Karen Memory

Chapter Sixteen

The fifth night after my talk with Madame, I went to bed early with a book, because there weren’t nothing more I could do. Priya was still at work in the kitchen.

I hadn’t been sleeping so good, and it turned out that was a blessing. When someone knocked at my door about four in the morning, I was awake and curled around the pages of Bea’s copy of this French book translated from the Arabic that I’d been struggling through. I liked it a lot, when I could make head or tail of it. It was about a woman who’s married unwilling to a sultan who murders each of his brides after consummating to stave off getting an heir, but she keeps him at bay every night by outwitting him, and telling him stories he can’t bear not to know the end of, so he keeps letting her live another day.

So I was lying on my side with the blankets pulled up to my ears, bent toward the lamp. Miss Francina always claimed reading in the dark would ruin my eyes sure as stitchery, and she was probably right. But even she couldn’t tell me nothing when I had an idea in my head. I save all my better judgment for dealing with horses.

I got up — getting out from under the quilt was hard, the air was that sharp — and stuck my feet in my slippers as fast as I could. Of course, the slippers was cold, too, though not as cold as the floor. Still, cold enough that I hissed and limped as I scuffed over to the door.

I had my hand on the latch when I heard Priya’s voice outside. “Karen, I’m cold. Let me in?”

I probably would of jumped out of bed faster if I’d known it were her, and no mistake. As it was, I yanked that door open so fast I made a draft.

Priya was bundled up in shawls over her shirt and trousers, her hair braided for bed but unmussed. She stepped out of the way so I could shut the door behind her. Then I gestured her toward my rumpled bed and she sat, sliding her sock-clad feet into a fold of the blankets. I should of gotten her slippers better than the carpet ones.

“Hi,” I said, and sat down on the bed, too. Closer to the head, though. Just close enough that our shoulders brushed together. I had made up my mind early that as long as she knowed I was willing, it was going to be Priya made all the moves between us. I was giving her time, and you know it weren’t easy. But like gentling a badly broke horse, I knowed I had to let Priya do most of the traveling if I didn’t want to spook her away for good.

I handed her a pillow. She smiled and leaned back against it. I stuck my legs back under the covers.

“Hi,” she said. She looked down at her hands, picked at her cuticle, and tucked her fingers into her armpits under the shawls while I tried not to stare at her.

A minute or two later, I said, “Did you want something?”

“Um,” she said.

She looked at me and glanced away again. In the lamplight, her dark eyes seemed opaque. She dropped her head as if she meant to hide behind her hair, but the braid thwarted her.

Then she said, “Company.”

I wanted to reach out and take her hand so bad I could taste it. But her hands were tucked up warm under her arms, and anyway the foot and a half between us seemed unbridgeable. I wanted to kiss her, too, but she didn’t look too kissable just then. More remote, and worrited.

I wished I could offer her tea. You don’t think about it, but all those little fusses we make over company have their purposes. They give us something to do with our hands and our anxiousness until everybody settles in and starts having fun. It’s probably why the men who come into Madame’s spend so much money at the bar. Even though they gotta know — the savvy ones, anyway — that we girls is drinking soda water or cold tea. But it gives everybody something to do with their hands.

“I want company, too,” I admitted. It was on my lips to say, In kind of particular, I want your company, but all I could see was her jumping up and scooting for the door. When people have only lured you close to hit you or throw a rope over your head before, it’s hard to learn to trust the ones who aren’t going to. Hell, it’s hard to learn to even know which is which.

So I just sat there like an idiot, watching the most beautiful person I’d ever seen huddled up on my bed, and I didn’t put an arm around her.

She pulled her hands out of her armpits and twisted them together, all pale with the chill. She had the most elegant fingers — tapered, like a lady’s, even with her nails kept cropped for the domestic work she was doing. Mine were blunt and plump, though I grew my nails out to make them look more genteel.

Looking at them, not at me, Priya said, “Karen, have you ever thought about leaving here? About what you might want to do after?”

“Are…” … you asking me to come with you? It died on my lips. It was too much to hope, and it would give too much away.

She waited patiently, still not raising her head.

“I have,” she said when I was quiet too long.

“Me too,” I answered. “I’m saving. I want a stable someday, a horse ranch. A breeding operation. Sell good cow ponies, and maybe break ’em for folks.”

