The Fire in the Glass

by Jacquelyn Benson

  The idea frightened her. That wasn’t how this was supposed to work. She was doing what she must to try to save Estelle but when that proved futile, she would go back to her old life, to the way things had been before.

  Nothing was supposed to change.

  “Are you coming?”

  “Sorry,” Lily replied to Sam’s call. She climbed carefully up the remaining steps. They seemed solid enough under her feet. Could she trust this instinct of hers to warn them before another part of the building collapsed?

  Sam waited for her on the first floor. It was brighter here, as the windows still opened to the pale light of the moon. They moved slowly past wards furnished with neat rows of narrow beds. There were shadowy storerooms and what looked like it might have been some kind of parlor. Lily saw a plush sofa and a coffee table, though the coziness of the space was compromised by the slashes cut into the upholstery and the foul-smelling liquids staining the walls where jars had been thrown and shattered.

  The damage from the fire was more apparent as they neared the end of the hall. Soot stains flared out from around the door that closed off the other half of the building, the smell of damp, charred wood becoming stronger.

  “It’ll be chancier, the further we head that way,” Sam warned.

  “I need to check in there,” she said, pointing to a room a few steps further down the hall.

  It was a generously-sized office dominated by a large oak desk. The fire had kissed this space, coming close enough for the heat to blister the paint on one of the walls. A glass-fronted cabinet of pharmaceuticals had been ravaged, the lock broken off. Only a few empty bottles were left behind. An articulated skeleton in the corner was missing its head and someone had driven a scalpel, viciously, through the back of the posh leather office chair at the desk.

  It was the file cabinets that caught Lily’s attention and made her risk coming this close to the more heavily damaged part of the building.

  They were an expensive variety, made of steel with a lock on each drawer. Painted black, they looked like heavy monoliths at the back of the room. These were clearly designed to hold records that not just anyone was to have access to—records that might tell her the truth behind the rumors and speculations she’d been following.

  “We might need those picks of yours . . .” Lily began, but trailed off as she tried the first drawer and it slid open under her hand.

  Empty.

  She pulled open another, and a third.

  All empty.

  Sam peered over her shoulder.

  “There aren’t any ashes in those drawers. If what’s in there had burnt, there’d be ashes. So either they were empty to begin with . . .”

  “Or someone has come and emptied them,” Lily concluded. She slammed the drawer shut, fighting against rising frustration.

  She needed answers, not empty drawers.

  “Could there be more records upstairs? Some sort of archive?” she demanded.

  “I’m game if you are,” Sam replied.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE ATTIC WAS ENORMOUS, stretching the full length and width of the building. The rafters made Lily feel like she was inside the roof of a cathedral, all flying buttresses and Gothic elegance. The elegant curves were formed by sections of the roof that had been gutted by flames, leaving them bare to the wild moonlit night above.

  Under the open wound of that damage, the space was packed with rows of metal cots and chairs stacked into unsteady towers, crates with mysterious contents jammed in between.

  She and Sam picked their way through, stepping over pieces of tumbled struts, boots splashing in puddles lingering on the wood floor. Light, soft feathers dusted the boards. Lily could hear the gentle rustling and cooing of doves tucked up into the remaining rafters.

  She stopped a few yards shy of where the floor gave way. The opening was jagged, edged in black, spilling down into the darkness of the levels below.

  “I don’t see any files,” Sam pointed out.

  Frustration welled up inside of her. There was nothing here but broken glass and ashes. She had come for answers. The building refused to give any away.

  She turned from the empty maw of the broken floor.

  “Maybe we missed something. I’m going to look around.”

  “Suit yourself,” Sam replied.

  He made himself comfortable on the edge of one of the narrow gabled windows. A pair of doves fluttered down from the rafters. They settled onto the windowsill beside him. One hopped onto his knee while the other pushed against his hand, cooing softly.

  He scratched the bird’s neck as Lily set down her stick and started wrangling with a row of cots jammed together like cards in a deck. They came loose with a scream of protesting metal, jangling like Jacob Marley’s chains as she dragged them across the floor.

  “So you and Lord Strangford, then. What’s all that about?” Sam asked casually.

  Lily kicked a mound of dusty linens aside.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Come on. I could’ve run a saw through the tension between the two of you back in the garage.”

  The image of Strangford standing in the doorway came back to her, hurt flashing through his dark eyes.

  “You must have misread the situation.”

  “So you don’t fancy him?”

  Lily turned back, glaring at Sam.

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  “Just passing the time.”

  More doves had joined the scouts on Sam’s knee. They fluttered down to the ground below his window, prancing like soldiers on parade.

  Lily moved to the other side of the attic. She wrenched aside an old door, revealing a pile of stained mattresses.

  “Can I usher your wedding?” Sam asked. “A Chinese man for an usher at a grand toff wedding. That’d be something, eh?”

  “There isn’t going to be any wedding,” Lily snapped in reply, shoving a rolling trolley out of her way. The wheel caught on some uneven shoal of floorboard and the boxy steel contraption tipped over, crashing to the floor in a cascade of breaking glass.

