The Invention of Wings(155)

            The dining table sat out in the garden laid with a white linen cloth strewn with platters of sweets and fresh-picked flowers—foxglove, pink azalea, and feathery fleabane petals. The confectioner had iced the wedding cake with frothed egg whites and darkened the layers with molasses in keeping with Nina’s brown and white theme, and there was a large bowl of sugared raspberry-currant juice where all of the teetotaler abolitionists were lined up, pretending it hadn’t fermented. I’d consumed a sloshing cup of it too quickly and my head was floating about.

            I walked among the guests, some forty or fifty of them, searching for Lucretia, for Sarah Mapps and Grace, thinking, a little tipsily, Here are our friends, our people, and thank God no one is speaking today about the cruelties in the world. I came upon Mrs. Whittier’s son John, whom I’d not seen since our head-to-head last August. He was amusing everyone with a poem he’d written that skewered Theodore for breaking his vow not to marry. He compared him to the likes of Benedict Arnold. When he saw me, he greeted me like a sister.

            Lucretia found me before I could find her. It had been years. Beaming, she pulled me to the edge of the garden beside the blooming rhododendron where we could be alone. “My dear Sarah, I can scarcely believe what you’ve managed to accomplish!”

            A blush crept to my face.

            “It’s true,” she said. “You and Angelina are the most famous women in America.”

            “. . . The most notorious, you mean.”

            She smiled. “That, too.”

            I pictured Lucretia and me in her little studio, talking and talking all those evenings. That fretful young woman I’d been, so stalled, so worried she would never find her purpose. I wished I could go back and tell her it would turn out all right.

            Glancing up, I caught sight of Sarah Mapps and Grace across the garden, striding toward us. Nina and I had traveled almost constantly for the past year and a half, and except for our visit last winter, we’d seen little of them. I wrapped my arms around them, along with Lucretia, who’d known them back at Arch Street.

            When Sarah Mapps pulled a letter from her purse and handed it to me, I recognized Handful’s writing immediately, though it bore my sister Mary’s seal. Unable to wait, I ripped it open and read Handful’s brief message with a sinking feeling. There were reports of runaways beginning to find their way across the Ohio River from Kentucky, or to Philadelphia and New York from Maryland, but rarely from that far south. We’re leaving here or die trying.

            “What’s the matter?” Lucretia said. “You look shaken.”

            I read them the letter, then folded it back, my hands trembling visibly. “. . . They’ll be caught. Or killed,” I said.

            Sarah Mapps frowned. “They must know what they’re attempting. They’re not children.”

            She’d never been to Charleston. She had no idea of the laws and edicts that controlled every moment of a slave’s life, of the City Guard, the curfew, the passes, the searches, the night watch, the vigilante committees, the slave catchers, the Work House, the impossibility, the sheer brutality.

            “They’re coming to us,” Grace said, as if it had just sunk in.

            “And we’ll welcome them,” Sarah Mapps added. “They can live in your old room in the attic. They can help out at the school.”

            “They’ll never make it this far,” I said.

            It occurred to me that Handful and Sky might already have left, and I opened up the letter again to look at the date: 23 April.

            “It was written only three weeks ago,” I said more to myself than to them. “. . . I doubt they’ve left by now. There may still be time for me to do something.”