Conn and Will lay on their stomachs in the dark hallway at the top of the stairs, listening to the voices coming from the sitting room.
“Elizabeth, it isn’t right for you and the children to be here all alone when you could be with us.”
Elizabeth’s voice was clipped as she replied, not for the first time, “I’ve told you, Mother, we aren’t alone. We have friends here. This is my home.”
Earlier that afternoon, Conn and Will had been mowing the grass and Elizabeth weeding the flower beds when a car had pulled up the drive. Looking up curiously, Elizabeth’s face had turned a peculiar blotchy red as her in-laws got out of their Cadillac convertible.
“Uh oh,” Conn murmured, pausing the mower.
“Well, aren’t you glad to see us?” said Grandma Mitchell, wearing a luridly floral dress with enormous sunglasses and a scarf to keep her hair from flying away.
“Doesn’t she look just like Grace Kelly?” Grandpa Mitchell asked loudly.
Will ran to them.
“Hey, Willy-boy,” Grandpa said, giving Will a rough shake of the shoulders.
“Come on,” Elizabeth said to Conn in an undertone as she pulled off her gardening gloves, “I’m not doing this alone.” To the Mitchells, she said as she forced a smile, “What are you doing here?”
“You all sounded so lonely when we talked on Connemara’s birthday,” said Grandma Mitchell. “We said we should come for a visit.”
“I told you we were fine,” Elizabeth reminded them. “Why didn’t you call?”
“Oh well, you know how it is on these hick roads,” Grandma Mitchell said. “You never know where you’re going to find a sign of civilization. I said to Harold, ‘Harold, aren’t you going to stop so we can call?’, but he said we didn’t need gas, so we didn’t need to stop.” She smiled, and kissed Elizabeth on the cheek, then held her at arms’ length. “Why, Elizabeth, whatever are you wearing?” she asked, looking disapprovingly at Elizabeth’s slacks, marked with grass stains at the knees, her worn canvas sneakers covered with dried mud.
“That’s right,” said Harold, hoisting up the waist of his Bermuda shorts over his ample belly, revealing white knees above black socks and deck shoes. “Gets twelve miles to the gallon. I told Clara we’re not stopping till we have to.” He gave the hood a pat. “There’s my Connie,” he said in an overly jovial tone, holding his arms out to Conn.
Conn just stood there, looking at him.
“What’s the matter with her?” Clara asked.
“There’s nothing the matter with her,” said Elizabeth, hiding a smile, “but don’t call her Connie if you expect a response. She hates being called Connie.”
“Well, I never,” said Clara, but Harold covered the moment with a gruff cough and said, “C’mon, Willy, you can help me carry in the suitcases.”
“Um, how long are you planning on staying?” Elizabeth asked as Harold retrieved two enormous suitcases and several smaller bags from the Cadillac’s cavernous trunk. Conn could detect the note of panic in her mother’s voice, though the Mitchells seemed not to have noticed.
“Why, Elizabeth, someone might think you weren’t glad to see us,” Harold said with a guffaw.
“Don’t be silly,” Elizabeth replied weakly as Will began dragging the smaller of the suitcases through the grass toward the house.
“We have nowhere we have to be,” Clara said, “so we can stay as long as you need us.”
“Where are they sleeping?” Conn asked, laden with the straps of two cases hanging from her shoulders and her hands filled with the handles of two more small bags.
“In your room, I suppose,” said Elizabeth, taking the suitcase from Will and carrying it with some difficulty up the porch steps. “You can sleep with me.”
Dinner was somewhat haphazard. Elizabeth had not planned for two extra people and while she, Will and Conn shuffled things in the bedrooms to accommodate their unexpected visitors, Harold played with the controls on the oven, declaring he had never seen such an antique, with the result that the roast that had been slow-cooking all afternoon burnt.
“I don’t know how you put up with the heat of that monster,” Clara said, fanning herself with the latest issue of Look magazine. “Why don’t you get something modern?”
“It was my grandmother’s and her mother’s before her,” Elizabeth said, trying to control herself as she pulled the charred meat from the woodstove and set it outside.
Conn could see the tension in her mother’s jaw, and said, “Let’s just have BLTs, Mom. We’ve got fresh tomatoes, and we’ll only have to fry up the bacon. And we have more potato salad in the frig.”
“Sandwiches? For dinner?” Clara sounded scandalized. “Do you and the children always eat like this?” she asked disapprovingly.
“Only when someone ruins the dinner,” Elizabeth replied snappishly. Forcing herself to smile, she said, “You’ve both had a tiring drive. Why don’t you go sit and we’ll call you when everything’s ready.”
Will made a pile of toast and Conn sliced the tomatoes while Elizabeth fried the bacon. When everything was done, Will went to call his grandparents.
Seated around the table, Harold said loudly, “Well, it’s the funniest dinner I’ve had in a month of Sundays, but I guess beggars can’t be choosers.”
Conn saw her mother bite her lip to avoid a retort. She reached for the bowl of mayonnaise and….
§§§
“We’ve got to stop and rest,” Hannah said. “Ruth can’t go any farther.”
