Mr Wetheral rubbed his forehead. “I don’t think so, no. They just wanted to get hold of Bella and send her to camp. They’d sent their eldests, after all.”

“So how did the fire start?”

“Bella found some old matches in a drawer. Simple as that. It was dark. The billy lamps had run down and we couldn’t charge them up again. She was trying to help. But houses burn quick. Quicker than you’d ever think. I tried to save them, Maggie.” Mr Wetheral’s voice shuddered. “I tried so hard.”

His whole family. Killed in the fire.

“There weren’t any wanderers?”

He shook his head.

“Then why don’t you tell everyone it wasn’t the wanderers? It’s not fair to blame them if they didn’t do it.”

“Oh, I did, Maggie. I said it again and again and again. It was my fault, I told them. It was all my fault. But then someone started the rumour.” Mr Wetheral pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his damp eyes. “I always suspected Mayor Anderson.”

“Mayor Anderson?”

“She needed someone easy to blame for her sister’s death, but she also needed to keep people from leaving town. Blaming the wanderers achieved both, even if it wasn’t true. I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m probably wrong. But in any case, once the rumour started, no one wanted to believe anything else.”

“Why not?”

“I wasn’t the only one feeling guilty about the fire. All those people who were outside the house that night – they didn’t help me. Not one of them. So they all preferred to believe it was wanderers to blame, rather than them letting a family burn. And if people really want to believe something, there’s very little you can do to change it.”

“They didn’t help? They didn’t try and save your family?”

Silence.

I couldn’t believe it. People from Fennis Wick. People I probably know.

Mr Wetheral rubbed his damaged hand.

“Why are you still here, Mr Wetheral? How can you live in the same town as them?”

He picked up his tea. Sipped at it.

“It’s hard to leave when you’re recovering from burns on over half your body. And harder still when you have an elderly mother to care for. And then, well, there’s my girls, of course. I can’t leave my girls.”

Those graves.

Those well-tended graves.

“But who were they, those people? You must hate them, you must—”

He shook his head again.

“It doesn’t matter who they were. They were scared too, just like me. Scared of the war. Scared of what they’d sent their eldests to. And there I was, refusing to send mine.”

“But you couldn’t have sent her, Mr Wetheral. You couldn’t have.”