25 September 1891 — Sanditon Season Close

Ford hadn't even wanted to come tonight. Granted, he hadn't wanted to go anywhere after his sister had been kidnapped. Verity, apparently, was entirely unconcerned with her own safety and wanted to go right back to swanning around the social scene trying to flirt with potential husbands. In other circumstances he might have been glad of it — he and Noble had talked so much about how badly they needed all the girls married, but not at the cost of their safety and potentially their lives. But Mama thought it would be better if they came, to show that Verity wasn't traumatized by the experience — wasn't damaged goods — and for all their squabbling, Ford did still tend to defer to Mama when it came to matters of society and appearances. So here they were, at another ball just like every other ball they'd been through for months, because this one was going to be special and different and make all the difference on the marriage mart, apparently.

To his credit Ford had tried to at least pretend to enjoy himself. He'd danced with a few young women — some of Verity's classmates, some of Grace's, one of the new ones — none that he particularly cared about, of course, but he'd done his part and presumably they'd enjoyed the dance well enough. Noble had slipped away from the ballroom, but that was fine — Ford trusted Noble not to get kidnapped, at any rate. Noble was still missing when things started to go sideways (the chandelier literally), but Ford didn't have time to worry about him because now Verity was missing too, and if she didn't end up kidnapped or dead by the end of this hurricane Ford really might end up murdering her himself. At least he knew Grace and Mama were safe enough, and he left them together while he went off in search of his errant oldest sister.

He thought checking the ladies' powder room would be the best place to start (not checking the actual room, of course, but hopefully someone would be near the door and could be enlisted to help look around it for Verity), so he headed that way — but the hallway was already half-dark, because someone had opened one of the doors somewhere and the wind had snuffed out half the candles. The ones that were left were in a sorry state, leaning precariously. Half a dozen feet ahead of him one of them fell out of the wall sconce, right onto the skirt of a passing young woman.

"Wait, stop!" he called, rushing towards her. "Your skirt!"

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@"Jemima Farley" Elias Grimstone

  

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Set by Lady!

Someone was dead and the chandelier had just come crashing down, so the party was – well and truly over, presumably. Jemima would have apparated away from the Sanditon then and there, except after fainting in Apparition lessons more than once she hadn’t worked up the confidence to take the test yet, so she didn’t trust herself to do it now.

Also the screams in the room and the shock of the chandelier had made her break the champagne flute in her hand, and after that Jemima had been almost too blankly taken aback by the jagged cut welling blood on her palm and the glass smashed at her feet to take in anything else in the room.

She should – fix her hand. She should find someone to help her fix up her hand. She should maybe find Jacob. Or at least Delilah and her husband; they had been standing close by before. She should get out of here as soon as possible – was that HALF A BODY?

Nerves wracked further by every new howl of the storm outside, Jemima hurried down the hall towards the powder room – to get out of the crush of people, to find somewhere quiet to clean up her hand, in the hope Delilah was there... she wasn’t thinking with any real coherence, her heart hammering too loudly in her chest.

And it was dark and she was alone and a little terrified, so when someone rushed after her, exclaiming with some urgency about her skirt, Jemima could only blink in detached disbelief at him, more concerned that she was almost about to embarrass herself by crying. “Really? Is now truly the time?” she said, her sniffling not making her response sound as indignant as she had planned. “It’s just a champagne stain,” she explained, face growing hot but refusing to look down at her dress again – it was just damp in places where the glass had spilled, that was all. On any other night, it might have felt like the end of the world, but... surely tonight this man had better things to worry about than the state of her clothes?

