In the pre-dawn darkness they reached the edge of Wellington. This would be the hardest part, Honor thought: getting to Belle Mills’s in the middle of town without anyone seeing them. Already she could hear dogs barking at farms around them.
The runaway seemed less worried. “You know where the lady’s shop is?” she said.
Honor patted her bonnet. “She made this for me.”
The woman nodded. “Thought so. Good. All you got to do is go up to her door and knock. You a free woman-can’t nobody snatch you off the street. Even that slave hunter can’t do that.”
“What about thee?”
“I ain’t comin’ with you.” At Honor’s panic, the woman gazed at her, holding her eyes. “It’s too dangerous right in town with the alarm up. He’d catch me here; I can feel it. Don’t you worry now; I got you close enough you don’t have to be scared no more. You can walk right on up the road-don’t have to hide in the woods with the bears. See, it ain’t so dark now.”
Honor looked around. There was a dimness in the east that made the darkness less heavy. Soon she would be able to see to walk more easily. “But where will thee go?”
“I’ll hide myself away. Ain’t gon’ tell you. Better you don’t know so the slave hunter can’t get it out of you. You go on now, ’fore some o’ these dogs come out an’ find us. Got to get me to some water-break the trail so they don’t come after me.”
Honor knew she was right. “Wait.” She opened her bundle and handed over all of her food, the penknife, and most of the money. Then she took off her gray and yellow bonnet and held it out.
“Oh.” The woman touched the yellow lining. “This too nice for me.”
“Please. I would like thee to have it.”
“All right.” She started to put it on over her red kerchief.
“Wait-thee should have my cap too. Let me have thy kerchief.” I will use it for the quilt, she thought.
With the cap on and the bonnet tied tight under her chin, the woman looked from the side like a white woman. “Thankee,” she said. “Now, you best go.”
Honor hesitated. Her eyes filled with tears.
“Go on, find your way.”
“God go with thee.”
“And thee.” The woman smiled. “Look at me, wearin’ a bonnet an’ talkin’ like a Quaker.” She turned and walked into the woods, the darkness taking her away.
He was waiting for her outside Belle Mills’s shop, leaning so still against the corner of the building that Honor didn’t notice him until she had raised her hand to knock on the door.
“What you doin’ with your head uncovered, Honor Bright? And where’s that nigger?”
“I do not know,” Honor could honestly respond when she recovered from her fright.
“Why are you wet? You been wadin’ in the river? She showed you all her nigger tricks, did she?”
Honor glanced down at her skirt in the dawn light. She thought it had dried, but saw now that it was once again sopping.
“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh.”
Belle Mills’s Millinery
Main St.
Wellington, Ohio
September 4, 1851
My dear parents,
Do not be alarmed by a stranger’s hand: Belle Mills is writing this letter for me, as I am too weak to sit up for long. I wanted you to know immediately that you are grandparents now, to Comfort Grace Haymaker. She was born three days ago with Belle and an able Wellington doctor in attendance. She is beautiful. I am tired but joyful.
For the moment it is best to write to me in Wellington.
Your loving daughter,
Honor
This part I write from myself, though Honor don’t know it because she and the baby are asleep now. I don’t know if she’s written to tell you she’s broken with her family. First she gave them the silent treatment, which I guess is the kind of punishment a Quaker would come up with. Then she ran away and is staying with me.
She can be silent all day long like no one else I ever met. I’ll tell you one thing, though: birthing that baby made her yell loud as any other woman, so loud her throat is sore now. Even Dr. Johns was surprised, and he’s heard some yelling in his time. But it was good to hear her voice loud, even if it came from pain.
You’re her family, so maybe you can talk sense to her. She needs to figure out what to do. She can stay with me for a time, but I’m dying. Liver. It’s slow but it’s happening. She don’t know that, and don’t need to. She’s got enough on her plate. Eventually, though, I’ll be gone and this store will be turned over to my brother, and you don’t want her staying here then. That would be a disaster.
I’ll tell you another thing for free: Honor won’t do no better than Jack Haymaker-not in Ohio, anyway. She wants the perfect man she’s going to have to go back to England to find him. Maybe he’s not even there.
Baby’s crying-time for me to stop.
Yours ever faithful,
Belle Mills
Comfort
HONOR WAS FINALLY beginning to appreciate rocking chairs. They were everywhere in America: on the front porches of almost every house, in corners of kitchens, in the parlors of travelers’ inns, outside of saloons, in shops by the stove. Only Friends Meeting Houses-and churches, Honor suspected, though she had not been inside one-did not have them.
Before Comfort’s arrival, she had always been suspicious of them: the rocking seemed to her an aggressive sign of leisureliness. The constant rhythm set by someone else bothered her when she was sitting near an occupied rocker. Americans demonstrated their own rhythm in a much more public way than the English, and it did not seem to occur to them that others might not care for it. Indeed, Americans often went their own way with little consideration for how others felt: proud of their individuality, they liked to flaunt it.
When Honor visited other Faithwell families, she had always chosen a straight-backed chair, saying it was better for the sewing she brought with her. Really, though, she did not want to rock in front of others and impose her internal rhythm on them.
Once Comfort was born, however, Honor discovered how soothing rocking could be, for baby and mother. She often sat with her daughter in the rocker by the stove in Belle’s shop, nursing or letting her sleep in her arms. Customers smiled and nodded at her, and seemed not to mind.
Perhaps, Honor thought one day, it is not that Americans are so wedded to individual expression, but that we British are too judgmental.
Given the violence with which she entered the world-the lengthy pain, the blood, the pushing and screaming that turned Honor briefly into an animal-it was perhaps not surprising that Comfort Haymaker was a vocal baby. She had corn-flax hair and her father’s blue eyes, but was small like her mother, and her tiny stomach filled and emptied quickly. She cried, was fed, slept for an hour, and then cried again to be fed, cycling through this infant rhythm all day and all night. Honor had never had such an insistent demand made on her, not even when nursing Grace through her final illness. For a time she was so exhausted she could do little more than doze with Comfort between feeds.
If she had been at the Haymakers’, Honor would have felt no guilt, for new mothers were expected to convalesce for several weeks. But at Belle’s she felt conspicuously idle, especially when she came down to sit in the shop rather than lie in the bedroom that had been given over to her. Belle seemed unbothered by either the crying or the idleness, but Honor insisted on doing what sewing she could when Comfort slept, though in her fatigue she kept unthreading her needle and sewing crooked seams.