I felt him even before the twig snapped and the gun barrel jabbed into my ribs. I turned, my hands reaching for the sky as a voice said, “Who goes there?”
“Erasmus?” said I.
A pause. Then: “Livvie?”
I lowered my hands and pushed back my shawl and said, “If you shoot me, Erasmus, James will hunt you down.”
He lowered the gun, his eyes wide with surprise. For once, my brother was speechless, for I must have appeared to him as an apparition.
“You’re not drunk,” I said. “’Tis I.”
“Holy smokes,” said Erasmus.
I studied his face. “What’s wrong with your teeth?”
He didn’t answer, but put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. William came running out of the house. He was up to my shoulders now, and surely didn’t know me. It was all I could do not to grab him.
“My goodness, Willy,” I said. “You certainly have grown. Do you remember me?” He nodded, but I wasn’t sure. Begrudgingly, I said to Erasmus, “It looks like you’re feeding him.”
“Livvie, how in God’s name . . . ?”
“Light a lamp,” I said. “I need some help.”
I had left the cart back by the road. Blankets covered the bundles in the back, including Handsome.
“Did you ride here alone, then?” Erasmus asked.
“In these woods?” I threw back the blanket to reveal Handsome, who raised his head, squinting into the light of the lantern.
“What the . . . ?” said Erasmus.
“Handsome,” I said. “You may recall my brother Erasmus. Is he the preacher you spoke of?”
“Handsome?” said Erasmus. “Handsome?”
Handsome unfolded and rose, swung his long legs over the side of the dray, and dropped to the ground. He rubbed his eyes and pulled on his hat.
Then he took a long, steady look at Erasmus. “You!” he said, and lurched toward my brother, grabbing him by the collar. Erasmus dropped the lantern. Little flames caught at the leaves.
“You that preacher!” Handsome said.
“What the hell . . . ?” Erasmus said just as Handsome’s fist landed on his jaw.
* * *
After the fracas in which Handsome punched Erasmus, and Erasmus went down, with me shouting, Sweet Jesus! as Erasmus crawled like a sidewinder away from Handsome, who bore down upon him as though he were an avenging angel with ten years of recrimination at the loss of his wife and child and blaming it on Erasmus, William and I managed to break them up and even cajole Handsome into contrition. Now we were seated on the porch, our breaths steadying as we listened to the swish of water. The boy wouldn’t take his eyes off Handsome in case he went for his father again. In spite of a cut on his cheek, Handsome had gotten the better end of the deal, for Erasmus was more of a runner than a fighter.
“I think my jaw’s broke,” Erasmus said. It came out, I hink my yaw’s roke.
“Nonsense,” said I, dabbing away the blood from his lips with a cloth. “You wouldn’t be able to talk.”
We were in the middle of nowhere, the night alive with the sound of crickets and frogs. I considered my situation, thinking of Eugene’s sneering face. I had exacted my small amount of vengeance along with a slave who, from years of toil and grief, was good for little more than holding the reins to a third-rate livery.
“I can take him north,” said Erasmus, jerking his head at Handsome, who was crouched on a log that served as a chair. “That is, if you’re running.” Iffer ‘unning. To which neither Handsome nor I replied. Erasmus went on. “Ripley’s just up the road. You know what they say about Ripley.”
“Seemed quiet enough,” I said, gazing at the bloody cloth in my hand. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking we wait for a dark night.”
William was too thin by half. I couldn’t tell if those were freckles on his forehead or dirt. The river had turned to lead in the twilight. A rabbit scurried out from beneath the porch. The boy’s eyes traced it hungrily. I wondered how often they had faced starvation with but a few stocks of corn and a rangy chicken or two. This was not what I had envisioned for the boy when I’d led him to the docks and said, Look, Willy. Look at all the beautiful boats. Someday, these boats could be yours.
“They’ll come looking for you,” Erasmus said to no one in particular.
“They’s looking already,” said Handsome, speaking for the first time in an hour.
