Besides, if the best thief was the one you’d never suspect of stealing, then the best spy was surely the one you’d never suspect of betraying his country. And Mr. Peter Holstein certainly filled that bill.
She had to increase her attempts to find the truth, that was all. Do less organizing and more reading in the library. Go back to that attic every chance she got. Find a way to get into his office.
Only a coward would have put that one off as long as she had. But every time she hoped to slip in unnoticed, he was there, regardless of the time of day. Or Mrs. Teague would stride down the hallway, always ready with a disapproving, distrusting glare.
And how was she to sneak into the attic when it required passing the servants’ quarters? Sunday mornings were the only time they were all out and guaranteed not to run back up to their rooms for a forgotten this or that. She’d have to be content with that hour or two.
The sun lit the clouds afire. Retta would love to see the colors—they looked somehow more like a painting than reality, like the strokes of a master’s brush. Such beauty in a world that systematically destroyed it. Rosemary sighed out a breath, drew in another. And frowned. Smoke. It still seemed so out of place here.
She sniffed again. This wasn’t cigarette smoke, actually. This was smoke smoke. Wood smoke. But it didn’t smell like what came from the chimneys, it had something else in it.
A shout scorched the air.
She was up, on her feet, running back along the path to the front of the house.
Black smoke streamed from the stables.
Fourteen
Coughing, Rosemary flew into the house, letting the door bang upon the wall and not much caring what picture it might knock askew. “Mr. Holstein!” Her feet tore over the carpet in the hall, thankfully still covered in the sensible walking shoes she’d worn that day. “Mr. Holstein!” The telephone was in his study, though she’d never heard it ring. That was what Kenver had said as he took another bucket from young Benny’s hand and told her to go and have the master call for help—now. And to send out any servant she saw to join the fire brigade.
“Mr. Holstein!” His door loomed before her—shut, of course. But there was no time to indulge his privacy. She pulled on the latch. Locked, blast it all. The blighted man. “Mr. Holstein!” She pounded on the door with a fist. With both of them.
Light snuck out from beneath it—he was obviously in there. She pounded more.
“Not . . . now! If you p-please. I need qu—quiet.”
“You idiot man! Your stable is on fire and if you don’t open this door right now you’re putting the lives of everyone here in danger. Now open the blighted door!”
“What?” Footsteps, rushed, and then the wood whooshed open from under her hand. “Fire?” He didn’t take the time to meet her gaze for confirmation, just brushed by and ran.
“The telephone! Mr. Holstein!” But he was already at the end of the hall, paying no mind to her. Growling, she went into his precious study and looked about until she saw the candlestick phone sitting on a table all alone, far out of the range of his mess.
She’d never used a telephone. Never even touched one, to be quite honest. They had them in London, of course, but not in any of the rooms she’d ever been able to afford. And whom would she call? But she headed toward it now and tried to remember seeing others use the contraptions while she was about in Town. Picked up the receiver. Held it to her ear. “Hello?”
“This is the operator. But you don’t sound like Mrs. Teague, Kensey Manor.”
Thank heavens someone was there. “No, it’s not. But we have an emergency—the stable is on fire. Is there someone who can be dispatched with a fire engine?”
“Oh, of course!” The voice suddenly sounded young and panicked. “I’ll get Tom to rouse the boys straightaway!”
“Thank you.”
“Fire?”
Rosemary jumped and spun. Mrs. Teague stood in the doorway, her face frozen somewhere between disapproval and fear. She motioned toward the door. “Hurry, then. What are you doing standing about? They’ll need all of us until the fire department can arrive.”
Not until she was running back down the hall beside the housekeeper did she realize she should have found some excuse to stay there in that study, alone. She could have poked around. Looked into drawers. Seen, perhaps, evidence of what he typed all day. But she’d missed her chance, and when they stepped outside and the breeze slammed them with acrid smoke, she couldn’t exactly regret it.
“Over there! The pump!”
