Chapter 27: What Van Drecht Cannot Permit Himself to Believe

The fire in the Thornfield Abbey library had been burning for some hours, and Van Drecht knew this because he knew fires — the specific amber of a fire that has moved past its first urgency into something steadier and more settled — in the way that a man knows things he has had occasion to observe across many cold nights in many countries where the work was never comfortable and never finished.

He stood where he was.

This was not, he told himself, because the girl's argument had stopped him. He had heard arguments before. He had heard arguments from frightened women in three languages, from men who believed sincerely that the creature they harboured was benevolent, from village priests who confused the absence of recent visible harm with the absence of harm. The arguments were always structurally similar. They proceeded from attachment to conclusion, and dressed the route in the vocabulary of evidence.