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"My mother's got a piece of property, Seven Islands, that my father intended for one of us girls."
"Where is it?"
"Halifax County. Just across the river from Red Hill."
"Wouldn't you be lonely, out there all by yourself?"
Sally doesn't have a good answer to that question. Maybe Margaret doesn't realize that she always feels lonely, even when she is surrounded by people, even on a night like tonight. Especially on a night like tonight. "I'd have Lettie and Judith. And Andy."
"Sally Campbell," says Margaret, as if she is scolding one of her children. "Your slaves do not count."
Behind them, Tom Marshall says something that puts the rest of the men in stitches.
Sally lowers her voice. "What choice do I have, Margaret?" It took her stepfather the better part of a year to unravel Robert's finances and to convince a judge that, with no heirs, Sally deserved more than the dower's share of her husband's estate. He won her the household furniture, the livestock, Robert's meager savings, and the couple's slaves, which didn't feel like much of a victory considering Sally had been the one to bring them to the marriage in the first place.
Margaret presses her lips together and casts her eyes about the theater, as if she is looking for a good distraction. She points at the box directly across from theirs. "That's the governor and his wife."
"The man with the big stock buckle?" Sally doesn't recognize him, but then again, she hasn't been to Richmond since he took office. "He's handsome."
"Oh, I don't know—you don't think his forehead's a little high?"
Sally cocks an eyebrow in her sister-in-law's direction. "Getting quite particular in your old age?" Archie, who is in his early fifties, is short and stout with a receding hairline and three chins where there was once only one. Sally thought Archie attractive when they first met, more than a decade ago, but the last few years have not been kind to him. She can only assume that Margaret, who is twenty years younger than him and quite comely, has noticed.
A small boy sits between the governor and his wife. "They have just the one child?" she asks Margaret.
"God, no. Seven or eight, I think. But they're all his from his first marriage."
Sally and Robert had wanted children. Sally, in fact, had been desperate for them. But each month, her courses had come like clockwork.
Her older sisters promised that if she swallowed three spoonfuls of honey each night, right before bed, she'd be pregnant in no time. But a year passed, and nothing happened. Soon, Sally was poring over Buchan's Domestic Medicine and Culpeper's Complete Herbal and English Physician and writing away to apothecaries in Philadelphia and even London for the herbs and extracts they prescribed. Over the next several years, she consumed dozens of tonics and teas, before eventually submitting to her physician, who prescribed bloodletting and blistering. The day she came home with a mercury douche, Robert finally intervened. "Perhaps it is enough for us to love each other, just as we are."
He had been right, of course. Loving Robert was more than enough, and those last years before he died, when she abandoned all of the treatments and forced herself to embrace the life she had, as opposed to the life she wanted, were some of their happiest together.
Still, sometimes when Sally sees a family, like the one in front of her, she is filled with an anguish so intense it threatens to overwhelm her. She watches the governor ruffle the boy's hair, sees the governor's wife smile at the pair contentedly, and it is all she can do to remind herself that a child—even Robert's child—would not have made his loss any easier to bear.
Excerpted from The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland. Copyright © 2023 by Rachel Beanland. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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