And the only thing they all had in common was her. Thomas felt the bourbon curdle in his stomach. "Coincidence," he managed, the word tasting like a lie. Krenshaw let out a short, bitter laugh.
"That's what we told ourselves at first. It's what you tell yourself when the alternative is unthinkable." But the whispers started. Stories from the Peton slaves.
Stories about why this chain of death began. He set his glass down, the clink of it against the wood as sharp as a final judgment. Six months ago, Celia's daughter took ill. A girl of 17, sick with pneumonia.
Dr. Vance was sent to treat her. Krenshaw paused, his eyes locking onto Thomas's. Celia claimed the doctor was drunk, claimed he administered the wrong treatment, that he bled the girl when her body was already failing. She said he killed her daughter out of arrogance and neglect.
She made accusations, loud ones. The story was painting a picture Thomas didn't want to see, a narrative of justified rage that his entire world was built to deny. Peton had her whipped for her insolence. Peton confined her to the old smokehouse for a week to cool her spirit.
They say you could hear her from the main house. Not screaming, chanting. Words in a language no one knew. Two weeks after she was released, Dr. Vance was dead.
Then Marcus, who held her down for the whipping, then Kelly, who wielded the lash, and finally Peton himself, who gave the order. Krenshaw's voice was barely a whisper. "Now, that woman doesn't just know herbs that cure, Mr. Pewitt. She comes from a line of them.
Women who carry knowledge that goes back across the ocean. She knows what grows in the dark corners of the swamp. She knows what soothes a fever and what can stop a heart so cleanly. The coroner calls it an act of God.
You didn't buy a slave today. You bought a judge, a jury, and an executioner with nothing left to lose." That evening, the setting sun bled across the sky, painting the clouds in hues of slaughter. Thomas found himself walking towards the small infirmary cabin, a place set apart from the main quarters.
He needed to see her, to look into her eyes and find the monster Krenshaw had described, or the victim his own conscience wanted her to be. He found her sitting on a simple cot, her hands resting in her lap, unbound. She was the picture of tranquility. Yet the very air in the cabin seemed to vibrate with a low, unseen energy.
When she saw him, she rose, not with the deference of a slave, but with the quiet dignity of a host receiving a guest in her own home. Her eyes, those dark, unreadable pools, met his without a flicker of fear. "You are Celia," he said, the words feeling foolish and inadequate. "Yes, master." The title was spoken without inflection, a simple statement of fact, not an acknowledgment of his power.
"I'm told you are a healer, a midwife." She inclined her head slightly. "I learned from my mother. She learned from hers. The knowledge is carried in the blood."
Her candor was disarming. It felt less like a confession and more like a lesson. "I am also told," Thomas pressed, his voice tight, "that there were many deaths at your previous residence." A long silence stretched between them, thick with the scent of dried herbs hanging from the rafters.
The cabin felt like a place outside of his world, governed by different laws. "People die, master," she said at last, her voice soft as moss. "It is the one certainty, the great balancing of the world's accounts." The phrase hung in the air, a philosophical statement that felt chillingly specific.
He decided to abandon subtlety. "Did you kill them, Celia?" He expected a denial, a protestation, perhaps even tears. Instead, a faint, slow smile touched her lips, a smile utterly devoid of warmth.
"Can a prayer kill a man, master? Can a wish for justice stop a beating heart? I am what you have made me, a slave. I have no power. If God chose to call those men to account for their sins, who am I to question his will?
Every life is a debt, every death a payment. It is the oldest law." It wasn't about revenge. It was about cosmic accounting.
He left her cabin that night with his certainty shattered. Her denial was more damning than any confession. She had wrapped her guilt, if it existed, in the language of faith, making it untouchable, irrefutable. She had positioned herself not as an actor, but as an instrument of a higher power, a force of nature as inevitable as the tide.
He lay in the master's bed, the fine linens feeling like a shroud, and thought of her words. The great balancing of the world's accounts. It was a worldview that terrified him because in its own dark way, it made perfect sense. The world he inhabited, the system that gave him his wealth and power, was built on a staggering imbalance.
What if she was simply the corrective force it had inevitably created? What if the cruelty of men like Peton had summoned its own antibody? He thought of her daughter dead at 17. He tried to imagine the rage, the profound helplessness of watching a child die because of a man's pride.
What would that grief do to a person? What would it do to a woman who possessed a deep and ancient knowledge of life and death, of plants that could either save or condemn? He fell into a troubled sleep, dreaming of scales perfectly balanced, one side holding a pile of gold coins, the other a single dark feather that outweighed it all. He was beginning to understand that Waverly wasn't just a plantation.
It was a crucible, and he was trapped inside it with something he could neither command nor comprehend. The harvest season arrived with the suffocating fist of late September heat. Ominous, bruised-looking clouds gathered on the horizon. They were the harbingers of a hurricane brewing in the Atlantic's warm cradle.
The cotton, white and ready, was a fortune waiting to be plucked from the earth. A fortune that could be wiped out in a single night of wind and rain. Thomas drove the enslaved workers with a frantic urgency, a desperation shared by every planter in the county. They worked from before sunrise until the last vestiges of light failed them, their bodies moving in a rhythm of pure exhaustion.
But Celia was not in the fields. Thomas had assigned her to work with old Patience, the plantation's long-serving healer, a woman whose knowledge was based on folk remedies and superstition. He'd hoped Patience would supervise, perhaps even contain Celia's influence. Within a week, the opposite had happened.
Hutchkins, the overseer, reported it with a grudging respect. "Patience says the new woman knows things. Things Patience has never seen. Remedies for ailments we've always just accepted as fate."