Chapter 21: Her Own Fire

Gareth caught my sleeve at the foot of the stage.

"The mayor has read the page," he said. "He is coming to the bank with me now, to sign Rhys out. Go after her. Go!"

I ran.

The east hall was dark and empty, and the glass door of the memorial room stood open.

There was a light in it, and it was not the lamp.

Lavinia was on her knees in front of the wall safe with the door swung wide.

She was pulling out folded papers and old notebooks and a stack of letters tied in ribbon, and she was throwing them behind her onto the gray carpet.

Beside her stood the brass lamp from the little table.

She picked it up and smashed it on the stone floor.

Oil ran out across the papers, and she took a match from her sleeve and dropped it.

The flame went up.

"Don't!" I shouted. "Those are the receipts!"

She looked round at me with a face I had not seen, white and wet and shining.

"Every one of them," she said. "I kept every one. What a fool I was."

The curtains caught.

They went up to the ceiling, and the heat hit me full in the face.

The empty glass case cracked.

I got my arm up and went in anyway.

I grabbed the nearest thing in the safe, a flat tin box, and dragged it out of the fire against my chest.

Behind me the doorframe groaned.

A burning beam came down across the doorway and the hall went orange.

"Nesta!"

My mother was in the hall.

She stood in the door with the beam in front of her and the whole room full of smoke.

"Mama, no!"

She did not listen to me.

She took off the coat, the heavy scorched wool with her initials in the hem.

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