Pike laughed at the suggestion.
Nathaniel left a folded note and walked to the stable without finishing his meal.
Daniel approached the stable as if he needed to repair a loose door.
Nathaniel recognized him from Blackwood Manor, though they had never spoken directly.
He said quietly that he knew Daniel had been threatened by the Colonel’s household.
Daniel asked whether he understood what Catherine had done.
Nathaniel looked ashamed and admitted that he had heard rumors but chosen not to ask.
Daniel told him that silence had made the rumors safe for the people who caused the harm.
Nathaniel did not argue.
He handed Daniel a small card with the name of a minister in Richmond who helped families search for missing relatives.
Daniel refused to promise that he would trust a Blackwood simply because this one had expressed regret.
Nathaniel said he would not ask for trust.
He asked only that Daniel remember the address if he reached a safer place.
Abram returned on the following Thursday with flour sacks, tools, and a note written in unfamiliar handwriting.
He passed it to Rose behind the laundry shed as though she had asked for a recipe.
The note contained no greeting.
It said that Hannah Vale had left Harper’s Ford after tending a difficult birth at a wealthy Virginia household.
She traveled with a woman carrying an infant girl who had been reported dead.
The writer had seen the pair board a riverboat at dawn.
Daniel reread the note until the paper softened in his hands.
It did not identify the mother or explain why the child was hidden.
Still, the timing matched Graves’s account.
Rose pointed to a second line that Daniel had missed.
The woman traveling with Hannah used the name Mrs. Ellis but had no wedding ring and carried a bag bearing the stitched initials M B.
Those letters meant nothing to Daniel at first.
Then he remembered Mary Baines, a quiet seamstress who had worked in Catherine’s rooms before vanishing from Blackwood Manor the winter of Daniel’s sale.
Mary had once helped his mother with an illness when no physician would come to the cabins.
She had spoken carefully and disliked the Colonel, though she never said why.
Daniel recalled seeing her mend a blue traveling bag with those initials stitched beneath the handle.
If Mary had carried the infant away, Catherine might have been protecting the baby from Richard rather than simply trying to erase evidence of what happened.
