The Last Runaway Read online

  At Faithwell, Honor found the face on the Elders’ bench perpendicular to where she sat. She was an older woman, with white hair under her cap and bright eyes focused on a distant point outside the room, indeed probably somewhere in her mind’s eye. Her arched eyebrows gave her an open, surprised expression, and the natural line of her mouth fell into a half-smile accentuated by round cheeks. Honor kept glancing at her, and had to force herself to look down so that the glance would not become a stare. Though immensely compelling, the woman’s face was not necessarily friendly. She was someone you admired and respected rather than loved. She did not enable Honor to concentrate as she had hoped, however.

  At length a man stood up to quote from the Scriptures. That at least gave Honor something to think about, even if she could not find a way to her own communion with God.

  After Meeting she was introduced to many people, but found it hard to remember a long list of unremarkable names: Carpenter, Wilson, Perkins, Taylor, Mason. Only a few stood out: Goodbody, Greengrass, Haymaker. The last she recognized as the dairy farmers they bought milk from; it was Judith Haymaker with the compelling face on the Elders’ bench. Now that Meeting was over her expression was less intense, but she still had widely arched eyebrows over a pale, blue-eyed gaze that Honor found hard to meet for more than a second or two. Her daughter Dorcas was with her; a similar age to Honor, she smiled obediently when introduced but seemed indifferent to this potential new friend. Indeed, though the Faithwell community was polite enough, they did not ask Honor any questions. It was not that she wanted them to—she was not eager to repeat the story of Grace’s death—but her new neighbors seemed solely interested in their own affairs.

  Judith Haymaker nodded at a young man standing among the others. “My son, Jack.” As if hearing his name from afar, he looked over, his eyes snagging on Honor’s as none of the other men’s had. His messy brown hair was lightened by blond strands like stalks of hay, and his half-smiling mouth was like his mother’s, but warmer.

  Oh, she thought, and looked away, catching Dorcas Haymaker’s pale blue eyes as she did. Dorcas did not have the perpetual smile of the rest of her family, but a forceful nose like a carrot and a frown that reminded Honor of Abigail. She looked down at the ground. Were all American women so difficult to talk to?

  No. She said a little prayer of thanks for Belle Mills.

  Faithwell, Ohio

  6th Month 14th 1850

  Dearest Biddy,

  I write this letter from the front porch of Adam and Abigail’s house in Faithwell. One of the benefits of American houses is that most have porches where one can sit and catch what little breeze there is and yet be sheltered from the sun. It is hot here, as hot as Dorset ever was, and I have been told that next month will be worse. It is not just the heat that enervates, but the inescapable humidity that makes one feel enveloped in a cloud of steam. My dress is damp, my hair frizzed, and sometimes I can barely take in a breath. In such heat it is difficult to summon the energy for work. If only thee were here beside me, to talk and laugh and sew. Then the strangeness of this place would be more bearable—as it would have been if Grace were here. Had she lived, she would have made our lives into the adventure the ship that brought us to America promised. Without her it is more like a trial I am being put through. I wish I could tell thee that I am settling happily into my new life in Ohio. I know that is what thee wishes for me, and I for myself. But I confess, Biddy, if it were not for the impossible journey to reach Bridport, I would immediately buy my place east on a stage from Cleveland. There is little to keep me here.

  I do not mean to sound ungrateful. Adam Cox has been welcoming, if rather silent about how I will fit into the household without Grace as the natural reason for my presence. Perhaps he does not know himself what to think. Abigail will think for him, I suspect.

  I must try to be fair. Abigail too has welcomed me, in her way. When I first arrived she threw her arms around me, as American women like to do; I had to remain very still and not flinch. Then she cried and said how sorry she was about Grace and how she hoped we would be like sisters. Since then, though, she has not been very sisterly. Indeed, at times I have caught her studying me in a way that is not friendly, though she tries to cover it with questions about how I am, or offers of cups of tea, or a loud cough at nothing. Underlying all that she says and does is the iron rod of an inflexible spirit. Whatever her plans were for Grace’s arrival, they have been put into disarray now that I have come instead. Abigail does not like her plans to be altered.

