Titus lowered the paper. He looked at her with something that was not exactly hardness, but a kind of frankness that burned a little. "I believe the man who wrote that was never enslaved himself," he said. "But I believe he was right anyway." Theodosia nodded slowly, then extended her hand.
"Pass me the pages when you're finished." Titus looked at her, then at the outstretched hand, then back at her face. "I've been reading since I was seven," Theodosia said. "My mother taught me before she died. My father never knew because he never cared to ask." For the first time since Theodosia had known him, something shifted in Titus's expression.
Not quite a smile, but the look of a man who finds in the last place on earth he expected it, a window opening onto a landscape he recognizes. He handed her the pages. What began as a small exchange of paper and ink slowly turned, without either of them naming it or deciding it consciously, into something else entirely. Theodosia had her own books, the handful she had managed to save from the big house, hidden at the bottom of a wooden trunk that Dileia had carried over on the day of her removal.
And in the evenings they read separately, and then gradually began to speak in low voices about what they found, a phrase that startled one of them, an argument that seemed wrong, an idea that opened onto another idea. Amos watched them from a distance and said nothing. Dileia watched them from closer and said nothing either. Though when she returned to the little room at night, her face carried an expression that was not quite relief, but something more complicated.
The look of someone watching a wound that might not fester after all, that might, against every likelihood, begin to close. What no one saw, or what no one wanted to see, was Jared Kums watching all of it. The overseer was forty-three years old and had spent 11 of those years running the daily business of Cedar Hollow. And in that time he had built a small mean architecture of power over the people who worked its fields.
He skimmed grain from the corn crib and blamed the shortfall on rats. He played favorites among the field hands in exchange for silence and punished those who displeased him with a severity that went well beyond what discipline required because Jared Kums was a man who needed other men beneath him to feel that he stood above anything at all. And Titus simply by existing denied him that feeling every single day. Titus was stronger, quieter, more respected among the enslaved people than Kums would ever be among anyone.
And the fact that Augustine Peton had, in Kums's mind, rewarded him publicly by handing over his own daughter, filled the overseer with a slow, patient fury that knew how to wait. He had been watching for three weeks. Counting the nights, Titus's candle burned longer than it should, building something. The trouble did not arrive all at once.
Real trouble rarely does. It arrives the way water seeps through a crack in a foundation. First a dampness, then a stain, then the stone giving way beneath it. The first crack was a whisper that Titus had been seen near the tool shed at an hour he had no business being there.
The second was the disappearance of a small strong box of silver coin from the plantation's counting room, a modest sum, but enough to make noise. The third was Kums's voice, low and reasonable, at Augustine Peton's ear, laying out the facts as though they were self-evident. "The man Titus, sir. He was seen."
Augustine barely looked up from his ledgers. "Proof?"
"Two men's words, sir."
"Which men?"
Kums named two field hands who owed him favors, and who had learned the hard way that refusing the overseer something was more dangerous than lying for him once. Augustine closed his account book and looked out the window toward the yard, where Titus was at that moment crossing with two timber beams across his shoulders that would have driven any other man to his knees. "That fellow is worth a great deal of money," Augustine said with the same indifference he might have used to discuss a plow horse.
"I don't want him broken too badly, just enough that he remembers who runs this place." Kums smiled inwardly. "As you say, sir."
That evening Theodosia knew nothing of any of this. She sat beside her candle with a volume of poetry open on her lap, listening to the ordinary sounds of the fields settling into night, the distant lowing of cattle, the wind moving through the row of chinaberry trees someone had planted along the north fence years before, and Titus's voice from two yards away where he sat reading in silence, suddenly breaking that silence to say, "Your father's going to try something." Theodosia looked up. "What?"
"I don't know exactly what, but Kums was at the big house twice today. And when Kums goes to the big house, somebody ends up in the stocks by morning." Theodosia narrowed her eyes at him. "How do you know that?"
"Because I've been here fifteen years." A silence. "And what are you going to do?" she asked.
Titus took a long moment to answer. And when he finally did, his voice carried something Theodosia had never heard from him before. Not fear exactly, but the sober awareness of danger. "Whatever I can," he said. Theodosia closed her book. She sat still a moment with her hands resting on its worn leather cover, watching the candle flame as though she were working out some private calculation.