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“A distinction the law does not acknowledge.”
“Then the law is obscene.”
He turned away sharply, one hand pressed to the mantel. When he spoke again his voice had roughened.
“I arranged this to keep you safe.”
“You arranged it because you believed no white man would have me.”
“That is also true.”
She stared at him. “Then do not speak to me of safety as though this house has ever protected me from humiliation. It simply made my humiliation elegant.”
That hit him. She saw it.
He paced once across the rug, then faced her again. “If this becomes known, you will be ruined beyond remedy. People already pity you. With this, they will call you mad, depraved, unfit for decent society.”
“I have no use for their society.”
“You will when I am dead and there is no money left to protect your principles.”
He said it not cruelly, but desperately, and she understood he was arguing not only with her but with a whole lifetime of assumptions collapsing underfoot.
“Sell me, then,” Josiah said suddenly from the threshold.
They both turned.
He had come back without being summoned. He stood in the half-open doorway like a man who had reached the limit of obedience.
“Sir,” he said, eyes fixed on the floor now because he dared not keep them raised, “if punishment is due, let it fall on me. Miss Whitmore should not suffer for what I allowed.”
Eleanor’s voice broke. “No.”
Her father stared at him with open disbelief. “You disobeyed me by returning.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And yet you speak of taking blame.”
“Yes, sir.”
The colonel crossed to the sideboard and poured himself a drink with hands that were no longer steady. He swallowed half of it and stood with the glass in one hand, looking first at his daughter and then at Josiah, whose entire body seemed braced for pain.
“I could sell you tomorrow,” he said.
The room went dead still.
Eleanor’s mouth opened, but no sound came.
“I could send you to the Deep South,” Whitmore went on, eyes on Josiah. “No one would question it. My daughter would recover in time. Order would be restored.”
Josiah closed his eyes once.
Then Whitmore looked at Eleanor.
“And I would watch her die by inches.”
The sentence seemed to surprise him as much as them.
He sank into the armchair by the hearth and suddenly looked old.
“I have eyes,” he said. “I have watched the last nine months. She smiles now. She argues. She works. She leaves her room without behaving as though entering the world is a burden laid on others. She has become more herself with you than with all the physicians and suitors and arrangements I ever purchased.”
No one moved.
“I do not understand this,” he said hoarsely. “I was raised to believe certain lines were not only fixed but holy. Yet I am forced to consider that every attempt I made to keep this household proper made my daughter miserable, and the one act of impropriety I committed by desperation made her come alive.”
He put the untouched rest of the whiskey down.
“If this continues here, you are both destroyed. That much I know.”
Eleanor leaned forward. “Then free him.”
The colonel’s eyes lifted to hers.
“Free him,” she said again. “Let us leave. North, if we must. Anywhere this can exist without requiring lies every hour.”
For a long time he said nothing.