“Help, Edmund, fire, fire!” Daisy’s voice—she had not taken much of a breath—was not loud but should have been loud enough for either Mickey or Edmund, whose rooms lay off the same landing, to have heard her.
“Mickey,” she shouted, more from good manners than because she thought him the one to deal with the crisis, as she pounded on Edmund’s door. There was no reply, and understanding that her hesitation was ridiculous, she opened the door.
“Edmund, Edmund, there’s a fire, the house is full of—”
But Edmund’s room was silent. The curtains were open—Nelly had forgotten to draw them, or to turn down the bed—and there was enough moonlight for Daisy to see the bed had not been slept in. If Edmund was, as he undoubtedly was, in Corisande’s room, then she should wake Mickey. Banging a little harder with her fist on his door—why did she assume he was a heavier sleeper than his brother-in-law?—and opening it a little more quickly since she had no reason to think Mickey would not be alone, Daisy found herself in another unoccupied room. Mickey’s bed, unlike Edmund’s, had been slept in, the sheets rumpled and the blankets hanging off the bed as though Mickey had had violent dreams. Or perhaps he, too, had been woken by the smoke. If so, where was he? What was he doing?
Daisy started toward Corisande’s bedroom. Then she paused, thinking it likely that Mickey had gone first to rescue his grandmother before raising a general alarm. The choice illogical, but not out of character.
Opening the door to Maud’s bedroom quietly, Daisy crept into the room.
“Mickey,” she whispered, not wanting to frighten Maud before she knew what she was supposed to do.
“He’s not here, I heard him go along the corridor about an hour ago,” Maud said calmly; the first words Daisy had ever heard her speak.
Along the corridor? An hour ago? To Corisande’s room? Had Mickey woken up, found the house on fire, and decided to alert Corisande and Edmund? And had the three of them decided to leave Maud and Daisy to perish? Or were Corisande, Mickey, and Edmund, oblivious to the danger, indulging in a midnight feast? Without her, she thought, with a little pang.
“I’ll be back,” Daisy said, keeping her voice calm and instinctively feeling no need to tender an explanation. Turning to leave, she saw, in the dim light—it was closer to dawn than she had imagined—the dark gray outline of a form in the armchair beside the fire. What was Philomena doing there at that hour of the night? Had she not gone home? Or had she come in early? If so, why hadn’t she lighted the fire?
“Philomena?” she said tentatively.
“It’s no use,” Maud said, in the same calm articulate tone. “I think she’s dead.”
Daisy began to wonder if this were not part of an unusually vivid nightmare. For a moment she considered screaming, since that was the way she had, as a child, woken herself; the struggle to emit even the faintest sound usually enough to return her, terrified, to the waking world and her dark bedroom. Instead, finding herself in what seemed to be a deserted, probably burning, house, her only companions an old, dead servant and an invalid she had, up to a moment before, assumed to be partly or completely senile, she tried to act decisively.
“We need to get you downstairs,” she said, crossing to the bed. “I think the house is on fire.”
“Yes,” Maud said, just as calmly. “It’s a chimney fire. Smoke has been coming up all night.”
“But, why didn’t—sorry—” Daisy broke off, horrified that Maud had lain awake for hours, aware that the house—her house—was burning slowly, unable to move or call out loud enough to get help. Her own reassuring “I’ll be back” didn’t seem quite adequate now.
“Let’s get you downstairs,” Daisy said, crossing to the bed. “Then I’ll find Mickey and Corisande, then I’ll come back for Philomena. I think there’s plenty of time.”
