The Fire in the Glass

by Jacquelyn Benson

“I gathered as much.”

  “So we will need to be quiet.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Have you any idea how many sugar cubes I removed from the pantry of my childhood home?”

  “No,” she replied.

  “Neither did the cook.”

  Lily stifled a laugh. It came out something like a cough. The sleet picked up, coming down in heavy sheets.

  “Come on,” she ordered and pushed inside.

  He followed her into the darkened hallway. Lily did not typically keep late hours and so had never seen it like this, cloaked in thick gloom so that even the oily pilchards in the still life on the wall were barely visible. She carefully closed the door, then considered what to do next, acutely aware of Strangford’s presence in the shadows beside her.

  She glanced from the stairs to the hallway that lay before them. The stairs were the obvious option, but she had been out for hours. She had no idea what the state of her little parlor stove might be. Her attic flat was likely freezing. It would still be better than standing in the sleet waiting for a cab that may or may not come, but . . . at the end of the hall lay the kitchen. Mrs. Bramble banked down her stove for the night but would only have done so a few hours before. It would have been a roaring fire up until then. The blaze could be brought back up without any trouble at all.

  It also felt a bit safer to bring her illicit male guest into Bramble’s kitchen, where the landlady herself might walk at any moment, than to sneak him up to the isolation of her rooms.

  “This way,” she whispered and led him down the hall.

  She paused at the entrance to the kitchen, glancing past it to the door leading to Mrs. Bramble’s rooms. It was closed, no light shining through the crack underneath it. The house was silent save for the sound of the storm pattering distantly against the windows.

  She stepped inside.

  Immediately upon entering the room, she was enveloped in warmth, a sensation so delicious she had to bite back the urge to sigh out loud.

  It was a generous space, dominated by a large, scarred wooden table. A scattering of chairs surrounded it, but the surface was meant for work, not dining. It was clear now save for a single porcelain biscuit jar in the center of it.

  She moved past the table to the enameled kitchen stove and opened the door. The low, glowing bed of embers inside flared up hungrily in response to the influx of air. She reached for the coal bucket.

  “Don’t,” Strangford said, stopping her. “I’ll do it.”

  “My dress could hardly be the worse for a bit of coal dust at this point,” Lily countered, trying to be firm while keeping to a whisper.

  She read his response in his face.

  “Fine.”

  She stepped back. Strangford shrugged out of his wet coat, laying it on the table. He loosened his necktie, tucking it into his pocket, then tugged off his gloves and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. The fabric of it was damp at the cuffs and collar.

  He worked quietly, rolling coals from the scuttle onto the shovel and sliding them neatly into the stove. When he finished, he moved to the basin and rinsed his hands.

  There was already a rocker by the fire. While Strangford washed up, Lily carried over another chair before picking up his coat and hanging it on the rack by the stove.

  She considered her own jacket. It was palpably cold and wet. The idea of shedding it was deeply attractive.

  Strangford returned, stopping as he contemplated the two chairs—one softened with a cushion and blanket, obviously built for relaxing by the fire, the other stiff-backed and practical.

  “Take the rocker,” Lily ordered.

  “I really shouldn’t.”

  “You had a longer night than I did,” she countered pointedly.

  He wavered, then sank down into the more comfortable chair. He leaned back in it, closing his eyes gratefully, and every line of him seemed to relax.

  It looked very natural—Strangford in his shirtsleeves, coal stains on the cuffs, bare hands resting on the age-polished wood of the rocker. She had seen him in a superficially similar state before, of course, that morning after Abney Park. This was different. Then, it had been a sign of distress. Now it was something else, a guard dropping. The caution she so often sensed in him was gone, revealing in full what lay beneath it—an openness that reminded her of the windswept expanse of the heath, of chill air and rippling grass. She recalled the wild art she had glimpsed on the walls of his study and thought of Mordecai Roth’s characterization of the man as a bohemian. It was clear to her now. His sober dress and the restraint of his manner were a disguise, a thin veneer he had built around himself to keep the truth hidden from casual view. Yet it had always been there for anyone who paused to look more closely.

  She understood that duality. She lived it herself. It was imbued into every stitch of her respectable wardrobe, of her own unimpeachable behavior since leaving Drury Lane. She shed it when she went to the heath with her Triumph. The motorcycle was about more than just speed. It was the freedom to be what she was without worrying about the eyes of society, of being exposed to them as an object of curiosity.

  Strangford knew that fear. It was gone from him here, wrung out by exhaustion and the sheer quiet comfort of this space with its lingering scent of cinnamon and roast chicken. The pretense fled, and something else rose into view in the lean lines of his body, something she realized she rather envied.

  The icy damp slowly dripped through the soaked fabric of her jacket.

  Toss it.

  She worked free the finicky fasteners and shrugged the blasted thing off. She dropped it over the rack next to Strangford’s coat

  She felt his eyes on her. Though nothing changed in his posture, she could sense the strict focus of his attention. Something in her body responded, her skin tingling with awareness—the slide of damp silk against her shoulders, the penetrating warmth of the stove.

