“While you decide,” says Sally, “will you help us get this man over the ledge?”
The woman nods and takes hold of Mr. Scott’s belt, and together the three of them hoist him off the floor.
“Feet first, ladies,” Margaret reminds them as she edges toward the window, then places his feet on the sill. He still wears his waistcoat and it snags on the splinters of wood and pieces of broken glass. Sally can’t waste time with any of it; the roof above their heads is going to go at any second. She gives him a good shove and watches him disappear.
“Does the woman on the floor have a life pulse?” she asks the woman with the birthmark who refuses to jump.
“I don’t know,” she stutters, then crouches down beside her to check for one. “I don’t think so.”
“All right. In that case, you’re next,” Sally says to her sister-in-law.
Around them, hot embers fall like rain. Margaret flinches. “What about you?”
“You have five children,” Sally says, looking her friend straight in the eye. “I have none.”
Margaret doesn’t argue. She squeezes Sally’s arm, then uses it for support as she climbs up onto the windowsill. Once her feet are on the ledge, she turns to her friend. “Robert would be proud of you, Sal,” she says, then she steps into the thin December air.
Sally didn’t watch Mr. Scott plummet to the ground, but she does watch Margaret jump. The skirt of her dress billows up above her head, then her legs buckle when she hits the ground. Sally can’t afford to wait long enough to see if she moves.
She turns to face the only woman who remains. The roar of the fire over their heads is so loud she has to yell to be heard. “If you don’t jump now, I will.”
“I can’t.”
A large piece of red-hot timber crashes down on the body of the woman that lies beside them, and Sally decides she’s done enough pleading and cajoling.
She climbs up onto the windowsill and looks out at the green. The ground is such a long way down. She is afraid of landing on Margaret or Mr. Scott or any one of the number of people who lie below, so she clutches the sill and lowers her body against the side of the building. The brick facade scrapes the soft underside of her arms as she hangs there in the hallowed space between life and death. Finally, there is nothing else to do but let go.
GILBERT
When Gilbert comes to, Dr.McCaw’s sister is screaming and pointing at the window, or more precisely, at a spot a few feet beneath the window, where McCaw dangles headfirst, a dozen feet above the growing crowd. Gilbert squeezes his eyes shut and then opens them again, trying to figure out what he is really looking at. McCaw’s coat is on fire, and all Gilbert can assume is that he must have jumped from the window in a hurry. One of his gaiters looks like it’s been caught on a piece of metal that protrudes from the building’s brick exterior, and now he squirms like a fish on a hook, trying to free himself. Gilbert sits up as fast as he dares, no time to check for his own injuries, and grabs the ladder, which he repositions against the building. In the time it takes for him to climb the rungs, the fire has spread across McCaw’s back, but there is nothing to be done—no way of putting it out—until Gilbert has got the man to the ground.
Gilbert feels his pockets for his folding knife, and when he has it in hand, he opens the knife with his teeth and brings the blade down on the soft leather that covers McCaw’s boot. He slides the blade back and forth, once and then twice, cutting a deep enough gash in the gaiter to release it from the metal obtrusion. McCaw is free and then he is falling and then he is perfectly still on the ground below. Gilbert scrambles back down the ladder, leaping the last four rungs. McCaw’s sister is hysterical and the crowd that has gathered around the ladder murmurs furiously, but no one rushes to the doctor’s aid, so Gilbert removes his own coat and throws it across the doctor’s broad back, until the last of the flames are extinguished. The man lies there, smoking like a ham, in the wet grass.
Gilbert inspects McCaw’s injuries. One of his legs is all torn up, and until his blackened coat can be removed, there will be no way to gauge the severity of his burns. The doctor’s breaths come in short, rapid blasts, which Gilbert watches collect in the night air. When Gilbert bends close to McCaw’s face, he hears him whisper, “Will nobody save me?”
“What do you think I’m doing, Mister Doctor?”
Gilbert gets no reply.
“Should we move him?” asks McCaw’s sister, but her teeth are chattering so hard in her head, she can hardly get out the whole question.
Gilbert is tempted to tell her she is on her own, that his one job was to find Louisa Mayo and bring her home and that he’s wasted too many precious minutes already. But then it occurs to him that maybe Louisa is alive, on the other side of the green, because some man like Gilbert is working to save the lives of people he doesn’t know. “I’m going to lift him,” he finally says.
Gilbert knows the Baptist meetinghouse best, and after he’s stood McCaw up and folded his body across his back, he staggers off in the direction of the clapboard building. Pastor Courtney locked the church up tight after the evening’s prayer meeting, but Gilbert can only assume that the good man threw the doors wide open when he realized the apocalypse had finally arrived.
CECILY
Cecily has yet to findMaria, and if she can’t find her soon, she’ll be forced to return to the Price place and wake the girl’s parents. She dreads the thought.
Maybe, Cecily tells herself, Maria will have beaten her there. If she is like the other girls and women Cecily has seen running around the green, Maria will arrive at the house coatless and maybe even shoeless, her dress filthy and torn to pieces. Cecily pictures Mrs. Price meeting her on the porch and ushering her inside the house. The lady of the house will wake Rosie and Constance; she’ll order Rosie to stoke the fire and boil water for a bath, and when Maria is all cleaned up and in a freshly laundered shift, Constance will tuck a bed warmer between her sheets.
The commotion will likely reach Cecily’s own parents in the quarters, and Cecily hopes they won’t assume the worst when they see that Maria has arrived home alone. If Della approaches the main house and asks after her daughter, Maria won’t even know to tell her that everyone from the gallery made it out just fine.
This fantasy has captured Cecily’s attention so completely that she nearly runs right into Maria’s father and brother as they make their way around the theater. Both of them are too busy screaming Maria’s name to have noticed her, and as soon as Cecily hears Elliott’s voice, she takes several steps backward, without even realizing what she’s done.
She moves toward a group of dull-eyed men who are watching the theater burn like it is a hearth fire that needs to be tended to before they can go safely to bed. With them as a buffer, she can spy on Elliott and his father without fear of being seen.
Elliott’s voice grows more panicked, and his father runs between the same piles of bodies Cecily has so recently checked. She should step forward, tell him not to bother, but something stops her.
