The Invention of Wings: With Notes Read Online Free PDF Page B

brass thimble. Nights like that, I hightailed it back to the stable room.
    Every time mauma woke and found me in bed with her, she had a fit, saying all the trouble there would be if I got caught, how I already lived too far out on missus’ bad side.
    “Ain’t nothin’ good gon come from you wandering off like this,” she said. “You got to stay put on your quilt. You do that for me, you hear me?”
    And I’d do it for her. Least for a few days. I’d lay on the floor in the hall, trying to stay warm in the draft, twisting round in search of the softest floorboard. I could make do with that misery and take my solace from the water.

Sarah
    O n a bleary morning in March, four months after the calamity of my eleventh birthday, I woke to find Hetty missing, her pallet on the floor outside my room crumpled with the outline of her small body. By now, she would’ve been filling my basin with water and telling me some story or other. It surprised me that I felt her absence personally. I missed her as I would a fond companion, but I fretted for her, too. Mother had already taken her cane to Hetty once.
    Finding no trace of her in the house, I stood on the top step by the back door, scanning the work yard. A thin haze had drifted in from the harbor, and overhead the sun glinted through it with the dull gold of a pocket watch. Snow was in the door of the carriage house, repairing one of the breeching straps. Aunt-Sister straddled a stool by the vegetable garden, scaling fish. Not wishing to rouse her suspicions, I ambled to the porch of the kitchen house where Tomfry was handing out supplies. Soap to Eli for washing the marble steps, two Osnaburg towels to Phoebe for cleaning crystal, a coal scoop to Sabe for re-supplying the scuttles.
    As I waited for him to finish, I let my eyes drift to the oak in the back left corner. Its branches were adorned with tight buds, and though the tree bore little resemblance to its summer visage, the memory of that long-ago day returned: sitting straddle-legged on the ground, the hot stillness, the green-skinned shade, arranging my words with marbles,
Sarah Go—
    I looked away to the opposite side of the yard, and it was there I saw Hetty’s mother, Charlotte, walking beside the woodpile, bending now and then to pick up something from the ground.
    Arriving behind her unseen, I noticed the tidbits she scavenged were small, downy feathers. “. . . . . . Charlotte—”
    She jumped and the feather between her fingers fluttered off on the sea wind. It flitted to the top of the high brick wall that enclosed the yard, snagging in the creeping fig.
    “Miss Sarah!” she said. “You scared the jimminies out of me.” Her laugh was high-pitched and fragile with nerves. Her eyes darted toward the stable.
    “. . . . . . I didn’t mean to startle you . . . I only wondered, do you know where—”
    She cut me off, and pointed into the woodpile. “Look way down ’n there.”
    Peering into a berth between two pieces of wood, I came face to face with a pointy-eared brown creature covered with fuzz. Only slightly bigger than a hen’s chick, it was an owl of some sort. I drew back as its yellow eyes blinked and bore into me.
    Charlotte laughed again, this time more naturally. “It ain’t gon bite.”
    “. . . . . . It’s a baby.”
    “I came on it a few nights back. Poor thing on the ground, crying.”
    “. . . . . . Was it . . . hurt?”
    “Naw, just left behind is all. Its mauma’s a barn owl. Took up in a crow’s nest in the shed, but she left. I’m ’fraid something got her. I been feeding the baby scraps.”
    My only liaisons with Charlotte had been dress fittings, but I’d always detected a keenness in her. Of all the slaves Father owned, she struck me as the most intelligent, and perhaps the most dangerous, which would turn out to be true enough.
    “. . . . . . I’ll be kind to Hetty,” I said abruptly. The words—remorseful and lordly—came out as