Page 54 of Happily Ever After
‘No it isn’t,’ I said.
Hugo clutched my arm. ‘The house is on fire?’ He was keeping himself hidden behind the curtains, from the group outside.
‘I’ve called the fire brigade, but I don’t know how long it will take them!’ Jay called up again. ‘Someone’s gone for a ladder, I’m not sure you can get out any other way now! The fire’s moving through the roof space by the look of it, but we don’t know how far it’s got, just get down here!’
In the background the wailing clamour had reached the landing. The smoke had clearly got far enough through the house to set off the alarms in this wing.
‘Mother!’ Hugo shouted, ran to the door, ran back, looked at me and then looked at his discarded clothing, jeans and shirt on the floor.
‘Let’s just get out,’ I said. ‘Lady Tanith will have heard the alarms, she’ll get out from her side.’
‘But if she’s taken her tablets she might not wake up!’ Hugo was staring at me again, his wig disarranged, holding his skirt bunched in both hands.
I chanced another glance out of the door. ‘The fire is above us, at the front of the house.’
‘Comeon!’ Jay yelled from outside. From somewhere deep in the house I heard a cracking sound, like a beam giving way.
‘You can’t go, Hugo.’ I grabbed his arm. ‘We have to get ourselves out.’
‘ButMother,’ he wailed.
I’d thought that whether or not to show the diaries to Hugo or Lady Tanith had been the epitome of my moral dilemmas, but now it seemed that was subsumed under ‘do I let this man run back into a possible inferno to rescue a woman who has stunted and stifled his entire life?’ Rescue human life, yes. Save Hugo from a future of furtive dressing-up and marriage to please his mother? Also, yes.
‘See how far you can get.’ I gave him a tiny push. ‘If her wing is already on fire, leave it, she may already be out.’
Hugo opened the door and fled down the landing in the direction of the back of the house. I went to the top of the stairs, but it was obvious that the fire was above the library wing. From that side of the house the smoke was billowing into the hallway, filling it with grey clouds that smelled not smoky but of a far more solid kind of smell. There was a creaking sound from the disused bedrooms in that wing and ghostly shapes wound their way along the landing as smoke issued from under the doors. I couldn’t feel any heat, but I knew enough to know that the smoke would reach and kill us faster than any flames.
‘Hugo!’ I shouted.
He came back, tottering in his shoes. ‘What?’
‘We can’t go out this way. The fire must be in the library wing and spreading from there. We can’t use the main stairs.’
From behind, I could hear Jay yelling at me from outside the window above the racket of the alarms, but then a voice cut through all the noise.
‘What onearthis going on?’ Lady Tanith, wearing a beautiful chiffon negligee, wafted like her own spirit, along the landing from the back of the house. ‘Who is making that dreadful noise?’
She gave me a grim, hard stare, as though I may be solely responsible for the siren-like shrieking that was now reverberating through the entire house. Smoke puffed, coming up the staircase towards where we were standing, then cleared, revealing Hugo, full-length velvet and all.
‘We need to get out,’ he said calmly. ‘The house is on fire.’
There was a tremendous bang from somewhere behind us. It sounded as though the library ceiling had fallen in, or was about to, and I could see a red glow now, just a sinister red line beneath the doors across the landing.
‘We need to go now,’ I said, my voice commendably level.
Lady Tanith stared at us both. ‘You will have left the gas on in the library,’ she said, haughty and gathering her swathes of chiffon around her, then she turned to her son. ‘And what onearthare you wearing?’
‘Ah. Um. Mother…’ Hugo began. I was beginning to feel two genres clashing – my mild rom-com coming up hard against thriller, as the two of them stood at the top of the stairs amid the drifting smoke.
‘We need to getout!’ I shouted. From beyond the Yellow Room window Jay was still yelling. I could hear his voice cracking with his increasing volume and desperation. ‘We may have to go out of the window.’
Lady Tanith took Hugo’s arm. ‘We can use the back stairs,’ she said, ignoring the fact that her son was wobbling on his enormous heels.
‘I’m not sure we can.’ I pulled at Hugo’s other arm, tugging the pair of them with me back into the Yellow Room, and closed the door so that we could block out the smoke and hear ourselves think. ‘It sounds like ceilings are coming down. If we go down the back stairs we might find ourselves trapped in the kitchen.’
‘We’ve got the ladder!’ Jay was practically screaming now. ‘Comeon! Getout!’
Lady Tanith, showing remarkably little fear considering that Hugo and I were almost dragging her towards the window, stopped again. The smell of smoke was increasing and there were random banging and crashing sounds that were getting closer. There was also an ominous, and growing, background heat.
