“You think your white skin is going to save you from everything? They catch you, they’ll say you’s either a slave stealer or a nigger lover. Probably hang you and take your shoes ’cause you ain’t worth no eight hundred dollars to no one.”

“You can meet me there, Henry. At the green house. That’s the safest way.”

“I’ll watch out for her,” Red says. “I promise.”

I shake my head. “You can promise what you will, but I’m going with Sarah and that’s an end to it.”

Red runs his hand along the back of his neck. “Then be here tomorrow night. We go when they sleep.”

He nods Sarah a farewell and heads up the path back to the plantation.

Her face is a mixture of terror and elation, and I think it must surely be mirrored on mine.

I place my hand on her stomach, over the babe growing in her belly. “The three of us are going to be together,” I say. “You’re going to be free and we’re going to go west.”

She smiles at me and it’s like the sun, so bright it’ll melt your heart.

In the morning, I’ll quit my new job at Liberty Valley and send a telegraph to Ennis telling him we’re ready, and to meet us in Maryland in a week, at the start of the Cumberland trail. And in the evening, I’ll be with Sarah on the road to freedom and future.

Chapter 59

Sarah

I barely close my eyes all night and, when I wake, I’m so nervous I’m jumping at my own shadow. Bessie’s up at first light to sit by Ben’s grave. That’s all she wants to do, ever since Master took to dragging her away to show people how much she loves being a slave. She’s hardly seen Samson and Clover and the children since this mess started.

The cellar off to the sides of the carry-through is the coolest place we got at Jubilee, so that’s where we keep the extra food we buy in town before we get ready to use it. It’s where I fetch the eggs for Maple in the mornings, but today my timing’s on double slow. Everywhere I go, it’s like I’m saying goodbye. By the time I get the eggs to Maple, she’s already got the ham sizzling in the pan. She says she’s in a hurry and doesn’t have time for my dawdling, but she’s sure got time to scold me for being slow. I tell her I got to get in to Master Thomas and check on him, but really I need to check on Finny. I get halfway across the lawn when Red meets me coming from the coach house.

“I just checked on him,” he says. “We can’t both be going in there all the time.”

He’s right, so I reach into my skirt and pull out a folded leaf wrapped around a thick paste.

“I made up more of that poultice for his leg,” I say. I hand it to him, telling him to get Finny to wrap it fresh. I also tell him I made up two sacks of food that I hid in the cellar, and one of us needs to sneak them out before tonight.