“I move with no time but my own,” Roscoe said. “I don’t care at all that blacks are enslaved, and I intend to hold the slaves I own as long as the law allows. I am, however, a man to see an advantage. There will be war, and the North will win, because they will blockade your ports. You will not be able to sell your cotton and timber, and you cannot manufacture the tools you need for war.” Roscoe paused thoughtfully. “I see that you do not contradict me with talk of courage—and the popular claim that the fighting arm of one Confederate soldier is worth ten of the Union’s!”

“I don’t pretend to know how it will go,” Leon said.

“It will go as I have said. Maybe quick, maybe slow. But when it ends, my son and his son will rise in this county and state in ways you do not dream. When that comes, they will have Beulah Land. They won’t even have to buy it.”

“Or steal it?” Leon said. “As you stole from Beulah Land and its slaves to make your beginning toward money and power?”

“They will have it as a gift,” Roscoe said. “And whoever here survives will be turned out to beg—and to starve, because all the others like them will be begging too.”

“Old as you are and powerful as you think you are, you would be lucky to live until sundown if I told in town half of what you have said here today.”

“But you will not tell,” Roscoe said.

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because of a thing I know and have told no one but shall tell you now.”

“More?” Leon asked with irony.

“I think you will think it more. Yes.” Roscoe shifted his weight again and turned his head to the portrait of Sarah. “It is a fine thing,” he said, nodding. “I have no knowledge of art, but I can see that it is no ordinary piece of workmanship, but rather—a labor of love. I never saw the mistress looking that way, and I wonder,” Roscoe swung his gaze from the portrait to Leon’s face, “I wonder if you ever did.”

“We will not speak of Mrs. Kendrick!”

Roscoe put on a look of dismay. “But that is the very reason I have come.”

“What has the painting, or Mrs. Kendrick, got to do with you?”

Roscoe’s voice gathered strength, no longer teased and insinuated. “I am familiar with the place used as background for the picture. It is easily recognizable to anyone who has seen it. It is the place your wife was found after she said she had been raped by my son.”

The silence between them had the cadence of a beating heart.

“You will not ever have heard of a woman named Geraldine.”

Leon made no answer but continued to look astounded.