An Acquaintance with Darkness - Ann Rinaldi [41]
"Feed her," he growled, "and let's get out of here."
"I'm not going to feed her. I'm taking her with me. To Uncle Valentine's."
"You can't."
"Why can't I?"
"Because— Look around. This place has been searched. Everything here is evidence."
"Not Puss-in-Boots, Robert. She isn't evidence. I'm taking her."
He sighed. He ran his hand through his hair in distraction. We looked around. He was right. Mrs. Mary's room was a shambles. Pictures had been taken from the walls. The desk in the corner, where she kept her accounts, was in disarray. "One picture had the arms of the state of Virginia," I told Robert. "And it said, 'Sic Semper Tyrannis.'"
"Wonderful," Robert said dryly, "that's what Booth is supposed to have said when he fled across the stage after shooting Lincoln. Let's get out of here, for God's sake."
He hurried me downstairs. I clutched Puss-in-Boots in my arms. Robert locked the back door and put the key back under the flower pot, and we went back across the two yards and out into the street to the carriage.
Only when we were driving off did it all come together for me in my head. "Robert," I said, "if Uncle Valentine had let me come yesterday as I wanted, I would have been able to see Annie. Now she's gone."
He did not answer.
"I'm never going to forgive him for that. I may never see her again."
"You'll see her again."
I stroked the cat in my lap. "And I'm not going to stay with him," I went on as if Robert hadn't spoken. "I just won't. I'm going to find a way to go and live with Aunt Susie in Richmond."
"Well, that would be going from the frying pan into the fire. Richmond is the only place in America probably in a worse state than Washington right now."
"I don't care. I'm not staying with him." Nothing could be worse than Washington right now, I thought. The president was dead. The whole town was in an uproar. People were running through the streets, forming mobs. Detectives were arresting anybody who looked suspicious. Cavalrymen were riding in groups with drawn swords. My best friend had been taken by the police. And Robert had just told me he'd been in the cemetery at midnight and seen a man I knew, a man who'd been a guest at the Surratts', climbing out of a marble vault.
"I thought you told me a person doesn't desert a friend in time of need? What about Annie?" he asked. "You going to run to Richmond when she needs you now?"
"That's why I hate you, Robert," I said.
He sighed. "I know, because I'm not Johnny."
"No," I said, "because you're always right."
"Well, I hope I'm not right about this."
"What?"
"I'm not so sure your uncle is going to let you keep that cat."
12. Miss Winefred Martin's Young Ladies
UNCLE VALENTINE let me keep the cat.
But he made me go back to school. And so it was that I stood in the large carpeted hall outside my classroom in Miss Winefred Martin's School for Young Ladies the very next day, knowing that I had seen too much in these last two weeks to ever feel like one of Miss Winefred Martin's young ladies again.
Mrs. McQuade smiled at me. Her large blue eyes, usually so open to the possibilities of the world around her, looked bleary this day. Black did not become her. She usually wore lavender or yellow. Clothing was her one passion. "Life can be a costume party or a wake, girls," she'd once told us. "I prefer to think of it as a costume party."
"I am so glad you are back, Emily," she whispered. "The girls are very unsettled, what with the assassination. And I must confess, I am myself. This is a most dreadful thing, most dreadful. I never expected to find such chaos in America."
The last four years have been chaos, I thought. Haven't you noticed? Of course, nobody is cutting off anybody's head and the blood isn't running in the streets like it did in France during your revolution. Leastways not in any way you can see yet. In all the time I had known her, Mrs. McQuade had