She stammered through her explanation and her request for the matches. The rain hurled itself against the window.
The man dug in his jacket pocket for the matches. He was formally dressed for the mountains, she thought, even to the tastefully striped tie.
“You’re the girl from Texas, aren’t you, the one James Rollins sent us? Medieval’s your field, isn’t it?”
She nodded. She wanted to leave almost as much as he seemed to want her to, but the violent rainstorm made it almost impossible to do so. Foolish to leave and awkward to stay.
“I don’t suppose the storm will last long,” she said uncomfortably.
“No, it should blow itself out soon,” he agreed. He seemed to resign himself to having to deal with his uninvited guest. “Here, have some sherry. It’ll warm you.”
She had noticed the bottle and two glasses. “A colleague dropped this off earlier,” he said. “Let me get you a clean glass.”
He disappeared into the kitchen. She heard the sound of running water. She stuffed her hands in her pockets, curling her fingers around that vial, comforting herself. The rain pounded furiously against the window and hammered the roof. She drifted to the box of books to see what it was that he took with him to the mountains, half hoping it was something nonscholarly. She took up a slender volume, worn, old. Letters in faded gold winked up from wrinkled leather and across centuries.
“Be careful with that,” he said sharply.
Startled, she almost dropped it.
“It’s rather fragile. I suppose I shouldn’t cart them about, but they’re rather valuable, you know. I don’t like leaving them. That’s the most valuable of the lot.”
“It’s lovely,” she said, conscious of the inadequacy of the statement. She was holding in her hands a piece of time, an eighteenth-century edition of The Canterbury Tales. She had heard of Keller’s rare-book collection. James had said with a sneer that it was the most distinguished thing about him. But that was probably James’s envy and jealousy of someone more highly regarded than himself in the field.
He handed her the sherry. It was smooth and had the slightly sweet taste of nuts. She was appropriately intimidated, she thought. His rare old books, his fine wine, his disturbing masculinity.
“To curly-haired girl graduate students,” he said and raised his glass.
He seemed to relax a little with the sherry. He listed some professors at Texas whom she knew and some others whom she knew only by reputation. She wondered how much he knew about her involvement with James. That he knew something she was sure. Her little affair had certainly been noised about. Discretion was not one of James’s virtues. Nonetheless, her credentials were sound. She had done very well in the master’s program — despite James, not because of him, she knew. Sleeping with department heads was anathema to graduate careers. She had mostly escaped the consequences, largely because she had published a monograph on Chretien de Troyes, an accomplishment which was sufficiently rare among master’s candidates to distinguish her from the field, and also because her late father was a past president of the MLA. The man tactfully did not mention her father.
The rain continued. One glass of sherry became two.
The rain continued, and he built a fire.
His hands, when, finally, they were on her, came as a relief. She didn’t have to talk to him anymore, to deal with his suspected sarcasm, to have the things she said measured and judged and found shallow and wanting. Now there was only the fierce communication of flesh, which released her from the obligations and obsequious regard of their respective stations and intellects.
What terror she had first felt in James’s presence she had once confessed to him in bed, and he had laughed. “No more than age when confronted with the endless procession of youth, of bright, eager minds like cannibals come to consume the graying flesh of our intellect.”
When she came to herself, there was a stinging in her throat, then at her eyes. She was almost fully dressed, lying on the bed. And she was alone. The smoke was coming up from the bottom of the door, leaking through the sides of the door and crawling lightly up the wall.
She coughed and called his name, but there was no response. It was becoming harder to breathe, but some innate caution made her lay her hand flat against the door rather than try to open it. It was warm, and she drew back as if already burned.
More smoke came rapidly now, surging under the door. There were two windows set high and narrow in the wall at the back of the room. They were painted shut. The armchair in the room was too heavy for her to lift. Moving quickly, she tore apart the bed and seized one of the slats. She smashed one of the windows, but that seemed to pull more smoke into the room.
She climbed onto the chair and pulled herself over the bits of broken glass in the window frame and fell headfirst to the muddy ground.
At first she lay stunned, unable to move, but the fire at last had possessed the room, and the heat made her get to her knees and scuttle crablike away from the burning house into the wet trees.
She felt the impact and saw the ball of flame roil upward as though it were a solid mass before the explosion almost deafened her. She lay quietly for a time in the wet grass, an injured animal, and then became aware of the cuts stinging her arms and hands and of the long tear in her side. She got to her feet and began to walk as quickly as she could to the road.
The rain had stopped. Behind her, far down the mountain and over the ringing in her ears, she heard the faint sounds of sirens slowly building in intensity as the vehicles worked their way up the switchbacks.
She lowered herself into the deep, old-fashioned tub despite the pain and let the hot water wash the blood away. She carefully did not think now, but treated her wounds tenderly, with a consideration she seldom gave her own body. The familiar red welts on her wrists were themselves nicked, but not reopened. She was not badly hurt. The long tear in her side was shallow, little more than a scratch, and had stopped bleeding.
When she no longer could keep the memory of what had happened from her, she took one of Dr. Goldman’s pills and lay down.
Before she fell asleep she made herself think over and over again: “I did not start the fire. That was not my fault.” She carefully clung to that thought until she lost consciousness.
When she awoke, she had a panicky moment of dislocation. The unfamiliar, water-spotted ceiling, the strange room, the rough blanket she had pulled over herself against the cold night air.
Then she remembered. The memory beat at her like one of her stepsister’s insistent children, demanding her attention. She remembered.
She felt little curiosity about what had happened to the man. He was dead, or he was not. She realized that she was angry with him. He had not tried to rescue her. She had been awakened by the smoke, not by any human cry. He had either died in the fire or left her there to die. All in all, she thought it would be better if he were dead; otherwise, she would have to see him again and deal with her anger and her embarrassment. She would not go to the authorities, for what could she tell them that would be of any use? Did she know how the fire started? No. The rest was nobody’s business but her own and Keller’s.
It was still a shock to read the headline in the local paper: English Department Chairman Dies in Fire. She felt less anger toward him dead. She felt she should be generous to his memory. Perhaps he had tried to save her. Perhaps she had been mistaken, and his dying cries instead of the smoke had awakened her.
She told no one, not even her stepsister. She still could see no purpose to it. She read the report in the paper several times, and found it to be substantially correct, if a little muddled as to sequence. The article made it sound as though there had been a propane leak that had caused the explosion and fire. The fire she knew had preceded the explosion, otherwise she herself could not have survived. How the fire had actually begun was a matter of indifference to her. An accident was an accident, and dead was dead. She saw no need to set the reporter right.