A startling shout cut the damp air, but it was merely a street vendor plying his wares. Roast chestnuts, hot and rich. Hunger gnawed at my belly provoked by that sound and that sweet smell as it reached me. But I would not be diverted from my fate. Could not be.
Again, I broke cover, sprinted across the gritty cobbles, hurrying to flatten myself against the shadows on the far wall, moving with stealth and guile, my breath all but held, my chest tight with it. He was broader at the shoulders than me, weightier, certainly, though no longer taller. As the distance between us shrank, so his presence grew. It took all my courage not to bolt. The proximity to one who had caused me such suffering for so long continued to urge my flight, however hopeless. And yet, I knew, I could run no more.
So deep was the darkness in the alley, save for slivers of candlelight through the gaps between the planks of the oak door beside us, that I could not see his face, nor he mine. This was no hindrance to identification, however, for I knew the bitterness of his odor and he the sweetness of mine. I could calculate the weight of his bulk by the manner in which it blocked those fractured lines of light, and he could assess mine by the way in which they fell upon me. He looked at me squarely then, and I could sense his grim smile, detect the subtle movement of his features, the wetness of his lips as they parted, the minute alteration in the sound of his breathing as his fetid mouth opened.
If he was intent on speaking I did not permit him the time to do so. The blade was long, and yet I plunged it to the hilt. I felt it cut through the thick cloth of his coat, glancing off a tortoiseshell button on his waistcoat, pressing through the yielding flesh of his stomach, the upward thrust finding its mark beneath his ribs. The shock of it preceded the agony, so that his in breath sucked the air from the space between us. He slumped forward, into my arms, his weight threatening to topple me as I braced myself against him. I would not have him die pinning me to the rough street. I would not ever suffer under his cruelty again.
As the life started to ebb from him and we moved in a small dance of death, a shard of light fell across my face and he found it in him to spit an oath at me one last time. “Curse you!” he hissed. “I say curse you to hell, Erasmus Balmoral!”
I let him slide to the ground, withdrawing my knife as he descended. I wiped the blade upon his coat, watching him a moment more to check that no further cry would come from him. At last I was convinced the deed was done. My persecutor was dead. My childhood finished along with him. I straightened, pushing my hair back off my face with a shaking hand, sheathing my knife at my belt. It was the first time I had used it to kill a man. It would not be the last.
Both the writing and the whispering stopped. The story came to an abrupt end. Xanthe leaned back against the wall of the window seat and gazed out through the darkened panes, as if hoping the stars might provide sufficient illumination to see how what she had just read related to her own situation. It was, as she had come to expect of Spinners, anything but straightforward. A young man in danger killing his tormentor, the setting unhelpfully vague. A town, certainly, and at least a hundred and fifty years ago, judging by the language used and the descriptions of carts rather than cars. Beyond that … what? It could be seen as a warning of danger, particularly from someone she already knew. It might be directing her to a particular place, but where? There were no landmarks. The Spinner had given no real clues as to his location. She had his name to go on. Erasmus Balmoral. She leaned over, picked up her phone, and quickly googled him. Nothing. A complete blank, which in itself was quite unusual. As if it had been waiting for her to finish reading, the wedding dress struck up its singing again. She frowned at it.
“I’m trying, OK? I’m trying.” Feeling more than a little exasperated, she climbed back into bed, wrapped the pillow over her ears, and willed herself to go to sleep.
5
It felt as if she had only been asleep a matter of moments when Xanthe was disturbed by a curious wailing noise. It took her a little while to realize she was not dreaming, and that the sound was coming from the landing outside her bedroom door. As she surfaced more fully from the depths of her sleep, she began to make out voices, urgent and agitated. They carried a similar tone of fear and distress to the sounds of those calling to her when she approached the blind house. The difference was that these cries were of the here and now. These voices were of people living and close to her.
“Xanthe!” At last she clearly heard her mother calling her name. It was in that instant that she smelled the smoke.
Throwing back the covers she jumped from her bed, running to the door, which opened as she reached it, Flora, Helga, and Pie all tumbling into the room.
“Oh, love, there’s a fire! The stairway is full of smoke!”
“We can’t go down!” Helga confirmed.
Xanthe helped her mother to the bed, acutely aware of the fact that she did not have her crutches. She would never have tried to walk without them, not unless she had been too terrified to take the time to pick them up.
Helga grabbed her dog as it ran by, clutching the trembling animal against her chest. “It was Pie who woke me! She was crying and pawing the door. Dear God, if she hadn’t, the smoke might have got us all while we slept!”
“It’s below the sitting room then?” Xanthe asked, wanting to know exactly what they were facing.
