The Trial
January 1798
Halifax County Court is a stage waiting for its players. The judge’s place is empty, as is the dock, enclosed on all sides but one. This is where the accused will stand. The room carries the weight of its past, all it has witnessed, leaving it hard and cold. Winter winds rattle loose windowpanes. Dark wood-paneled walls remember the methodical dissection of every kind of crime. Killers and crooks, robbers and the robbed, victims and perpetrators alike have all wet the uneven floor with their tears, lifted their gaze to the rafters and prayed.
The public benches are almost deserted, but a young woman waits there. It is, of course, a waiting kind of place—for confessions, for verdicts, for justice. Her eyes dart between the clerk in the corner and the two white men who stand in hushed conversation at the front, a lawyer and his client. She cannot stay still, one moment leaning forward in her seat, the next sitting back and gripping the bench with both hands. She breathes with some difficulty, the sign of a chill settled on the lungs.
The door to the courtroom opens. Everyone falls as silent as the snow-covered streets outside.
As the accused is brought in, she keeps her hands behind her, as if bound, but when she reaches the dock, she holds its sides to steady herself. They have left her free for now, though red welts of worn skin at her wrists betray that she has recently been chained. On the public benches, the young woman is on her feet. She says a name. The accused looks up. Their eyes meet. They cannot move from where they are, but their gazes cling to each other with the desperation of the drowning. All the accumulated history of the courtroom, the vast body of past crimes, recedes, and something vital and singular shines through. These two women. This case. The whole world might as well hang in the balance; the whole world might as well be awaiting the arrival of the judge, for the trial to begin.
Winter
1796-97
The air smells of salt and fish on the edge of rot, their carcasses piled high and stinking in the market. But it is the noise that assaults Cora-the noise and the crowds, wagons trundling over mud and stone, shouts from the drunks crowding the taverns, the distant sound of drums and pipers as the militia parade up Citadel Hill. Squat wooden houses, peeling brown and yellow paint, flank the streets. Rising up the hill are grander buildings, made of slate; the morning's frost, now melted, turns them dark and foreboding. All the people have hard, weathered faces, and they walk at a tilt, angled into the bitter wind.
Cora passes stalls with slaughtered sheep and pigs. Barrels of oats. Shops-the tanner, the dressmaker, the dry goods store. Her trip here has been in vain, still no flour to be bought in the city. She misses home with a dull ache, everything in Halifax reminding her only of what has been lost: bright-colored fruits and crystal-clear mountain streams. She has forgotten how it feels to be warm. . . .
A hand seizes her by the lapel of her woolen coat. Cora starts but does not shrink or cower. She stares directly into the face of the white man who has stopped her, their heights almost the same.
"Quite a way from the Negro quarter, aren't you, girl?"
His features sharp, a mean set to his mouth.
"Papers," he says.
"Let go-"
"Papers," he repeats. "Where are your papers, girl?"
The eyes of strangers slide over her, indifferent to her plight. She swallows anger as she pulls herself free.
"Me no have papers."
The white man is thrown, briefly, by something. Perhaps her lack of deference; the way she has, all this time, held his gaze. Or perhaps it is the unfamiliar accent, the rise and fall of it where he expects broad, flat tones.
He is the one who looks away first.
"In that case-"
Cora puts a hand on her chest.
"Maroon," she says. "From Jamaica."
It hurts a little, the name in her mouth. Home.
The man still stands too close, slow to understand.
"Free," Cora says firmly.
It might not be enough. She has learned that the people in this place don't know what Jamaicans know. Can't always accept her status as something different than the others with skin like hers. But luck is on her side. A shout from close by. The man turns; a fellow inspector tussles with a ragged-clothed man, someone who looks more like the runaway type. Cora is left as the white man hurries to help with the arrest. She doesn't want to watch. She walks away and lets the market crowd swallow her.
She leaves the city empty-handed, huddled on the Dartmouth ferry, freezing; she still doesn’t have the knack for this weather, is without a hat or gloves, her thin layers inadequate to warm her. Hard waves knock the sides of the boat. Impossible to believe that this water is the same as the water that breaks on the sands of home.
Will she ever return?
Cora oscillates between determination and despair. Some days, she thinks she would swim the distance if she could. That nothing could stop her from clawing her way back-that she would rather die in the attempt than resign herself to a life on these forbidding shores. But then there are the dark days, the days when she can hardly rise from her bed, when she lies motionless, listening to the roaring wind or driving rain outside, or when fog presses close around the windows, and she cannot imagine ever seeing her island again.
