but you can never again
say that you did not know.
—William Wilberforce, in a speech to the House of Commons
Chapter 1
West End
December 1853
Lantern light spilled out from the carriage post as Alden Payne climbed inside the brougham, setting his valise on the broadcloth seat. The lantern cast a veil of light from the frosty window on the carriage up to the holly berries intertwined in a bough of fir hanging limply on his sister Eliza’s front door.
He should have been elated at the thought of going home early this morning, excited to see his parents and younger sister after another semester at Harvard, but his chest filled with dread instead.
As he waited for the coachman, his father’s face ballooned in his mind. The intense gray eyes that could find fault in any argument, the ash-colored hair salted with white.
Alden had inherited his father’s gray eyes and ash-brown hair. His father had inherited Scott’s Grove, a thousand acres of tobacco in Virginia, and the obsession to enlarge this plantation.
After Alden graduated from Harvard in the spring, his father expected him to join in his work at the plantation. What was he going to say when Alden told him that he’d already made a different choice? Other plans—especially ones that differed from his father’s decrees—weren’t tolerated.
The Negro coachman, dressed in formal livery, climbed onto the bench above the carriage’s front window, but before the carriage rolled forward, the front door to the house opened.
“Wait!” Eliza called out, tramping down the narrow carpet of light to the carriage door. She was tugging on the arm of the Negro boy who’d carried a pitcher of water up to Alden’s room last night.
Alden opened the door, concerned.
Eliza stopped beside the carriage door, tying the cord of her dressing gown around her waist. “I almost forgot to give you this.”
He looked at his sister’s hands for some sort of package, but they were empty. “What are you giving me?”
She pushed the Negro boy forward. “It’s a Christmas gift for Father.”
He eyed the boy standing in the shadows. His curly black hair was trimmed short over his ears, and he was as gangly as one of the stalks in Victor’s fields. Instead of studying the ground, the boy confidently met Alden’s gaze.
Alden glanced back at his sister. “You’re giving Father a slave?”
Eliza nodded, brushing her frizzy hair back over her shoulder. “To help him plant the tobacco.”
Alden stepped down onto the packed dirt of the driveway. Eliza’s husband, Victor, had inherited a farm on the outskirts of a village called West End, but Victor wasn’t nearly as competent of a planter and overseer as Alden’s father. It seemed to him that Victor needed the boy here to help with their hundred acres of corn.
“Are you certain?” Alden persisted, but Eliza didn’t seem to hear him.
“Father will be pleased,” she replied before commanding the boy to climb on top of Alden’s trunk, which had been tied to the back of the carriage.
She wagged her finger at him. “Don’t you move until you get to Scott’s Grove.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the boy replied.
“And I don’t want to hear of you giving my father or anyone else trouble.”
Alden studied the boy perched up on the wooden trunk. Temperatures had dipped below freezing this morning, but he only wore a linen tow shirt and trousers. His feet were bare. “Does he have a coat?”
Eliza shook her head. “He doesn’t need anything.”
“Perhaps a blanket?”
“Discipline is all he lacks, Alden. Don’t you dare coddle him.”