  She fought back the curse that wanted to burst from her lips and turned instead, calmly, to the stack of mattresses.

  “No light matter, then,” Sam remarked. “But where’s the trouble? Seems simple enough to me.”

  “I’m not his type.”

  “He don’t have a type. Never seen him more than half interested in a lady before you.”

  “He is not—”

  “Oh, he is.”

  Lily pushed aside the surging conflict of emotion this assertion sparked in her.

  “I mean that I’m not the type a peer of the realm marries.”

  “How’s that? You look like the type. Sound like the type. You telling me you didn’t have some high-class governess teaching you how to talk like that?”

  “I went to school.”

  “One of them high-class ladies’ schools, no doubt.”

  “I told you. I’m not what I sound like.”

  “So—what? You’re not a toff? What’s it, then—your people in trade? That’s nothing, these days. More money in trades than titles. All them nobles are broke. Death duties, you know,” he clarified, putting on a perfect aristocratic drawl.

  Lily moved a precariously stacked chair out of her way, tossing it aside. The impact rattled another pair of beds together, the metal clanging.

  “I’m a bastard. That make it clear enough?”

  The doves fluttered up to nearby rafters, a few light gray feathers drifting down behind them.

  Sam considered her from his perch in the window.

  “Bastard who got sent to finishing school. Not some back alley swive, then. But if the money was on your dame’s side she’d have been shipped off to one of those convent hospitals in Switzerland. You’d have been adopted out and raised yapping German. So it must be your old man. What’s he—a Russian count? Scottish baronet?”

  “English earl, actually,”
Lily snapped, wrenching up the lid of a crate.

  “That’s not a joke, is it? Your old man’s an earl? What’re you sulking for? If your old man’s an earl, it don’t matter what side of the blanket you were born on. No one’d look down on his lordship for making that kind of a connection.”

  “There is no connection. I’m not acknowledged.”

  “So get acknowledged.”

  Lily scoffed, slamming the lid back into place.

  “Why are you so determined on this?”

  Sam shrugged, posture turning a touch defensive. “He’s just a decent bloke, is all.”

  Lily opened her mouth to retort but held back as the more subtle cues in Sam’s words and posture finally broke through her own too-ready defenses.

  He cared. Though he’d likely deny it if she asked outright, he thought of Strangford as a friend. Lily expected Sam didn’t put very many people in this world into that category.

  “I’m sure there is a perfect mate for Lord Strangford out there somewhere,” she said, gentling her tone. “But I’m not her.”

  “I haven’t met many daughters of earls, but I suspect most of them are all frills and furbelows. Doubt there are many who’d toss burnt buildings in trousers on a long-shot chance to save a friend.”

  Lily paused with her hands on the lid of the next crate. The compliment caught her off guard, striking with more force than she’d anticipated.

  She looked over at the tough young Cockney in the window. He was slouched against the glass, arms crossed defensively over his chest.

  “Just saying it ain’t so far-fetched. But no worries. I know how it is. You’re scared, is all.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s alright. I’ve been there myself. It was this flower girl back in Limehouse. I couldn’t get three words out to her. Just ‘D-d-daisy, please’.”

  Lily finished rifling a the crate, replacing the lid and pushing it aside. Another stack of mattresses lay before her. She began yanking them out of the way, one by one.

  “This story have a happy ending?”

  “Nah. She got knocked up by the butcher.” Sam scratched his nose. “Think it’d go better for you two, though. If you’d chance it.”

  Lily pulled the last of the mattresses aside. The sight of what lay beneath them made her pause.

  “What’s that?” Sam asked, rising. The movement disturbed a few birds who had returned to cluster around him in the window. They warbled in protest, hopping out of the way.

  “Suitcases,” Lily replied.

  There were perhaps two dozen of them tucked under the eaves of the roof. They were humble things, battered and scratched. A few were held together with an old belt or a bit of twine. Some weren’t suitcases at all, but a mere canvas sack.

  The collection felt out of place next to the rest of the contents of the attic, which had so clearly fallen under the umbrella of surplus hospital supplies.

  What did a hospital need with a bunch of third-hand baggage?

  “Who’d you think those belong to?” Sam asked, giving voice to the question ringing through Lily’s mind.

  “I would assume the patients.”

  “There ain’t any patients left, if you hadn’t noticed. How come these are still here?”

  “Perhaps they’re the property of the ones who never made it home.”

  This had been a charity hospital. Would those employed here have gone to the trouble of seeking out the next of kin of the patients who died in their care? Unless someone came to claim the deceased’s property, it would simply have been taking up space. She supposed it should be seen as a sign of compassion that they hadn’t simply thrown it on the rubbish heap.

  Still, something about the sight of those poor, battered cases hidden in the dust of the attic made her skin crawl.

  Sam pulled off his cap, scratching at his hair. The doves trilled softly in the rafters.

  “Should we look in ‘em?” he asked.

  She found herself thinking of Abney Park and the moment before Dr. Gardner thrust his crowbar into the lid of Sylvia Durst’s coffin.

  Something about what she was contemplating felt just as profane, but Lily had come here for answers.

  She pulled the first of the cases toward her and tossed back the lid.