“Oh,” she said.

She didn’t sound disappointed so much as concerned, so I hurried to say, “You would always be welcome. I … I’d build you a machine shop, and you could fixit while I wrangled, and you could cook and I could sew. And, and we could each read to the other while we did it.”

It was about the prettiest dream I’d ever put to words, and no mistaking. I held my breath while I waited to see if she was going to shoot it down.

She said, “I don’t know anything about horses. My family had cattle and sheep … but the cattle weren’t for eating. We don’t eat cows at home. They’re for milk and cheese and ghee.”

I didn’t know what ghee was and made a note to ask her. But it seemed more important to say, “I know all about horses. I practically grew up on one. I could teach you, especially if you know cattle. If you’re not afraid.”

“I’m afraid of all sorts of things,” Priya said. “But not farm animals.”

“I wish you could have known my Molly.”

“Molly? This is a … what’s the word? Mare?”

“Is, yes. As far as I know, she’s still alive. I had to give her away after my da died.” Horses live a long time.

“Not sell?”

I shrugged. “I sold the rest. Her … the person I wanted to have her couldn’t pay for a horse, so I gave her to him. A neighbor’s lad. My age.” I knowed Lutz would give her back to me if I ever came looking. That was part of it. I didn’t say that, though, because I didn’t know if it would be fair to him — or to Molly — and frankly, I didn’t know if I would. You grieve, it’s one thing. You grieve and go back, it’s another.

She gave me a sly look. “Did you love him?”

“Hah! No, of course not. I loved that mare. Though some folk would say you can’t love an animal, on account of they have no souls.”

“I don’t believe that,” Priya said.

“That you can’t love an animal?”

“You can love an animal,” she said. She was uncoiling a little, straightening up. Though it hadn’t gotten any warmer in the room. “And animals have souls. Your religion is very strange to me, Karen. I believe that when we die, we come back on a wheel of rebirth. And depending on whether we have acquitted ourselves well — depending on our karma—we may be reincarnated to a good life. Or we may be reincarnated to a life where we must earn our way out of misdeeds — pain we have caused, injustice we have benefited from.”

I’d been blinking at her confusedly, I’m afraid. But when she said that last, I bounced on my seat bones, ridiculously pleased to find some common ground in her blasphemy. Or was it just heathenish? Can a heathen blaspheme?

I’m a fallen woman; who am I to judge?

I said excitedly, “That’s like Purgatory!”

Her lips curved so gently I’d be afraid to call it a smile, lest it fly away. “We would say it is dharma. It supports the natural and proper order of things.” She got quiet again, and I knowed from her frown that she was wondering what her past self had done to deserve a life in Peter Bantle’s cribs. But she pulled herself back together and said, “Tell me about your mare. Your Molly.”

“She’s a strawberry Appaloosa,” I said.

Priya looked at me like I was speaking one of the maybe five or six languages on earth that she wasn’t already fluent in.

I guess it was what you’d call technical vocabulary. “That means she’s a roan, a kind of speckled red and gray. With a white blanket across her shoulders and … sort of silver-dollar-sized spots of red on top of that. And she’s smart, Molly is. Smart for a horse, anyway.”

Smart enough to get herself into plenty of trouble. Learning to unlatch gates and suchlike. Nearly colicked herself once, getting into the grain. I told Priya about some of that but wound down halfway through what was supposed to have been a funny story about a barn cat when the wave of longing hit me. Loneliness and missing … Molly, and Da. Molly almost worse than Da. Because Da was gone, and he weren’t coming back, and I hadn’t had no choice about it.

I hadn’t had no choice about Molly, neither. Not really. But I’d had to make one anyway.

Priya waited a few seconds, as if to see if I was going to carry on. Then, as if I’d asked a question, she started to tell me about her baby brother, and her parents, and the crop failures. And how she and her sister had signed indenture papers to come to America so their family could afford to eat, not realizing that they was going to wind up in a barred crib or paraded on leashes through Chinatown weekly for their only exercise. “It was supposed to be domestic work,” she said. “We were supposed to send money home.”

She was picking at that cuticle again. She was going to draw blood in a minute.

“Well,” I said. “That’s what you’re doing now, ain’t it? You just got a bit delayed.”