2
The problem is that she is not paying attention. Taking a shortcut, off the main road from Dartmouth toward Preston, but her mind is following the forest paths of Trelawny Town in Jamaica, retracing old steps. The cold draws her into herself-cutting off the feeling in her fingers and toes, a spreading numbness as though the inessential parts of herself are falling away and she will be left with only her core. And the core of her has always been the forests of home.
Lost in the past, she does not realize she has taken a wrong turn until it is too late. Until, looking around, she thinks that these spruce trees are not as they should be. The uncanny feeling of familiar shapes turned slightly strange-just enough to make the world around her feel unreal, like the illusion of another distorted landscape in the surface of rippling water.
She stops. Looks around, inwardly cursing. But not so bad, surely. She can retrace her steps, she is sure of it. She looks up at the gray sky, trying to calculate the angle of a sun half-hidden by cloud-and that is when she feels something land on her face. A pinprick of cold.
The winter's first snow.
Cora stands for a while and watches it fall, the flakes so slow it makes the heavy, pounding rains of Jamaica feel like a distant memory.
Overhead, the sky seems lower. Cora recalls a folk story, of a time when people could reach up and pick pieces of the sky like ripe fruit and eat it, so no one ever went hungry. The story can't be her mother's, but Cora imagines for a moment that it might be. That somehow, twenty years ago, a woman laid a hand on the swell of her belly and whispered things, making herself heard through layers of skin, speaking of lions and trickster gods and the very beginning of the earth.
The flakes settle on her face and hair fleetingly before they melt away. The paths are beginning to disappear under the dusting of white. She is already lost. How will she find the right way now?
Some, at this point, would start to panic, but Cora's is not a mind so easily unsettled. She prides herself on taking things as she finds them. Has little patience for those who worry, where getting to work will do. So, nothing for it but to walk.
She sets off, back in the direction she came.
By the changing quality of the light, Cora guesses that another hour has passed, maybe more. Her feet, at least, do not ache, too frozen for feeling. But her shoulders, hunched around her ears, are stiff, her coat fighting a losing battle to keep out the cold.
This new, muffled world does strange things to sound; her heels kick up snow as she walks, and it is easy to imagine that the soft noise as it lands is something else creeping behind her, close as a shadow. She looks around. Nothing. She is alone.
Her rational mind keeps fear at bay. What use, after all, is fear? But there is an animal part of her that is heightened by the thick silence, that hears every snapping twig like a gunshot, that turns the whistling wind into some creature's call. She finds herself walking a little faster, releasing silver clouds of breath. Paying more attention to the forest, until her eyes are drawn to something and she cannot, at first, make sense of it. A break in the trees, a vast expanse of whiteness. She moves toward it until she understands. A lake, the ice covered with snow, creating the illusion of solid ground.
She stands and shivers. The desolate beauty of it. The ache of loneliness, the quiet. Easy to imagine nothing living out here but her.
She closes her eyes the better to regain control of herself, of her racing heart.
When she opens them again, there is something out there.
A shape in the distance. She had taken it to be a tree stump on the distant shore, but now it is moving, a slow shuffle across the ice.
Wolf? Bear?
Cora's chest tightens. She dare not breathe.
It is dark and bundled in fur, too distant for her to make out anything but the strange movement of its limbs, ghostlike in the weak afternoon light.
Cora has, without realizing, been drawn out from the tree line and to the lake's very edge. Another step, and she is on the ice; underneath her feet, it groans, an awful noise that sends her back into the thick of the war and the sounds of people dying.
The creature turns to look at her. It cannot be possible-she is too far away-but she feels, in that moment, that she can see its eyes, black, devoid of anything like feeling or life. Neither animal nor human. Eyes that do not belong in this world.
All at once, the hold she has kept over her terror breaks; cold panic leaks through her body as she stumbles back, slips, tumbles to the shore. The creature moving again with startling speed. Cora turns and runs.
Crashing through the pines. Roots poke treacherously from the earth to trip her. Snow still swirling, a storm of white, one hand held out ahead of her to shield her face, the thudding of her heartbeat matched to every stride-
When the forest falls away and Cora tumbles out into the road, she smashes headlong into something as solid as a wall. The impact knocks the breath from her. From the ground, dazed, she looks up-sees all kinds of strange apparitions until finally, the shape looming over her resolves itself. An ox, white, camouflaged in the snow. Its keeper, a man, gazes down at her. With his hood drawn, a shadow falls across his face, but she gets an impression of calm curiosity, his skin as dark as the ox is white.