She didn’t know who shouted it, but she and Mrs. Teague obeyed the direction. Kerensa was already there, pumping with all her might into the line of buckets waiting. Black smoke billowed around them, turning sunset into night, making the maid erupt into coughing.
Rosemary elbowed the girl aside. “Run into the house and get towels that we can wet to wrap around our faces. Hurry now, luv.”
Kerensa, arms hanging limply at her sides already, nodded and took off at a run. Rosemary took over the pump. Up, down, gush. Up, down, gush. It was an action she knew well—and one she had used once before to fill buckets for a fire brigade before the red engines could come whistling their way into the dank street with the old wooden buildings so easily set aflame. That had been her first flat, gone. She and Barclay and Willa hadn’t yet been teenagers—Pauly had posed as their father so they could get the place. They’d stayed there two whole years, until the fire ate up everything they had.
That was when they’d decided never to keep everything in one place again. And when they’d met Retta and Lucy, orphaned that night thanks to the blaze.
She hated fire. Hated it nearly as much as she hated fever. Up, down, gush. It was like money—one needed a bit of it, for warmth and food. But too much and it charged out of control, taking over your whole life. Eating you up. Destroying everything it touched. Up, down, gush.
“I can take over and give your arms a break.” Mrs. Teague set down more empty buckets, handed off the full ones to Cadan.
Up, down, gush. Rosemary shook her head. “I got me rhythm. You just keep on there.”
A bell clanged in the distance, growing closer, as a weak siren whined. It gave her a sudden pang of homesickness—it was the first alarm she’d heard in Cornwall. Not like London, where every night there was some sort of clamor nearby. A fire or a robbery or a who-knew-what that sent police running or the fire department out.
Another two minutes and the long red wagon sped into the drive, pulled by galloping, heaving horses. Apparently their little village hadn’t the funds yet to purchase one of the lorries she’d begun to see in London. But it had water hoses and ladders and a great tank no doubt ready to spout water onto the blaze.
Kerensa held up a small, wet towel in front of Rosemary’s face. “Here. Shall I tie it around your neck for you?”
Rosemary couldn’t bring her arms to stop. Not as long as Mrs. Teague kept replacing full buckets with empty ones, not so long as Cadan and Mr. Teague kept taking those full ones and rushing toward the stable. She nodded, trying to hold her upper body still so that the maid could tie the thin towel around her and lift a portion of it up over her nose.
Only with the cool filter did she realize her lungs were burning with black. That she was tasting it as much as smelling it. Within a minute the terry cloth had gone hot from her breath, but it was still better than smoke. Up, down, gush.
Her arms burned, but she ignored the pain and kept pumping. She coughed, but she didn’t let it interrupt her. She kept half an ear on the shouts from the men, on the sound of water streaming from a hose, of horses whinnying and thrashing against the hands leading them to safety. Someone shouted to someone else that all the animals were safe and accounted for. Another someone shouted that most all of the tack had been rescued, and the carriages were parked safely away. But the hay was quick tinder, and the blaze ate through the building, swallowing each stall in turn.
Greedy monster.
At some
point, hands took her by the shoulders and pulled her away from the pump. Propelled her a few steps away, to a hot something-or-another that she sank to a seat on. Those hands then took her place at the pump, but it required a long minute of staring blankly to realize it was Gryffyn Penrose under the masking grey towel, no doubt summoned by the black cloud.
She couldn’t lift her arms, they were so tired. And her stomach was trying to heave, her lungs to spasm. She untied her own towel and used it to mop at her face, which was streaming sweat and apparently gone black as midnight with soot.
She’d posed once as a chimney sweep, when she was just nine and had nothing to distinguish her from the boys who usually performed the task. Soot on her face, her hair under a cap, a gap-toothed grin as she knocked on the door of her mark. She’d climbed into an upper-floor window that day rather than onto the roof and made off with a handsome music box filled with jewelry. She’d seen the woman wearing the shiny jewelry and thought it would be easy enough to lift.
It was. Of course, it had also all been paste. But she’d been nine, she hadn’t known real from fake back then.
