Chapter 13: The Paper in the Fire

Greta woke me by dropping a full water jug on my bed.

"Fire," she said. "East stair. Up."

I smelled it before I was upright.

It was a thick, brown smell, and it was already in the curtains.

My rooms were in the east wing, as the Terms said.

Scene eight in the book was The East Wing Burns.

In the book, the Duchess was trapped in her bedroom and carried out by a footman, and she coughed for a month.

The book did not say who had poured the oil.

"I saw her," said Greta, hauling me by the elbow into the corridor. "The lady-in-waiting. In the yard with a can. She ran when she saw me."

"Are you sure it was her?"

"She had her good grey cloak on. Nobody else owns one that dull."

We went down the east stair in our nightclothes, coughing.

Smoke rolled along the ceiling above us, low and orange at the edges.

The servants were already in the yard with buckets.

Somebody was ringing the bell on the stable arch, over and over.

Greta threw me out into the cold and turned to count heads.

I stood on the gravel in my nightgown and felt for the one thing I had not brought.

Not the glove. The glove was in a flour tin in the pantry, where nothing in the east wing could touch it.

It was the Terms.

The signed copy lived in a tin box under my bed. Every article, every price, the Duke's name in black ink on the priest's back.

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