Helga nodded. “I shouted up, thinking we must get down through it, but the smoke was already too thick. I ran up to wake Flora.…”
“Mum, use my phone, call the fire brigade,” she said as she hurried out of the room to the top of the stairs and peered down, ignoring the shouts of protestation of the two women behind her. “I’ll be right back,” she called to them, already beginning to cough because of the thickness of the smoke that billowed up the narrow stairwell. She cursed the fact that the only fire extinguisher in the house was in the kitchen. There was no chance she could get down to it; although the fire itself might be on the ground floor, the smoke was too thick, the heat too intense. Quickly, she dived into the bathroom, grabbing the nearest towels, jamming them beneath the cold taps, which she turned on fully. The seconds it took for the towels to soak up water passed as if in slow motion, with Flora all the while calling her with increasing anguish in her voice. At last, Xanthe lifted the towels, leaving the taps running, and raced back into the bedroom. She slammed shut the door and placed the largest towel along the gap at the bottom of it. Helga helped her move the narrow wardrobe against the door and pin another of the wet towels against the jamb in an attempt to hold back the smoke. That done, she joined her mother on the bed. “Did you get through?”
Flora nodded. “They are on their way.” She took her daughter’s hands in hers and the two women exchanged looks that were a mixture of fear and determination. Each was, in truth, terrified. Both were, as an instinct, set on helping the other.
“The fire station is close by,” Xanthe said, more for Helga’s benefit than her mother’s. “It’ll be OK. They’ll be here any minute.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Helga with great control, her voice giving nothing away, but her anxiously tight grip on her dog making it wriggle. “Because I for one am too large to fit through that,” she said, pointing at the tiny dormer window set into the slope of the roof.
Xanthe knew she was right. If the firemen couldn’t get up the stairs they would have to go back out onto the landing and try the slightly bigger window there, which was at the front of the building. Her mind raced to figure out how such an escape could be possible. Even assuming they could help her mother climb out, it would be difficult for the firemen to get a ladder to it, as the fire engine could never fit down the narrow street to the shop. Sensing rising despair in the others she sought to reassure them.
“They’ll get through the front door. You know it will give with a good enough shove. They can take hoses in that way. The fire is at the bottom of the house somewhere. They can put it out. I don’t think we’ll need to climb out of any windows.”
> Flora mustered a smile. “And here was me looking forward to being carried down a ladder by a hunky firefighter.”
A sudden loud crack followed by a judder that seemed to shake the whole house startled everyone. Into that moment of held breath came the wailing of the engine siren.
“They’re here!” Xanthe grabbed the bedclothes and piled them up against the bottom of the door, determined to keep back the smoke that had started to work its way through the defenses. “We just have to sit tight. They’ll soon have it under control.” As she spoke she could hear shouts and then a repeated slow banging.
Helga gasped. “They are breaking through the front door. We should let them know we’re here.”
Flora dialed the emergency services again and told the operator they were staying put unless instructed to do otherwise.
As they waited, more smoke began to crawl through the cracks in the door, creeping through Xanthe’s barricades, even seeping through chinks in the plaster where the wall met the sloping attic roof. Pie began to whine again and Helga fell to a bout of coughing. In that tense moment, the smell of the burning building filling her senses, Xanthe was taken back to the time she had arrived in the hayloft at Great Chalfield when it was on fire. She recalled the familiar rush of adrenaline, the tightness of her chest as she had breathed in the smoke, the heat from the flames as they had begun to devour the boards beneath her feet. She had been lucky to survive that time. This time, she told herself, help was on its way.
The shouts from below became louder.
Flora listened to the operator on the phone, then told the others, “They’ve reached the bottom of the stairs! There’s no fire in the shop. She says they already have it under control and we are not to move.”
There came the noise of water pouring onto the fire, causing the floorboards to crack and pop, a wet hissing sound continuing as the flames were doused. The discordant sounds signaled the moment of danger had passed. Whatever mess and destruction awaited them downstairs, their lives were no longer in peril.
“I don’t understand what caught fire,” said Xanthe. “I mean, if it started on the ground floor, it’s none of the appliances in the kitchen … were you using something volatile in the workshop today, Mum?”
“Not especially. I always keep white spirit and varnish under the sink. There’s nothing that could make a spark. I never have any naked flames in there.”
The same thought occurred to Xanthe and her mother in the same moment. They turned to look at Helga, who had already guessed what they were thinking.
“I swear I have not had a single cigarette in the house! I always go out into the garden, I promise you.”
“It’s OK, Helga.” Xanthe put a hand on the older woman’s arm and found she was trembling more than the whippet. She felt for her then, admiring the way in which she had hidden her own very real terror. “No one’s saying the fire had anything to do with you. We’re just trying to work out what could have happened.”
“Hello! Everyone all right up there?” The shouted questions reached them through the sounds of the hose and the hissing fire. “How many of you are there?”
“Three of us here!” Xanthe yelled back. “We are all good, and better for hearing you!”
“Be with you in a minute, ladies. Wait for us to get to you,” came the instruction.
Flora got up from the bed and helped herself to one of Xanthe’s oversize cardigans, shrugging it on over her pajamas.
“Are you cold, Mum,” Xanthe asked, helping her into the sleeves.
“These pjs are really not fit to be seen. If the room’s about to be filled with strange men I’d rather not meet them looking like an orphan.” She ran her fingers through her hair and smiled, posing, doing her best to relieve the tension in the room. “What do you think? Got any good pink lippie handy?”
