When the onslaught from the tempest died down and all seemed quiet again, she bundled the children off to bed, put her coat on, and went over to check that nothing had happened to Magnus and Adelia at the main house.

As she walked along the path hugging the lake, she could see fire burning in the distance, though from two different directions. The first was off on her left-hand side, about a hundred yards from where she stood. The wind was blowing it away from a barn that had burned down already, and the fire in grasses around it were moving out toward the barren fields, where they would wither away from lack of anything to feed upon. The other blaze came still from the direction of Stonehouses. It was not until she rounded the lake that she could see the house itself was alight with flame. She quickened her pace after that but tried not to panic as she ran on toward it.

When she arrived, she found Adelia and Magnus standing out there in the storm, looking at their home as it burned to the ground.

“Isn’t there anything more we can do to save it besides just standing here?” Libbie demanded, looking first at them then again at Stonehouses as it cackled and crumbled in the still-falling snow.

Magnus shook his head stoically. “The lightning was right on top of us, and the whole place seemed like it went up at once. It will have to burn out now or not.”

They looked ghostly and faded standing there in the snow, wrapped in blankets and watching the house burn from the inside out. Libbie felt pity when she looked at the two old people, saying only that all of them should all better get in out of the storm before they caught chill on top of everything else. Reluctantly, then, they began to follow her back to the other place, filled with sorrows for all that departed that day.

As they made their way down the path, however, Libbie could see the winds were shifting, and the fire that had been burning toward the meadow was moving instead toward her house, where her children were. All at once she started to run, trying to outrace the flames that were feasting so swiftly, and cursing herself for leaving them there alone; promising to never do so again if they were still safe.

When she arrived at the other building, fire was already licking at the back wall, and she had to rush round to the front to get in, where she ran up the stairs through a thicket of black smoke that had filled the room. Mercifully the two girls were unharmed, though both had stayed there and were deathly afraid when she reached them. Rose, the older one, knew exactly what was happening, and what fire was and the danger they were in, but Lucky had hidden under the bed, and Rose had been unable to coax her out. Nor could she leave without her sister.

“Mother, the house is burning,” she said, pleading.

“Come with me,” Libbie told her sharply, bundling them up and hurrying outside.

Behind the house, Magnus and Adelia were carrying buckets of water from the well, which they struggled to throw onto the flames. Libbie joined in, running back and forth with water buckets, as Magnus battled against the fire with all the strength in his old body, knowing that, if they failed, all was lost, and what had taken so long to make would be snatched away in a single day.

They fought out there for hours, and even Lucky and Rose tried to help, carrying a single bucket between the two of them to give to Magnus, with barely a word passing between them all, until, as darkness fell at last, they began to gain the better of the fire. It was finally extinguished around seven that evening, but the exact time was impossible to reckon. Much of the house was still standing and useful, and they went inside what remained of it to rest, all shivering from wetness and exposure to the freezing air.

Libbie put on a pot of water for tea, and brought the first ready cup to Magnus, who aside from the coldness had grown stiff in his joints from the diseases of age. He was still covered in gray ash from head to foot and coughed violently from time to time due to the smoke he had breathed in. The smell of burning still clung to him, as it hung in the air in general, but in greater concentration. Still, he wanted to go out and inspect the damage the fire had done to his lands. Libbie and Adelia, though, prevailed on him to rest awhile longer. He seemed then to all of them to have grown ancient, and he felt as much in his own mind, as it was true.

“It is nothing to worry about,” he said, trying to speak to their collective worries and console them, even as they looked after him. “We will rebuild everything just as soon as Caleum returns. It only took four of us a summer to put the majority of this place up, and I don’t imagine it will take half that to fix.” The main house he was less certain of, whether there was need to rebuild, or whether they could on that scale again. During the time he drank his tea, he tried to recall what Stonehouses had looked like the first time he laid eyes on it. Certainly it was bigger now than it had been then, and rooms had been added not from a plan but according to where and when they were needed and the purpose they were to be put to, so that he was not even certain he could draw a plan of the place from memory, even though he had been in each of its rooms a thousand times and could walk through each of them in his sleep at night.

When Magnus mentioned Caleum’s name, Libbie was silent, as was Adelia. Having all expected him home so long, there was no evidence now that he was anything other than dead. Magnus had counseled them steadily against assuming anything until there was ready proof of it — such as the army usually sent back to fallen soldiers’ families. However, as the weeks and months passed with no word from him, Libbie had all but given up hope of ever laying eyes on her husband again.

“I had better see what the damage is to the house,” she said, not wanting to speak out loud what was uppermost in her heart.

When Magnus offered to help her, though, she declined.

“You should rest, Uncle, and get back your strength,” she urged him. “Besides, I know better how everything out here was before.”

“Then I’ll walk around to the main house to see what is left of it.”

“Are you rested enough?” Adelia asked her husband.

“It’s just to have a look around,” he answered. “You stay here and tend to Libbie and the girls.”

Magnus left the women, then, and walked back to his house, surveying his lands as he went and the damage done to them. At the same time, Libbie went off to assess her house and how much of it was still sound.

What she saw was that the kitchen was in far worse shape than it had seemed before, and the upper portion of the house was burned very badly, so that those rooms were all open to the outside. She had also lost many of her household effects, but on the whole it was stable enough that they could live there until spring.

At Magnus and Adelia’s house, fire had taken a far higher toll. Besides the barn and an acre of trees around the lake, most of the main house was gone entirely along with everything it had held, except for the fieldstone outer shell. The fireplace and chimney was all that remained of the kitchen, and a few of the rooms that had been added over the years sat exposed to the elements, like something children had built and left in the woods. The original structure could be discerned for the first time in decades, so that Magnus could see, as he had not before, that for all its grandness Stonehouses was really two cabins, identical to the ones he had known at Sorel’s Hundred, built side by side. Being used to the completed house, this foundation seemed unimaginably small to him, as the house was already four times its original size when he came to live there, and it had grown four times that again. In his sadness, when he returned to Libbie and Caleum’s place, he told Adelia that the house was destroyed completely. “It claimed the whole thing, except some scraps you can have at if you want.”