The Fire in the Glass

by Jacquelyn Benson

One week later

  East Sussex

  THE AIR WAS WARM, a balmy spring breeze sharp with the scent of the sea. Lily stepped down from the express train, crossing the platform at the quaint coastal town of Hastings.

  The steam whistle blew. She wove her way through a light, busy crowd, stopping at the baggage car. She handed over her ticket. The boy who took it paused only a moment to gape at her driving coat and trousers before he disappeared into the darkness of the car. He emerged a moment later, wheeling her Triumph.

  Lily grabbed the handlebars, helping him bounce it down the steps onto the platform.

  A few waiting passengers stared as she pushed it down the ramp.

  The road before the station was busy, bustling with shoppers or couples walking arm-in-arm through the warm spring afternoon. Ladies clad in soft pastel gowns showed off their straw bonnets. Crocuses bloomed in the window boxes and the air smelled of the fresh salt of the shore.

  She swung her leg over the motorcycle, hopped onto the pedals and spun. The engine caught, roaring to life. A few startled gazes turned her way as she opened the throttle and shot up the road.

  Out in the country of West Sussex, the grass was turning a verdant spring green in the fields, the few remaining patches of snow quickly melting. Sheep grazed contentedly while hens pecked at the side of the road. Between the budding hedgerows, Lily caught glimpses of the broad, blue sea to the south.

  The landscape grew wilder as she turned inland toward the weald. Stretches of forest intermingled with the fields, hills rising around her. As the Triumph rattled over a wooden bridge, she caught a glimpse of a torrid little waterfall spilling white water down into a narrow stream.

  She turned at an ancient gatehouse.

  The drive was long, covered in neatly combed gravel and sheltered by a row of massive lime trees. Their regular trunks marched by as she flew along, slowing only when she had reached the yard.

  She turned to stop in front of a rambling but elegant Jacobean manor, an assortment of gray wings and towers nestled at the edge of a wood.

  Brede Abbey, the Torrington family seat.

  A still, shining pond reflected the ivy-covered walls. The green lawn was scattered with ancient trees, their roots circled with white and purple blossoms. She could see sheep grazing, a pair of gardeners raking a path. An ancient church sat just beyond the house, a relic of the monastery from which the place took its name.

  She killed the engine, and quiet settled back over the landscape. It was beautiful—her father’s home, this place that she had never seen before.

  She kicked down the stand of the motorbike and dismounted, tugging off her goggles. At the front door, she hesitated only a moment before lifting her hand and knocking, firmly.

  It opened.

  A butler, dressed in a pristine black suit, stood in the entry. He was quite old, at least seventy. His frame had likely once been impressive but was starting to bow with age, though his carriage was still straight. Clear eyed, he took in her appearance with only the briefest glance, eyes flickering over her fitted trousers, wind-tossed hair, and the Triumph parked on the drive behind her. Then, with perfect courtesy, he greeted her.

  “Good afternoon.”

  “Miss Lily Albright, to see his lordship,” Lily announced, handing him her card.

  “Very good, miss,” the butler replied, accepting it without missing a beat. “I shall see if he is in.”

  He opened the door, motioning Lily into the entry. She felt her own unexpected note of surprise, some part of her anticipating that she would be left waiting on the step. Obviously, the staff of Brede Abbey had been trained to offer courtesy no matter who called at the front door.

  “If you’ll wait here.”

  Lily nodded and the butler made his way down the hall. He walked slowly, favoring one of his knees.

  She waited in the entry. The ceiling was high, paneled in rich, dark wood, as were the walls, carved in elegant patterns glowing with years of polish. The furnishings were a mix of old and new, an ancient tapestry on the walls hanging dangerously close to a propped-up cricket bat and a pair of extraordinarily muddy shoes. A grand Tudor chair, embroidered upholstery faded with years, held a woman’s feathered hat and veil alongside a set of pale lavender gloves. Someone had left a copy of Herodotus on the table next to the silver salver for calling cards.

