“I am doubtful.”
“I’m not saying it will be easy. But wasn’t it you who just told me you wanted to put away the laudanum? To feel what it was like to be alive?”
“Did I?” asks Margaret, closing one eye. “That was a terrible idea.”
“I don’t think so,” says Sally, with a smile. She plants a kiss in the middle of Margaret’s forehead, which is mercifully cool. “In fact, I think it may be the best idea you’ve ever had.”
JACK
Jack knocks on the doorof the snug, and finds Ritchie inside, packing up his things.
“Are the interviews over?”
Ritchie lets slip an exhausted sigh. “Mr. Gibson, I think you know as well as I that they were over before they began.”
Jack watches him slide his notebook into a satchel.
“I wondered if I might speak with you, sir?”
Ritchie motions for Jack to take a seat across from him. “Shall I close the door?”
Jack nods. When Ritchie returns to his seat, they sit there for several seconds, staring at each other.
“You were the one who wanted to speak with me,” Ritchie reminds him as he moves to clean his spectacles.
“Yes,” says Jack, but he’s too afraid to go any further. “What I’m about to say, you can’t tell the company you got it from me.”
Ritchie returns the spectacles to his face without cleaning them. “Fine,” he says.
“I’d like to retract the statement I gave you this morning.”
Ritchie holds up a finger—as if to tell Jack to wait—then retrieves his notebook and a pencil from his satchel. When he has pressed the notebook open and wet the pencil with the tip of his tongue, he says, “Please continue.”
Jack says the biggest, most important thing first—just in case he loses his nerve later. “It wasn’t a slave revolt that started the fire.”
“I’ve known that for some time.”
“Was it the Skelton article that gave it away?”
Ritchie seems charmed by his question. “For a bunch of actors, none of your testimonies were particularly convincing.”
“I’m not an actor,” says Jack. “And at this rate, I’ll never be one.”
“Do you mind if we start at the beginning?” Ritchie asks.
Jack nods.
“You are, as I presumed, the boy Skelton references in his article?”
“I am.”
“And am I to assume that Skelton got most of the details right?”
“Most of them, yes.”
“So, it was you who raised the chandelier?”
Jack nods again.
