Baby Sophia woke from her nap and Annabel’s moment of quiet contemplation popped like a bubble. Managing her day around the child’s naps was a juggle until they had enough set aside to find their own accommodation. She’d not seen much of the Jowls, the proprietors of the tavern. They’d barely spoken to her, with Colin doing the talking for them both. She’d learnt the hard way to keep quiet in this time — to swallow her opinions, and to freeze her tongue.
The Jowl brothers were as identical as two pools of water, although she’d sensed an underlying current of something from one twin, as if danger lurked beneath the surface, a monster waiting to prey on the unwary. She’d tried to ignore the feeling but when Colin and Joe were talking in the kitchen, the quiet one kept clenching his fists, then flexing his fingers, over and over. Soundless words forming on his lips, without ever looking her in the eye, even though she knew he was staring at her.
Sophia’s crying swept away those thoughts, and on autopilot she fed and changed her, oh what she’d give for disposable nappies. She propped the babe up in a homemade playpen in the corner. When you considered the hazards of the 1800s, it amazed her the world had the population it did. The absolute lack of attention to health and safety astounded her, and keeping the baby safe was a daily struggle, but like millions of mothers before her, she managed.
The stifling hot kitchen was no place for a jacket either, as lunch morphed into the supper service. She didn’t need it as she gathered in the washing — ironing and folding it, before helping cook the supper, followed by more dishwashing, then feeding the baby and changing her again, before taking a moment to stuff food into her own hungry mouth.
Too exhausted to retrieve her jacket, she slunk up the creaky wooden stairs to her room, where she settled the baby, trying not to think how good a hot shower would be right now. Even as she slipped into bed and drifted off to sleep, she gave no thought to her jacket hanging on the kitchen door, nor to the crumpled letter in the pocket. A letter never sent.
The Fire
Annabel was so used to the pungent smell of hops clinging to everything around her, that the smoky scent of fire woke her. Expecting to wait until her eyes had adjusted to the dark, tonight it looked like someone had taped a sheet of cellophane over her window, diffusing the moonlight with a rose-coloured filter.
Through sleep-encrusted eyes, the colour was pleasing and Annabel nestled further into a mattress which was neither soft nor hard, but like Baby Bear’s bed in Goldilocks, it was just right. Warm and cosy, surrounded by a comforting light, with the baby sleeping, all was quiet, and someone had a comforting fire alight. She’d always loved the cosiness of a fire in the hearth. It was weird that she could smell the fire when she knew her windows were closed.
What Annabel couldn’t see were the flames bursting through the wooden shutters of the building belonging to the firm of Morrin, and Co., and the fire spreading across the shingle roofs of the adjacent buildings. She slept on, oblivious to Mister Baker and his brother clambering from the window of the smouldering building and jumping for their lives. Annabel slept through Constable Hastie giving the alarm as amber flames licked the sides of the large wooden building. A frenzied hammering on her bedroom door finally woke her.
Stumbling from her bed, Annabel turned the iron key in the lock to find Colin pulling on his boots.
‘Get Sophia and grab your things, we need to get out,’ he yelled.
‘What? Why?’
‘There’s a fire, and it’s spreading. We have to leave.’
‘A fire?’ she said, sniffing the air. The tang of fire obliterating the usually pervasive scent of hops used to brew the gallons of ale which lubricated the new city.
Colin pushed past to pluck Sophia from her makeshift bassinet. The supernatural glow outside lit the room like a Las Vegas stage production, and orange lights danced over the spartan room.
Annabel shoved her feet into her boots, thrusting her few remaining belongings into her bag.
‘Where’s your jacket?’ Colin asked, the fear in his voice as loud as the bells of the volunteer fire engines labouring their way towards the conflagration.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, giving up her search of the room.
‘Forget it, we have to go. This place will be next if the wind changes,’ Colin directed.
Annabel grabbed the blanket from her bed, wrapping it over her shoulders. Would she ever have any peace in this godforsaken country?
