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Later, when Annie remembers this moment she will forget that she was angry with Isabelle for calling her Mary and for suggesting that she lock the boy in a cupboard. She will forget Gus’s boredom. She will even forget the strength and quality of the sun as it made a bow through the window wall of the glasshouse. She will call this moment back as happiness, and what she will remember of it, only, is kneeling on the straw with the soft weight of a child in her arms. “Look up at me,” Isabelle says. “As if you love me.”

“An angel is a good thing,” says Annie, carefully threading one of Gus’s small arms through the leather straps on the underside of the goose wing.

“It doesn’t mean I’m dead?”

“No, no.” Annie pats his shoulder, reassuringly. “It means you’re heavenly. A creature of the Lord. It’s not about being dead. It’s about being chosen to be special because you are full of kindness and mercy.” She kneels down in front of him and guides his other arm into the wing harness.

“I look big,” says Gus, peering over her shoulder into the looking-glass. With his outstretched winged arms he is as big as an eagle. Annie tightens the straps and then moves behind him. He stands with his arms stretched right out and they both look at the magnificence of this, of him, in the mirror.

They are in Eldon’s bedroom because the looking-glass there is large enough to show Gus his reflection with his wings spread. He had expressed reluctance at being an angel, and Annie has brought him indoors to show him how wonderful he would look as a creature of heaven.

“Do angels have clothes?” asks Gus, looking in the mirror at his loose blouse and short pants.

“Good question.” Could he just wear his blouse, like a nightshirt? Would they have to tailor a sheet to fit around him like a shift? He and Annie stare at each other in the mirror. “Why don’t I run out and ask the photographer,” she says. “You just stay where you are and admire yourself.”

“All right,” says Gus, perfectly happy to remain in attendance to his visually impressive bird self until she returns to him.

Annie walks out of Mr. Dashell’s bedroom, along the upstairs hall, and down the main stairs. At the bottom she turns left into the drawing room. Tess is there, sweeping out the hearth. They stare at each other as Annie crosses the room, opens the French doors onto the terrace, and goes outside.

Isabelle is not in the studio. The bench has been moved onto the carpet of straw so that the boy angel can kneel on the straw and rest his elbows on the bench, hands pressed together in prayer.

It’s a dull, cool day. The absence of sun makes the straw and the narrow bench look as if they really are inside a stable. Annie surveys the dark starkness of it. Perhaps the bell-ringer is right and they do need a cow or some sort of animal to fill out the scene. Without them, without Annie and Isabelle and Gus, the studio seems huge with loneliness. Funny that a photograph, which is a still thing like this room, depends so much on their living, moving selves.

Annie sits on the bench and tries to imagine how she looks from Isabelle’s usual position at the camera. She tilts her head up. She turns to the right. That’s your best side, Isabelle had said, although Annie, when she sees herself in a mirror, cannot deduce why this is.

After sitting on the bench for a while Annie goes to the
camera, stands behind it, and tries to imagine herself sitting on the bench. She swings up the tiny brass cover and peers through the lens. The perspective of the lens shrinks the world to only what is directly in front of it—the straw, the stone bench. The side walls of the studio are no longer there. Nor the cold day beyond the glass. It is a small enough world, thinks Annie, that it can be easily controlled. That is something to want.

The wind knocks softly against the studio. Annie straightens up. That is something, too, she thinks. None of the sounds of the world, the smells, the way things feel, make it to the photograph. The photograph is evidence of this world and yet it really doesn’t come from this world at all.

Annie is not sure how long she stands behind the camera, listening to the weather and the creak of the building. Suddenly she remembers Gus waiting in Eldon’s bedroom for her return. He will be getting worried.

Isabelle must be in the darkroom. Annie will walk over there and knock on the door, their signal for Isabelle to finish what she is doing and rejoin the above-ground world.

Tess is crying, down on her knees in front of the drawing-room fireplace. Her tears fall into the ash, become inky black drops on the stone. Tess has again tried to talk to Wilks, to plead for his understanding. All that has happened is that she has heard again how he doesn’t love her, has heard again how he no longer wants to touch her now that she has grown so huge with the pregnancy. He avoids her when-and wherever possible. He has actually said the words,
Don’t come near me.
She said,
I love you,
and he said,
You’re a slut. How could anyone love you?

