I slipped my hand into hers.

“What does he mean, Mama?”

“He has just suffered a great shock to his system and won’t make much sense for a while.”

“Because you and Madame Elizabeth got him free?”

She took her hand out of mine and knelt so that we could look each other in the eye. I did not like this at all. I preferred looking up at her, tilting my head back till all I saw was her chin. Eye to eye was more frightening.

People said Mama was a beautiful woman, but I think what they really meant was she was light enough to pass. She had large eyes, true, set deep in her skull, but they were more owl-like than anything else. She had a heavy brow, hooded, that made it look as though she was about to scowl, even when she was laughing. Her skin, of course, was pale but it was sallow. It was her one vanity, the only one she allowed me to witness anyways—she dried lily petals in the spring and ate them year-round, to make the tone of her cheeks even. It was, up until this moment, my favorite secret we shared between us. I was the only one who saw her do it. Her nose was straight—I think this is what people meant when they called her beautiful—but it was severe. Her lips were the only pretty thing about her, the same as mine, full and always resolving themselves into the shape of a rose. When I looked at her, I never saw my own face, and maybe that is why I found it so disturbing, these times when she’d kneel down to look me in the eye.

I preferred, at that age, to think of us as the same person. I was still young enough for that.

She looked me in the eye and said, “What did you say?”

“You got him free. You and Madame Elizabeth. You got him here to be free.”

She looked me steadily in the eye. Finally. “This is true.”

I expected her to stand again, but she did not. “You cannot repeat to anyone what you just said to me—”

“But why?”

“This is not a game, Libertie. What we did, what we are doing, is very dangerous. If you tell somebody, it would not end well for us. We would go to jail, Mr. Ben would go back to bondage, and you and I would never see each other again. Do you understand?”

I did not, entirely. But to admit this would not please her, so I nodded.

She stood up and put her hand on her hip. The sun was finally out, and we could see, in the new light, Lenore coming up the road. Lenore was not a big woman, but she still managed to roll her hips when she walked, and she liked to ball her skirts in her two fists and switch them this way and that, to keep the dust off her. Mama was insistent that no dust be brought into the examination room, except by her patients themselves, and made Lenore wipe herself down with damp cloth and beat her skirt with a straw brush before she could join her each day, so Lenore had devised this method to make it a bit easier.