“No,” Lovey said after a moment. “I couldn’t stand that.” Floyd had begun to cry, ashamed of having distressed his mother and father. He fell to his knees between them and embraced their legs. “I’m sorry, Mama, Papa!” His forehead touched Lovey’s shoes.

Ezra looked down at him with love and anguish, and then touched his shoulder. Floyd stopped crying, although he was still too embarrassed to look up. Clumsily, he caught his father’s hand and kissed it.

“I’ll go see Miss Deb,” Lovey said. Her voice and face were bitter as she marched back along the cold, hard path to the main house.

She found her mistress in the sewing room upstairs conferring with Laura-Lou about the new night gowns for Selma. She made herself be still and patient until the conference degenerated into a series of repetitions on both sides.

“You understand what I mean about the width of the hem and the buttons here so that a neckband may be attached in really cold weather?”

“Yes’m. Button here, just to side of this panel of embroidery—?”

“That’s right. Here and here too, remember—”

“Yes’m.” Vigorous head nod. “Here and here—”

At that point Lovey cleared her throat in such a firm way that Deborah looked over at her. Seeing Lovey’s grim face, she merely directed an automatic last word to Laura-Lou before leaving the sewing room. With Lovey following, she walked quickly down the second-floor hallway and into her own room. Already it had lost its look of dual occupancy. The wardrobes contained only Deborah’s clothing, Arnold’s having been given, not to the people on the plantation, but to the minister of St. Thomas’s in Highboro to distribute to whatever needy white men might apply to him for help. His brushes and razor and strop had been put away for Leon’s future use.

Following her mistress into the room, Lovey closed the door behind them, and the two women looked straight at each other.

“Miss Deb,” Lovey began, “you know the girl Clovis works in the kitchen, sometimes serves at table—”

“Yes, yes.” Deborah nodded impatiently, seeing that Lovey brought trouble and not wanting to endure her gradual approach to it.

“She is pregnant.”

Deborah’s tension relaxed a little. The problem was serious, of course, but not unfamiliar. “And not married.”

“Yes’m. Not married.”

“You’ve talked to her.”

“Yes, Miss Deb.”

“Who is the father?”

There was a long pause. Lovey heaved a heavy, aching sigh.

“Tell me, Lovey,” Deborah insisted, carefully controlling her voice, but wondering instantly if it could be Felix.

“I had to beat her with a stick before she’d say.” Deborah waited in growing alarm. It was not the simple problem she had guessed. “She’s a trifling girl, Miss Deb—she go with this-one, that-one, but when I scared her good, she say—she say Floyd!”

“Floyd is still a boy.”