Though Caitríona wouldn’t have asked to stop, she was grateful for the excuse to rest.
For nearly two weeks, they had pushed west, guided by a map Caitríona had taken from Lord Playfair’s study.
“Here,” Burley had said, counting out money from the strongbox and pushing it into her hands. “This is a fair wage for your years here, plus some for Orla.”
Caitríona blinked up at him. “I don’t know what to say. From the day we met you, you’ve been so kind.”
“Don’t be silly,” he blustered, though he looked pleased. “Now, I think it’s best if we don’t tell anyone you’re goin’. If we tell ‘em, they’ll be askin’ all kinds of questions.”
“But what will they say about Henry and Ruth and Hannah?” Caitríona asked worriedly.
“Well,” he frowned, rubbing the stubble on his chin. “There’ll be a fuss, for sure. Might even be a search party. If there is, I’ll try to head ‘em to the river.”
“God keep you, Burley Pratt,” Caitríona said, standing on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek.
“You’d best be keepin’ those prayers for yourself,” he said with feigned gruffness. “You’ll be needin’ ‘em.”
And so the small party had slipped away in the night, taking one of the draft horses from a far pasture. Deirdre rode or was carried, and the horse was laden with their pathetically small bags of possessions and the provisions Burley could spare.
Caitríona, who had arrived in America with so little, had no difficulty leaving with nothing more than her journal and a change of clothes for herself and Deirdre, but Henry had stood in his shop, agonizing over what few tools he could afford to take with them.
“You’ll make new ones,” Ruth said, patting his arm. She herself had packed only a few jars of medicines and herbs she thought they might need.
At first, the going wasn’t too bad, but the terrain became wilder and more mountainous the farther west they pushed. Though they tried to avoid towns and settlements, they occasionally ran into other travelers or bands of soldiers.
“My husband was killed in the war,” Caitríona would say if she was pressed for an explanation as to why a white woman was traveling with a baby and three Negroes. “He wanted us to go to his people if anything happened to him.”
Which side her fictional husband had fought on changed depending on who was asking. One trader had been particularly irksome, asking uncomfortably probing questions about where they came from and where they were headed.
“We’re going to Charleston,” Caitríona lied. They had no intention of going that far west, but if Burley was right about a possible search party hunting for them, she wanted no chance of laying a trail they could follow.
When they did run into fellow travelers, she tried to glean some information as to their whereabouts. Her map pre-dated West Virginia’s split from Virginia, and they weren’t sure where the new boundary was. One farmer driving a small herd of swine pointed to a distant depression in the mountains.
“That’s Rucker’s Gap,” he said. “If you get across there, you’re in West Virginia.”
The paths leading them to Rucker’s Gap were little more than deer trails through the woods. While in the forest, it was impossible to accurately head toward a specific landmark, and they often had to crash through undergrowth in an attempt to correct their direction, using axes and knives to hack paths wide enough for the horse. They crossed innumerable streams, some shallow enough to ford with no difficulty, but others running swiftly through steep canyons that forced them to detour up or downstream, sometimes for miles before finding safe places to cross. Where they found grassy clearings, they were forced to stop to allow the horse to graze.
“Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?” Caitríona asked Henry in a low voice one night as they pored over their map yet again after a lengthy detour to cross a stream.
“This is hard now, Miss Caitríona,” he replied, “but it will be worth it when we can breathe free.”
His confidence reassured her. Their food stores were getting low, and they were all battered and bug-bitten and weary, but she reminded herself that she had endured worse. She glanced over at Deirdre who was lying on a blanket next to Hannah. Watching the two of them sleeping together, she knew she would do anything to keep them safe. Anything.
§§§
“Conn? Conn!”
Conn became aware of her brother prodding her. Blinking, she looked around. Her grandparents were staring at her as if she had sprouted horns, but her mother was shaking her head, her hand over her eyes.
“Day dreaming,” Conn shrugged with a half-laugh. She realized she was still holding the mayonnaise. She passed it on to Will. “Sorry.”
Lowering her eyes to her plate, she breathed a sigh of relief that this dream had not been a bad one. She was not really listening for a while, so she was jolted when the conversation between the adults began to penetrate her preoccupation.
“The whole family thinks it would be for the best,” Clara was saying.
“They do?” Elizabeth said, trying to keep her tone neutral.
“Of course they do. Why shouldn’t you come back to Indiana to be near family?” Harold interjected. He waved a hand in the air. “I can’t see how anyone would be sorry to leave this old place.”
Conn looked up, panic in her heart. Surely, her mother would never – but Elizabeth met her eyes and Conn knew it was okay.
“Mark would want you to be with family,” Clara said.
A shadow immediately fell over Elizabeth’s features, but she calmly said, “Mark wanted us, if anything happened to him, to be where we felt at home. This is our home and we are with family.”
“What family?” Clara demanded.
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Conn said.
After dinner, Elizabeth insisted that Harold and Clara go sit on the porch while Will entertained them by catching faerieflies. As she and Conn were clearing the table, she whispered, “And you tell Caitríona, her timing could be better!”