Honor by Lyn Cote Read Free Book Online Page A

can count on me,” Royale said, her voice stronger. “’Cause I know I can count on you. You said you would free me, and even when you lost everything to Darah, you kept your word.”
    “I was raised to keep my word.” By a grandfather who was capable of betraying his own flesh and blood.
    Honor realized that Royale was weeping. She pulled her closer. “Don’t worry. Way will open.” The Quaker phrase mocked her.
    “I don’t know that. But I know I’m sticking with you.”
    Honor’s eyes moistened at this.
    “You got to think of marrying, though. Nobody need a governess or companion, and I don’t want to work in a house with a master. You marry, and we can stay together.”
    Panic at the thought of marrying a near stranger swept through Honor. “Royale, I can’t. Not now.”
    “Miss Honor, I already told you. We do what we got to. If it’s between starving and working with a man in the house, then I’ll do it. But better we stay together. We all we got left.”
    Unable to draw up words, Honor lay staring at the faint shadows on the ceiling. She must try again to find a haven for both of them. Royale had spoken the truth: they had only each other. Then she listened to the summer night in the city, the voices and footsteps of other people wafting through the open windows.
    Samuel’s tortured face flickered in her mind. She ached for him. He’d already lost so much, and now he would lose not only his mother but his dream of a better life in Ohio. Life had been so easy for her in Maryland, but it had allbeen an illusion. Did they all live just one step from disaster? Oh, Lord, help.

    SEPTEMBER 12, 1819
    When another First Day came, Miriam was again too ill to go to meeting. Her friend Jemima Wool, white-haired, petite, and dressed in sober gray, arrived to walk with Miriam. Honor and Royale set out with her instead, taking turns holding Eli’s pudgy hand. Honor opened a light-blue parasol against the blazing sun. Her black mourning dress and bonnet soaked in the cloying heat.
    Last week Honor and Royale had both been too daunted to face a group of strangers, and Honor still did not feel like entering a meetinghouse full of people she’d never met. But she and Royale needed a place to live, jobs to support them—and soon. Fear sped her pulse as she walked sedately between Jemima and Royale.
    “Miriam looked some better this morning, don’t you think?” Royale asked.
    Honor tilted her head to one side, peering around the parasol, realizing that Royale might be resisting the truth just as Samuel was.
    Walking under her own gray parasol, Jemima kept up a gentle flow of words about the meeting and Pittsburgh.
    Honor fanned herself and tried to observe the pleasantries.
    “There it is!” Eli finally called out, pointing half a block ahead toward a white clapboard building with green-striped canvas awnings above the windows.
    Honor smoothed her plain, modest dress and hoped she presented a cool and ladylike appearance in spite of the heat. Certainly positions might exist among the members of this large meeting, positions for her and Royale that would not require them to go through an agency.
    They mounted the few steps into the shady interior of the unadorned building, its coolness a relief. They trailed Jemima to the women’s side of the large room, filled with the hum of quiet conversation.
    A tall, commanding woman with wisps of iron-gray hair escaping her plain bonnet stepped in front of them. “The black girl must sit on the rear bench.”
    The words stung. After Miriam’s acceptance of Royale, Honor hadn’t expected this. She should have. In Maryland, the slaves who had become Quakers sat separate in the balcony of the meetinghouse.
    Still holding Eli’s hand, Royale headed toward the rear bench, her head lowered.
    Immobilized, Honor helplessly watched Royale’s humiliation. We’re related by blood, but only the color of our skin matters—even here.
    Jemima nudged Honor into the nearest row.