St. Peter's Fair (30 page)

He
uttered a bellow of rage, and lunged as quickly to snatch
it
out again, but the net had flared at a touch, tiny worms of fire climbed to
lick his hand, and all he touched of the precious letter, before he recoiled,
was the wax of the seal, which had melted at once, and clung searingly to his
fingers as he wrung them and whined with pain. She heard herself laughing, and
could not believe she was the source of the sound. She heard him frantically
cursing her, but he was too intent on recovering his prize to turn upon her
then. He tore off his cotte, wrapped a corner of the skirt about his hand, and
leaned to grasp again at the glowing cylinder thrust upright in the
fire-basket. And he would get it, defaced and incomplete, perhaps, but enough
for his purpose. The outer covering was not yet burned through everywhere. He
should not have it, she would not bear it! She stooped as he snatched at it,
clutched with her good hand at the leg of the brazier, and overturned it over
his ankles and feet.

He
screamed aloud and leaped back. Glowing coals flew, cascading over the floor,
starting a brown furrow, a flurry of smoke and a stink of burning wood across
the nearest rug, and reached the tinder-dry skirts of the tapestries on the
wall between the two windows. There was a strange sound like a great indrawn
breath, and an instant serpent of flame climbed the wall, and after it a tree
of fire grew, thickened, put out lightning branches on all sides, enveloped all
the space between the windows, and coursed both ways like hounds at fault, to
reach the dusty hangings on the neighbouring walls. A brittle shell of fire
encased the room before Emma could even stir from her horrified stillness. She
saw the huntsmen and huntresses in the tapestries blaze for an instant into
quivering life, the hounds leap, the forest trees shimmer in fierce light,
before they disintegrated into glittering dust. Smoke rose from a dozen burning
fragments over half the floor, and vision dimmed rapidly.

Somewhere
in that abrupt hell beyond the hearth, Ivo Corbière, shirt and hair aflame, a
length of blazing tapestry fallen upon him, rolled and shrieked in agony, the
sounds he made tearing her senses. Behind her one wall of the room was still
clean, but the circling flames were licking round both ways towards it.

There
was a rug untouched at her back, she dragged it up and tried to reach the
burning man with it, but smoke thickened
quickly, stinging and
blinding her eyes, and flashing tongues of fire jetted out of the smoke and
drove her back. She flung the rug, in case he could still clutch at it and roll
himself in its smothering folds, but she knew then that it was too late for
anyone to help him. The room was already thick with smoke, she clutched her
wide sleeve over mouth and nostrils, and drew back from the awful screaming
that shrilled in her ears. And he had the key of the room on him! No hope of
reaching him now, no hope of recovering the key. The room was ablaze, timber at
window and wall and floor began to cry out in loud cracks and splitting groans,
spurting strange jets of flame.

Emma
drew back, shielding her face, and hammered at the door, shrieking for help
against the furious sounds of the fire. She thought she heard cries somewhere
below, but distantly. She knotted her hands in the tapestries on either side
the door, where the flames had not yet reached, tore the rotting fabric down,
rolled it up tightly to resist sparks, and hurled it into the furnace on the
other side of the room. Let the door at least remain passable. All the hangings
that were not yet burning she dragged down. Her seared hand she had forgotten,
she used it as freely as the other. All those other lives, surely, were safe
enough, no one was ever going to read the letter that had failed to reach
Ranulf of Chester. Even that fearful life shut in this room with her must be
all but over, the sounds were almost lost in the voice of the fire. A busy,
preoccupied voice, not unlike the obsessed hum of the fairground. She had a
life to lose, too. She was young, angry, resolute, she would not lose it
tamely. She hammered at the door, and called again. No one came. She heard no
voices, no hasty footsteps on the stairs to the gallery, nothing but the
singing of the fire, mounting steadily from a hum to a roar, like a rioting
crowd, but better harmonised, the triumphant utterance of a single will.

Emma stooped to
the keyhole, and called through it as long as breath and strength lasted. She
could neither see nor think by then, all about her was gathering blackness, and
a throttling hand upon her throat. From stooping she sank to her knees, and
from her knees sagged forward along the base of the door, and lay there with
mouth and nose pressed against the gap that let in a thread of clean air. After
a while she was not aware of anything, even of breathing.

