Read Online The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn by Lori Benton - Free Book Online

swelling nose.
    “Mama, you’re choking. Can you sit up?” Tamsen slid a shaking hand behind her mother’s head to help raise her. Seeming dazed, her mother pushed herself off the hearth to sit, slumped in a tangle of petticoats. Blood spattered the nutmeg silk.
    “I’m all right.” Her voice was as thick as her breath.
    Tamsen stared at the hand that had cupped her mother’s head. Blood slicked her fingers. “You aren’t all right, Mama. Look.”
    Sarah’s head swayed like a flower too heavy for its stem. She put a hand to her temple. “I don’t know …”
    Tamsen got her mother on her feet and half-carried her to the bed. She lowered her head to a pillow, smearing blood over the coverlet and her embroidered petticoat. “You need help, Mama. I’ll find Dell.”
    Where was the maid?
    Go on out to Sim . The stable. Before she took a step, her mother grasped her hand. “Dell’s gone her way.”
    “Mama—” Tamsen faltered, looking back at her mother’s battered face. At first she thought it was the light—the sun was setting, casting the room in a swelling amber glow—for a youthful gloss had flushed her mother’s skin despite the cruel effects of her stepfather’s blow. A gloss she hadn’t possessed in years. But it wasn’t the light. It came from within.
    It was joy. Her mother glowed with it, smiling through the blood on her mouth and chin.
    “Has Stephen come? Where is your papa?” Her mother was staring at a corner of the room, as if Dell, their troubles, and her injury were matters too insignificant to concern her now. As if something long anticipated was about to transpire there. Fear slipped cold down Tamsen’s spine.
    “What are you saying? Mama, look at me. Where is Dell?”
    “Tamsen …” Her mother’s voice was losing strength, though her grip still anchored Tamsen to the bedside. “Get the box.”
    “What box?”
    Sarah’s fingers fluttered to the bodice of her gown, fumbling for something tucked beneath her blood-spattered kerchief. There was a cord around her mother’s neck, tucked into her bodice. Tamsen pulled it free. On it hung a key, small and dark. From the clothespress Tamsen grabbed her mother’s scissors, left out for repairs to the gown. She snipped the cord. The key dropped into her hand, warm from her mother’s body.
    Sarah’s eyes strayed again to that corner, seeing something Tamsen couldn’t. Behind their almost feverish glow, urgency glittered. “In my trunk …”
    “Mama, whatever this is, it can wait—”
    “You have to know. Hurry … ”
    Sick with dread, Tamsen went to her mother’s trunk, pushed against the wall where Sim had left it. She knelt and rummaged among the few contents still unpacked until she found what she thought her mother meant—a box the size of a bread loaf, dark with age, hinged with iron. She set it on the floor and fumbled with the key. The lock was rusted. The key wedged tight. She wrenched it sideways. Finally it sprang. Inside were papers. Letters with broken seals. She fingered through them, heart hammering, the need to dump them in a heap and run for help all but overwhelming. How long had her stepfather been gone? Five minutes? Ten?
    “Mama, what is all this? Why—” A paper caught her eye, silencingher. The name Sarah was penned near the top, under a date. April 1767. Tamsen snatched it from the box and skimmed the first lines.
I, Stephen Joseph Littlejohn of the Colony of North Carolina and County aforesaid, owner & possessor of Sarah, a female slave of mixed blood …
    It was a request for manumission. The petitioner was her father.
    Hands shaking, Tamsen checked the date again. A year before her birth. She rifled through the papers, coming up with a more official-looking document bearing the seal of the North Carolina Assembly, dated later that same year.
The petition of Stephen Joseph Littlejohn praying that the petitioner may have a license to set free and liberate from slavery a certain female slave