We had been too wrapped up with each other to notice that the light in the sky had changed, that a warm glow bled from the long gallery of Lockwood, brightest in the cracks around the boarded-up windows halfway down the wing, near where the table was. The table with my animals arranged around it.
The museum’s mammal collection, the crates, and boxes, and cabinets, and jars—
Oh god.
“The stirrup pump!” I called, racing toward the door of the gallery wing, where the night guards and servants huddled.
“Where is my father?” Lucy shouted, sprinting after me. As we reached the building, Mary came running out, a hot rush of air behind her like a sweltering summer’s day. We could see the fire now through the open door—the table and the animals around it both ablaze, flames licking toward the ceiling and walls, but it was still manageable, I thought, not yet out of control. We could save almost all of the other animals, I was sure of it.
“My father?” Lucy asked, grabbing Mary, whose hair was hanging loose from its pins, her face flushed and smudged with soot.
“He went back inside,” she panted, her expression wild. “He’s trapped by the fire—”
Lucy pushed past her and entered the long gallery.
“The stirrup pump!” I called again, my hand on the doorframe, torn: wanting to follow Lucy, not wanting her to put herself in danger, but also knowing I needed to save the museum. I saw two temporary servants, women from the village, carrying the pump toward us across the dark grass. “Shovels and sand and water,” I ordered, looking around wildly. “Quick!” I told the guards.
“It’s no use,” the guard nearest to me said. “The fire’s too large already.”
“We have to try,” I said, following the women with the pump into the corridor, eyes fixed to the silhouette of Lucy ahead of me.
The flames were climbing up the walls on both sides of the table, filling the entire width of the long gallery, and the air was hot and sharp in my throat as I tried to see whether they had reached the rooms at either side—the ones with boarded-up windows. The windows I’d had boarded up. Oh god, if my actions had made the fire worse, if they turned the whole wing into a furnace, oh god—
“We need more water, more buckets!” I called, and one of the women ran back to fetch some.
Lucy was right at the edge of the flames, arm held across her face against the heat, screaming, “Papa, Papa!” I crouched to the right of her, pumping the water that was being aimed toward the base of the blaze by the other servant, trying not to notice how all three of us were having to inch backward as the fire strengthened and pushed out toward us. The water was gone in moments, useless.
My eyes were stinging; my skin felt flayed. “Lucy!” I tugged her back as something in the inferno exploded. My animals, all that work; we were about to lose it all.
“We need to leave,” the villager holding the hose said, her eyes wild with fear. “The whole place is going to go up.”
The fire was traveling toward us like a predator who knew its prey was already weakened. It was feeding itself with the teak of the walls and all the wood of the crates and boxes in the rooms to either side, gorging on each hummingbird body left like kindling on the floor; it was growing taller, louder, hotter. The long gallery was crackling and groaning and roaring. The museum was on fire.
The animals were burning in their cases, boiling behind shattering glass, their feathers and fur igniting like candles, their newspaper bodies sparking into flame, clay mounts melting, eyes rolling onto the floor and turning back to stare at their own destruction.
The ceiling shrieked loudly and a large beam fell a few feet away, shaking the ground, sending up sparks that burned our skin. Lucy turned and broke into a sudden run. “He might have made it through to the house, I’m going to check his office!” she shouted.
“Back!” the woman was saying, pulling me, and I picked up the stirrup pump and fled outside with her.
“Is that everyone?” the guard called when we rushed through the door. “Lord Lockwood?”
“We couldn’t see him. Is the fire brigade here yet?” I asked, but before he could answer me I was racing across the grass toward the back door of the main house, passing two more people with buckets.
Maybe if we cut off the fire before it spread to the main house? We could still save some of the collections then.
“Dorothy!” I called, barreling into her in the entrance hall, steadying myself with my hands on her shoulders. “The fire brigade?”
“They’re on their way,” she said. “You need to wait out at the front with everyone else!”
“I can’t! My animals!” I looked around. “Where’s Lucy?” Dorothy glanced toward the west wing of the house.
“We need to get a stirrup pump here now, and stop the fire spreading!” I skidded across the floor toward the other entrance to the long gallery, next to the Major’s office. If we kept the door closed, if we sealed the fire in—
The door was open, heat and smoke already coming through.
I could hear a cough as I slipped through the narrow corridor, my dress snagging on the teeth of a mounted lion’s head that had fallen off the wall.
“Lucy!”
“Papa!” she was crying, her form barely distinguishable in the haze.
“We need to keep the door closed!” I shouted, grabbing her.
“He wasn’t in his office or his library; I checked,” she sobbed.
“He won’t be here either! He’s not here! He’ll have gone to the front of the house with everyone else.” I had forgotten to ask Dorothy if she had seen him. But I didn’t need to, I already knew the answer: she wouldn’t have seen him because he was somewhere in the fire, dead, and Mary was somehow responsible.
“He’s not here,” I said again, pulling Lucy along and out of the corridor, turning our backs on the inferno as we scraped past snouts and jaws and noses and antlers, past faces posed as placid prey or ferocious predator, their dark eyes flickering with reflections of the fire that stalked toward them, a final hunter they could not escape from, far fiercer than the man with the rifle, the dog, the arrow, that had killed them first.
Lucy rushed through the house toward the front door as I slammed the door to the long gallery shut, holding my hands against its warming surface as if I could hold the fire back myself. The collections, the work of thousands, the rare specimens, everything—
The kitchen errand boy and one of the guests, still wearing black tie, hurried toward me, carrying another stirrup pump and bucket of water. It wasn’t going to be enough. This fire needed a flood to put it out, a biblical downpour.
The water from the pump turned almost instantly to steam, the smoke curled its way through the tiny cracks between door and doorframe, and the roaring heat of the fire seemed to mock our paltry efforts against its hunger.
“Miss Lucy!” I heard someone call, and turned my head. Dorothy came running through the haze. “She’s gone upstairs,” she panted, grasping my elbow. “I can’t get her to come back. It’s not safe in here. We all need to leave.”
She gestured to me to look up. Up, where the ceiling was smoldering, the plaster burning. The fire had leaped from the long gallery to the first floor of the main house.
“We need to save the other museum rooms,” I said, staring at the ceiling, but I wasn’t thinking about the museum, about the animals ablaze, I was thinking only of a girl, a woman, with dark eyes and a tremulous smile.
I ran back down the corridor, my hands slamming hard into the wall as I took a tight corner.
Lucy.