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No. No.Marcelline’s gaze went to the burning building. Her mind shrank from the thought.
“Lucie!”she shouted. Her sisters echoed her. The street was filling with gawkers. Her gaze raced over the crowd but no, there was no sign of her. There wouldn’t be. Lucie wasn’t brave at night. She wouldn’t run into a crowd of strangers.
“The doll!” Sophy cried. “She wanted to take the doll. There wasn’t time.”
“But she couldn’t have gone back,” Leonie said, her voice high, panicked.
Marcelline started to run back into the shop. Her sisters grabbed her. She fought.
“Marcelline, look,” Sophy said in a hard voice.
Flames boiled in the windows. The showroom was a bonfire of garish colors made of silks and satins and laces and cottons.
“Lucie!” Marcelline screamed. “Lucie!”
Clevedon had counted heads as they passed through the door. He’d heard their voices outside the building. He was sure they were all safely out.
But he’d scarcely stepped out onto the pavement when he heard Noirot scream for her child.
No. Dear God, no. Don’t let her be in there.
He ran back in.
“Lucie!” he shouted. “Erroll!”
The fire was spreading over the ground floor and flowing upward, hissing, crackling. Through the smoke, he could scarcely make out the stairs. He found them mainly by memory, and ran up.
“Lucie! Erroll!”
He kept calling, straining to hear, and at last, as he felt his way along the first-floor passage, he heard the terrified cry.
“Lucie!” he shouted. “Where are you, child?”
“Mama!”
The smoke was thick and choking. He could barely hear her above the fire’s noise. He very nearly missed her. Had he passed that spot a moment sooner or later, he wouldn’t have caught the muffled cry. But where was it coming from? “Lucie!”
“Mama!”
He searched frantically, and it was partly by sight and partly by sound and partly by moving his hands over the place where the cry seemed to come from that led him to the low door. It was under the stairs leading to the second floor. She might have hidden or played there before, or it simply might have been the first door she found.
He wrenched the door open.
Darkness. Silence.
No, please. Don’t let her be dead. Give me a chance, please.
Then he made out the little form, huddled in a corner.
He scooped her up. She had the doll clutched tightly against her chest, and she was shaking. “It’s all right,” he said, his voice rough—with the smoke, with fear, with relief. She turned her face into his coat and sobbed.
He cradled her head in his hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “Everything will be all right.”
Everything would be all right, he promised himself. It had to be. She would not die. He wouldn’t let her.
Behind him the fire hissed and crackled, racing toward them.
Marcelline fought bitterly, but they wouldn’t let her go back for Lucie. Now it was too late.
