“Archie was committed to seeing you returned to your old self.”
“My old self,” says Margaret thoughtfully. “I don’t think I’ll ever return to my old self. Will you?”
“After this?”
“It feels impossible.”
Sally doesn’t disagree.
“That old self, she didn’t know anything,” says Margaret, and her voice has a hard edge to it that Sally doesn’t recognize.
“That’s not true,” says Sally. “She knew a great deal.”
“She knew how to make a mutton curry and burp a baby, but she didn’t know a thing about prying open windows or shoving people out of them. She didn’t know that the men she’d surrounded herself with were all cowards.”
“None of us could have known.”
“It’s funny—I feel like we’ve been sold a false bill of goods.”
“In what way?”
“Well, weren’t we promised that if we married well, we would be taken care of? That our futures would be secure? Where is the security in a husband who would sooner climb over you than help you to your feet?”
“Are you speaking rhetorically?”
Margaret lowers her voice. “No, I am speaking quite specifically.”
Sally can’t believe what she’s hearing. “Is that what happened? Archie climbed over you to get out?”
She nods her head. “I was in front of him. When the crowd surged, we both went down. It was impossible to get up, the people just kept coming. I thought we would die, right there, in each other’s arms, except that the next thing I knew, Archie’s hand was on my head, and his foot was on my shoulder.”
“Oh, Margaret,” Sally whispers.
“I was so naive. Even as he was pressing my head into the floor, I was thinking, ‘This must be the only way. He’s got to get himself to his feet, and then he’ll pull me along with him.’?”
“But he didn’t do that?”
She shakes her head no.
“I knew you’d been separated,” says Sally, “but I didn’t realize how it had happened.”
Sally tries to remember exactly what Archie said to her in the lobby, when she asked where Margaret was. She knows he didn’t say anything about Margaret having been trampled. In fact, he made it seem as if it was likely she was ahead of them, on the stairs.
“We never had the type of marriage you and Robert did,” says Margaret, fingering the hem of the quilt Mrs. Cowley has loaned her. “But Archiewas a good husband, and I suppose I just assumed that I could count on him to take care of me.”
“Of course,” says Sally. “Who wouldn’t have assumed it?”
“How do I look at him every day, from here on out? Knowing what he did?”
Sally can’t stop thinking about her conversation with Thomas Ritchie. He would paint every man in that theater as a hero if he could. “Something tells me you are not the only woman in this city asking yourself that question.”
Margaret snorts. “You’re probably right.”
From downstairs, Mrs. Cowley calls up and asks Sally if she’ll check on Mr. Scott.
“You’ve become quite the Daughter of Charity,” says Margaret. “I never would have guessed.”
“I am full of surprises, it turns out,” says Sally brightly. But then she turns serious. “You’ll get through this, Margaret. I know you will.”
