And the Knights were getting desperate, Walker knew. “What do you need me to do?”
“Get a note to my friend. He’s the only one who still…who I trust to listen to a warning.” In the darkness of the stables, Walker could barely make out Osborne reaching into his pocket and pulling out a thin square that rustled like paper. “I can’t risk a telegram, not with the wires originating at Hughes’s rail station.”
“Encode it.” The answer—an obvious one to him, given the Culpers’ history with codes—tripped off his tongue before he could think to stop it. Though he wished, when Osborne froze, he could take it back. He shouldn’t be allowed to speak before he had a stiff cup of coffee in the morning.
“We haven’t established a cipher.” At least he didn’t sound suspicious, just frustrated. “Should have, but…”
Walker reached out and took the paper. “Is this the message?”
“His address. Will you be able to read it?”
A perfectly valid question for someone to ask a Negro man, even a free one. But Walker couldn’t help but snort a laugh. “You do realize I was Stephen Arnaud’s best friend, right? Owner of all those books you’ve been reading?”
“Good. I can’t risk paying Herschel a visit today, not when I have to meet the others. If you could find him, though, and tell him to change Lincoln’s route at the last minute. That’s all it will take to foil them.”
“I can handle that.” Going to Washington hadn’t been in his plans for the day, but no doubt Marietta would agree that this was more important than the trip to the hospital the womenfolk had planned. “Gotta ask, though…you really trust me with this?”
Osborne shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’m short on allies, and I can’t ask Marietta to help here.”
Walker tucked the folded paper into his pocket to examine when he had light. Then he paused. “You trust her these days?”
A beat of silence was the only response he could discern in the low light. “Don’t you?”
“Yeah. But we’ve known each other all our lives.” He knew the old Yetta, not just the socialite. The woman so long slumbering under the mask of hurt—and the determination not to feel the hurt.
How much of her did Osborne know? He shouldn’t trust the mask…and if she’d lowered it, then they had some talking to do, him and her.
Osborne hummed, low and quick. “One minute I think I have her figured, and then the next…”
“It ain’t too hard.” He buttoned up his coat and fished thick gloves from his pockets. “The way she seems to be…well, that’s my fault.”
He could all but hear her screaming at him in his head, telling him he had no business letting Slade in on the secret no one else knew, aside from themselves and Cora. And maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was just the lack of sleep forcing the words past his lips.
But he couldn’t shake the feeling that this man would respect her the more if he knew all she’d been willing to give up, once, to follow her heart.
“Your fault.” The measured, flat tone of caution possessed Osborne’s voice. “How so?”
“I hurt her.” Walker tugged his gloves on, welcoming the insulation from the cold March air. “We’d been planning to run off together. Go north and get married.”
Though shadows cloaked Osborne’s face, they sure didn’t do anything to mute the surprised inhale.
Walker smiled into the darkness. “I know. Wouldn’t think it of her, would you? Fine, rich white girl like her willing to give up everything for a quadroon whose life goal was to work with horses.”
“No. I wouldn’t have.” Osborne’s voice was quiet as a thought.
“No one did. Look, I’ve been judged all my life for my mixed blood and the fact I ain’t got a father. Most folks don’t know my mama was attacked, and if they did, they wouldn’t care.” But it was something he’d never been able to get past. Something he sure couldn’t let Cora and her unrequested babe go through alone when he found her sobbing in a horse’s stall. “Yetta never judged. Never looked at me like I was less.”
The breath whispered back out. “What happened, then?”
“I told Stephen. He talked me out of it.” Though his companion wouldn’t be able to see, he shook his head. “Looking back, I know it was the right decision. But I didn’t handle it right. I was going to take off and not tell her, and when she caught me leaving—well, we both said things we shouldn’t have. I broke her heart, Oz, plain and simple.”
“You’re the one she was trying to hurt by marrying a slave owner.”
Sounded right, but not coming from him. “She told you that?”
“Yeah.” He turned but didn’t walk back through the door. “Why are you working here if it ended so badly?”
“Stephen. He made me promise when he signed up that I would watch out for her. He never trusted the Hugheses. He made her promise to provide me a job.”