Sweeter than Birdsong Page 6

  Ben retrieved his hat from the ground and dusted it off, then trailed John around the cabin to the front door. John’s feet were bare—he must have come out in a hurry.

  Inside, the cabin was dark. John opened the shutter over the back window, then sat down cross-legged on the floor without losing one whit of his air of command.

  Ben glanced at the sleeping forms under a blanket on the bed. “How many do you have with you?”

  “Two girls. I’m taking them to Sinai.” Like all Railroaders, John used code to identify his destinations. “One of the freemen gave the girls his cabin, and I bunked with him next door.” John was always careful to preserve the womanly privacy of his charges, no matter what degradation they had known in their captivity.

  “I have a question for you.” Ben must get straight to the point—John had no patience for parlor niceties when he was conducting fugitives. “I’m searching for a woman named Nelly. The last I knew, she lived on the Macrae plantation just over the Kentucky line.”

  “You want me to find her?” Joseph’s voice remained calm, but his head tilted. It was as close as he came to surprise. He had learned stoicism during his youthful enslavement, long before he bought his freedom and became a successful businessman.

  “Yes.” Ben opened the flap of his knapsack and pulled out the miniature basket. He pulled the reed latch through its closure and opened the lid. “See this?” He showed John the curled lock. “This is her hair. Her promised husband left it at our cabin when he died, twelve years ago.”

  “So you want me to tell this woman that he died?”

  “No, I merely want you to send news if you locate her. I will do the rest.”

  “Don’t do anything foolish. You have my assistance, if you need it. If she’s still alive, and still at the Macrae place, it’s across the river from my house.”

  “Thank you.” Ben wanted to shake John’s hand, but he refrained. John was not one for effusive demonstrations.

  “I’ll send you a letter when I learn anything.” John reached under the bed for his boots and pulled on each with a practiced tug. “Her name is Nelly,” he said to himself, as if to seal it in his memory. He got to his feet and moved across the room, his severe, dark face like that of a general at war. “Girls!” he ordered. “Out of bed!”

  Two brown girls emerged from the blankets fully dressed, like a rustle of birds flushed from the ground into the air. They rubbed their eyes.

  “We must go,” John said to Ben. “I heard there was a posse on our trail back in Cincinnati, so we have to stay ahead.” He grabbed a pack from a hook as the girls put on shoes. He must have given them footwear, as few slaves possessed such luxuries. John held the door open for them and raised one hand in farewell.

  The sleep-dazed girls stumbled out of the cabin as Ben called after them, “God go with you.”

  John went out, silent and light of tread.

  In the Hanby barn, Ben unbuckled Gabriel’s girth and lifted the saddle from his back. The gelding was not overheated, as he had kept to a moderate pace on the way home. Ben hoisted the saddle to its rack high on the wall and then returned to pull the bridle over his horse’s ears and release the bit from his mouth. A horse deserved patience and care for its hard work.

  The barn door opened, letting in the dawn light. “Ben?” His father walked in and rested his arms on the half door of the stall. “Did you just ride out somewhere?”

  He hesitated. He certainly would not lie. “Yes.”

  “Might I ask where?”

  “To see a friend.”

  His father’s quizzical eyebrows told him of the inadequacy of that reply.

  “I rode to Africa Road to see John Parker.”

  “John? How did you know he was there?”

  “President Lawrence told me he would be coming through.” The college president was a fellow abolitionist and had secretly aided fugitives many a time to go north from Westerville.

  “I wish John had stopped by to greet us.”

  “He was conducting passengers.”

  “I see. And what urgent business took you to see him at the crack of dawn?”

  “I prefer not to say.”

  “Indeed.” His father watched as Ben rubbed down the horse’s back and the mark left by the girth. “That is your right, I suppose, now you are twenty-one. I trust this is business of which I would approve.”

  “Yes, sir.” His father would certainly approve in the abstract of finding Nelly. Whether he would approve of the reality was another question. Ben thrust his hands in the water trough and rubbed them together, dripping, to divest himself of horse grime.

