I had thought Mama would nod in agreement. Some of the other women did. I saw Miss Clara and Miss Annie smile when I said it. But Mama looked at me sharply. “It’s a sin to wish such a thing on another person,” she said. “Even on him.”

I thought of the woman under the water, who I was sure had the vengeance in her to do something horrible like that, and I directed my thoughts to her. Burn him up. Drowning’s too good for him.

Mama stood up. “To work,” she said. Even then, our household had more than the households of the other women—more jars of preserves, more salt pork, more cloth, more firewood. And so we spent the afternoon taking stock of the pantry and of the root cellar, dividing what we had to feed everyone, which household should take from the extra barrel of salted cod and which needed more blankets.

We did not know it then, but this is how we would spend the rest of the war. All of us in that room there became a sisterhood. We called ourselves the Ladies’ Intelligence Society—it had started as a kind of joke, when the few men in town asked the women where they were going, why they spent so much time at Dr. Sampson’s house. I was a mascot of sorts—the doctor’s girl, who was always in the room.

We were hell-bent on plotting. How could we get information from Kings County to Ohio, to Maryland, to Virginia, to the West, about the children left in the destroyed orphanage? How could we find their parents? It was from hours of those meetings that we found the father of the baby I’d carried off the boat, got word to him, were able to send her to relatives in Massachusetts. She was no longer in my arms, but I could still feel the weight of her there, pressing. Whenever I did, I’d fold my arms over my chest and pray again, to the woman in the water. Keep her safe. Keep them safe. Keep us safe.

“After the war” became everyone’s refrain. We read of men dying every day, even as a few of those made their way off the battlefield, their eyes wide with horror. Whenever the war ended, if it ended, whoever won, we knew there would be colored people in need of aid. And what could we do, from the safety and comfort of our town that the whites had overlooked? What would help them best?

“A school,” Miss Annie said. The women all nodded; that was a given. “Homes,” Miss Dinah added. But it was Mama who cleared her throat and said, “A hospital.” She looked around the room. “For colored people,” she said. “We cannot live in freedom if we are not well.”