It seemed at last Honor had met someone who could keep as still as she.
She had always taken a secret pride in how still she sat at Meeting. When she settled on a bench, feet firm on the floor, legs pressed together and hands folded in her lap, she could hold her position for two hours without a movement. All around her men and women shifted in their seats to relieve aching legs and buttocks. They shrugged shoulders, scratched heads, coughed, reclasped hands. Jack was a particular culprit. On the rare occasions when he got up to speak, Honor suspected it was not because he felt moved by the Holy Spirit to do so, but because he needed to stretch. Being a Quaker did not mean you were naturally still.
Huddling in the straw next to her, the woman at her side would not have had Honor’s years of experience in not moving. Yet she was still-so still that Honor strained to detect even a single rustle of straw. All she could hear was a nest of mice stirring and squeaking nearby; and, once, the moist click of the woman’s blink, a sound that seemed enormous in the silence. It became almost a competition between them to discover who could be quieter.
Then she heard the snap of a stick, the creak of a leather boot, and tensed. Donovan too was playing the quiet game, though less skillfully than the women. The slave did not move except to unstick her tongue from the roof of her mouth with a tiny “tock.”
The sound seemed almost a signal. With a painful rasp of metal against metal, Donovan drew back the bolt on the barn doors and swung one open. After the intense darkness his lantern seemed as bright as sunlight. As he stepped inside, the temptation to bolt was almost overwhelming, but Honor knew they could not outrun him. They must remain where they were, and not only keep still, but somehow negate themselves so that he would not sense their presence. This was harder to do than keeping quiet. It meant harnessing and stilling the Inner Light.
Honor closed her eyes, though it went against her instincts. She wanted to be able to watch Donovan, whose outline wavered in the lantern’s light as he swung it to light up the corners. However, if she turned off the power of her sight, and in her mind left the barn, she might manage to diminish her self. She tried instead to imagine herself back across the ocean. She was standing with her mother and sister on Colmer’s Hill outside Bridport, looking toward the sea.
“Honor Bright.” Donovan said her name as if he knew she was there, and his voice brought her right back to the barn. Honor did not open her eyes, but she could feel his gaze on her, even covered in straw. Her spirit was stretching toward him, though he represented everything she opposed.
Inside the barn the air had become thick and tense.
The runaway did not respond to this change, except to blink with another click.
The three of them remained frozen for a long time.
At last Donovan cleared his throat. “I’m gonna let you go this once, Honor. Don’t know why. Won’t happen again, I guarantee it.”
Honor waited for a quarter-hour beyond the last hoofbeat of his horse before easing back into the straw and flexing her cramped legs. “All right,” she said. “He has gone.”
Still the black woman did not move.
“I have never heard another be so quiet,” Honor admitted. “Thee would do well as a Quaker.”
At last she heard something: the sound of a smile.
When they were back outside, Honor whispered, “Does thee know where to go?”
Still wordless, the woman pointed up at a star in the northern sky: the pole star. Samuel had explained to her once that everything in the night sky turned around that one unassuming star, and because it did not move, you could follow it. It always astonished her that in a sky full of movement, there could be one fixed point.
Faithwell, Ohio
1st Month 20th 1851
Dearest Biddy,
I was overjoyed today to receive thy letter that accompanied the Star of Bethlehem quilt, along with those from William and my Aunt. It has been a treat to receive the package, with letters from thee and Mother and Aunt Rachel all at once, with so much news and warmth to be found in them. They have truly broken the monotony of these winter days.
When I unwrapped the quilts and spread them on our bed, I cried to see all that familiar fabric and stitching. I am so grateful to thee for giving up the quilt, with such generosity and understanding-in particular since I am beginning to sense from the frequent references in thy recent letters to a certain Sherborne family that thee may soon be in need of quilts thyself! I thank thee, Biddy. My mother-in-law is pleased they have arrived, even if she and Dorcas inspected the quilts with puzzled looks they did not try to conceal. English patchwork is clearly not to their taste.
I had thought that with the coming of winter there would be more time for me to write letters. There is indeed more time, for nothing is growing now, there is snow up to the windows, and apart from milking and feeding the animals and going to Meeting, we rarely go outside. Yet I am disinclined to write, perhaps because there is less to tell thee. Each day is identical to the one before. Like the chickens and the cows, we have been cooped up inside together for a month, and I find I have become weary and dull. I do not recall such a sensation during Dorset winters: it was milder, with less snow, and being in town thee and Grace and I were always going about, with a circulation of people and goods and ideas and sea air to keep us fresh. Here I sit with Dorcas and Judith all day long in the kitchen, where it is warmest, and the air is as stale as our conversation. Then I wonder what I would write to tell thee, and so I put it off. For that I am sorry. But the arrival of thy letter and the quilts has given me a good reason to take up my pen.
I smile now to remember that in my last letter I said I was looking forward to the cold. How I long for summer now! For weeks there has been a thick blanket of snow on the ground, with more added every few days, and no thaw to melt it. Jack has cleared paths to the chickens and well and privy and barn, and regularly takes the horses out to break a path to Faithwell to deliver milk. Yet the snow is hard to get through, and the cold too drives us inside. When I go out in the mornings for the milking, my fingers turn so stiff that I can barely pull at the udders, and I have to warm them against the cows’ flanks. At least the beasts are warm, and their breath keeps the barn from freezing. The chickens stay in their house and lay little; occasionally one freezes to death and we have to eat it, which upsets me as that is not what they are meant for.
We are less productive now. It feels strange to be eating through what we worked so hard to store in the summer and autumn, even though of course that is why we stored it. Each day the jars in the pantry lose a member or two. Every week we kill a chicken. We are eating through the ham and bacon of the pig slaughtered last month. The bins of potatoes and carrots in the cellar are diminishing. Out in the barn the hay I thought such a mountain has already become more of a hill. And the corn crib is still full but the horses are eating into it, as well as the oats. When I witness this depletion, and the snow that is trapping us here, and the cold that keeps anything from growing, I get a queer, panicked feeling that we are going to run out of food and starve. Of course the Haymakers have lived through many such winters and are more confident. They are used to making everything we need rather than buying it. I can see Jack and Judith calculating daily, measuring and considering how to make what we have last. Yesterday Judith got out some ham steaks for dinner, then put one back without cooking it. That small gesture troubled me-though as it happened we had plenty to eat. I must trust them to get us through the winter, and assume that one day I will be as content and unconcerned as Dorcas, who maintains a hearty appetite. She did admit to me, though, that when they first moved from North Carolina she found the Ohio winters a trial.