Erasmus held his hand as if pointing a pistol and pulled the trigger. “Pow,” he said.
The keening frogs crescendoed.
“They’ll be looking for you, too,” Erasmus said to me.
If they found me, I could be fined or jailed. Not for the first time in my life, I had disregarded the consequences. But this was far more dangerous than dissecting corpses or standing in support of secular virtue. Yet here we were. If I abandoned Handsome, his fate would be worse than mine.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life,” Erasmus said to Handsome. “And you’re not the worst of them.” His eyes traced to the boy.
“Aksing you for help was the worst idea I ever had,” said Handsome.
“This time,” said Erasmus, “we’ll figure out a better plan.”
Chapter 19
1837
Tilly stared at me as if I were a ghost. Like me, she was dressed in black. “You’ve been gone for a while.”
“You thought I’d been held captive?” I said, and breezily, too, dropping my bag and yanking off my bonnet. “You thought Mr. Eugene wouldn’t let me go?”
That morning, Erasmus and William had ferried me to a steamboat that I boarded for Cincinnati. I had made Erasmus promise to shepherd Handsome to safety.
Tilly’s eyes were ringed and red. She said, “Your hair could do with a wash.”
Not that she looked much better. Normally immaculate in her own braids and twists, her hair fell below her shoulders in a bushy cascade. And her skin? So gray on her bones that I’d wondered if she’d eaten since I’d left. Surely, she’d tended her ladies, but now I wasn’t sure. I had left so quickly to accompany Silas’s corpse that I’d barely thought about the effect his death might have on Tilly.
That night, I sat straight up in bed and shouted, “Stop!”
A moment later, there was tapping on my door. “You all right?”
It took me a minute to realize where I was. My throat was dry. I had handed off Tilly’s father to Erasmus, and yet I could risk no mention of Handsome. My heart pounded. I felt spent.
“Maybe some warm milk?” Tilly said. Her candle flickered along the bottom edge of the door.
“You fuss too much, Tilly. Go back to sleep.”
But I lay awake long after she’d gone.
The next morning, sitting by the window at the table where Silas had scribbled out notes on gout and pleurisy, I fiddled with my tea. Tilly hovered, picking hair from a brush as if she were plucking a chicken.
“Tilly, you are staring at me as if I were Lazarus.”
“You look queer.”
I clinked my teacup. “I am not myself.”
“I ain’t passing judgment.”
“‘Am not,’” I said. “Passing judgment.”
“Your clothes, Miss ’Livia. I unpacked your bag. Filthy, like you’d been rolling in hay. I’da thought they’d take better care of you.”
A day and a half in a wagon; a night in my brother’s hovel. “I’m sure they’ll clean up fine.”
She leaned in close, said, “I ain’t seen you like this since you was got with child.”
My belly gripped with the memory. A year into my marriage, my menses had stopped. I had agreed with Silas that we’d have no children, but for almost two months, I had felt a sweet fullness that was the closest my spirit had ever been to peace. I remembered the pity on Tilly’s face when I’d doubled up with cramps, the blood seeping through my undergarments. Silas could not forgive me for becoming pregnant in the first place, but Tilly had tended me well.
Tilly set the brush on the table, pulled out a chair. “You didn’t like me much at first,” she said. “You almost didn’t get married on accounta me.”
“It wasn’t just you.”
“But Mr. Silas? He was a much better man than his brother. Not perfect. But much, much better.” Then, sitting across from me like an inquisitor, she changed her tone. “Tell me about Missus Bethany’s girl.”
It seemed a strange question. But remembering how Silas had taken Tilly back to Orpheus Farms about a year after William was born, I realized she must have midwifed Bethany’s child.
“Pretty girl. Could do with a bit of tutoring. But overall, well dressed and clean.”
Her hands clasped in her lap, she leaned forward. “How pretty?”
I thought of all the pupils I’d tutored over the years. “You must get attached,” I said, “to the children you deliver.”