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Ford was only a few feet away from her when she whirled on him, and he was so surprised by her words that he actually draw back for a moment. This wasn't the time to feel chastised that she'd pointed out his lack of decorum, though — she was on fire, or if she wasn't yet she would be quite soon. Still, his cheeks flushed as he gestured at her skirt. "It's not," he insisted, not sure why he had to find the words to articulate this at all. Shouldn't the situation itself have been quite obvious? How could she not have noticed that a flaming candlestick had fallen onto her skirt? Luckily the flames didn't seem to have caught too quickly — maybe the champagne she'd mentioned had done a passable job of dampening the fabric, or maybe she'd gotten near enough one of the open doors to be soaked by the rain. If the candle didn't catch her skirt, though, it would only catch the carpet once it fell, and that would hardly be any safer for either of them.

"The candle, it's — oh," he said, cutting off abruptly as he spotted a smoldering red ember on the edge of her skirt. There ought to be smoke, and maybe there was, but he couldn't tell. The air was so thick and heavy with whatever was happening with the weather, and it was too dark to see much beyond vague outlines of shapes. "Hold still, I'll —" he started, moving closer to her and attempting to stamp out the hem of her skirt. That was actually much harder than he would have thought, and he found himself so close to her that he had to catch hold of her elbow to keep from losing his balance.

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Set by Lady!

Jemima’s gaze was caught now on the young man’s face, as if she could possibly place him from all society in this dim light, or with her cut hand, or with the disorienting swirl of general worry in her head from everything else terrible that was currently happening in the ballroom beyond them in a way that felt like too much.

“Oh!” Jemima squeaked, caught entirely off-guard as, all of a sudden, he was very close. He was saying something, but all she felt first was his foot’s urgent pulling at her skirts, and the press of a hand on her elbow; and maybe she had imagined finding herself alone with a man in some darkened room once or twice before – guiltily, in the back of her mind – but it had never really begun like this.

And then she felt the candle roll beneath her dress, stopping by the side of her shoe. He’d mentioned a candle, hadn’t he? This time, glancing down in horror and sidestepping slightly, she realised its effects: there was a smell of burning fabric, and it must have already been eating away at the edge of her dress. And it had spread to the carpet, where another, proper flame blazed up suddenly from the floor. “Oh –” Jemima clutched at his arm in return, all her indignance transformed to alarm – and half in warning, lest the fire catch his trouser-leg while he tried to help her! “– careful!”

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Between trying to stamp out the fire and her suddenly grabbing hold of him it was all Ford could do to stay upright, which... wasn't going to be enough to save the pair of them, now that the hallway was on fire. He couldn't possibly stamp that out. He wasn't even sure he'd succeeded in saving her dress, but he pulled her away from the fire all the same, hoping that doing so wouldn't cause it to spread more. In any case, it was better than simply staying put while he fumbled around for his wand somewhere inside his jacket, which — why was his wand suddenly so difficult to get hold of? He knew exactly where it was, and he could feel it through the fabric, but where the hell was the top of the pocket? Ford finally found it and started pulling his wand out, while his mind mimicked the desperate grasping of his hands by trying to come up with an appropriate spell.

"Aguamenti," he seized on, but because he'd said it before his wand was actually out of his pocket all the way he mostly only succeeded in soaking his jacket, not doing any damage to the fire. Well, on the bright side, it was probably unlikely that any stray sparks would catch it, he supposed — he was still far more concerned with the fire than with a damp jacket. With his wand properly freed now, he pointed to the nearest blotch of flame on the carpet and tried again.

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Set by Lady!

Jemima thought her dress had been sufficiently saved, although it must be horribly charred where the flame had eaten before he’d stamped it out for her – but the young man seemed to have some sort of a plan, now, to tackle the rest. Blindly mimicking him, Jemima groped about for her wand too, but between her cut palm and the decoratively tight wand-pocket in the folds of this gown and her dance card in the way, still swinging on her wrist – for heaven’s sake, of all the useless things! – it took her valuable moments and considerable effort to retrieve it. Assuming his water-spell to drench his clothes was part of the proposed strategy, Jemima did the same, casting a shaky Aguamenti on her skirts where it was not already sodden with champagne. Hopefully that would be enough to spare her – 

But Aguamenti wasn’t proving enough for the fire on the floor, and the man’s efforts seemed to be only just keeping it at bay, because the flames were still springing up in the gaps, still creeping across the carpeted hall. He had set himself between it and her now, which she was immensely grateful for, but Jemima didn’t have much of an angle to add to the water-streams. She felt a twinge of responsibility for the fire – if she’d caught the fallen candle faster, it wouldn’t be spreading like this – but maybe the storm would do the work for them, if they let it blaze and burn out by itself?

