Freedom Stone by Jeffrey Kluger

water and a bite o’ bread. We’ll be there waitin’.”
    Lillie looked slowly around herself at the busy town with the milling people and swallowed hard. Then she looked back at Bett.
    â€œGo, little Ibo,” the old woman said. “Do what you got to do.”

Chapter Nine
    MINERVY WASN’T the kind of girl inclined to use a curse word. That was good, since even at age thirteen, she hadn’t yet learned one. Her mama was very strict on the matter of curse words and made that clear from the time Minervy was old enough to speak.
    â€œThere’s words what are poison berries and words what are sweet berries,” she’d say. “Put too many bad ones on your tongue and you quit tastin’ the good ones.”
    That made sense to Minervy, and she’d always prided herself on never having uttered so much as a single word too nasty to say in polite company. She dearly wished she had at least one at her command, however, the day Lillie told her she’d be going off to Bluffton and leaving her to tend the nursery cabin on her own.
    Lillie had mentioned nothing about the Bluffton trip until the very afternoon before she went, reckoning that every hour a nervous girl like Minervy knew about what lay ahead was another hour she’d fret about it. Best to give them both fewer of those hours to abide. When Lillie finally did reveal her plans, Minervy indeed became a tangle of worry.
    â€œBut what if somethin’ happens when you’re gone?” she asked.
    â€œSomethin’ like what?” Lillie responded.
    â€œS’pose a baby gets sick or a mama gets cross?”
    â€œThat happens every day.”
    â€œS’pose all the littlest ones takes to squawlin’ at once?”
    â€œThat happens too,” Lillie answered. “And it’s always you what sets things right.”
    Minervy was not convinced and passed the rest of the day clucking her tongue worriedly and looking at Lillie crossly. But when the next morning came, she handled the nursery cabin as well as Lillie had predicted she would, collecting the babies and shooing away the mamas with so little fuss that most of them didn’t even seem to notice that Lillie was gone. Still, when the last of the mamas had left, Minervy closed the door in relief, knowing that it would not be until mid-morning that she’d see any of them again and looking forward to a quiet hour or two with no more noise in the nursery cabin than the sound of the sleeping babies. She was thus both surprised and cross when, not long after all the mamas were supposed to be at work, there was a rap at the door. Minervy snapped her eyes to the slumbering babies, who stirred slightly but did not awaken. The knock sounded again, and the door creaked open. Minervy rose and hurried over, hoping to stop whichever mama it was before she entered and created a disturbance.
    â€œBabies is sleepin’!” she hissed in a tone she never took with any adult, much less with the mamas. “If you wakes’em all up, I’ll—”
    Before she could continue her thought, the door opened the rest of the way and the words choked in her throat. Standing on the other side wasn’t a slave mama at all, but Miss Sarabeth, the Master’s daughter.
    Sarabeth regarded Minervy with a cool expression and a small nod of the head and at first said nothing. She wore a frilly strolling dress and a large-brimmed hat with a little flurry of light green ribbons streaming from it. She carried a closed parasol that she could open to catch any stray beam of sunlight that might get past the oversized hat. At the moment, the morning sun was still low, lighting up Sarabeth from behind in such a way that she appeared to be less a true girl than a shadowed shape inside a cloud of luminous clothes. Minervy squinted to make out her face, and Sarabeth squinted back into the shadowy cabin.
    â€œMiss Sarabeth!” Minervy burbled, still holding her