  It was one of her younger brothers, most likely—the brothers she had never met. The hat was a relic of their mother, the countess. Her father’s wife.

  At the end of the room, an enormous clock ticked steadily, then struck a rich, resonant one.

  The butler returned.

  “Apologies for the delay. His lordship is in the study. May I take your coat?”

  “That won’t be necessary. I won’t be staying very long.”

  She followed him down the hall past large, elegant rooms that spoke of generations of history and the influence of a woman’s particular eye. The combination could have been jarring, but wasn’t. Instead, the house felt lived in, real. She could too easily imagine reading a book while curled into the brown armchair next to the drawing room fireplace, or racing a set of unruly boys down the grand central staircase.

  She forced the images away, locking them out.

  The butler turned into an open door.

  “Miss Albright, my lord,” he announced as she followed him in.

  “Thank you, Mr. Manning,” her father replied, his voice as rich and resonant as the toll of a great clock.

  Mr. Manning bowed and showed himself out, leaving her alone with the earl.

  The study was large. A row of tall windows looked across the east lawn. She could imagine the room must be exceptionally bright and warm in the mornings, an inference confirmed by the empty fireplace at her back.

  The walls were covered in more rich wood, lined with bookshelves. The volumes that filled them were obviously there for reference, not for show. There were well-thumbed books on law, history, agriculture and finance beside tomes on philosophy and a complete collection of the works of Shakespeare.

  A grand old desk held court in the center of the room. It was comfortably cluttered with stacks of papers, a half-finished cup of tea and a scattering of photographs in elegant little brass frames. She glimpsed the faces of a pair of mischievous young boys beside a pale-haired woman in an elegant gown.

  Lord Torrington stood at the desk, clad in a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows, his feet tucked into a pair of loafers that looked well broken-in. The light from the windows brightened the thick silver of his hair.

  “Would you like tea?” he asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  A silence stretched across the room.

  “How is Lord Deveral?” Lily asked.

  “Cleared of all charges. Thanks to you.”

  “That was Mr. Ash’s doing, not mine.”

  After Lily had told Strangford and the others the whole of how Hartwell and Waddington had managed their crimes, Ash had said simply that he would see to the details.

  The details had turned out to be coordinating with law enforcement to confirm that a man matching Waddington’s description had been admitted to the location of each of the murders, claiming to have come from the gasworks.

  Of course, the gasworks had no record of any leak or of dispatching an inspector. When a search of Waddington’s flat revealed a case of syringes and rubber tubing, any lingering doubt about the matter had been put firmly to rest—in time for Deveral’s arraignment to be quietly canceled.

  As for Hartwell, the world believed he had leapt from the roof of his asylum out of the shame of discovering he had been unwittingly harboring a murderer among his staff. His true part in the affair remained known to only a few.

  It didn’t matter. He was dead.

  “You undervalue your role,” Lord Torrington countered. He moved from behind the desk and paced to the window. He seemed uncomfortable, an emotion Lily suspected was rather rare for him. “You should not have
had to come here,” he said, looking out over the lawn.

  The words stung. They shouldn’t have. It was hardly a surprise that he thought that way. Lily shrugged, refusing to let it show. “I knew it would be safe.”

  “Safe?”

  “That your wife would be out.”

  He stared at her as though shocked by her words. Lily pressed on, forcing a casual tone.

  “You always came to us on Wednesdays. To my mother. Because that was when the countess made her social calls.”

  “You misunderstand . . .” He stopped, looking down. When he raised his head again, the lines on his face seemed deeper, as if he had grown older in that moment. “What I meant is that this visit should not have been necessary because I should have come to you. To thank you for what you did. And to apologize.”

  His words left her feeling even more unsettled, as though the ground were threatening to shift beneath her feet.

  “There’s no need for that.” She looked away, hiding herself in a study of the Arcadian landscape beyond the glass.

