He got quiet and brushed the sugar dust off his mouth. He knew I was right, but didn’t want to say.
The sun was stepping through the window, laying down four bright quilt squares on the floor. I stared at them while the silence hung, thinking how he’d said I was Charlotte all over, and it popped in my mind the way she’d put pieces of our hair and little charms down inside her quilts, and then I remembered the time she got caught red-handed with missus’ green silk. She’d told me then, “I should’ve sewed that silk inside a quilt and she never would’ve found it.”
“I know what you need to do with the list,” I said.
“You do, do you?”
“You need to hide it inside a quilt. I can sew a secret pocket inside to hold it. Then you just lay the quilt on the bed in plain sight and nobody knows the difference.”
He paced cross the workshop three, four times. Finally, he said, “What if I need to get to the list?”
“That’s easy, I’ll leave an opening in the seam big enough for your hand to slip in and out.”
He nodded. “See if Susan has a quilt somewhere. Get busy.”
When the new year came, Nina scrounged up five girls and started the Female Prayer Society. They met in the drawing room Wednesday mornings. I served the tea and biscuits, tended the fire, and watched the door, and from what I could tell, the last thing going on was praying. Nina was in there doing her best to introduce them to the evils of slavery.
That girl. She was like Sarah. Had the same notions, the same craving to be useful, but the two of them were different, too. Seventeen now, Nina turned every head that looked her way and she could talk the salt from the sea. Her beaux didn’t last long, though. Missus said she chased them off with her opinionating.
I don’t know why she didn’t chase the girls off either.
During the meetings, she made hot-blooded speeches that went on till one of the girls lost the point of it and turned the talk to something else—who danced with who or who wore what at the last social. Nina would give up then, but she seemed glad to speak her mind, and missus was happy, too, thinking Nina had finally found some religion.
It was during a meeting in March that the Smith girl took umbrage. Nina was taking special care to let her know how bad her neighborhood was.
“Would you come over here, Handful?” Nina called. She turned to the girls. “See her leg? See how she drags it behind her? That’s from the treadmill at the Work House. It’s an abomination, and it’s right under your nose, Henrietta!”
The Smith girl bristled. “Well, what was she doing at the Work House in the first place? There must be some discipline, mustn’t there? What did she do?”
“What did she do? Haven’t you heard anything I’ve been saying? God help us, how can you be so blind? If you want to know how Handful came to be at the Work House, she’s standing right here. She’s a person, ask her.”
“I’d rather not,” the girl said and tucked her skirts in round her legs.
Nina rose from her chair and came to stand beside me. “Why don’t you take your shoe off and show her the kind of brutality that takes place on the same street where she lives?”
I should’ve minded doing it, but I always remembered that day Tomfry caught me in front of the house sneaking off to Denmark’s, how Nina came to my rescue. She’d never asked where I’d gone, and the fact was, I wanted the girls to see what the Work House had done to me. I tugged off my shoe and bared the misshaped bone and the pinky-flesh scars wriggling cross my skin like earthworms. The girls pressed their fingers under their noses and blanched white as flour, but Henrietta Smith did one better. She fainted sideways in her chair.