Ellis Peters - St Peter's Fair

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 …

“Her eyes are open,” said Philip in an eager whisper. “She’s smiling.”

Cadfael stooped to her. “How is it with you now, daughter?”

“I am alive,” she said, almost inaudibly, but with great joy.

“So you are, God be thanked, and Philip here next after God. But lie still, we’ll find you a cloak to wrap you in, for you’ll be feeling the cold that comes after danger. There’ll be pain, too, my poor child.” She already knew about the pain. “You’ve a badly burned hand, and I’ve no salves here, I can do no more than cover it from the air, until we get back to town. Leave your hand lie quiet, if you can, the stiller the better. How did it come that you escaped clean, but for the one hand so badly burned?”

“I put it into the brazier,” said Emma, remembering. She saw with what startled eyes Philip received this, and realised what she had said; and suddenly the most important thing of all seemed to her that Philip should not know everything, that his candid clarity should not be made to explore the use of lies, deceptions and subterfuges, no matter how right the cause they served. Some day she might tell someone, but it would not be Philip. “I was afraid of him,” she said, carefully amending, “and I tipped over the brazier. I never meant to start such a fire …”

Somewhere curiously distant from the corner of peace where she lay, Hugh Beringar and the sergeant and officers who had followed him from Shrewsbury were mustering the distracted servants in salvage, and damping down all the outhouses that were still in danger from flying sparks and debris, so that the beasts could be housed, and a roof, at least, provided for the men and maids. The fire had burned so fiercely that it was already dying down, but not for some days would the heat have subsided enough for them to sift through the embers for Ivo Corbière’s body.

“Lift me,” entreated Emma. “Let me see!”

Philip raised her to sit beside him in the clean, green grass. They were in a corner of the court, their backs against the stockade. Round the perimeter the barns and byres steamed in the early evening sun from the buckets of water which had been thrown over them. Close to the solar end, men were still at work carrying buckets in a chain from the well. There would be roofs enough left to shelter horses, cattle and people, until better could be done for them. They had the equipment of the kitchen, the stores in the undercroft might be damaged, but would not all be spoiled. In this summer weather they would do well enough, and someone must make shift to have the manor restored before the winter. All that terror, in the end, had taken but one life.

“He is dead,” she said, staring at the ruin from which she, though not he, had emerged alive.

“No other possibility,” said Cadfael simply.

He surmised, but she knew. “And the other one?”

“Turstan Fowler? He’s prisoner. The sergeant has him in charge. It was he, I believe,” said Cadfael gently, “who killed your uncle.”

She had expected that at the approach of Beringar and the law he would have helped himself to a horse and taken to his heels, but after all, he had known of no reason why he should. No one had been accusing him when he left Shrewsbury.

Everyone at the abbey ought to have taken it for granted that Emma had been duly conducted home to Bristol. Why should they question it? Why had they questioned it? She had much to learn, as well as much to tell. There would be time, later.

Now there was no time for anything but living, and exulting in living, and being glad and grateful, and perhaps, gradually and with unpractised pleasure, loving.

“What will become of him?” she asked.

“He’ll surely tell all he knows, and lay the worst blame where it belongs, on his lord.” Cadfael doubted, all the same, whether Turstan could hope to evade the gallows, and doubted whether he should, but he did not say so to her. She was deeply preoccupied at this moment with life and death, and willed mercy even to the lowest and worst in the largeness of the mercy shown to her. And that was good, God forbid he should say any word to deface it.

“Are you cold?” asked Philip tenderly, feeling her shiver in his arm.

“No,” she said at once, and turned her head a little in the hollow of his shoulder, resting her forehead against his grimy cheek. He felt the soft curving of her lips in the hollow of his throat as she smiled, and was filled with so secure a sense of possession that no one would ever be able to take her away from him.