  Of course it cannot be easy to have an unexpected stranger arrive to live in one’s house, especially when that house is as chaotic as hers. She does not seem to have an order to her work; I have not yet discerned which day is wash day, for example, or on which day she bakes. Most noticeable is that the kitchen is not the comfortable centre of the house. Always when I worked with Mother in the East Street kitchen there was a sense of clarity, of light and warmth and happy industry. I could not be miserable in such a kitchen, even when there were things to be unhappy about. By contrast, Abigail’s kitchen is dark and muddled and temporary. It is hard to feel settled in a place that itself is so unsettled. I would like to scrub every inch of it, air it, and make a place for everything so that I may put it in its place. I have tactfully tried to put things in order without offending Abigail, but with little success. Though she said nothing about my scrubbing and sweeping, when I rearranged the crockery on the sideboard, the next morning I found the bowls and plates back in their random stacks. She does her work with such clattering and rattling and slamming that I grow weary just hearing her.

  Perhaps thee will best understand what Abigail is like if I tell thee that when she quilts she prefers to stitch in the ditch, hiding her poor stitches in the seams between the blocks. I do not think thee or I has resorted to such a technique since we were girls!

  But I am being unkind. Abigail too has had her own unhappiness. She lost her husband to consumption after a long struggle, and she and Matthew were married for three years before he died, yet had no children. That must be a sorrow, though of course we have not spoken of it.

  Perhaps it is simply me. I have been unsettled since leaving home—and before then, in honesty, for Samuel’s change of heart shook loose my solid life. So I am seeing my surroundings in that light. We are an odd trio, Abigail, Adam and I, for it is only indirect bonds of duty that hold us together. That is truly what makes the house feel temporary—my position in it is so precarious. After twenty years of living in the secure arms of family, it is a strange and terrifying feeling to be so adrift.

  Faithwell itself is a tiny, rough sort of place. I know Adam did not deliberately lie in his letters describing it, but when he called it a ‘town’ he was clearly exaggerating. They boast that this part of Ohio is cleared and populated, much more so than ten years ago, but to me it feels like a frontier, with a few houses scratched out of the wilderness. Thee would be amazed at what is called the ‘general store’ here—a shop with mostly bare shelves and little to choose from, set on a track that a coach could never manage. Even wagons frequently get stuck in the mud, or the ride is so jolting one would rather walk.

  The Meeting House is pleasant at least, and the Friends kind. I do not know why, but I have not been able to settle at Meeting yet; this is a great disappointment, as I normally take much comfort from the collective silence, and it would do me good now truly to wait in expectation with others. I need to be patient, I know, and a way will open once again.

  I have not yet got to know the other families, nor discerned who might become a friend. The women in general here are straightforward, in conversation, in dress, even in the way they walk, which is flatfooted and rather graceless. Thee would smile. At least thee may be content that there is no rival here who would ever take thy place as my dearest friend.

  I must stop criticising my new country. I will leave thee with something to smile at: in Ohio they like to call quilts ‘comforts’!

&nbs
p; Thy faithful friend,

  Honor Bright

  Dandelions

  TWO WEEKS AFTER her arrival, Adam Cox asked Honor to help him at his Oberlin store on a Sixth Day, as Abigail, who usually helped him when needed, was unwell. Sixth Days were busy ones in towns, with the stores in Oberlin remaining open late for farmers coming in from the fields. Honor was pleased with the prospect of going to a larger town, for she was finding the isolation of Faithwell trying. She was also glad to have time away from Abigail, who had become increasingly hostile.

