It occurs to Cecily that she never even asked Maria where her seats were. It seems it’s the folks on the second and third floors who are having the hardest time getting out, and while Cecily would like to tell herself that Maria and her friends bought the cheap seats in the pit, she suspects that’s not the case.
Cecily decides to circle the theater. As she rounds the side of the building, a member of the fire brigade carrying a pail of water yells at her to move out of the way. She jumps backward, then wonders at the man’s urgency. Half the water has already sloshed over the top of the pail on its long journey up Shockoe Hill. Behind him, a line of volunteers—passing pails back and forth—stretch down H Street and out of sight. They could run Shockoe Creek dry, and still it wouldn’t be enough.
More Richmonders have begun to pour onto the green, and they shout for the people they love. A man with no coat, wearing a fancy stock buckle, dashes past her, screaming the name George at the top of his lungs. “Has anyone seen a little boy? About this high?” he asks a group of nearby onlookers, but he barely waits for them to shake their heads no before taking off again. Cecily had probably seen half a dozen little boys since her escape, but how is she to know any of them are his?
She picks her way slowly around the building, making a point to stay far away from the windows, which teem with panicked men and women fighting to get out. Remarkably, she watches one man jump from a second-floor window, a distance of at least fifteen feet, and land on his feet. He gives a little yip and runs off into the crowd.
People have begun to drag the bodies of victims into small piles, and Cecily forces herself to stop at each one, to look at the face of every woman she comes upon. Many of them are young, around Maria’s age. Some wear fine dresses and expensive jewelry, others only a torn shift. All of them wear expressions that, to Cecily, seem frozen in fear, and it is in their faces that she comes to fully understand the horror that is unfolding in front of her.
GILBERT
The wind is loud inthe trees, but Gilbert thinks he hears a woman’s voice, screaming out in the yard. “You hear something?” he asks Sara.
“Go stand over there,” Sara says, pointing to the far corner of the room, where he can remain out of sight.
When Sara opens the door, Elizabeth Preston flies inside, screaming and yelling as if she is on a mission to wake the dead. “Get up, Sara! Somebody! All of you!”
“What’s the matter, Missus Elizabeth?” says Sara in a voice Gilbert knows she works hard to control. Maddie and the others peek their heads out over the edge of the loft. Sylvie has already started getting dressed.
“Fire,” says Elizabeth, breathing hard. “There’s a fire!”
Gilbert moves out of the shadows and into the glow of the lamp. “At the house?”
If Elizabeth is surprised to see him, she doesn’t say a word, just shakes her head so hard her body sways. Sara reaches for her arm to hold her steady. “The theater,” whispers Elizabeth, squeezing her eyes shut.
“Who’s at the theater?” Gilbert asks Sara, too scared to answer the question for himself. The way his wife’s face has folded in on itself, he already knows.
Sara pulls her lips tight together, like she is trying not to cry. “Gillie, it’s Louisa who’s there.”
Elizabeth nods and sinks to the kitchen’s dirt floor, a sob near tearing her in half. Sara looks at him then. “Do something. Please.”
The next thing Gilbert knows, he is running. Through the Prestons’ yard and out into their private alley. Down Twelfth Street and through the Public Square. The streets are crowded with people—Black and white—and, for once, Gilbert doesn’t worry about being stopped and having his pass inspected.
He doesn’t have much use for white people, hasn’t met many decent ones in his life. There was Good Pete, who Gilbert only came to appreciate after his death, and Louisa, who Sara has taught him to love, one day at a time.
Louisa is as silly now as all the other little white girls running around Richmond, but when Gilbert started seeing Sara, Louisa was twelve or thirteen and as earnest as they come. Gilbert used to complain that he couldn’t ever get Sara alone because, wherever they got off to, there Louisa was, wanting to read Sara something or tell her a story or get her help untangling the threads of her embroidery. Before he knew better than to open his mouth, he used to tell Sara, “You ain’t got to be a mother to that little girl,” and she would tell him to hush. “That child’s been through plenty. She can look for a mother wherever she wants.”
The inky sky glows gold. The bells toll, and in the side streets and alleys that Gilbert passes, he hears the shouts of the town criers mingle with the voices of Madison Ward residents, who run from house to house with the news. Women who had already turned in for the night answer the door in their shifts, and Gilbert sees more than one man dash out onto the street wearing nothing but a long shirt and an overcoat.
As Gilbert turns onto H Street, the wind pummels him. He tucks his chin and pumps his arms, willing himself to go faster, but he cannot maintain a sprint. By the time he nears the theater, the street has grown crowded with people, and as the blazing building comes into view, his pace slows.
The fire is worse than he imagined. Worse than anything he’s seen before. It is clear there will be no saving the structure. The city’s only fire engine sits parked in front of the theater, but the cart—with its hand-operated pump and short leather hose—can do nothing other than serve as a meeting place for volunteers to congregate. Gilbert asks several of the volunteers if they have seen Louisa Mayo, but he’s met only with looks of sad confusion. Taking a deep breath, he covers his nose and mouth with his arm and runs headfirst into the theater’s lobby, calling her name.
Gilbert can see that the pit is empty, but when he turns down the narrow hallway that leads to the stairs, he stops in his tracks. The stairs are gone, or rather, they are buried under a vast pile of rubble. When he looks up at the ceiling, where the stairs once were, he can see clear to the thirdfloor. Among the debris are bodies, most of them women and all of them firmly trapped, impossible to budge. Gilbert tries to look for any clue that Louisa is among the dead, but his lungs soon begin to burn, and he tells himself that she is not there. Cannot be there.
Outside again, he gulps the clean air and circles the building. The windows on the theater’s second and third floors are crowded with people, who have likely discovered by now that the stairs are not passable. Is Louisa among them?
The jump from the second floor is manageable, but the jump from the third floor is anything but. Those windows have to be at least thirty-five feet in the air. If any of the folks on the third floor are to have a real chance, they need a softer place to land.
Gilbert thinks of the fiddler Sy Gilliat, who lives just down the street from the theater green. Perhaps he can convince Sy to part with his mattress. Gilbert takes off running, and within moments, is beating on Sy’s front door.
No one answers, so he tries the door handle. The door doesn’t budge. “Open the door, Sy!” he shouts. “It’s me, Gilbert!”
Inside he can hear someone moving around.
“I don’t have much time. The theater’s on fire!”
The door opens to reveal the familiar face of Sy Gilliat, who doesn’t seem in the least bit surprised—or particularly worked up—by the news.
