Page 4 of The Bedlam Stacks

He gave me an odd look. ‘Yesterday was Sunday. There was no one here but you and Sir Charles. No one came in till six this morning. The storm was all over by then.’

‘Look, I don’t mind if people use it – it’s not mine, nothing here is mine, there’s no need to cover for anyone. If they could just shut the door, though. Otherwise the crows steal my keys.’

‘I’m not covering for anyone, I promise.’

‘I’m sharing the greenhouse with a ghost, then. With boots bigger than mine. I found footprints.’

He was still frowning. ‘There’s . . . no one that tall here.’

‘Well, there’s someone out there,’ I said. ‘Has been for a while, I think.’

‘We’ll have a look through the valley. If we’ve got tramps drifting about the greenhouses, we need to know. There’s valuable things lying about.’

I felt like a damselling idiot for not being able to help. ‘Don’t turf them out if there’s no need. It isn’t as though we’re using that particular thousand acres.’

He looked like he might have argued with me, but he didn’t have the chance.

It seemed to happen in slow stages, although it couldn’t have. The gardeners were looping ropes around the trunk, ready for it to tip, but it leaned before they were ready, only a couple of inches, and the dead branch swayed. It fell, smouldering, straight down into the damaged section of the roof, which broke. Tiles slid down in a flint landslide and smashed on the drive. I was sure that I heard those sharp crashes well before the bigger, deeper bang of the branch smashing into the main stairway inside, for all that would have made Galileo wrong. There was a moment of quiet in which things seemed to settle and there was no sound but pine needles falling and the little hissing of the remaining fires in the rain. But then, inside the house, something exploded.

It blew out the windows nearest to us and dust and smoke plumed everywhere. We were just far away enough not to be hurt and for a second it was nothing but beautiful, because the peach-coloured sun was still filtering through the tree and now the light came down through the smoke like threads in a loom. The taste of burned paper and brick scratched the back of my throat. Men must have been shouting, but I couldn’t hear anything except the crunch of the gravel where Gulliver had jerked in front of me. The first real thing I heard was when she barked.

She must have been able to see or smell something else through the smoke, because she ran around the house, towards the front door. I followed her as best I could and by the time I reached her, pacing up and down, the smoke was clearing; part of the wall had been blown clean through, and the one between the hallway and Charles’s study.

‘Come on, let’s find him,’ I said. I gave her a push inside.

She understood and hurried over the scattered bricks. Her normal pace was a sort of ooze, but she was quick now. I followed. There wasn’t much to climb over and the doorways were more or less all right, but just inside the hallway now was what was left of the exploded branch. It had sprayed pieces of itself everywhere and each one burned like a phosphorous torch, smoke pouring from them. The hearts of the flames were bluish green. Gulliver barked again. She had found Charles; he was in the corner near the desk. She nudged him out towards me. He was all right, but he had banged his head and there was blood just under his hair. He was unsteady even with both crutches.

‘Charles—’

‘Of all the bloody juvenile things!’ he shouted at me. ‘What, you can’t bear to see the wretched tree come down, so you douse the thing in turpentine?’

‘I didn’t do anything, don’t be stupid.’ I put my arm around him to help him over the rubble near the door.

‘Get off me,’ he snapped.

‘Look, it takes something to go from sniping at each other to blowing someone up, doesn’t it?’

‘You’d do it in the right mood,’ he said. ‘And you know you would. Your idea of benign and acceptable violence is nearly crucifixion.’

‘Look at this,’ I said, gesturing to the brilliant fires.

He did look. Though he had shaken me off, he leaned on my arm while he stood still, the top of his dark head not quite to my shoulder. He was so frail it didn’t feel like touching a human being. ‘Why is it burning like that?’

‘I don’t know.’

Once we were safely out, I cast around for a decent-sized shard of wood. I found one just outside the door. It was warm when I picked it up. I held it to my nose, waiting to catch the smell of dynamite, but there was nothing until I tipped it to the light. It was honeycombed with tiny holes, minuscule. The combined surface area inside must have been vast.

‘What is that, some sort of disease?’ Charles murmured.

‘I don’t . . . God, feel that. It’s light.’

I put it into his hand and his arm bobbed upward because it weighed so much less than it looked.

‘There’s nothing on it,’ I said at last. I hooked my cane over my arm and found some matches in my pocket. He frowned but watched me hold a flame to the corner of the wood. Nothing ignited on the surface, but I threw it away from us, on to the grass, just in case. After a second it went off like a bomb and left a little crater in the lawn.

‘It explodes,’ he said slowly.

‘Listen – you’ve got a concussion, your eyes aren’t even. Sit down.’