  Adam normally rode his horse to the store, or walked if he had the time. For Honor, however, he borrowed a buggy. Just as they drove past the general store, Judith Haymaker came out carrying a sack of flour. Honor hoped her eyesight was not keen enough to spot the gray and yellow bonnet she was wearing. She had not touched Belle Mills’s gift since arriving in Faithwell, but thought that it might be appropriate while working in Adam’s store—smarter than her everyday bonnet but not ostentatious. Of course it should not matter what she wore, as long as it was clean and modest. She should not care. But Honor did care about that inner rim of pale yellow, its reflection lifting her face from the gray of the rest of the bonnet, just as she cared about the inch of white cloth edging the necklines of her dresses. Such details made her feel clearer and more defined. She suspected, though, that Judith Haymaker would not approve. Adam himself had raised his eyebrows when Honor came down wearing the bonnet, but said nothing.

  Now he nodded at his neighbor, and Judith Haymaker nodded back, otherwise standing motionless to watch them pass.

  East of Faithwell the trees closed in, and Honor swallowed several times to force down a rising panic. She wondered if she would ever grow used to the monotonous Ohio woods. It made her miss the ocean—not traveling on it, but the shoreline, with its definitive break from the land and its open, promising horizon.

  Once they had turned onto the road north to Oberlin, however, she could relax a little, for it was clearer, running past farms and fields of corn, and the pressure of the woods receded. There was enough sunlight along the road that wildflowers could grow, chicory and Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans. There was also more traffic: other buggies and wagons and horses heading their way, or passing them in the opposite direction toward Wellington.

  “Why do all the roads run north and south or east and west?” Honor asked. She had been puzzling over this regularity since first riding with Thomas from Hudson to Wellington. In England roads followed the contours of the landscape, which did not conform to rigid compass directions.

  Adam chuckled. “Because they can. This part of Ohio is very flat, so there is nothing the roads need go around to avoid. Except for one dogleg by the Black River a few miles south of here, this road runs dead straight between Oberlin and Wellington for nine miles. The towns are more or less evenly spaced too, every five miles or so in either direction, like a net.”

  “Except Faithwell.”

  “No, we stand apart,” Adam agreed.

  “Why did they place the towns so evenly?”

  “Perhaps the surveyors of this territory were trying to bring order to a land they felt they had no control over.” Adam paused. “It is very different from Dorset.” It was the first time she had heard him compare Ohio to home since coming to live with him.

  * * *

  Adam drove Honor around Oberlin before stopping at the shop. It was a pretty town, more substantial than Faithwell and twice the size of Wellington. The buildings looked sturdier and more permanent, with a few even built of brick. In the center of town, four streets formed the sides of a square, which had been created by felling all the trees. Half the square had college buildings on it; the rest was a park planted in diagonal lines with new oaks and elms. Honor was glad to see trees that were familiar and ordered, so different from the thick, indistinguishable woods surrounding Faithwell.

  Two of the streets making up the square were taken up by other college buildings. Honor sat in the buggy and watched the young people hurrying back and forth, so busy and earnest. Some were women, and some were black. “Are they all students?”

  Adam nodded. “Oberlin was founded on principles of equality similar to Friends. Indeed, it began as a religious community, with strict rules of conduct. No alcohol is sold in town, or tobacco.”

  “No spitting, then.”

  “Yes, no spitting.” Adam chuckled. “It is surprising, isn’t it? Funny, though, one gets used to it. I don’t notice the spitting now when I go to Cleveland.”

  Oberlin’s shops were for the most part on Main Street, and the variety after Faithwell dazzled Honor, with several groceries, two butchers, a cobbler, a barber, a dentist, a milliner, two bookstores and even a daguerreotype artist. The roads were better than the one running through Faithwell—wider and less rutted, though still prone to thick mud when it rained. Planks had been laid in front of the shops for pedestrians.