I couldn’t stand it anymore. I reached out and pulled her nails away from her skin. She looked up in surprise, like she hadn’t noticed what she was doing to herself, despite having been so studious over it. Her fingers was strong for being so slender, and she gave my hand a short, quick squeeze. I was half-stunned by how warm it was, and I thought — for a second — she was leaning in toward me and I thought I might get my kissing in after all.

I wondered if someday she might trust me enough to fall asleep with her head on my shoulder. Or even lie there a little while without having to get up and pace circles to burn off the anxiousness of getting too close.

All I saw was her lips as she hesitated. Then her head twisted around and her expression froze. “What’s that smell?”

A second later and I caught it also. Burning — and not the clean smell of wood or coal. This was a dirty kind of stink, like a trash fire.

“I smell smoke!” Priya cried.

“Shit,” I said. “I do, too.”

* * *

Some good grace of God made me pry open my hiding place — right there in front of Priya — and grab out my journal and my savings. I left Da’s wooden horse, though it about killed me. We pulled sheets from the bed, wet them in the basin, and wrapped them around our heads. I opened the door — Priya made me touch it first and check to see if the wood or the handle was hot, which I had never heard about before then — and we stumbled hand in hand into the corridor, me holding up the lamp.

The door at the top of the stairs was open, and ordinarily Connie would of had the head of whoever left it so — letting all the heat run out of the downstairs like that. And the heat was sure running out now: streamers of smoke crept along the stair ceiling like foul black fingers. Hot air rushed up the steps, like holding my hand over a lamp chimney except on an industrial scale. The smoke had already left oily smears on the corridor ceiling, like the ripples on water. I stared at it, trying to think — could we get down the stairs? Could we go out the window? It was only a short drop down to the street, but it was farther to the sidewalk — much farther — and I wasn’t sure I could jump the gap. And even if the fire companies were en route, which they probably weren’t because I hadn’t heard nobody raise the alarm of Fire! it might be twenty minutes before they arrived. And then if two or more showed up, they might just have a fistfight over who got to hook up to the hydrant rather than getting to the business of dousing fires.

In twenty minutes, we might all be dead.

“Fire!” Priya shouted, thumping on the nearest door. “Fire!”

Now, that was what you call direct and functional action. Since I couldn’t make up my own mind what to do, I figured I might as well follow Priya’s lead.

She was pounding on Effie’s door, because Effie was next door to me. I whirled around and ran down to Miss Francina’s room, shouting.

Other doors were starting to open — Crispin, and Bea, and Pollywog all pouring out in their nightclothes. Crispin had grabbed boots and was stamping them on over his pajamas. That seemed like a fine sensible idea, but all my boots required a buttonhook and if I was going to die in a fire I didn’t want it to be because I stopped to make sure my shoes was fastened. Or because I broke my neck trying to run in ones as weren’t.

Madame’s bedroom was on the floor below, behind her office. I looked up and saw Miss Lizzie and Miss Bethel coming out of the room they share, and from the way they headed to the stairs they had realized that, too. But just as they got there, I heard a door below slam open and Madame shouting up the stair, “Girls, it’s a fire in the kitchen! Go out the windows at the front! Get out! Get out!”

Priya grabbed my arm. She pulled me toward Pollywog’s room, which was at the front of the house. But just then, Bea darted toward the stairs. “Signor!” she yelled.

She probably would of gotten past Miss Lizzie and Miss Bethel, too, because by then they each had Madame by a wrist and was hauling her, limping, up the stairs. But when she darted past Priya, Priya let go of me and grabbed at Bea.

The air was getting thick. My head spun, even with the wet cloth over my face. I grabbed Bea’s other arm and helped Priya hold her. “I’ll look for him,” I said. “You go with Priya.”

“Karen!” Priya snapped.

I shoved my journal and my little purse at her. “Keep these safe. They’re yours if—”

“Karen.”

“Connie’s down there, too, unless she made it out the back,” I said. “And didn’t you just tell me animals have souls?”

She threw up her free hand in despair. “All right,” she said. “All right.”

And then she leaned forward, and in front of God and Madame and Effie and everybody she kissed me square on the mouth, wet rags and all.

“For luck,” she said, and dragged Bea toward the windows.

