were ashamed of something almost—my foolishness at being captured, perhaps. And I thought then that they had been called to do something awful yet necessary.
“Hiram,” Raymond said. “Bland is an old friend to me. I trust him as much as my own family, and to be truthful with you, more than certain members of that family. He is not, as you well know, an exclusive agent of this station. He has his acquaintances across the Underground and, in his dealings with those acquaintances, has, on occasion, taken up projects that would not have met my approval. I understand that you were among those projects.”
I began to feel a shift in the temperature of things.
“I know well the methods and reputation of Corrine Quinn. They are not my methods, Hiram, no matter their aim.”
Raymond shook his head now and looked to the ground. “This ritual burial, the hunting, the chasing, it is all abhorrent to me. In that spirit, I am compelled to say that you are owed an apology. I feel that what was done to you, no matter the aims, was wrong.”
“It was not you who did it,” I said.
“Yes, but it is my cause. It is my army. And while I cannot balance Corrine’s accounts, I can tend to my own. And it was wrong, not just on her behalf, but to our cause”—and here Raymond paused a moment before looking back at me—“no matter what power may beat in your breast.”
“I understand,” I said. “It is nothing. I understand.”
Now Raymond took in a deep breath. “No, Hiram,” he said. “I do not think you truly do.”
“I know more than you give me credit for, Hiram,” Bland said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean, I knew it all. I knew about Sophia, all about your feelings. It is my business to know. And that is why I know not just how you felt then, nor just how you feel now. I also know exactly where Sophia is being held.”
“What?” I said. My head throbbed with almost the same force it had throbbed last night.
“We had to know,” Bland said. “What kind of agents would we be if we didn’t know exactly who you ran with and what became of them?”
“I asked Corrine,” I said. “She said it was out of her power.”
“I know, Hiram, I know. It was wrong. I can’t defend it. I can only tell you what you must already know—that when you are operating as Corrine Quinn does, on the other side of the line, the math is different. It has to be. You were part of that math.”
I screened out the headache and said, “Where?”
“Your father’s place. Lockless. Corrine prevailed on him to take Sophia back.”
“But you didn’t get her out? All the power held by your Underground and you…”
“Virginia has its rules. We took what we could from them. We could not take it all.”
“And so that’s it,” I said. “You’re going to leave her to it?”
“No,” Otha said. “We don’t never leave nobody to it. Ever. They have their rules. And by God, we got ours.”
“Hiram,” Raymond said. “We don’t mean to just offer you an apology. It is not just words we bring, but action to match them.”
“You see, we don’t just know where Sophia is,” Bland said. “We know precisely how to bring her out.”
18
FOR THOSE NEXT FEW days, walking the streets of Philadelphia, or at work with chisel and lathe, at work forging the letters and passes, I thought of little else but Sophia. I thought of her water dancing by the fire. I saw us under the gazebo, trading the jar of ale. I remembered her long fingers, brushing against the dusty furniture in the workshop. I thought of us down by the gulch and I, very badly, wished I had embraced her there. And I thought of all the possibilities of a life up here—of a family of our own, of gingerbread memories, and daughters who sang after dinner, and long walks by the Schuylkill. And I wanted badly to show this world to her, wondered what she would make of it all—the trains, the crush of people, the omnibus—all of which were, day by day, more and more familiar.
Two weeks after I was taken by the man-catchers, I was summoned out to Raymond’s home across the river. He met me on the porch and told me he was alone. His wife and children were in the city, and I gathered from the look on