Honor (7 page)

Later Samuel carried Miriam to her bed. Honor told him to wake her if Miriam needed her. She and Royale entered their room. As soon as the two of them were alone, what lay between them reared up. They avoided each other. And neither spoke till they were in bed and no light but the moon glowed.

All day, even in the midst of worry over Miriam, Royale’s words had streamed through her mind like a circle of ribbon. Honor braced herself. “Now tell me,” she whispered.

“Your grandfather be my father.”

The air went out of Honor’s lungs. She closed her eyes and her mouth, struggling to conceal her reaction.

“He be my father, and he didn’t leave me one word or one thing for my own,” Royale said, hurt in each word. “Or set me free in his will.”

Honor found Royale’s hand and gripped it. She whispered the only comfort she could offer. “He knew I’d set thee free.”

“But I wanted
him
to set me free. Don’t you see?”

Honor did. “He betrayed both of us. Did he love us at all?” That last sentence bubbled up from deep inside.

All her life she had loved her grandfather, and she’d thought he’d loved her. But he had turned out to be a man she didn’t know at all.

“You can count on me,” Royale said, her voice stronger. “’Cause I know I can count on you. You said you would free me, and even when you lost everything to Darah, you kept your word.”

“I was raised to keep my word.”
By a grandfather who was capable of betraying his own flesh and blood.

Honor realized that Royale was weeping. She pulled her closer. “Don’t worry. Way will open.” The Quaker phrase mocked her.

“I don’t know that. But I know I’m sticking with you.”

Honor’s eyes moistened at this.

“You got to think of marrying, though. Nobody need a governess or companion, and I don’t want to work in a house with a master. You marry, and we can stay together.”

Panic at the thought of marrying a near stranger swept through Honor. “Royale, I can’t. Not now.”

“Miss Honor, I already told you. We do what we got to. If it’s between starving and working with a man in the house, then I’ll do it. But better we stay together. We all we got left.”

Unable to draw up words, Honor lay staring at the faint shadows on the ceiling. She must try again to find a haven for both of them. Royale had spoken the truth: they had only each other. Then she listened to the summer night in the city, the voices and footsteps of other people wafting through the open windows.

Samuel’s tortured face flickered in her mind. She ached for him. He’d already lost so much, and now he would lose not only his mother but his dream of a better life in Ohio. Life had been so easy for her in Maryland, but it had all
been an illusion. Did they all live just one step from disaster?
Oh, Lord, help.

SEPTEMBER 12, 1819

When another First Day came, Miriam was again too ill to go to meeting. Her friend Jemima Wool, white-haired, petite, and dressed in sober gray, arrived to walk with Miriam. Honor and Royale set out with her instead, taking turns holding Eli’s pudgy hand. Honor opened a light-blue parasol against the blazing sun. Her black mourning dress and bonnet soaked in the cloying heat.

Last week Honor and Royale had both been too daunted to face a group of strangers, and Honor still did not feel like entering a meetinghouse full of people she’d never met. But she and Royale needed a place to live, jobs to support them—and soon. Fear sped her pulse as she walked sedately between Jemima and Royale.

“Miriam looked some better this morning, don’t you think?” Royale asked.

Honor tilted her head to one side, peering around the parasol, realizing that Royale might be resisting the truth just as Samuel was.

Walking under her own gray parasol, Jemima kept up a gentle flow of words about the meeting and Pittsburgh.

Honor fanned herself and tried to observe the pleasantries.

“There it is!” Eli finally called out, pointing half a block ahead toward a white clapboard building with green-striped canvas awnings above the windows.

Honor smoothed her plain, modest dress and hoped she presented a cool and ladylike appearance in spite of the heat. Certainly positions might exist among the members of this large meeting, positions for her and Royale that would not require them to go through an agency.

They mounted the few steps into the shady interior of the unadorned building, its coolness a relief. They trailed Jemima to the women’s side of the large room, filled with the hum of quiet conversation.

A tall, commanding woman with wisps of iron-gray hair escaping her plain bonnet stepped in front of them. “The black girl must sit on the rear bench.”

The words stung. After Miriam’s acceptance of Royale, Honor hadn’t expected this. She should have. In Maryland, the slaves who had become Quakers sat separate in the balcony of the meetinghouse.

Still holding Eli’s hand, Royale headed toward the rear bench, her head lowered.

Immobilized, Honor helplessly watched Royale’s humiliation.
We’re related by blood, but only the color of our skin matters—even here.

Jemima nudged Honor into the nearest row. “Dorcas could have been more gentle,” the older woman murmured.

Honor dropped onto the backless bench in a daze.

The meeting began with a quiet time of prayer. Then men and women rose at the prompting of the Inner Light—the Light of Christ—to quote Scripture or give insights. Finally Jemima rose and introduced Honor, and she was welcomed into the meeting. After a closing prayer,
everyone gathered in the aisles and on the steps, greeting one another and exchanging news.

Royale, with Eli in hand, slipped outside, but Honor forced herself to stay and chat with women who came up to greet her individually and in small groups. She tried to connect names and faces, but both flowed through her mind like water through fingers.

“I’m looking for a position as a governess or lady’s companion,” she repeated. “And my maid is seeking a position too.”

