Page 93 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

He called her name, and the smoke swallowed it.

He found them at the juncture between the nursery corridor and the upper stairs.

Alice was crouched against the wall with her back to the fire and her arms locked around both boys, her body curved over them, the cotton of her nightgown dark with soot and damp with sweat, Freddie’s face turned into her side and Charlie’s pressed against her shoulder.

She looked up when his footsteps reached her, soot-streaked, red-eyed, her hair loose across her shoulders. When she saw him, something in her face shifted, settled, held.

“Kenneth,” she croaked.

He crouched before her. His hands found the boys first, rapid, the practised inventory of a father who knew the dimensions of his children better than his own. Freddie’s grip transferred to his coat, desperate. Charlie looked at him with wide green eyes and said nothing.

“Can you stand?” Kenneth asked.

“Yes.”

He gathered both boys, one in each arm, their weights warm and familiar. Alice rose beside him, one hand on the wall, and he saw the way her knees steadied and her shoulders squared.

Quickly, they moved down the corridor, the turn, the second landing where the smoke thinned and the heat loosened. Alice followed with her hand on his shoulder, and the press of her palm against the damp linen of his shirt was incredibly comforting.

The first-floor landing. The stairs down to the entrance hall, still passable, and beyond the open front door, the night and the distant shapes of figures on the pavement.

Something behind his ribs loosened.

Suddenly, he heard a sound on the stairs above.

He turned.

Tidswell had climbed down the last step, his coat charred at one shoulder, his face blackened, his hair singed close on one side, a portrait miniature pressed against his chest with both hands. His eyes moved from Kenneth to Alice to the boys and stayed there, stripped and grieving.

“Alice.” Kenneth did not turn away. “Take the boys. Go.”

Alice hesitated. He felt it in the hand on his shoulder, the fingers tightening once before relaxing.

“Go.”

She took Freddie from his arm and pulled Charlie against her hip, then descended the stairs and crossed the entrance hall and reached the door.

The sound freed him for what was left.

He faced Tidswell.

The flames had pressed closer along the upper banister. Tidswell stood before them, the portrait miniature pressed over his heart, his ruined face almost still.

“Come down.” Kenneth extended his hand. The words left him steady, stripped of fury. “You will answer for what happened tonight, but not like this.”

Tidswell looked at his hand, then past it, at something in the smoke and the firelight that Kenneth could not see.

“She is here.” His voice was quiet and level and completely certain. “She has been here the whole time.” His eyes shone. “I should very much like to stay.”

Kenneth lunged at him, but his hand closed on empty air. Tidswell had already stepped back into the fire.

The ceiling above the landing groaned once, deep in the bones of the house, and the beams gave way in a cascade of timber and flame and plaster that sealed the stairway like a door shut.

The heat drove Kenneth back. Through the roar, he could see nothing of the upper landing but fire.

The man was gone.

Kenneth descended the stairs and staggered through the entrance hall and out the front door into the October night. The air hit his lungs, and he stood on the front steps and breathed.