CHAPTER 13
After fighting sleep for hours, Marlie had finally dozed off—by need and not by choice. Instead of the darkness that usually greeted her, she found herself back in the house where she’d been born.
Vivienne sat cross-legged on the floor, picking through a woven basket overflowing with honeysuckle that rested in her lap. The sweet smell was mixed with rosemary, the calming scent Marlie always associated with her mother. Vivienne didn’t seem to notice her as she used a pin to extract the scented droplets from the flowers and transfer them to a bottle beside her.
“Maman?”
Vivienne didn’t look up at her, but she spoke and her voice seemed to emanate from the walls of the cabin.
“Put the water on, chérie,” she said. “You know what to do.”
Marlie heard a noise by the cookstove and turned to find Ewan already there. What was he doing in their home?
Ewan lit match after match, but a cold wind blew each one out before it reached the kindling.
Then he reached for a book—her medical botany—ripped out a page, and lit that instead. It caught fast and flared and he threw it into the stove’s belly before looking over his shoulder at her. He was smiling, a wide, sunny smile that looked unnatural on his face.
“They’re waiting for us,” he said. “Come on, we’ve got to go.”
“I don’t want to go,” she said, and suddenly she was hugging her mother outside of their shack, as she had the night when she’d first left.
“You have to. Better things await you. Faites moi confiance.”
The carriage was there, too, but now Ewan was at the reins. He waved her toward him, but when she took a step she crashed down into the earth. The roots of trees and plants began to bind her, holding her fast as dirt filled her mouth and nostrils....
“Marlie? Hey, girl. Wake up.”
She opened her eyes to find Lace and Tobias standing over her, their eyes wide with concern. She tried to capture the fading strands of her dream, the first she’d had in so long. Her mother had been there, and Ewan, but what had it meant? What was it her mother had said? Why was she breathing so hard?
It was too late; the dream was gone, erased by the stark reality of her situation.
“You hurt?” Lace asked.
Marlie shook her head, then realized her face was damp with tears. She kept her gaze on Lace and Tobias as she wiped them away, giving herself a moment of reprieve—to imagine a world in which the previous night hadn’t passed—before looking at her ruined work space. At least the still hadn’t been harmed too much; the other things could be replaced, eventually, but the still was her prized possession.
She shifted herself up to a sitting position and pain flared in her hip bones and back. Apparently, the pile of stuffing she’d pushed together hadn’t made for a comfortable resting place, but she’d been so overwhelmed the previous night that she’d simply curled up into a ball on the first surface not covered with broken glass.
“Sarah got sent to give food at the Reb hospital,” Tobias said. “Said we should check on you.”
Marlie nodded, tried to stretch, and then caught herself as a wrench in her neck caught painfully.
“Marlie. Look at your hair, and your dress, and—” A tear slipped down Lace’s cheek and she shook her head angrily. “This ain’t right. You not supposed to get treated like this. None of us are, but especially not you.”
Lace was often curt with her, although Marlie knew the woman loved her. Seeing her tears shocked Marlie.
“I’m all right, really.”
“She gonna be okay,” Tobias said. He rubbed one hand on Lace’s back and extended the other to Marlie to help her up.
“Okay?” Lace sucked her teeth in annoyance. “Don’t you see? Marlie ain’t never been a slave, never been a servant. She ain’t ever worked for anyone but herself. She’s smarter than any of these white folk, and still she can be treated like this.” She held her hands toward Marlie as if presenting some damning evidence. “What’s the point of freedom if people can still do this to you and act like you deserved it?”
Lace moved away from Tobias’s comfort, her mouth pressed into a line, and dragged Marlie up to a chair. Marlie felt a tug at her hair and then release—Lace had grabbed a brush from amongst the mess and was pulling it through her hair, as she had when Marlie first arrived and Sarah had begged for help. The brush didn’t feel good going through her tangled curls, but there was a comfort in the sensation of being cared for. She remembered sitting between Vivienne’s legs on braiding day, and how she’d always felt beautiful afterward.
Maman. The thought of her mother’s papers in Melody’s hands made Marlie ill. She wrapped her arms around her stomach.
“What am I going to do?” she asked aloud, more to herself. “Melody has said I’m to be punished, Cahill has decided I need to be put in my place, and Sarah can do nothing without Stephen, who has left us again, the coward.”
