"They didn't," Adrian said, and heard his own voice come out level, a gift from some ancestor. "Car stayed home. Dario had a stomach bug β I wasn't going to drive the valley road alone at that hour on a whim." He buttered toast. "Another night."
"A stomach bug," Benny said, and laughed, and reached for the coffee with the hand that had passed the mint sauce. "The whole empire waits on one man's stomach. That's the family business for you, Dom. We should put it on the crest."
"Perhaps we should," Dominic said mildly, and poured his brother's coffee himself, and watched the hand that took the cup β the hand he had held, plum-stained and defiant, under their mother's roof, fifty years and one whole world ago.
Chapter 13: The Bakery Fire
Poppy woke because the house smelled wrong.
It was not a dream smell. Dreams smelled of whatever they liked β the sea, birthdays, her father's shirt. This was a real smell, thin and sharp and sliding under the door of the little bedroom above the shop, and it made the back of her throat feel the way it did when June burned the toast downstairs and the whole flat had to be aired like a church. Poppy sat up in the dark with her hair in her eyes and listened to the shop below her make a sound she had never heard it make: a small, dry, busy sound, like somebody crumpling paper in another room, over and over, getting faster.
She went out into the hall in her bare feet and the smell stood up to meet her, and under the door of the stairs that led down to the bakery the light was wrong too β not lamp light, not street light. A moving light. An orange, hungry, breathing light.
"Mama." She shook June's shoulder with both hands, the way you shake somebody in a story, and her voice came out very clear and very calm, the voice June would hear in her own head for the rest of her life, at odd hours, in safe places. "Mama. Wake up. The shop is coughing."
June was awake before the sentence ended β mothers are, even widowed ones, even tired ones, even ones who have been asleep less than two hours after a midnight of accounts. She had the situation whole in the time it took to put her feet on the floor: smoke in the hall, heat breathing up the stairwell, fire at the front of the shop below, set or accidental she did not stop to wonder. She wrapped Poppy in the quilt off the bed, quilt and child and all, and she took the back stairs β the narrow iron stairs that came down from the flat's kitchen into the alley behind the bakery, the stairs the flour came up and the bins went down.
The smoke followed them down the first flight like a hand trying to be gentle. On the second flight it thinned. At the alley door the night air hit their faces, cold and clean and enormous, and Gabe β the quiet man who had taken to parking across the bakery's street at night, the Don's watch that June had cursed for a fortnight β was already at the gate with his phone at his ear and his other arm out, and he took the quilt-wrapped weight of Poppy for the last three steps without a word and set her on her feet in the alley like a parcel of great price.
"Front's going," he said to June, over the noise that was beginning. "Someone poured something at your door, ma'am. I smelled it not ten seconds before it lit. Trucks are coming. I called it in before I called the house." He said it like an apology. He had been three seconds too late to prevent it and he would carry those three seconds a long while.
The fire, when the engines came and the hoses uncoiled and half of Lane Street stood in the road in its nightclothes, proved to be a deliberate and almost delicate piece of work. It had been set at the front door and the awning with something poured in a patient line, and it wanted the front of the shop β the door, the window, the pretty painted sign that said LANE'S in June's late husband's lettering β and the captain of the engine, a man who had eaten June's pies for a decade, said it to her flatly while the water ran black in the gutter: This was a warning fire, June. Set small, set to be seen. Whoever did it wanted smoke and a fright. He looked at Poppy, asleep now against Gabe's shoulder with the quilt around her and soot on one cheek like a thumbprint. This time, he said.
June stood in the wet street in her nightdress and her dead husband's coat, holding a telephone that Gabe had put into her hand, and she understood with a completeness that left no room for the trembling, which would come later and stay for days: the warning had an address, and the address was not the bakery. It was the six-year-old who repeated grown-up sentences exactly. Someone wanted the witness frightened into forgetting, or wanted her mother frightened into silence, and had lit a match at the border of a child's bedroom to write the message.
She had never once telephoned the Serra estate. She had received its cars, its quiet men, its master's unsettling courtesies, and she had telephoned none of it. Now she dialed with a thumb that missed once.
He answered himself, on the second ring, at three in the morning, as if he slept beside the telephone in his clothes, and perhaps he did.
"Don Serra." Her voice did not shake. She was proud of that for years. "It's June Lane. Someone has set fire to my shop with my daughter asleep above it. She is safe. She woke me β she saved us, do you understand, she is six years old and she saved us. I am done arguing with you about protection. We are coming to your house. Tonight. Tell them to open the gate."
There was a silence in which she could hear the old man breathing, and then Dominic Serra said, "The gate is open, Mrs. Lane. It was never closed to you. Come home."
By dawn the guest house at the edge of the great lawn had its lamps lit and its beds turned down by hands that worked in whispers. Poppy, installed in a bed the size of a boat, in a borrowed nightdress with somebody's crest on the pocket, announced to the room at large that they lived at the castle now and that she required toast. June sat in the chair beside the bed with her daughter's hand in both of hers and let the shaking come at last, privately, in the rhythm of the house waking around them, and when Dominic came to the guest house door β not entering, standing at the threshold of his own property like a petitioner β she looked up at him with her face wrecked and did not perform gratitude and did not perform defiance either.