Chapter Four

PHILIP
LOST HIMSELF BRIEFLY in the tangle of small valley tacks that threaded the
hills, after leaving the Long Forest, and was forced to hunt out a local man
from the first assart he came to, to put him on the road for Stanton Cobbold.
The region he knew vaguely, but not the manor. The cottar gave him precise
instructions, and turning to follow his own pointing, saw the first thin column
of smoke going up into a still sky, and rapidly thickening and darkening as he
stared at it.

“That
could be the very place, or near it. The woods are dry enough for trouble. God
send they can keep it from the house, if some fool’s set a spark going…”

“How
far is it?” demanded Philip, wildly staring.

“A
mile and over. You’d best…” But Philip was gone, heels driving into his stolen
horse’s sides, off at a headlong gallop. He kept his eyes upon that growing,
billowing column of smoke more often than upon the road, and took risks on
those little-used and eccentric paths that might have fetched him down a dozen
times if luck had not favoured him. With every minute, the spectacle grew more
alarming, the red of flames belching upward spasmodically against the black of
smoke. Long before he reached the manor, and came bursting out of the trees
towards the stockade, he could hear the bursting of beams, splitting apart in
the heat with louder reports than any axe-blow. It was the house, not the
forest.

The
gate stood open, and within, frantic servants ran confusedly, dragging out from
hall and kitchen whatever belongings
they could, salvaging from
the stables and byres, dangerously near to the wooden part of the house,
terrified and shrieking horses, and bellowing cattle. Philip stared aghast at
the tower of smoke and flames that engulfed one end of the house. The long
stone building of hall and undercroft would stand, though as a gutted shell,
but the timbered part was already a furnace. Confused men and screaming maids
ran about distractedly and paid him no heed. The disaster had overtaken them so
suddenly that they were half out of their wits.

Philip
kicked his feet out of the stirrups which were short for him, but which he had
never paused to lengthen, and vaulted from the horse, leaving it to wander at will.
One of the cowmen blundered across his path, and Philip seized him by the arm
and wrenched him round to face him.

“Where’s
your lord? Where’s the girl he brought here today?” The man was dazed and slow
to answer; he shook him furiously. “The girl—what has he done with her?”

Gaping
helplessly, the man pointed into the pillar of smoke. “They’re in the solar—my
lord as well… It’s there the fire began.”

Philip
dropped him without a word, and began to run towards the stair to the hall
door. The man howled after him: “Fool, it’s the hob of hell in there, nothing
could live in it! And the door’s locked—he had the key with him… You’ll go to
your death!”

Nothing
of this made any impression upon Philip, until mention of the locked door
checked him sharply. If there was no other way in, by a locked door he would
have to enter. He cast about him at all the piles of hangings and furnishings
and utensils they had dragged out into the courtyard, for something he could
use to break through such a barrier. The kitchen had been emptied, there were
meat-choppers and knives, but, better still, there was a pile of arms from the
hall. One of Corbière’s ancestors, it seemed, had favoured the battle-axe. And
these craven creatures of the household had made no attempt to use so handy a
weapon! Their lord could roast before they would risk a burned hand for him.

Philip
went up the stone steps three at a time, and into the black and stifling cavern
of the hall. The heat, after all, was not so intense here, the stone walls were
thick, and the floor, too, was laid with stones over the great beams of the
undercroft. The worst enemy was the smoke that bit acrid and
poisonous into his throat at the first breath. He spared the few moments it
took to tear off his shirt and bind it round his face to cover nose and mouth,
and then began to grope his way at reckless speed along the wall towards the
other end of the hall, whence the heat and the fumes came. He did not think at
all, he did what he had to do. Emma was somewhere in that inferno, and nothing
mattered but to get her out of it.

