“No. We didn’t need anything so otherworldly for that bunch.”
“Bland, if Moses can do this, why not send her after Otha’s family?”
“Because she is Moses, not Jesus. She has her own promises to keep. There are limits to everything. I respect Corrine. I respect what she wanted to do with you. But she does not really understand the power, nor how it works.”
We walked some more, wordlessly. The sun was setting behind us. I had not been out for an evening walk since Ryland’s Hounds had tackled me near the docks. But I felt a kind of safety with Micajah Bland. The fact was he was my oldest friend on the Underground, to the extent that I had any. And it was he who had, in his own particular ways, believed that there was indeed something in me.
“How in God’s name did you get tangled up with Corrine?” I asked.
“You have it backward,” Bland said. “When I met Corrine she was a student, a girl at an institute in New York, where these Virginians of a certain class would often send their daughters for a lady’s education—French, housekeeping, art, a little reading. But Corrine was precocious and the city entranced her. She would often sneak out and attend the lectures of abolitionists. That is how she and I met.
“You see, there were those of us then who’d long felt that we’d like to expand our war into the South. She was easily recruited, and then cultivated as our chief weapon to stab at the heart of Demon Slavery itself. And she was a weapon—their prim Southern belle, an ornament to their civilization, turned back against them. She has proved herself repeatedly, Hiram. You cannot imagine the sacrifice.”
“Her own parents,” I said.
“Sacrifices, Hiram,” he said. “Tremendous sacrifices, the kind that Raymond and Otha, and even our Moses, would never approve of, nor would I ever ask them to. This was about the time I met you. I was then in the business of reconnaissance, under the guise of Mr. Fields. It was there at Lockless that I first heard the stories of Santi Bess, but even then I did not make the connection between you, the boy with the invincible memory, and Conduction. Lockless was one among the ancient houses that Corrine targeted, but the only one featuring an heir who we believed could be deceived with relative ease. But as she closed in she realized that the Virginia station stood to gain control not just of an ancient Elm County estate but of one who could bring a great power into our control.”
“But you had Moses,” I said.
“No, Hiram,” he said. “No one has Moses. Certainly not Corrine. Moses has her loyalties and they are tied most strongly to the station here in Philadelphia. Corrine sought similar power, but tied to Virginia.”
“So everyone clean, huh? No one to blame?” I said.
“No, Hiram. She is not clean. She is right. Have you ever thought about what they would do to her if she were found out? Do you realize what, particularly, they would do to a woman like that, who’d mocked their most sacred principles, and sought to destroy their whole way of life?”
We had by now wound our way back to the front of the Ninth Street office, my home. It occurred to me, then only emerging from my feelings, that Bland was seeing me home. I looked at him, laughed quietly, and shook my head.
“What?” he said. “We cannot have you getting blackjacked and bound yet again.”
I laughed again, a little louder this time. At this Bland threw his arm around my shoulder and laughed with me.
19
THAT NIGHT, I SAT up replaying the small Conduction I had brought about in Bland’s home. The power was within me, but it was not in my hands so much as I was in the hands of the power, for when it made itself known, when the blue glow came over and the curtains of fog fell upon me, I was but a passenger in my own body. I needed to understand, and for that I needed someone who already understood, and the only such someone was Moses.
But first, the fate of Lydia White and her children. I found myself, the next day, with Micajah, Otha, and Raymond in the parlor, discussing the various means by which we might bring them