  His father turned and walked to the other side of the large barn. Ben left the stall and shot the bolt behind him. “Do you need my help this morning, Father?”

  “If you could give me an hour, it would help. I plan to finish this harness commission by evening. The customer may come through town this week.”

  Pieces of a harness lay over the saddling bench and hung on nails against the rustic planks of the barn. Ben crossed to the straps on the bench and picked them up to inspect them, holding them to the light coming in the door.

  By the barn wall, his father unbuttoned his clean shirt and suspended it on the wall peg. Turning to lift his oil-stained shirt from the other peg, he revealed his bare back.

  Ben had seen it before, but it still made him wince. Pale scars stood out from the muscle over his father’s shoulders, though it was decades since a master’s whip had almost taken his life. The whiteness of his father’s skin had not spared him from a beating as cruel as any given to a plantation slave.

  That map of scars had always made his father reluctant to change his shirt before his children, even now that Ben was far beyond childhood at twenty-one. But his father refused to appear before his mother in shirts stained from his work, not if he could help it. He was careful in his attire, because as he had once explained to Ben, any man who has been forced to live in filth will ever after cherish cleanliness.

  But Ben must not brood on it. What was the jauntiest tune he knew? He began to hum “Tim O’Galway” as he checked the bridle straps in his hands.

  His father finished dressing and turned around with a faint smile. “Lift those thoughts.”

  He was never fooled. He patted Ben on the shoulder as he passed and seated himself on the saddling bench.

  “Should I do the noseband?” Ben held up the straps of leather.

  “If you don’t mind.”

  Ben pulled over the small table and they worked next to one another for a few minutes, his father humming one of the primitive hymns he had collected on his travels.

  The humming stopped, and his father looked up. “I told your mother you might accompany her to Columbus next week, if you were willing. Will that interfere with your musical practice?”

  “No, Father.” Ben aimed the hammer and struck the awl a sharp blow so it plunged into the leather strap. A clean hole for the tongue of the buckle. Three more to go. “Why is she going to Columbus?”

  “It’s the end of May.” His father leaned back and stretched his arm for the two needles lying behind him on the large worktable. He threaded them one by one and began to stitch. “I wish her to make an excursion, to help divert her mind from sad thoughts.”

  “I see.” Ben punched another hole. His mother’s father, Samuel Miller, had died in the month of May, and shortly thereafter, she had suffered the stillbirth of her first child. Over twenty years later, his mother still grew mute and sad at the end of May.

  “Do you want this browband round or flat?” Ben finished the last hole and moved on to the next piece of leather.

  “Flat. Your grandfather always preferred it, and I agree.”

  Ben crossed to the worktable to get another set of needles and thread. He wished for the thousandth time that he could have met his grandfather. “What would Grandpa Miller have done about the Fugitive Slave Law?”

  “Ignored it. And helped those in need. An
d kept making fine saddles.”

  “He would not have been afraid to go to jail?”

  “He would not refuse to aid a fugitive who came to him bleeding, poor, and hungry, no matter what the law dictated.”

  Ben pierced the leather with the needle and drew the thread through.

  His father bent over his work, speaking with the slow abstraction of the craftsman. “He always said that Colossians 3 applied not only to saddle making but also to how we treat fugitives.”

  “Which verse?”

  “Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.” With a deft turn of his strong hands, his father finished the row of fine stitches, the unmistakable hallmark of his grandfather’s legacy.

  The legal work of his legacy.

  For the illegal work, Ben must wait upon word from John Parker.

  Nine

  THE DAY OF THE SOCIAL DAWNED WARM AND FAIR, which was never a guarantee in the unpredictable month of May. Kate spent the morning reading for her classes.

