Like when we were little, I’d recite a story to keep her company until she slept. “Let me tell you about snow, Helena. It’s freezing. Britain has bone-chattering cold and infernal white ice that children love to throw. How does God do that, make the rain form frozen stars? You know that people actually lie in it and wiggle and call it an angel.”
“Our older sister, she would say it was Agassou’s doing. Papa put away those ideas of Mama’s gods when she passed. He took us to chapel every chance he got. He talked a lot about forgiveness. Remember forgiveness?”
Weaving my fingers with hers, I pulled our hands to my lap. “You get on that boat with me, Helena, I’ll do what you say. I’ll forgive the world.”
“I’ll be with you always. My Chari. Forgiveness. Your name is love, Charity. Forgiveness, it is merely another form.”
My sister shuddered, then went very still.
I held Noah in my arms and began to pray to everyone—Agassou, Jove, even the church deacon Quamina, and the smugglers who helped us escape.
My sister needed healing, and I didn’t care who did it.
CHAPTER18
CECILIA—ESCAPE FORFREEDOM
The morning light filtered to me, warming the wood of the dray. I traced the outline of the purple blooms of the jacaranda above me. Pity that when they fell and were trampled, they smelled like horses’ leavings.
Didn’t matter.
Felton said I was so pretty the day of our wedding with my hair braided with twigs of lavender in the tightest crown. When we left on the schooner, I thought the world was ahead of us. Just didn’t know we’d keep going on separate adventures.
“Little Noah, I’m going to take you on a ship across the sea. I’m going to love you and make you great.”
Those words fell easily, but then doubt crowded in. I hadn’t exactly been a good stepmother. I’d been a friend to Agatha and Amelia. What would make me a good mother?
Noah began to cry. His gums started to suckle.
“Oh, please. I take it back, whatever I said wrong.”
Quamina, the enslaved man who helped us flee the Elizabeth Ann Plantation, came out of the bushes. He wore a white tunic and pants, looking like a holy shepherd.
Well, he was a deacon for the Anglican missionaries now coming to Demerara.
He clasped the side of the dray. “Lady Gantry, the boat’s in the harbor. Your friends are waiting. My sister Enna is there now. She’ll go with you. She’ll be a wet nurse. She lost her babe. This will be healing for her.”
The man had made preparations, and I was thankful. Noah wouldn’t survive without mother’s milk.
Quamina cast his eyes to my silent sister.
No words had to be said, and I couldn’t say Helena would never awaken. She’d fed Noah one last time before drifting to permanent sleep.
He made the sign of the cross over the shawl covering her face, then climbed into the driver’s seat. “You take your fancy papers and go. Don’t return.”
Picking up the reins, he headed the dray down the reddish-brown dirt road.
“You’ll never be safe in the colony, Lady Gantry. Papers or not, someone who liberates a runaway slave will be hunted.”
“What of you? Surely you should come.”
“Lady Gantry, I’m helping the priests bring liberty here. Can’t stop now.”
“Then pray for me. Jeremiah Gladstone did this. I want him to pay.”
“The Gladstones are absentee planters who make money from enslavement, then pretend they do not to know it’s blood money. Their young men come here to do things away from the eyes of their mamas.”
I fingered Papa’s knife in my pocket. He meant it for protection, but I wanted to deliver vengeance. Tramel was right. “Gladstone killed my sister. He needs to die.”
