She gripped each of their hands and walked them to the door. “I’ve been blessed with the best friends a girl can have. Till the party.”
Walking out of the parlor, her friends gathered their things from Clancy and stepped out to Theodosia’s waiting carriage.
Ester watched the two-pair, and footmen aplenty, turn the corner. She was alone again. Wandering back to Mama’s parlor, she passed Papa’s door. No lights were on inside. He still hadn’t the strength to be there.
Shoulders drooping, she went inside the parlor and flopped onto the couch. She picked up the stack of newspapers, her mother’s personal collection of gossip pages. She flipped past the dreadful headlines and found Bex’s advertisement. What must he think of her lack of response?
Mama came into the room with her arms folded across a gown of mourning gray, for the workers lost. Her silky locks were covered in a jet mobcap. “I told Mrs. Fitterwall to put these away.”
“No. Please leave them, Mama. I’ll do it.”
Sitting beside her, Mama held up one of the papers. “There’s no mention of the Croomes or your ill-fated marriage.”
“Yes,” Ester said. “I think we are safe from embarrassment.”
“Oh, there’s plenty of embarrassment.” Her mother stacked the papers. “Arthur Bex is still your husband. That means he’s family, and you’ve sent him away. But that is your business.”
Ester sank into the couch. “But you were so quiet. I thought you were disappointed in me for marrying the nephew of a man who helped enslave your family.”
Mama folded her arms. Her rings twinkled in the light as she twisted them. “Ester, Bex may be a lot of things, but he’s not Captain Bexeley. I haven’t disowned Bex, even if you have.”
The words stung, but they were true. Ester brushed a loose curl from her braid. “He’ll allow me to claim fraud to end this marriage. I don’t have to accept his lies. You won’t have to think of him as family anymore.”
The frown on Mama’s face was wider and deeper than she’d ever seen. “I’ll send for Papa’s solicitor, if that’s what you want. That’s your business, even if I think it wrong. I owe Bex my peace. I wish him well.”
“Mama, what are you talking about? How has Bex given you peace?”
Mama unfolded the pages so that the worst headline,Hero Unmasked, showed. “Did you read this article?”
“I don’t want to read about how Captain Bexeley chose to drown fifty men for insurance money.”
“Not even if one was your uncle?
“Papa’s brother? No, he was murdered in the streets.”
“No, my brother,” her mother said. Her soft voice froze Ester’s blood.
“How, Mama? What are you saying?”
“Bex is not his uncle. Next to your father, he is the bravest man I know.” Mama rose from her chair and went to the closet and pulled out a small box. She sat back down with the wooden thing sitting on her knee. Her jeweled hand rested on the box, and Mama had that distant look in her eye, the one she had sometimes when she knitted.
“I don’t want to upset you, Mama. But like you said, Bex is my business.”
Ester stood and readied to go back to her room.
“You’re stubborn like your father, Ester, but let’s hope you don’t get so rigid that you become like your grandfather. The man that was my father. He was very stubborn, cruelly stubborn. Stubborn and wrong.”
Blinking, Ester turned back. The woman had never spoken much of her father, just her mother and the enslaved in Jamaica. “Please tell me. Trust me with all of it. I’m strong enough to know.”
The woman drummed the box upon her knee. “My mother was taken on the first raid of her village, and she came to Jamaica on theZhonda, probably one of the ship’s first voyages. She was sold to my father, who bought her because she wasn’t as dark as the rest. He forced her to be his concubine, to give birth to children so he could give them to his wife, who couldn’t have none. This man who was evil to the mother who bore me treated me like a full daughter, at first. His wife, Mama Rose, I believed she loved me, too.”
A little too stunned to breathe, Ester listened with her whole heart.
“Birthdays were very important to my father. Maybe that’s one thing that I hold over from him. He’d parade Mama Rose and me around the plantation. He put his big white hands about us in hugs so tight. So tight.”
A hundred questions filled Ester’s brainbox, but she saw her Mama’s eyes drift, her face paler than ever, so she said nothing.
“He was good to me, but cruel to those darker than me. I tried to unsee his hands, unsee him whipping or nearly strangling his enslaved workers, but I couldn’t unsee him slap a woman with my same eyes and my wide nose. That’s when the whispers made sense. Maybe, why I pay attention to the gossip now.”
