by Alyssa Cole
“I’m searching for further proof of treason,” he said. “You were already a problem, but after your actions this afternoon, you’ve proven yourself a criminal.”
“A criminal? For trying to prevent the death of an innocent woman?” Sarah cried out.
“She’s been dealt with.” He looked up at Marlie, his gaze so devoid of emotion that it chilled her to the bone. “Now it’s your turn.”
He pulled a large knife from its sheath and brought it down into the mattress, ripping a jagged line down the middle. The filling of the mattress began to fall out, and he aided it along, pulling it out in great handfuls and tossing it haphazardly onto the floor, as if delighting in the chaos. Marlie stood in mute shock, unable to take in everything that was happening. It was just a bed, but it was the thing that kept her warm and comfortable every night. It was where she passed her most intimate moments, and it was being destroyed before her eyes; the sense of foreboding she’d felt when she first spotted both Melody and Cahill overwhelmed her.
She thought of her mother, who had sent her to the Lynches because she’d thought they could keep her safe from the ills of the world.
Maman.
Something crashed behind her, and she whirled to find Melody going through books on the bookcase, flipping through them in search of correspondence and then throwing them to the floor behind her. Sarah was scrambling, trying to pick up the mess, but it was no use.
Marlie’s face flushed with anger. There was no correspondence—she’d burned everything she received. The pinpricks in the books weren’t detectable. Her Polybius square was safe in the hidden compartment in her desk. There was only one thing of value that Marlie hadn’t hidden away.
As if reading her thoughts, Cahill strode over to the desk and began rifling through the papers. “What’s this hogwash? ‘The whites here seem to both relish the pain of slaves and pretend that we are happy to be subject to their whims. I wish there was a treatment for this disease of the mind.’ Is this some kind of abolitionist tract?”
“No, it’s no tract. A story I was copying from another source as a diversion.”
She wanted to scream and cry and rip the pages from his hands. He was defiling the remnants of her mother with his coarse fingers, with his gaze upon words not meant for him. She didn’t remember translating that portion, and as she drew nearer, she realized the writing was indeed not hers. The strokes were short, cribbed, as if the person writing had been in a rush but was too fastidious to let the work be sloppy. She’d seen it every time a note passed under the hidden door.
Ewan.
“Truly, truly nothing of interest,” she said, reaching for them. A hand darted out and smacked her fingers, hard.
“I do enjoy a good story,” Melody said, taking the papers from Cahill and adding them to the stack sitting on the desk. She turned and began opening drawers and throwing things to the floor. After a few moments of continued destruction, she sighed and turned toward Cahill. “I suppose that’s that. Her outburst today was not part of some greater conspiracy among the darkies, but we’ll handle it accordingly.”
What more could they do? Marlie couldn’t begin to conjecture.
“Marlie is a Lynch, and further abuse will not be tolerated,” Sarah said, coming to stand in front of Marlie.
Cahill laughed, and Melody joined in. “Marlie is a nigger, Sarah—the Lynch name doesn’t change that.”
Sarah’s eyes squeezed shut in frustration.
“Don’t you understand? Her skin might be dark, but her soul is white!” Sarah shouted, and everything in the room went silent afterward, or perhaps it just seemed that way to Marlie. She looked at Sarah, at the conviction on her face, and realized with a horrible clarity that her sister had spoken the ridiculous words because she believed them.
It was true, the father Marlie had never met was white. But the woman who had birthed and raised her and taught her everything she knew? She wasn’t, and her soul had been as pure and strong as anyone’s.
Marlie wanted to grab Sarah and shake her, to make her take the words back. For half of Marlie’s life, Sarah had been everything to her, both sister and, in a way, mother. She was all Marlie had. And she had just revealed that she didn’t know Marlie at all. She thought Marlie’s soul was white—was that the only reason she had shown her love and affection? Marlie felt a press of tears and fought at the burn behind her eyes.
