Lake in the Clouds (24 page)

And she was taken by a sudden sense of loss so complete that it left her dazed. A slick panic filled her and she knew with certainty that if she turned around now and went home, ran as fast as she could, they would be gone, lost to her while she was somewhere else, tending to another woman’s needs.

Nathaniel reached over and put a hand on her knee. He had read her face and understood what he saw there. It was not the first time she was overcome by this panic for her children, nor would it be the last. But she did not have to explain herself to him and he would never shame her by saying out loud what she knew in her rational mind: Robbie was gone, yes, but Lily and Daniel were a full eight years of age, healthy and strong, in the care of people they trusted completely.

He would not say those things to her because he understood that the fear came from someplace deep inside her where logic and reason had no power. The twins had been taken from them as infants, for a short while but long enough to teach Elizabeth how fear could etch itself into the bone. Robbie’s death had reinforced that lesson.

Selah Voyager cleared her throat. “Thank you kindly for the food,” she said in her low, slightly hoarse voice.

Elizabeth blinked hard to put the thought of her children away from her. “You’re very welcome, Miss Voyager.”

The young woman had a smile that transformed her unremarkable but pleasing features, lending her for that moment a radiance that must be called beautiful. She said, “Please, won’t you call me Selah?” And then, more softly: “It ain’t my slave name, understand. Selah the name my mother give to me on my first birthday.”

There were so many things Elizabeth did not know about this young woman and would have liked to know, but she had never thought to ask about what she called herself. She understood without being told that all the runaways sent north by Almanzo Freeman took the name Voyager, at least to start with. Slaves, their owners believed, had no need for or right to a family name; one of a freed slave’s first acts was to name herself.

The young woman before them had led a life Elizabeth could hardly imagine, a life she did and did not want to know about. If she inquired, Selah would answer her questions, perhaps out of gratitude, but more likely simply because she had not yet been free long enough to know that she could turn aside a white woman’s questions. Elizabeth could not, would not take such advantage, no matter how curious she might be; she would wait, and accept what information Selah Voyager offered.

And she had offered. She had given them the image of a slave who had taken the rebellious step of naming her own child. Most probably her owner had never known of that small act; had it come to his attention he might have laughed at such a futile gesture, or punished her for impudence. Her mother had given her the name Selah; her master or masters had called her something else, Phyllis or Cookie or Beulah.

But all of that was behind her now. She was on her way to a place where she could use the name her mother had given her, where she could name her own child as she pleased. Elizabeth’s fears seemed suddenly very shallow and self-indulgent, and she flushed with gratitude for her own good fortune.

“You thinking about your children,” Selah said gently. “I expect you must be worrying about them.”

“Oh yes,” said Elizabeth with a small smile. “I am worried for them. I’m afraid it’s the first law of motherhood.”

Selah put a light hand on her belly, and nodded.

The first night on the trail Nathaniel led them to a protected spot under an outcropping of rock as tall as himself. It was overhung by balsam branches and it was dry and sweet-smelling, with a cushion of fallen needles underfoot. The trees wouldn’t protect them if it should rain or even snow in the night, but they had oiled buckskins to tent over themselves if it came to that, and for the moment the sky looked clear.

Nathaniel went off to see to fresh meat while the women started a fire and settled themselves. They would sleep as soon as they had eaten, so they could be up and on the move before sunrise. Elizabeth was tired enough to sleep on an empty stomach; she couldn’t remember the last time she had walked so far, or so long.

She sat down across from Selah, who was feeding the fire with bits of deadwood. “Did Curiosity or Joshua explain our plans to you?”

She nodded. “Three days to the lake you call Little Lost, and we wait there in the caves until the Mohawk woman come for me. Splitting-Moon. Have I got that right?”

Elizabeth took a slab of cornbread and broke it into even pieces. “Yes. We may have to wait three or four days for Splitting-Moon. There is no way to know exactly when she will come.”

They had this information from Joshua, whose job it had been to take the runaways to the meeting place. Sometimes Joshua’s brother Elijah came with Splitting-Moon, and they would spend a day together talking. Joshua had never asked either of them about the exact location of Red Rock, or even how far it was; what he did not know he could not tell.

Nathaniel and Hawkeye had listened without comment while Joshua related all of this. Later, in the privacy of their bed Nathaniel told Elizabeth what he suspected: that Red Rock was no place at all. It would be far safer for a colony of runaways hiding from the law and blackbirders to keep moving. A permanent settlement was too much of a risk; some trapper would come across it and eventually word would drift back, down the waterways to the city.

Elizabeth related all of this to Selah, who listened without interrupting, her arms wrapped around her belly. Her expression gave nothing away, neither curiosity nor fear.

She said, “There’s a blackbirder in the city, name of Cobb.
Saw him a few times myself with a whole gang of men around him, slapping him on the back ‘cause he brought in a runaway called Big George everybody had been chasing after for a year.” She looked Elizabeth directly in the eye. “Folks say he routed out a whole lot of blacks living free in the forests down south. Brought back the leader’s head carrying it over his shoulder on a spike rammed clean through the ears. Put it on display outside the courthouse, to show the other slaves that they’d best not think of running. He look like any other person on the street, but the devil’s in the man who can find it in himself to do something like that.”

