Now Placide’s voice travels up the back stairs and down the narrow hallway. “All of you! I want you downstairs. At once!” He’s as loud as a rooster greeting the dawn, but no one stirs, with the exception of Anderson, who kicks Jack in the ribs and says, “Get up.”
“Huh?” says Jack, who has decided it’s worth pretending to be asleep.
“Placide’s here. Go wake everyone.”
While Anderson relieves himself, Jack stumbles down the hall, knocking on doors. “Placide’s here. He wants us downstairs.”
“They’re not listening to me,” Jack reports to Anderson when he returns to the room a few minutes later.
“Cocksuckers!” Anderson yells down the hall. “If you’d like to avoid the gallows, might I suggest listening to young Master Gibson and getting your ugly arses downstairs? You don’t want Placide to come up here.”
Now Jack can hear the sounds of the actors’ feet hitting the floor, chamber pots being dragged out from under beds, suspenders snapping into place.
Jack slips on his boots and follows Anderson downstairs, where Placide is waiting for them.
He’s a different man from the one Jack saw the previous evening. Lydia has accompanied him, and when Jack goes to greet her, she whispers to him, “He got out of bed all by himself today.” He smiles, not so much at what she’s said but at the fact that there now exists a joke that only the two of them understand.
Anderson flags down a barmaid, who brings the men breakfast—eggs and bacon, with potatoes, and coffee to wash everything down.
The barmaid is back and forth between the back room and the kitchen, until Placide gets annoyed and asks her to give them five minutes alone. “Ritchie’s arriving soon,” he says when she is gone, “so we don’t have much time.”
Jack takes a seat next to Lydia, who is staring at an untouched cup of coffee in front of her. He doesn’t know what possesses him, but he reaches for her hand, which rests in her lap, and gives it a light squeeze. She seems surprised—how could she not be?—but also maybe appreciative of the gesture. After all, she is mourning her friend. As Jack watches the color rise in her cheeks, he wonders what it must be like to be Placide’s daughter. Wherever she goes, for the rest of her life, she will not want for roles—not with his last name. But will she want for a father who is honest and kind, who cares more about doing right by others than about saving his own skin? Jack’s father could never have helped him establish a career on the stage, but he was an honorable man, and Jack is beginning to see that that counts for more than he ever realized.
Placide rehashes the conversation he had with Ritchie at the boardinghouse, then asks Anderson to tell everyone what happened at the capitol. All of the actors, with the possible exception of Perry and West, seemimpressed that Anderson was able to seed the slave revolt story so effectively, and they begin whooping with delight when Twaits reports that the slave patrol has been out all night, arresting any Negro man—free or enslaved—who looks even vaguely suspicious. “The birdcage is brimming with them,” Twaits says. “And Kemp wants me to go down there this morning to identify the men I saw out back.”
Already Jack regrets offering up Twaits as a witness. The success of the slave revolt story now hinges, in large part, on his testimony, and in the same way that the role of the no-good commodore was the right fit for his talents, this one also suits him exceedingly well.
“What will they do to those men?” Jack asks him. “Once you’ve identified them?”
“That’s up to them,” says Twaits with a shrug of indifference, as if it hasn’t occurred to him to care.
“Ritchie is going to want to talk to you first,” Placide warns Twaits. “Get that out of the way, and then you can head down to the jail.”
Twaits nods in agreement before shoving a whole hard-boiled egg into his mouth.
“Now, for the rest of you, remember—there will be no talk of chandeliers or broken pulleys or flaming backdrops,” says Placide. “You didn’t see anything unusual backstage, at least not until Twaits alerted us to the fire out back.”
“And then what did we do?” asks Young.
“Twaits and Perry tried to put it out, but it had already spread to the roof. Young, you ran to warn the others.”
Young seems to like that.
“What if he asks us about the Negroes?” says Burke.
“Just tell him that Twaits saw about a half dozen of them, and that they were angry and brandishing torches.”
“Is a half dozen enough?” asks Twaits.
“Good question,” says Placide. “A dozen?”
The only sound is the scratching of heads.
“Does that seem about right?” Placide asks the room.
Young yawns. “Seems good to me.”
“Fine. About a dozen Negroes. With torches.”
