“A little late for a shave,” Caleb said.
Prentiss moved toward him with soft steps, and Caleb sat up. Perched above him, uncharacteristically tall against the arching beams of the low attic ceiling, Prentiss offered a hand.
“What you say,” he began. “What you say we get gone from here?”
The sleep drained from him in an instant. He did not need to respond for Prentiss to know his answer. Caleb rose and grabbed for his belongings under the bed. There was little to bundle up. His own razor. The extra shirt he’d bought at the general store and the few other clothes he had. The last jar of his mother’s canned peaches, which he’d kept sealed and uneaten all this time, if only to remember her by.
“You never liked to walk the woods in the dark,” Caleb said. “We can wait till morning.”
“I don’t want to hear that bell. Not once more. I want to be gone.”
Prentiss’s clothes were already laid out on his bed. He’d been ready, Caleb realized. At least for some time that night.
“No reason to be in the woods anyway,” Prentiss said. “Ain’t nobody after us. We’ll stick to the roads. Be two towns over by sunrise.”
“Catch a train. North in no time.”
Under the bed, beside his mother’s peaches, was where Caleb kept the rolled-up piece of parchment that Mrs. Benson had given him. He had meant to use it yet never had, all these months, having convinced himself that his current life—the grinding work, the freezing attic—was not what his mother would hope to hear. But he had kept it beneath his bed all along, knowing the day would come when he would put words to page. The conditions had to be right. Now he knew that full well. He would compose it from a desk, his own desk, in a sunny house that belonged to no stranger. Some place of safety, and beauty, and peace. A place where he would feel himself set free. A place worth writing home from. He would be there soon, he knew, Far from Convent. Far, far from Old Ox.
CHAPTER 30
The ground had nearly frosted over and a gloomy mist fell upon Isabelle as she walked down Stage Road. She had given Elliot use of the donkey early that morning. There was little need for her on the farm this deep into winter and she did not feel like helping the others with their land. Not today.
All these months later the trees were still bare from the fire and for some distance there was startling clarity, the grandeur and mystery of the forest having been betrayed by this newfound nakedness. Not so much as a rabbit or a fox could be spotted. Just unending stillness. Which would be the better part of the country for some time, she thought, with no means to change it but to wait for another season.
Ted Morton’s land had fared no better, and she hesitated at the gate to his property. The fountain was where it had always sat, right before the road. It was no longer running, the lower basin lined with rust. The cherubs on the second tier continued to pose, shooting their arrows and pointing at one another with mawkish looks of adoration. At its top stood a goddess, slender yet muscled, holding a vase from which the water would typically flow, staring upward with astonishment; now she was left to look only at the sky, and it took on a sorrier note, as though the goddess were praying, desperately, for the stream to return to her.
Morton’s land had been so disfigured by the fire that there was still hardly a shrub to speak of. The mansion had been scorched to a skeleton of its former self. Even the stone pillars failed to hold—the heat cracked them and when one fell, the second-story veranda followed, collapsing such that a heap of stone and rubble covered the front entrance. The family somehow managed to survive, although all of their furniture, not to mention their land, was consumed by the fire. All that had been left of the manse was the foundation—an absence so odd it had given Isabelle the shivers when she’d first laid eyes upon it some months ago. A raft of Negroes now worked about the place and the first floor had been built back with an eye toward mimicking its original design. Wooden beams lay in enormous stacks and a few men passed her by with wheelbarrows of stone. A gang of mired, barefoot women carried small bundles of bricks to a pile before the home.
Isabelle finally spotted Ted beside the trail to the back of his property, standing idly with his young son, looking over some papers and smoking a pipe. As she approached, the sheaf of papers slowly descended from his eyes, and once she was upon him, he handed it to his son.
“Go find Gail and tell him what we’ve discussed,” Ted said. “If he must go to the mill once more, so be it.”
Seemingly content with his errand, the boy ran off. Ted regarded her suspiciously, sucking on his pipe until his cheeks caved, smoke trailing out the side of his mouth. His suspenders hung limply at his side. Dust had collected in all the fissures of his face—the pocket of his chin, the lines of his brow—as though an ancient rug, long stowed away, had been unfurled right before his face.