CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ELIN
The old chapel stood a mile beyond the Lebon boundary, where the river road bent around a field of tobacco and disappeared beneath the trees.
Its bell had been taken down years before, and one side of the roof sagged over pews silvered by dust. By the time we reached it, nearly forty people had gathered beneath the oak beside the graveyard: cooks, stable hands, laundresses, field workers, children and three old men who had served the Lebons long enough to remember Monsieur étienne as a boy.
No one knew what freedom required first.
Some spoke of Richmond. Others had kin in Petersburg or across the Carolina line. A few stood facing the road with nothing in their hands, as if waiting for Le Champ des Fleurs to ring them back. Years of obedience do not vanish merely because the bells burn.
Dinah understood that better than anyone.
She put the chapel in order before allowing herself to sit.
She found water in the parson’s well, counted the bread people had carried from the kitchen and sent two men to ask help from the nearest farms. By midafternoon, children slept across the pews while women divided food upon the communion table beneath a plain wooden cross.
I sat outside with my Swedish trunk between my knees.
The smoke from Le Champ des Fleurs had thinned to a blue stain above the trees. From that distance, the ruin made no sound. Cicadas resumed their summer song. Crows crossed the sky. The world had accepted the death of the Lebon house with an ease none of us could share.
Vale’s letter remained tucked inside my bodice.
I had checked for it so often that the folded edge had rubbed my skin raw.
The letter named the Sea Nymph and more than five hundred people carried through hidden inlets and sold under false papers.
It named étienne Lebon, Hollis Dewey and Reuben George.
Human beings had been reduced to numbers in their ledgers, but Nathaniel had tried to restore enough names to make denial impossible.
The Fairhavens had answered him in the language of graves and fire.
I still hoped ordinary law might answer in ink.
Near sunset, a horse came hard along the road.
Several men rose from beneath the oak. Dinah reached for the kitchen knife she had tucked into her waistband. The rider passed the tobacco field with his coat streaming behind him, and I recognized Lucien before the horse stumbled to a stop.
He slid from the saddle.
Dust covered him from boots to hair. One sleeve had been torn away at the shoulder, and blood darkened the cloth along his forearm. He looked past the gathered servants, searching every face.
“Cécile?”
I stood.
His eyes found mine, and hope died before I answered.
“She is alive.”
He crossed the yard in three strides. “Where is she?”
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
There are truths that cannot be softened, but they may still be delivered with care.
“She left with the Fairhavens.”
Lucien stared at me. “They took her.”
“No.”
“You expect me to believe she walked willingly into that carriage after they murdered our father?”
“Your father murdered Commander Vale.”
His mouth hardened. “I know what he did.”
The answer surprised me.
Lucien sank onto the chapel step and pressed both hands over his face. The anger left him as quickly as it had come, revealing the frightened young man beneath it.
“Philip told me everything he could remember,” he said.
“He heard our fathers arguing before dawn. Reuben kept saying Vale should have been thrown into the river, that the garden was étienne’s mistake.
When I asked what he meant, Judge Dewey ordered the carriage stopped and tried to put me out on the road. ”
He lowered his hands.
“Philip would not let him.”
“Where are they now?”
“The Deweys took the north road. Reuben means to reach Norfolk and put his family aboard the first ship that will carry them. Philip helped me take a horse at the river fork. Before I left, he said he would search his father’s papers.”
Philip’s pleasant, bewildered face rose in my memory. Perhaps he had spent his life recovering from the things his father said because he had already begun to understand the man who said them.
“Did he believe you?” I asked.
“He believed enough.”
Lucien looked toward the smoke.
“My mother?”
“She would not leave the house.”
His eyes closed.
I sat beside him. We watched the blue stain fade above the trees until nothing remained but ordinary evening.
“And Cécile chose them?” he asked at last.
“She chose to go for one day. She said she would decide the next when it came.”
“That sounds like her.”
“She asked me to tell you she is alive. And that she chose.”
He bowed his head.
“I should have been there.”
“Perhaps. But you could not have chosen for her.”
“I could have said goodbye.”
There was nothing I could offer against that grief.
After a while, Lucien noticed the raw place at my throat where the letter rested.
“You still have it?”
I drew the pages from my bodice.
We carried them into the chapel. The parson had returned while we spoke, an elderly man named Bell whose hands shook until he began reading. He knew enough of the Lebons to fear the names upon the page and enough of God to make fear a poor excuse for silence.
“This must be copied,” he said.
He brought paper, ink and a sand shaker from the small room behind the pulpit. Lucien copied the letter in his neat school hand while I compared each line to Nathaniel’s original. Dinah watched from the nearest pew, correcting the spelling of two names belonging to people she knew.
Philip George’s name did not appear.
Neither did Warren Dewey’s.
The sins of a house might shape every child beneath its roof, but the letter understood what our elders too often did not: guilt was not inherited merely because wealth was.
When Lucien finished, we made a second copy.
The parson sealed one for a federal magistrate in Norfolk. Lucien placed the other inside his coat. I returned the original to the book of Exodus in my mother’s Bible.
