“Oh, I don’t know—you don’t think his forehead’s a little high?”
Sally cocks an eyebrow in her sister-in-law’s direction. “Getting quite particular in your old age?” Archie, who is in his early fifties, is short and stout with a receding hairline and three chins where there was once only one. Sally thought Archie attractive when they first met, more than a decade ago, but the last few years have not been kind to him. She can only assume that Margaret, who is twenty years younger than him and quite comely, has noticed.
A small boy sits between the governor and his wife. “They have just the one child?” she asks Margaret.
“God, no. Seven or eight, I think. But they’re all his from his first marriage.”
Sally and Robert had wanted children. Sally, in fact, had been desperate for them. But each month, her courses had come like clockwork.
Her older sisters promised that if she swallowed three spoonfuls of honey each night, right before bed, she’d be pregnant in no time. But a year passed, and nothing happened. Soon, Sally was poring over Buchan’sDomestic Medicineand Culpeper’sComplete Herbal and English Physicianand writing away to apothecaries in Philadelphia and even London for the herbs and extracts they prescribed. Over the next several years, she consumed dozens of tonics and teas, before eventually submitting to her physician, who prescribed bloodletting and blistering. The day she came home with a mercury douche, Robert finally intervened. “Perhaps it is enough for us to love each other, just as we are.”
He had been right, of course. Loving Robert was more than enough, and those last years before he died, when she abandoned all of the treatments and forced herself to embrace the life she had, as opposed to the life she wanted, were some of their happiest together.
Still, sometimes when Sally sees a family, like the one in front of her, she is filled with an anguish so intense it threatens to overwhelm her. She watches the governor ruffle the boy’s hair, sees the governor’s wife smile at the pair contentedly, and it is all she can do to remind herself that a child—even Robert’s child—would not have made his loss any easier to bear.
CECILY
Maria Price scolds Cecily asthey hurry toward the theater. “I told you I wanted to leave at half past seven. How hard is it to be in the foyer at the appointed time?”
Cecily is struck by the way she can hear Maria’s mother’s voice in the sixteen-year-old girl. Maria has always been a good mimic, even when she and Cecily were young, but in recent years, it has gotten harder to tell what is an act and what is real. The phrase “I told you,” the short, decisive sentences, the way her voice dips when she asks a question she already knows the answer to—all of it makes Cecily cringe.
She touches her forehead, just below her headscarf, and feels for the knot she knows is forming underneath the skin. “I told you,” Cecily says, sure to place every bit as much emphasis on those three little words, “that Master Elliott wanted me to iron a shirt.”
“You should have said you were busy,” Maria says, her mouth a stubborn line across her face. Maria may be naive about a great many things, but she knows there is no telling her eldest brother that he can’t have what he wants.
Maria’s father, Elliott Price Sr., owns a flour mill at the top of the falls, and Cecily’s parents have worked it since before she was born—her father, Cecil, hauling sacks of grain and barrels of flour and her mother, Della, sifting the bran and the middlings. Most of the slaves the Prices own are sent to the mill as soon as they are old enough to operate the sack hoist or clean the bolting cloths, but Cecily was spared the backbreaking work on account of her light skin. Instead, she was sent to work in the main house, where she helped with the sewing, and eventually became Maria’s lady’s maid. Cecily took to the work fine, probably liked it better than she’d have liked mill work, but what she has never taken to is that feeling she gets, up at the house, that she is easy prey.
Maria’s brother, Elliott, is five years older than Cecily and eight yearsolder than Maria. When he was young, Della used to call him spoiled, which was true enough. The Prices gave him whatever he wanted because to do anything different was to risk ruining what might otherwise have been a perfectly fine day. As a child, Elliott cried easily, was quick to disrupt a game of marbles or scotch-hopper, and had the habit of running to his mother with all kinds of complaints, both real and imagined. But there was more to him than all that childish business. He didn’t seem to register other people’s feelings, couldn’t see other people’s sorrow or hurt. Once, when Cecily’s younger brother, Moses, had fallen from the old white oak in the yard, Elliott had laughed to see the boy’s arm swinging from his elbow like the rope swing at Shockoe Creek.
Elliott has always treated Cecily’s body like an extension of his own. She was four or five years old, just a wisp of a thing in a cotton dress, when he first dragged her into the smokehouse. Among the ham hocks and pork shoulders, he prodded her with his fingers, said he wanted to know if her chum was brown, too. She was eight when he revealed the appendage that rose like a misshapen thumb from his britches, but another year passed before he figured out what to do with it.
