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They were at the right-hand side of the school, as far as they could be from the cottage on the other end. Now the slope was slightly uphill and Dani took a deep breath and forced her tired legs to carry her up the tarmac drive. It had never seemed so long before. Would she ever get there? Her knees felt rubbery and as she reached the green-painted wood of Mrs Rowett's front door, she did not even have enough breath to shout. She began to beat on it with her fists, and as she did so she heard Rusty bark.

'Mrs—Rowett. . .' Her voice had no strength in it, but her shaking fingers found the bell and she leaned against the stone of the small porch that protected the entrance and tipped her head back to gasp for breath. She kept her finger on the bell and, a moment later, heard footsteps on the stairs inside.

'Dani?' The door opened wide and Emma Rowett, iron-grey hair unusually untidy, stared at her. 'What. . .'

'The school's on fire.' Dani managed the words with difficulty. 'I've—called the—fire brigade . . .'

'All right.' Emma Rowett's reputation for calmness did not desert her. 'I'll tie Rusty up outside and . ..'

Dani waited for no more. Now that Mrs Rowett was safe, she could concentrate on the school itself. Maybe some of the records, her own logbook of the children's progress, and correspondence files could be saved.

There was a door leading from the staffroom to the playground around the back of the building. Dani ran to it, picking up a fist-sized stone from the rockery of Emma Rowett's garden as she went. Without hesitation she threw it at the glass that made up the top half of the door, and when it shattered she knocked some vicious-looking shards of glass inwards and then reached through for the key.

Dani's legs were still trembling with exertion, and her heart was thudding heavily and sickly with fright, but she struggled to keep her brain clear. She could hear the fire but not see anything, and as she switched on the light it gave her a sense of security not to have the evidence of the flames to scare her from her purpose.

Fighting to keep calm, she opened the filing cabinet and pulled out the more important items, wrapping them in an old anorak that she kept at the school and in the plastic covers from the typewriter and the spirit duplicator. She hoped that the precaution would save them from the rain as she dumped her bundles outside.

When that was done, Dani took a deep breath and glanced around her, noticing for the first time the petty cash box on the floor and the evidence of the splintered wood of the desk drawer. It seemed that a burglary had taken place and she guessed that if she went into the classrooms, she would probably find them vandalised.

What more could she do? Was there anything else that was vital to the school? There were just too many other files to take outside, so she shut the filing cabinet and hoped that if the flames got that far, they might be protected for a while. As she did so, she glanced out of the staffroom door that led to the cloakrooms. Beyond the cloakrooms she could just see, in the darkness, the main hall and the display cabinet that housed the school's trophies.

Dare she risk getting them? Dani bit into her lower lip and stared hungrily at the cabinet. Intrinsically, the cups were worth little; they were valued for the effort and endeavour that had gone into the winning of them. And she wanted them!

Mentally she tried to work out how safe she would be. The fire appeared to have started in the junior classroom. Next to it was the middle classroom that doubled as the room in which the children ate their lunch, and then came the hall. One room between her and the flames, and Dani was sure that the folding doors that separated the middle classroom from the hall were closed. It should be all right.

Deliberately, she schooled herself to take a deep breath, and then she opened the door and walked quickly through the cloakroom and into the hall. Immediately she felt the heat of the burning building, but she talked to herself calmly as she reached the cabinet and opened it, making an inventory in her mind as she took each trophy out; swimming cup, drama award, internal school cups. Coldly she took a moment to wonder why they had not been touched by the vandals, but there was no time to think about the puzzle now. The cups clanged against one another as she stuffed them into her arms, and all the while she was aware of the heat at her back and the way her lungs were suffering from lack of air.

There, that was all of them! Dani was forced to take another breath, aware that her lungs had not fully recovered from her run, and as she did so the roar of the flames increased and, as she swung round, she saw fire breaking through the door.

Immediately there was smoke. Blinding, choking, killing smoke. Dani inhaled some with the breath she was taking and immediately coughed, turning towards the front door of the school only two paces away. She struggled with the handle, wrenching at it desperately, before her panicked mind told her that it was locked. She fumbled for the key—Hurry up! Her brain screamed the warning—and when it fell from her fingers to land with a metallic tinkle on the floor, the smoke was becoming so thick that her watering eyes could not see it.

