She settled herself to crack and pick nuts, rocking gently as she worked—all three of them rocked, for the small motion stirred up the ghost of a breeze. Around the borders of the front yard a half-dozen magnolia saplings sagged, their limbs seeming almost too weak to support the glossy dark green leaves. A planting of grass in the yard had died out and the surface was going back to dirt. Too late for a watering to renew it.
Nut meats ticked against the tin. In the slave pens next door a commotion broke out. The sharply raised voice of John Forrest, a thump, a grunt, slap of a strap against something. A moment after these sounds had subsided, the high wooden gate of the pen creaked open and Catharine came out, unperturbed and moving languidly, carrying a twig broom. She came into the Forrests’ front yard by the waist-high picket gate and began to sweep dead leaves and dust across the surface of sere yellow grass.
Mary Ann folded her hands over the nuts. “There are times,” she remarked, “when I do wish my dear husband might take up some other line of work.”
Bite your tongue, she thought at once, forbearing to steal a glance at Fanny. It was the heat that made her feel quarrelsome, she thought.
“I don’t know …” Doctor Cowan raised a bushy eyebrow toward her. “Well, some of the family have thought so too, I reckon—You know your mother did.”
“I know she does still,” Mary Ann said, aware of a wry twist in her lips.
Cowan crossed his eyes on the tip of his cigar, then tucked it away in his breast pocket. “I won’t deny I felt the same in the beginning,” he said. “Everybody despises a slave-trader. It’s like he was a man defiled. But then there’s nobody in this country that don’t depend on slavery—”
“Now that’s a leaf right out of his book,” Mary Ann said.
Cowan rocked, reflecting. “Well, but leave the slaves a minute. Consider this. You may buy yourself a fine horse. Trained up and schooled to the last inch, till all you practically have to do is think where you want her to go, and there she goes, before you even need to touch her with your hand or heel.”
Mary Ann considered her own mare Nelly, whom Bedford Forrest had given her—the quick sensitive grace of all her movements. Animal knowledge. Half-consciously she watched the slave girl move through the yard, her back straight, head slightly inclined, expending the precise bare minimum of effort required to keep the dry broom whisking. Oh, and she was glowing, certainly; her sweat-darkened calico twinned with her hot flesh like sealskin.
“Who knows and cares for that mare the best?” Cowan said. “The one who uses her and rides her? Or the one who broke her and trained her to your service?”
How the Devil should I know? Mary Ann stopped herself from saying. Instead, feeling a cross knot tighten in the center of her forehead, she set aside the tin pan, stood up and dumped an apronful of broken nut shells onto a patch of yard Catharine had just swept.
“Hmmm. Perhaps it’s a little too warm, this afternoon, for philosophy.” Cowan smacked his palms on the knees of his trousers, then pushed himself out of his chair. “Ladies. I believe I may attempt a stroll.”
The picket gate didn’t catch, but drifted open slowly once Cowan had gone out. A lean tawny dog paused to look in, eyes dull with the heat and tongue lolling over black gums.
“Git, you.” Catharine stepped over to shake her broom at it, and snapped the gate firmly shut as the dog trotted off. Then she returned to sweeping up the nutshells, with the same faintly indolent grace as before, expressionless. There was nothing about her comportment that Mary Ann could have fairly called sullen. The futility of her spite lumped in her throat. Though she might have given the girl some new command, she simply watched as Catharine swept her liquid way toward the magnolias at the far end of the yard.
“Don’t you know he loves you?”
“I know it,” Mary Ann said, before she thought to ransack her memory for where in the previous conversation this question might spring from—they’d been talking about horses, hadn’t they … or had Fanny Forrest just read something straight out of her mind. She was Forrest’s twin, and looked much like him if you took away the beard, tall and rawboned and with