The Duke’s Fiancée Threw Water at the Maid — She Wiped It Off and Said, “You Will Remember This Day”

Chapter 6

That same night, in the tiny attic room she shared with Molly Green, Cora Bell lay awake staring at the ceiling.

Molly was snoring softly on the other cot, curled up like a dormouse. The wind rattled the little window in its frame, and somewhere below them the house settled and creaked, and a mouse ran along the wainscot, and none of it mattered, because Cora was not in the attic.

She was sixteen years old.

Slowly, she pulled off the gray glove and held her right hand up in the moonlight.

The skin was twisted and shiny from her fingertips to her wrist, pale as tallow, puckered in ridges where the flesh had melted and healed wrong. It did not hurt anymore. Sometimes, on cold nights, it ached — a deep dull ache like a tooth in the bone — and that was all. But she never for one moment forgot it was there, because everyone else always remembered.

She closed her eyes, and the attic was gone, and she was standing in the doorway of her father’s inn.

The Crown and Anchor had belonged to Thomas Bell.

A small place, but clean and honest, and travelers liked it. The sheets were aired and the ale was good and the fire was always lit. Cora served the tables. Her mother cooked. Her father did everything else, from the barrels to the books, and whistled while he did it.

It was a good life. It was the only good life she had ever had.

That night there had been only two important guests. One was a young gentleman upstairs who had gone to bed early with a book, quiet and polite, who had thanked her for his supper and said the mutton was the best he had eaten in a month.

The other was Lord Alaric Vain, who had stopped on his way home from the races with his daughter waiting in the carriage outside and mud on his boots and a great deal of wine already in him.

Lord Vain drank too much. He always did. Everyone knew it, and nobody said it.

He became loud. Then he became angry. He wanted another bottle, and her father said, politely, that he had had enough, that the roads were bad, that he would send a boy to fetch the carriage round.

And Lord Alaric Vain swung his arm and knocked the oil lamp off the table.

Cora saw it fall. She was standing four feet away with a tray of cups in her hands, and she saw the whole thing as clearly as she saw the moon outside the window now.

She saw the lamp strike the floor and the oil spill out across the boards in a bright spreading line. She saw the flame catch it and run — running, actually running, like a living thing — up the old dry wooden stairs faster than anyone could believe.

Everyone ran outside. Lord Vain ran first. He was through the door before the flames had reached the second step.

Then Cora heard her father shout, from the yard, over the noise: “The young gentleman! He’s still upstairs!”

She did not think. That was the thing she had never been able to explain to anyone — she did not think at all. She grabbed a wet cloth from the water pail, wrapped it around her face, and ran into the fire.

She found him on the floor of the back room, not moving, his coat smoking. She got both hands under his collar and she pulled, and he was so heavy — so terribly heavy — and the smoke was so thick she could not see the stairs.

So she sang.

She sang her mother’s hymn, the only song she could think of, because if she was singing then he could hear her voice, and if he could hear her voice then he would keep breathing, and if he kept breathing then he would live.

Guide me home when the dark is deep. Guide me home by the light you keep.

Step by step. Down the burning stairs. His boots bumping behind her.

At the doorway her sleeve caught fire. She felt the flame go up her arm like a strip of ice and then like nothing at all, and she screamed, and she kept pulling anyway, because the door was right there and he was still alive behind her.

She got him out.

She laid him down on the wet grass, and his chest was moving, and she was crying and laughing at the same time with her arm on fire in the rain.

Then she heard her mother screaming for her father, and she ran back to help.

When she came back, the young gentleman was gone.

Lord Vain’s carriage had taken him.

The next morning, the magistrate came.

Lord Vain told him that Thomas Bell, the innkeeper, had been drunk and careless, that he had knocked over the lamp himself, that he had been warned about the state of his house a dozen times.

A stable boy swore it was true.

Cora told the magistrate the truth. She told him everything — the wine, the arm swinging, the lamp, the race up the stairs, her father shouting, the young gentleman still inside.

The magistrate was Lord Vain’s hunting friend. He listened to her with his head tilted to one side, and when she had finished, he laughed.

Her father was found guilty. The inn was ruined, so he could never pay for the damage. He was sentenced to transportation: seven years in the prison colonies on the other side of the world.

Cora watched them put her father in chains.

She never saw him again.