Tess has been told by Cook to set fires in the drawing room and upstairs in the bedrooms because it is a cold day and the house, drained of heat, is chill and damp. Tess has trouble with the tinder. It’s not catching. She takes some crumpled paper from the wastebasket and throws it on top of the coals. It licks into flame. In her distress Tess neglects to put the screen back in front of the fireplace. As she leaves the room and closes the door one of the fiery balls of paper rolls out onto the rug.

The fire chooses favourites. The tassels of the rug. A shawl draped over the back of a chair. The fire is quick-fingered, touching what it wants so gently at first, saying, Trust me, trust me.

Annie has knocked on the door of the coal cellar and is standing in the stone stairwell, waiting for Isabelle to come out. The entrance to the coal cellar is down a small flight of steps, so that where Annie is standing is partially underground. She can’t see over the structure of the cellar. The rest of the house is far away and invisible. She doesn’t see the fire, but she does hear Tess’s screams, shrill and terrifying.

Annie scrambles up the steps and around the side of the coal cellar. Tess, tearing down the path from the house, runs right into her. She clutches Annie’s cloak. “Help,” she says. “Help.”

“What? What is it?”

Tess’s breath is threadbare. “Fire,” she says, holding tight onto Annie. “The house is on fire.”

“Tess,” says Annie. “Calm down.” She grabs Tess’s face in her hands, so she’s looking straight into Annie’s eyes. “Is Cook out? Is Mr. Dashell?”

“Cook is getting Mr. Dashell. It’s the main house. He’s not in danger. Cook is
outside
,” says Tess, fumbling for the right words to make Annie understand what is happening. “She’s getting Mr. Dashell from outside.”

“Go,” says Annie. “Get Wilks to ride out to the Brooks’ farm for help.”

Tess stumbles off down the path.

“No, wait.” Annie runs after her. “What about the boy? Did he get out?”

“What boy?” says Tess.

Isabelle thought she heard a knock on the darkroom door, but it didn’t happen again, so she thinks she’s mistaken. Then she thinks she hears a scream, but she’s counting off the seconds that the negative needs to be under the developing liquid, and she is relieved when the scream doesn’t recur and she doesn’t have to rush outside to see what is happening. If it is urgent enough, Annie will come and bang on the door to let her know. She doesn’t have to worry.

“Thirty-six, thirty-seven.” She counts out loud and her voice fills the small brick chamber, seals her safely inside this pocket of darkness.

Cook stands in the roses outside Mr. Dashell’s library, banging on the window with her fist. “Fire,” she yells. And then, “Sir.” The thorns are scratching at her legs. She turned her ankle rushing down the path and long needles of pain shoot up it as she stands in the flower bed.

Eldon, sitting at his desk, hears the shouts from far away, as though they’re underwater. He looks up and sees a face at his library window, and then a fist raised and hammering on the leaded glass. It’s Cook. Behind her, smoke trails in wisps above the hedge. His first thought is that the garden is on fire. He doesn’t realize that the smoke has blown over from the main house until he has unlatched the window and sees where it is coming from.

“Quick,” says Cook, not knowing how much longer she’ll be able to remain on her painful ankle. “The house is on fire. Come out the window. Sir,” she says, as an afterthought.

Eldon unlatches his window and swings his leg over the sill. He sees the smoke behind Cook gathering like a storm cloud. “Is everyone out?” he asks.

“Everyone’s out, sir.” Cook puts her hand out for him to grasp as he guides himself over the sill and out of the library, but at that moment Tess rushes round the side of the house.

“She’s gone in,” she says to Cook. “She says there’s a boy in there.”

“The bell-ringer’s son,” says Cook. “I thought they were all down the garden.”

“Who’s gone in?” says Eldon. He is perched on the window sill, one leg out against the wall of the house, one leg still anchored on the floor of the library.

“Annie, sir. Annie’s gone back in,” says Tess.

