She and Comfort stood on in the window, the baby quiet, balanced on her mother’s shoulder and reaching her hand out toward the darkness. In the last few days she had stopped flailing so much, her movements more controlled.
Soon Belle was back. “All right. I’m gonna fix supper.” When Honor opened her mouth to speak, Belle interrupted her. “Don’t ask. If you don’t know, then you won’t have nothin’ to tell Donovan when he comes back. ’Cause he will come back tonight. He’ll be back for another look.” She was talking as if Honor knew what was happening. She did know. She just did not let herself think openly about it. Some things should remain hidden.
But they did not remain hidden. Honor and Belle were eating in the kitchen, the baby asleep in the cradle at Honor’s feet, when she heard a whimper. It was not Comfort-Honor was so attuned to her child’s noises that she did not even glance down at the cradle. She froze, her knife stopped in the groove it was carving into a pork chop, and listened.
Belle, however, clattered her cutlery onto her plate and stood up, pushing her chair back so that the legs scraped along the wood floor. “You know what I feel like with supper?” she said. “Tea. The English drink tea anytime, don’t they? I’m gonna boil some water.” She picked up a jug of water and filled the kettle. “Makes a change from coffee or whiskey, don’t it?” Belle banged the kettle on the range. “You ain’t never touched a drop o’ liquor, though, have you? No whiskey or beer or nothin’. Poor Quaker.”
Even under Belle’s valiant effort to make noise, Honor heard another whimper, then the low murmur of a woman’s voice. Not just any voice: it was a mother’s, shushing her child. Now that Honor herself was a mother, she was much more sensitive to the sorts of tones a mother needed to use.
“Where are they?” she said in a pause among Belle’s clatter.
Belle looked almost relieved, and smiled as if to apologize for thinking Honor would be fooled by her clumsy attempt at concealment. “If I show you,” she said, “you gotta think about what you’ll say if Donovan asks you ’bout ’em. I know you Quakers ain’t supposed to lie, but ain’t a small lie that helps a bigger truth all right? God ain’t gonna judge you for lying to my brother, is He? And if the Haymakers judge you for it, well…” She did not bother to fill in her thoughts about Honor’s in-laws.
Honor thought. “I have heard of Friends blindfolding themselves so that they do not see those they’re helping. That way they can honestly answer no if asked whether they have seen them.”
Belle snorted. “That’s just a game that God’s gonna see right through anyway. Ain’t playin’ with the truth like that worse than lyin’ outright for the greater good?”
“Perhaps.” The child was no longer whimpering, but crying outright, the sound coming from the hole by the range that led into the lean-to. Belle could reach in through the hole for wood without having to go outside. Though covered with a thick cloth to keep out drafts, it did not completely muffle the sounds. Honor could not bear the crying. She let out a deep breath she did not realize she had been holding. “Please bring in the child,” she said. “I would not have it freeze because of me. I will lie to Donovan if I must.”
Belle nodded. Pulling aside the cloth, she called through the hole. “It’s all right, Virginie, bring ’em in for a little while.”
After a moment a pair of brown hands pushed first one, then a second girl through the hole and into Belle’s arms. She set them on their feet, side by side. They were twins, identical, about five years old, with wide dark eyes, their hair plaited and tied with the red ribbons Thomas’s wife had taken the day before. They stood solemn and mute in front of Belle and Honor, the only difference between them being the runny nose and wheezy cough of the one who had been crying.
Belle pulled them aside as a gray bonnet pushed through the hole. Honor caught a flash of its pale yellow lining and started.
Belle smiled. “So that’s where that bonnet got to. Didn’t recognize it in the dark before. I thought you’d left it with the Haymakers-though Lord knows what they would do with it. Make it into a milk bucket, maybe.” She gave a hand to the runaway woman so that she could stand. Honor recalled her slender height, her sallow skin, her steady gaze.
The woman looked back at Honor and nodded. “I see you still here. Got your baby now. Well, I got my babies too.” She put her arms around the girls. Now that she was out in the open, her mother beside her, the girl with the cold felt confident enough to begin crying freely.
“Honor, get her some raspberry jam in hot water,” Belle commanded. “Kettle’s boiled. Add a drop o’ whiskey to it. Don’t you frown at me-it’ll do her good. I’ll make up a poultice for her chest.” She glanced at the window, which had a heavy curtain pulled across it, and at the door between the kitchen and shop, which she had pulled shut. “Can’t be out like this for long-Donovan’ll be back. We fooled him once-he thinks you ain’t here yet. But he’ll come round again soon enough.”
“When did they get in?” Honor asked.
“Right at the end, just when Donovan was leaving. That’s always the best time, when they’re still here but not suspicious any more. Old Thomas moved ’em. He hid ’em in his wagon, in a compartment under the bottom of the wagon. You lay out flat an’ they put the false bottom over you. It ain’t comfortable, is it, Virginie?”
“Is that how Thomas brought the runaway from Hudson when he drove me here?” Honor thought of Thomas stamping his feet now and then, and his talking while she was in the woods, and the feeling she had had that someone was with them.
“Yep. And Donovan still don’t know about it. He looks under the front seat.”
Now that she knew Honor wouldn’t give away her secrets, Belle became chatty, proud of the ruses she and Thomas and others working on the Underground Railroad had developed to keep runaways hidden. Once they’d dosed the sick child with raspberry jam and whiskey, and spread a mustard paste on her chest, Belle had Honor crawl through the hole into the lean-to, which was deeper along the side of the house than she’d realized from seeing it from the outside. Belle and Thomas had stacked the wood so that it seemed to be up against the back wall, but actually there was a gap between the woodpile and the wall, making a small chamber barely bigger than a cupboard, which you got to by squeezing around the stack. Inside the chamber were three stumps the runaways must use as stools, though turned on their sides they would look innocuous enough. Indeed, if you pushed the back stack of wood into the space it would turn into a messy pile waiting to be burned. As she gazed on it, Honor wondered how many runaways had hidden here. Dozens? Hundreds? Belle had lived in Wellington for fifteen years, and there had been runaways probably for as long as there had been slavery.
Honor heard Comfort crying then, and hurried to get back to her, struggling through the hole so clumsily that Belle chuckled. By the time she was on her feet, Comfort was quiet in the black woman’s arms. Though Honor reached out, the woman did not hand Comfort back. “I looked after a string o’ little white babies for the mistress,” she said, swinging Comfort in the crook of her arm with ease. “Feels good to hold a baby again. Look at her, girls,” she said to her daughters seated at the table. “She ain’t smilin’ yet. She only a month old. Too young to smile at us yet. We got to earn her smile.”
Honor struggled not to snatch her daughter back, even though rationally she knew that Comfort could come to no harm.
The woman’s name was Virginie. The whole night Honor had been with her in the woods and fields, she had not thought to ask her name. Indeed, she had never asked any of the runaways their names. Now she wondered why. Perhaps she had not wanted to personalize them in that way. Without names it was easier for them to disappear from her life. And they did-all except the nameless man buried in Wieland Woods.