on the Underground, this sense did not diminish but increased. So it was that day, at the closing of the year, when I insisted on what must be done, that we stood at opposite ends.
We were down by the Street. Our story was simple—Corrine had desired a tour of the old quarters and I was her guide. So I had escorted her down from the main house and we made small, insignificant talk, until we cleared the gardens and the orchards and found ourselves on the winding path to the Street.
“When I came back to Howell’s, it was on the promise that a family would be conducted north,” I said. “The time for that conduction is now.”
“And why now?” she asked.
“Something happened here a couple of weeks ago,” I said. “Somebody got after Thena. Took an axe-handle to her head and then busted up her quarters. Took all the money she had been saving from the washing.”
“My Lord,” she said, and a look of real concern broke through the mask of ladyhood. “Did you find the villain?”
“No,” I said. “She don’t remember who it was. Besides, the way people are moved in and out of here these days…tough to tell. I know more of this crew you have brought with you than of the people who work here every day.”
“Should we investigate?”
“No,” I said. “We should get her out.”
“But not just her, right? There is another—your Sophia.”
“Not mine,” I said. “Just Sophia.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Corrine said with a faint smile. “How much have you grown in one year? It truly is a marvel. You really are one of us. Forgive me, it is a thing to behold.”
She was regarding me in amazement, though I now think she was not so much regarding me in that moment as regarding the fruit of her own endeavor, so that it was not I who amazed Corrine so much as her own powers.
“Do you yet remember?” she asked.
“Remember?”
“Your mother,” she said. “Have your remembrances of her returned yet?”
“No,” I said. “But I have had other concerns.”
“Of course, forgive me. Sophia.”
“I am worried that Nathaniel Walker will call her title, call her down to Tennessee.”
“Oh, you needn’t worry about that,” Sophia said.
“Why?”
“Because I made arrangements with him a year ago. In one week, her title will revert to me.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
Corrine gave me a look of bemused concern.
“Don’t you?” she said. “She’s had his child, hasn’t she?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then you understand,” she said. “You are, after all, a man yourself, a simple creature of severe but brief interests, subject to seasons of lust that wax and wane. As is your uncle, your man of Quality, Nathaniel Walker. And now that he is in Tennessee, he has an entire field for his passions. What would he need of Sophia?”
“But he called on her,” I said. “It was not but two weeks ago that he called on her.”
“I am sure he did,” she said. “A souvenir, perhaps?”
Corrine Quinn was among the most fanatical agents I ever encountered on the Underground. All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave. Corrine was no different, and it was why, relentless as she was against slavery, she could so casually condemn me to the hole, condemn Georgie Parks to death, and mock an outrage put upon Sophia.
I had not put it together like this in that moment. What I had was not logic but anger, and not anger at the slandering of something I owned, but of someone who held me upright in the darkest night of my life. But I did not vent this anger. I had been practicing the mask long before I met Corrine. Instead, I simply said, “I want them out. Both of them.”
“There’s no need,” said Corrine. “I have title to the girl, and so she