A Sea Unto Itself Read Free Page B

Mr. Willard?”
    “I can’t say,” the woman answered, her eyes studying Charles for a moment, and then settling on Penny. “He lit out with some white folk hot after him. He already long gone to my thinkin’.” Charles thought she didn’t seem particularly concerned.
    “Who is Mr. Willard?” Penny asked.
    As Augustus spoke, Charles took a moment to study the pair. The man, he decided, was likely in his mid-twenties. He was tall, taller than Charles, and heavily muscled, but in an oddly proportioned sort of way. His shoulders seemed unnaturally large with no discernible indentation around his middle between chest and hips so that he looked something like a section taken from the trunk of a good-sized tree. The woman seemed a little younger, although it was hard to be sure. She was diminutive by comparison, with slender features, alert black eyes that gave her a kind of calculating look, and black hair bound up in a scarf. Her skin was the color of lightly creamed coffee, which made her a mulatto, he assumed. She held herself stiffly, almost defiantly, erect.
    “Dost thou not agree, Charlie?” Penny said.
    “Dost I not agree to what?” Charles answered.
    “Dost thou not agree to sup at our hotel?”
    He took a moment to consider this. Their lodgings were booked at the Prince Regent on St. Bridget Street, a respectable establishment catering to ships’ officers, bankers, insurance brokers, and other moderately well-heeled travelers in the mercantile trade. He suspected that the management would be reluctant to welcome two shabbily dressed blacks, indeed any black Africans, as guests in their establishment. They would just have to adjust their way of thinking, he decided. “Fine,” Charles said. “What an excellent suggestion.” With that, Penny took up his arm and the four set off across the square.
    “Oy, you there!” the hotel clerk shouted as Augustus and Viola tentatively entered into its spacious foyer. “Get you back where you came from. We won’t have your kind in here.”
    “They are with me,” Charles said firmly. “I have invited them to dine with Mrs. Edgemont and me.”
    “Oh, I am sorry, Captain Edgemont,” the clerk apologized. “But this establishment does not permit blacks, and certainly not in the dining room. It’s a long standing rule.”
    “I insist that you make an exception in this case,” Charles said in his best quarterdeck I’ll-brook-no-argument voice. When the clerk hesitated, he added more menacingly, “I wish to speak with the owner, Mr. Carthwright.” Mr. Carthwright quickly agreed to a private room where their meals were brought and the door kept tightly shut.
    “Tell us,” Charles said to his guests after they were settled, “how you two came to be in our fair city of Liverpool.”
    “How much do you want to hear?” Augustus said cautiously.
    “All of it,” Charles answered.
    Augustus cast a glance at his female companion. After she nodded, he spoke, reluctantly Charles thought, as if it were a closely held secret. “Miss Viola and me both be at this place in ‘Ginia. Mostly I work in the rows, Miss Viola in the house. One time she say she is decided to run. I allow I am partial to go along. She hear of a way, a place we could go on a certain night, and there was some what would help us. We slip away in the dark and sure enough there be two men there, a black and a white that put us up in a hayloft in an old barn with some others.” He stopped for a moment with his eyes fixed as if on some distant object.
    “Why didst thou decide to run?” Penny asked, directing her question to the girl.
    “I don’t want to say, missus,” Viola answered, her face coloring. “Everyone want to run.   But for me it was just some attention I was getting.”
    Charles could guess what that meant, with white owners and supervisors feeling themselves naturally entitled to the favors of slave women. “Go on,” he said.
    “Yes, sah,” Augustus nodded, and then spoke in