I saw only one chance.
In desperation I reached out and grabbed the matchbox. I ripped it open and the wooden matches spilled out onto the tabletop.
As Miss Tanty’s massive hand came sweeping round again with the handkerchief, I scraped a match’s head on the wooden breadboard and held it awkwardly out behind me.
It went out.
I had moved too quickly.
I seized another—struck it—and slowly, agonizingly slowly, bent my elbow back toward her.
There was a moment’s grace, as if nothing had happened, and then a sound as if an exceptionally large Saint Bernard had just said “Woof!”
A great globe of fire rose up like an orange hot-air balloon to the low ceiling, then came roiling down the walls in waves of black greasy smoke only to boil up again around our ankles in a dense, choking cloud.
For a paper-thin slice of time, Miss Tanty was a frozen statue, one arm holding a flaming torch aloft above her head like Demeter searching the underworld for Persephone, her lost daughter.
And then she screamed.
And went on screaming.
She dropped the blazing handkerchief and blundered from wall to wall, beginning now to cough.
Cough … scream … cough … scream.
It was enough to shatter anyone’s nerves.
Round and round the room she spun, crashing into the furniture like a monstrous and maddened bluebottle fly, rebounding from one smoking wall to another.
By this time, I was coughing, too, and my face felt as if I had fallen asleep for hours in an August seaside sun.
I stamped out the flames of the burning handkerchief.
Miss Tanty was still screaming.
“Stop it,” I told her, throwing open the window, but she paid me no attention, flying round the room with one wrist clasped in her other hand.
“Stop it,” I said again. “Let me have a look.”
I had already had a look, and could see that her hand was burned.
“Stop it,” I told her, but she screamed on and on. “Stop it!”
I slapped her face.
I may not be as nice a person as I like to believe I am, because I have to admit that in rather an unexpected way, it gave me a great deal of pleasure to let her have it. Not because this was a creature who just moments ago had tried to murder me—not because there was any vengeance in the act—but somehow because it was, in the circumstances, the correct thing to do.
She stopped screaming instantly and looked at me as if she had never seen me before in her life.
“Sit down,” I ordered, and wonder of wonders, she meekly obeyed. “Now give me your hand.”
She stuck out a reddened fist, staring at it as if it belonged to a stranger—anyone but her.
I rummaged through half a dozen kitchen drawers before finding a lint dishcloth, which I draped over her wrist. I reached for the bottle of ether which she had put down on the draining board.
I pulled out the stopper and poured it over the dishcloth, watching the look of cool relief which spread across her face as she looked up at me in dumb adoration or something.
I flung open cupboards beneath the sink and finally, in a swiveled storage bin, found what I was looking for: a potato.
I half peeled it, then cut slices so thin that you could have read the Bible through them. With these, I made a wet poultice with which, having removed the cloth, I dressed her hand and wrist.
“Hurts,” Miss Tanty said, staring up into my face with her great moon eyes, her glasses trampled to shards on the floor.
“Hard cheese,” I told her.