Melody ignored Sarah and began to walk past her, then stopped. “Wait just a minute, now. Now I’m fairly certain Stephen said that the entire attic had been changed into rooms for the darkie, but this house is longer than these two rooms.”
She turned back toward the desk and bookcase, studying both. Marlie said nothing. Her throat was sealed by the fear that had snapped shut around her like the fly-eating plants that grew in the swamps. She was found out. She’d lost her mother’s papers, she felt a thousand leagues from Sarah even as her sister defended her, and now she’d lose Ewan, too. Her life, and certainly, her soul, might be lost as well. She’d thought herself daring, but she was nothing but a fool. She wanted to sink down to the ground but, improbably, her legs kept her upright.
Cahill pushed away the bookshelf first, and, finding nothing there, then moved the desk. He saw the door, and for the first time Marlie saw some emotion in his gaze: excitement. “Well, what do we have here?”
“A room full of rodents,” Marlie said. She didn’t know where the lie came from, how it flowed so effortlessly from her lips. “A raccoon and her pups got loose in there, eating the plants I’d been drying, and I preferred letting them have the run of the place rather than fighting them. Cunning things. I shut the door and pushed the desk against it to keep them from finding a way into my bedroom.”
“Well, if anything is living in there, it won’t be for long.” He unsheathed the vicious knife again and nudged the door open with his boot. Melody handed him a candle, and he stepped into the darkness.
Marlie closed her eyes, waiting for the sound of struggle, hoping that perhaps Ewan would have the element of surprise. It was the only way he could survive.
“I’ll kill him if he tries to hurt you.”
Marlie remembered how Ewan had said those words, as if it were an eventuality—as if he had no qualms. And he’d offered the same again, when she came to him. His eyes had gone dark and distant when he’d recalled his time in the war—in all likelihood Ewan was capable of more than she credited him with. But that wasn’t something she wanted to discover that night, in that way.
She had envisioned possible discovery before, had always thought she’d be panicked or indignant, but she felt nothing. It was as if so much was going on that her mind chose to process none of it. That was perhaps the only reason she didn’t rush into the room after Cahill.
She heard crates being knocked over, baskets and boxes crashing to the floor. Cahill’s annoyed grunts as he searched. And then . . . nothing. Cahill came out and placed the candle on the desk.
“It seems your coons are gone,” he said.
Marlie stared at him. How? How had he not seen Ewan, with his great height and his shock of red-orange hair?
“G-g-good,” she said, hoping they didn’t notice how her teeth suddenly chattered.
“Well, I’ll just be taking this,” Melody said as she pulled at the chain around Marlie’s neck with the hand that wasn’t holding Vivienne’s papers. She pulled it up over her head, heedless when the links snagged in Marlie’s curls. She tugged harder, and frowned disdainfully at the hairs caught in the clasp that she’d pulled out by the root. “Disgusting,” she muttered as she undid the clasp and removed the key. She added it to her keychain.
“You’ll be locked up here until further notice. Sarah. Commander.”
“I’m sorry,” Sarah whispered, clutching Marlie by the shoulders. Tears filled her eyes, and her expression was so pained that Marlie was almost tempted to comfort her. “I’m supposed to protect you, but Stephen has left me with few options. I will figure som
ething out, do not fear.”
She kissed Marlie on the cheek.
Marlie didn’t respond. She couldn’t. She felt that if she opened her mouth in that moment she’d release a shout that would shake the world.
“Come, Sarah,” Melody commanded.
They filed out of the door and Marlie stood numbly in the wreckage of what had once been the last peaceful oasis in a country set against allowing her to live freely. Glass crunched as she walked, and she noticed a scrap of red—the gris-gris she’d made had been crushed underfoot.
She picked up the candle and looked about the drying room. Where had Ewan gone? For one disorienting moment, she wondered if she hadn’t imagined him entirely. A figment of her imagination, conjured from her desperate loneliness. Of course, she hadn’t realized how alone she’d been until she thought of being without him.
“Socrates?” she whispered.