By now the other residents of the inn had roused, either by Colin’s yells or the peals of the alarms, and the stairways filled with people fleeing, their possessions in tow.
Colin shepherded Annabel through the dark corridors. The building was like a rabbit warren, with rooms and hallways added on haphazardly as the need arose. He’d thought it quaint when they’d first arrived, but in the darkness it was a potential death trap for anyone confused by the strange corners and sliced off hallways. It was fortunate that they’d been there long enough to know their way around, even in the dark.
The streets filled with refugees from the innumerable taverns and inns catering to the burgeoning population, and Colin stood with Annabel and dozens of other half-dressed residents clutching their earthly belongings. An air of inevitability cloaked the crowd as flames leapt from one building to another, the crackling and splitting of wood a peculiar symphony in the night air.
‘It’s got the Thistle Tavern,’ yelled someone, pointing to a building further up the road. That building danced, dressed in layers of orange tulle, twirling like a ballerina in the wind. The tavern’s windows shattered in the heat, sending glass missiles dozens of feet into the air.
Desperate men rallied the bystanders to help, cajoling the crowd to step forward to soak blankets or ferry buckets or to empty the buildings of their stock, to just do something, anything, to slow the path of the fire or to save what they could on behalf of their fellow citizens.
‘Quick, there’s a well behind Levy’s building, get some water from there,’ yelled a man, short of breath from sprinting up Queen Street, only half dressed.
‘Where’s the bloody army?’ asked a man next to Colin.
Colin turned to reply but a cry from across the road swallowed his answer as the walls of the Thistle Tavern gave a great sigh and the building collapsed inwards on itself, sending spark-laden lumber spinning towards its neighbouring buildings.
The bells from two more fire engines joined the cacophony of screams and shouts and crashes and bangs and the smashing of glass and the buckling of timbers. A chain gang had formed nearby as countless people emptied the stock of McGuffie’s Saddlery and the provisions from Prime’s Grocery store, piling up in a place of relative safety.
‘I should help,’ wheezed Colin as the smoke wound its way into his damaged lungs. ‘Take Sophia away from here and I’ll find you afterwards. Take her to Neumegen’s place, it’s a brick building, it’s safer than the others,’ he said, kissing the baby on her uncovered head.
The insatiable fire devoured everything in its path, with no thought to the people left homeless by its hunger. Colin expected her to know her way to Neumegen’s shop, but Annabel only had a vague idea of where it was, and in the crowds filling the streets, she had little hope of finding a direct route there.
‘Come on, Sophia,’ she said, turning away from the crowd.
A hand grabbed her on the shoulder, spinning her back. It was Colin, the fire’s reflection twisting his face into an anguishing visage.
‘I forgot about Sarah, oh my god I forgot,’ he screamed.
Annabel shook her head. ‘Who’s Sarah?’
‘The girl from Neumegen’s. You’d gone to bed when we got back last night so I couldn’t introduce you. She was in the room at the end of the hall,’ he said, scanning the faces of the crowd milling in front of Sheehan’s Hotel.
‘Can you see her?’ Annabel asked, checking the crowd herself even though she didn’t know who she was looking for. Never once considering that the girl was her dau
ghter.
‘It was so odd, but when I first met her I would have sworn that she looked just like you,’ Colin said, pushing through the bystanders in a panic.
Annabel followed in his wake, her stomach twisting as his words sank in. ‘Like me?’
‘God, I hope she isn’t still inside,’ Colin said, staring upwards.
Tiny fireworks floated on the gathering breeze, miniscule embers, each of them as hungry as the next, looking for more to eat.
An almighty explosion from behind the hotel sent the crowd cowering to the ground. Unseen, the fire had slipped round the back of the building, seeking the spirit barrels stored there. The alcohol proving to be the best fuel.
‘Up there, look!’ yelled a bystander.
Annabel and Colin looked towards the windows of the upper story of the hotel to see several faces pressed to the glass, eyes wide with fear.
‘Why don’t they climb out?’
‘They should jump—’
‘Where’s the army? They should be here helping.’