It seemed important, now that she knew Maud was sentient, to explain exactly what was happening; at the same time, Maud’s calm gave Daisy the illogical reassurance that she was in the presence of an adult. She paused a moment by the bed, looking down. Maud was frail, tiny-boned; she must have been a small woman even before she had faded and shriveled. Daisy was a strong girl; she had no doubt of her ability to carry Maud downstairs, but she was not sure how to do so without hurting or frightening her. She pulled the heavy, slippery satin eiderdown off the bed, better to assess her task, and Maud shivered. Knowing that now was not the time to try to dress the old lady, Daisy started to wrap her in the sheets and blankets in which she lay. She discarded the pillows and tugged at the undersheet and blanket in order to wrap Maud more fully, deciding that when she had brought her downstairs and possibly outside, she would return for coats, shawls, and blankets. The sheet came loose easily enough, but the underblanket caught on something as Daisy tugged at it. Letting go of Maud for a moment, she lifted a corner of the mattress to unhook the blanket from the spring that caught it. It took her a moment to free it; she was aware she was wasting time and it made her clumsy. The washed-out flannel blanket had caught because there was a solid object wrapped in it and pushed between two of the coiled metal bedsprings. Once she could see the problem, it was easy for Daisy to free the wrapped object and then the blanket.
Surprised to find herself with something apparently secret, and not belonging to her, in her hand, Daisy hesitated, confused. But Maud, quicker than Daisy could have imagined possible, whipped the flat package, loosely wrapped in a piece of old white silk, away from her. She unwound the silk, which Daisy had the impression was intended to keep the box she now revealed closed rather than to protect it. The box was flat, a dull worn black, the hook that should have secured it broken. Maud opened it a little, as though to make sure the contents were intact, and Daisy caught a glimpse of a strand of fat pearls before the old lady closed it again. Glancing slyly at Daisy, she tucked the case and the hand holding it under her shawl and waited to be rescued. Daisy continued to wrap Maud into a warm bundle so that she could carry her downstairs.
She was almost at the door of the room, Maud light and limp in her arms, her head, like a baby’s, against Daisy’s shoulder, when Edmund arrived.
“The house—” he said. “Well done, Daisy, I’ll—” and his eyes flicked to Philomena’s motionless form.
“I—Aunt Maud,” Daisy said, the question of how to refer to the old lady solved by the urgency of the moment, “Aunt Maud thinks she’s dead.”
Edmund’s expression did not change as he quickly moved to the armchair and lifted Philomena’s face, pressing two fingers against her neck as he did so.
“Yes, I’m afraid she is.”
Edmund hesitated, looking down at Philomena.
“Perhaps—” Daisy murmured.
“Yes, of course. Sorry,” he said, and carefully took Maud into his arms.
Daisy preceding him, and holding up the trailing ends of the sheets he might have stepped on, they went quickly down the stairs. Daisy wondered what they would do with Maud once they got her downstairs; Edmund, without hesitation, carried her into the drawing room and set her on a sofa close to the French window that opened onto the conservatory.
“It’s not the warmest seat in the house,” he said cheerfully, “but it makes it easy for someone to break in and bring you out, if it’s necessary. Not that that’s going to happen, of course.”
Maud, who to Daisy, didn’t look as though she needed reassuring, looked about her.
“Corisande changed the slipcovers,” she said. “No one told me.”
Daisy thought Corisande might have quite a lot of explaining to do. She wondered if new slipcovers had been an overdue necessity or, like the dressmaker bills, an investment in Corisande’s future.
“Good girl, Daisy,” Edmund said. “Right, let’s wake the others, and the maids, get help, and maybe take a few of the better things out onto the lawn. Why don’t you telephone and I’ll get the others up.”
So Edmund went upstairs and Daisy, standing in the hall, lifted the receiver and wound the handle. No on
e picked up her call at the exchange, but since it often took minutes during the day for the postmistress to connect a call, particularly if one were so thoughtless as to attempt communication at times when Mrs. Crowe was cooking, feeding her family, or answering a call of nature, Daisy was not at first alarmed by the lack of response. She watched Edmund turn the corner on the landing and he was out of sight before she realized that the telephone exchange was probably closed for the night and she didn’t know what time Mrs. Crowe got up in the morning.
Daisy went back upstairs. She asked herself where was Corisande while all this had been going on? Had Edmund left her catching up on her beauty sleep while he went to investigate the now quite thick smoke? Was she packing the contents of the locked desk in her room? And where was Mickey? She realized she had not told Edmund that Mickey was not in his room, and she hurried along the corridor toward the room she assumed Edmund was sharing with Corisande. She paused by the door to the room that appeared to have been frozen in time since 1918. Daisy pushed the door open tentatively.