The ceiling creaked over her head and a board lifted and moved to the side. His pale face appeared in the darkness. “One must always have a contingency plan,” he said in a low voice, and she couldn’t help the low giggle that burbled out of her. The giggle quickly caught on a sob, and the tears started to flow.
She felt as if the foundations of her life had been kicked out from under her, one by one, until she was left balancing precariously, like a cat chased up a pole.
“Everything is ruined,” she whispered. “Everything I love has been taken from me.”
Ewan said nothing, but there was the sound of shifting and scraping and then his hand lowered down from the darkness. She reached up and sighed as he caught her hand fast and held it tight. She didn’t let go until her arm began to ache.
CHAPTER 13
After fighting sleep for hours, Marlie had finally dozed off—by need and not by choice. Instead of the darkness that usually greeted her, she found herself back in the house where she’d been born.
Vivienne sat cross-legged on the floor, picking through a woven basket overflowing with honeysuckle that rested in her lap. The sweet smell was mixed with rosemary, the calming scent Marlie always associated with her mother. Vivienne didn’t seem to notice her as she used a pin to extract the scented droplets from the flowers and transfer them to a bottle beside her.
“Maman?”
Vivienne didn’t look up at her, but she spoke and her voice seemed to emanate from the walls of the cabin.
“Put the water on, chérie,” she said. “You know what to do.”
Marlie heard a noise by the cookstove and turned to find Ewan already there. What was he doing in their home?
Ewan lit match after match, but a cold wind blew each one out before it reached the kindling.
Then he reached for a book—her medical botany—ripped out a page, and lit that instead. It caught fast and flared and he threw it into the stove’s belly before looking over his shoulder at her. He was smiling, a wide, sunny smile that looked unnatural on his face.
“They’re waiting for us,” he said. “Come on, we’ve got to go.”
“I don’t want to go,” she said, and suddenly she was hugging her mother outside of their shack, as she had the night when she’d first left.
“You have to. Better things await you. Faites moi confiance.”
The carriage was there, too, but now Ewan was at the reins. He waved her toward him, but when she took a step she crashed down into the earth. The roots of trees and plants began to bind her, holding her fast as dirt filled her mouth and nostrils....
“Marlie? Hey, girl. Wake up.”
She opened her eyes to find Lace and Tobias standing over her, their eyes wide with concern. She tried to capture the fading strands of her dream, the first she’d had in so long. Her mother had been there, and Ewan, but what had it meant? What was it her mother had said? Why was she breathing so hard?
It was too late; the dream was gone, erased by the stark reality of her situation.
“You hurt?” Lace asked.
Marlie shook her head, then realized her face was damp with tears. She kept her gaze on Lace and Tobias as she wiped them away, giving herself a moment of reprieve—to imagine a world in which the previous night hadn’t passed—before looking at her ruined work space. At least the still hadn’t been harmed too much; the other things could be replaced, eventually, but the still was her prized possession.
She shifted herself up to a sitting position and pain flared in her hip bones and back. Apparently, the pile of stuffing she’d pushed together hadn’t made for a comfortable resting place, but she’d been so overwhelmed the previous night that she’d simply curled up into a ball on the first surface not covered with broken glass.
“Sarah got sent to give food at the Reb hospital,” Tobias said. “Said we should check on you.”
Marlie nodded, tried to stretch, and then caught herself as a wrench in her neck caught painfully.
“Marlie. Look at your hair, and your dress, and—” A tear slipped down Lace’s cheek and she shook her head angrily. “This ain’t right. You not supposed to get treated like this. None of us are, but especially not you.”
Lace was often curt with her, although Marlie knew the woman loved her. Seeing her tears shocked Marlie.
“I’m all right, really.”
“She gonna be okay,” Tobias said. He rubbed one hand on Lace’s back and extended the other to Marlie to help her up.
