A Free Heart Read Online Free Page A

arms. “I’d never been kissed before. I’d never even had a beau. His touch on my cheek—it was so tender and soft, I thought I’d die from happiness. And then he kissed me, and I knew I was his. I just knew it. Nothing else mattered. Not our skin color, not our stations in life—nothing. He was my best friend, and now he’d claimed my heart.” She opened her eyes again and saw Elizabeth wipe a tear from her jawline. “I’m sorry. I’m getting a little carried away.”
    “Oh, gracious, no. I’m getting married on Saturday—I completely understand being swept up in romance.” Elizabeth grinned, a sad, understanding grin. “Go on. What happened next?”
    “Can’t we just stop here? That’s the beautiful part.”
    “But there’s more,” Elizabeth said, her voice full of compassion. “Why aren’t you living with Jane right now?”
    Harriet took a deep breath. She didn’t want to say the words aloud, but she’d already come this far. “A friend of my father’s heard about our plans. As it turns out, his son had decided that he was going to marry me, and he’d seen me talking to Sam on the street. The next thing I knew . . .” Harriet stopped. She couldn’t say it. She just couldn’t.
    Elizabeth stood from the bed where she sat and knelt at Harriet’s feet, looking into her eyes. “What happened?” she whispered.
    “Sam was hanged from the rafters of my father’s barn,” Harriet murmured. “My brother Sterling found him with a note pinned to his chest. It said that this was God’s punishment for being unequally yoked with a black man. It called me out specifically and warned me to marry one of my own kind.”
    “No. Oh, Harriet. No.”
    Harriet nodded, the tears now coming so fast, there was no way to stop them. She saw everything all over again—Sterling coming into the house, holding her back so she wouldn’t go running out to the barn, seeing a white-sheeted form being carried out to a wagon feet first, her father’s grim face. The pain in her chest was unbearable. It seared. It burned. She grasped Elizabeth’s hand and squeezed it too hard as she gasped for breath. It was too much. Too much.
    Abigail poked her head up the stairs just then. “There you are. We’ve got just enough time to get the laundry on the line before the next train.”
    “Can you start without us, please?” Elizabeth asked over her shoulder. “We’ll be down as soon as we can.”
    “All right.” Abigail paused, seeming to take in the situation. “Is there anything I can do?”
    “She just needs to cry it out,” Elizabeth said.
    Abigail nodded. “We’ll see how much we can get done. Please let me know if I can do anything.”
    Harriet smiled faintly. “Thank you.”
    After Abigail’s footsteps receded, Elizabeth turned back to Harriet. “And then what?”Harriet swallowed hard. “I cried in my room for days. Then I cried in the parlor, on the porch—wherever I happened to be. And then one day, after months of heartache, I decided that I was going to come to Kansas and find Jane. Sam was gone—I couldn’t do anything about that—but I could see his mother and make sure she was all right. I couldn’t move on with my life until I had put a seal on that chapter of it.
    “I sent a letter to the Salina post office. The postmaster replied that he’d see if he could locate her. In the meantime, I got on a train and ended up here. I told the postmaster where I’d be, and his reply is the letter I received this morning. It took him a while to find Jane because she had gotten married and has a new surname, but I now know where she lives.”
    “You’re amazing,” Elizabeth said. “What did your parents say about your coming here?”
    Harriet winced. “They actually don’t know where I am. I just . . . left.”
    Elizabeth gasped. “You ran away?”
    “I did. No, it wasn’t the most responsible thing I could have done, but I knew my father would never allow me to go if I spoke with him about it