“Mickey,” she said, entering a little breathless, “wake up. There’s a fire—”
But although the top of bed was rumpled, the room was empty.
“I woke Mickey,” Edmund said from behind her. “He was asleep in here—I sent him—”
“The exchange doesn’t answer—I think it’s closed for the night.”
It was cold on the lawn, and Corisande stayed in the drawing room with Maud. Dawn was breaking. As Daisy went back and forth into the house she could now see smoke coming up between the floorboards. The house, she thought, was a little warmer than it usually was early in the morning, but there was no sign of fire or sound of burning.
She passed Edmund on the stairs; he was carrying a painting. Daisy had never noticed it before and even now in the dim light, had Edmund not appeared to have thought it worth saving, she would have passed it by. She peered at it as they paused, a dark portrait of a far from handsome woman; it badly needed cleaning.
“Where—” Daisy asked, embarrassed that she had not asked the obvious question before, “where exactly is the fire?”
She had opened the dining-room door to take out silver a little earlier and had been faced with such thick smoke that she had been unable to enter, but the smoke had not been accompanied by flames or the crackle of fire.
“It’s in the chimneys; they’re all connected and it’s probably been burning all night. Or longer.” Daisy remembered, horrified, the small belches of smoke she had seen from above the fireplace in the dining room. “But it’s going faster now, getting hotter—what happens is that when it reaches a certain temperature the whole thing goes up and—”
Edmund gestured and Daisy, reminded of the lack of time, continued more quickly up the staircase. It felt strange and almost dreamlike that she and Edmund were drifting around the burning house, making arbitrary and probably illogical choices of what they would save.
Daisy wandered—her lack of any kind of plan making her light-headed—into Maud’s bedroom. What were the old lady’s treasures? Philomena still sat, forgotten, in the armchair. She had to be taken downstairs, but where? Not to the drawing room to join Maud and Corisande. Not out onto the lawn, to be exposed to the dew and the increasing light of day. Maybe Mrs. Mulcahy and Nelly—Kathleen had disappeared sometime before—would go and tell her daughter, still asleep in the gate lodge.
Daisy swept the photographs off the dressing table into a large tapestry bag, which Maud must once have used to keep her needlework, and hurried on to find Edmund. Philomena would have been too heavy for Daisy to have carried herself, even if she had known how to carry the now perhaps stiffening body.
Holding the heavy but not large clock that sweetly chimed the hours and quarters from the landing table, Daisy ran downstairs. As she crossed the hall there was a sound—a whoosh—as though a rush of air was being drawn out of the whole large drafty house and expelled through the chimney. She fled through the hall door, across the gravel, onto the semicircle of lawn. The grass was wet under her feet.
Corisande and Edmund were helping Maud slowly out through the conservatory. Daisy slipped past them; looking back through the dusty, mildew-edged glass, Daisy could see that a light armchair for Maud had already been carried onto the lawn. Despite the whoosh, there were still no flames. It seemed foolhardy to go back through the front door into the paneled hall, but she thought it might still be possible to save a few things—silver, photographs, a small painting—from the drawing room. The conservatory would surely be one of the last places to catch fire.
On a wicker sofa in the conservatory were piled the valuable and random objects brought from upstairs or from the library and smoke-filled dining room, left there until the last moment to protect them from the dew. Corisande’s fur coat had been tossed over one end of the sofa. Daisy picked it up; she didn’t much care if it got wet on the dew-covered grass, and it might serve to keep someone—probably Corisande—warm during the next few hours. She was surprised, even at such a moment, by the softness of the fur. Squirrel, she thought. Underneath the coat lay Corisande’s dressing case. Pale leather, with her initials on it. Daisy glanced out at the group on the lawn and unlocked the fasteners; she was curious to see what contraband Corisande had chosen to rescue from her room. Would, for instance, the photograph of Ambrose have been saved? As she opened the dressing case, releasing the sweet mixture of powder and scent, the soft leather of the case’s interior changing and adding to the comforting smell. Inside there was a jewelry box and a flat case, similar to the one she had found under the mattress of Maud’s bed. And a silk scarf loosely wrapped around an oblong object. Daisy picked it up; it was heavier than she expected. Unwrapping one end, she found that she was holding a gun. A revolver or a pistol, she thought, not knowing the difference. Not a kind of gun she had ever seen before. Not a gun for shooting birds or even one that she imagined soldiers using—this was the kind of gun a man could carry, concealed, in his pocket.