She rose up, smoothed her skirts. “Some.”
I studied her face as if for the first time. Narrow-nosed. Green-eyed. A brow that was so familiar. I could imagine Handsome’s wife, Delilah, taken by Eugene. In the stable. In a field. And when Erasmus brought Handsome back, just to spite him, Eugene had sold off Tilly’s older brother along with his wife and Tilly’s mother, Delilah.
I set down my teacup, dabbed my lips with a piece of cloth. “I am so sorry, Tilly. And you are right about my hair.”
* * *
I had been back less than a week when I heard the knock. At first, I thought nothing of it because there was a pounding from time to time—a patient who didn’t know that Dr. Orpheus had passed (six hours it took me to ride here, ma’am. Are you sure he can’t fix this tooth?); a solicitor of scraps; a census taker; a lame barker looking for work. When I flung open the door, I was half expecting to see that barker again because he’d been most insistent about his carpentry skills that, in truth, I would have welcomed were it not for that look in his eye.
“I said not to—!”
A caped man turned to face me.
“Mr. Orpheus!”
Eugene Orpheus removed his hat. “Ah,” he said. “So I do have the correct address?” He leaned in ostentatiously to read the plaque.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, though I already knew.
“Madame?” He smiled an ingratiating smile. “I fear that we parted with ill feeling, for you left without saying good-bye.”
Ill feeling? But I was determined to play along lest he suspect I realized he was here to inquire about Handsome. Tilly had gone out that morning to the market, leaving me alone wearing only muslin and with hair poorly suited to company.
“What do you want?”
“Will you not welcome your brother-in-law? You should, you know.”
He pushed across the threshold into Silas’s office and sat down in the Windsor chair where Silas would sit to consult with Mrs. Spencer on her rheumatism or Mr. Burgess on his liver. His hands were steady and his eyes clear, no sign of the drink. “I have never seen my brother’s office,” he said, looking about. “I regret that now. I should have come when he was living.”
I inhaled deeply the scent of antiseptic. That something so astringent and unnatural should console me was unnerving. Eugene’s eyes were on the labeled jars that crammed the floor-to-ceiling shelf. How many times had I told Silas to let me do the labeling, his penmanship was so poor?
“Ah!” said Eugene, getting up and crossing to the shelf. “And what is this?” He touched a large glass container. “Of course! A cat! He was horrible to cats. Good Lord, nothing much changes does it?”
I knew not what to say, so I waited, standing behind the chair that was used for patients. I did not want him to stay, and yet if I looked too discomfited by his presence, it might lead him to conclude . . . what? That I was still upset about our incident in the bedroom? And why shouldn’t I be?
But we both knew why he was here.
“It’s a stray cat,” I said, as if that explained it.
“Cut it up, did he?” Eugene laughed fondly, as one might respond to a precocious child. “He was always cutting things up. You can imagine the fuss. Chicken parts were one thing. But when my mother found a dog’s head in his room . . .”
“He was a curious man, interested in physiology.” I could see the room through Eugene’s eyes—a dusty place attesting to the near poverty of his younger brother, who had shown no interest in farming, in land, in the owning of property other than dead things in jars; three sticks of shabby furniture; a widow.
“Physiology? Is that what it was about?” Eugene said, returning to his seat and crossing his legs. He looked quite at home and was clearly enjoying himself. And again, that eerie resemblance to his brother. “Cats?” he said, one eyebrow archly rising.
I cleared my throat. “Why have you come?”
His smile didn’t waver. I felt my cheeks grow hot. In a placid tone, as if he were making a desultory inquiry about the weather, he said, “Where is he?”
Whatever color had infused my cheeks drifted away. I willed my voice to stay calm. I cocked my head. “Where is who?”
“My dear Olivia. You left five days ago. My wife and daughter are quite beside themselves. You left, and the slave who drove you never returned to the farm. What are we to make of that?”
