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“Come back to bed,” she said gently, “you are shaking with cold, lamb.”
    Not cold, but
fear, and he hated it, all the more for knowing it was not real, that he was
afraid of a phantom in his own head.
    His mouth was
very dry, and his marred cheek stiff as wood, but he choked down the bile in
his throat and said, “My. Sis. Ter.”
    And his voice
was slurred, odd, and she glanced at him with a look of understanding. And
crossed the room again, barefoot and tall and slight and radiant as a white
candle, to squat on her haunches in front of the dying fire and shake the jug
of spiced ale that had been left there, and to pour the last of it and offer it
to him wordlessly.
    He didn’t taste
it, but the warmth of it eased his cheek a little, and eased the shivering cold
in his bones, and he swallowed it gratefully. 
    Thomazine set
the jug back in the ashes, though it was all but empty now, and perched herself
on the bed, cross-legged as a tailor.
    He was awake,
now. He could not see Thomazine with her skirts blazing around her, or her
loose hair burning like the tail of a comet. He could not smell roasting meat,
or imagine the shattering roar as the roof fell in to obliterate her dear body
under a ruin of charred wood and broken glass. “Four Ashes burned,” he said
softly, his voice under control again, now. “That much, you know. Well. My
sister burned with it. She was in the house.”
    She nodded
encouragingly.
    “I. Dream of it,
sometimes.” And thought, but did not say, that sometimes it was not Fly he saw
in his dreams, but other people, the people he loved. Burning. Always burning,
and begging to be saved, and he was always standing outside. Standing in the
thin rain of a Buckinghamshire winter night, with the heat on his face, and the
whirling sparks like scarlet snow, and the roar and whoosh of collapsing
timbers.
    Thomazine
touched his hand, and he snatched at her fingers and held them, hard, and in
his head he was pulling her free from the falling timbers. Too hard, he
thought, for her level brows drew together in a tiny wince. He was sorry for
it.
    “Yes,” she said.
No more than that. “I imagine you would.”
    And then, after
a little pause, she freed her hand and linked her fingers through his, that he
might not squeeze them quite so hard any more. “I’m sorry, Russell. I don’t
think I have said that before. I am truly sorry.”
    And he was
tired, and his head was beginning to ache with lack of sleep, and so he was
honest, and he said, “I’m not, tibber.”
    He thought she
might be shocked. She took a little sharp breath, but then she glanced up and
looked both sad and angry at once. “I am sorry for you , love. Not her.”
    “No one deserves
to die so,” he said softly, and it was the first time he had said as much,
aloud, and the closest he had yet come to forgiveness. “No matter how vile a
sinner they may be. No one deserves that death. I am sorry she died so hard. I
am not sorry she died, and I cannot find it in my heart to mourn her.” 
    Thomazine’s
gilded russet lashes dipped, and she said nothing. The house was still again,
so still that you could hear the murmur of voices, in the room at the end of
the landing, and the creak of floorboards where Frannie Pettitt was walking to
and fro to ease the pain of bringing a new life into the world. (Or perhaps it
was her husband, for Luce had ever been an anxious young man, and not grown
less so with middle age.)
    So still that
the disconcerting, all too audible grunting snarl from the far chamber made
Russell jump and blink, imagining the worst. And made Thomazine smile at his
discomfiture, for being a woman she had more knowledge of these matters than he
did. He stared at her, wide-eyed, and she leaned forward till her forehead
touched his. “What was it you always used to say to me,” she said gently, “ -
all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well?”
     - as if
she were the older of the two of them, and he nodded,