An Acquaintance with Darkness - Ann Rinaldi [73]
Fourth rung. He promised that he'd brought live bum victims back from the accident.
Fifth rung. I believe Robert. He wouldn't lie to me. Johnny lied to me. Not Robert.
I was level with the window now. I stopped and looked in.
"Well?" Myra was calling up from below. "Well?"
"Tell us," the other girls were saying, "tell us what you see."
The faces were horribly burned. You could scarcely make out the features. The hair was singed. One man had an ear missing. Their cheeks were sunken in, like Abraham Lincoln's must have been when he got to New York City after having been dragged around for a week. Their bodies were wound in sheets. And they lay there as if they were sleeping.
I felt sick. It seemed as if the ladder swayed. But Jason was holding it steady.
"Why would I bring back dead people, Emily?" I heard Robert asking.
Oh, Robert! A sob formed inside me, a great heaving sob.
I wanted to die. I wanted to be lying on that table instead of those men. "No!" I screamed. "No, Robert, no!"
"Get down, Emily." Myra's voice. Then Jason's urging me down.
Then another sound. A whistle and a cry. "You there! What are you kids doing down there in that courtyard?"
"God's teeth," Jason mumbled. "A guard. You told me they were all elsewhere. My God, if I get caught ... I can't get caught. I can't get in trouble. Or it'll be the end of Annapolis for me."
"Let's get out of here!" Myra cried. "Come on, everybody, he's on the hill above the steps. There's a door over there. And steps to the street. I went that way with my daddy. Come on!" Her voice was hoarse, yelling it.
They ran. "Come on, Emily!" Melanie yelled.
The ladder was unsteady. Nobody was holding it. It jiggled and I nearly fell. But somehow I made it to the second bottom rung and jumped.
The ladder fell crashing to the ground. I ran. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the guard running through the tunnel toward me. I followed the others across the courtyard, through the door in the wall, and up the steps to the street.
20. Along Came a Spider
THERE IS NO FEELING in the world worse than betrayal. I felt cheated, laughed at, shut out of the lives of all around me.
I went home. Maude was there, puttering in the kitchen.
"Well, where were you? Your uncle won't be home this night. I thought I'd just serve leftovers."
"All right," I said, "but I have to go out a little later, on an errand. I'll be home about six." I went to my room. There was so much to do and not enough time.
First I had to decide what I was taking with me and what I was leaving behind. I stood in the center of my blue-and-white room. I wanted to take everything and I wanted to take nothing.
I would take nothing that Uncle Valentine had given me, I decided. Not clothes, books, or even food. I would buy food before I got on the train. I would take nothing from anybody in this house. I would go to Aunt Susie's in Richmond as poor as I'd been when I'd come here.
Except the cat. I'd take Sultana. Because it was as plain as the nose on your face that he couldn't live without me, poor thing. And already he'd been kicked around from pillar to post, worse than a freedman.
Only, first I'd change his name. Sultana was a girl's name and he was a boy. What would I call him then, Sultan? No, it had to be far removed from the name Robert had given him.
No, don't think of Robert.
I threw some things into a portmanteau. Oh, Lordy, I thought, if I go to Richmond I won't be able to finish at Miss Winefred Martin's. And there would go my daddy's money. What would my daddy have said? Miss Muffet had been frightened away. I felt a great sadness cut through me at the thought of Daddy. And another for Mrs. McQuade. "There was one I thought had so much promise," she'd say. "You never can tell." I'd disappoint her. Well. How many people had disappointed me?
I ran around my room throwing things into that portmanteau. All the while I tried out names on Sultana, who