‘Get a ladder—’
The suggestions came thick and fast, but the fire flew faster than any of the solutions, blistering the paint on the weatherboards and pushing the bystanders back even further.
‘There she is!’ Colin pointed to the far left window.
Annabel saw her own face mirrored back. Sarah.
‘Break the window,’ someone yelled up to the windows, pantomiming the suggestion.
‘Sarah!’ Annabel cried, ignoring everything around her, even the baby in her arms. ‘Sarah, break the window. Jump,’ she screamed, her voice hoarse with the effort and the suffocating smoke.
The window next to Sarah’s exploded open, the glass littering the audience. A sturdy chair poked through the hole, clearing the remaining shards from the wooden frame. Moments later the occupants of that room — two middle-aged men, waistcoats askew, their heads bare, clambered out onto the narrow ledge, their bootless feet providing poor purchase on the anorexic ledge.
The falling embers landed on the shoulders of a man lurking within earshot of Annabel’s cries. A huge man, intimately acquainted with the layout of the hotel, Jimmy Jowl.
The face at Sarah’s window struggled again to lift the sash window, but to no avail and she vanished from view. Fire was devouring the building’s far side with the ease of a biblical whale swallowing Jonah.
The hose truck finally appeared, and as the volunteer firefighters rolled out their hoses, Sarah reappeared at the window, brandishing something in her hands. The crowd gasped in unison as they watched her striking the window.
‘Why doesn’t she just open the window?’ someone asked.
‘They’re nailed shut, those upper windows,’ replied a portly man, resplendent in gleaming white long-johns and a matching vest which barely constrained his mammoth belly. ‘Heard it from the barman,’ he added, stroking the snowy beard which completed his outlandish outfit.
Just then, one man lost his footing on the ledge, plummeting to the ground as the women in the audience shrieked, and the men surged forward. Whether it was for a better look or to offer help, it didn’t matter because the man’s skull had broken in half upon impact, his face unrecognisable in the dirt.
When Annabel and Colin returned their gaze to Sarah’s window, but no one was there. The only occupier of the room now the creeping caress of orange and red flames licking at the window and the curtains and the bed, sipping at the kerosene in the lanterns and nipping at the wicks of the candles.
‘Sarah!’ Annabel screamed.
‘I’ll find her,’ Colin said, but the acrid smoke forced its way down his throat, and a coughing fit doubled him over as his lungs struggled to function.
Annabel swung her head around until she spied someone suitable, a matronly looking woman clucking over a small tribe of children staring at the carnage.
‘Please, please hold the baby?’ Annabel begged thrusting Sophia into the woman’s surprised arms before running off without waiting for an answer.
A line of bucket-toting locals sprang up, filling leather buckets from every available water source, the line of grabbing hands tossing the water over the nearest burning building. It seemed as if they were fighting a hundred different fires at once such was the confusion and lack of coordination.
Annabel intercepted one bucket, emptying it over her head and soaking the blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She shoved her handkerchief into another and, holding the sopping wet cloth over her face, she took a deep breath and dashed into the open mouth of the hotel.
Ignoring the men who tried to stop her, Annabel ran through the dark smoke-filled building, trusting her memory of the layout to get her upstairs to her daughter’s room. She slammed her thigh into a misplaced chair, the pain barely registering in her mind. Sarah was here, and she needed her. The thought of her daughter enough to propel her up the stairs, the sodden blanket protecting her from the burning embers dancing with joy throughout the corridors.
‘Sarah?’ she coughed through her handkerchief. ‘Sarah?’
She’d never have heard if Sarah had answered her, the sound of the fire sucking the noise from the air and replacing it with a loud crackling and splintering and spitting and groaning. Sounds which could have been mistaken for the screams of a young woman and the grunts of a deranged man struggling with his latest victim.
Annabel fell over a suitcase abandoned in the middle of the hall, blistering her hands on the super-heated floorboards. She pushed herself to her feet, the pain of no consequence with her daughter’s life in peril. The stench of the fire stung her eyes making it all but impossible to see where she was going. Using the edge of the blanket as a protective glove, she felt her way along the wall, bent double, trying not to breathe, counting the doors, Room 9, Room 10, Room 11 - Sarah’s room.
