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was done and I got back to the dairy again.
    After a while we had filled a trunk with chemises, drawers, and petticoats. Daniel brought the carriage around one morning and took the white girls home. Then it was me and Liza and Kitty left to help Missus finish the dressing gowns.
    Missus told us over and over to be careful because the silk was dear as gold, and the more times she reminded me of it, the more nervous I got. One day somehow the needle slipped and stuck my finger. Blood dripped onto the hem.
    Missus was busy folding another petticoat Kitty had just finished, so she didn’t see me when I jumped up and ran out the door with no safe place to go. I didn’t dare face the missus, even though she would find out soon enough that I had ruined her finest creation.
    I ran as fast as I could, my head filling up with all sorts of terrible things. Every slave at Arlington knew about folks from other plantations who had been sold South for things like breaking a crystal butter dish or leaving the field too soon or talking back. Althea said once you was sold South you wasn’t never heard of again. What if Missus sent me South? I’d never see Mauma or my daddy again. No more helping Ephraim in the garden. No more of Althea’s stories. No more Lottie. No more lessons with Miss Mary.
    I couldn’t go home to Mauma either. She wouldn’t send me away, but she would whip me so hard I’d wish for the next boat to anywhere. I was crying so hard I was blinded.
    Then Miss Mary called my name. I cried even harder because I had ruined something special that was hers, and even if I survived whatever punishment was coming to me, Miss Mary never would speak to me again. That was the worst part of it.
    She gave me her own handkerchief, which smelled sweet. Like flowers or spices or something. “Now, dry your eyes and go back inside,” she said.
    “I can’t go by myself. You got to come with me.”
    She bent down to look me straight in the eye and told me I had to have courage for whatever things happened in life. Then she held my hand and we went back inside.
    I wasn’t anybody’s fool. Mister Robert was bound to take up most of the room in Miss Mary’s heart. But I hoped she would save a little spot for me.

6 | M ARY
    R obert wrote that he was unwilling to wait any longer and would arrive at the end of June. At which time we would become husband and wife and then proceed to his new posting at Fortress Monroe. I chose half a dozen bridesmaids. Robert rounded up an equal number of men to stand as groomsmen and chose his brother Smith to be best man. Papa conferred with our minister, the Reverend Dr. Keith, and the ceremony was set for the evening of June thirtieth.
    Servants, both ours and borrowed, were dispatched to ready the house for the guests and our wedding party. Food was prepared, beds made up, silver polished. The china and silver that had once belonged to my great-grandmother graced table and sideboard. The carpets were beaten and aired, the curtains washed and pressed, the woodwork polished to a high gleam. Mother prevailed upon friends and family to lend us mattresses, candlesticks, punch bowls, and cake baskets, and by the eve of the wedding all was in readiness.
    Except for the bride. Unable to sleep and seized by a strange melancholy, I wandered through the rooms of the only home I had ever known, pausing at the touchstones of my childhood. The portrait of President Washington when he served as colonel in the Virginia Militia. My great-grandmother’s tea table in the parlor, and her silver service on the sideboard in the dining room where Robert proposed. The chair where I often sat on Papa’s lap while he read to me from the newspapers. Porcelain cups on the mantel. Shelves of books I had read over and over.
    My new life, fraught with uncertainty, was about to commence.
    I went to bed after midnight and slept fitfully until Mother woke me and sent me down to breakfast. I managed to eat a biscuit with a cup of tea