bay, lying lost and cold on the floor of the folly. Annabelle, sinking slowly into the river. The endless roar of the fire, turning the sky crimson and black.

The clothes she wore smelled of lavender and age, but Janie could still smell the reek of soot beneath it, in her hair, in her skin, beneath her nails, ground right down to her core.

The soot of her mother’s pyre.

“How long can it burn?” she blurted out.

“Days.” Burke’s eyes were red and impossibly weary. Janie remembered, vaguely, that Burke had walked two miles from the station. It seemed like a lifetime ago. An hour ago was a lifetime ago. “But the snow should damp it.”

“So you said.” Flames, shooting out of the window. Her mother’s lips moving. “What did my mother say to you? At the end.”

Burke blinked and shifted from one foot to the other. “It was hard to tell. The wind…”

“No.” Janie put her hand on his sleeve, forcing him to look at her. “I want to know.”

“It sounded like…” Burke’s lips quirked in a something out of an actor’s mask, half-comic, half-tragic. “It sounded like, If you publish this, I will haunt you.”

A harsh laugh burbled out of Janie’s throat, and then another one, and another one. No words of love, no, not for her mother. No contrition, no apologies. Just a posthumous attempt to protect her reputation. It was suddenly hysterically funny, her mother, in a bedsheet, flitting about Burke’s window, sabotaging the printing presses, spooking the horses that carried the papers. Her stomach ached with laughing, except that it wasn’t laughter anymore. Sobs pushed out of her, great heaving sobs, bending her double, mixing and mingling with the laughter as tears ran down her face, seeping through her fingers, wetting the bodice of her grandmother’s dress.

Janie could feel Burke’s arms around her, his hand stroking her hair, his voice murmuring, over and over, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I’m not.” The words came out harsh and raw. Janie shoved the hair out of her eyes, blinking at Burke, her throat aching, her chest aching, all of her aching. “Is that horrible? I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry she’s gone. If anything, I’m … relieved.”

Janie could feel it like the lifting of a storm. She had never imagined that her mother might have hurt Bay—some part at the back of Janie’s mind mocked her for the euphemism—but her mother’s tension had pressed through the house, infecting them all. She had felt her madness, even if she hadn’t recognized it for what it was. It was dreadful, all of it, and she knew that, at some point, the full horror of it would hit her, but right now all she could feel was a horrible sense of relief that her mother was gone.

“It’s as if she was haunting us already, crushing all the life out of us, one by one, and now she’s gone and we can breathe again.” Janie looked up at Burke, trying to put her feelings into words. “Now is where you’re meant to be shocked and appalled.”