She’d learned.
“Here.” Kerensa pressed a cup into her hands. “Drink. You’ve worked as hard as any of the men, you must be parched.”
She gave her face one last swipe with the towel that was barely damp. There was scarcely any light left to tell her what the towel looked like after such a use, but she set it aside and raised the cool water to her mouth.
“They nearly got it under control.” Kerensa took the discarded towel. “I’ll wring this out for you.”
“Thanks.” Not that Rosemary was convinced she could ever stand again, having sat. Or raise her arms. Or breathe normally.
She hated fire.
What light remained died—it hadn’t been the remains of the sun lighting their world, just the blazing stable. As the men staked their claim on the shell of a building and banished the flame, night pounced, cool and dark and complete.
She shivered. But didn’t budge. No other monster would creep near, surely, with this one still fuming.
Unless it had been waiting for this chance.
She pushed to her feet, setting the empty cup in her place. With such little light, she could scarcely make out who was who. Penrose still manned the pump, and it was the mister of the Teagues, she thought, now replacing buckets. The missus had probably grown tired and had to take a respite as well. Rosemary counted a team of six shadow-figures that seemed to revolve around the fire engine. The more familiar silhouettes of Cadan and Benny and Kenver and then Treeve, cradling his arm. And Peter Holstein there, closest to the building, throwing a bucketful of water onto a smoking beam.
She didn’t know what monsters she was looking for. Only that she didn’t see any. Not here, not now. Aside from the smoke, and the darkness itself.
“Enough!” The shout came from one of the village men, who made a barely visible signal to one of his comrades. “It’ll just smolder from here. No danger of it catching anything else.”
A bit of silver light sliced through the smoke and illumined the ramshackle shell of the stable. The roof was gone. A few of the walls. Heavens but it was a miserable sight, even knowing the loss, aside from the building itself, was minimal.
With the urgency gone, the charge in the air changed. Led, of course, by Mrs. Teague, who physically tugged Holstein away. Even from where Rosemary stood, she could hear the woman’s infernal fussing. “What a fool thing to do, Master Peter! Why did you pull Benny back? He can throw a bucket of water as sure as you can, but what would we do if something happened to you? You with no heir, no one to see to the place if something happens to you.” From there, the rant lapsed into gibberish. Or perhaps Cornish.
Holstein pulled away from Mrs. Teague’s hands. “He’s only a . . . a boy. He shouldn’t have . . . been out here.”
Rosemary’s fingers curled into her palm. Benny was just a boy, it was true. Not yet come into his height at twelve, but strong. Capable. The few times she’d run across him, she’d rather liked him—he reminded her of Georgie in some ways, as he’d been when they’d first met him five years ago. Eager and willful and full of mischief that nothing could tame. Was her little brother still preying on blokes at the tube stops, even after she’d told him not to?
Probably. He never listened to anyone but Barclay, and seldom even him. Oh, how she missed him.
Benny likely wouldn’t have stayed inside even had someone commanded it. He’d have wanted to be out here, helping. But it was good of Mr. Holstein to want to protect him from the most dangerous of the jobs. Even if Benny was probably better able to handle it than a pampered gent who spent all his days in front of a typewriter.
“. . . do you think?”
It took her ears a moment to catch the low murmur, to distinguish it from crackling wood and the whoosh of smoke and the footsteps of all those people milling about, not sure what to do with themselves now.
Penrose’s voice.
“I don’t think. I know.” Kenver, and it wasn’t the scratchiness in his tone that brought Rosemary to attention, or the weariness. It was the anger, blazing as hot as the stable had done. “I saw someone running away, that’s why I went in when I did. But they’d set it in the empty stall where we store the hay. It went up too fast.”
Her fingernails bit, but she pressed them all the harder to her palm. It wasn’t an accident.
Of course it wasn’t an accident.
Penrose muttered something hot and low and fuming. “I’ll go into the village. Get the constable.”
“Aye, well, I’m going into the village too. And it ain’t no constable I’m after.”
