He knew how quickly an official record could become a weapon when it was wrong or deliberately falsified.
The Blackwood child’s record worried him because Richard had filed a death notice while privately searching for a living infant.
If the notice remained unchallenged, anybody caring for Eleanor could be accused of having no lawful connection to her.
Isaiah examined a copy of the physician’s certificate obtained from Nathaniel Blackwood.
The doctor claimed to have witnessed the infant’s death shortly after midnight.
Nathaniel had seen the baby alive after dawn.
The contradiction was simple enough to understand but difficult to establish in a court controlled by the same wealthy families who entertained the Colonel.
Isaiah wanted testimony from the midwife and the woman who took the child from the manor.
He also wanted to know whether Catherine would admit the circumstances of the birth.
Daniel said Catherine had spent months threatening to accuse him of a crime if he ever spoke about her demands.
Isaiah did not press him for details.
He said no person should be compelled to relive an abuse merely to satisfy another person’s curiosity.
Daniel could decide what to disclose and to whom.
That respect allowed Daniel to explain more than he had intended.
He described the summons, the threats, the pregnancy announcement, and the sale that followed Richard’s return.
Isaiah wrote only the facts Daniel approved for his statement.
They discussed how testimony from an enslaved Black man might be excluded or discounted in a Southern court.
Isaiah refused to promise that the law would offer fair treatment.
He proposed protecting the evidence through independent witnesses, copying the documents, and making sure the public record could not be quietly destroyed.
It was an imperfect strategy, but it was grounded in what they could actually do.
Daniel said he wanted Eleanor kept alive and free of the people fighting over her.
Isaiah told him that was a clear purpose, even if the path remained difficult.
Rebecca Finch lived in a narrow house at the edge of a farming village where the road divided beside a stand of chestnut trees.
Her husband had died eight years earlier, leaving her two rooms, a small vegetable plot, and debts she had struggled to pay.
She earned enough to survive by mending clothes and keeping accounts for local merchants.
People in the village described her as quiet and unremarkable.
That reputation had helped her shelter Mary Baines and Eleanor without drawing attention.
