By early November, Thomas began receiving visitors. Planters he barely knew, men who had avoided him since the auction, now arrived at his door, hats in hand. Their polite inquiries about his crop yields were a thin veneer over their real purpose. They wanted to borrow Celia to rent her skills.
At first, it was for yellow fever at the Mansfield estate, then a difficult child birth at the Rutledge place, a mysterious wasting sickness near the Ogeechee River. In each case, Thomas agreed. It was good for neighborly relations, and the fees they offered were substantial. Celia was dispatched like a visiting physician.
Sometimes for a day, sometimes for a week, and everywhere she went, she succeeded. Fevers broke. Babies were born healthy. The dying rallied. Her reputation grew, transforming from something dark and feared into something miraculous and sought after.
She was no longer Celia the curse. She was Celia the healer. But Thomas knew the truth. Healing and killing were two sides of the same coin.
The knowledge required for one was the knowledge required for the other. As he deposited the fees into his bank account in Savannah, he felt a growing dread. He wasn't just profiting from her skill. He was laundering her reputation.
He was helping her build a network, an empire of obligation and dependency that stretched across the entire county. He was making her untouchable. Reputation is a dangerous currency. For a woman like Celia, it was both a shield and a target.
As people celebrated her cures, they also began to remember the deaths that had first made her infamous. They started to connect the two. How could someone know so much about saving a life without also knowing with equal intimacy how to take one? The whispers returned different this time, less fearful, more aruck.
They said she could walk through a field and name every plant that could kill a man and every plant that could save him. They said she didn't just heal the body, she could see the sickness in a person's soul. Thomas heard the rumors but chose to ignore them. He was in too deep.
Celia had been nothing but a model of efficiency and skill. She had saved his workforce, stabilized his plantation, and was now a significant source of income. Whatever had happened at the Peton estate was in the past. Waverly was a clean slate.
He repeated this to himself so often it almost felt true. That was when the first sign appeared. It was a cold Tuesday morning in December when Hutchkins, the overseer, came running to the main house, his face the color of ash. You need to come, sir, now.
A crowd of the enslaved had gathered near the northern wall of the quarters. They parted silently as Thomas approached, revealing a symbol painted on the wood in a dark reddish brown substance that looked disturbingly like dried blood. It was a complex geometric design, a circle containing a seven-pointed star with smaller symbols radiating from each point. In the very center was the clear imprint of a human hand, fingers spread wide.
It felt ancient, alien, and radiated a palpable sense of power. "What is this?" Thomas demanded, his voice tight. An old man named Daniel, whose grandmother had been brought over from the old country, stepped forward, his eyes wide with a fear that was almost religious.
"It's a warning, master," he whispered, his voice trembling. "It's old magic." From before my grandmother, she spoke of such things. She said, "Signs like this are a notice.
They mean someone is working roots, calling on the old powers. And when the signs appear, it means a debt is about to be collected." Thomas stared at the symbol, at the handprint at its center. Whose hand? Whose debt?
The questions echoed in the unnerving silence of the crowd. He ordered the symbol washed away immediately and threatened severe punishment for whoever was responsible. But the act was futile. You cannot wash away an idea.
You cannot punish a belief. The symbol wasn't for him. It was a message to the community, a declaration that a different law was now in effect on his plantation. Fear, a far more potent master than himself, had taken residence at Waverly.
Three days later, Hutchkins's prize hunting dog, a beast he valued more than most people, was found dead by the well. The dog had been perfectly healthy the night before. Now it lay stiff, its lips curled back in a silent snarl, a white foam crusted around its mouth. "Poison," Hutchkins said, his voice hollow.
"Something quick, something that leaves no trace." A week before Christmas, the debt came for a human soul. A field worker named Samuel, a man known for his strength and his cruelty to others, suddenly fell ill. It began with stomach cramps so severe they bent him in half.
By evening, he was vomiting uncontrollably, his body racked with violent convulsions. Celia was summoned. She knelt beside the dying man, but not with her usual healer's touch. She simply observed, her face a mask of detached clinical interest.
When she finally looked at Thomas, her eyes were cold as riverstones. This is no natural sickness, she stated. He has been poisoned. Poisoned. Thomas felt the world tilt on its axis.
The abstract fear he'd been living with had suddenly become terrifyingly concrete. How? By whom? Celia rose, wiping her hands on her apron.
There are a dozen plants that grow within a mile of here that could do this. As for who, that is the more difficult question. She looked directly at Thomas, and he felt as if she were reading the darkest corners of his mind. But perhaps you are asking the wrong question, master.
It is not who gave it to him. It is who taught the giver. Samuel's death was an agonizing spectacle that lasted 3 hours. His screams echoed through the quarters, a sermon of suffering that every man, woman, and child on the plantation was forced to hear.
The fear that had been a quiet murmur now became a collective shriek. Thomas launched an investigation, interrogating everyone who had been near Samuel that day. It was a useless exercise. Samuel had eaten from the same communal pot as everyone else.
He had drunk from the same well. He had no single obvious enemy. He was cruel to many, and so the list of suspects was impossibly long. But a chilling thought began to form in Thomas's mind, a thought planted by Celia's carefully chosen words.