It is the easiest thing Eldon has ever done. He doesn’t even think about it, just leans his weight back into the room and his leg clears the sill. He lets go of Cook’s hand, and as he moves from the window, listening to their cries of protest, it’s as if they’re at sea, the great smoky spray behind their wrecked ship. It is their drowning cries he hears, as he sails safely past them.

*

Annie comes through the kitchen door. She wets a cloth in the pail of water by the sink and clamps it over her face. The kitchen is clear but there’s a lot of smoke in the main hall, billowing out from the drawing room where the fire must have started. Annie sprints up the staircase, as fast as her heavy cloak will allow.

Gus is standing in the upstairs hall, pressed against a wall. He is not crying or screaming, doesn’t say anything to Annie when she rushes out of the smoke towards him. There are flames trickling down the feathers on his wings. She removes the cloth from her mouth. They stare at each other for the briefest of moments. It is now that Annie feels afraid. When she ran into the house and up the stairs she was so intent on finding the boy that she wasn’t aware of anything else. Now, when she sees how frightened Gus is, she thinks he must be recognizing the same fear in her eyes. He must know how afraid she is, and in that moment, with the smoke blurring around them, Gus reminds Annie of herself as a child in Mrs. Gilbey’s home. How small and scared she must have been.

“Put your arms out,” she says to Gus. He stretches his burning wings so that they stay clear of her clothes and she runs with him like this, down the hallway to Isabelle’s bedroom. The bedroom is at the end of the house. The fire seems to be mainly in the central portion of the building, seems to have burnt through the drawing-room ceiling into part of the upstairs hall. It is not fanning out. They will be safer in Isabelle’s bedroom.

There is smoke in the room, but the window is open. Annie sets Gus down by the door, closes it, then goes over to the bed and hauls the mattress off it. She struggles the mattress through the window and it somersaults to the earth below.

The wings on Gus’s arms are burning. It is too late to try and fumble them off him. It will take too long to undo the
leather straps. Annie grabs the boy under the arms again, rushes him over to the window, and then leans with him in her arms over the sill.

“I’ve got you,” she says.

And then she lets him go.

The shape he makes as he’s falling, his fiery wings spread and holding the air, is almost the shape of a country. All jagged on the edges, carved out by the punishing sea.

Annie leans out over the sill and watches the boy fall to safety. Michael, she thinks. Connor. He is her brother and she has saved him and now he can live, again. She has dropped him from the heavens and he flies down to his mortal life.

Angel of Mercy. I have set you down upon the earth.

Annie feels something around her ankles. It’s like a tickle, like a feather that has worked loose from the wings and is brushing up against her legs. She looks down. Her cloak is on fire.

Eldon moves through the corridor outside his library towards the main part of the house. He is moving into the smoke and halfway down the hall his eyes are stinging too much and he can no longer see. He puts his arms out, feeling along the walls to find out where he is. He has never realized how thoroughly he knows this house, how every nick in the wallpaper, every texture of picture frame is a landmark detailing his position. His hands, he thinks, his hands have always made journeys. They have been to many wondrous places. They have traced the skin of Isabelle and felt along the walls of this darkened hallway. They have held the head of a flower filled with rain. If he had been a surveyor, walking through the wilderness, surely he would have been no different. He would have felt distance out,
tree by tree, measuring the landscape by feel. Just as now his hands slide over walls, marry the shape of doorframe and lintel.

I am here.

The main staircase is burning. The banister a shivering ladder of flame. Eldon has pulled himself up the few stairs that are still safe. He is coughing now and having trouble breathing. There’s a pain in his head. He sits down on the bottom stair. Perhaps the back staircase is still functional. He should go into the kitchen and check it. He could get out through the kitchen door if need be. Phelan is probably long gone by now. But he doesn’t move. He has used all his strength to get here and now he’s coughing too much to go any farther. But it is all right, he thinks, sitting on the stair. He has done his best. He has gone back for a member of the expedition. He has been his bravest self.

It has been a long journey. He is finally home.

And as Eldon sits there, for the few moments that he sits there, he feels the air cool around him, until his skin tingles with it. His breath is smoke, rising out of his body. Ash wafts down from the floor above, floats down the emptiness where the staircase used to be, as fine and particulate as snow falling to earth. He is snow, falling to earth.