A feeling of utter relief washes over Jack. “He’s not?”
Anderson laughs. “No.”
For a few moments, they both stand there, staring at Professor Girardin’s house. The windows are aglow.
“Is this where you were headed?” Anderson asks.
Jack nods. “It’s Girardin’s place. I stayed with him for a while, before I got the job with Placide and Green.”
At their Thursday rehearsal, Girardin had told Jack that he didn’t plan to stay for the pantomime, and it reassures Jack to know that his friend was home long before the fire broke out.
“Are you going inside?” Anderson asks.
“I was planning to.”
“To tell him what happened?”
“I’ve got to tell somebody,” says Jack.
“You think he won’t tell you to cover your tracks? To do what Placide says?”
“He’s a good man.”
“He’s a realist.”
“You barely know him.”
“I know he could have stayed in France and died alongside all his royalist friends. But he snuck out of the country, first chance he got.”
Jack has never thought of Girardin’s escape in that light. To him, it always seemed heroic. Giving up home and country for his beliefs. “That’s not true,” he says with a firm shake of his head.
“Just walk with me a minute,” says Anderson. “You don’t have to go back to the tavern, but I’m going to freeze to death out here without a coat.”
Jack hesitates.
“Oh, come on. You’re not making a deal with the devil. You’re just walking.”
Jack glances back at Girardin’s house, then allows himself to be led away.
“Do you know why the Globe burned?” Anderson asks when they are on H Street and closing in on the theater green.
“You mean in London?”
“Right.”
Jack lets out an exhausted sigh. “I have no idea.”
“I’ll tell you. The actors shot a bloody cannon into a thatched roof in the middle of a performance ofHenry VIII.”
Jack doesn’t know what he was expecting Anderson to say, but it wasn’t that.
“Ask me who did it.”
Jack acquiesces. “Who?”
“No idea,” says Anderson, and he slaps Jack on the back. “It happened two hundred years ago.”
“Very funny.”
