Far away, down by the water, an explosion sends shafts of fire into the air like red spears, which then fall back into the boiling cauldron of smoke and flame. This all happens behind his father, the fiery backdrop to his speeches. He doesn’t turn to see.

His father says that in January, the New Theater in Vicksburg burned. He was supposed to be playing Iago. “I begin to think God doesn’t care for Shakespeare,” Edwin’s father says. He passes a hand over his flattened nose.

He has his usual rapt audience. The others have only just figured out that the oddly dressed man before them is the famous, the infamous Junius Booth. They may be losing their homes and all their worldly goods, but what a story they will have to tell.

Father returns to extolling the firefighters. “Most satisfying thing I’ve ever done,” he says, “fighting in a battle so worthy. Against so implacable a foe. If I didn’t have my son here to watch out for, I’d be down there right now, surrounded by comrades in arms. A man has so few chances to prove his mettle. Don’t ever let one pass you by, Ned.” Ripples of flame behind him, the low black sky above. The devil never had a better setting.

A skinny old woman stands next to Edwin. She has a drooping eye, a twisted foot, and a walking stick. Edwin thinks that she has already proved her mettle, just by making the climb here. She taps his shoulder with her stick, then thrusts it upwards. “Maybe God is not such a philistine, after all,” she says. The thick, dark clouds above them are not, as he’d thought, entirely smoke and ash. It begins to rain, lightly at first, then with gusto. Everyone moves to the shelter of the trees. They are wet; they are smiling; they are thanking God for His mercy. The wind has shifted and over the slow minutes, the red horizon vanishes, either drowned or hidden by clouds. Lightning appears as arrows in the sky.

The branches are a porous roof. Edwin shakes the water from his hair like a dog, Hamlet’s cape plastered wetly onto his shoulders. “ ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will,’ ” he tells the woman.

His father regards him amiably. “You’re soaked through, Ned. We really should get you in front of a fire.”

—

By the time the rain comes, the fire has lasted five hours. Much of Albany has been destroyed. There are ten fatalities, many more injured by flame or smoke inhalation. Six hundred buildings are burned, businesses and ships, the whole Hudson River waterfront reduced to cinders. But the firefighters have more than repaid Father for his admiration. The Eagle Hotel is gone, but Father’s trunks have been saved. Rumors that a careless chambermaid started the whole conflagration are never proved.