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“Ada, please stay calm.” He shook her shoulders. “We need to get your father now.”
“Papa! Papa—he’s not there. I went to his room, but he’s not there!”
“Ada! Your brother then. Whoever you can find. Clarence!” he screamed, relieved to see her suddenly appear.
“I heard all the screaming. Ada, come now, quickly, quickly.”
Their feet pounded the carpet. The flames inside the room licked up the mahogany desk like a coffin on a pyre. He ran to his room, the closest to the library, and grabbed for his phone, dialing for the fire brigade, then raced back to the library. Ada should have gone to the others first. Had wasted precious time coming to him. What couldhedo?
The room was red and orange and smoke. He spotted a hint of crystal glass rolling on the floor, a tumbler from which Darcy had been drinking. Darcy, who’d been left alone in the room, drunk, in the early hours of the night.
Ada’s loud scream downstairs sounded like demonic laughter echoing through the halls. He turned away from the room. He should leave—leave and join them safely downstairs. Instead,he peered further into the flames, to the winged-back armchair, spotted the hem of a robe, the glint of a jacket—and was that an arm—a hand? Bron knew instinctively that it was Darcy.
Thinking not of his safety, and going against his instincts and everything he’d learned from years of fire drills, he pushed into the room, the smoke choking him and stinging his eyes. He shut them, thrust himself forward, and felt his way through, blinded.
“Darcy!” he called out, but coughed on it. He made it to the chair: empty but for the robe that had been left there. What had looked like a body within was no body—a trick of the eye, a moment of panic.
A hand pulled at his shoulder sharply, dragging him away from the flames and tossing him out of the room and onto the floor. He felt a dull pain at the back of his head as it struck against the door. Bleary-eyed, he saw Darcy towering before him in loose clothes, a white linen shirt, meaty thighs at his eye level. He threw a bucketful of water, knocking over one of the decanters in the meantime, which sent the flames into a more ferocious frenzy. The wallpaper melted away like unfurling scrolls. Bron peeled himself from the floor.
“Stay back,” Darcy ordered.
He cowered at the doorway, and inside a window shattered, glass shards falling into the room like rain. They needed to get out of there.
“Come away,” Bron said, gripping his shoulders, but Darcy only knocked him off. Ada’s continued scream howled across the hall.
“It’s lost, it’s lost, it’s gone,” Darcy wailed, a wounded man, and sirens began to blare outside. The firefighters were quick coming through the doors, and Clarence urged them up the stairs, holding Ada close to her chest. Darcy hollered, asking the brigade if they had anybody manning the courtyard. “You can get to the window from there. And we must alert the Hansons!”
Darcy’s chest heaved heavily through his shirt. The air was hazy with smoke, breathlike, as if it were Darcy releasing it into the cold night.
“Sir, you must both vacate the building immediately.”
“I can’t believe this,” Darcy cried, his face, his hair dripping with sweat. Bron reached out to him, his chest prickling from gooseflesh. The sweat from Darcy’s face dripped onto his; he pressed his forehead into it.
“Now, sir,” the fireman repeated, pulling them away.
“I thought you were inside,” Bron said.
Darcy allowed the fireman to maneuver them downstairs. Bron gripping onto his forearms.
When they’d reached the outside, Ada clung to them both. The fireman urged them farther away from the house, but Darcy broke away, ignoring the pleas for him to step aside, and took a hold of a hose. A firewoman took over, her face hidden beneath the dip of her glaring yellow helmet. She led Bron and Ada by the arms and guided them to the courtyard, where they looked up to the now windowless hole in the building, the flames continuing their dance as water fought to quench them.
“Captain! Where’s Captain?” Ada said, screaming that the dog was still inside. The firefighters ran to the rescue—“Birdie! Birdie too!”—and they emerged with a quivering dog and a caged bird.
An elderly couple, who must have been the Hansons, stood in matching nightwear, the woman’s hair a tendril of silver along her back, her blue and white hands clasped to her mouth as the ivy burned before them. Even the trellis outside the window had caught, although they’d managed to put it out before any real damage had been done to the borders beneath. Bron stroked the curls of Ada’s hair and watched as the cursive smoke dissipated into the sky. They listened to the gushing of the water from hoses, the hooting of the owls in the trees, and the sirens still blaring.
“I’m cold,” Ada said.
“Yes,” he said, shivering now as the adrenaline drained from his blood. “I’m cold too.”
An engine roared through the gates, and the car’s headlights flooded their bodies. Mr. Edwards climbed out of the vehicle and rushed toward them.
“What is going on? Is everyone okay? Is everybody safe? What has happened? What has happened?”
They huddled together for warmth and inhaled the air that smelled like a bonfire.
8
BRON ANDADA HADbeen bundled into a taxi before the fire had ceased and taken to the nearest hotel for the night.