He
found the foot of the staircase to the gallery by stumbling blindly over the
first step, and went up the flight stooped low, because it seemed that the bulk
of the smoke was rolling along the roof. The shape of the solar door he found
by the framework of smoke pouring in a thin, steady stream all round it. The
wood itself was not yet burning. He hammered and strained at the door, and
called, but there was no sound from within but the crackling of the fire. No
way but to go through.

He
swung the axe like a berserker Norseman, aiming at the lock. The door was
stout, the wood old and seasoned, but less formidable axes had felled the trees
that made it. His eyes smarted, streaming tears that helped by damping the
cloth that covered his mouth. The blows started the beams of the door, but the
lock held. Philip went on swinging. He had started a deep crack just above the
lock, so deep that he had trouble withdrawing the axe. Time after time he
struck at the same place, aware of splinters flying, and suddenly the lock
burst clear with a harsh, metallic cry, and the edge of the door gave, only to
stick again when he had thrust it open no more than a hand’s breadth. The upper
part, when he groped round it, offered no resistance. He felt along the floor
within, and closed his hand upon a coil of silky hair. She was there, lying
along the doorway, and though the heat that gushed out at him was terrifying,
yet only the smoke, not the flames, had reached her.

The
opening of the door had provided a way through for the wind that fed the
flames, such a brightness burned up beyond the black that he knew he had only
minutes before the blaze swept over them both. Frantically he leaned to get a
grasp of her arm and drag her aside, so that he could open the door for the
briefest possible moment, just wide enough to lift her through, and again draw
it to against the demon within.

There was a great explosion of scarlet and flame,
that sent a tongue out through the opening to singe his hair, and then he had
her, the soft, limp weight hoisted on his shoulder, the door dragged to again
behind them, and he was half-falling, half-running down the staircase with her
in his arms, and the devil of fire had done no worse than snap at their heels.
He did not even realise, until he took off his shoes much later, that the very
treads of the stairs had been burning under his feet.

He
reached the hall doorway with head lolling and chest labouring for breath, and
had to sit down with his burden on the stone steps, for fear of falling with
her. Greedily he dragged the clean outside air into him, and pulled down the
smoke-fouled shirt from about his face. Vision and hearing were blurred and
distant, he did not even know that Hugh Beringar and his guard had come
galloping into the courtyard, until Brother Cadfael scurried up the steps to
take Emma gently from him.

“Good
lad! I have her. Come away down after us—lean on me as we go, so! Let’s find
you a safe corner, and we’ll see what we can do for you both.”

Philip,
suddenly shivering, and so feeble he dared not trust his legs to stand, asked
in urgent, aching terror “Is she…?”

“She’s
breathing,” said Brother Cadfael reassuringly. “Come and help me care for her,
and with God’s blessing, she’ll do.”

Emma
opened her eyes upon a clean, pale sky and two absorbed and anxious faces.
Brother Cadfael’s she knew at once, for it bore its usual shrewdly amiable
aspect, though how he had come to be there, or where, indeed, she was, she
could not yet divine. The other face was so close to her own that she saw it
out of focus, and it was wild and strange enough, grimed from brow to chin, the
blackness seamed with dried rivulets of sweat, the brown hair along one temple
curled and brown from burning! but it had two fine, clear brown eyes as honest
as the daylight above, and fixed upon her with such devotion that the face,
marred as it was, and never remarkable for beauty, seemed to her the most
pleasing and comforting she had ever seen. The face on which her eyes had last
looked, before it became a frightful lantern of flame, had been the face of
ambition, greed and murder, in
a plausible shell of beauty.
This face was the other side of the human coin.

Only
when she stirred slightly, and he moved his position to accommodate her more
comfortably, did she realise that she was lying in his arms. Feeling and
awareness came back gradually, even pain took its time. Her head was cradled in
the hollow of his shoulder, her cheek rested against the breast of his cotte. A
craftsman’s working clothes, homespun. Of course, he was a shoemaker. A
shopkeeper’s boy, of no account! There was much to be said for it. The stink of
smoke and burning still hung about them both, in spite of Cadfael’s attentions
with a pannikin of water from the well. The shopkeeper’s boy of no account had
come into the manor after her, and brought her out alive. She had mattered as
much as that to him. A little shopkeeper’s girl…