Chapter 6: Smoke at Midnight

By the time I reached the yard the barn roof was falling in.

Sparks poured across the lane.

Hild stood at the barn door screaming "Mam!" into the heat.

"She's in there," she said. "She went in for the goat."

"Get back."

"She's in there!"

I pulled her away from the door by the collar and threw my cloak over my head.

I had learned in the old Duke's school that fire is a thing you walk into with your eyes shut and your mouth closed.

The smoke hit.

I could see nothing but orange and black.

I called, and a cough answered, low and to the left.

I found her on her knees by the stall with the goat under one arm and her cap burning.

She looked up at me with streaming eyes.

"The kid," she gasped. "The kid's behind the stall."

"I have you."

I tore the cap off her head and threw it down.

I took the goat in one arm and my mother in the other, and I do not remember the walk to the door.

A beam came down behind us.

It struck my back and shoulder, and a pain went through me that was white, not red.

Then the cold air was in my mouth, and I was on my knees in the mud with Edith Cobb coughing in my arms.

"Mam," Hild sobbed, and fell on us both.

I held them.

I looked up.

The whole village had come.

They stood in the lane in a long ring, forty or fifty of them.

They wore nightshirts and green cloaks, with the firelight on their faces.

Not one carried a bucket.

They simply stood and watched the Cobb house burn.

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