Black Heather by Virginia Coffman Page B

firemaker.
    With the lighted candle I hurried back to the sick man, followed by the swift, darting Timothy. Nothing about the man moved except his eyes. In attending him I had to turn my back to that staircase at which he stared so fixedly above my head. The little cat waited for me also, his gray-green eyes likewise fixed upon the staircase. It made me more than a little nervous. I could not resist glancing over my shoulder. I cannot imagine what I expected to see, and I saw nothing but shadows.
    “Tell—Jassy ... ” It was the first thing he had said in several minutes, and I realized that his condition was rapidly worsening.
    I took up the candlestick, telling him I would be back immediately, and with the sturdy little candle lighting the way, I made swift work of the trip back behind the staircase that led to the upper floor. It was in this direction that Timothy had darted the day before, when he must have snagged his collar on the bit of lace from the cellar debris. Therefore, I assumed the most direct steps to the cellar must be back here. Behind the upper staircase I did indeed find the flight of stone steps pitching downward into the cold, musty darkness where, long ago, Megan Kelleher had died. I descended with great care, rather sardonically observing the caution with which Timothy stayed behind me.
    The candle revealed an entire wall of bottles and barrels. Some of the latter were obviously empty, the bung holes open, and here and there among the cobwebbed bottles there were a surprising number of empty spaces. I began to suspect that it had been visited by various wine-loving moorland citizens along with the stray gypsies who often made this region a landfall in their endless journeying. Tongues of the long-ago fire had licked at the wooden structure of the wine racks, but it appeared that this fire had come through the burned door from the other cellars, for the walls between the cellars were of stone and impregnable to those flames.
    I had no time for sightseeing and gazed just once into the next cellar, one of the centers of the fire, which was not as black as I had expected, because of the many cracks in the wall of the west, or entrance, side of the building at a level with the ground. Inside this burned cellar and the one beyond it, there was so much blackened debris that I assumed most of it was the contents of a cold storage stillroom, which had, of course, been destroyed in the fire and produced that haunting, acrid odor which permeated the house above.
    Actually, Mrs. Sedley had been right. From what I could see of the cellars and the ground floor above, the building was still solidly constructed and very likely a bargain. I turned back after taking up a bottle that felt heavy and seemed to gurgle a little. I was just moving up the steep steps, having called Timmy away from his exploration of the burned area, when we heard a piercing shriek near the taproom above us that made Timmy arch his back, sitting, and gave me such chills that I found it even more difficult to run the rest of the way. I, at least, knew that that shriek of mortal terror came from the wounded stranger, and I could not imagine anything so awful as to produce such a sound.
    At the top of the steps a sudden gust of wind from the open front door blew out my candle, but I was in too much of a hurry to reach the sick man to pay attention to that. There was light enough in the open doorway so that the stranger would not be in the fearsome darkness. I was deeply concerned to note that he had moved away from the protection of the door and was crawling, with irrational, crablike movements, toward the forsaken taproom. He had crawled only a few feet when I reached him. I did not dare cry out to him to stop this deadly motion, for fear the sharp command itself might act as a cruel prod to his movements.
    As quietly as possible, I went and knelt before him, trying to ease him against my arm, but he was too heavy. I had to drop the dusty wine