enemies. Their humanity wounded me, for here too were the bonds of family, and here too were young lovers overrun by the rituals of courting, and here too lay a sorrow, a grim understanding of the sin of the Task. And here too were fears that in the last calculation they too were slaves to some Power, some God, some Demon of the old world, which they had unknowingly unleashed upon the new. I nearly loved them. My work demanded no less: I must reach beyond all my particular hatred and pain, see them in their fullness, and then, with my pen, strike out and destroy them.
Every soul sent to freedom was a blow against them. And we did much more than that. We returned the documents edited and augmented. Our forgeries encouraged feuds. We altered inquests. We lent proof of fornication. My anger was now free and ranged beyond Maynard and my father, aimed now at all of Virginia, an anger I sated each night, under the lanterns, at the long library table.
When done, I would retire to my bed, all worn. In sleep I escaped the men I studied every day and instead dreamed of some far place, a small plot, a stream running to carry away all troubles. I dreamt of Sophia. Those were the good days. On the bad days my dreams were hot, and I saw the jail, the boy, his mother raining down the wrath of God upon Ryland’s Hounds—“Ryland’s Hounds! May black fire scorch you down to your vile and crooked bones.” I saw a man who’d loved a woman and lost his name. And I saw all of my own betrayal, the cackling, the moaning, the rope. On those days I woke up nursing a different feeling, particular and direct, for I awoke thinking of all the things I would do should I ever again cross the path of Georgie Parks.
* * *
—
But I had not been brought to the Underground for vengeance, nor even mere forgery, but for the power I was believed to bear. If we could only learn to trigger it, to control it and harness it. There was one who knew, one like me, but unlike me she had mastery of this power. In her section of the country, she had become so beloved and famed for fantastic exploits that the coloreds of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York had given her the name Moses. The power she wielded had been dubbed “Conduction”—the same word Corrine used to describe my own power—for how it “conducted,” seemingly at will, the Tasked from the shackled fields of the South to the free lands of the North. But this Moses kept her own counsel and declined to give the Virginia Underground any notion of how she worked. And so I was left to my own devices, or more properly stated, I was left to their devices.
We decided to experiment. First, we all agreed that to trigger the power, I needed some kind of stimulation, some kind of threat or pain, even. And too it was thought, from my own testimony, that the power was tied to the indelible moments of my life—and in my own mind I remembered that it might be connected specifically to my mother. But how to summon those memories up and make them serve? Corrine and her lieutenants employed all manner of tricks to draw me out. Hawkins shackled me and asked me to recount, in every detail, the betrayal of Georgie Parks. Mr. Fields blindfolded me, then took me out into the forest and asked for every detail of the day I plunged into the Goose. Amy and I met at the stable and I recounted everything I knew of the crime my father had put upon my mother. I drove Corrine in a carriage, one Saturday, and recalled all that I felt while taking Sophia to meet my uncle. But no blue light of Conduction came to me, and when I finished my story, though my hosts might well be riveted and my own heart in tatters from the memories, I was always exactly where I had begun.
The afternoon after the drive, after another aborted attempt at Conduction, Corrine and I walked together up to the main house and into the dining area. Mr. Fields and Hawkins were there drinking coffee. They greeted us both and then departed. Summer was well upon us with its long days, which meant less cover for our rehearsals.