The flames were bad, obviously, but she also didn’t want to watch it get any worse and fatally burn this bystander for his efforts, because if he died saving her it really would feel like her fault forever. “It’s not enough,” Jemima said, over all the noise of it all, because the flames were springing back more fiercely than she’d expected, and she flinched at how close he was to it. So she tugged him back by the arm, hardly knowing which way down the hall they were stumbling – hardly considering that the powder room might be a dead end – just adamant that the best thing they could do was get away from here, and maybe even put a solid door between them and the flames.

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   Fortitude Greengrass

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Ford had never stood this close to a fire which was not safely contained inside a fireplace, and he didn't care for the experience at all. The heat was oppressive, nothing like the mild warmth of stepping into the flames after a puff of floo powder, and it was spreading much too quickly. Of all the things he'd expected to deal with tonight, combating fires hadn't made the list. Even when everything in the ballroom had started to fall apart, why would he have supposed anyone might burn to death in the midst of a frightful rain storm? In the abstract it seemed ridiculous, but standing a foot away from the nearest flame it felt like a very real possibility.

He had to find Verity. If the whole place went up in flames presumably the people in the ballroom would be safe, since there were enough of them there that someone would be able to fight it off, but Verity wasn't in the ballroom. If she was out here somewhere and the hallway was engulfed, she'd never make it back to safety. (It did not occur to him that he might not, either).

Fortunately the young woman was pulling him in the right direction for that — not towards the ballroom and the crowd, but down the hallway in the direction of the powder room, where perhaps he might find his sister. He nodded (perhaps needlessly; he wasn't sure she would even be able to see it unless she was specifically looking for his reaction) and used the hand not holding his wand to wrap behind her waist and hurry her along the hallway. Smoke was starting to curl above their heads, making his eyes sting and water. They reached the door to the powder room, where Ford hesitated. He obviously couldn't stay out here in the hallway, twiddling his thumbs and waiting for her to look around the powder room for any signs of other women, but even in an emergency it felt wrong to just plunge headfirst into a room in which he wasn't allowed. "Go ahead," he prompted, intending to follow her in.

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The following 1 user Likes Fortitude Greengrass's post:1 user Likes Fortitude Greengrass's post
   Jemima Greengrass

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Set by Lady!

He hadn’t protested, so she felt on some instinctual level that her plan was sound – which was a relief because Jemima had never spent much time in her life assessing what to do in possible emergencies, and she had not expected to be any particular good at it. She was confident he was coming with her, at least – he was half guiding her at her waist, and she didn’t dare look over her shoulder at how close the blaze might be – but when they reached the door up ahead, he slowed down? Jemima was already grasping the handle and tugging it open as she shot an incredulous sidelong look at him. There wasn’t time enough to argue, but there also wasn’t time to stand about and check whether the coast was clear, here! Not that it was a vast room, especially, but still: one would think he was more worried to set foot inappropriately in a ladies’ powder room than to burn politely to a crisp. At any other moment, Jemima might have found this rather sweet.

But not now.

“Don’t – be – silly,” Jemima got out before the smoke caught in her lungs, and dragged him forcefully in with her. Letting out a cough, she lurched around him to close the door behind him, more concerned about that than anything else. It was no sure solution either but, turning and covering her mouth with her hand to prevent another cough, Jemima took a cursory glance of the room for something or someone to help. It seemed rather deserted of people, though, save for something that looked suspiciously like a lady’s foot missing the rest of its body. A splinching, maybe? Jemima decided to pretend she had hallucinated the stray leg, and only called out a swift, nervous, “Hello?”