  Physiognomy was challenging, even though the ladies had been excused from several lectures out of concern for the potential indelicacy of certain topics related to human anatomy. But she had finally memorized all the bones in the skeleton. She turned to the last page of her notes, the section on the structure of the human hand. Distal, middle, proximal phalanges, metacarpals . . . so many pieces. Her gaze fell on her own hand where it lay on the desk beside her papers. The human body gave the illusion of wholeness, with its smooth covering of skin. But underneath, it was a collection of broken fragments held together by strings.

  A knock came at her bedroom door, and her mother stepped in. “What are you wearing for the party?” Her voice was always pinched and dry. “Whatever it is, I trust you will select a good sun hat.”

  “Yes, Mother.” Kate could not deny the wisdom of the suggestion. Her mother’s iron determination to wear a hat at all times outdoors had kept her skin fair, and only faint wrinkles traced her eyes and the corners of her mouth.

  “I haven’t settled on what to wear.” Little use in stating a preference when her mother would expect to choose her attire for her. “It’s just a social, so I probably won’t wear the silk.”

  “Certainly not. The silk would be ruined by any picnicking or the like. Wear your blue linen. It flatters you.” Her mother crossed to the armoire, every step a testimony to a girlhood spent in the shelter of fine Philadelphia buildings. She still moved with regal posture and gliding gait from the best deportment classes her family’s merchant wealth could buy. She reached inside the wardrobe and fanned out the cornflower-blue skirt. After assessing the dress, she studied Kate with equal objectivity.

  “I will wear it, Mother.” Kate hoped that would be the end of any discussion of the social. Her mother had been fishing around for days to discover Kate’s opinion on Frederick Jones. Kate had demurred each time with noncommittal statements.

  Her mother withdrew from the room and Kate began to unfasten her day dress. The buttons were hard to manage in back. She did not want to call Tessie, though, knowing that the maid would also have to dress Leah and her mother that afternoon. And Kate needed all the practice available in managing her own attire. She shrugged out of her pagoda sleeves and hung the day dress carefully in its place before taking down the blue one.

  After shifting through yards of material, she found the middle of the skirt and slipped her arms through, swimming up through the piles of fabric to the top. She straightened the bodice over her corset and adjusted the embroidered linen sleeves over her white lace undersleeves. A sigh escaped her. She must go down now and sit with her mother in the parlor.

  To the tick of the clock, they waited for Frederick to arrive. Small thumps revealed that Leah was still dressing upstairs with Tessie. Kate’s father was out—she dared not ask where. He never accompanied them anywhere, so he surely would not attend this social. The mere thought was too horrible to contemplate. She pushed it aside.

  Her mother appeared peaceful in her hard-backed chair. Such serenity from her was always a deception. She picked up her embroidery frame and removed the needle and thread without looking at Kate. “Have you thought any further about Frederick as a suitor?”

  “I don’t believe I will be thinking of any man in that way for some time yet.”

  “That would not be a prudent decision on your part. I married at eighteen. The best marriages are made young.”

  Kate paused, looking at her mother in disbelief. The best marriages, like her parents’? “Really?” she asked aloud. Oh, she should not have said it. Her mother’s eyes narrowed.

  Kate must cover her hasty response with another comment. She remembered something vaguely from a church sermon. “Perhaps God will choose someone for me if he wishes me to marry.”

  “Don’t talk like a tent revivalist.” Her mother jabbed the needle scornfully into the design, then jerked it out again. “That’s for the ignorant and the desperate. If you don’t make your choices, some other person will choose for you. God has nothing to do with it.”

  This would be a long lecture. Kate began to count the blue flowers in the wallpaper. If only she could leave this instant.

  Wheels crunched on the gravel outside. Her mother looked up from her embroidery. “It appears your suitor is here.”

  The bell rang, and a minute later, Tessie showed Frederick into the parlor.

  Hat in hand, hair burnished, the young gentleman nodded and smiled in response to her mother’s pleasantries. Ruth Winter could put on a charming public face.

  It would all be the same if Kate lived in Westerville, even if she married. Tea in the afternoons, church on Sundays, and gossip. Then raising another crop of children to do the same thing.

