Initially, Rosalie is not alarmed. The fire and the crowds seem to be moving away from the house. She still thinks of war as something tidy enough to happen on prearranged battlefields, the women left out of it, their only role to nurse the wounded and mourn the dead.

She wonders a little about John. He seems exhilarated. Is he truly only an observer? He has always had this need to be in the story. And she has no doubt that agents of the Confederacy are working the mob, stoking the rage, whispering a word in someone’s ear, handing someone an axe. She tries to remember how Dickens described the mob in A Tale of Two Cities—something about a howling universe. Surely John, despite his sympathies, would never be part of that?

Edwin goes upstairs to sit with Adam. Rosalie begins a letter to Asia. “We are all well here,” the letter begins, “though suffering considerably from the heat.”

—

By eleven-thirty a.m., the draft has been suspended. This has no impact on the rioters. John’s periodic reports grow more alarming. They’ve torched the Eighth District Office. They’re destroying the Lexington Avenue homes of wealthy Republicans, smashing their windows, chopping up their sofas and paintings, emptying their pantries. Looting stores, destroying telegraph lines. A policeman was stripped of his clothing and murdered with paving stones.

Five thousand frenzied rioters are right now swarming First Avenue, armed with pistols and hatchets. They’re looking for more policemen. They’re looking for rich men. They’re looking for abolitionists. They’re looking for Negroes. They attack the first two black men they find—a man selling fruit from a cart and a little nine-year-old boy. By suppertime, the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue has been sacked, the beds, the children’s clothes, carpets, and desks carried off and the building now nothing but embers. The police presence held out just long enough to get the more than two hundred children to safety.

The smoke has thickened. “We should leave,” Rosalie says. She’s been thinking this for the last couple of hours, waiting for someone else to say it. She’s worried about the fires, worried about the difficulties of moving Adam in a hurry should it come to that. Better to go too early than leave it too late. Surely Edwin has friends in the country who would welcome them.

John says that the railways and the ferry slips have all been destroyed. No one is working. “There’s no one to take us,” he says. “Besides, it’s too dangerous to go out.”

“Stay home tonight,” Mother tells John and he complies. The decision is an easy one. Another storm has moved in.

—