“I’ve been better,” says Margaret with a tight grin, and Sally laughs because she hears something of her old friend in those three little words.
While Sally was at the Prices’, Mrs. Cowley moved Margaret upstairs to Maria’s old bed. The other bed in the room is empty now; the girl with the terrible burns took her last breath sometime in the middle of the afternoon. Mrs. Cowley saw that her body was carefully wrapped in a sheet and tucked under the stairs, where she waits to be picked up by the burial committee. John Gamble himself has promised that she will be included in the processional.
Sally hates to admit it, but it is a relief to be in this bedroom and not hear the poor girl struggling for breath. She cracks a window, just to try to get rid of the awful smell of burnt flesh, which hangs in the air, then she sits on the side of Margaret’s bed. “Do you need anything? I can get you more laudanum. Or maybe some brandy?”
Margaret shakes her head. “I think I want to feel what it’s like to be alive. We are alive, aren’t we?”
Sally squeezes her hand. “It’s a miracle.”
“Don’t credit the divine with this, Sally Campbell.”
“The divine and I are not on speaking terms, at present.”
“Very funny.”
Sally grins. She would do absolutely anything to make Margaret laugh right now.
Margaret shifts in the bed so she is looking directly at Sally. “You didn’t have to come back for me. In the theater.”
A single tear slips down Sally’s cheek. “Of course I did.”
“Not everyone would have,” says Margaret slowly, and Sally knows that they are not talking about everyone.
“Are we talking about Archie?”
Margaret nods.
Sally would like nothing more than to detail all of Archie’s bad decisions. But she reminds herself it will do Margaret little good to know her husband is a cad. “He was frightened.”
“We all were,” says Margaret quietly.
Sally reaches for her sister-in-law’s hand. It’s true. Sally was terrified, and even now, thinking about what’s next for Margaret, leaves her with a nearly paralyzing tightness in her chest.
Margaret looks around the room. “Where is Archie?” she asks.
Sally is embarrassed to tell her that he’s gone home for the night, intent on sleeping in his own bed. So, she bends the truth. “He wanted to check on the children.”
“How are they?”
“Concerned for you, of course,” says Sally.
Her friend bites her lip. “This is too much for them to comprehend.”
“They comprehend only that their mother is not with them, that she is being well looked after, and that she will return to them as soon as she possibly can.”
Margaret reaches for Sally’s arm, grabs hold of her sleeve. “Will I?”
“What?”
“Return to them?”
Sally is crying again—she doesn’t know how to stop. “Of course you will,” she says. “You don’t think I went to all that trouble getting you out of the theater for nothing, do you?”
Margaret relaxes her grip, but the worry doesn’t leave her eyes. “Archie told me that you were a proponent of amputating the leg.”
The last thing Sally wants to do is cause Margaret to second-guess her course of treatment. “I had no right—”
“You had every right.”