She reached round the edge for the doorknob, just as the door opened.
A giant stumbled from the room, a hulk of a man with a wet handkerchief obscuring his face, carrying a limp bundle.
He barged right past Annabel, the only noise his deep coughing in the smoke, the bundle unmoving in his arms.
Annabel grabbed his arm, desperate to see that it was Sarah he carried.
Thwack
The giant swung his fist throwing her backwards. If Annabel had been standing upright, it would have knocked her out. But as hunched over as she was, it only clipped the top of her head. The knock enough to send her sprawling to the ground, dazed and confused leaving the man’s back a dark retreating shadow as he disappeared down the corridor with her daughter in his arms.
Annabel tried to stand — the blow to her head, coupled with the smoke and the flames reflection on the walls, more than disorientating. She didn’t know which way was out, the bedroom doors as indistinct as the walls and the floor and the ceiling. She crawled towards the staircase, the thunder of the fire louder with every inch. The damp blanket had fallen off, and she’d lost her handkerchief, certain she was inhaling the hot sparks with every breath.
Every inch took an hour, two hours, ten hours. Time stood still. Was she crawling in the right direction? One more inch, that’s all she could manage. It was too hot. Too late. She couldn’t breathe. There was no air left.
The Hero
Colin sank to his knees in absolute agony, not physical pain but mental anguish. Too late he’d seen Annabel dash into the burning hotel, the cries of the people alerting him to her folly. Damn and blast these lungs he thought, wheezing. The stupid, stupid woman, if only she’d waited a minute.
The army had arrived and were assisting the volunteer firemen and directing the gawping onlookers. Within a matter of minutes it looked like they would beat the fire. Soldiers and sailors had scurried onto the roofs of the surrounding wooden buildings, training hoses and beating out smaller fires with wet blankets. The bucket brigades were making headway, and the horses freed from the burning stables were no longer rampaging through the city. It was incredible what military coordination and
discipline could achieve.
Colin spied Joe Jowl standing nearby. Of all the men here, he’d be able to save Annabel, and Sarah, Colin thought as he pushed through the crowd.
‘Help me, please?’ he wheezed. ‘They’re both inside.’
‘Who?’ Joe Jowl asked.
‘Sarah, and then Annabel went in after her,’ Colin gasped, his lungs almost incapable of speech.
‘Who’s Sarah?’
Colin tried replying, but nothing came out, the smoke too much for his body. He grabbed at Jowl’s jacket, his eyes wide, gasping like a fish flapping next to a bucket of water.
‘Save them…’ he gasped before collapsing at Jowl’s feet.
The army had commandeered a hose and a team of men to saturate the burning hotel. They couldn’t save the hotel, but it was possible they could rescue anyone left inside if they got the flames doused.
Jowl’s mind was overflowing with jumbled data and supposition. His brother was somewhere not by his side, which was a concern. Jimmy had unusual tastes, and in a disaster like this, victims were ripe for the picking. Joe had always covered up his brother’s activities, cleaning up any mess he left behind, but tonight, with the army crawling over the city, his ability to conceal Jimmy’s crimes would be slim. Bribing the army wasn’t the same as paying off a miner, or the native, or silencing a witness. No, he needed to deal with whatever Jimmy was doing himself, and quickly.
Joe stepped away from the unmoving body of Colin, and vanished, ducking between buildings, his huge body parting the crowd without having to resort to violence, the inferred threat of his bulk enough to make them move.
Jowl doused himself with water and forcing his way through a side door, he entered the burning building. He had to get to Jimmy before anyone else did. Making his way up the stairs, the heat trying to force him back. But like Annabel’s quest to save her daughter, Joe’s only thought was of his brother. It was just them, and if he lost his brother, he didn’t know how he could go on, but he didn’t let himself think that way. He’d find him, he always did.
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