She takes the man's proffered hand and gets to her feet. Neither of them speaks, but his look conveys a question-is she hurt? Cora, stiff but unharmed, glances back toward the forest, the tangle of pines and cedars and bare-branched maples, birch trees the color of bone. The fall has knocked her to her senses, giving everything a surreal quality. The creature on the ice, the running. What was she so afraid of?
Cora and the stranger assess each other. He seems steady, surprisingly unruffled by an unfamiliar girl hurling herself out of the trees at him. The ox waits patiently, blowing clouds of steam from its nose.
"Thursday," the man says.
Cora frowns. "Monday today."
He does not laugh or smile, but his shoulders open a little in a way that conveys amusement.
"No," he says. "My name. Thursday."
"Oh," she says. "Cora."
She isn't sure what to make of him. He must be one of the Americans. She has heard of them, seen a few around Halifax. Like the Maroons, war brought them here, though she is not sure of the details.
"You all right?" he asks. His gaze sliding behind her, to the woods, the way she has come, as if in case of a pursuer.
She nods; a few snowflakes come loose from her hair. Rationality has returned now, and she would be too embarrassed to try to explain. Not to this man-so real and solid, big and made bigger by his bulky coat.
"Lost," she says finally. "Looking for Preston."
Thursday considers this. Cora stares back, her expression polite but firm-she will account for no more than this. He is willing to accept it.
"You ain't far. Just up the road here. I can show you."
Thursday pats the ox once and says, "Gee up." The animal plods away, Thursday beside it, while Cora follows. She watches the way the ox's bones move under its skin. Each heavy step produces a jolt, a sense of crushing and crunching-a fleeting image of herself caught under its hooves.
Cora, not usually one for shyness, finds it hard to know what to say, so they walk in silence.
They come to a crossroads; Thursday speaks a command and the ox responds, turning left with a slow grace. It moves with its head bowed, as if braced against something heavy, though currently it is yoked to nothing at all.
Thursday must see her looking.
"Name's Abel," he says.
"Abel," Cora repeats. The road is wider here, so she can come alongside him.
"Like the Bible."
Cora doesn't know the Bible, so says nothing.
"Two working on the farm. One's always Cain. One's always Abel. Cain on the left, Abel on the right."
Underneath the hood, what little she can make out of his face shows it to be broad, moving slowly and deliberately from expression to expression.
"What you mean, 'always'?" Cora asks.
"One Cain dies, train the next," he says. "Same with Abel."
He gestures toward the ox.
"This'll be the fifth Abel."
Gradually, imperceptibly, the snow has slowed and then stopped. Now there is a little low afternoon sunlight from behind the clouds; it makes the snow glitter.
"So you a farmer?" Cora asks.
"Work for one."
This makes her wonder. . . . In Jamaica, as far as she knew, there was only white, slave, and Maroon. This place is harder to understand. Here there are rich whites and poor whites and whites without a penny to their name, and there are free Blacks and there are slaves and there are people who seem to hover somewhere in between.
Eventually, the wondering gets too much. She has to ask-
"You free?"
Thursday doesn't lose the rhythm of his strides, but the surprise registers on his face. The question seems straightforward enough to Cora, but he takes his time considering it.
"Yes," he says. "And no."
"No?"
"Farmer Nash got me some years yet. No choice about the work. So he owns me, I reckon." A glance toward Cora, and he must be able to tell that she doesn't quite understand. "It's called indenture."
Cora repeats the word slowly.
"Like a contract," Thursday says.
"So you choose it?"
Under the hood, she catches the flicker of sadness.
"You might say that."
Even though he is a stranger, even though he gives so little away in his words or his expressions, she knows they are straying somewhere painful. She doesn't pry.
A track crosses the road, a scattering of stone buildings in the distance. Thursday calls Abel to a stop.
"This here's the farm," he says. "Another bit on up the road to Preston."
They stand facing each other. The silence is, strangely, not uncomfortable. He pushes back his hood, showing all of his face. There is a scar at his temple, half-obscured by the line of his hair.
"Say," he says. "You one of the Jamaicans?"
Cora nods, surprised he knows. But then, being so close to Preston, how could he not?
When he speaks again, there is a small change in his voice. He speaks more slowly. Cora takes it for kindness.
"Must be different. Being here."
The words so inadequate to cover the enormity of everything she has felt in these months of exile that she has to stop herself from laughing.
Copyright © 2026 by Eleanor Shearer. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
