“Granny’s cane!” cried Kit softly, lowering her voice to a whisper. “That means we’re keeping her awake. But there’s so much I want to hear. How you met this Gerry, and—”
“Hush!” breathed Sally Rose, remembering Granny’s outbursts of short-lived peppery wrath. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
They slipped into bed and lay quiet, side by side, arms relaxed on the counterpane, watching the moonlight along the wall. First Kitty turned over and sighed. A few minutes later Sally Rose did the same. Finally Kitty sat up and punched her pillow. “I can’t sleep,” she said.
“Neither can I,” said Sally Rose. “I feel as if something were going to happen.”
Below them in the town the church bells began to ring.
They rang and rang, and kept on ringing. Kitty could see them in her mind, tossing wildly in their belfry, high over Market Square. She sat up higher in bed. Sally Rose sat up, too, and reached out for her cousin’s hand.
“It must be a house afire,” said Kitty. “Can’t be a ship in trouble. The wind isn’t that strong.”
She jumped out of bed and ran to the window, but no hot glare lit the sky, only the cold pale light of the April moon. Now a noise of shouting broke out in Fish Street, growing louder every minute. Lights flickered behind the windowpanes of the small wooden houses all about, and went on burning, steady and strong. Shadows moved across them. People were getting up.
Kitty turned from the window. “Let’s get dressed!” she cried. “Maybe Granny will let us go and see what it’s all about.” But Sally Rose was already fastening her petticoat.
Pulling large winter shawls about them to hide half-buttoned bodices and yawning plackets, they tiptoed into the hall, but Granny had got there ahead of them. She stood at the top of the stairs, small, and neat, and wizened, looking as if she were ready to go to church on a Sunday morning, her costume complete, even to gold eardrops and a chip bonnet with ostrich plumes. She had a lighted candle in one hand, and her cane, which she carried but seldom used, in the other. She opened her mouth to speak to them, but was interrupted by a heavy knocking on the front door and a man’s voice shouting for Timothy.