“I have little faith in men. Paper sometimes embarrasses them into pretending decency.”
Lottie snorted. “Put that on his grave.”
When Jonah rode to Redfern Hall two days later, Seraphine watched from the barn.
He returned near dusk with mud on his boots and murder behind his eyes.
“He is there,” Jonah said.
Seraphine knew who he meant.
Her hands went cold.
“My brother.”
“Yes.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“No.”
“Did he see you?”
“For a moment.”
“And?”
“He is thin. There is a scar near his left ear. He limps.”
Seraphine closed her eyes.
Jonah said, “Havelock agreed. We leave Friday.”
Her eyes opened.
“We?”
“I will drive you there.”
“No.”
Jonah blinked.
“You will not drive me like a delivery,” she said. “Abram will. You will come later, when they need a man with papers to underestimate.”
Lottie smiled from the doorway. “She learns.”
Friday came hot, bright, and full of insects.
Seraphine wore the same patched dress from the auction yard. Lottie had cleaned it but not mended every tear. “Let them see what they think they know,” she had said.
Before dawn, Seraphine stood beside the springhouse.
Jonah approached with a small cloth bundle.
Inside was the deed.
“No,” she said. “Keep it hidden.”
“It belongs to you.”
“It belongs in court. If I carry it into Redfern and they find it, everything ends.”
Jonah nodded.
Then he held out something else.
A yellow scrap of cloth.
Seraphine did not take it.
“My mother’s?”
“Miriam tore it from Eliza’s shawl when she tried to stop the bleeding. She kept it. After Miriam died, I kept it.”
Seraphine’s face went blank.
“Do not give me relics,” she said.
Jonah lowered his hand.
“I am not trying to buy forgiveness.”
“Good. You cannot afford it.”
He nodded.
She turned away.
Then stopped.
Without looking at him, she said, “Keep it until I ask.”
Jonah closed his fingers around the cloth.
Abram drove her to Redfern Hall.
The plantation rose from the heat like a white lie.
Tall columns.
Wide porch.
Clean windows.
Fields stretching behind it in green rows that smelled of sweat and fear.
Darius Havelock stood on the steps, silver-haired, handsome in the way knives are handsome when polished. Beside him stood his overseer, Lem Cade, a thick-necked man with one bad knee and eyes like dirty water.
“Well,” Havelock said, smiling. “Jonah Vale’s giant.”
Seraphine lowered her gaze.
“Name?” Cade snapped.
She let a pause stretch just long enough to annoy him.
“Bina, sir.”
Havelock’s smile deepened. “Perhaps Jonah has improved her manners.”
Abram’s hands tightened on the reins.
Seraphine did not look at him.
Cade took her first to the mill shed, where a cracked beam had trapped part of the press. Four men had tried and failed to raise it.
“Lift,” Cade ordered.
Seraphine looked at the beam.
There had been a time she would have seized it in anger and torn half the shed apart.
Instead she placed her feet.
Breathed.
Found the balance.
Lifted.
The beam rose.
The men scrambled to brace it.
No one laughed.
Cade’s eyes changed.
Not admiration.
Use.
By evening, every person at Redfern Hall knew the giant woman could raise what men could not.
Havelock ordered her kept near the counting house instead of the quarters.
“Too much talk among field hands breeds sickness,” he said.
Seraphine lowered her head.
“Yes, sir.”
The room where she slept had sacks of seed, broken harness, and a wall shared with the old laundry.
At midnight, three soft taps came through the plank.
Seraphine sat up.
Her heart struck once so hard it hurt.
Two taps answered from her hand before she thought.
Silence.
Then a whisper.
“Sera?”
The name opened the world.
She pressed both hands over her mouth.
Through a gap near the floor, she saw one eye.
Brown.
Wet.
Alive.
“Tobias,” she whispered.
A shaky laugh came through the wall. “Nobody calls me that.”
“I do.”
“You got tall.”
“You got stupid. Letting them keep you here.”
“I did not apply for the position.”
She choked on a laugh that almost became a sob.
“How bad?” she whispered.
“Not dead.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the one I have.”
She closed her eyes.
There were a thousand things to say and no time to say them.
“Listen. There may be a wagon near the west ditch tomorrow or the next night. If I come, you move. No questions.”
“What about the others?”
Seraphine rested her forehead against the plank.
Of course he would ask.
He had once hidden half a biscuit for a girl he did not know because she cried from hunger.
“How many?”
“Four children in the root cellar. Two men chained near the smokehouse. A woman named Margaret in the laundry. She says she was born free in Kentucky. There are papers somewhere. Havelock burns most, but not all.”
“The ledger?”