“Okay?” Lace sucked her teeth in annoyance. “Don’t you see? Marlie ain’t never been a slave, never been a servant. She ain’t ever worked for anyone but herself. She’s smarter than any of these white folk, and still she can be treated like this.” She held her hands toward Marlie as if presenting some damning evidence. “What’s the point of freedom if people can still do this to you and act like you deserved it?”
Lace moved away from Tobias’s comfort, her mouth pressed into a line, and dragged Marlie up to a chair. Marlie felt a tug at her hair and then release—Lace had grabbed a brush from amongst the mess and was pulling it through her hair, as she had when Marlie first arrived and Sarah had begged for help. The brush didn’t feel good going through her tangled curls, but there was a comfort in the sensation of being cared for. She remembered sitting between Vivienne’s legs on braiding day, and how she’d always felt beautiful afterward.
Maman. The thought of her mother’s papers in Melody’s hands made Marlie ill. She wrapped her arms around her stomach.
“What am I going to do?” she asked aloud, more to herself. “Melody has said I’m to be punished, Cahill has decided I need to be put in my place, and Sarah can do nothing without Stephen, who has left us again, the coward.”
Marlie felt all her anger flow in his direction. He was the one who had brought this misfortune into their lives. She’d been afraid of war and bloodshed coming to their doorstep, but it was a woman in an impractical hoopskirt who had blown their lives apart.
“I wish he’d never come back. I wish Grant had captured both of them before they could make their way.”
She glanced up and caught Tobias raising his brows in Lace’s direction. He caught Marlie’s movement and looked back over at her. “Melody been raging since this morning. She told us we weren’t to help you clean up because you need to get used to the new order around here. Every servant has to take care of his own task, and she said now you’re to be considered . . .”
He looked away from her.
Marlie felt dread seep into her bones. She tried not to show it, that being forced to be a servant would feel like a degradation. Why? She didn’t think less of Lace or Tobias or Pearl. When she’d first arrived, she’d been reprimanded for helping them with their work. They’d been the only people she thought could understand her, but a sea of privilege separated her from them on one side and from Sarah on the other.
But she’d found a different purpose for herself, one that also wasn’t considered fitting for a lady, that was largely only permissible because of the island of one she occupied in the Lynch house. Marlie imagined never experie
ncing the joy of the quiet concentration of mixing and macerating, of taking disparate plants and finding the right proportion to make them into healing tonics. It was magic to her, and that magic was about to be snatched away and replaced by a life of scrubbing and toil.
“Oh,” she said quietly.
Marlie felt the pull on both sides of her head as Lace began a French braid.
“Don’t hold back on our account,” Lace said with a rueful laugh. “It’s not like I got to choose what path I took in this life. And it’s not like you’re some pampered debutante. You got a talent, and you use it. Melody is just jealous, when it comes down to it. She’ll never be anything more than she is, and she wants you to suffer for it.”
Marlie knew Lace was trying to make her feel better but she felt worse, wondering what Lace and Tobias and all the other Negroes forced into slavery or servitude might have done with their lives if given a choice. It hit her hard and all at once, this thing she had always known but never allowed herself to feel: Slavery didn’t just take away a person’s freedom; it took away an entire people’s future. And even the freedom that Marlie had was just an illusion, if Melody and Cahill could snatch it away so easily.
She felt that scream building in her throat again, the last cry of her belief in fairness and her hope for the future.
“What happened to—?” Tobias asked, nodding toward the open door of the still room. She’d forgotten Ewan for a moment, as impossible as that seemed. Marlie wondered how he had slept; if her body ached from the floor, she couldn’t imagine what his must feel like.
“Hid away in the ceiling,” she whispered. Marlie remembered what had happened before that. Her first kiss, her first sensual touch. That, too, had been tarnished. She kept her eyes averted, hoping Tobias wouldn’t see where her thoughts had strayed. That was of no import now. It had been a passing whim, just another part of the fantasy world that had to come crashing down on them eventually. There was no escape from the war; the Lynch estate was not a fortress, and even if it had been, it was occupied by the enemy now.