Sally is all for a quick burial, but she doesn’t see how John Gamble will get all the victims identified by tomorrow morning, much less in the ground. Some of them, like the girl in Mrs. Cowley’s upstairs bedroom, might not even be dead by then.
There is a commotion behind them, and everyone, including the woman in the nun’s habit, turns to watch the doors of the Hall of Delegates swing open. Dozens of men stream past them, clapping each other on the back and talking over each other like they’ve just left a cockfight and not an emergency legislative session. “What in the world were they doing in there?” Sally asks Marshall, but her audience with him has ended.
“Passing a resolution,” says the woman in the habit. “But a lot of good it will do my Nancy.”
Sally turns to look at her. “What’s the resolution for?”
“How did they put it? I think they called it an expression of their sorrow at the loss of the governor, and ‘other worthy and meritorious citizens.’?”
Not one of the men in the crowd looks half as sorrowful as the woman sitting before her, which makes her wonder how a resolution written by women might have read.
CECILY
The sound of the boathousedoor opening wakes Cecily with a start.
She has no idea how long she’s been sleeping, just that it is daylight and she can feel the warm rays of the afternoon sun on the sailcloth that envelops her.
The only person who knows Cecily is here is her mother, and if it is her, Cecily feels sure she will announce herself right away.
She holds her breath.
Nothing.
The door closes, and still Della has not said a word.
At first, this silence confuses Cecily, but after several long seconds pass, she begins to panic. Something isn’t right.
“Cecily?” comes a small voice. Cecily closes her eyes, thinks she might die right there where she lays. It’s her little brother.
She sits up quickly in the canoe. “Moses,” she says, “what are you doing here?”
Her brother scrambles backward, trips over the push poles in the middle of the floor, and lands on his rear.
“Shhh,” says Cecily as she frees herself from her canvas cocoon and climbs out of the canoe. “You trying to let everyone this side of the river know I’m hiding in here?”
She helps him to his feet.
Moses looks at her in disbelief. “You’re alive?”
“How’d you know?”
“I didn’t. I mean, I thought I did. But Mama said I was dreaming.”
“You saw me in the cabin last night?”
He nods. “I know I wasn’t meant to.”
So much for the hours she’d spent standing there in the cold, behind her parents’ cabin, waiting on her brother and sisters to fall asleep. “You haven’t told nobody, have you?”
He shakes his head. “Just Mama.”
“What’d she say?”
“That she didn’t need me giving her any extra grief at a time like this.”
It sounds like something Della would say, especially if she was trying to put him off the track. “So, she didn’t tell you to come?”
Moses laughs. “No way. She’d kill me dead if she knew I was here.”
