The Stars Are Fire(32)

“It is. It isn’t. How did you get in?”

“Houses like these are always easy to get into. Impossible to secure.”

“I think…”

“I think…”

“This house belongs to my husband. I’m Grace Holland.”

“Aidan Berne.”

They shake hands. His grip is warm.


Grace sets the kettle to boil, finding tea, sugar, a little milk, and producing from a cupboard a package of Lorna Doone cookies. She wonders if Aidan Berne, too, lost everything in the fire.

He’s at least six feet tall. He wears his light brown hair long. His eyes are light brown, she concludes, during the brief glances her way. He has on a navy sweater and gray wool pants in the drafty house. She interrupted him in his slippers.

“When did you come here?” she asks.

“The afternoon the fire hit Kennebunk. We were in the middle of rehearsals when men warned us through bullhorns to get out of town. We packed up quickly and fled to waiting cars, and I managed to snag a seat. Then they let us out on Route One with no instructions. They said they had to go back into the village to rescue more. We could hardly complain.” He takes a sip of tea and holds out the plate of cookies to Grace. She takes one.

“We started walking away from the fire,” he continues. “Those who knew the area slipped down dirt roads leading to cottages, but we could see that the fire was beginning to invade the woods along the coast. We started running. When I looked up the hill, I caught sight of a piano in a round room, just a glimpse, and I peeled off. I played until nearly eight in the morning.”

“What were you playing just now?” Grace asks. She has on Joan’s blue wedding suit, having decided she should dress up a bit for Merle’s house.

“Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto.”

“You can play that from memory?”

“A lot of people can. Well, not a lot. A few. It’s meant for an orchestra and a piano.”

“I was moved,” Grace admits.

“By what exactly? I’ve always been curious about this. By how music affects people.”

“The melody,” she says, setting down her cup. “The passage that keeps getting repeated in different forms. The hairs stood out at the back of my neck.” She pauses, embarrassed. “I’m not explaining this well.”

“For some, the concerto is purely an intellectual pleasure. You sound as though you absorbed it through the skin.”

“Yes, that’s it, through the skin.”

“Didn’t you listen to music in your home?”

“The radio.”

“You’ll have to get some records.”

She nods but wants to protest that she hasn’t any money, which leads her to her next thought, the reason why she’s here. “I have two children,” she says. “My husband, Gene, went off to make a firebreak, and he didn’t come home. His body was never found.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“Yes, thank you, it’s awful, but there’s another problem. Our house burned down, and I have nowhere to live. At the moment we’re living in the attic of a friend of my mother’s, but we can’t stay there indefinitely. Then I remembered this house. Gene inherited it when his mother died.”

“I’ll leave of course,” he says. “I can be gone by evening.”

Grace wants to touch his fingers. How can so much magic come from them? “Are your fingers insured?” she asks.

“My hands.”

“They’d have to be, wouldn’t they?”

“I can’t do anything else except play the piano.”

“I don’t want to make you leave,” Grace admits reluctantly. “I’d like to be able to hear that music again.” She blushes and bends her head. “The world is so dreary, so awful now.”

“Everything in the house seems to be working fine, as far as I can tell,” he offers. “Good hot water, the stove works, can’t speak for the oven, the steam heat is better on the second floor than on the first.”

“Don’t go anywhere tonight,” she says. Perhaps, she thinks, he can remain as a tenant. The money would be a relief, a source of income while she looks for a job. “When I come back with the children and my mother in the morning, we’ll have made a decision. If you would, could you unlock the front door starting around nine?”


Before Grace can tell her mother about the man at Merle’s house, she needs to be sure it’s what she wants. It doesn’t take her long to decide that the man must stay—somehow, in some capacity. The decision surprises her. She knows nothing about Aidan Berne. He might be an escaped convict, he might be a leech, he might be a spy who will endanger them all. But Grace feels certain he is only an evacuee who was interrupted in the middle of a rehearsal by a fire.

Grace has to wait until two o’clock, when everyone goes up for a nap, Gladys and Evelyn included. Her mother doesn’t leave the kitchen, however, knowing that her daughter has news to deliver.

They sit, her mother with a dish towel in her hand. “Well?” she asks.

“The house is open and is in good shape, and we can move in anytime. But it seems we have a tenant.”

“A tenant? Paying rent?”