The other way! Dani turned, banged into the open door of the trophy cupboard, and recoiled from it with a cry of pain. Her lungs were aching, and for a moment she did not know which way to go as the small passage got hotter, so hot that she knew she had only a matter of moments, to get to safety. On a half-remembered piece of advice, she dropped to her hands and knees and began to crawl awkwardly towards the cloakroom, frantic for air and knowing that in another second she would have to breathe in the smoke-filled atmosphere or collapse from lack of strength.

The fire was right behind her! She expected to be enveloped in flames at any moment, and the short passage had become an alleyway straight to hell. She had no breath to scream, but she pleaded for help inside her head, and doggedly kept crawling forward while the pain in her lungs seared through her. She would have to take another breath and she knew it.

At first she thought the footsteps on the tiles of the cloakroom were a fantasy, conjured up by her fear, but then she heard her name called through the distortion of the billowing smoke. She banged her hand on the floor to try to attract attention and then Prentice was there in front of her, hauling her to her feet, stooping and lifting her over his shoulder as if she was, Dani thought hysterically, an awkward sack of coal. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and felt herself being carried back into the staffroom and through the door into the open air.

Air. Real, fresh air. She had thought she might never breathe it again. She took great gulps of it, and immediately began to cough, wringing fresh tears from her smoke-irritated eyes with the lung-wrenching depth of them.

Prentice put her down, roughly, and she was bent over double with a paroxysm of choking while his arm held her up and his voice above her head cursed her vividly and fluently.

'. . . going to call an ambulance . . .' she heard him say amid the tirade of abuse.

'No!' She flapped her hand weakly to stop him. 'Be all right—in a minute.'

'You fool!' His voice thundered in her ears. 'You stupid,—stupid—fool!'

'Had—to . . .' Suddenly she realised that she still had the school cups cradled in her left arm and she laughed weakly. She would have to give herself ten out of ten for determination, if nothing else. She stood upright, groaned, and opened her eyes to look into his face. 'The cups.' She held them out towards him. 'Had to—have them. Oh . . .' Another fit of coughing overtook her.

'Cups?' His voice rose in disbelief. 'You nearly got yourself killed over
these?'
The scorn in his voice annoyed Dani.

'School.. . trophies . . .' she managed to choke out.

'I'll buy you a dozen damn cups, if that's what you want!'

'Just want. . . these.'

The coughing died down and she opened her eyes once again and pushed the silverware towards him. He took them, spared them one glance, then his eyes raked over her face.

'You must be insane!' Something, perhaps something in her face, enraged him and white lines appeared around his mouth. 'You could have been killed!' His hand closed around the swimming trophy and lifted it, and intuitively Dani realised that he was about to hurl it from him.

'Don't do that!' She snatched at his arm and gripped his wrist tightly. 'Don't lose your temper!'

'Lose my temper?' He glared down at her. 'I damn near lost more than that!'

'I didn't mean to put you in any danger . . .'

'I wasn't thinking about me!'

'Prentice, please!'

She did not have the strength to force him to lower his arm, but she refused to loosen her grip, and after a moment, in which his arm was taut with tension and his eyes locked with hers and seemed to reach down into her soul, he slowly lowered his arm.

'You're a fool.' His words held no sting and Dani just shook her head. She did not have the strength to argue with him and waited, hoped for the gentleness that she knew lurked inside this man's veneer of hardness. 'Oh, Dani, you are such a fool!' The cups were placed on the ground, his thick anorak was thrown around her shoulders and then suddenly he was holding her tightly, so tightly that she thought her bones would crack with the strength of his grip. One arm encircled her shoulders and the other took possession of her waist, and she slipped her own arms around him and clung on desperately, burying her face against his chest and closing her eyes as memories of her escape flooded her mind with gruesome scenarios of what might have happened. She began to shake.

