“WHO MADE THIS APPLE TART?” THE DUKE ASKED — THEN HE SAW THE WIDOW NO ONE HAD EVER THANKED

Chapter 17

The fire took the barn the way fires take old buildings — not gradually, but all at once, with a sound like a cloth being torn.

Smoke filled the small, close space between them with frightening speed, dense and black and already hot. Corbin seized the bundle from the floor and ran deeper into the burning building rather than let it go — even as the flames climbed the wall behind him, even as the loft ladder above him caught and went up like a pine torch.

Rosalind went after him without a single second’s hesitation.

Edmund’s final statement was folded inside those very pages — the real pages, though Corbin did not know it, because Voss had put the true bundle in her bag with the blanks and she had sat on it all evening — and she would not let fire finish in one careless moment what Silas Corbin had started so deliberately years before.

“Rosalind —” Alaric’s voice behind her, sharp for the first time.

She was already through the smoke.

She caught Corbin at the rear wall, where the old drying racks had come down and blocked his way, and she got the bundle out of his hands — he let it go more easily than she expected, because by then he had begun to cough and had understood that the back door was nailed shut from the outside and always had been. He was a man in a trap of his own making who had just realised it was a trap.

Rosalind turned back with the bundle against her chest.

Above her, a support beam, dry as paper and burning along its whole length, gave way with a sudden groan and came down.

She heard it. She had time to get her arms up over her head. She did not have time to move.

The beam came down across the drying racks and a stack of broken crates, and a great length of it caught across her hip and her right leg, pinning her half under, and the heat came down over her with it, and she cried out once, sharply, into the roar of the fire.

On the other side of the fallen timber, Alaric Wensley heard her.

For one unbearable second he stood frozen, the heat of the flames pressing against his face, unable to see anything through the thickening smoke but the orange glow where the beam had come down.

Every calm, careful instinct that had carried him through three years of quiet grief deserted him at once. There was only the sound of her voice, and then the terrible silence that followed it, and the certainty settling into his chest, cold and absolute, that he would not survive losing another person he loved to a fire he could not stop in time.

“Rosalind!”

He went into it without a thought for his own safety.

The smoke near the doorway was thick enough to swallow a man whole. He went through it on his hands and knees under the worst of it, and came up on the other side into a wall of heat, and found her.

She was conscious still — coughing hard against the smoke, her face grey with ash, alive and fighting to get her leg free. The bundle of papers was still clutched against her chest.

Past her, at the rear door, Silas Corbin had nearly reached the nailed boards and was throwing himself against them, the bundle in his hands now nothing but curling, blackening paper, its edges already alight.

“Save the ledger,” Rosalind gasped out, struggling against the weight pinning her down. “Alaric — the ledger—”

Alaric did not so much as glance toward it.

“I have already buried enough people I have loved,” he said.

It was the first time he had ever said the word aloud to her without a moment’s hesitation, and it steadied something deep in her chest, even through the choking smoke and the rising fear.

He got both hands under the beam where it rested on the racks and lifted with everything he had. It did not move. He tried again, with his feet braced against a fallen crate, and this time it lifted perhaps three inches — enough for her to get her shoulder out from under, not enough for her leg.

He could not hold it. The wood was hot enough that his palms were beginning to blister.

Then the barn door behind them came off its hinges, and there were men in the smoke.

Three estate workers had followed him in from the yard — the same men who had hauled coal through a storm with him a fortnight before, who had watched him kneel in wet ash to mend a flue with his bare hands — and behind them one of the Ripon constables with a wet sack over his face. Between the five of them they got the beam up and held it, and Alaric pulled Rosalind Thorne out from under it and carried her out through the smoke into the cold, wet, blessedly clean air of the orchard.

She was alive. She was coughing. She was swearing, softly and continuously, in a manner that her late husband would have found entirely unsurprising.

At the rear of the building, Gideon Voss had reached Silas Corbin as he finally collapsed against the nailed door, overcome by smoke. Voss pulled the scorched bundle free of his weakening grip and got it out into the yard before the fire could finish it.

Most of the pages survived. The oilcloth Edmund Thorne had wrapped them in so carefully, three years before, had done its work — as though he had known, even then, that they would one day have to live through exactly this.

Corbin was dragged out of the smoke by two estate men and laid on the frostbitten grass, coughing, sobbing, alive.

The old cider barn burned to the ground in forty minutes.

Rosalind Thorne lay on the wet ground with her head in the Duke of Ravensmoor’s lap and watched the roof fall in, and found, absurdly, that she was thinking about apples.