“Don’t do anything foolish, Kenver. If you know who it was, we’ll give his name to the authorities. And if you don’t, it won’t do any good to make wild accusations.”
“No, it won’t do no good to sit around and let whoever it was gloat into his ale, that’s what.”
“Stop. This won’t achieve anything. Go home to Tamsyn, get cleaned up—”
“Stow it, Penrose.”
Rosemary hadn’t realized how much she liked Kenver. Nor did she realize her intent to follow him until her feet started scurrying after him, with no input, it seemed, from her mind. A glance over her shoulder, though, told her that none of the night figures seemed to be concerned with her. No one called for her, no one was hovering near the place where she’d been sitting. They’d just assume she’d gone back to the cottage.
She followed instead the retreating footfalls of the stable master. He headed, of course, for the corral where all the whinnying had come from. He would take a horse. And she surely wouldn’t—she hadn’t the foggiest notion how to ride one of the beasts.
But the fire engine was preparing to leave, and all the blokes who’d arrived on it were climbing up near the front, hanging onto railings and talking in low murmurs. Once they were all in place, she simply slipped to the rear of the thing and stepped up onto it, wrapping her tired arms about the rails as the men were doing.
No one hailed her as the horses pulled the engine around the circle before the manor house and then down the drive. Glancing down at the shirtwaist that had once been white and was now black as the night, she guessed that they couldn’t even see her, if anyone bothered to look.
The ride into town wasn’t long, though the blasted thing seemed to hit every rut in the road, and her rubbery arms had a time of hanging on. But Kenver overtook them just as they reached the outer edge of the village, and she could more or less tell which direction he went. When the fire engine slowed to turn down an opposite street, she simply hopped off and, sticking to the shadows, headed in Kenver’s direction.
The pub lay ahead, well-lit and loud. How many of the men currently in their cups inside had sat in a pew in that pious church twelve hours earlier? And how many had the foggiest notion what any of the words Mr. Trenholm had spoken actually meant? Not that she did either—but she at least knew not to pretend she
did. She may be a liar and a thief and bordering on a spy just now, but Rosemary Gresham wasn’t a hypocrite.
And if what the vicar had said was true, then Jesus had no trouble spending His time with liars and thieves and worse. It was the hypocrites He couldn’t stand.
Kenver, his horse tied to a post, was even then striding through the door. He was still soot-covered and no doubt stank every bit as badly as Rosemary did. He hadn’t even taken the time to wipe off his face, from what she could see as the pub’s light caught him. Talk about making a striking entrance.
She ran on silent feet toward the building and found an open window facing the alley. Perfect. Keeping to the shadows, she stationed herself underneath it and listened as the usual hubbub died down to that particular quiet that bespoke discomfort and, perhaps, confusion.
“Who was it?” Fury weighed his words down so low that Rosemary could scarcely hear them. And had a feeling no one would dare stand up and stake a claim to the fire, especially not if it meant facing Kenver.
Heavy steps, a bit of scraping, like a stool or chair being dragged across the floor. Then, “I said, who—was—it?”
A throat cleared. “We heard the fire engine go by. Didn’t know where it was headed. What happened, Kenny?”
Rosemary imagined Kenver turning toward whomever had spoken. She couldn’t quite picture what look would be on his face. Was he glaring at someone he suspected or regarding someone he trusted?
“What happened?” The man could keep a rein on his anger, she gave him credit for that. His tone was taut, and there was no mistaking the undergirding of rage. But he didn’t shout. Didn’t snap. She had a feeling he stood with perfect calm, probably not even baring his unfortunate teeth.
She’d yet to meet his new wife, but whoever the girl was, she would be proud of him in that moment. Or should be, if she had a speck of affection for her man.
“I’ll tell you what happened. Some coward set fire to the stable at Kensey, that’s what.”
Enough murmuring filled her ears that Rosemary nearly missed the scoffing laughter. But it came from near the window under which she stood. She turned toward it, though she didn’t dare put her head within view. If she could see them, then they could see her.
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