  Cox’s Dry Goods on Main Street was modest compared to the shop Adam’s brothers had run in Bridport, where there had been bolts of cloth stacked in open cupboards from floor to ceiling and a ladder on runners they slid along to climb for out-of-reach material. Here the floor space was bigger but there was less stock, laid out on tables in the center of the room. Adam’s brother had not managed to make the shop into a thriving business before he fell ill. In the year since, Adam had built it up only slowly. It was perhaps the very principled nature of the town that drew Quakers like Matthew and Adam to run a shop there, but those principles were also the cause of the limits to its success. Apart from restrictions on diet and behavior, original Oberlin settlers were discouraged from wearing clothes made from expensive fabrics. Although the town population was now diluted by newer, less principled settlers, there were still few buyers for the more profitable soft velvets and bright satins the Cox family had sold to non-Quakers in Bridport. In fact, there was little Adam sold that Honor could not have worn herself. Full of gingham and chintz—which American customers called calico—and only a little damask or dimity for curtains, the shop’s brightest fabrics were the bundles of offcuts Adam kept in stock for quilters. There were no restrictions on what an Oberlinite or a Quaker could use in making her quilts, even if the bright reds and greens of Ohio quilts might never be seen in her dresses.

  Adam kept Honor at his side for the first hour to teach her how to measure cloth against the marks made on the edge of the table, make a small cut and rip the fabric along the weave, and wrap it in brown paper and string. She had bought cloth often enough to be familiar with the procedure, which did not differ between Oberlin and Bridport. At least some things were the same in the two countries. Once Adam was confident that Honor knew what to do, he left her to deal with customers alone while he handled money and oversaw a boy he’d hired to sharpen scissors and needles brought in by customers, a recent initiative he hoped would help the shop’s prospects.

  Honor was glad to have contact with new people. While living in a community of Friends was familiar, after just a few weeks in Faithwell, among the same people day after day, she was finding its limitations trying, and craved variety. At home she had been more used to the mingling of Quakers and non-Quakers, and with the coming and going of ships there was always something different to see, and strange faces to ponder. In Adam’s store she studied people’s clothes and listened to their talk about politics or the weather or crops, or what foolish Oberlin students had been up to. She watched boys run by with hoops, and smiled at a girl dragging a carved toy dog on a string. She held a baby while a customer spread out a bolt of cloth, and helped an elderly woman around the corner to the buggy waiting for her on College Street. All of these interactions made her feel vital rather than the unwanted extra she was at Abigail’s.

  Among the steady stream of customers, several black women came in to buy cloth or needles or pins, or to have their scissors sharpened. Honor tried not to stare, but she could not help it, as they were like exotic birds blown off course to land among sparrow
s. They all looked the same to her, with brown skin like polished oak, high cheekbones, wide noses and dark, serious eyes. They conducted themselves similarly too. After glancing at her, they went over to Adam, waiting for him if he was helping someone else, then asking him for material, or giving him the scissors or needles for the boy to sharpen. It was as if they had established that Adam was safe, and so they did not have to approach her. Clear about what they wanted, they chose quickly, paid and left, saying little to Adam and nothing to Honor. They certainly would not have asked her to hold their babies for them.

  When there was a lull in the shop, Honor went out for a brief walk to escape the heat inside, and discovered a few doors down a confectioner’s where a crowd of black women were gathered, chatting and laughing in groups. The man behind the counter, selling peppermints and shaved ice, was also black and clearly in charge. Honor had not expected Negroes to own their own businesses. Donovan had been right: Oberlin was radical.

  As a Quaker, Honor had been used to the feeling of being set apart, and she was an outsider in almost every place in America. She knew the black women must feel more comfortable with one another, just as she did with other Quakers. However open-minded, people tended to gravitate to those like themselves. And Negroes had reason to be wary of whites, where one family could produce two people as different as Donovan and Belle Mills. But as she watched the women so clearly at ease, where they hadn’t been in Cox’s Dry Goods, she felt a pang. I am excluded even from the excluded, she thought.