Once, when Cecily was maybe seven or eight years old, she had tried to fight back. Elliott had dragged her into the smokehouse and she had given him a hard shove, then raced to the door, thinking she had a chance at making it out into the yard. But he was quicker than she was, and when he caught her, he pulled her back inside. Cecily grabbed hold of the doorjamb, crying for help, and Elliott must have panicked, because the next thing she knew, he’d slammed the door shut on her fingers. The pain was so bad that, for a few moments, it was as if the whole world went white. Cecily couldn’t cry. Couldn’t even breathe. When she finally opened her eyes, she discovered the tip of her middle finger was as crooked as a sickle. “Try that again,” Elliott warned her, “and I’ll break the other nine.”
Those were the darkest years, when she hadn’t learned to stop wishing for her mother to save her, or for Maria to report Elliott to their parents. Cecily didn’t bleed for the first time until she was twelve, and on the day she asked her mother for some rags, Della looked at her funny, then brewed her a cup of cotton-root tea, laid down on the bed in the corner of their cabin, and wept.
With age, Elliott grew bolder, until he eventually took Cecily whenand where he wanted her—in the smokehouse but also in the carriage house and even the main house. The household bustled, but Elliott had little fear of being walked in on. In some cases, Cecily wondered if the risk contributed to his pleasure.
Twice, her mother’s cotton root failed her.
The first time, she was fourteen, and it was her mother, who still washed her rags, who noticed right away. Della made her drink a concoction of gunpowder and sweet milk that the healer, old Mrs. Cowley, who claimed to be a descendant of the Chickahominy Indians, promised would unfix her quick. Almost immediately, Cecily suffered a terrible cramping in her stomach. She was up half the night vomiting, but the following day, she passed a clot of blood as big as her thumbnail.
The second baby, whom she’d parted with this past September, was harder to coax from her belly. The cotton root, which she chewed in large wads now, had stopped her menses, so she didn’t notice the little life growing inside her until her stomach grew taut as a newly stretched drum. This time the shot didn’t dislodge the child from its hiding place, so it continued to grow until Cecily could get back over to Mrs. Cowley’s. The old woman put her hands on Cecily’s stomach, as if she were measuring a length of ribbon, and instructed Cecily to drink a mixture of black haw and redshank roots, then to chase it with the juice of dog fennel root, which she poured into a small glass jar. When this was done, Cecily was to swallow a teaspoon of turpentine each morning for nine days. “Do that and he’ll let go,” Mrs. Cowley promised.
The turpentine smelled like pine trees, and Cecily worried that the poison, which burned going down, was eating her from the inside out. But the old woman’s prediction came to pass. On the sixth day, Cecily felt the familiar cramping in her stomach, except this time it was accompanied by a searing pain that radiated up her back. She suffered through the early hours of labor silently, and even tried to stay busy, letting out the hems of some of Maria’s dresses. But by the early afternoon, Cecily couldn’t thread a needle, much less make it do its work. All she wanted to do was push.
It was an unlucky day for any baby to be born. The newspaper had predicted a solar eclipse, which Maria had impatiently explained meant that—for a few brief moments—the moon would block out the sun. When the family went out into the yard to stare at the ever-darkening sky, Cecilyvanished as quickly as the afternoon light. She found a quiet thicket of St. John’s wort behind her parents’ cabin, and right there—among the dead flower heads—she gave birth to Elliott’s son. No bigger than a turnip, but with arms and legs and eyes. When Cecily peered at the creature lying in the dirt, her body shook with rage. The baby’s skin looked so translucent she wasn’t sure if his heart was on the inside of his body or the outside. Hers, for certain, had flown her chest entirely.
In early November, when Elliott’s parents announced their son was engaged to marry Lavinia Price, a first cousin from Winchester, Cecily thought she’d finally been delivered. Elliott’s father set about building the couple a house on a piece of property in Church Hill, and Cecily counted down the days until their wedding, which was set for the first of the year. While Cecily wasn’t in the habit of feeling pity for white people, she felt something akin to it for Elliott’s unsuspecting bride, who was no older than Maria and would soon learn that the whole of her husband’s spicket could be made to fit down her throat.
The wedding was a week away, but this evening, when Elliott had cornered Cecily in the cellar, he had not come off as a particularly eager bridegroom.
“Do you know what I just got?” he hissed in her ear.
Cecily didn’t say a word. Wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. So, he grabbed her by the headscarf and banged her head against the wall. “I said, ‘Do you know what I just got?’?”
Her temple throbbed. “What?” she finally whispered.
He let out a short laugh. “You.”
