Heart’s Gambit

Chapter Zero

Death smells like sugar and dirt. When a hard Louisiana rain mingles with a lightning strike in the cane fields, the scent chokes the plantation, a bittersweet reminder that the only way out of here is burial in shallow ground.

No one wastes a marble crypt on people like us.

Fog swirls through weeping willows and rolls low in the fields, and a full moon glares, teasing me with its freedom in the starry night sky.

Ahead, a haze bends into the form of a woman, gliding through the grass separating the big house from the field. Missus Sabine is out of bed.

I freeze and consider running back inside the big house, but that will make me look guilty. I’m not supposed to be out at this time of night, and she’s already seen me. I fight the tremble rumbling through my body. My mind turns over the lie I must tell.

She slowly walks closer. Her heels stabbing the dirt. A specter like death himself closing in. I wonder who’s getting whipped tonight, who has angered her and yanked her away from her beauty rest.

The broad expanses of cane fields merge with the trees of the distant wood. She ignores the slave quarters, glancing ahead to her two-story plantation home.

My heart races. My fingers grip my bag as I tuck it behind me. Guarding my plan and all I own. She’ll demand to know why I’m not asleep in my attic room or preparing her breakfast for tomorrow morning. I hold my breath.

Sabine’s skin blends with her white nightdress. Her hair looks like flames tied up in a bird’s nest of a bun. Her sharp angular features and icy blue eyes are as hard and jagged as the two stone chimneys rising above the house. She belongs here.

But I won’t stay on this island and be worked into the grave. I’ll take my chances with the handmade boat hidden on the other side of the wood. I’m not sure if freedom or anything else exists beyond the bayou, but I’m willing to die to find out.

Sabine nears the porch stairs now. Please don’t let her notice my bag, I think. She’s more brutal than the overseer, laying down fury with her whip and tongue. Her eyes, laced with crow’s-feet, find me. “Venus,” she shouts, nearing the porch. “It’s dangerous to be out at this hour.”

You’re out. That’s the danger. I bow, then tuck a curl under my scarf, knowing the sight of it will cause her to slap me.

She hates everything about me. My skin. My eyes.

Every part of me that reminds her of the Master.

My father. Her husband. I lower my eyes and fixate on the freckles of blood scattered across the columns of the big house.

Or “the big evil” as we call it. I wish my mama was still here.

She’d know the best way to handle Sabine.

She knew how to tuck her fear away in times like these, but my hands shake.

“Did you hear me, girl?” Sabine says.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m heading round to the cookhouse now.

” I knit my fingers and thank God the kitchen is at the back of the house, that you can reach it from outside.

“Mabel wanted me to sleep there with her so we could get an early start on breakfast. She’s making something that tastes real good, and it’s gonna take hours. ”

“Oh, well, get to it.”

My muscles tense as I prepare to get as far away from her as possible.

Sabine catches sight of my ragged little bag. Realization lights her face. “What are you up to, Venus Davenport?”

Goose bumps rise on my arms. My mind flashes to images of others starved till their bones showed for disobeying her.

I imagine the overseer’s cowhide whip ripping my flesh for trying to run away.

A lie comes quickly. “Picked some herbs for Mabel, ma’am.

Got some jars in here so she can season breakfast too. ”

“Mmmm.” She looks at me with suspicion. “Are you thick in the head, or do you think I am?”

“Huh?”

Titus comes out of one of the slave cabins in the distance. I still, my pulse racing. He’s here! But late as ever. I hope she doesn’t look back. I want to signal him to go inside until she’s gone. But I’m scared she’ll notice.

At least the sight of him distracts me from my fear.

Even in ragged tan cotton pants, his dark skin is intoxicating in the silvery glow of the moon.

He holds a cloth bag of his own. He waves at me, stepping forward.

He notices Missus Sabine. He freezes, but his hands don’t seem to shake like mine do.

She dismisses me with a wave and doesn’t notice Titus. “You can’t cook outside of the kitchen, girl. Go on now.”

“Yes, Missus,” I reply, relieved she believed me.

I tug at my plain cotton dress and head down the porch steps toward the back of the house.

I hear the creaky front door slam behind Sabine as she steps inside.

