Fire endangers any document preserved on paper: Thus, in the novel, the motif of fire represents the concealment of truth and the risk of stories being lost. The leatherbound copy of A Song for a Knave is first damaged by fire after a dying William uses his last moments to pull it from the flames. Silas (either directly, or through his henchman Devlin) killed William and tried to destroy the book. By salvaging the book (perhaps because he knew it contained documents from Isabel, or simply because he treasured it), William preserved his love story and his son’s legacy from flames that threatened to obliterate both.

The charred smell of the book lingers decades later, drawing Lilian’s attention towards it. The same fire that almost caused Isabel’s story to be lost forever becomes an instrument for it finally coming to light: if the book had not been burned, Lilian would likely never have noticed it. The motif of fire reveals that efforts to hide the truth are more difficult than they appear. While individuals who represent established systems of power (such as Silas and Malcolm) try to obliterate information that would challenge official narratives, stories tend to circulate and live on. Isabel’s documentation finds its way to a sympathetic audience decades later, just as a buried artifact might surface from the earth.

The motif of fire finds its most powerful expression in the novel’s climatic confrontation between Julia and Lilian. Julia burns Isabel’s documents, destroying the carefully preserved evidence and the only written record of Isabel’s experiences. However, the same fire that consumes the documents ends up spreading and destroying both the Chatton townhouse and Julia herself. The effort to conceal the truth is always a destructive one that carries its own costs: Those who play with fire are doomed to be consumed by it. Julia only succeeds in her mission of wiping out Isabel’s narrative at the cost of her own life. And, by the time she destroys the documents, Lilian has read them and can now pass on Isabel’s story through her own oral testimony. While fire represents an attempt to suppress the truth, the fire at the townhouse shows that this effort is ultimately futile and dangerous.