Marlie felt all her anger flow in his direction. He was the one who had brought this misfortune into their lives. She’d been afraid of war and bloodshed coming to their doorstep, but it was a woman in an impractical hoopskirt who had blown their lives apart.
“I wish he’d never come back. I wish Grant had captured both of them before they could make their way.”
She glanced up and caught Tobias raising his brows in Lace’s direction. He caught Marlie’s movement and looked back over at her. “Melody been raging since this morning. She told us we weren’t to help you clean up because you need to get used to the new order around here. Every servant has to take care of his own task, and she said now you’re to be considered . . .”
He looked away from her.
Marlie felt dread seep into her bones. She tried not to show it, that being forced to be a servant would feel like a degradation. Why? She didn’t think less of Lace or Tobias or Pearl. When she’d first arrived, she’d been reprimanded for helping them with their work. They’d been the only people she thought could understand her, but a sea of privilege separated her from them on one side and from Sarah on the other.
But she’d found a different purpose for herself, one that also wasn’t considered fitting for a lady, that was largely only permissible because of the island of one she occupied in the Lynch house. Marlie imagined never experiencing the joy of the quiet concentration of mixing and macerating, of taking disparate plants and finding the right proportion to make them into healing tonics. It was magic to her, and that magic was about to be snatched away and replaced by a life of scrubbing and toil.
“Oh,” she said quietly.
Marlie felt the pull on both sides of her head as Lace began a French braid.
“Don’t hold back on our account,” Lace said with a rueful laugh. “It’s not like I got to choose what path I took in this life. And it’s not like you’re some pampered debutante. You got a talent, and you use it. Melody is just jealous, when it comes down to it. She’ll never be anything more than she is, and she wants you to suffer for it.”
Marlie knew Lace was trying to make her feel better but she felt worse, wondering what Lace and Tobias and all the other Negroes forced into slavery or servitude might have done with their lives if given a choice. It hit her hard and all at once, this thing she had always known but never allowed herself to feel: Slavery didn’t just take away a person’s freedom; it took away an entire people’s future. And even the freedom that Marlie had was just an illusion, if Melody and Cahill could snatch it away so easily.
She felt that scream building in her throat again, the last cry of her belief in fairness and her hope for the future.
“What happened to—?” Tobias asked, nodding toward the open door of the still room. She’d forgotten Ewan for a moment, as impossible as that seemed. Marlie wondered how he had slept; if her body ached from the floor, she couldn’t imagine what his must feel like.
“Hid away in the ceiling,” she whispered. Marlie remembered what had happened before that. Her first kiss, her first sensual touch. That, too, had been tarnished. She kept her eyes averted, hoping Tobias wouldn’t see where her thoughts had strayed. That was of no import now. It had been a passing whim, just another part of the fantasy world that had to come crashing down on them eventually. There was no escape from the war; the Lynch estate was not a fortress, and even if it had been, it was occupied by the enemy now.
“Marlie, we don’t got much choice here,” Tobias said, rubbing a hand over his short, kinky hair. He blew out a breath and then looked at her. “He gotta go tonight. If he stays here, it’s when and not if we get found out.”
Marlie felt every ache in her body as she thought of turning Ewan out into the Carolina wilds without a guide, but he was intelligent and resourceful. He’d make it. And she could no longer endanger the household with his presence.
“We decided the same last night,” she said, rising to her feet. “Knock on the board above that pile of sassafras and you can figure things out with him. I’ll start cleaning this mess.”
She began picking the books up and putting them neatly in the shelves. She felt like a windup automaton as she moved, her thoughts far away from the room as if that were the only way from screaming her anger into the quiet morning of the house.
She wondered what Vivienne would have done, then recalled how her mother had described her entry to the boat that would carry her to America.
“My wrists were shackled but my spine was straight. I would not be broken by these people.”
Marlie pushed her shoulders back as she picked up another book. Beneath it, a dried, shriveled thing lay on the ground. The John the Conqueror root her mother had given her when she’d sent her off with Sarah; her totem of protection. She hadn’t seen it in years. She picked it up, the leathery feel of it strange on her fingertips, and then pushed it down into the bosom of her dress, close to her heart.
“You got this, Marl?” Lace asked.
Marlie nodded, tried to force a smile, and continued picking up the mess.