  The rising desire was matched by a quick and powerful fear.

  No.

  Without looking at him, she sat down in the other chair, stretching out her legs towards the fire. The sleet softened against the windows, gentling to a subtle chorus at the edges of the room.

  She studied the response even as her heart still pounded with it. She was skirting up against something dangerous, something that set her to flight. She pushed it back, that unnamed thing, and grasped for a distraction.

  “I just wish . . .”

  “For what?” Strangford asked, his voice a low murmur from the darkness beside her.

  Something in his tone set her heart pounding again. She forcibly ignored it.

  “I wish that it hadn’t been for nothing. Deveral,” she added in explanation.

  “We learned what we needed to about Annalise. We know it was the same killer. That isn’t nothing.”

  “But we have no idea who that killer is.”

  He was quiet after that, gazing into the flames.

  “It shouldn’t have been necessary at all. If I had done more with Mrs. Durst . . .”

  “You can’t possibly mean that,” Lily blurted.

  “I might have spared you Deveral if I had been able to read more details about the killer.”

  “You put yourself at incredible risk to learn what you did.”

  He did not seem to hear her. He was looking down at his ungloved hands.

  “I have this power. This . . . gift, Ash calls it. This charisma. And I am constantly afraid to use it. What could I have learned in Deveral’s house if I had the wherewithal to take my gloves off? In Annalise’s room?”

  The last suggestion filled her with horror.

  “You couldn’t possibly ask that of yourself.”

  “If I were stronger—”

  “Stronger?” Lily cut in. “I watched you walk straight into death itself and back out again without so much as flinching, and you ask yourself to be stronger?”

  It was a moment before he answered. The pause was filled with the tap of the sleet on the windowpanes and a s
ubtle shift of the coals.

  “Well,” he admitted quietly. “One must admit there was a flinch or two along the way.”

  “Don’t you dare underestimate yourself. You are extraordinary in a way that has nothing to do with your hands.”

  The words snapped out of her before she could think better of them, compelled by the need to correct him on what seemed to her so obvious a misconception. Yet once out, they rattled her to a quick silence.

  The intimacy of this room, the comfortable silence of the fire, the focused attention of the man beside her—there was a threat in it, something with the potential to undermine all her carefully-wrought defenses.

  She needed to back away from this place, to steer them to some safer ground.

  Before she could think of how to do so, Strangford spoke, and she could hear from his tone that he was taking them in exactly the opposite direction.

  “Lily . . .”

  She was saved by the creaking of a door.

  “Bramble,” she hissed, sitting upright in her chair.

  The name shattered the tension building between them, replacing it with a different sort of urgency.

  Strangford rose.

  “The table,” he ordered.

  She dove beneath it and he grasped her chair, turning it neatly around to face the way it had been when they came in. He managed to do so without so much as a tap when the legs touched the floor again. Then he was sliding in beside her.

  They crouched together under the great oak plank of Bramble’s work surface and waited.

  Footsteps sounded in the hall. Lily was painfully aware of Strangford’s presence beside her, the warmth of his body palpable. The sensation threatened to reignite the tension she had felt so intensely a moment before.

  Then it occurred to her that she was currently hiding under a kitchen table with a peer of the realm, as fearful of getting caught as any schoolgirl.

  The urge to giggle rose up. Her efforts to stifle it had an inverse reaction, making the impulse overwhelming. She felt it stiffen her shoulders and had to exert herself to stay still.

  Some sign of her distress must have communicated itself to Strangford.

  “Don’t start.” His voice was low from beside her, barely more than a breath. “Or you will set me off as well.”

  Bramble thumped into the room.

  She was dressed in an enormous flannel nightgown. Despite its volume, the garment had clearly been in use for a decade or more and was worn thin as silk in places, offering her a rather more intimate glimpse of her landlady than Lily might have preferred.

  Behind her, Lily realized that the door of the stove was still cracked. A warm orange light emanated from it, the glow of their resurrected blaze. She thought of their coats hung in the shadows beside it.

  She waited for Bramble to notice but the landlady’s course was unfaltering, as though it were a path she was very accustomed to walking in near-darkness in the middle of the night.

  Even steps took her to a cupboard. She opened it and plucked out a tin cup.

  Her next stop was the icebox. She removed a bottle of milk and poured herself a cup.

  Beside Strangford, Lily watched the routine in silence, praying it did not involve lighting a lamp.

  Then Bramble turned for the table.

  She stopped with her bare feet just a few inches from where Lily hid.

  Strangford was still as a statue beside her, his tension matching her own. She found herself wondering what exactly would occur when Bramble looked down and realized that her tenant was huddled beneath the table with a baron in his shirtsleeves. She held her breath, waiting for that explosion.

  The silence of the room broke with a clatter of porcelain. It was the sound of the biscuit jar.

  There followed a stretch of quiet crunching.

  Bramble did like her biscuits rather dry.

  The laughter asserted itself more overwhelmingly this time. She fought against it, perfectly aware of the consequences, but the force of that effort made her shake.