  “We’ll see you at the social, Mrs. Winter.” Frederick ushered Kate out the door.

  On the way to the Joneses’ farm, he guided his horse and buggy with expertise. He was an excellent horseman, that was clear. The deftness of his gloved hands at the reins was born of long practice. The horse’s shoes clicked against the stones in the road, and Kate’s tongue stuck fast to her palate.

  “Have you finished your essay for Professor Allen?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And I suppose you’re a week ahead in Latin as well?”

  “Yes.”

  “You shouldn’t admit it.” He smiled. “I’ll just ask you to help me now.”

  She considered. “I will, if you need help.”

  He grinned, taking his eyes off the horse ahead to look straight at her. “You’re wasted on Westerville. I’ve seen your papers. With your mind, and your singing voice, you could be the most brilliant lady of Boston society, leading your own musical salon with scores of Harvard men at your feet.”

  “That sounds awful.” Repellent as it was, she had to smile at its utter impossibility.

  He laughed and slapped the reins on the horse’s back. “Look, we’re almost there. Our home is behind that grove of elms.” His face held no secrets—this was a young man at ease with the world and himself. His lips were made to smile, generous but strong.

  The odd pulse returned to her ears and made her turn away and focus her attention on the trees beside the road.

  They drove down a dirt lane and the trees melted away into jade-green fields. A large home came into view, its proud pillars stretching from ground to roof, a little Parthenon inexplicably transported to the western woods.

  The buggy rounded the edge of a glistening ornamental pond and pulled up at the entrance. Frederick left his place to hand her down from her seat. If only she didn’t feel so wooden and clumsy.

  A Negro servant opened the front door with a deferential bow. Frederick stepped back to allow Kate to precede him through the crystal-transomed doorway.

  A small cluster of people stood in the parlor. Cornelia Lawrence, the president’s daughter, looked very sophisticated in a pale yellow gown and silk-flowered straw hat. She spoke with an older man, tall, gray-haired, and e
vidently well fed. She paused at the sight of Kate and beckoned her over. Cornelia had been gracious and warm since her return from a two-year trip to France. If Kate’s family were different, she and Cornelia might have become friends.

  Frederick offered Kate his arm to escort her in that direction.

  “Mr. Jones,” Cornelia said to Frederick’s father as they approached, “this is my friend Miss Winter with your son.”

  Despite the older man’s girth, Kate saw the family resemblance. Mr. Jones had a friendly face.

  “Delighted to meet you.” He took Kate’s hand with a dip of his head. “Though I must ask what you’re doing with this rascal.” His speech was Southern and slow, as if he had all the time in the world.

  Frederick looked at Kate with open admiration. “I ask myself the same thing, Father.” The older man and the younger man grinned at one another. She liked to see their camaraderie. That was how a home should be—harmonious.

  As Cornelia and Frederick chatted about his horse and buggy, Kate took in her surroundings with subtle glances to the left and right. The house was new, thickly carpeted and furnished in burgundy and hunter green, with dark wood paneling. In the enormous parlor, a magnificent tapestry covered almost an entire wall. It depicted a white mansion amidst green fields dotted with animals—and slave workers. She turned away, uncomfortable.

  “You have a lovely home,” Cornelia said.

  “Yes.” Mr. Jones hooked one thumb in his waistcoat and surveyed the parlor with pride. “Many of the pieces here are heirlooms from my family.”

  Frederick offered Kate his arm. “May I show you the grounds?”

  She laid her hand on his crisp white sleeve, still adjusting to the firm, alien feel of a masculine arm, so solid compared to her own slim wrist.

  Frederick called to the uniformed black maid in the dining room. “Marie, please bring us some bread. We’re going to feed the ducks in the back.”

  He invited Cornelia to join them, and she cheerfully agreed, taking his other arm. He led them past the other guests toward a French door that opened at the rear of the house.