“What will you do?” I asked him.
“Take this to Norfolk. Find Philip before his father sails. Make certain the magistrate receives Vale’s words from someone who cannot be bought by a Lebon.”
“You are still a Lebon.”
Pain moved across his face.
“It is all I have left.”
“Then make it mean something else.”
He considered that before folding the copy more carefully.
Night entered through the broken chapel windows. The farmers returned with two wagons, blankets and enough cornmeal to feed us until morning. Families began arranging their journeys. Some would leave together. Others had nowhere certain to go but refused to call uncertainty bondage.
Dinah intended to travel with a niece in Petersburg.
“Come with me,” I said. “There is money enough to bring you as far as Norfolk.”
She smiled. “I got people this side of the water, Miss Elin. You go find yours.”
“And if I do not find them?”
“Then you find out who you are without somebody telling you.”
It sounded like freedom when she said it.
I slept beside my trunk beneath the old oak. Sometime after midnight, I woke to the smell of gardenias.
The chapel yard lay quiet. Lucien slept near the steps with Vale’s copy beneath his coat. Beyond him, the road shone pale under the moon, empty in both directions.
A blue butterfly rested upon the lid of my trunk.
I sat up slowly.
Its wings opened and closed while I unlocked the brass clasps. The butterfly remained in place until I raised the lid, then flew into the branches above me.
My belongings had been rearranged.
My mother’s Bible lay beside the winter shawl. Beneath them rested a singed coral ribbon, a pair of white gloves stained dark at the fingertips and Cécile’s thin book of music bound with blue thread. Her name had been written across the cover in the small, careful hand that never hesitated.
A folded note waited inside.
Elin,
I do not know what I will become. Please remember that I chose before I changed.
Cécile
My tears spotted the paper.
At the bottom of the trunk lay the contract I had torn beneath the glasshouse.
It was whole again.
The places where I had ripped it were marked by fine blue lines, delicate as veins beneath skin. Across the back, in Adrian’s precise hand, were the words he had written before offering it to me in the gallery:
The service of Elin Andersdotter is concluded. No person or house may claim her labor, her body or her remaining years.
Below it appeared Nathaniel Vale’s name as witness.
That signature was impossible. He had been dead before Adrian purchased the contract. Yet there it remained in dark brown ink, unmistakable beside the commander’s seal.
I nearly tore the paper again.
Instead, I folded it with my other documents.
I was free whether the contract existed or not, but ships, magistrates and border officials trusted paper more readily than women.
One day I would place it beneath my bed in Sweden and try to remember why I had ever believed it possessed more authority than my own will.
The butterfly descended from the oak.
It landed upon Vale’s letter where it lay between the Bible pages. A second butterfly joined it. One rested across the name Dewey. The other covered George.
Then they rose.
The first flew north along the road Judge Dewey had taken. The second followed the river toward Norfolk.
Neither hurried.
I watched until darkness swallowed them.
Five days later, Lucien and I stood upon the wharf at Norfolk.
The federal clerk had accepted Vale’s letter without promising justice. Judge Dewey possessed friends in Richmond, and Reuben George’s money had already persuaded a ship’s captain to misplace the family name upon his passenger list. Philip had sent Lucien one message through a dockworker:
I found the ledger. Do not follow yet.
It was not enough to convict his father, rescue the living or return the dead. It was enough to keep the truth moving.
My ship waited beyond us, its sails furled against a white morning sky. Goteborg lay weeks away. V?ster?s farther still. I did not know whether my parents lived or whether they would welcome the daughter whose service they had sold. Home had become a question rather than a destination.
Still, it was mine to ask.
Dinah had left the previous morning with twenty-three others bound for Petersburg. Before climbing into the wagon, she had pressed a loaf of bread into my hands and warned me not to waste freedom by feeling guilty for surviving it.
Lucien carried my trunk to the gangplank.
“If you find Cécile,” I said, “do not demand that she return.”
“I will demand an explanation.”
“That is your privilege as her brother.”
He almost smiled.
“Will you write?”
“If you give me somewhere to send the letters.”
“I will.” He rested one hand upon the trunk. “Tell Sweden that one Lebon tried to do better.”
“Do better first.”
“You sound like her.”
“She learned it from me.”
This time he did smile.
The ship’s bell rang.
I embraced him and went aboard without looking back until the sailors had drawn in the gangplank. Lucien remained upon the wharf, one hand raised, growing smaller as the tide carried us into the James.
Beyond Norfolk, Virginia opened green and beautiful beneath the morning. No blue smoke marked the place where Le Champ des Fleurs had stood. No ivory carriage waited upon the river road. For the first time in days, the air smelled only of salt, tar and living water.
Then a blue butterfly settled upon the rail beside me.
Its wings were the color of Cécile’s voice when it existed only in her mind.
I did not ask whether it had come as a warning or farewell. I opened my hand, and it stepped onto my palm.
The ship turned toward the sea.
Behind us, Le Champ des Fleurs was gone.
The Beautiful Ones were not.
And in Virginia, two guilty houses still kept their doors closed.