It was proof that somebody at Blackwood Manor was frightened enough to make mistakes.

Rose asked the question neither man wanted to speak.

She wanted to know whether the missing infant might be Daniel’s daughter.

Daniel looked at the river until he could answer.

He said that if she was, he wanted her safe, but that did not make what Catherine had done to him anything other than abuse.

Rose nodded.

She told him he did not have to surrender his own safety in order to care about a child.

That night Daniel heard the guards discussing a second party arriving from Virginia.

One man said Colonel Blackwood had sent orders of his own.

Richard wanted the child found and the man from Red Creek returned before any outsider learned about the birth.

The two sets of orders did not agree on what should happen afterward.

For the first time Daniel understood that Catherine and her husband were not acting together.

They had begun a struggle in which his life and a baby’s life were things each hoped to use against the other.

Daniel could not afford to trust either one.

He had to learn the truth before the next wagon came.

Rose had met a woman from Blackwood County once before.

The meeting happened two years earlier at a livestock market where Red Creek workers were sent to carry feed.

The woman was a midwife named Hannah Vale, and she had arrived with a family traveling toward Carolina.

Rose remembered her because Hannah had refused to let a frightened child be separated from his mother while an agent checked their papers.

She had argued with the agent in front of everybody, an act Rose had never forgotten.

Hannah told the child’s mother that she intended to settle near the border and help families who had nowhere safe to go.

Rose could not remember the exact village, but she remembered a blue sign painted on the road to an old ferry landing.

She described the sign to Thomas that evening.

Thomas drew the river branches in the dirt with a stick.

One crossing matched the description, a narrow place near a settlement called Harper’s Ford.

The settlement lay several days away, far beyond the nearest patrol station.

Daniel wondered whether Catherine’s child might have been taken to somebody like Hannah.

If Catherine had arranged a secret birth, a midwife would know what became of the infant.

The possibility was thin, but it was more than the statement Graves had brought.