“Handly, was it?”
“Handsome. He has been with us for forty years. Such disloyalty in a servant we’ve housed and fed all that time—well, it hurts a man.”
“You don’t look hurt.”
“Don’t I? And yet, I’m a man of strong feelings, Mrs. Orpheus. May I call you ‘sister’? May we resume our familiarity? I meant you no harm. I was overtaken.”
Overtaken by what? By me? Drink? As I saw it, he was an opportunist who liked to prey upon the helpless and had misidentified me as such. Poor Olivia Givens—“so thin and hairless”—unable to resist his charm. He had mocked his brother, saying he was impotent. But Silas hadn’t been impotent. Not really. True, his ardor was for his work, but our marriage had been consummated, if not passionately or frequently, at least dutifully and earnestly, though I confess thinking meanly that Silas felt more tenderness toward corpses.
“Even so,” I said. “I can’t help you with your man. He dropped me off at the landing, and I waited for the second packet after the first one did not come.” How many times had I rehearsed this over the last few days?
Eugene looked at me sharply. “So you say . . . and yet I could find no witnesses. No one seems to recall your taking a ticket.” He sighed. “Handsome’s one of our own. Came to us as a boy. Not so young now. Scarred. Some would say problematic, though the last few years he’s been docile. A good nigger, good with horses. You know how much a nigger like that’s worth?”
“I couldn’t possibly say, having never held with slavery.”
“Your husband certainly held with slavery. Yes, indeed. ‘Held’ is one word for it. And yet you, Miss Givens—Mrs. Orpheus—you do not hold? I wouldn’t have pegged you for a zealot. Only, perhaps . . . a bit naive?”
I gripped the back of the chair and forced myself to look assured. “I read the papers, Mr. Orpheus. Nothing more. My time in your state was perfectly pleasant, but this is Ohio, and you see how our laws hold differently.”
“O-hi-o.” He mimicked my accent in every syllable. He rose from the chair, took a deep breath as if an odor was pressing in against him, as if the fact of it made him very sad. He looked at me from beneath his brows, the way that Silas would when he wanted something, something he knew he could take but was trying instead to cajole.
“I’ll ask again—”
“—and I’ll deny it.”
Eugene drew in close. From the depths of my soul, I stood my ground. He touched my face. “Such a pity,” he said. He smiled mildly, but his eyes were devoid of amusement. “It would have been much easier. Are you absolutely sure?”
When I did not speak, he picked u
p his cape, his hat. His shoes were pointed, almost dainty. They’d be caked with mud by the end of the day.
When he got to the door, he stopped and turned, almost as if with an afterthought.
“One more thing, sister.”
I stiffened.
“I believe we can agree that you still have some of my property?”
I swept my arms around the room. “Tissue in formaldehyde? Medical tools and bits of bone?”
“To the contrary,” he said, repositioning his tall hat. There was no more flirtatiousness in his manner. “You have my girl. Little light-skinned thing? The girl who calls herself Tilly?”
Chapter 20
1837–1838
A month later, a letter came from Bethany saying how unhappy she’d been since I had left. Elizabeth missed me as well, and since my departure, wouldn’t read a thing. Just stared out the window, sad as could be, and did I hear that a slave had run off? Never came back from taking me to the landing. I wouldn’t know anything about that, would I?
I wrote her back. Why no, sister. The man dropped me off as we had planned, though I had to wait for a later ferry, as the one I had intended to take had some problem with the engine. Perhaps he headed west?
Oh, undoubtedly, was her reply. The man had given them problems once before, and though it pained her to say it, once a nigger ran, they were just as apt to do it again, having gotten it in their nostrils, that rank smell of running. All these problems, and Eugene creating such a fuss.
It seems he thinks you had something to do with it, sister, though I’ve told him he has misjudged your fine character. I’d be sorry if I were wrong.
Tra-la-la, I wanted to write, but when the next letter came, it was from Eugene.
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