It was a pattern, a clear, undeniable, terrifying pattern. But to admit it to this man would be to admit his own complicity, his own weakness. "Celia is the finest healer in this county," Thomas said, his voice steady despite the tremor in his hands. "I am not selling her."
Peton stared at him, his fury slowly giving way to a look of pity. You fool. My uncle was a fool, too. He thought he could control her.
Now he's dead. You are dancing with the devil, and you don't even hear the music. After Peton left, Thomas stood on the portico, the man's warning echoing in his ears. You are dancing with the devil.
He felt a desperate need to believe Peton was wrong, that he was just a grieving man looking for a scapegoat. But he knew better. That evening he locked himself in his study and did what Peton's visit had forced him to do. He went through the plantation records and through his own memory, and he made a list.
Samuel poisoned. Ruth driven to madness and suicide. Hutchkins's wife faded away under Celia's care. Hutchkins himself now a ghost waiting for the grave.
And there were others he hadn't allowed himself to consider before. An old field hand dead in his sleep, though he'd been healthy the day before. A house servant who had fallen down the stairs, breaking her neck just two days after she had complained to Thomas that Celia frightened her. It was a ledger of death written in the invisible ink of his own willful ignorance.
Against that, he weighed the other side of the scales, the 21 lives saved from the fever, the dozens of healthy babies delivered, the countless fevers, infections, and injuries she had cured. Her ledger was horrifyingly balanced. Life for life, death for death. The question that kept him awake that night, the question that pounded in his skull, was where did he fall on her scales?
Was he an asset to be protected, or was he a debt to be collected? He began to take precautions. He ate only what he saw prepared. He barred his bedroom door at night.
He never turned his back on her. He became a prisoner in his own home, a king living in fear of his most powerful subject. His precautions did not go unnoticed. One morning in April, he found a small bundle on his doorstep.
Inside were dried herbs and a note in her familiar script. For the tension in your shoulders, master, a tea to help you sleep. As long as you remain a just man, you have nothing to fear from my garden. The message was a hand of silk stroking a razor's edge.
I know you're afraid. I am watching you, and your life is conditional. He threw the herbs in the fire and watched them burn, but he couldn't burn away the fear. The power dynamic had shifted completely.
He was no longer her master. He was her subject. His life was a privilege she granted him day by day. In early May, Hutchkins completed his slow suicide, found dead in his cabin with an empty bottle of laudanum beside him, a bottle Thomas recognized as one Celia had prepared for his wife.
Had she given it to him? Did it matter? In Celia's world, a guilty man had met his deserved end. The method was irrelevant. The balance was all that mattered.
Life on the plantation continued. The cotton grew. The sun rose and set. But beneath the placid surface of routine, a revolution was taking place.
A transfer of power, silent and absolute. Thomas felt the ground beneath him turning to quicksand. His moral compass, once so fixed and certain, now spun wildly. He was an accomplice. He was a beneficiary.
He was a hostage. He was a student learning a new and terrifying catechism. One day, Josiah Krenshaw returned. He looked 10 years older.
"She's building an army," Krenshaw said, his voice a strained whisper. "It's not just her anymore. It's happening on my plantation, on a dozen others." The women are meeting in secret.
They're sharing her knowledge. One of my own girls looked me in the eye and said, "The old ways are coming back, master. Best you remember that. What am I supposed to do with that?"
Thomas looked at the terrified man and heard himself say the unthinkable. "Have you considered that perhaps we deserve it?" Krenshaw stared at him, his face a mask of horror. "My God, she's gotten to you.
She's gotten inside your head." Thomas tried to explain. He spoke of the lives she had saved, of the balance, of justice for injustices the law would never punish. But the words tasted like ash in his mouth.
"That's not justice, Pewitt," Krenshaw said, his voice filled with disgust. "That's moral rot." He left Thomas alone on the portico to reckon with the terrifying truth of his own transformation. In the suffocating heat of June, Celia came to him.
It was the first time she had sought him out since the night he had searched her cabin. She sat in his study, a queen holding court in the house of her vassal. "A man is coming tomorrow," she said, her voice calm and even. "Benjamin Lel, you will remember him from the auction.
He was one of the men who looked away." Thomas remembered him. "His daughter is dying," Celia continued. "She is 17, the same age as my Sarah.
He is desperate. He will beg you to command me to heal her." Her eyes locked on his, and the world seemed to shrink to the space between them. "And you will not," she said.
It was not a request. It was an order. "You see, Mr. Lel was a guest at the Peton estate the day they whipped me. He stood on the veranda and watched.