Love Finds You in Liberty, Indiana

by Melanie Dobson

  Simon stomped on the floor behind them. Shoved furniture. Kicked at the walls. The two young brothers were hiding right above them, hearing it all.

  “Where’s the attic?” the man demanded. Edwin escorted him out of the room.

  “I’d already put the dishes away when he arrived,” Charlotte whispered.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Better than they are.”

  “It used to be safe for you in Indiana.”

  Charlotte lowered her head. “The free states aren’t so free anymore.”

  Anna heard something crash into the ceiling above her, and she rushed toward the attic stairs. By the lantern light, she watched Simon hack through the wooden planks on the floor, searching for slaves hiding underneath the boards. Her father stood to the side of the room, his hands still on the gun. She didn’t know what he would do if Simon found the two runaways behind the wall.

  A barrel of flour tipped and shot white powder across Simon’s dark face and clothes. He swore but didn’t stop. He chopped down the dry sprigs of rosemary and basil hanging from the ceiling and aimed toward the wall on his right side. The one without windows.

  He heaved the ax over his shoulder and swore again when it hit the brick. He glared at her father. “I can smell ’em up here.”

  Edwin sniffed the air. “The only thing I smell are onions and garlic.”

  The man leaped toward him, the ax clenched in both his hands, but her father didn’t flinch. “I know you’re hiding slaves,” Simon growled.

  “There are no slaves in my house,” Edwin said, and even in the midst of her fear, Anna smiled. Her father hadn’t lied. In his mind, every person under his roof was free.

  The man spat in his face. “I’ve got it from a good source that you stole a couple of ’em.”

  Edwin calmly wiped off his face with his sleeve. “I hope you didn’t pay someone for this information.”

  The man shoved the ax handle back down into the leather carrier on his waist. “I ain’t leavin’ your county till I find the baby.”

  A trail of flour shadowed Simon as he stamped down the stairs and out the front door.

  Even when he hopped on his horse and turned south, Anna knew he hadn’t gone far. It would take weeks for them to clean up and repair his damage, but they could start later. Right now, they had to decide what to do about the boys.

  Edwin turned toward her and bolted the door, his face grim. “We have to move them tonight.”

  Anna nodded. “I’ll help get the wagon ready.”

  Charlotte stepped into the hallway. “And I’ll get our guests.”

  Edwin lowered his voice. “Tell Ben it’s not safe for him to bring runaways right now.”

  “We’re supposed to have two more arriving tomorrow,” Charlotte said.

  Edwin paused. “We can hide them in the mill.”

  Anna faced him. “But all the workers?”

  “We’ll take them there at night, after almost everyone is gone.” He took his hat off the peg and put it on his head. “I’ll hide them in the basement.”

  “The hunters will find them there,” Anna insisted—but when they asked her for a better idea, she didn’t have one. The mill, she finally agreed, was safer than their house. For now.

  Someone pounded on Daniel’s door before the sun rose. He groaned and pulled his pillow over his head, thinking a drunk from the tavern must be searching for a place to sleep. But the knock grew more and more persistent.

  “I’m coming!” Daniel shouted as he rolled out of bed and struggled to pull on his pants and button his shirt in the darkness. He no longer drank alcohol, but he felt like he’d drunk a bottle of whiskey last night. Stumbling toward the door, he tripped over one of the many stacks of newspapers and scattered them across the small room.

  Someone knocked again, and when he opened the door, the haggard face of his brother-in-law looked back at him. Daniel’s own exhaustion vanished. His mind cleared.

  “What is it?” he demanded.

  “Esther’s having cramps.”

  “Labor?”

  Joseph shook his head. “Not yet, but I’ve told her she has to stay in bed until the baby is born.”

  “For two months!”

  “That’s exactly how Esther said it.”

  Daniel buttoned the top of his shirt. “I bet she wasn’t too happy to hear that from you.”

