match from my pocket. Martha and Phillis were each standing and brushing dirt from their clothes. All three of us looked down in the candlelight. Jane Patterson’s body lay motionless on the dirt floor. There was a dark stain spreading out on the ground beneath her.
Martha screamed.
I knelt beside Jane’s body. Her eyes were wide and frozen and her chest was still. I lay my fingers on the inside of her wrist, feeling for a pulse that did not come. The fabric of her dress by her heart was torn apart and some of her insides spilled out horribly. I looked away and saw the muff pistol still clenched in her right hand.
“Is she . . . ,” began Martha.
“She’s dead,” I said, rising to my feet.
“Did we do that?” cried my sister. “Did I do that?”
I held Martha against my chest and stroked her hair. “It’s all right,” I said. “You’re not to blame.”
“But—”
“Shhhhh. She shot herself, most likely. I doubt we’ll ever know fully what was in her mind.”
My sister nodded, her resolution flooding back.
We heard shouting from the infirmary room and banging on the door. A female voice called out: “Who’s there? Was that a gunshot?”
“What do we do now?” asked Martha.
“Take back one of my blankets, for starters,” I said.
Twenty minutes later, we had loaded Jane’s body, shrouded in a checkerboard quilt, into the cart in the front yard of the poorhouse. With the help of Martha’s acquaintance Abigail, we’d managed to exit the house through a side door without drawing any more attention than necessary. The poorhouse residents seemed used to persons coming and going in the dark without explanation. I helped Phillis climb into the cart next to Jane’s body and started to hitch up Hathaway’s horse.
“Where are you taking my horse and carriage?” came a harsh voice from behind me. “And my slave?”
I turned and saw Hathaway standing unsteadily at his front door, a shotgun clutched in his hands. Given the iron hand with which he ran the poorhouse, I supposed it was no wonder he had an ally somewhere in its depths who had freed him.
“I’m simply borrowing the horse and carriage,” I said. “I’ll return them tomorrow and pay you twice the market rate. As for the slave—you know full well she’s mine, not yours.”
“She’s mine in this state,” said Hathaway. “And I’ll not let her go.” He swayed before steadying himself on the doorframe. “Not for nothing, anyway.”
I sighed and asked Martha to finish hooking up the cart. Martha nodded, her eyes flickering back and forth between Phillis and Hathaway. I took a few steps toward the poorhouse master. With everything else we still had to accomplish that night, paying the venal man a few coins in exchange for an unobstructed departure seemed the better part of wisdom.
“You yourself said you’d take pennies on the dollar for her,” I said. “At her age, with her physical condition, I can’t imagine her fetching fifty dollars on the St. Louis quay. I’ll pay you two dollars to be done with it.”
“She’s worth at least two hundred,” he said, clutching his shotgun tightly, “but I’ll take forty.”
“How about five dollars, then? That’s the best I can do.”
“Thirty.”
I stopped to consider the absurdity of the situation. Here I was, bargaining over how much to pay for the right to take away a slave who had belonged to my family since her birth in the prior century. What would my father say if he could see me engaged in such folly? But I looked again at Martha and realized such concerns would have to await another day. Over Martha’s shoulder, I could just make out Phillis’s impassive face in the dim moonlight. She seemed to be watching our negotiations closely.
“Very well,” I said, turning back to Hathaway. “Ten for the lot—the slave and the horse and carriage rental.”
His face broke into a jagged, discolored grin. I noted with pleasure that the area around his eyes was swelling with the same black and purple hues of his teeth.
“I always say I’m open to business twenty-four hours of the day,” Hathaway said. “Throw it on the ground and be off with you.” I did so, noting with even greater pleasure his determination to stay far away from my right hand.
We set off through the prairie, me astride Hickory and Martha sitting sidesaddle atop Hathaway’s nag, which pulled the rickety cart. But after about fifteen minutes, we came to a halt. We were traveling at the pace of