“Out of the theater?”
Della nods.
Gilbert’s head is spinning. “You mean to tell me, she’s been hiding since last night?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Oh, Della.”
“Don’t ‘Oh, Della’ me. It’s not the craziest thing I ever heard of.”
Gilbert feels an overwhelming urge to get off his feet, but they have arrived at the canal, and he sees nowhere to sit. Just a lot of river barges, knocking against each other.
“Running’s dangerous,” says Della. “We all know that. But it’s a hell of a lot less dangerous if no one’s looking for you.”
“How you so sure no one’s looking for her?”
“Are you hearing what I’m telling you?” Della says. “The Prices, all the folks in the quarters, even her own father—God help him—they all think she’s dead.”
“So, wait. You know about Cecil?”
“Moses told me he’s been taken in.”
“I saw Kemp stop him,” says Gilbert. “I wish I could have done something.”
“I’ll get to Cecil eventually, but right now it’s Cecily I got to figure out.”
“Della, I’ll help however I can. But I don’t know nothing about running.”
It’s true. Gilbert has never paid much attention to the stories of daring escapes and moonlit river crossings. Maybe he’s naive, but he has always believed his freedom will taste sweeter if he buys it, fair and square. That he’ll breathe easier, knowing no one’s looking for him.
“Brother,” says Della coolly. “I’m not coming to you because you know a thing about running. I’m coming to you because you know a thing about writing.”
“Writing?”
“She needs a good pass,” says Della without batting an eye. “The kind that will take her on out of here.”
“What you gonna do when she has it? Just put her on a stagecoach?”
“It’s not a terrible idea.”
“God almighty. Are you serious?”
“Remember Samuel Jefferson?”
“Of course I do.”
“I went to see him today.”
Samuel Jefferson is a wheelwright who Gilbert used to work with at Callum Murrow’s Carriage Shop. Between the two of them, they were responsible for making the wheels for all the gigs and coaches the shop produced. Samuel would construct the nave, the spokes, and the felloes outof wood, and then Gilbert would strake the wheel in iron. Gilbert wasn’t smithing—not yet—but fitting all those iron plates onto the rim of the wheel gave him some sense of the ways he might one day be able to make a piece of metal move.
Samuel is a freedman, has been for close to a decade. Most men leave town once they buy their way out of bondage, but Samuel stuck around Richmond and kept working for Mr. Murrow. Said Mr. Murrow was the finest carriage maker this side of the Atlantic, and he didn’t aim to work for anyone who was second-rate.
That might have been true, but there were also rumors that, sometimes, when Samuel was called upon to deliver a carriage to one of Mr. Murrow’s northerly customers, he traveled a little heavy, delivered something extra when and if he could. Gilbert was always too scared to ask Samuel about it directly and assumed he wouldn’t get a straight answer out of him if he did.
“Did you ask him if he could help?”
“In a way,” says Della. “I didn’t tell him who was needing the ride, but he could probably figure it out if he spent half a minute thinking about it.”
