Flora drifted into the room, dressed in a morning dress but with her hair still loose. “You’re up early,” her uncle remarked dryly.
“I had such a restful night, there was no need to linger in bed.”
“A restful night?” Rollo asked with a snort, and Olive giggled.
Flora turned around from serving herself from the sideboard. “What’s so funny about that?” she asked.
“You didn’t hear anything odd last night?” Rollo asked, his eyes wide with disbelief.
“Was there anything to hear?”
“Only a huge riot that came up the avenue, with hundreds of people shouting and throwing rocks and setting fires.” He waved his arms vigorously as he spoke.
“There was no such thing. Stop making up stories. That’s so very childish.”
“There was a riot,” Lord Henry said. “Our house escaped unscathed, but our neighbors lost some windows.”
“You’re in on it, too,” she accused.
“Really, there was a riot,” I said. “You must sleep very soundly not to have heard it. Mrs. Talbot even went into your room to ensure your safety.”
“Rollo’s school is closed for the day because of the damage,” Lord Henry added. “He’ll be having lessons at home. I believe you already have your reading for the week.”
“I do?”
“The book your aunt lent you?” At her blank look, he prompted, “You’re supposed to go with Miss Newton to discuss it on Thursday.”
“Oh, yes, that,” she replied, her cheeks tinting delicately with pink.
“You forgot about it completely,” Rollo chortled.
“I did not. I merely set aside time this week to read it.”
The instant I put down my fork, Rollo was out of his seat like a shot. “Hat, gloves, and coat!” his uncle called after him. “It’s cool this morning. Autumn has definitely come to us.”
When I went up to my room to get my own hat, gloves, and coat, I folded my article into a narrow packet and tucked it into my left glove, against my palm. Now all I needed was to find someone to take it from me, for I feared I wouldn’t get out again.
Rollo practically danced with impatience in the foyer while he waited for me to button Olive’s coat. He tore down the front steps to the sidewalk, where he stopped and looked up and down the avenue. When Olive and I reached him, he complained, “There’s hardly anything to see.”
“That’s what your uncle said. It appears they made a lot of noise but did little damage.”
We walked down the sidewalk to the neighbor’s house. The front windows on the lower level had been boarded over, and servants were scrubbing a great red stain off the white marble façade. Other servants picked trash out of the front garden. I found these blots on the perfection of the block shocking, but Rollo kicked at the ground in disappointment. “That’s all?” he asked.
“One would think you sympathized with the rioters,” I teased.
The white picket fence at the next mansion was charred. Tears trickled down Olive’s cheeks. “That was such a pretty fence. I liked it. And the roses burned, too. They shouldn’t have burned the roses.”
“When people get that angry, they don’t think about things like that,” I said gently.
“Why were they angry?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“They won’t come back, will they?” Olive asked, her lip trembling.
“I don’t know that either.”
Rollo and Olive got into an argument over the best way to get rid of invading rioters, in case they came back, and I took advantage of their distraction to look around for a possible newspaper contact. The only people in sight were servants and workmen cleaning up the mess. Could it be one of them? None of them appeared to be wearing the Mechanics’ symbol, and none of them seemed to notice me.
At the end of the block, I led the children across the avenue to walk on the park side of the street back toward the house. They were now debating whether we should have thrown things at the rioters as they passed. “I bet they wouldn’t have expected that,” Rollo said.
“But then they’d have been mad at us, and they’d have hurt our house,” Olive countered.
When we stood across from the Lyndon mansion, it was striking how untouched it appeared in contrast to its neighbors. Most of the damage to the nearby mansions was merely vandalism, but it still looked unseemly against the gleaming, virginal white of the Lyndon home.
“Why didn’t they attack us?” Rollo wondered out loud.
“We may never know,” I said. I was about to suggest that we return home for lessons when