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“Please slow down.”
    Bel dressed quickly and crept along the hallway, to see Mary and her father at the foot of the spiral oak staircase that wound through the center of Greenwood. She watched the top of her father’s black hat bobbing, his shoulders already encased in his mink winter overcoat. He looked small and stiff, like a figure in a tableau.
    â€œHe—he’s got fangs and a head of fire,” Mary stammered, her brogue thick. The maid’s usually tidy appearance was marred by a torn petticoat peeking from beneath her hem.
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œIn the c-c-coach barn, sar,” she said, shifting out of Bel’s vision.
    â€œCerberus in the coach barn? I didn’t know we were so close to the gate of Hades,” Daniel Lindsey mused aloud. “Perhaps this war…”
    â€œSar?”
    â€œYou say there’s a dog in the coach barn?”
    â€œNot a dog, a Negro!” Mary burst into ugly sobs.
    Daniel’s hat tipped back and he slapped his calfskin gloves against his wayward left hand. “We’ll see about this. Tell Johnny to get my pistol right away and meet me out by the barn.”
    â€œWait!” Bel called from behind a balustrade. “Papa, I don’t feel well.” She uttered this with her best impersonation of fever.
    â€œThen find your mother, please, sweet girl. I have some business to attend to,” he said without looking up, and put on his gloves, the left hand unsteady, yanked on finger by finger. He turned to Mary. “What were you doing in there anyway?”
    â€œOh, sar.” Bel saw Mary’s skirt spread over the floor in a deep curtsy, the petticoat a smile of white. “Sometimes Nicky will leave me a present there.”
    â€œHmm,” Bel’s father grunted, and Bel heard him open the door to the quiet morning. December’s silver light spilled around his feet. “Tell my wife and daughter to stay inside.”
    When he shut the door, Bel hesitated for a moment, considering. Her mother would not emerge from her room for hours, and then what could she do? Admit that she had tried to hide a runaway slave against her husband’s wishes? It was better that it was Bel’s deceit. She thundered down the stairs, flying to the coat closet to pull on her boots. “You can’t go out there!” she heard Mary say in a waspish voice as she ran after her father.
    â€œTraitor,” Bel hissed over her shoulder, and fell into an unladylike sprint across the stiff crust of snow.
    *   *   *
    Her father was standing in the doorway of the coach barn, preaching to a congregation of family-owned carriages, tipped down from their high wheels. His thin legs spoked from beneath the long mink coat. “You had better come out, or I shall have to get the constable. I don’t want to do you any harm, but I will not violate the laws of this country to save you.” After each statement, he would pause and peer into the gloom, staring past the carriages toward the ladder to the hayloft.
    â€œHe can’t understand you,” Bel said, touching her father’s cuff. The silky fur slipped through her fingers. You can’t understand him, she added to herself, remembering with shame her own flight the day before.
    â€œBel! Get back in the house!” he ordered.
    â€œHe can’t understand you, Papa, so he won’t come out,” she repeated, backing away from his hard blue stare, his gray beard burned metallic by the winter sun.
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œI found him. By the lake. He was hungry and cold, so Laurence and I brought him home, and I told Mother that a peddler wanted to sleep in the coach barn,” Bel said, lying. “She said that was all right, and asked Grete to fix him a plate of food.”
    â€œI will not harbor runaway slaves,” Daniel said, as if repeating something he had memorized.
    â€œBut you will let someone die in the