Chapter 11 The Aftermath

The fire destroyed the east wing but spared the rest of the house. Eleanor stood in the garden the next morning, watching the smoke rise from the ruins, and felt a grief that was not her own, a grief for Marguerite, for the painter, for the Thornes who had chosen power over love and paid the price. Sebastian joined her, his arm around her shoulders, his body warm against the morning chill. We did it, he said. We broke it. We did, Eleanor agreed. She leaned into his side, feeling the strength of his arm, the steadiness of his breath, the certainty of his presence. What happens now? Now? Sebastian smiled, the real smile, the one that reached his eyes, the one she had first seen in the ballroom and had been chasing ever since. Now we marry. Before the deadline. Before the law catches up with us. Before the world remembers that we are supposed to be enemies. Eleanor looked at him, really looked at him, and saw not the rake, not the predator, not the man who had ruined three women and broken two men. She saw the man who had held her hand in the fire, who had let go of her arm to find Marguerite, who had followed her into the flames without hesitation. She saw the man she loved. Then marry me, she said. In the morning, the east wing was a skeleton of blackened timbers and collapsed stone. The rest of the house had survived — somehow, impossibly, the rest of the house had survived — and Eleanor stood in the garden with Sebastian at her side, watching the smoke curl into the gray dawn sky. Graves appeared beside them, his face streaked with soot, his hands shaking less than she'd ever seen them shake. "The east wing is gone, my lady," he said. "But the house stands. It always stands." Eleanor nodded, and she felt a grief that was not entirely for the lost wing. It was for Marguerite, who had returned from death only to watch her home burn again. It was for the painter, who had spent thirty years capturing a face that no longer existed in the material world. It was for herself, for the life she had left behind in London, for the certainty she had carried and now replaced with something larger and more uncertain. "What happens now?" Sebastian asked. It was the first time she'd heard uncertainty in his voice. "Now," Eleanor said, "we rebuild. Not just the east wing. Everything. This house has survived fire and curse and neglect. It will survive us too." She looked at Sebastian, and he looked back, and between them stretched the rest of their lives — not a contract, not a bargain, but a choice they had both made freely, in a burning house, with nothing left to lose. By noon the household had assembled in the forecourt, soot still freckling their clothes, their faces still carrying the bewildered look of people who had outrun a thing they had not fully understood. There were eight of them now, counting the new boy who had arrived with Graves the previous autumn as a second footman and who had spent the fire carrying water buckets he was too small to lift without two hands. Eleanor addressed them from the lowest of the stone steps, her shoes still damp, her hair still smelling faintly of smoke, and she told them what she had told Sebastian and what Sebastian had told her — that they would rebuild, that they would stay, that Blackmore belonged to no ghost any longer. Two of the older maids wept. One of the grooms set his jaw and nodded, the way a soldier nods when the order is unwelcome but unmistakable. The boy looked up at Eleanor with eyes that were too old for his face and asked if she would teach him to read, so that he might keep the new accounts that would have to be opened with the timber merchants and the masons. She said she would. Sebastian spent the afternoon walking the boundary of the property with Graves, marking the places where the dry stone walls had tumbled inward and where the ash from the east wing had drifted in a thin grey blanket across the lower meadow. They spoke in the low practical register of men who have been given a task and mean to finish it, estimating loads of slate and quantities of lime, calculating how many hands would be required to raise the new roof before the winter rains arrived. By dusk Sebastian's coat was white with dust and his hands were split across the knuckles, and he came to Eleanor in the kitchen smelling of cold air and honest labor. She washed his cuts with vinegar and bandaged them with linen she had torn from her own hem, and she asked him, as she had not asked him in all the months since they had met, whether he missed the rooms in London that he had lived in before, the club on St James's, the mistress in Cheyne Walk. He looked at her as if she had asked him whether he missed a fever he had recovered from, and he said he did not. That evening, alone in the small parlour that opened off the kitchen, Eleanor sat down with a sheet of foolscap and a pen that Graves had sharpened for her, and she wrote the first of many letters she would write in the days and weeks that followed. She wrote to her solicitor in Derbyshire, instructing him to draw upon the modest trust that her late husband had settled upon her and to apply the proceeds to the rebuilding. She wrote to a firm of surveyors in Matlock, asking them to send a man of experience to assess the remaining walls and certify that the west wing was sound. She wrote to her sister Chloe in York, telling her that the fire had come and gone and that Blackmore was still standing, and that Eleanor herself was changed in ways that she could not yet articulate but would try to explain when next they met. She sealed each letter with candle wax and set her signet ring into the soft pool, leaving the impression of her initials in the hardened disc, and when the last letter was sealed she carried them all to the hall table herself, refusing to ring for a servant, because she wanted to feel the weight of them in her own hands, to know that she had done at least one thing this day that was not undone by flame. Before she slept she walked through the house, room by room, touching the walls as she had on her first night, but this time the walls felt different — not warmer, exactly, but more present, more attentive, more willing to be touched. In the corridor outside the master bedroom she stopped and pressed her palm flat against the plaster, and she felt, or thought she felt, a faint answering pressure from the other side, as if the house were placing its own palm against hers and holding the position for one long breath before letting go. She did not speak. She did not weep. She stood for a long moment with her eyes closed, listening to the house breathe around her, and when she opened them the corridor was darker than she had remembered, and she understood, without being told, that she had been given a thing she would be required to give back someday, and that the giving back would not feel like loss. ---