“Where’s justice for my Mary?” one man yells from the gallery, and another man follows suit. “My Jane was with child!”
The crowd is in an uproar now, everyone relieved to have found someone to blame for the fire and its resulting destruction, and Jack feels a paralyzing sense of guilt. What has he done, allowing this lie to take root and grow?
Jack has to get out of this room. He tries, again, to slip through the venomous crowd and out into the rotunda, but this time it is Ritchie’s voice, loud as a gong, that stops him. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Jack turns around slowly, sure Ritchie is about to rip into him, but when he is facing the dais, he realizes that Ritchie is addressing the room.“How is any of this helping?” the newly nominated head of the inquest committee continues when the crowd has quieted.
Jack takes a series of small side steps, moving incrementally closer to the door.
“Who here knows anything about this slave revolt?” Ritchie asks the crowd.
“We all do,” says the man with the big beard, and there is general agreement from the people around him.
“Yes, but did any of you actually witness a Negro—free or enslaved—light the theater on fire?”
A low murmur makes its way around the room like a wave, but no one says anything.
“None of you?” Ritchie asks, surprised.
The room is quiet.
“So, who is the source of the information?”
Jack knows, without needing to look up, that the men in the back of the room are searching the crowd for Anderson’s broad back and loose curls. “Where’s that man with the kid?” he hears one of them say, but by then Jack is out the door and skidding across the rotunda, where he finds Anderson waiting for him.
SALLY
Sally is on her wayback to Mrs. Cowley’s, ruminating on what Tom Marshall has just told her, when she hears someone calling her name.
She turns to find Maria Price’s brother waving at her from the interior of a five-glass landau drawn by two horses.
“Mr. Price,” she says as she picks her way slowly across the rutted road.
“Are you headed back to Mrs. Cowley’s?” he asks through the open window.
“I am.”
“Let me give you a ride.”
The carriage is a beautiful contraption—all sleek lines and gracious curves—and he looks at ease in it. More comfortable than he’s looked at any point since his sister’s arrival at Mrs. Cowley’s.
“Are you sure it’s not too much trouble?” she asks. “I really can walk.”
He is already out of the carriage and offering her his hand. “I insist.”
When she is inside the cab and seated across from him, he places a bearskin blanket across her lap. The press of the heavy pelt on her tired limbs feels like heaven, and after Elliott gives word to the coachman and the carriage begins to move, she thinks she might very well fall asleep, right here, with him staring at her.
“You’ve got to be exhausted,” he says.
“I am.”
“Where are you coming from?”
“The Marshall residence.”
“You know the chief justice?”
“I do, but I was there to see his son, Tom. I’m trying to work out the identity of the man you and Mr. Campbell took upstairs.”
