I followed him up to the long room, not allowing myself to think yet. For a short time we were alone there. The fire was out. Downstairs, folk were clearing away buckets, returning to the table, their voices animated.

It had been a strange fire. Passing strange. One end of the room was quite untouched. There was Lady Anne’s upright chair of fine oak, with the carved back, there her embroidery frame with the intricate work of unicorn and vine stretched on it unharmed. There were the baskets of wool and the spinning tools and the small hand looms. But the air was heavy with smoke and at the end of the room where Margery and I would sit to work, everything was black. The fire had scorched the boards of the floor and the roughhewn benches along the walls and the rafters above. Spiders hung lifeless in the shreds of their webs. My spindle and distaff were charred sticks, my stool a heap of charcoal. The basket which had contained the last of my gathered starwort was ashes. And there on the ground, just recognizable, was the fragile burned remnant of Finbar’s partly made shirt, which I had left hanging over the basket, ready to start work again in the morning. I walked over as if in a dream, crouched down and put out a hand to touch it. It crumbled away in my fingers. I pictured Finbar as I had last seen him, slumped between his two brothers as if the life had been drained from him. A brittle shell of a man. I saw his eyes, once a deep, clear gray like the winter sky, saw them wild and confused and terrified as he tried to bridge the gap between beast and man. Held the ashes of his shirt in my palm; felt them trickle away through my fingers and disperse to nothingness.

“Jenny, my dear.” I looked up with a start. Lady Anne was as soft-footed as her son, when she wanted to be. Now she stood by him, frowning. “I regret this. But it must be an accident. A careless tending of the fire; a freak wind. I shall, of course, replace these things for you. We have spindle and distaff enough.” Red said nothing; looked at the hearth, which was at some distance, in the middle of the inner wall; looked at the path of the fire. Looked at me. I would not weep. My teeth were clenched tight together, so that I could not weep.

“Hugh,” said Lady Anne. She sounded as she might have done when he and his brother were little boys, and she was calling them to account for staying up too late, or stealing pies from the kitchens. “After this you must consider sending her away. This sort of thing is intolerable. You have the safety of your household to consider. Why can’t you send the girl to Northwoods? Surely even you must realize now that she cannot stay here.”