CHAPTER 4
Philip lost himself briefly in the tangle of small valley tacks that threaded the hills, after leaving the Long Forest, and was forced to hunt out a local man from the first assart he came to, to put him on the road for Stanton Cobbold. The region he knew vaguely, but not the manor. The cottar gave him precise instructions, and turning to follow his own pointing, saw the first thin column of smoke going up into a still sky, and rapidly thickening and darkening as he stared at it.
“That could be the very place, or near it. The woods are dry enough for trouble. God send they can keep it from the house, if some fool’s set a spark going . . .”
“How far is it?” demanded Philip, wildly staring.
“A mile and over. You’d best . . .” But Philip was gone, heels driving into his stolen horse’s sides, off at a headlong gallop. He kept his eyes upon that growing, billowing column of smoke more often than upon the road, and took risks on those little-used and eccentric paths that might have fetched him down a dozen times if luck had not favoured him. With every minute, the spectacle grew more alarming, the red of flames belching upward spasmodically against the black of smoke. Long before he reached the manor, and came bursting out of the trees towards the stockade, he could hear the bursting of beams, splitting apart in the heat with louder reports than any axe-blow. It was the house, not the forest.
The gate stood open, and within, frantic servants ran confusedly, dragging out from hall and kitchen whatever belongings they could, salvaging from the stables and byres, dangerously near to the wooden part of the house, terrified and shrieking horses, and bellowing cattle. Philip stared aghast at the tower of smoke and flames that engulfed one end of the house. The long stone building of hall and undercroft would stand, though as a gutted shell, but the timbered part was already a furnace. Confused men and screaming maids ran about distractedly and paid him no heed. The disaster had overtaken them so suddenly that they were half out of their wits.
Philip kicked his feet out of the stirrups which were short for him, but which he had never paused to lengthen, and vaulted from the horse, leaving it to wander at will. One of the cowmen blundered across his path, and Philip seized him by the arm and wrenched him round to face him.
“Where’s your lord? Where’s the girl he brought here today?” The man was dazed and slow to answer; he shook him furiously. “The girl—what has he done with her?”
Gaping helplessly, the man pointed into the pillar of smoke. “They’re in the solar—my lord as well . . . It’s there the fire began.”
Philip dropped him without a word, and began to run towards the stair to the hall door. The man howled after him: “Fool, it’s the hob of hell in there, nothing could live in it! And the door’s locked—he had the key with him . . . You’ll go to your death!”
Nothing of this made any impression upon Philip, until mention of the locked door checked him sharply. If there was no other way in, by a locked door he would have to enter. He cast about him at all the piles of hangings and furnishings and utensils they had dragged out into the courtyard, for something he could use to break through such a barrier. The kitchen had been emptied, there were meat-choppers and knives, but, better still, there was a pile of arms from the hall. One of Corbière’s ancestors, it seemed, had favoured the battle-axe. And these craven creatures of the household had made no attempt to use so handy a weapon! Their lord could roast before they would risk a burned hand for him.
Philip went up the stone steps three at a time, and into the black and stifling cavern of the hall. The heat, after all, was not so intense here, the stone walls were thick, and the floor, too, was laid with stones over the great beams of the undercroft. The worst enemy was the smoke that bit acrid and poisonous into his throat at the first breath. He spared the few moments it took to tear off his shirt and bind it round his face to cover nose and mouth, and then began to grope his way at reckless speed along the wall towards the other end of the hall, whence the heat and the fumes came. He did not think at all, he did what he had to do. Emma was somewhere in that inferno, and nothing mattered but to get her out of it.
He found the foot of the staircase to the gallery by stumbling blindly over the first step, and went up the flight stooped low, because it seemed that the bulk of the smoke was rolling along the roof. The shape of the solar door he found by the framework of smoke pouring in a thin, steady stream all round it. The wood itself was not yet burning. He hammered and strained at the door, and called, but there was no sound from within but the crackling of the fire. No way but to go through.
He swung the axe like a berserker Norseman, aiming at the lock. The door was stout, the wood old and seasoned, but less formidable axes had felled the trees that made it. His eyes smarted, streaming tears that helped by damping the cloth that covered his mouth. The blows started the beams of the door, but the lock held. Philip went on swinging. He had started a deep crack just above the lock, so deep that he had trouble withdrawing the axe. Time after time he struck at the same place, aware of splinters flying, and suddenly the lock burst clear with a harsh, metallic cry, and the edge of the door gave, only to stick again when he had thrust it open no more than a hand’s breadth. The upper part, when he groped round it, offered no resistance. He felt along the floor within, and closed his hand upon a coil of silky hair. She was there, lying along the doorway, and though the heat that gushed out at him was terrifying, yet only the smoke, not the flames, had reached her.
The opening of the door had provided a way through for the wind that fed the flames, such a brightness burned up beyond the black that he knew he had only minutes before the blaze swept over them both. Frantically he leaned to get a grasp of her arm and drag her aside, so that he could open the door for the briefest possible moment, just wide enough to lift her through, and again draw it to against the demon within.
There was a great explosion of scarlet and flame, that sent a tongue out through the opening to singe his hair, and then he had her, the soft, limp weight hoisted on his shoulder, the door dragged to again behind them, and he was half-falling, half-running down the staircase with her in his arms, and the devil of fire had done no worse than snap at their heels. He did not even realise, until he took off his shoes much later, that the very treads of the stairs had been burning under his feet.
He reached the hall doorway with head lolling and chest labouring for breath, and had to sit down with his burden on the stone steps, for fear of falling with her. Greedily he dragged the clean outside air into him, and pulled down the smoke-fouled shirt from about his face. Vision and hearing were blurred and distant, he did not even know that Hugh Beringar and his guard had come galloping into the courtyard, until Brother Cadfael scurried up the steps to take Emma gently from him.
“Good lad! I have her. Come away down after us—lean on me as we go, so! Let’s find you a safe corner, and we’ll see what we can do for you both.”
Philip, suddenly shivering, and so feeble he dared not trust his legs to stand, asked in urgent, aching terror “Is she . . . ?”
“She’s breathing,” said Brother Cadfael reassuringly. “Come and help me care for her, and with God’s blessing, she’ll do.”
Emma opened her eyes upon a clean, pale sky and two absorbed and anxious faces. Brother Cadfael’s she knew at once, for it bore its usual shrewdly amiable aspect, though how he had come to be there, or where, indeed, she was, she could not yet divine. The other face was so close to her own that she saw it out of focus, and it was wild and strange enough, grimed from brow to chin, the blackness seamed with dried rivulets of sweat, the brown hair along one temple curled and brown from burning! but it had two fine, clear brown eyes as honest as the daylight above, and fixed upon her with such devotion that the face, marred as it was, and never remarkable for beauty, seemed to her the most pleasing and comforting she had ever seen. The face on which her eyes had last looked, before it became a frightful lantern of flame, had been the face of ambition, greed and murder, in a plausible shell of beauty. This face was the other side of the human coin.