"So will I," she said. Titus looked at her. "Then you don't have to be part of this." "I already am part of it," Theodosia said in a voice that admitted no argument.
"I was made part of it three weeks ago in that yard in front of everyone. So yes, I do." What Theodosia did not tell him that night was what she had been turning over in her mind for days slowly and almost involuntarily. The way a person works out a problem of geometry while their hands are busy with something else entirely.
That Titus was the first human being in twenty-two years who had treated her words, her decisions, and her presence as though they mattered, not out of pity, not out of some obligation of blood, but simply because that was how he treated anything he judged worth his attention. And Theodosia Peton, who had learned as a child to need no one in order to survive, was beginning to discover that surviving and living were two entirely different things. That same night, while Titus slept outside on the porch, and Dileia's breathing settled into the slow rhythm of sleep in the corner, Theodosia drew from the bottom of her trunk the one object of real value she had brought with her from the big house, a small glass inkwell and a goosequill pen wrapped in a scrap of cloth, the very pen with which she had once copied passages from books and written letters she never sent to anyone. She set it on the shelf beside the candle, looked at it for a long while, and began to write.
They came for Titus before dawn. Four men, and three field hands, who obeyed because refusing left them nothing better to do. Titus did not resist, not because he was afraid, but because fifteen years of hard-earned understanding told him that resisting now would only cost him more later. And he let them bind his wrists with a length of hemp rope, and march him across the yard in the pale-blue light before sunrise toward the shed at the edge of the property where the stock stood.
Amos watched from the stable door and said nothing, because that was what fear did to a man after enough years of it. It did not take away the pain of watching injustice, only the voice to name it. Dileia ran to Theodosia's room and shook her awake. Child, child, they took him.
Theodosia was already awake, already upright in her chair, already holding in her hands the folded and sealed sheet of paper she had finished writing two hours before. "I know," she said. "How do you know?" "Because I was expecting it." Dileia looked at her with those wide dark eyes that had seen too much in this life already. "What are you going to do, child?"
Theodosia looked down at the letter in her hands. It was addressed to Mr. Elias Wardlaw, an attorney in Selma, who had once handled a boundary dispute for her father, and whom Theodosia had gathered, from years of half-heard conversations at the dinner table she was rarely invited to sit at, despised Jared Kums personally, having caught the overseer padding an invoice for fence posts three years prior. The letter did not plead.
It laid out in the precise legal language Theodosia had absorbed from years of reading her father's own law books, out of sheer boredom, a description of the accusation against Titus, the absence of any material evidence beyond the coerced word of two men who had every reason to lie, and most dangerously of all, a set of figures Theodosia herself had copied late at night from the counting room ledgers over the past two weeks. Figures that did not add up. Figures that suggested the missing strong box of silver had never left the estate at all, but had simply moved from one set of hands into another. "I need this letter to reach Selma today," she said. "Not tomorrow. Today."
"How, child, if none of us can leave the place?"
"Pete brings the mail sack up from the crossroads store on Thursdays. Today is Thursday. He's reliable. His mother worked in this house twenty years. He owes me nothing, but he'll do it if it's put to him right."
And Kums will wait at least a few days before doing anything that can't be undone because he wants this to look like a proper process, not a lynching. That gives us time. Dileia found the boy within the hour. Theodosia gave him the letter and the single silver dollar she had kept sewn into the hem of her dress since childhood, the only money she had ever owned outright, and told him plainly that if the letter did not arrive, she would know it, and so would he.
For two days Theodosia could not see Titus at all, the shed where they held him sat at the far end of the property, and Kums had given strict orders that no one approach. Amos told her in a low voice that they had him standing, chained, given water, but no food. Awaiting whatever formal punishment Augustine Peton had not yet ordered because, and this was the part Theodosia understood correctly, Augustine wanted the whole business to look proper. Augustine Peton was not a cruel man for pleasure.
He was a cruel man for convenience, which was a far more dangerous kind of cruelty, because it always came dressed in the language of order and reason. Louisa Peton, Augustine's second wife, a narrow-faced woman of forty, with expensive tastes and very little patience for anything that disturbed her household's calm, appeared once at the edge of the quarters, and looked at Theodosia with something that was not quite pity, but the discomfort of a woman who would prefer certain problems simply did not exist. "Do you need anything?" she asked without stepping any closer. "No," Theodosia said.
Louisa nodded, visibly relieved, and left. Theodosia did not hate her. She found her simply irrelevant, which in its own way was worse. By Thursday evening, Dileia returned with news Theodosia could not immediately read on her face.
"The letter got there," Dileia said quietly. "Mr. Wardlaw wasn't in his office, but his clerk took it straight to him at his supper table. Pete said the lawyer read it twice right there at the table and then—" She paused. "Said he'd ride out first thing."
Theodosia closed her eyes for one single second. "Good," she said.
Elias Wardlaw arrived at Cedar Hollow the following morning before the sun had cleared the tree line on a tired bay horse, wearing a look that suggested he had slept very little and thought a great deal. He was fifty-four years old, broad through the middle, with a lawyer's careful eyes that missed nothing, even when his face gave away almost as little as Titus's did. He had known Augustine Peton for close to twenty years, had drawn up two of his contracts, and settled one of his disputes, and the two men understood each other the way that men of business often do, each aware of exactly what the other was worth, and exactly what he would do to protect it. Wardlaw went directly to the house, asked to see Augustine, and while he waited in the parlor with its imported rug and its portrait of Augustine's grandfather, no one had bothered to take down in eighty years, he read Theodosia's letter again, slowly, the same careful way he had read it the night before, with the same mixture of astonishment and alarm.
The reasoning was airtight, better in places than that of several junior attorneys he had trained himself, and if even a portion of what it alleged reached the ears of the county court, not the accusation against Titus, which mattered little to any court in Alabama in 1852, but the plain evidence of an overseer systematically defrauding his employer, then Augustine Peton's own management of his estate, and by extension his standing among the planters of Marengo County, would be thrown Thrown open to exactly the kind of scrutiny no man in his position wanted, Augustine entered with his usual air of a man who owned the world around him, and stopped short at the look on Wardlaw's face. "What's the matter with you?" "Sit down, Augustine. Don't tell me to sit down in my own." "Sit down,". Wardlaw said again, and something in his voice made Augustine do it for what may have been the first time in years.