“Wait!” Crispin yelled. He had a big voice. It carried through the room. I thought he was going to try to stop me, and I’m sure he thought about it — but Miss Lizzie and Miss Bethel was struggling with Madame, who was coughing like a consumptive as she came to the top of the stairs. I saw him look around, and think about the odds.

“You can catch the girls when they jump,” I said. “I can’t do that.”

One thing about Crispin. He don’t waste time making up his mind. He yanked his boots off and shoved them at me, then threw the overcoat he’d been struggling into over my shoulders. “It might help,” he said. “Get Connie. I won’t let them open the window for two minutes, so’s you can get down the stairs.”

Because once that window was open, the stairs would be a chimney. Right.

Hopping on one foot to get the other boot on, I looked him in the eye and nodded. “I’ll see you outside,” I said. “Shut the stair door behind me, too.”

I wouldn’t of gotten past Miss Francina that easy. But she was corralling Pollywog and Effie after Priya, so in the thickening haze I figure she didn’t see what I was fixing to do.

It’s damn hard to crawl down stairs, I don’t mind telling you. I skidded down backward on my hands and knees as fast as I could, mindful of my time limit. Whenever I lifted my head, it felt like dunking it into a warm bathtub, except for upside down and strangely dry. But there was a ribbon of cooler air down by the steps, and through the wet cloth I could breathe it.

I was counting under my breath — that one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi — and I had gotten to sixty-seven when my feet thumped against the wall at the landing. I couldn’t see much anymore — my eyes was streaming and the smoke was damn near chewable — and I hoped Crispin didn’t count much faster than me. So I turned around and scurried faster. Eighty-Mississippi. Eighty-one. My knees were going to look like somebody’d taken a hoof file to ’em. I weren’t going fast enough, and I knowed it. I think I peeled off half my senses, reaching ’em out like whiskers, trying to feel the draft that would be followed by the flood of hot air and maybe fire up those stairs.

I should of shut the door at the top. Ninety-Mississippi. But I weren’t going back up there to correct the oversight now. Maybe Crispin would remember I’d asked him to. My elbows were bruised up something awful, but I was running on so much fear and excitement that they only hurt when I whacked one of ’em on something. In sorrow I report, I whacked ’em on a lot.

One hundred. Twenty seconds until Crispin opened the window. I must be almost there by now, but I couldn’t count stairs and seconds both at once. One-hundred-five …

The door was kitty-corner to the stairs, and I kicked out as I slid down what I thought was the last few steps. So I felt it was open space. I kind of swapped ends and fell out into the hall, then scrambled forward and kicked the door shut, nearly losing one of Crispin’s giant boots. I jammed it back on by stomping my foot against the doorframe.

Then I lay there on my belly for what felt like enough time for the whole damned house to have burned down around me but was probably only ten seconds or so. My breath heaved in and out like a bellows, and thank Christ there was less smoke down here or I would of choked on it. I pressed my face to the carpet and breathed through the wool fibers and the wet sheet, and it was almost like breathing air.

But the fire wanted that air, too, and when it was done there wouldn’t be none left for me. Even if I didn’t manage to roast alive before then. I pushed myself to my knees — damn, my knees — and tried to crawl. But Crispin’s overcoat got tangled in my legs and his boots was too big, and I didn’t have rags to stuff them with, so instead I laid back down and I kind of shuffle-kicked my way forward. Like a frog. Smoked frog.

I laughed, which I shouldn’t of done, because even with the wet wrap I got a stinging lungful. But I couldn’t see anyway, so coughing myself blind didn’t really matter, except it slowed me down.

I couldn’t afford to get lost. It was dark as pitch down here, like swimming in muddy water at night. I figured that was a good sign, because if I got in sight of the fire I’d sure be able to see that, no matter how dark it was otherwise. So I was feeling my way around and hoping I could remember where all the furniture was in the dark. Furniture we’d recently rearranged, of course, due to the riot in the parlor previous.

Down here, though I couldn’t see the fire, I could hear it. There was a hollow, grumbling roar, like a splintercat raging in an empty barn behind a stark oak door. It came from the kitchen, and that made my stomach churn, because Connie’s room was in the hall right outside. Every so often that was punctuated with crackling pings of hot metal and the thud of falling beams. I could hear something else, too — the clarion peals of Signor’s loud, monotonous, evenly spaced meows, that rang all the way back from the parlor to where I huddled at the base of the servants’ stair.

