Missy’s ivory hair combs, and, at the very bottom, something rolled up in one of Old Mister’s black silk cravats. The thing inside is hard and heavy and jingles a little when I unwrap it. A shudder goes through me as a little pearl-handle two-shot pistol and a pair of loose rimfire cartridges drops in my palm. I dump the pistol back in the cloth and sit looking at it on my knee.
What’s Missy doing with something like that? She’s a fool for getting herself in this mess, that’s what she is. A fool.
I let the pistol stay there while I open the corn pone and eat some. It’s dry and hard to get down without water, so I don’t eat much, just enough to settle my stomach and my head. I put the rest back in Missy’s reticule with the money pouch. Then I sit looking at the little pistol again.
The smells of pipe smoke and leather, shaving soap and sipping whiskey rise up from the cloth that wrapped it, bringing to mind Old Mister. He’ll come home, and all this mess will be over, I tell myself. He’ll be good to his word about the land papers. He won’t let Old Missus stop it.
Old Mister don’t know you’re here. The idea slips through my head, sudden as a thief. Nobody knows it. Not Missus. Not even Missy Lavinia. She thinks some yard boy drove her carriage to this place. Make your way home, Hannie. Don’t ever tell nobody what you seen tonight.
That voice falls easy on my ear, takes me back to the last time somebody else tried to get me to bolt and run from trouble, but I didn’t do it. If I had, maybe I’d still have a sister right now. One, at least.
“We oughta take our chance,” my sister Epheme had whispered to me all them years ago when Jep Loach had us behind his wagon. We’d stumbled off into the woods to do our necessary, just us two little girls. Our bodies were stiff and sore from walking and whippings and nights on the froze-up ground. The morning air spit ice and the wind moaned like the devil when Epheme looked in my eye and said, “We oughta run, Hannie. You and me. We oughta, while we can.”
My heart pounded from fear and cold. Just the night before, Jep Loach had held his knife in the firelight and told us what he’d do if we troubled him. “M-m-marse is comin’ to f-fetch us,” I’d stammered out, too nervous to work my mouth right.
“Ain’t nobody gonna save us. We got to save ourselves.”
Epheme was just nine, three years older than me, but she was brave. Her words peck at me now. She was right back then. We should’ve run while we could. Together. Epheme got sold off, two days farther down the road, and that’s the last I ever laid eyes on her.
I oughta run now, before I get shot or worse.
Why’s it my trouble, what young Missy’s got herself into? Her and that girl, that Juneau Jane, who’s been fetched up like a queen all these years? Why I oughta care? What’d anybody ever give me? Hard work till my body screams from it and my hands bleed raw from the cotton thorns and I fall to bed nine in the evening, then get up at four the next morning, start all over again.
One more season. Just one more season, and you’re finally gonna have something, Hannie. Something of your own. Make a life. Jason maybe ain’t the quickest in the head, not as exciting as some, but he’s a fine, honest worker. You know he’d be good to you.
Get walking. Get back into your dress and burn these clothes soon’s you make it to home. Nobody ever need know. The plan sets up in my head. I’ll tell Tati I been holed up in the cellar of the Grand House, couldn’t slip out because there’s too many hired boys out sweeping the yard, then I fell asleep after that.
Nobody’s got to know.
I set my teeth in that idea, and put away the pistol, cinch up Missy’s reticule, hard and angry.