“I have heard of such things,” said Elizabeth.

Selah raised her shoulder. “There’s worse that goes on, things to turn your hair the color of salt. But what I meant to say is, for all his evil, that Cobb ain’t much different than any blackbirder. They got no understanding at all. The truth is, dying’s easy when living means going back where you run from in chains.”

“You are not going back, in chains or out of them. Cobb has no power here in the endless forests.”

“Don’t speak of the devil no more,” Selah said, holding up a palm. “He might just appear.”

“Superstition,” Elizabeth said firmly, even as unease sent a shiver slick as grease up her spine.

Selah rocked forward slightly, and when she raised her head her expression had cleared itself. “Tell me about the cold season.”

“The winters are hard,” Elizabeth said, more than willing to change the subject. “But I expect that by the fall you’ll be in Canada with Manny.”

Selah touched her belly, moved her hands out over its roundness with fingers spread. “In Canada, or in my grave.”

Elizabeth said nothing. It was true that the healthiest and strongest person might die without warning; her own mother had woken one day with a fever and died before sunset. Her cousin Will Spencer had lost a brother to a bee sting that caused his throat to swell shut. And of all people, a woman heavy with child knew very well that she might not survive the ordeal before her. If she did, and the child with her, she would have to keep it safe from too many threats to count: ague, putrid sore throat, dropsy, smallpox, lung fever, yellow fever. Quinsy. Blackbirders.

Selah Voyager was watching Elizabeth, and she had the sudden and uneasy feeling that the younger woman had read her mind.

She said, “You know I killed a man.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said, trying not to show her surprise. “I heard as much. So have I.”

Selah acknowledged this with a nod, and then she drew a deep breath.

“It was on the dock at Newburgh, two days out of the city. I was looking for a sloop called the
Jefferson.
Manny told me, just walk normal like any servant looking to deliver a message. Anybody stop you, say you’re looking for Captain Small. And that’s what I was doing when I come around a corner and there was old Vaark.”

She paused, her eyes fixed on some point far away. Elizabeth had been wrong; Selah Voyager needed to tell this story, whether or not she was ready to hear it.

“Mr. Vaark was your master?”

Selah nodded. “Bought me from the farm where I was raised up, the summer I turned twelve. Mama still there, I suppose.” Selah dropped her gaze from Elizabeth’s face to the fire.

“He was a good enough master, was old Vaark. Like to talk the bible, but he wan’t quick to raise a fist like some bible talkers. There was three of us house slaves and Josiah out in the stable, and we always had enough to eat and good clothes. Every six months a Sunday free, long as we come back before sunset.

“When I was fifteen the master got me with child, but it come into the world dead. Like that little one you buried the day I come to the mountain.”

“She was born too early,” Elizabeth said.

Selah nodded. “It happen that way sometime. But the next year my little girl come along, big and strong. She was the prettiest thing. I called her Violet.”

There was a fist in Elizabeth’s throat, the kind of anger that made it hard to swallow, but she must ask the question and so she forced herself to speak, striving to keep her tone even. “What happened to your little girl?”

Selah’s eyes closed and opened again. “The missus, she made old Vaark take my Violet away just as soon as she was weaned. Said she cry too much and keep me from my work. I
asked would they sell me too, sell us together, but the master just got to looking sorrowful. He say, ain’t you happy here? Don’t we treat you good? Like it was an insult to him, me wanting to be with my baby.

“Then she was gone. They never would tell me where to, no matter how I thought to ask. Took me down just as low as a woman can go.

“So the master, he finally come upon the idea of sending me to the African Free School two evenings a week. He got it in his head that it might raise up my spirits if I was to learn to read. The missus didn’t like the idea of me spending time with free blacks. Said it would put ideas into my head. But she didn’t like me crying all the time neither so she say, go on then, as long as you get your work done.

“And it did stop me crying, but not for the reason they was thinking. You see, there’s so many blacks coming and going in the Free School, I thought for sure I’d find somebody who could tell me about Violet, who had bought her and where she was in the city.”

There was the flicker of anger across her face, banished as quickly as it had come.

“And did you find out?”

“Oh, I found out sure enough, but not the way I thought. The answer was right under my nose the whole time, but I couldn’t make sense of it till I learned to read. Don’t think it ever occurred to old Vaark that a slave who can read the bible can read anything else that come her way. One day when I was sweeping out the little room where he keep all his paperwork I come across a piece of paper with my baby’s name on it.”

She closed her eyes and recited from memory:

“Except I couldn’t read so good yet when I found it. Or maybe I just didn’t want to believe the words on the paper. So I stole it, just put it in my apron and that night when I went to the school I asked the first person I come across would he please read it to me, just to be sure. That’s how I met Manny.

“He read it to me twice, and every time it was like a fire in me, burning and burning until there wasn’t nothing left of my heart but a cinder.”

“But why?” Elizabeth asked. She could not make sense of what she had heard. “Why would they do such a thing?”

Selah’s mouth contorted, as if the things she had to say were sour on the tongue.

“The Gradual Manumission Act say, once Violet get to be twenty-five years of age she could walk away, free. Vaark didn’t like the idea of bringing up a child and feeding her twenty-five years and then letting her go with no profit to show. The law say, he don’t have to keep her if he don’t want the trouble.”