Maybe I should of tried to come down the grand staircase to the front, but I was thinking about Connie and—

Well, it was too late to change my mind now.

Groping, I felt a doorjamb and found the door to the back hall, where Connie’s room was. Priya saved my life, because before I jerked it open I touched it.

I yanked my hand back with a real ladylike swear: my finest. Hot; sharp hot. Blistering. Then I realized I could see my hand, dull red through the clouds of smoke. And something like flakes of black snow was falling through that smoke, stirring eddies.

I looked up. The ceiling was on fire, flames licking from behind the door, and what was flaking down on me now was bits of blackened lath and plaster. And I could see the glare of red through the keyhole, too.

If Connie was back there … there weren’t nothing I could do for her. All I could hope was she’d made it out the kitchen door.

I wanted to curl up and sob. I wanted to yank open that door and go running into the fire looking for her, but I couldn’t even touch the cut-glass doorknob, it was so hot. And Signor was still yelling. Maybe I could get to him. And anyway, that was my only way out now.

I got up on my hands and knees and crawled.

At first, it seemed like the air was getting cooler around me, the smoke less thick. But then it started getting worse again — hotter, smokier. And when I came around the corner to the parlor, there was that awful orange flicker again.

The parlor wasn’t on fire.

Just those poor much-abused front doors.

I was trapped.

* * *

God bless Signor. I think I would of frozen there in horror until the roof fell on me if he hadn’t picked that moment to yell, with all the power of his deaf little lungs, right in my left ear. It shocked me into moving. And squeaking like a mouse. Like a stepped-on mouse.

Signor was standing right at the base of the grand stair, glaring at me with his one blue eye and one yellow exactly as if the whole thing were my fault. I scooped him to my chest, and the ungrateful little bastard left a bloody long trail of scratches down my forearm with his hind foot. But I hung on to him. And about squeezed him into pudding, I was so glad to see him alive.

I say “little,” but Signor was twenty pounds if he was an ounce. I crouched, hugging him, and he hid his face in my wet sheet wrap. Flakes of burning something was sizzling out on Crispin’s overcoat, the wool adding a scorched stench to every other awful smell in the room. I needed a way out. Anything. I had to pick a direction, and I was terrified that whatever direction I picked would be wrong. I didn’t think I was gonna get a chance to change my mind and try something different if I happened to get it wrong.

Maybe I could go back up the stairs? Go out a window? Crispin would be out there to catch me now, or Miss Francina. Or there might be a firefighter with a ladder by now—

And then my eye lit on the sewing machine to the left of the parlor doors. That big, industrial, ridiculous, totally overengineered, souped-up-to-Jesus Singer sewing machine. The one that Priya and Lizzie had been hot-rodding for weeks, with the ornamental metal plates all over the armature, and Miss Lizzie’s diesel engine welded in beside the hydraulics.

It hurt me to stand up. Knees, spine, everything. My lungs, from the heat of the air, even through the wrap. The wrap was nearly dry now anyway, all the water sizzled off into the fire.

Head spinning, breath rasping, I staggered to the sewing machine. It weren’t easy getting into it while holding on to an unhappy cat, wearing boots four sizes bigger than my feet. The sewing machine was hot as a bitch, but I managed somehow, and the coat and boots were a lifesaver. It burned my legs through my socks and where my night shift didn’t quite meet up with ’em at the knee. I burned my hands some, too, in the process but didn’t drop Signor and I got about half the straps catched.

That were probably enough. I just leaved the machine’s left arm hanging, because I was using that hand to hang on to Signor anyway. He quieted down a bit when I swaddled him up in the sheet and bound him against my chest. At least it was easier than getting a horse out of a burning barn — a job I only knowed in theory, though Da’d made sure I was good and drilled in it. Stable fires had been the worst dread of my childhood.

Turned out there was something worse.

I had the coat, and I had the big machine. And I had the cat, who had quit yowling and twisting and scratching and now just huddled against me, face shoved into my chest. The heat was rising as I sparked the boiler, hoping whoever’d used it last had left some water in the damned thing. It ran on kerosene, not coal — thank God — because kerosene was cleaner indoors.

