What Cecily hates the most about the whippings is the way Master Price calls everyone up from the quarters and makes them watch. She imagines her parents, Moses, and even her little sisters being forced to stand by as he fillets the flesh on her back, and before she realizes it, she has started to heave.
If the whipping were the worst of it, that’d be one thing. But Cecily’s got Elliott to worry about, too. He looked half-crazed as he circled the theater, screaming her name, and she knows he’ll be waiting to exact his own special kind of revenge once the dust has settled.
The worst punishment of all—far worse than whatever Master Price and Elliott can mete out—will be seeing the looks on her parents’ faces when they learn that Cecily let them believe she was dead. Her mother knows how miserable Elliott has made her and for how long, so maybe—just maybe—she’ll understand. But her father, Cecil, who has beendeliberately shielded from Elliott’s misconduct, will be doubly hurt when he realizes the what and why of her disappearance.
Is it too late to reverse course? Surely not. All Cecily needs to do is return to the green and find Elliott and his father. When they ask her where she’s been, she can make up some excuse about how she was looking for Maria at the homes of some of Maria’s friends. They’ll believe her. Why wouldn’t they, when she’s standing right there in front of them, begging to be taken home?
Home is such a tantalizing prospect, particularly now. Her family lives down in the quarters, in a one-room cabin set up on blocks. A fireplace stretches the length of one wall, and in the winter they’ve got to keep the fire going all night to combat the cold that seeps in through the floor. The room is sparsely furnished; there’s a small table and a couple of straight-backed chairs, a stool, a cradle, and a bed that her papa made for her mama when Master Price allowed him the use of some scrap lumber and a cord of rope. All the children sleep on a pallet on the floor—a knot of arms and legs that Cecily complained about right up until the moment Mrs. Price offered her a bed in the sewing room down the hall from Maria’s room.
That pallet is home. But home is also the cellar and the smokehouse and all the other dark places she cannot escape, even in her dreams. Home is the thicket of St. John’s wort, where the bones of her baby rest in a shallow grave. And soon, home will be Elliott and Lavinia’s house, on the other side of town, where she is unlikely to be allowed to see her parents or her siblings from one year to the next.
She touches the bump on her forehead. Even all these hours later, it still throbs.
No, she decides. She cannot turn herself over to Elliott and his father.
It is that hazy hour between people’s first and second sleeps, when it wouldn’t be unusual—on an ordinary night—to see a candle or even a lamp burning in a window. But tonight, the houses Cecily passes are lit up like stars. Smoke pours from the chimneys, and the houses’ curtains have been thrown open so that their occupants can better watch the street.
When a man shouts at Cecily from his stoop, asking what news she has of the fire, she thinks she is done for, and it is all she can do to say “It’s bad” as casually as she can. She worries he won’t be satisfied with that answer, so she volunteers a little extra information—tells him how the roof cavedin. She says it like she’s just gossiping, like she could stand there all night shooting the breeze, but the trick is her feet never actually stop moving, and when she has passed the house, she picks up her pace.
At the rate she is going, Cecily will be at the edge of town in a matter of minutes. But she has no plan as to what she’ll do then. She doesn’t actually know where she’s going, doesn’t understand the first thing about how to get from here to anywhere. She has only ever been allowed to walk to church and the shops on E Street. Sometimes, Mrs. Price sends her to the mill with a message or a midday meal for Master Price, and then, of course, there are the nights Maria—desperate for a chaperone—drags her out to the theater or a dance. With such limited knowledge, Cecily can barely imagine what lies on the other side of Prior’s Gardens, much less the other side of the Potomac.
The wind whips through Cecily’s thin dress, and she hugs her shawl tight around her shoulders. All night she’s been so scared that she has barely felt the cold. But now it gnaws at her face and hands and feet.
The fire presented Cecily with an opportunity, but now she needs a real plan. Immediately, she needs a place to hide, somewhere warm where she can rest. Eventually, she’ll need food, and if she is to travel north at this time of year, warm clothes and a good pair of boots. But what she needs, more than anything, is a person she can trust. And there is—unfortunately—nobody Cecily trusts like her own mother.
