Leon sat down in the chair at the desk he had earlier occupied and waved a hand. “Sit if you please.”

“I do not please. I have always stood in this room, and I shall now.”

Leon shrugged and waited. Roscoe looked about him slowly, as if seeking something. When he saw the portrait of Sarah over the mantel, he smiled slightly with his lips, although his eyes did not change. “The mistress of Beulah Land.”

“Painted some years ago,” Leon said.

“Yes,” Roscoe said. “The year my son Alonzo was murdered.”

Leon looked at him sharply. “That was all settled then.”

Roscoe continued to inspect the room, moving his body not at all and his head minimally. “It is a room in which money has been discussed much and handled.” Leon nodded curtly. “It is where I bought and paid for my first slave: Clovis.”

Leon sat very still.

“You remember her, of course!” Roscoe said with sudden force that was just short of obvious anger.

“I remember her—of course,” Leon said.

“You paid her the compliment of visiting her, I believe, in the last year of her life when her residence was the farm next to yours.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“I knew,” Roscoe answered without answering. “That was only your late acquaintance. Your earlier acquaintance, if I may call it that, resulted in the birth of the cripple named Roman, whom your wife much fancied and adopted as a pet. It was, indeed, the result of his conception that I came to marry the woman. Your mother would not tolerate illegitimate issue, and I obliged—everyone, I may say—on that occasion. Your mother was grateful. It was then, in this room, she gave me the title of ‘Overseer.’ It seemed important to me then, but that is all so long ago.”

Leon acknowledged Roscoe’s remarks with a slight frown. “I know all this, but I don’t know why you are recounting it.”

Roscoe raised both hands, as if to ask patience, and then lowered them. “In time.” He paused to think about it. “You will know in a little time.” Almost imperceptibly he shifted his weight from one leg to the other, and Leon thought again that he looked not only old, but frail, although the dark strength of his eyes belied any appearance of weakness. “You did not come to her funeral.”

“Our families,” Leon said carefully, “are not on those terms.”

Roscoe nodded with deliberate irony. “It is so. The areas of intimacy and formality between black and white are complex matters, surely enough; and suicide makes for a certain alarm and discomfort. People do not like anything to do with it, so I understand why you would ignore the affair. And yet—I was with her when she died, and she had only just spoken of you; so you see you were in her thoughts.”

“You’ve waited a long time to bring her message. What did she say?”