“Stunning even without the lipstick,” Xanthe said, rolling her eyes and slipping her arm around her mother’s shoulders. She knew how Flora preferred to cope with things that frightened her, and playing the whole thing down, remaining matter-of-fact, was crucial. She had learned, years earlier, how her mother dealt with her illness in the same way. Giving in to self-pity or voicing her darkest fears just wasn’t her way. It didn’t mean she was never frightened. Didn’t mean she never doubted that all would be well. It was simply her way of coping, and Xanthe loved her all the more for it.
Two firemen came walking in with surprisingly light steps in heavy boots. They gave reassurances that the stairs, though badly damaged, were now navigable.
“There are several treads missing and the whole staircase will need to be properly assessed,” said the taller of the two men. “What’s important now is that we get you out of the building so that we can carry out a proper check, make sure there are no hot spots left, make a report of where the blaze has affected the integrity of the building.…” Seeing the alarm on Flora’s face he went on. “The damage isn’t significant. There was a lot of smoke, but the fire itself seems to have been limited to the stairwell.”
“But why would the stairs catch fire in the first place? Was it a bit of faulty wiring in the electrical system, perhaps?”
The fireman wouldn’t be drawn further on possible causes. “As soon as we’ve done our inspection we’ll let you have our findings. Now, let’s get you ladies out into the fresh air, shall we?”
“My mum needs her crutches. They’re in here,” Xanthe said, moving toward her mother’s bedroom.
“I can’t allow you to go in there yet, miss.”
“They’re just beside her bed. I can get them really quickly.”
The fireman shook his head. “The floor could well be unsafe.”
“She needs them.”
“It’s all right, Xanthe, love, I’m not in a hurry to go anywhere.”
“Leave it to us,” the second firefighter insisted. Cautiously, with practiced focus, testing each floorboard with a gentle tap from his fire ax, he moved into the bedroom and retrieved the sticks.
With great care, the men helped the three women down the stairs. Another firefighter joined them so that two were able to carry Flora without difficulty, while Xanthe and Helga, who was still clutching Pie, managed to clamber down by themselves. The firemen had already put ladders in place to bridge gaps where the fire had consumed some of the old wooden steps. As they made their slow descent the men warned them which bits were still hot, which bits were too damaged to stand on, and how to safely use the ladders. Xanthe felt her stomach lurch at the thought of how close they had come to disaster. If the smoke had got to them before they had woken up, or the fire had burned a little quicker, they might not have got out at all. As they reached the ground floor she heard Flora making the point that they still hadn’t got around to checking the smoke alarms, and Helga insisting to anyone who would listen that she absolutely had not smoked a single cigarette in the house during her stay. All the time Xanthe could not shake off a growing sense of dread. How could a fire have started in a place with no volatile substances, no electrical appliances, not even a plug socket? Wooden stairs did not simply burst into flames on their own. On the other hand, old wood, with years of polish worked into it, each plank as dry as bone, would burn very well if someone set light to it. She thought of Fairfax. Of how he had left the threat of danger hanging over her. Could he have broken into the shop and set the fire?
When they reached the foot of the stairs they were assailed by the acrid smell of wet ash, sodden plasterwork, and saturated soot. Flora was unable to suppress a small, heartfelt wail at the sight of the mess.
“I don’t know which has done more damage: the fire or the water,” she said, causing a slightly defensive firefighter to point out that without the water the fire would have consumed the whole building. “I know, I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just…” She raised an arm and let it drop to her side in a gesture of defeat.
Xanthe put an arm around her mother’s shoulders. “Come on, Mum. It’s not as bad as it looks. Most of
the stock has escaped being either burned or soaked. We can wash off the smoke and get someone in to repair the stairs.” Even as she said it she feared for the vintage clothes. Smoke would spell disaster for most of the delicate fabrics. She couldn’t bring herself to look and was at least thankful to think of the wedding dress safely upstairs in her own room.
“Oh, love, it’ll take such a lot of work,” Flora muttered.
At last Helga set Pie down, looping her dressing gown belt through the dog’s collar so that she wouldn’t get in the way or trample wet soot further through the shop. “I feel bad giving you something else to do,” she said. “Last thing you need is a dog to look after on top of everything else.”
Xanthe leaned down to stroke Pie’s silky ears. “If it wasn’t for this little one things might have been much worse. She raised the alarm. If her barking hadn’t woken you up…”
Helga nodded. “She certainly knew we were in danger, but she didn’t bark.”
“No?”
“She squeaked and whined and scrabbled at the bedclothes. Once she was certain she had woken me up she ran about in circles, but she never barked, not once. She’s not really very vocal. That’s typical of sight hounds. She only ever barks at a person if she doesn’t know them, or if they frighten her badly.”
Xanthe looked at her. “So, if someone had broken into the shop, if she’d heard somebody on the stairs, that would have made her bark?”
The Garden of Promises and Lies Page 7