“How do they fit now?”
“Better.”
Della shakes her head. “You know you free when you wearing a shoe that foolish.”
“Mama,” Cecily says as she admires her feet, “I got something to ask you.”
Della has reached for the bonnet and is adjusting the ribbon that runs across the brim. “What is it?”
“Is Uncle Gilbert paying for all this?”
Della clears her throat. “I don’t know the exact particulars he worked out with Samuel, but it ain’t free.”
“He said something to Samuel about my stagecoach ticket from Washington to Philadelphia needing to come out of the seventy-three dollars he already paid,” Cecily says, “and it got me worrying. Did Uncle Gilbert spend all that to get me in this carriage?”
Her mother doesn’t say anything.
“Does Uncle Gilbert evenhavethat much money?”
Della sighs. “He must.”
“How?” asks Cecily. She doesn’t know anyone who’s got seven dollars, let alone seventy-something.
“Hiring himself out, back when he worked for Pete Goode. He’s been saving a long time.”
“What’s he saving for?”
“What do you think, baby?” says Della. “Same thing we’d all save for, if we could.”
“I can’t go, then,” Cecily stammers. “I can’t take his money. Or let Samuel take his money.”
“Shhh,” says Della, glancing at the door. “Keep your voice down. If Samuel’s agreed to take you, and Gilbert’s paid for it, you going.”
“How can I? When that money could go toward buying his freedom, or Sara’s?”
Della rushes to reassure her. “Gilbert could have seven hundred dollars, and Kemp wouldn’t sell, so there’s no point even worrying about that. And your uncle was just telling me yesterday evening, when he came by to checkon me, that there’s a white lady in town, trying to buy Sara and give her her free papers.”
“Really?”
“Sounds made-up,” says Della, “but it’s some sort of a thank-you for what Gilbert did the night of the fire.”
Cecily loves the idea that there are people in town who want to do right by her uncle. “You telling me the truth?”
“I swear.”
Cecily starts to relax a little.
“If you want to help your aunt and uncle, or any of us for that matter, then you get where you’re going and you work hard and you find a way to take care of someone else, the way your uncle’s taking care of you.”
Cecily can do that, she can do anything so long as she’s out from under Elliott Price.
“All right,” she says. “That’s what I’ll do.”
She reaches for the bonnet, but Della stops her. “We got to do something about that hair first.”
SALLY
Sally wakes sometime in themiddle of the night, bleary-eyed and confused, to discover she has fallen asleep in Mr. Scott’s room, her head resting against the foot of his mattress. She stands, startled, and when she does, the ladder-back chair she’s been perched in tips backward and falls to the floor with a crash.