'Shh.' His hands rubbed her back soothingly. 'You're safe now. Don't think about it.' Yet his voice was still rough as if he, too, was re-living some private nightmare, and his face pressed into her hair gave Dani an indication that he, too, had been afraid.

They stood in silence for a few moments, wordlessly giving and receiving comfort and, wrapped tightly in his arms and clutching him fiercely, Dani trembled with shock and a sudden aching desire to be like this always; held closely in his arms and protected by him.

'Dani!' Emma Rowett called her name and she started, the spell broken completely when Prentice released her and bent to pick up the trophies again.

'We'd better put these somewhere safe.' His voice was completely neutral. 'I'd hate them to get damaged after you went to so much trouble to get them.'

'Yes,' Dani agreed meekly. The anger was back in his voice and she felt too tired and too weak to fight back. 'And I'd better move the files, too.'

'Of course,' he agreed smoothly. 'Then I'll take you home. If you don't sit down soon, you'll fall down.'

'I'm fine.' But her legs felt weak as she followed him around the side of the school furthest from the fire, and the crackling flames and the reddish glow they cast seemed to throw an aura of light around Prentice's stiff-backed figure, turning him into a menacing Mephistophelian character.

With the files and cups safely stowed on the back seat of the Volvo, Dani leaned against the side of the car and shivered despite the thick anorak.

'I'm going to take you home,' Prentice said, his lips close to her ear, talking above the noise of the burning building and the hubbub of the people around them. 'There's nothing you can do here.'

'I can't leave.' She knew that there was nothing more that she could do, but she could not abandon her school now. She began to walk back up the driveway.

'Oh yes, you can.' His hand on her arm was firm. 'The fire brigade will be here at any moment. What's the point in standing here, soaking wet, when there's nothing you can do?'

Practical Prentice. Dani resented the calm, logical tone of the man.

'This is
my
school.' She wrenched her arm away from his grip. 'It may not mean anything to you, but it's my school and . . :' Her voice rose and a group of people close to them turned to stare. ' . . . and I can't walk away and leave it now.' She made a conscious effort to lower her tone. 'But no one's asking you to stay.' She hunched her shoulders inside her coat—his coat—and took a deliberate step away from him to stand in isolated misery on the side of the drive. Moments later she watched with dull eyes as the first fire engine rattled up the tarmac.

Dani had the sense of walking in a nightmare. So much had happened within a few minutes that she could not accept the reality of the situation. She felt frightened by the power of the flames, angered by her own helplessness, and she thrust her hands deep into the pockets of the anorak and clenched them into two hot fists to try to stop herself from trembling.

'You win.' Prentice's voice made her start. She had thought he had gone. 'We'll stay.'

'You don't have to.' Only a short while ago she had been dancing with this man and loving the closeness between them. Now she resented him, estranged from him by his inability to understand her distress.

'I know I don't,' he answered her honestly. 'But someone has to make sure you don't do anything else stupid.'

'I'm touched by your concern.'

'I thought you would be.'

He stood close behind her, a bulwark against the other people milling around them, and Dani clenched her fists even more tightly as she fought against turning her face into his chest and crying out her shock and unhappiness.

'Oh no!' She groaned out her dismay as the old school bell that hung in its own small wooden belfry and was still rung punctually every morning at eight fifty-five, toppled slowly sideways and disappeared with a crash and a shower of sparks through the burning roof.

Around her she heard murmurs of regret that matched her own, and she blinked back the stinging tears. It had been considered such an honour to ring that bell. The children vied for the favour and Dani herself had known a great sense of satisfaction on the few occasions she had performed the duty herself, and heard the melodic clang of the clapper against the metal. Somehow it was the end of everything.

'I'm sorry,' Prentice said quietly.

Dani shook her head, not daring to trust her voice, but when his arms slid around her waist and drew her gently backwards, she left the support of the stone wall she had been leaning against and let her body relax into his embrace. He might not understand her sorrow, might not have any sympathy for what she was feeling, but he would not let her down. She could trust him and draw on his strength. Dani sighed and closed her eyes for a moment to block out the people and the flames. Perhaps she would wake up and find it was all a dream.