“It’s not time, Hiram,” she said. “There are a great many things in the works, and we must take care to not endanger them. The powers of Elm County are diminished and every day we grow stronger, but we must take care. And I have done much already that might arouse suspicion. There is the fact of what we have done at Starfall. There is the fact that both of you ran, that the girl ran. Did she tell you I looked after her?”
“She did.”
“Then you must understand. There is too much to contend with at once. If we were ever figured out, so many would suffer.” She had dropped her mocking tone and was now on the verge of pleading. “Hiram, listen to me,” she said. “Your service to the Underground has been of great value. Your reports on your father have opened up possibilities we had not even considered. Even if you never master Conduction, you have proven yourself more than worth the risks we took in bringing you out. But we have much to balance and consider. What does it look like for me to take the title of Nathaniel Walker’s consort, only for her to immediately disappear? And this woman Thena has made an enterprise out of the washing. Will people not wonder when she suddenly stops coming around? We have to be so very careful, Hiram.”
“You made a promise,” I said.
“Yes, I did,” she said. “And it is my intention to keep it. But not just now. We will need time.”
I locked on to Corrine with a hard gaze. It was the first time I had looked at her without the respect that Virginia demanded. She was not being unreasonable. In fact, she was correct. But I was hot over her mocking of Sophia and there were my own feelings and shame at having delivered Sophia into outrage all those times, at having left Thena to run, and then left her again to be assaulted, at my mother who was sold, who I could not protect, who I did not avenge. All of that roiled in me and it shot out in the look I now put upon Corrine.
“You cannot do it,” Corrine said. “You will need us, and we will not consent. We will not put ourselves to the sword for your brief and small infatuations. You cannot do it.”
And then a look of recognition bloomed across her face until it covered the whole of her visage in horror, and she understood.
“Or maybe you can,” she said. “Hiram, you will bring hell upon us all. Think. Think beyond your emotions. Think beyond all your guilt. You have no right to endanger all who might be so rescued. Think, Hiram.”
But I was thinking. I was thinking of Mary Bronson and her lost boys. I was thinking of Lambert under the Alabama ox and Otha presently tracking cross the country for the freedom of his Lydia. Lydia, who endured all outrage for the chance of family.
“Think, Hiram,” she said.
“You told me freedom was a master,” I said. “You said it was a driver. You said none can fly, that we are tied to the rail. ‘I know,’ you told me. ‘And because I know, I must serve.’ ”
“You know I am not without sympathy,” she said. “I know what happened to you.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “You can’t.”
“Hiram,” she said, “promise me you will not doom us.”
“I promise that I will not doom us,” I said. But the word-play put no folly upon her, and the less said about our remaining interview the better, for I hold her, all these years later, in the highest respect. She was speaking in full faith and honesty. And so was I.
32
I WAS OUT THERE ON my own now, and if Conduction was to be achieved, it must be done by my hand alone. And it seemed to me that there was no longer any avoiding the facts of my departure. I would have to tell them both—Sophia and Thena. I decided I would tell them each separately, for my confession to Thena involved matters far greater than the Underground. So I would start with what I thought was the simpler of confessions—Sophia.
Thena had begun to have nightmares, we thought from her attack. And so we got in the habit, on difficult nights, of leaving Caroline down below with her to sleep on her bosom and calm her. And it was such a night as this when