  “You came to me for help and I did not give it to you. That choice put you in the path of a great deal of harm.”

  “No,” Lily snapped in reply. “It was my own choice that did that. Not yours.”

  He moved to the chair, dropped into it.

  “I am arguing with myself,” he muttered.

  Something lurched in her chest. She ignored it. Turning to him, she cut to the core of the reason she had come.

  “I know about the memo. The one Hartwell wrote to the War Office. The one you were copied on.”

  She waited for the impact of her revelation, of the accusation it implied.

  “You read it?” he asked quietly.

  “I read the reply acknowledging receipt. Saying how very interested the office was in the outcome of Hartwell’s research.”

  The questions burned against her lips, demanding to be asked. How much had he known? How much had he condoned?

  She kept them close. She would wait and see how he rose to the challenge she had thrown at him.

  He stood and joined her by the window.

  “A war is coming,” he said from beside her.

  The light shifted, a cloud momentarily obscuring the clear spring sunlight, casting its shadow across the idyllic landscape beyond the glass.

  “Perhaps with Germany, though it might just as easily be Russia or even the Ottomans. It will be great, unlike anything we have fought before. More brutal. More terrible. There is no avoiding it, not by any possible scenario I have reckoned.” He glanced over at her. “But perhaps you already knew that.”

  Lily remembered what she had seen. The vision of crouching in a hole cut into the cold, muddy ground braced with wood and barbed wire. The shaking, ear-splitting impact of artillery shells. How the world had exploded, Strangford torn from her in a blast of dirt and splinters.

  A war.

  “England will need every advantage she can muster to come out of it intact,” he said, his voice low but steady. “We cannot afford to turn our backs on any option, no matter how far-fetched it might seem.”

  “No matter what it costs?” Lily countered.

  “No,” he countered clearly, firmly. “Cost must considered. That is what keeps us from becoming monsters.”

  “And what Hartwell’s research would have cost? The lives of a few women?”

  He looked at her, his gray eyes—so very like her own—shot through with regret.

  “I didn’t know. None of us knew. God help me, I thought he was a gentleman.”

  “Oh, he was a gentleman,” Lily retorted.

  She felt the blow hit, as it had been intended to. He went quiet beside her, the stillness stretching between them, tense as a bowstring.

  “It would seem that I am perpetually failing you,” he said.

  Her throat caught. She looked away. Outside, the clouds shifted once more, light dancing across the spring-green fields.

  The question that had been burning inside of her finally forced its way to her lips, spilled out into the room.

  “Did you want me here?” she asked. “After my mother died.”

  “Yes,” he replied simply. “I wanted that very much.”

  She felt the impact of the words. They hit with all the force of an artillery shell, shattering something inside of her.

  “But you sent me away.”

  “I had a duty to my family.”

  “To your family,” Lily echoed numbly. “Of course.”

  When he spoke again, his voice was rougher than it had been, more uneven.

  “How could this have ever been your home, if they would not welcome you? If I’d brought you here in spite of them, you would always have been an outsider.”

  “Sending me away didn’t change that.”

  He pressed his hand to the glass, his shoulders bowing.

  “God help me, but I have made a mess of things. I wronged you, Lilith. I wronged my wife, my children. And yet I cannot regret it. Not for a moment.”

  She felt exposed, her senses sparking, sensitive to the point of pain. Part of her wanted to stop right here, walk away before the conversation could go any further, reveal more of what she both wanted and was desperately afraid to know.

  Her own voice had grown rough.

  “Because you loved her.”

  He looked at her, the grief written on his face.

  “Because I loved both of you.”

  A spring shower burst over the great green lawn. The raindrops pelted against the small spring leaves, rattled against the window-panes. It was the sort of storm that would pass quickly, leaving newness in its wake.

  He cleared his throat, moving over to his desk, rearranging some of the papers.