Still, all she could hear was the crackling of the flames in the hall; the rain outside. She looked back at him.

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She'd settled the dilemma for him by tugging him along with her, and now he was in a room he had never expected to be in. It took a second to orient himself, even though it was by all appearances a perfectly ordinary room. It wasn't much different than the gentleman's version, except that presumably it usually had ladies in it. At the moment though it seemed to just be the two of them — which meant, he realized as his stomach dropped slightly, that he still hadn't found Verity. He hadn't found Verity, and now there was a hallway full of fire between him and the rest of the party, where he'd left Mama and Grace.

He leaned his back against the door and ran his free hand through his hair. He wasn't sure if he was suddenly dizzy because of smoke he'd inhaled or the realization that he wasn't going to be able to reunite with any of his family members any time soon. Maybe it wasn't either of those things. Maybe it was that he was trapped alone in a room with a young woman, which was dizzying even if this was an emergency, or maybe it was the stray foot over by the counter. There were plenty of things to be dizzy about, when he thought of it. Could he feel the heat from the fire through the door, or was he only imagining it?

"Oh, wait, I've got something for this," he realized, pushing off the door and turning his wand on it before muttering a spell he mostly used when trying to create makeshift shields against the antics of poltergeists. "It's just a basic protection spell, but it'll keep the door from catching for a while. I don't know any spells to put it out," he admitted with a frown. He glanced around the room again. He wondered if he ought to do something about the foot, but couldn't imagine what, so he ended up just averting his gaze again as he took in their surroundings. "Who are you here with?" he asked the young woman after a moment. "Did they see you head off this way?"

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Set by Lady!

Jemima was not exactly the sort of person who had been trained for this, for any emergency situations  at all, and she was quite at a loss of what to do with all the nervous energy in her veins. So she had just been looking at him, helplessly, when something else struck him. Jemima exhaled a little in relief as he sprang into action, nodding along gratefully at his talk of protection spells, as if she had anything to offer when it came to putting out fires.

She stopped peering blankly at the door – which didn’t seem to be burning through just yet, so his spell must have done something – when he asked her a question. Jemima blinked, trying to tease out the process of events as they had happened. “My sister and her husband,” she said, with confidence. “And my brother was at the party, too. And –” she hadn’t been with any of them when she’d broken the glass in her hand, she had gone to look for them, and – Delilah wasn’t here. (Jemima shot a quick look at the foot, just in case she could recognise her sister’s shoe and stocking. Neither looked recognisable. Good. That was probably good.)

Except the answer to the young man’s question was no, they didn’t know she’d come in this direction, so... oh, no, that meant no one would know to look for her here. “Maybe,” Jemima began, chewing on her bottom lip and feeling like she was telling a lie, because amongst all that chaos how would Delilah have kept track of her? “I don’t know. Maybe not.” Why had she ever left the ballroom?

She twisted her hands together, never mind that her palm was tender from the cut across it, to try and resist the sinking feeling in her stomach. Still, maybe someone was looking for him. She didn’t know who he was, but – oh no, he wouldn’t have come to the ladies’ powder room if he weren’t looking for someone too. What little was left of her hope and cheerfulness abruptly evaporated in the heat of the room. “Are we – going to die here, do you think?” Jemima asked seriously, her bottom lip wobbling now. No, no, no: if this was the end, she was going to meet her end bravely and not cry, just for once in her life.

(She wasn’t sure that was actually going to work, but it was the thought that counted.)

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Ford caught the emotion in her expression and his insides twisted. With three younger sisters, he wasn't the sort to be paralyzed by the idea of a girl crying, but it wasn't going to do them any favors for either of them to get emotional at the moment. There was a real and present danger facing them, and while Ford didn't think they were actually going to die here he also recognized that they both needed their wits about them.