  “She thinks I’m being unreasonable, but I want this baby in our family as much as she does.”

  Joseph may be making demands of his wife that he wouldn’t of his other patients, but Daniel understood. “I know you do.”

  “I have an urgent call to make this morning.” He clasped his hands together and begged. “Could you come sit with her while I’m gone?”

  “I can’t promise to make her stay in bed.”

  “She’ll stay there,” Joseph replied. “I told her that if she kept moving around at this pace, she might lose the child.”

  “Is that true?”

  When Joseph nodded, Daniel reached for his jacket. “I’ll come right away.”

  Esther had propped herself up on the lace-swathed pillows and bedding. She was awake and staring out the window when Daniel sat down in the chair beside her. Slowly she turned her head toward him.

  “He said I’d have to stay here until the baby is born.”

  “I heard.”

  “I’m going to go crazy.”

  “Joseph and Greta and I will take turns entertaining you,” he said. “That baby will be here before you know it, and I bet she’ll be as fiery as you were as a newborn.”

  Her lips turned down. “I wasn’t fiery.”

  Daniel smiled at the memories of the newborn girl who’d arrived into their family the year he’d started first grade. He used to hold his hands over his ears to block out her cries while he attempted to sound out the words in his primer. When she turned four, he began reading to her, though she resisted learning to read herself. She always said she’d rather play with her dolls.

  “You never enter or leave a room unnoticed, Essie.”

  She pouted. “Are you saying I’m insufferable?”

  He couldn’t help but laugh. “You’ve been full of life from the day you were born, and that’s why it’s nearly impossible for you to stay still.”

  “For eight weeks,” she sighed.

  “And in eight weeks, you will be holding your own fiery newborn in your arms.”

  The thought made her smile.

  “Will you read to me?” she asked.

  The last thing he wanted to do was pick up a copy of Godey’s Lady’s Book, but he had promised to care for her. He took a magazine from the top of her nightstand and opened it to an article about furnishing a fashionable home. The two women in the story were shopping to decorate their new homes, and he read about rosewood sofas and papier-mâché tables and damask satin chairs of crimson and black. Once the women had indulged themselves with expensive new furnishings, they visited a crowded shop called Miss Waters’s to search for new hats.

  Daniel glanced up at his sister.

  “Go on,” she urged him, like she couldn’t wait to discover what type of hats the girls would choose.

  Daniel forced out the words. “Marsha picked out a white hat, and Abigail exclaimed, ‘What? That plain Quaker-like affair? Oh, do have some yellow flowers, at least.’”

  When he choked, Esther giggled. “You can’t stand it, can you?”

  He slammed the magazine pages together. “There has got to be something else around here that we can read.”

  She pulled a blanket around her shoulders. “You can read me Anna’s poems.”

  His groan was louder than he’d expected. He didn’t want to think about Anna Brent today, and he certainly didn’t want to read any of her writing. He stood up. “Why don’t I get a book from Joseph’s library?”

  She shook her head. “Just the poems.”

  “I’m not very interested in poetry.”

  “Well, I am,” sh
e said as she shooed him away with her hand.

  He found the papers on top of the piano in the parlor. Picking them up, he eyed the smooth strokes of Anna’s handwriting and wondered what she would write about. The joys of slavery? The benefits of the institution? He would read them for Esther, though he wasn’t particularly interested in her work…only a bit curious was all.

  When he returned to Esther’s room, he sat down beside the bed with Anna’s poems in hand. At least he didn’t have to read about damask chairs or white bonnets anymore.

  Her first poem was descriptive verse about falling leaves that shimmered to her toes. She reveled in autumn’s light and described nature wrapping itself into a cocoon for winter days until the rebirth of its beauty in spring.

  As he read her words, Daniel felt oddly disappointed. She was a good writer, but he’d expected more passion in her content. Deeper subject matter than the seasons.

  Esther didn’t share his sentiments. When he was finished, she sighed with delight. “That was beautiful.”

