That he was dull, that he was without tenderness: was this reason enough to hate him? Surely not, but by the time we left the city, I had come to dread the feelings that must arise in my own breast when I was dependent on my husband alone for whatever joy life might have left to offer me. And I was right to be afraid. In town he was unsure of himself, but in his own home he was a tyrant. He drained the color from every scene, the flavor from every bit of food, the warmth from every exchange of sentiment. He had not so much destroyed my life as emptied it, and now that he was gone, I had to pretend there was something alive in me. Joel had sensed this. My laughter was too ready, and it was hollow. When he looked into my eyes, it must have been like staring through the windows of a burnt-out house. Doubtless, he attributed this to the ordeal of the insurrection, and it didn’t occur to him that what had left me with ashes for a heart was not murderous negroes, but my marriage.
The coals had crumbled in the grate and a chill rose up from beneath my feet. Images from the night I wanted to forget flickered across my mind: the horse champing the grass, the sharp blow to my jaw, the flare of the torch, Sarah pausing to point into the darkness, my husband’s startled face as his murderer pulled him up by his hair. I examined his expression as if I were looking at a painting, and I discovered a detail I hadn’t noticed before. The moment before the fatal blow was struck, my husband called Sarah’s name.
I heard the gate open, the sound of footsteps in the alley: Rose and Walter returning from their excursion. There was the repeated slapping of a hand against the side of the house, all the way to the back. Walter, I thought. My husband’s curse, as impossible to accustom myself to or rid myself of as my own crippled right arm.
“HOW CAN A light woman and a dark child disappear without a trace?” I complained to my aunt. We were seated in her drawing room. On the table between us lay a much-crumpled, atrociously written letter, the report of Mr. Leggett on his efforts to secure the runaway Sarah.
“He has been up the coast as far as Savannah,” my aunt said, “quizzing the captains and the stewards of every ship.”
“Has he located the brother?”
“I’m afraid not,” my aunt said.
I bent over the offensive scrawl, trying to make out a sentence. Captain Wash ceen only won child as caut. “What does this mean?” I exclaimed.
My aunt examined the sentence. “Mr. Leggett takes an original approach to spelling and punctuation,” she observed.
“It’s appalling.”
“Yes. It is, isn’t it? It took me some time to make any sense of it at all. Your uncle is nearly an adept. He was able to give me a summary within twenty minutes of first viewing the document.”
“What must his speech be like?” I said.
“Not much less recondite, I’m afraid. However, he’s good at figures. He can compose an excellent invoice.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” I said.
“No,” she agreed. “What he says is that a Captain Wash, that’s probably Walsh, your uncle thinks, has seen only one such dark baby girl in the last month, and it was in the company of its mother, equally dark, a servant traveling with her owner, who was an elderly white gentleman en route to visit his doctor in Philadelphia.”
“Well, that is certainly useless information.”
“There were no free women of color on that trip. Might she have separated from the child?”
“It was weaned. It’s possible.”
My aunt turned the page over, skimming the lines. “Mr. Leggett did find a report of two free women, sisters, traveling together, about the right age, but he traced them to St. Louis and found they were well known in their neighborhood.”
“Perhaps she is disguised as a servant and some northerner is playing her master.”
“Or she may not be traveling by boat, or she somehow contrived to blend in with the other passengers, or she is still here among us, but we just don’t see her,” my aunt said. “There’s no way of knowing.”
“No,” I agreed. “Should we increase the reward?”
“I think so,” my aunt said. “And we’d best insert the notice in the papers in a few of the larger towns.”
“Very well,” I said.
“I don’t despair of Mr. Leggett’s finding her,” my aunt assured me. “He has a marvelous persistence.”
“So has she,” I said.
When I left my aunt’s, I walked to the Faubourg Marigny to leave a pair of shoes with the shoemaker there. That neighborhood is populated largely by free negroes, and a more arrogant and supercilious group could hardly be found. As I went among them, I found myself turning again and again to follow a figure or face that resembled Sarah’s. A man in a bright yellow frock coat approached me, his eyes meeting mine with perfect insolence, and for a moment I thought it must be Mr. Roget, though I had had such a brief glimpse of this person it was unlikely that I would recognize him. Was Sarah in hiding behind one of these simple house-fronts? Was Mr. Roget even now writing to her with further instructions for their eventual reunion ?