I never would of gotten a coal engine fired up fast enough to save our lives. It took me thirty seconds that felt like six hours just to get the diesel engine cranked up so it would spark, and then and turning over — me praying the whole time that I remembered right that diesel didn’t explode, then remembering the kerosene.

And it turned out to be a horrible kind of blessing that the thing was hot, because the water in the boilers might already have been near simmering. Anyway, it came up to pressure right quick, with hissing and creaking and a whole mess of noise. While I waited, I managed to force the thing into a crouch by main strength and with the torque from the auxiliary engine, so I could get me and Signor closer to the floor where there was still some air lasting.

I don’t recommend any of it.

The parlor, as I said, wasn’t burning, though now flames licked out from the doors into the paneling on either side. I imagined those flames inside the walls, creeping up to the ceiling — and the fire behind me, from the kitchen, chasing down the hall. I knowed rooms could get engulfed in flames in an instant when they got hot enough. But I also knowed — I knew—that somebody had set this fire on purpose to trap us inside. There weren’t no other reason for just the door to be burning, excepting if somebody had set it on purpose to shut us in. And I knowed the longer I let it burn, the weaker the wood would be.

And the more pressure there’d be in the sewing machine, in order to break it down.

I don’t mind saying I ain’t never been so scared in my life.

Finally — it seemed like hours, but it were only two minutes or so — the gauges read 70 percent pressure and climbing. When I rose up, it was a hell of a lot easier than squatting down had been. As soon as my head came up into the smoke layer, though, everything went dizzy and rough edged. I would of swayed, but the sewing machine has gyroscopes, so it shifted around me and caught my stagger. This is a good thing, because the sewing machine weighs half a ton and if you fell inside it you might never get up unless the hydraulics kept working.

And if it fell so the weight was on you, well. You’d crack a rib or three sure as if a horse fell on you. You’d be lucky to walk away without a hole in your lung, and not even Miss Lizzie can fix up that.

Now that I was decided, I had to go fast. The smoke up here was that thick. I could barely hear the roar of the Singer’s engines over the roar of the fire. I might of missed the door, honestly, if it weren’t for those flames glaring orange. They made such a beacon I couldn’t of asked for more, except maybe a fog light.

I clutched Signor against me, turning my shoulder toward the door, and started to lumber up to a run. I aimed right at the middle, at the place the panels met. And I thought, If Peter Bantle can break it in, by God I can break it out.

I half-surprised myself when I came up on the edge of the flames, howled with all the strength in my lungs, and ran faster and more hard.

Don’t get me wrong. I knowed I had courage. But until that moment, I didn’t know I had the courage to run through a fire. We surprise ourselves all our lives, Miss Bethel would say. That is, if our lives is gonna be worth living.

The fire licked all around me, but the Singer’s big grippered feet beat the flames down, and the plates Miss Lizzie had welded to the legs shielded me a little. I hit that door screaming and I busted through so hard I didn’t stop until I fetched up on the other side of the sidewalk, against the masonry wall that held the street up. Rock dust powdered down around me. My scream turned to coughing, and all around me the sewing machine armature smoked in the cool air. Puddles hissed under its feet and its springs complained of the sudden change in temperature.

“Mother of God,” I said, turning to look back at the house.

The second story was all ablaze. I couldn’t see any higher, because smoke and flames billowed out the windows, and the narrow space of the sidewalk was near full of smoke as the inside.

I couldn’t stay here, either.

Signor wasn’t moving, but he was wrapped up close against my chest under the coat and I didn’t have time to look at him. And the ladder wouldn’t support the weight of the sewing machine.

Which left climbing.

I pulled more wrapping sheet off my head, tucked Signor into it against my chest, then strapped my left arm in with three quick jerks. If Signor was passed out — he’d better not be worse than passed out, and I didn’t have time, dammit, to think about Connie — he was probably safe enough just slung against me like a papoose. And if he started to fight, well …

My breasts would be the first to know. I’d worry about it if it happened.

The rock wall was too smooth for climbing, unless you was Merry Lee. But with the sewing machine, I could drive the fingers right into the mortar between the big stones, and the feet had grippers meant to anchor the thing when it was hauling cloth off bolts of denim heavier than it was. It weren’t easy, don’t get me wrong. And I broke three needles and blunted the scissors and awl something fierce. But length by length, I dragged me and Signor up that wall.