  He dropped the paper onto the nightstand. “I suppose it was.”

  She turned toward him. “Why don’t you like Anna?”

  He slapped the remaining pages against his hand. “It’s not that I don’t like her. I just don’t agree with her views on slavery.”

  “You disagree with me, too, but you manage to be cordial.”

  How could he explain to his sister that it was complicated? She would only say that he was the one making things difficult. He couldn’t allow himself to become interested in a woman like Anna Brent. Couldn’t keep his mind from wondering if there might be something more.

  “You’re my sister,” he said dryly. “I have to be nice to you.”

  She rolled her eyes. “What’s her next poem?”

  He lifted the next piece and scanned it. “It’s about contentment.”

  Esther leaned back against the pillows, and Daniel dove into the words. “‘Above all things my longing heart strives to be content. Though bitterness looms in darkness. Though trials glean torment.’”

  He read on, but his mind was still on the first stanza. Where had he heard those words before? Maybe he’d read something similar in the stack of materials that Isaac hauled in each week and plopped beside his desk.

  “‘Many suffer so much more than I, souls begging me to pray,’” he read. “‘“Help me,” they cry out in pain, but I look the other way.

  “‘How can I listen to their cries and still ignore their pleas? My heart will never find contentment until those prisoners are set free.’”

  He looked up at his sister, and her eyes were closed, pondering Anna’s words. “That’s what I want,” she whispered. “To be content.”

  He stared at the last stanza. “By helping other people?”

  She glanced sideways. “Of course I want to help people.”

  They were poignant words, even he would agree, and much more thoughtful than her poem about the fallen leaves. But how could Esther and Anna talk about helping people when they ignored those who passed through Liberty? Those who needed help the most?

  Church bells rang out on the street, and he waited for them to stop before he picked up another poem. They chimed seven times. Eight times. Nine times.

  And they didn’t stop.

  Hurrying to the window, he looked down and saw a crowd of men running toward Main Street with buckets in their hands.

  He pushed the window open and shouted down. “What is it?”

  One of them looked up and shouted back at him. “The newspaper office is on fire!”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Daniel collapsed on the stoop of the blacksmith shop, exhausted. His clothes were coated with soot and soaked from the buckets of water he’d passed along on the brigade. Smoke hovered in the street, clinging to the buildings and crowds of people who’d come to gawk at the burned remains of his office. No one said anything to him. Either they didn’t recognize him or they were ignoring him.

  He, along with dozens of Liberty’s mill workers and farmers and businessmen, had dumped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of buckets of water on the blaze, trying to save the printing press and his tools inside, but everything was ruined. All the wood and paper had gone up in flames.

  The fire had been no accident. Someone had come and destroyed the press before dousing the room with oil. What hadn’t been chopped or pried apart had melted or was warped beyond use.

  He’d known that the article about Noah Owens terrorizing Liberty’s citizens would anger Milton Kent and his pals, but he’d never guessed they would resort to arson. He leaned his head against a post and stared at the charred skeleton of wood and nails across the street.

  The same people who had stolen away the innate freedom from those in slavery had also stolen away his freedom to speak out against it. They’d stripped him and Isaac of their press and everything they needed to publish a newspaper.

  Whoever had set the blaze must have known that Isaac was in Cincinnati for the week. Maybe they even knew Daniel was over at Esther and Joseph’s house that morning.

  He took off his hat and raked his streaked hands through his hair. All he had wanted to do was tell the truth. He’d only wanted to help those who weren’t being heard.

  He kicked a tin pail in front of him, and it rolled into the street. He’d worked so hard these past two months, and now all his work was for naught. He’d spoken the plain truth as loud as he could, but no one wanted to listen.

  “Action is a thousand times more powerful than words.”

  Daniel blinked as he watched the people crossing in front of him.

  “Christ used more than words to demonstrate His love for people. He died for them. There is no greater demonstration of love than to sacrifice your life for another.”

