he loved me? I could see myself in the glare of the window, the flushed, round face, Father’s long nose, the pale eyes, the mis-colored hair. I’d clipped a piece of that hair for him. He must have laughed at that.
I went to my desk and retrieved the letter with his proposal of marriage. I didn’t read it again, I tore it into as many pieces as I could manage. The tatters fell onto the desktop and the rug and the folds of my skirt.
It was the time of year when migrating crows wheeled across the sky, thunderous flocks that moved like a single veil, and I heard them, out there in the wild chirruping air. Turning to the window, I watched the birds fill the sky before disappearing, and when the air was still again, I watched the empty place where they had been.
Handful
Sarah was up in her room with her heart broke so bad, Binah said you could hear it jangle when she walked. Her brother, Thomas, hadn’t even got his hat on to leave before the whole house knew what happened. Mr. Williams had himself two more fiancées. Now who has to remove himself hastily?
Come teatime that day, missus said to Tomfry, “Sarah will not be receiving visitors for the next three weeks. Explain to any callers that she is indisposed. Indisposed, Tomfry. That’s the word I would like you to use.”
“Yessum.”
Missus saw me hovering. “Quit dawdling, Hetty, and take a tray to Sarah’s room.”
I fixed it, but I knew she wouldn’t touch a bite. I got the hyssop tea she liked, thinking of us when we were little, how we drank it on the roof, her telling me about the silver button and the big plan she had. I’d worn that button in my neck pouch almost every day since she’d tossed it away.
I slipped into the warming kitchen, slid off the pouch, and dug the button out. It was full of tarnish. Looked like a big shriveled grape. I studied it a minute, then I got out the polish and rubbed it till it gleamed.
Sarah was sitting at her desk, writing in a notebook. Her eyes were so raw from crying I didn’t know how she could see to write. I set the tray in front of her. I said, “Look what’s on the tea saucer.”
She hadn’t laid eyes on the button in all these years, but she knew right off what it was. “How did . . . Why, Handful, you saved it?”
She didn’t touch it. Only stared.
I said, “Awright then, there it is,” and went to the door.
Sarah
The following morning, despite my protests, Mother sent Nina off to spend the day with one of the little Smith girls, whose family lived a block or so from the Work House. During Nina’s last visit there, she’d heard screams floating on the breezes and had leapt up in alarm, scattering jackstones across the piazza. At the time, my sister knew nothing of Charleston’s torture chamber—I’d tried to protect her from it—but the Smith boys had no such scruples. They informed her that the cries she heard came from a slave in the whipping room, describing it for her in lurid detail. Apparently there was a crane with pulleys by which the slaves’ bound hands were drawn over their heads, while their feet were chained to a plank. The boys told her of other horrors, too, which she reported to me through sobs, stories about the splitting of ears and the removal of teeth, about spiked collars and some sort of birdcage contraption that was locked over a slave’s head.
I’d assured Nina she wouldn’t have to go back. But now, with Father’s career in dire straits, Mother was not above using a seven-year-old to make an inroad with the politically powerful Smiths.
The rain began to fall not long after Nina left, a torrent coming at the peak of high tide, turning the streets into canals of mud. By early afternoon, after the storm had blown out to sea, I could bear it no longer. I put on Mary’s old black riding hat with the veils and slipped out the back door, determined to collect my sister no matter the cost.
Sabe wasn’t in the stable, only Goodis, which seemed just as well as I felt I could trust him more. “I just the footman, I ain’t meant to drive the carriage,” he told me. It took some doing, but I convinced him it was an