Effie tells me that when I hauled myself over the edge of the street and lay there suspended inside the frame, the machine scrabbling on its belly like a big turtle out of water to move forward, the first thing that happened was a cheer. I don’t remember, or maybe I just couldn’t hear it over the incredible roar of the fire. I was coughing and coughing and coughing, and all I could feel was the skin on my hands and around my eyes where the sheet didn’t wrap, tight and sunburned hot and sore.

Crispin and Effie got me up — or guided me up, anyway. The machine did all the work. They led me at a staggering run away from the blazing building, to where the rest of the girls was huddled, staring and waiting. Crispin just looked at me — he didn’t say Connie’s name. I couldn’t even make myself shake my head, but he must of read the answer in the way I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, he didn’t say nothing. He just started unbuckling the armature. Effie was petting my cheek and crying.

She started crying harder when they unwrapped the sheet and found Signor.

I looked down, not wanting to. He looked small — ridiculously small, for a white cat — gray now, smudged and sooty — with a head as big as both my fists together. And at first my heart lurched, and I moaned … but then I saw his eyes was open, his ears laid flat.

He looked me right in the face and hissed like a furious teakettle, and I hugged him as hard as I have ever hugged anything in this life or, if Priya is right about what happens when we die, I am likely to hug them in the next one.

And then everybody was around me, helping me out of the sewing machine, and Bea took Signor, which was good because she’s the only person on the planet who can pick up that damned cat without getting scratched. I staggered, and I stayed up because Crispin held me up. It seemed like I was doing a lot of that tonight — staying up because something else caught me.

Then he and Miss Lizzie was unwinding me, pulling his burned coat off, checking over my every limb. There was a little drizzle out here, and I turned my face up to it. There was a heavy mist, too, and it fought the smoke back and felt good, so good, on my scalded skin. “Connie,” I said.

Crispin put his finger on my lips. I pushed it away. Or tried to: I missed. But he moved it back a fraction. That’s what I like about Crispin. Well, one thing out of many. He leaves it to you to judge what you is and ain’t capable of. Most men seem to like to decide that for a girl.

Maybe it’s because he ain’t preening his feathers for no woman. Maybe Crispin’s just busy trying to run the lives of other men.

Or maybe he ain’t. This evening, my money’s on ain’t.

“Somebody did this on purpose,” I said. “There was fire at all the doors.”

“Connie was murdered.” He said it like he was getting it straight in his head.

I meant to nod; I don’t know if I succeeded. The firelight was painting us all weird through the mist, stark and glowy at the same time. Like somebody draped gauze over one of those Dutch oil paintings that show somebody’s face side-lit. And I don’t think it was just the fog made everybody look a little hazy at the edges.

Miss Lizzie finished inspecting me. She said, “You need aloe on all of that,” and then she said, “Honey, it’s a miracle, but if you don’t pick open a wound scratching and if it don’t take a taint you’re going to live without any big scars. Maybe a couple around the knees there, but stockings will cover that. Most of this ain’t even going to blister.”

I didn’t quite make sense of it.

But she moved away, and suddenly my arms were full of Priya hugging me breathless tight, which started me coughing again. “Stupid!” she yelled at me when she stepped back. “Stupid, stupid!”

And before I could try to hug her back she knuckled her eyes and ran off, shoulders hunched. The mist ghosted over her. I took a step after, Crispin steadying me, but Miss Lizzie had pulled his boots off me and the cobbles hurt my feet something fierce. “I don’t—”

“She likes you,” Crispin said with the tired wisdom of somebody who’s seen it all before. I half-hated him for his wisdom at that second, and I was half that grateful for it. “She’s running away because she’s scared of how much it would have hurt if you’d got killed. She’ll be back, no fears.”

“I’m sorry about Connie,” I said between coughs. Lord, don’t let me retch.

He kissed me on the head. “I ain’t sorry it weren’t you, too.”

That was when, with a thunder of hooves and a clamor of bells, amid the barking of a pair of dalmatians who ran guarding the horses, the fire engine wheeled out of the mist, rampaged past us, and halted before the blaze with so much rearing and head tossing that I would of marched right over there and had a word with the driver about hauling on the horses’ mouths that way. I would of, that is, if I hadn’t of fainted.

Somebody caught me this time, too. But I didn’t see who, because everything was black in all directions.