"Hey, no," he said in his most reassuring tone (which would have been more effective if he hadn't also been trying to rush through the reassurances so that he could get back to thinking through how to get them out of here). He reached out and rubbed her upper arm gently and reached his other hand around to touch her back — nearly hugging her, though there was still plenty of room between them. "We're not going to die, alright? We'll get back to the ballroom and you'll find your sister and everyone else. I just have to... we'll just figure out which one of these walls is shared with the ballroom and we'll use a spell to get through it," he decided. Did he actually know a spell which would allow them to walk through walls? No, but finding the closest path back towards the ballroom seemed like a good start regardless. If things really got dire they could maybe blast a hole in it... though given the state of the building, he didn't particularly like the idea of harming the integrity of the walls any more than they already had been.

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Set by Lady!

Since Jemima’s only escape plans were to wait it out and hope the flames burnt out of their own accord, or alternatively that someone heard their shouts for help through the wall before they went up in the blaze, she wasn’t completely convinced by his response.

But the physical contact, ridiculously, helped calm her slightly where his words didn’t; and Jemima almost wanted to lean forwards even more than she was and let herself be held and be comforted in that moment – which of course was horribly impractical, and one extracted moment of comfort by a stranger probably wasn’t worth dying for.

So Jemima resisted the urge to put her head on his shoulder, and after a moment of swaying there, drew back with a nod and latched onto his plan instead. The walls. Good, yes, fine. She could test the walls, if he knew a spell.

“Alright,” she murmured, forcing a determined expression onto her face at the flash of her own fear she caught in the mirror behind the sink; she paced down the wall, rapping her palms against it as if she knew anything about walls and whether they were internal or not, and wracking her brains to remember the wider layout of the Sanditon. In – determination or desperation, she wasn’t sure, she even hauled herself up onto the counter in a muddle of skirts, in case there was some way through nearer the ceiling, some weakness to blast through there.

“I’m Jemima, by the way,” she said resolutely, teetering up on the countertop and aware that this perhaps was her most useless addition to their endeavour yet – but in case they didn’t find a way out, at least they didn’t have to die complete strangers.

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She seemed agreeable to the plan, and since they still had a minute or more free from fire, Ford decided he'd better turn it into an actual plan. He wanted a quill and parchment — sketching out the floor plan of the Sanditon, at least as far as he knew it, seemed like the best way to figure out where they ought to go from here — but it seemed unlikely he would find any here. He looked around for some anyway, and came up with a stick of something pink (purpose unknown, but he thought it might be the right sort of color to be used on someone's cheeks or their lips) which, when tested, marked fairly clearly on one of the mirrors. He tried to draw out his path from the ballroom to here, retracing his steps mentally as he did. He was trying to count out how long the hallway ought to be when her voice interrupted him.

Ford's first thought when she introduced herself by her first name was she really does think we're going to die, because that was not something that young ladies typically did regardless of circumstance. His second thought, as he glanced over to see her standing on top of the counter (he had been distracted since moving away from her and hadn't been watching what she was doing) was that maybe some of the smoke or the panic or the something had gone to her head and she was a little bit crazy, at least at the moment.

"Ah — Ford Greengrass," he supplied, as he scanned over her surroundings and tried to work out why she had climbed up there. He was coming up blank, and it looked rather precarious — though in fairness, he didn't know what she really looked like beneath the singed skirts, so perhaps she was sturdier than he was giving her credit for. In any case, based on his knowledge of ladies' footwear from his own sisters' closets he couldn't help but imagine she was one poorly placed toe away from toppling over. "Here, can I help you down from there? The last thing we need is one of us breaking an ankle," he explained, moving to offer her a hand.

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Set by Lady!

Truly, Jemima did think they were going to die here. Not that he hadn’t done his best to be reassuring and not that he had shown any sign of giving up on them yet, considering his outlining upon the mirrors, but – and this was very ungrateful of her to think, but – as far as rescuers went, this Ford Greengrass was not exactly the dashing, confident hero she might have conjured up in her mind.

