“No,” he said.
“She threatened to, and I gave her a reason to think again.”
Hannah’s hands paused beneath the water.
“That’s a dangerous kind of reason.”
“I know.”
He described the hidden packet without touching the names that could still bring punishment on others.
Hannah listened until he spoke of the old account book.
Then she turned away from the trough and checked the path.
“The colonel keeps a second register,” she said.
“I’ve seen Silas Rook carry it out of the study in a canvas satchel.”
“Where does he take it?”
“The old mill road.”
The mill had closed two years earlier after repeated spring floods.
Its machinery remained under a sagging roof a mile from the southern boundary.
Daniel had repaired the waterwheel as a boy.
The place was distant enough that servants rarely passed it by accident.
Hannah leaned closer.
“Eunice says they move wagons there after midnight.”
Eunice was the oldest cook in Blackwood House, a woman who could identify a person by the way he opened a pantry door.
She almost never volunteered a rumor.
If she had spoken about wagons, Daniel believed she had heard their wheels.
“Could she tell us when?” he asked.
“She wants to know whether you have proof.”
“I have names.”
Hannah swallowed.
“Names matter.”
She kept her eyes on the sheets.
“So do the living.”
Daniel understood the warning.
Rumors about illegal sales or false records could bring outside attention, but outside attention had rarely arrived in time to help the enslaved.
He could not assume a magistrate would protect someone merely because a wealthy man had falsified a ledger.
Property law itself was part of the danger.
Still, the existence of Margaret’s letters meant somebody outside the household had once seen the scheme.
There might be other witnesses.
He needed to discover whether they lived and whether they could speak without being seized.
That afternoon he carried a repaired chair to the kitchen and found Eunice cutting apples for a pie.
She glanced toward the pantry before addressing him.
“Your father knew what was under that old mill.”
Daniel stopped.
He had heard dozens of stories about his father, but never one involving the abandoned building.
“He worked on its foundations,” Eunice continued.
“He refused a job there just before the fever took him.”
“Why?”
“Because he saw wagon tracks where there shouldn’t have been any.”
Daniel looked at her.
“You’ve kept that quiet for years.”
