She shook her head and tightened her hold on Gaet’a.
Her cat looked at the stranger and hissed.
“No, he didn’t. He and Mama are sleeping.”
The man calling himself Luc approached slowly. “No, they are downstairs. There’s a fire in the house. They’re trying to put it out, so they asked me to make certain you were safe.”
She inhaled again. The scent of smoke was too strong to miss now. “I want to help them.”
“I’m sure they’d be glad to have help. Do you know how to put out a fire?”
She shook her head. “Pa pours water on the fire in the hearth sometimes.”
“This fire isn’t in the hearth, and it’s very big. Fighting it is dangerous. Your parents want to know you are safe so they can concentrate on the fire. Do you understand?”
Grace nodded. She didn’t want to understand. Her parents were in danger, and she was too young to help. “Will you come with me?” Luc asked.
“Where will we go?”
“To a friend of your mother, who lives in New Orleans.”
“N’awlins is a long way from here. Takes us all day to get there in the wagon. How will Mama and Pa find me?”
The look on his face suggested he had a belly ache. “They know which friend I’m taking you to.”
She nodded. “May I bring Gaet’a?”
“Sure, Grace, darlin’, but we need to go now.”
“Okay.” Grace stepped forward. Gaet’a settled into the curve of her arm at her waist. She slid her hand into the man’s much larger one. As they descended the balcony stairs, she thought she heard screams. Smoke filled the air around them. The man scooped her up and ran. The sight of Sweet Dreams’ ground level engulfed in flames was the last thing she saw, “Mama…”
Grace startled awake at her own scream. “Mama,” Echoed around her. Or was it only in her head?
Her chest and lungs ached with her struggle to take in air. The scent of smoke was strong in her nostrils, and another weaker odor. Gun powder? Cinnamon?
Grace leapt from the bed, ignored her wrapper, and shoved her feet into the heavy work boots she’d left by the door. She tucked thelaces inside the ankles—tying them would take too much time. She raced from her room, down the hall and the staircase.
She paused at the large main level entry. All was still and quiet.
Driven by the wisps of smoke rising from the stairwell, she plunged on toward the kitchen level.
She flew past a blanket, beating down flames burning a trash heap outside the hearth. Grace grabbed the nearest object, a broom, dunked it in the fire bucket standing ready and began to strike at the closest flames. Dawn had come and gone when she at last put down the broom. One glance at herself showed she was covered in as much soot as the kitchen. However, she’d not been burned seriously, nor had the house suffered much damage.Thank God, soot is the worst of this.
She was kidding herself if she believed that.
The memory of the blaze that killed her parents leapt to the fore. She tried to shove it back. She hated giving in to panic and fear, but the image of burning to death refused to be banished. Wearied to the bone, she collapsed onto the floor and wept. Sobs made her chest ache. Wails scraped her voice raw. How could she imagine that she could escape all the anguish of life by simply leaving all her troubles behind? The weakness was in her, not in the betrayers and haters of the past. She pounded her fist on the floor, bruising her hand.
Once before, she’d felt desolation this great. The day her fiancé, the honorable Eustace Van Alder, had pointed at her in court and said, “She’s the one who did it. That’s the witch who falsified all the records and cost me and my client more than one hundred thousand dollars.”
That pointed finger had struck like a flaming sword into her heart and seared away all her defenses. How she’d managed to remain silent then she’d never know. She certainly was anything but silent now. Later—who knew how long—she sat up. She found the only clean spot left on her sleeve and used it to dry her eyes. She swiped her sooty arm across her nose to stifle the sniffles. She’d leave her face black, but she didn’t care. Right now, she didn’t care about anything. She couldn’t. Caring, like hope, only led to pain and despair.
Turning her head, she saw a cat staring at her from the keeping room about three feet away. It tilted its head and did a slow blink of its eyes. Holding out her hand she hoped the feline would come to let her rub the black fur. However, the cat was having none of that. With a shrug of its tail, it turned and ambled to the keeping room. Even the cat wanted nothing to do with her.
Hades, I wouldn’t either.
No one wants a person who crumbles under stress. That thought finally moved her to her feet. Her own weakness weighed on her, pressing into her, but weak or not, she refused to lay down and die. The alternative meant she had to keep living, keep acting like she might have a future filled with something other than desolation.
Grace turned a circle surveying the extent of the damage from the fire. Like a drowning woman clinging to a life line, her gaze fixed on the remnants of the blanket she’d noted earlier. Where was the person who wielded it?