There was the sound of a footstep from the drawing room behind her. Daisy, shocked by what she held in her hand, remained frozen for a moment, then rewrapped the gun, and put it back in the dressing case.
“I think we should—” Edmund said, and then seeing Daisy replacing the gun, paused. Daisy, shocked and confused, looked at him silently for a moment. His face was expressionless and for a moment he didn’t say anything. Then, “It’s probably time to get out of the house.”
Daisy picked up the dressing case and the fur coat and stepped out onto the lawn, followed by Edmund. Corisande and Maud were not far away but Daisy could hear nothing but the sounds of dawn. A cow, waiting to be milked, lowed in the pasture below the house; a blackbird, oblivious to the drama of the burning house, assured his mate on her nest that all was well with the world.
A lilac tree, mature, the blossoms wet, the leaves green and full of resilient presence, magnificent against the black horizon of incipient rain. Rain that would be hard and heavy, but probably not heavy enough or soon enough to drench the flames that would surely engulf Dunmaine.
Chapter 18
...THERE WAS SOMEBODY coming up the avenue on a bicycle. At first, I thought he was coming to help—although I don’t know what good a boy on a bicycle could have been. He'd been given the package of letters and told to bring them on his way home. Mrs. Crowe knew we hadn’t had a letter from you since the first one. But he—it was never clear, he was evasive—I think been to a dance in the other direction and was on his way home. I suppose he’d planned just to push them through the letterbox but when he saw us he didn’t seem at all surprised. I took letters and Edmund sent the boy off to the village.
Daisy, once again writing from Shannig, had already described the fire and the extent of the damage. Not in huge or depressing detail. She had told Patrick that Dunmaine was intact but uninhabitable. She reassured him that everyone had a roof over his head and that she, Mickey, and Maud were staying with Edmund and—leaving this bit out—a visi
bly less enthusiastically hospitable Corisande.
First, of course, we looked at the dates. The postmarks on the envelopes. The last one was addressed to me and was dated six weeks ago. Mickey said I could open it first if I wanted, that I wasn’t to read it out to anyone, so that your letters could be read in the proper order.
She hadn’t opened it first, although she had held the letter in her hand, her eyes focused on the blurred postmark. She waited silently as Mickey sorted the other letters into the order in which they had been sent; it was the first time she had seen Mickey take charge, or assert himself in any way that did not involve sullenness, withdrawal, silence. When he had sorted them, he handed them out. Some of the letters written over Christmas were addressed to the family as a group; these he handed out in order, as though dealing cards for a primitive game. They opened them and took turns reading them aloud.
Now that I know you get my letters,—or have been getting my letters—it is easier to write.
She paused; it was true that it was easier to write, but not true, as she had implied, that it was now easy. Six weeks was a long gap; she didn’t know whether Patrick was still at the prisoner-of-war camp from which he had written.
Your last letter took six weeks to get here. Since they all came at the same time, that’s probably longer than they usually do. When you next write please let me know how long this one takes to get to you.
Daisy no longer sent the questions she needed answered to Patrick. Too long without a letter back made them feel demanding, and the letters that had arrived, all at once, the morning of the fire, contained little information and no direct answers. Maybe he had not had all her letters. By now Daisy knew these questions would have to be answered, although gradually, by herself. Through inference, instinct, and sometimes, as she understood more of the world of the Anglo-Irish, by a process of elimination.
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