Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [135]
“I’ll pray that you make it, Robert,” I said.
“Amen,” Eli added. “We both be praying.”
On a rainy night in early March, Eli startled me out of my wits when he appeared in the darkness beside my bed and shook me awake. “Missy Caroline? Missy. . . ? Better wake up and come with me. You friend Robert is here . . . and he’s hurt.”
Tessie awoke, too, and quickly fetched the matches to light a lamp. Eli stopped her. “Guards gonna be all over this city when they find out there’s a prison break. Better not see our lights on.”
I put on my dressing gown and carefully followed Eli downstairs, the familiar furnishings looming in the eerie darkness. It was raining lightly outside, and I shivered in the cold. With no light from either moon or stars, I could barely find my way down the path to the carriage house. Robert had chosen a good night to conceal his escape.
“Why did he come here?” I whispered to Eli. “And how did he find our house?”
“Said he knew your address from writing all them letters. He thinking he just gonna hide out in the stable for while and not let us know he here. But the little mare woke me up—she don’t like strangers, you know—so I go on out and see what’s bothering her. There’s Robert, hiding in the hay. He’s bleeding, Missy Caroline. Guard shoot him in the leg.”
Robert huddled in the dark in the farthest stall, looking very pale. His face, hands, and uniform were covered with dirt from the tunnel and smudged with blood. Eli had hung an old blanket over the window to mask the candlelight, and Esther and Ruby knelt beside him, doctoring his leg. The bullet had scraped across the side of his calf, taking a good-sized chunk of flesh with it. The wound was deep, but it was already starting to clot. At least there was no bullet to remove.
Robert groaned when he saw me. “I don’t want to involve you, Caroline. Please, tell your servants to let me leave now.”
Ruby grunted. “Humph! How far you think you gonna get, dragging this leg like a crippled grasshopper? They catch you in no time, limping along.”
“I just needed to rest. I couldn’t run anymore. It hurt too much, and I had to stop and wrap up my leg. Please, I can’t stay here.”
“Do the guards know there’s been an escape?” I asked.
“They do now. A lot of us made it out, though. I volunteered to wait in the Towing Office and watch out the front window. I was timing the sentries, telling the others when it was safe to go.”
“What went wrong?”
“One of the men panicked and ran out before it was safe. Three others misunderstood and ran with him. A sentry spotted them and shouted for the rest of the guards. After that, all the prisoners stampeded out. We’re all in Federal uniforms, so there was no point in waiting or trying to bluff our way free. I had to run, too. One of the sentries started shooting at us with his revolver. I was lucky he only nicked me. I know he hit a couple of my friends because I saw two of them fall. Couple more jumped into the canal.”
Ruby finished wrapping his leg and tied the bandage. “Don’t you be moving your leg all around or it’s gonna start bleeding again,” she warned.
“I have no choice. Thanks for your help, but I have to go.”
“They’ll have roadblocks up,” I said. “You’d better stay right here.”
“No! I won’t endanger you!”
But in the silent night we could already hear the faint sound of the alarm bell ringing downtown in Capitol Square. “Too late to worry about that,” Esther said. “They ringing the alarm.”
“You can’t outrun the home guard,” I told him. “They’ll be on horseback. And they’ll have torches.”
“What are we going to do?” Tessie asked.
We all looked to Eli.
“Everybody go back to bed,” he said. “If they come here looking for him, y’all be just waking up. I’ll hide Massa Robert. That way, they ask you where he hiding, you won’t have to lie because you won’t know. And you won’t be