SALLY
As Sally hastens toward thetheater to see what became of Mr. Scott, she reminds herself that she doesn’t owe him anything. He was barely civil when they met in the box before the show, and if he is dead, there is nothing for it.
She thinks that, if anything, it’s the shoving him out the window that makes her feel at least partially responsible for his welfare, but as she crosses the green, she reminds herself that he would most certainly have died if she and Margaret had left him in that third-floor hallway.
Sally returns to the spot where she presumes Mr. Scott landed and spies his crumpled form right away. His head rests in the lap of a young girl, who wears a blank gaze. It is an indecent sort of posture—on both their parts—but it isn’t until Sally sees that the girl’s neck has snapped and that Mr. Scott’s head is, in fact, resting on her posterior that she lets out a small yelp. She squeezes her eyes shut, then opens them again, refusing to look in the direction of the girl’s frozen face. Instead, she focuses on Mr. Scott, whom she also assumes is dead. His eyes are closed, his skin unnaturally pale. Even when she gets close, she can’t detect the rise and fall of his chest.
She speaks to him in as loud a voice as she can manage. “Mr. Scott? Can you hear me?”
Miraculously, he mumbles something, as if he is a drunk slowly coming to.
“Can you stand?” she asks, reaching for one of his arms. When she grabs it, in a bid to encourage him to get up, he screams in pain.
The building has started to fall in on itself. Sally looks up at the windows on the second and third floors, which were so recently crowded with people fighting for air. Now they are empty, engulfed in flames. “You can’t stay here.”
She tries Mr. Scott’s other arm, and he allows her to pull him to his feet. “Do you think you can walk?” she asks, and he doesn’t say no.
He is more substantial than she assumed him to be when they first met, and when he leans on her, she sways under his weight. She places a hand on his back, but immediately retracts it when she realizes his shirt is soaked with blood. Sally thinks about stopping, trying to find the source of the bleeding. But she wonders what good it will do. It isn’t as if she can stitch him back together in the middle of the green. No, she decides, it is better to keep him upright and moving, so she replaces her hand and leads him, ever so slowly, in the direction of Mrs. Cowley’s.
By the time they arrive at the house, Sally’s shoulders ache, and she cannot feel her feet. She pushes open Mrs. Cowley’s front door without knocking, and calls to her as she helps Mr. Scott up the steps and over the threshold. “Do you have room for one more?”
Mrs. Cowley meets her in the entryway with a lamp. “He’s bleeding?”
“It’s his back. I think.”
Since Sally left, the parlor has filled with people. “We’ll just put him here in the hall,” says Mrs. Cowley as she kicks a thick braided rug out of the way. “Lay him down near the stairs, and he won’t be in the way of the door.”
Mr. Scott is all too willing to return to recumbency, but Sally forces him to remain seated so she and Mrs. Cowley can peel off his jacket and waistcoat and eventually his shirt. The watch piece, which Sally remembers him studying so intently in the box, falls from his pocket, clinks against the floor, and springs open. She stoops to pick it up and is surprised to find that it is not a watch at all but afausse montre. Where a watch face should be, there is instead a miniature of an attractive woman with dark hair and mirthful eyes. Opposite the miniature, under a plate of glass, is a lock of hair, which has been artfully arranged to form the lettersFS. The piece is exquisite, and not knowing what else to do with it, Sally tucks it into her own pocket for safekeeping.
Once Mr. Scott is disrobed, it is easier for Sally to assess his injuries. “It’s his lower back,” she tells Mrs. Cowley as she inspects the wound. “A big gash. Maybe five or six inches.” All she can figure is that he was cut when she and Margaret heaved him up and over the windowsill.
Mrs. Cowley hands Sally the lamp, then goes to fetch a wet rag with which to clean the wound. Once she can clearly see the gash, she inserts herfingers beneath the folds of his skin and offers an official diagnosis. “Whatever it was that snagged him very narrowly missed his kidney.”