But he was evidently trying his best; and Jemima supposed she was not being the model damsel in distress, either. He certainly seemed to think her more a hindrance than a help, and she had once again distracted him from his efforts to save them. 

“No, you’re right...” She glanced at the hand he’d offered her, and tried, apologetically, to explain herself. “I just thought, that if we can’t find a way through –” she gestured at the wall, being careful not to slip on the surface and prove him right again by making things even worse, “– that perhaps there would be some way to go up?” Jemima proposed, uncertainly. She reached up and knocked on it again loudly, lest someone happened to be in some room above them, on a higher (and hopefully less-on-fire) floor of the building. The ballroom’s ceiling was high, but this one was well within reach. Of course, if no one heard them, then they would still have to get through it somehow – and the ceiling caving in on them was really the last thing they needed – but maybe the ceiling was thinner than the walls?

(Or maybe she should just strategically slip and fall and break her neck now and spare Mr. Greengrass the trouble of trying to get her out too.)

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"That's... not a terrible idea," Ford admitted as he glanced at the ceiling. He didn't know the layout of the Sanditon well enough to know what would be above them, but it was unlikely to be on fire. The hallway had been catching slowly enough, so it might not have burned through the walls or ceiling yet. Maybe if they went up they'd be able to get back through the same hallway they had come from, only one floor above, and from there find some central staircase back down to the ballroom. He liked the idea better than trying to blast his way into a crowded room and possibly taking out a load-bearing wall, anyway.

Assuming, of course, that there was something above them. If the only thing above this room was the roof, going up would be a pretty bad idea. Though one silver lining, he supposed: if they punched a hole in the ceiling and the rain started pouring in, at least it would lower their chances of being stuck in this room when it eventually went up in flames.

"Well, let's try it," he decided. They'd need to make a hole in the ceiling, and some way to climb up to it, but with magic that oughtn't to be much of a problem. Actually, maybe they could solve both problems at once? Ford considered the nearest high-backed chair, then leveled his wand at it and cast Engorgio, causing it to grow until the back burst up into the ceiling tiles.

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Set by Lady!

Not a terrible idea? Not? Oh! That, more than anything, nearly made Jemima topple over in surprise. Having been a decidedly average student in her whole Hogwarts career, hated quite fervently after the diary incident, and hardly the standout amongst her own family, not terrible was about as generous an assessment as any of her ideas ever got.

There was a pleasant bubbling feeling in her chest as she slid down off the counter and her companion actively considered the ceiling; there was a funny temptation to smile, but Jemima was certain that, in context of the burning hallway and the hurricane, smiling now would only make her look insane.

But maybe they weren’t going to die? She watched, holding her breath, as he enlarged a chair, shrinking backwards as it grew to a giant’s size and finally burst into the ceiling. Instinctively, she clasped at the man’s arm to hold him back beside her, just in case the tiles began to rain down upon them, or some deluge of water or something from above –

After a little debris and dust, however, Jemima ducked her gaze back up to it. Well, the chair had broken through. She couldn’t see what was above them, but it didn’t seem open to the elements, and the opening was certainly big enough to fit through. The chair had been a good idea, too: the frame of it had become very ladder-like, all rungs and footholds. Nothing for it, then, was there? She didn’t want to stand around and look terrified again and insist that he went first – and knowing him (as she had for all the length of these hellish last few moments, ha), Mr. Ford Greengrass would probably try for gallantry or propriety and insist ladies first anyway. Well, poor him: pulling off her dancing shoes, and sucking in a breath for some bravery, Jemima began to clamber up the chair-ladder in her stockinged feet.

Privately, maybe she was a little glad that he was somewhere below to catch her if she fell – but as she neared the ceiling crevice, Jemima glanced downwards again in worry, not about to let him fall behind and have to watch him burn up somewhere beneath her, either. “You are coming, aren’t you?”

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