“Oh, I thought you knew him.”
“Well, yes, I mean, we were introduced the night of the fire. But I don’t have the means of contacting his family.”
“That’s funny.”
Sally is confused by the comment, and her face must show it.
“I just mean, I assumed you and he were attached.”
Sally is startled. “Oh, no. Not at all.”
“Are you attached to anyone?”
She tries to read his tone. In another lifetime, she might have interpreted it as flirtatious.
Usually, this is when Sally would tell him about Robert—that she was married, that her husband died three years ago, and that, no, they did not have children. But something stops her from offering Elliott the same tired story. Instead, she just shakes her head ever so slightly and whispers, “I am not.”
“Well, good,” he says. “I am very glad for it,” and Sally allows herself an uncomfortable laugh.
The carriage slows as it approaches the theater green, and as much as Sally would like to look away, she can’t quite manage it. The ruins appear much the same as they did this morning, only now even more people are picking through the rubble. The carriage windows have begun to fog over, and when she squints, she can almost see the building still standing—the brick facade, theoeil-de-boeufwindow, the pair of doors that opened into the lobby.
When Elliott speaks, the spell is broken. “Mrs. Cowley tells me you jumped from a third-floor window.”
“It’s true.”
“And you look hardly the worse for wear.”
She thinks he means the statement as a compliment, but something about his tone makes her uncomfortable, particularly when so many women jumped from the same window and wound up dead or seriously injured. “A lot of people weren’t so lucky,” she says.
“I know, but wouldn’t you say that most people got out?”
“What?” says Sally disbelievingly.
“I mean, the theater holds six hundred people, maybe more. And I’m hearing they think less than a hundred people perished.”
“What is it you’re saying, exactly?”
“Just that the odds are good on a person making it out in one piece.”
“Are we speaking of one person in particular?” says Sally. “Because, assomeone who was sitting in a third-floor balcony, I must say it felt like the ‘odds’ were not in my favor.”
His face reddens, and she wonders if she’s overstepped.
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” he says, and she can hear the pitch of his voice rising. “Everyone I’m talking to, they say their bondsmen made it out. Freedmen, too. Henry Gordon, over at the Virginia Tobacco Company, was in the gallery. He got out fine. Solomon Freeman at the armory. Hector Lucas, down at the wharf. All of them, they said they just took the stairs. Said it was like they were filing out of church on Sunday.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing this afternoon?” she asks. “Going ’round to all of these people and asking after Cecily?”
Elliott swipes at the fogged-over window with the side of his hand. “I had to do something.”
Sally doesn’t know what to make of this man. A moment ago, she was ready to write him off entirely, but now she feelsalmostsorry for him. “Do you think it’s possible—”
Elliott interrupts her. “If you’re going to ask whether I think she went back inside to find Maria, the answer is no.”
That was what Sally was going to ask, but she can admit it doesn’t make much sense. By the time Cecily made it out of the gallery and around to the front of the building, the lobby would have been an inferno.
“It’s not just the timing that doesn’t work out,” says Elliott. “It’s that I’ve never known a slave to lay down his life for his master.”
“It happens, surely,” says Sally.
