The Invention of Wings(96)

            Just a few more minutes, I told myself, and when my lids sank closed again, I had no expectations, no hope, no endeavoring—I’d given up on the Voice—and it was then my mind stopped racing and I began to float on some quiet stream.

            Go north.

            The voice broke into my small oblivion, dropping like a dark, beautiful stone.

            I caught my breath. It was not like a common thought—it was distinct, shimmering, and dense with God.

            Go north.

            I opened my eyes. My heart leapt so wildly I placed a hand across my breast and pressed.

            It was unthinkable. Unmarried daughters didn’t go off to live unprotected on their own in a foreign place. They lived at home with their mothers, and when there was no mother, with their sisters, and when there were no sisters, with their brothers. They didn’t break with everything and everyone they knew and loved. They didn’t throw over their lives and their reputations and their family name. They didn’t create scandals.

            I rose to my feet and paced before the window, saying to myself it wasn’t possible. Mother would rain down Armageddon. Voice or no Voice, she would put a swift end to it.

            Father had left all his properties and the vast share of his wealth to his sons, but he hadn’t forgotten his daughters. He’d left us each ten thousand dollars, and if I were frugal, if I lived on the interest, it would provide for me the rest of my life.

            Beyond the window, the sky loomed large, filled with broken light, and I remembered suddenly that day last winter in the drawing room when Handful cleaned the chandelier, the allegation she’d leveled at me: My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round. I’d dismissed the words—what could she know of it? But I saw now how exact they were. My mind had been shackled.

            I strode to my dresser and opened the drawer of my Hepplewhite, the one I never opened, the one that held the lava box. Inside it, I found the silver button Handful had returned to me some years ago. It was black with tarnish and long forgotten. I took it in my palm.

            How does one know the voice is God’s? I believed the voice bidding me to go north belonged to him, though perhaps what I really heard that day was my own impulse to freedom. Perhaps it was my own voice. Does it matter?





PART FOUR


            September 1821–July 1822





Sarah


            The house was named Green Hill. When Israel wrote, inviting me to stay with his family in the countryside of Philadelphia, I’d imagined an airy, white-frame house with a big veranda and shutters the color of pine. It was a shock to arrive at the end of spring and find a small castle made entirely of stone. Green Hill was a megalithic arrangement of pale gray rocks, arched windows, balconies, and turrets. Gazing up at it for the first time, I felt like a proper exile.

            Israel’s late wife Rebecca had at least made the inside of the house soft. She’d filled it with hooked rugs and floral pillows, with simple Shaker furniture and wall clocks from which little birds popped out all day and coo-cooed the hour. It was a very odd place, but I came to like living inside a quarry. I liked the way the stone façade glistened in the rain and silvered over when the moon was full. I liked how the children’s voices echoed in slow spirals through the rooms and how the air stayed dim and cool in the heat of the day. Mostly, I liked how impenetrable it felt.

            I took up residence in a garret room on the third floor, following months of correspondence with Israel and endless skirmishes with Mother. My tactic had been to convince her the whole thing was God’s idea. She was a devout woman. If anything could trump her social obsessions, it was piety, but when I told her about the Inner Voice, she was horrified. In her mind, I’d gone the way of the lunatic female saints who’d gotten themselves boiled in oil and burned at the stake. When I finally confessed I meant to live under the roof of the man I’d written those scandalous, unsent letters to, she broke out in symptoms, cold sores to chest pain. The chest pains were real enough, as evidenced by her drawn, perspiring face, and I worried my intentions might literally kill her.