But after a time, she could make out some of the words. “When the battle’s over,” a woman’s voice sang, while deeper voices hummed along behind it, “we can wear a crown—in the new Je-ru-sa-lem.”

“Over yonder, less than a mile,” Grant said softly. “Smith’s Creek Bridge.”

He clasped his bare fingers gently around the back of her neck and swiveled her head. Twinkling like a low star, a faint light shone in the distance.

“A lantern?” she said.

“White soldiers up there. Sentries. They’ve sealed off the city.”

“Then we’d better warn—”

“Shush, now. They won’t come out here. Those white boys know better than to try and rout us out of the swamp.”

She nodded in the dark. They must be huddled out there by the hundreds.

Grant said, “Runaways been hiding out in these swamps for a hundred and fifty years. It’s a hole in the map.” Alex Manly’s father, mother, and two brothers were out there somewhere, he knew.

“Then they’re safe? But it’s so cold.” She didn’t think she could survive the night in the open.

He sighed. “Safe is an approximate thing, teacher. Nobody’s going to shoot them out here. Nobody’s going to get close enough.”

She shivered in the rain. The mare snorted but stood patiently, waiting for the driver to take up slack on the reins. Gray Ellen said, “It’s no night to be sleeping outdoors. My God.”

“They dare not light fires,” Grant said, his voice suddenly breaking.

She wished there were light enough to see his face. He had not hesitated to urge on the violence—was he now feeling remorse? Did he have any right? He had invented himself—a man who was not a man but a living cause, a flame burning toward a single purpose hallowed by a dead grandfather and two centuries of racial memory. But in this moment, in the dark, she glimpsed the man who lived inside the invention. He was close to breaking.

His voice recovered its matter-of-fact tone. “Some will catch pneumonia. Some will die. The old and infirm, the babies.”

“The children,” she said, suddenly realizing. The willowy, squirming bodies who lived behind the wooden desks in her classroom were tonight sleeping in the swamp, without even a fire.

Grant abruptly handed over the reins and started to climb out. She could only hear him. “What are you doing?” she said.

“It’s all over now. They’ll be hunting me down, too, by and by. Can’t go back.”

She thought quickly. She couldn’t help all those invisible people out there in the darkness, but she could at least help this man. “Come back with me. Stay at the house until morning. Wait till things calm down.”

“I ought to stay here. I belong with them.”

“You can’t do anything for them.”

“Maybe not. But I am a preacher of the Lord—”