Excerpt: A Smokeless Flame of Fire

[B]efore [Mary] could complete her sentence, she heard the sound of running footsteps from outside the cottage and her brother’s high voice calling to her.

“Mary! Where are you, Mary?”

Mary felt herself smiling almost involuntarily.

“In here, Elias,” she called back, getting to her feet. Her brother cannoned into the sickroom, clearly intent on finding her to tell her all about the market, but when he saw that Gabriel was awake he stopped dead in his tracks.

“You en’t dead,” he said, almost accusingly.

“No,” Gabriel said, in the same, measured voice he had used to answer Mary. “I am not.”

Elias looked uncertainly at Mary.

“Elias,” she said. “This is Gabriel. Gabriel, this is my brother, Elias. I apologize for his manners – “ she ruffled her brother’s hair. “He has an unhealthy obsession with dead people.”

Elias stuck his tongue out at her, but took the hint.

“Pleased ter meetcher,” he mumbled in Gabriel’s general direction. He did not give the injured man time to reply before launching into excited speech. “Mary, I saw Johnny in the village, and he said that his da might have a place for me in the smithy. Can I go, Mary? Meg said she would think about it, and you know that means she has to talk to you about it first, so can I?”

“Eli – “

But the boy was in full spate, telling her how Johnny had singled him out to be his father’s apprentice, if the old man decided to take one on later in the year. He seemed to forget that Gabriel was there, listening intently with an inscrutable expression on his face.

“ – so I told him, I said, that I would work right hard, and that he wouldn’t regret it, and I was right, en’t I, Mary? I’ll do a good job, you see if I don’t.”

“I’m sure you will, Elias,” Mary said, seizing her chance as her brother paused for breath and interrupting him. “But I’m not sure it’s a good idea. Smithing is very dangerous work, what with the forge and the horses and so on. I really don’t think you’re old enough just yet.”

“But Ma-ry,” Elias whined. “I’m nine years old. All the other boys have jobs to do, and I’m stuck here doing housework.”

He said the last word with such violent disgust that Mary wanted to smile. But the idea of her little brother working in a hot, smelly, dirty forge – not to mention leaving home to start work as an apprentice – upset her too much.

“I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” she said. Her brother’s face fell.

“Meg thought it was a good idea,” He sulked. He sat down heavily at the end of Gabriel’s pallet, jolting the injured man with such force that he winced, slopping steaming stew onto his fresh bandages.

“We’ll talk about it later, all right?” Mary told her brother firmly, eyeing their patient as he brushed feebly at the spilled vegetables. “Gabriel needs to rest, and having you in here chattering is not helping.”

“I don’t mind,” Gabriel spoke up unexpectedly. Mary shot him a look.

“Well I do.” She said. “Come on, Eli. That’s enough.”

“But I didn’t even get to say hello!” Elias protested. He turned to Gabriel. “I didn’t, did I? An’ that en’t proper.” His voice was lofty.

Mary rolled her eyes and resisted the urge to haul him out of the room by his ear.

“Very well, then,” she said. “Say hello to Gabriel, Elias, then go and help Meg eat the stew.”

“Hello, Gabriel!” Elias said obediently. He gave the wounded man the sunniest of smiles, his round face looking perfectly angelic. It was an irresistible expression, managing to combine simultaneously the look of a beatific saint receiving a vision from heaven and the face of a wizened gnome from one of the woodcuts Mary sometimes saw in the village square. Even Gabriel, sober and straight-faced as he had remained thus far, could not prevail against it, and broke into a smile as the child, apparently satisfied, skipped happily out of the room to eat his supper.

It was almost startling, the change that such a simple thing wrought in his expression. Where before he had been dour, and somewhat homely-looking, with stern, lined features topped by an unruly mop of curly, light-blond hair, the smile relaxed the taut lines around his mouth and brought a sparkle to those frigid blue eyes so that Mary found her breath quite gone from her lungs. It was almost, she thought, as if he were halfway between saint and devil, and so focused on walking the line between them that he dared not either laugh or frown for fear of tipping the balance, but that smile gave away all that he could have been, if only he made up his mind which way to turn.

Meg ducked her head in to check on her patient a moment later, and Gabriel’s face returned to what appeared to be its habitual sullenness, but Mary, as she left the room in search of her own supper, found it hard to forget that sudden, face-altering smile.