Her requests were met with polite surprise and delicate inquiries of what had brought her to Pittsburgh. But no leads. No one knew of anyone seeking either a governess or a companion. No one required another maid.

“The times are bad,” Jemima said, summing up all the commiseration and rebuffs.

“I’m also interested in abolition.” Honor posed this to the group of ladies around her. “Are there any other Friends here working toward that?”

Again the response was lukewarm at best. Emancipation was laudatory but had nothing to do with this meeting. Pennsylvania was a free state.

Then, even more unwelcome, first one and then another gentleman presented himself to Jemima to be introduced to Honor. One was a young attorney and another a middle-aged businessman. Each asked where she lived and if he might call on her. Each question caused her nerves to tense.

Jemima reminded them that Honor was in mourning and added that Miriam was not well enough for visitors.

Both men in turn bowed solicitously over Honor’s hand, and from their expressions, she feared she would be seeing them again anyway.

Jemima patted her hand. “’Tis hard to be among strangers.”

Honor’s smile was merely a coating on her lips, and Samuel’s anguished face glimmered in her mind. For some reason her fingers fidgeted as if they wanted to practice the signs Miriam continued teaching her.

Finally Jemima walked beside her down the steps, stiff from sitting so long. From the shade where they’d been waiting, Royale and Eli joined them.

“Miriam has been faithful to this meeting her whole life,” Jemima said as they started home on foot. “It is a shame that her older son Samuel stopped coming to meeting. People didn’t make the effort to learn how to speak to him in that hand language Miriam found. And it has made matters difficult for her and Samuel.”

Honor had wondered why no friends visited the Cathwells in the week she’d been with them. Walking within the small circle of shade cast by her parasol, Honor pondered the end of her hopes. She had lost her home and her inheritance—and in the midst of very bad times. Everything stood against her. And intertwined with concern for herself and Royale was worry over Miriam, little Eli, and most of all, Samuel.

That stifling afternoon Royale carried Eli to the back garden to play. Samuel’s mother reclined on her chaise in the parlor, and at her request Samuel and Honor joined her.

Samuel resented his mother for including Honor. This woman had learned sign language, breached the barrier existing between him and everyone else. Also, she always looked him directly in the eye. Women ignored him. Why didn’t Honor?

Her regard caused him to imagine impossibilities like having a wife and a family—things other men could possess, not him. The old, empty feeling dogged him.

The sheer curtains fluttered in the faint breeze. His mother began to sign and speak. “Samuel, I don’t have much strength, so . . . please do not counter everything I say. I must settle matters . . . for thee and Eli, and soon.”

Samuel’s heart sank.
I waited too long.
Clenching his fist by his side, he felt like pounding his head.

“When we lost thy brother last year, the time was already too late for me to venture to the wilderness,” Mother signed and said. “I have prayed and prayed, and now God has answered my prayers. He has provided someone else to go to Ohio with thee.”

Samuel started at this, rising. “No.” His fingers slashed the air.

His mother appeared to sigh. Then she rested her head on the back of the chaise and closed her hollow eyes.

Honor lifted her hand toward Samuel. “Please let her speak. She is so weak.”

Samuel bent forward and touched his mother’s hand. She opened her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mother.”

She waited till he sat down again and continued. “I had thought of speaking to each of thee separately. But I have so little time left. Let us not argue. This is what I have to
say. Samuel, thee cannot go alone to Ohio . . . with Eli still so young. Honor, no other recourse has opened to thee or Royale. Samuel, thee must consider offering marriage to Honor—” she forestalled his protest with a sharp gesture—“and, Honor, thee must consider accepting.”

Samuel felt heat rising up his neck and face. He could not look at Honor, could not bear to see the rejection on her face.

Glancing finally from the corner of his eye, he saw that Honor was wiping away tears. Was she crying because his mother was dying? Or was she upset over the thought of being forced by necessity to consider marrying someone like him?

“Arranged marriages or marriages of convenience are not uncommon,” his mother continued, her hand lowering as if she were losing strength. “My own parents met on the day they wed. And thee remembers the girl next door, Samuel. When her parents died at the same time we lost thy brother, her uncle came and took her home with him to marry a neighbor of his, a prosperous farmer. She has written to me that she is fine and happy. A couple can learn to love one another if there is trust.”

Samuel watched his mother’s slowing fingers, but he knew a woman would do almost anything to avoid being burdened with a deaf man. Now he would have to suffer through Honor’s excuses as to why she couldn’t marry him.

“I must rest now,” Mother signed and said. “The two of thee should sit at the table and discuss this. I cannot force either of thee to do this, but I urge thee both to discuss it honestly.”

Honor rose and spoke to his mother; then she complied, walking into the kitchen.

Samuel stayed where he was. This could not be happening.

His mother rapped the wooden leg of Samuel’s chair.

He looked up, and she motioned for him to go to the table in the kitchen. He rose slowly, reluctantly, obediently.

At the table, he took the place facing Honor. “I did not know my mother would say that,” he signed, trying to stop this before it went further. “I have never thought of marriage. Who would marry a deaf-mute?”

She dismissed this idea with a scornful expression. “Thee is hardworking and caring. Deafness means thee cannot hear. That is all.”

Her proficiency in sign grew every time he talked to her, increasing his discomfort as the barrier between them lessened. “You cannot want to marry me.”