  “I am returning to London next week, Tuesday at the latest. Perhaps we could . . .” His voice caught, halted.

  She felt the space left by those unspoken words, that sudden, aching vulnerability reaching across the room.

  She burst out, the words spilling from her, sounding as raw as they felt.

  “I won’t be anyone’s secret.”

  The quick downpour rattled against the glass, tapping impatient fingers as he looked at her from across the desk.

  “No,” he said firmly at last. “Never be that.”

  The rain passed, fading into a spare few drops dancing on the wet blades of grass.

  Her answer to the question he had not quite asked should have been harder to give. It should have involved more of a struggle within herself. But something had changed.

  “Then perhaps we could,” she replied quietly.

  The coachman was wheeling the Triumph up from the garage as she stepped out the front door, the full freshness of spring after rain enveloping her. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and held the motorbike ready with a posture she suspected was nearly identical to the one he used to help dowagers into their Daimlers.

  She climbed on, ignited the engine, and roared down the lime-lined drive of the estate. The air smelled of new mud, forest and the sea, the wind tossing the loose tendrils of her hair. She flew across the weald knowing that something fundamental had shifted, like a curtain thrown open on a view she had not known existed.

  She throttled the Triumph up to speed and laughed.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THE LIGHT WAS TURNING golden over Bedford Square, casting a warm glow over the residents who strolled along the pavement or stood chatting on the bright green grass of the park.

  Lily stopped the Triumph next to the wrought iron fence that lined the narrow front garden of her destination.

  She should have come sooner. She knew that. She also knew that the inhabitants of the building before her were better equipped than anyone to understand why she hadn’t.

  No one here would judge her for needing time and space to come to terms with all that she had learned.

  All that she had done.

  She leaned the motorcycle against the rails and climbed the steps.

&nb
sp; Automatically, she lifted her hand to rap on the rich blue paint of the door—then hesitated. Her eyes drifted to the small brass plaque mounted by the entrance, engraved with a series of Chinese characters.

  She couldn’t read them. She didn’t have to. She knew what they said.

  Instead of knocking, she lowered her hand to the knob. She turned it and the door swung open.

  Lily stepped into the hall.

  It was empty and quiet. The Ming vase stood on the narrow table in the entry, the bright orange goldfish swimming busily among a field of blue lotus blossoms. Beside it, the bust of Sir Isaac Newton watched her impassively.

  A burst of bright, familiar laughter rang from the door to her right. Drawn toward it, Lily stepped into the library.

  Estelle reclined in one of the armchairs. She was draped in her peacock blue caftan, a light gauze bandage wrapped around her throat. The rich hues of her turban stood out boldly against the subdued colors of the books that surrounded her.

  She held a cup and saucer in her hands. As Lily entered, she took a break from laughing to sip her tea.

  “It is not the least bit funny,” Cairncross countered from the chair across from her.

  “Of course it is,” Estelle retorted.

  “You mustn’t mind her, Mr. Cairncross,” Miss Bard cut in. She stood on the far side of the room, plucking a volume on Polynesian religions from the shelf. “She gets a bit giddy after her third cup of Darjeeling.”

  “This has nothing to do with tea and everything to do with envisioning James in his knickers, facing down an angry hippopotamus.”

  “They are extremely dangerous animals,” Cairncross protested. “Especially when one’s rifle is back on the beach with one’s trousers.”

  Estelle snorted from behind her teacup. It struck Lily how impossible this moment should have been. Only a few weeks before, she would have believed—known beyond doubt—that this woman would be dead, lying cold in her grave.

  Instead, she sat here in the warmth of the library, mercilessly teasing Cairncross and eliciting a wry little twitch of Miss Bard’s lips.

  It was not that Lily had been mistaken from the start about the import of her vision. That foresight of Estelle bleeding, pointing an accusing hand at some unseen threat, had meant her death. She knew that with a certainty that went beyond logic to someplace bone-deep and undeniable.