I walk slow, watching through the windows as she makes her way through the house, ensuring she’s in for the night.

I spot her figure passing the parlor window.

The sight of the checkerboard floor sends a chill up my spine.

The room of no return. Her punishment room.

Misbehaving slaves enter but never leave.

Its blue walls spill over with gaudy gold frames between the matching stone columns that hold blue-flamed candles.

Statues of enslaved children line the edges of the room, their stone bodies white as salt but their features frozen in perpetual horror, vacant eyes swollen with frozen tears, mouths yanked open, as if recoiling from evil.

Their fear is as great as mine. But I push forward because Titus and I have plans tonight.

When I am sure she’s not coming after me, I ease back around to the front of the house.

Titus meets me by the stairs.

“Let’s go,” I whisper.

Under the full moon, we hurry down the grimy path beside the field, clutching our faith and our cloth bags that hold rice and what little else we own.

My heart beats so hard it’s all I can hear as I run. The lush flowery trees become a blur. My lips move in silent prayer.

First the forest. Then the shoreline. The hidden boat. And finally, onto an ocean of possibility.

Fog rushes through the weeping willows. Pink petals rain down on us like blood. As we dash, the haze melts into the form of a woman racing behind us. Missus Sabine.

“Never run. Stay in the big house,” Mama had told me before she and my older brother were sold off.

Her voice drums through me now. I wish I had listened.

“Getting caught would be worse than just up and dying,” Mama had warned.

The memory of her worried face flickers through my head.

Her warnings echo. The overseer’s whip will be unforgiving.

The sounds of the hounds will ring in your ears.

Bloody ribbons of flesh ripped from your back or worse …

that room. “Let the clock run down. The Master and Missus don’t have no children.

When they die, that’s it,” she’d claimed.

“You’ll be all that’s left of that man on this godforsaken earth.

That ought to count for something.” I’d wanted to believe her, to just bide my time, but I couldn’t stay away from Titus Baldwin.

And I couldn’t say no when he asked me to run before they sold him away from me.

His bright smile soothed the fear inside me.

For the first time since they’d taken Mama and my big brother, I found someone to love—someone who valued me.

Someone who dulled the pain all around and made me wonder what freedom might feel like.

Even when freedom was a drink neither of us had tasted.

Master bought Titus and his little sisters three years ago from a plantation in North Carolina.

At the time he and I were both fourteen.

He’d arrived in a carriage, playing his fiddle as his little sisters giggled and clapped, unaware that they were arriving in hell.

I hadn’t stopped thinking about his dark, haunting eyes since.

I loved the way he adored his sisters. The way he always made them smile.

That day, his shirt was as brown as the tree trunks I’m now running through.

My heart had rushed; my hands had longed to hold his.

Mama had called him “uppity.” She’d said, “A boy with a smile that pretty can’t be trusted.

” But she didn’t trust any man. Not after the Master.

My father. The man she’d had to stomach for decades.

Of course, he didn’t deserve trust. He let his wife torment Mama for things beyond her control.

My mind flashes to Mama screaming and flailing, her hair wild, as white men brutally dragged her away.

She’d shouted to me, “Don’t let that Devil woman break you!

” I cried so many tears, my heart stuck and stumbling because Mama’s mind hadn’t been right in years.

But Master wouldn’t let Missus Sabine kill her.

He called what happened to my mama a mercy.

I called it evil. Mama had blamed her troubles on the mistress and her dark magic, but no one believed her.

My chest tightens thinking of the heartbreak of being forced to have a child with a man who owned you.

Being forced to serve his even crueler wife.

“Hurry, Titus!” I shout. We run faster.

I look over my shoulder. Sabine is so close that I can make out her ghostly nightdress. I speed up. We need to get through the forest and down the hill to the boat that will carry us to freedom.

Tired. Panting. Sprinting.

The forest’s witch grass slaps me, leaving red marks on my legs as I dart through it. Nature’s punishment for the foolish risk I’ve taken to be with Titus.

To love him.

My mind flashes to the songs we sang, the all-night talks and stolen moments we’d shared, to how he is the first boy I’ve ever kissed. Was it worth it? The word yes echoes inside me. A life away from the plantation with my love.

I curse the slashing grass and the branches under my feet for their loud crunching sounds.