  What lay inside was as humble as the exterior of the bag would suggest—a threadbare nightgown, a pair of old handkerchiefs. A woven belt and a scrap of crimson ribbon. They were the few possessions an impoverished woman had thought might offer her comfort in this place—a place she had come to for healing. Instead, she had found death.

  The others were similar. Sam joined her after Lily had made it through three of the bags. He knelt beside her in the dust, tugging another suitcase free and examining its contents with a solemn reverence.

  Lily closed one case and moved on to the next. It was made of cardboard thinly covered in black twill. She tugged loose the knotted twine that held it together and opened the lid.

  She moved aside a pair of stockings and a little sachet that still smelled faintly of lavender. Next came a ruffled blouse, the seams showing signs of having been carefully re-sewn.

  As she lifted it, something slipped from a pocket, landing on the floor with a knock.

  She put down the blouse and reached for what had fallen.

  “What was that?” Sam asked, glancing over at her.

  It was a small silver charm.

  Lily rubbed at the tarnish that darkened its surface. The metal had been shaped into the form of a human hand, thumb extended. Its surface was covered in tiny characters in a language Lily had never seen. The minuscule, blocky letters ran up and down each finger, crisscrossing the palm.

  “That’s Jewish.” Sam had come to crouch behind her shoulder. “I’ve seen those letters on the signs in their shops over in Whitechapel.”

  Lily flipped the charm over, examining both sides of the piece once more, running her hand along the plain leather strap that would have been used to hang it around someone’s neck.

  She stood, slipping the charm in her pocket.

  “It ain’t worth much,” Sam pointed out.

  “I’m not taking it for money.”

  Why had she taken it? She didn’t have an answer. It was an impulse, just simple instinct, but there was little more than that guiding this whole mission.

  She closed the suitcase lid, tucking it back into place among the others.

  “I think we’ve found everything we’re going to here,” she announced, retrieving her walking stick. “Let’s go.”

  On the floor below, Sam glanced down the shadowy hallway.

  “Can’t go back the way we came.”

  “We’ll have to find another stair. There’s likely one at the opposite end of the building,” she suggested.

  “There’s more damage from the fire that way. I can’t speak to the sureness of the floor.”

  “Let’s at least take a look.”

  Lily led the way. The smell of char and wet ash grew stronger as they passed the ransacked offices, moving closer to the heart of the now-extinct blaze.

  They stopped at a set of doors. Narrow windows set into them were criss-crossed with wire and warped with long-ago heat. A cot was jammed into the opening, the mildewing mattress and blanket stained with soot.

  Lily climbed over it and slipped inside.

  The room was vast and black. Smoke stains climbed the walls like angry fingers reaching towards the jagged hole the fire had cut into the ceiling. Above them, a few scattered stars and the ghost of the moon shone through the frail covering of thin clouds.

  Beds lined the walls, scraps of mattress and blanket, charred to ash, clinging to the coils of the springs. Beyond them, the glass of the windows was cracked and glazed behind sets of sturdy iron bars.

  The floor ended a few yards in, the boards turned to blackened stumps extended over a deep void.

  “This must’ve been where it started,” Lily noted.

  “Looks more like a pri
son than a hospital,” Sam noted.

  Lily felt cold, looking at the wisps of burnt linen clinging to the beds. “What direction is this?”

  Sam considered. “East.”

  The East Wing. The place Berta had said was kept locked, the women within cut off from communication with those on the other side.

  Her imagination took over, envisioning what this space would have looked like packed with sick and crippled women, windows barred, the flames chewing hungrily up the walls as the inmates clawed at the door, desperate to escape. It was a scene out of Dante, a slice of hell in Southwark.

  Sam turned his attention to the door, examining the chipped and blistered paint. “This was locked. Looks like they used this cot as a battering ram. No easy thing, given the door had a deadbolt. Would have to have been some muscle behind it.”

  “Or a lot of them, working together.”

  The pieces fell together in Lily’s mind.

  No one had come for them. The building had been burning and the doctors, nurses and orderlies had fled, leaving the women of this room to die.

  The notion filled her with a rage quick and hot as the blaze that had once engulfed the room.

  “There’s our stair,” Sam said, pointing to a doorway in the far wall, across the open chasm where the floor had been. “Looks like we ain’t getting out that way.”

  In the end, they returned to a closet in the hall for a load of mold-stained sheets. Sam neatly knotted them into a rope, then dropped it through the hole in the floor.

  He went first, then caught her stick as she tossed it down to him. She followed, her arms aching as she worked her way down the twisted lengths of linen to where he waited, balanced on the collapsed remains of the East Wing.

  “Something odd about this fire,” he commented as she descended.

  “Oh?” she grunted in response.

  He peered up at the hole in the floor, tilting back his cap.

  “Didn’t start at the hearth.”

  Lily’s feet reached the ground. She shook out her arms, then looked up.

  “See the floor by the fireplace?” he noted. “There’s three, four feet of it wasn’t burnt. If the fire’d started in the hearth, that would’ve been the first bit to go up.” Sam studied the great, charred opening. “It’s almost like it sparked up in the middle of the floor.”