I chose you to bring me here. It wasn't a series of events. It was a strategy, a campaign. She hadn't been sold to him.
She had recruited him. "You've been manipulating me from the very beginning." He breathed a mixture of awe and terror rising in his chest. She gave him that same faint, unnerving smile.
"We all use the tools we are given, master. You use whips and laws and bills of sale. I use knowledge and fear and the quiet turning of the human heart." You are not supposed to know this, but hidden within the Gullah Geechee communities of the Low Country, there are still whispers of the keepers, women who trace their lineage back, not through names on a bill of sale, but through a chain of passed down knowledge, a knowledge of the old ways, of the earth's power, of a justice that operates outside of man's law.
Thomas felt the power dynamic shift, not like a subtle tremor, but like a seismic, world-altering quake. He was the master of Waverly in name only. The true authority belonged to the woman he had purchased for $12. She controlled life and death.
She controlled the loyalty and fear of his workforce. And now she controlled him. "I could sell you," he threatened, the words feeling weak and hollow even as he spoke them. "You could try," she agreed.
"But who would buy me now that the stories are everywhere? And what would happen to your plantation in the next fever outbreak? In the next difficult birth, how many would die? How much profit would you lose?
She had made herself indispensable. It was the ultimate form of power. Not the power to command, but the power to be essential. She had woven herself so deeply into the fabric of his life and his business that to remove her would be to unravel everything.
"So what do you want from me?" he asked. The question was a final act of surrender. "Nothing you are not already providing," she answered. "A place to work, access to my garden, and your silence, your willingness to look the other way when the scales require balancing.
Do not ask questions you do not truly want the answers to. Let nature take its course, even when nature has a helping hand." He was being asked to become a willing accomplice to murder, to sanction her secret reign of terror. "Get out," he said, his voice low and defeated.
"Leave me." Celia nodded, accepting his dismissal as the terrified retreat it was. Before she stepped out, she turned back one last time. "Hutchkins will break after his wife dies.
The guilt will consume him. You'll need a new overseer. Daniel is the right choice." And with that final chilling prophecy, she was gone.
Thomas did not fight her. He did not sell her. He did not go to the sheriff. He did nothing. He told himself it was pragmatism that he was protecting his plantation, his investment.
But in the long silent hours of the night, as he lay awake listening for footsteps that never came, he admitted the truth to himself. He was afraid. He was paralyzed by a fear so profound it had reshaped his reality. He was afraid of what she would do to him if he crossed her.
He was afraid of the chaos that would ensue if her healing hand were removed. And most terrifyingly of all, he was afraid that on some deep suppressed level, he agreed with her. Her justice was brutal, but the system she was fighting was just as brutal in its own quiet legal daily way. Hutchkins's wife died seven days later.
She faded like a photograph left in the sun. It was a slow, gentle decline that Celia attended to with what appeared to be the utmost care. Hutchkins, as she had predicted, shattered. The once proud, disciplined overseer became a ghost.
His eyes were haunted by a grief that was intertwined with a deeper, older guilt. He began to drink, a slow, determined slide into oblivion. By February, Thomas had no choice but to replace him. He promoted Daniel, just as Celia had instructed, and just as she had predicted, Daniel proved to be a far more effective leader, governing by respect rather than fear.
Production on the plantation actually increased. Celia's influence, meanwhile, expanded beyond the borders of Waverly. Her medical practice became a regional phenomenon. Women, both enslaved and free, began to make pilgrimages to her cabin, seeking cures for ailments of the body and the spirit.
Thomas became the unwilling administrator of this strange enterprise, collecting the fees, recording them in his ledger, and becoming ever more deeply entangled in her web. He was profiting from her power, and that profit was the price of his soul. In late March, the past came calling. A man arrived at Waverly, his clothes and horse speaking of Charleston wealth.
His name was Robert Peton. He was the nephew of the late Dr. Harold Peton, and he had come for Celia. Thomas received him in the parlor, the air thick with unspoken tensions. Peton refused the offer of a drink.
He was not there for social niceties. "I know you own the woman, Celia," he said, his voice tight with a cold fury. "I am here to buy her. I will pay you five times what you paid.
Thomas felt a familiar knot of dread tighten in his gut. She is not for sale. Not for sale? Peton laughed, a harsh, ugly sound.
Do you have any idea what you are harboring in this house? That woman is a serpent. She murdered my uncle. She murdered his physician, his driver, his overseer.
I have no proof that a court would accept, but I know it. I know it in my bones. Those are dangerous accusations, Thomas said, his own words feeling like a betrayal of what he knew to be true. Dangerous? Peton shot back, his eyes blazing.
The danger is in your ignorance. I've been investigating. I know about the fever outbreak you had and how she miraculously saved everyone. I know about your field hand who was mysteriously poisoned.
I know about the girl who went mad and killed herself. And I know your overseer's wife just died of a convenient, untraceable wasting sickness. Are you seeing the pattern yet, Mr. Pewitt, or are you determined to be the last one to die? The words laid out so starkly were a mirror reflecting Thomas's own deepest fears.