  Daniel thought about the stacks of newspapers in his room and wondered where he had read those words.

  He sat up straight on the edge of the porch when he finally remembered. It was in the same place he’d read Adam Frye’s column on contentment.

  Anna poured Charlotte a mug of hot coffee and handed it to her. The shock from Simon’s appearance last night clung to Anna like smoke that wouldn’t wash away. She knew that aiding slaves was a dangerous job, but she’d never wanted a slave hunter to threaten her dear friend.

  She lifted the fireplace poker off a nail above the hearth and stirred the blaze in front of her.

  What would happen if Simon did catch Charlotte while she was going to town? Free papers didn’t matter to a man like him. Even if she carried the papers with her, he could burn them and whisk her away before Anna even realized she was gone.

  Then he might do what he threatened and sell her on an auction block in Kentucky.

  “What’s wrong?” Charlotte asked.

  “Joseph said Peter needs lobelia, but I don’t know where to get some.”

  Charlotte reached into her pocket and pulled out a vial filled with a deep wine-colored liquid and passed it along to her.

  “How—?”

  “Best not to ask.”

  Anna clutched the vial. “Do you know how much he’s supposed to take?”

  “Five drops every half hour until his fever breaks.”

  She prayed it would work.

  Charlotte took the medication from her hand and stuffed it back into her pocket. “The Palmers have neighbors whose son disappeared a few nights ago. They think a hunter might have kidnapped him.”

  She stirred the fire. “His poor parents.”

  “They’re worried, Anna,” Charlotte said. “I’m not sure how much longer they’ll be able to care for Peter.”

  She almost dropped the fire stick. “Why not?”

  “They’re thinking about going to Canada.”

  “But they’re already free!” she insisted.

  Charlotte’s head hung. “They’re free, but they’re scared.”

  Anna hung the poker back on the nail. Charlotte had been purchased and freed a decade ago, but she
was beginning to think that Indiana was no longer a safe place for her friend, either.

  Daniel shuffled through the stacks of newspapers on the floor of his room. When he found an Independently Weekly, he opened it and scanned Adam Frye’s column quickly until he found the words he was searching for.

  How can we listen to the cries of these slaves without acting?

  How can we ignore their pleas? The only way for each of us to find contentment is to set those prisoners free.”

  Either Anna Brent had been lifting words from Adam Frye’s column or...

  Or what? he pondered. Anna didn’t talk like the type of person who would be reading a column by an abolitionist, but her pro-slavery rhetoric had been so harsh that they almost hadn’t seemed like her words, either.

  He flipped through the pages until he found another column by Adam Frye, this one written days before Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act.

  “Neither fear nor intimidation will force me to flee this fight. Some of us must be silent as we battle. Others must speak out. But none of us will stop fighting until the war is won.”

  He tossed the paper onto his bed and tore off his shirt. The acrid smell of smoke permeated his clothes and his skin, but he’d take a full bath later. Instead he scrubbed his hair and face and arms in the basin on his chest of drawers.

  Eyeing the trunk at the end of the bed, he felt the sudden desire to pack it up and run back to Cincinnati. He could rent an office. Hang up a sign saying he’d returned to lawyering. Plenty of people in Cincinnati liked to sue each other. He would have more than enough work.

  He buttoned up a clean shirt. No matter what he desired at that moment, he wouldn’t return to the city. Adam Frye was right. No matter what happened, God had called him to fight. A burned building would not force him to stop.

  He picked up the latest Independent, the one he’d started to read before dinner last night, before Anna Brent had interrupted him.

  Adam Frye’s column was about a slave girl named Tessa and her baby that had stayed at the Fryes’ home. Adam described the traumatic life of the young girl, who had been abused by her master and forced to run away before her baby was even born. He portrayed the trials of the runaway slave, not only birthing a child in secret but confronting the anger of other runaways as she attempted to keep her baby quiet on their journey north.