  She glanced over at Strangford, hoping perhaps that his seriousness would guilt away her hysteria. He had covered his mouth with his arm, head bowed, and his shoulders were shaking violently.

  Lily began to resign herself to losing her lease.

  Then the cookie jar lid clanged back into place.

  Her hand flashed out, gripping Strangford’s arm through his shirt and willing him into silence for a moment longer as Bramble’s bare feet retreated. Her steps echoed back from the hallway, punctuated by the creak and snap of her bedroom door.

  Lily waited for the space of a breath, making certain Bramble did not suddenly recall something else she wanted from the kitchen. Then she released her grip on Strangford’s arm.

  “You have no idea,” he whispered softly from beside her, “how badly I wanted to reach out and pinch her toes.”

  It broke her. The laughter spilled out, and she could only be grateful it was fierce enough to take the form of breathless gasps rather than a roar that Bramble would surely have heard from down the hall.

  “Stop,” she ordered, when she had the air for it. “If you get me booted out of here . . .”

  “I would have to offer you my rooms and move into the carriage house with Roderick, which would be terribly inconvenient.”

  That threatened another wave of hysteria. She wrestled it into submission, though she could see by the watering of his eyes that she was not alone in the struggle.

  Finally, they both caught their breath, facing each other across the darkness.

  “Perhaps we should get out from under the table,” Lily offered.

  “An entirely sensible suggestion,” Strangford returned.

  He climbed out, then turned to offer her his hand—and stopped, flinching.

  The gloves, she realized. He had recalled that he was stripped of them.

  “It’s fine,” Lily hurriedly assured him, making her own slightly awkward way out.

  She straightened beside him and that abrupt, exquisite awareness returned. She knew exactly what it demanded. The possibility of realizing it felt precariously close.

  They were alone in the dark, her rooms just a short climb up the stairs.

  She teetered at the edge of that desire then felt it shift beneath her, the ground she was clinging to dissolving into quicksand.

  She was falling for him.

  The truth of it washed over her as hot and real as the flames roaring in the kitchen stove, shattering through the defenses she had carefully, unconsciously built against it. In a matter of days, the man beside her had threaded his way past her shield and into her life.

  It must not be.

  He was a lord. She was a bastard. There was only one possible form such a relationship could take, the form that was her own origin story—a man and his mistress. The bit on the side. He would be hers at his own convenience and then return to another family, another life that she could never be a part of.

  And if it came down to the choice, what would win? Obligation or affection?

  She had learned the answer to that question fourteen years ago.

  Silence slipped into the room, licking at the edges of the crackling flames as the tension danced between them.

  She stepped back.

  “I think the rain has stopped.”

  “Yes,” he confirmed. “I suppose that means I shouldn’t risk your lease any longer.”

  Risk it, she wanted to urge him. She bit back the words.

  He reached for her. She realized she was standing in the way of his coat. He slipped it back on, pulling the gloves over his elegant hands. She winced inwardly, knowing the black wool must still be damp from the storm. She could not afford to let him wait until it was dry. Even now, she felt her resolve shifting, threatening to crack.

  “Is there anything else you need? Before I go.”

  She fought against her response to him, clinging to what she knew she needed to do.

  “No. No, thank you. You�
�ve done more than enough already.”

  “If you’re sure.”

  “I am,” she replied. “I’ll show you out.”

  She turned and led him to the chill darkness of the hall.

  They stopped at the front door, still wrapped in the long shadows of the night. She opened it. He stepped through, then paused and looked back at her across the darkness.

  Danger. It was written into every line of him. She was exquisitely aware of it now, could hear it in each word that fell from his lips.

  The only way for Lily to save herself from the inevitable pain he entailed was to walk away. As fast and far as she could.

  “Good night, Miss Albright.”

  The words were formal, but the warmth of his voice flooded through her.

  “To you as well, my lord,” she replied.

  He left.

  She closed the door behind him, then leaned against it, her hands shaking.

  Distance. That was what she needed. Distance would make it safe again.

  She clung to that, ignoring the soft voice inside of her that shivered for something entirely different.

  SIXTEEN

  SHE WOKE TO COLD. It penetrated her room, creeping in around the feeble warmth of the dying fire in her stove.

  Frost glittered on the windowpanes, etching elegant fractals across the glass. Beyond it, the street itself was glazed with sharp, lingering winter, from the icy pavement to the shimmering tips of the wrought-iron fences.

  She remembered the spinning white flakes of her vision of Estelle’s death, the snow acting as harbinger to the threat that stalked her.

  The cold air took on a greater significance, one Lily didn’t want to acknowledge.

  Why couldn’t spring arrive? If the weather warmed, then perhaps she could be assured that the danger to Estelle wouldn’t strike for another year. She would have months to try to find the killer.

  She would need them. She had exhausted her ideas of how to seek the murderer. She had forced Strangford to thrust his consciousness into a corpse, had faced her half-brother in all his viciousness. All she had earned for those efforts were more questions.

  If this cold were a precursor to snow . . . If the danger to Estelle loomed closer . . .