Never did Leon allow his eyes to linger overlong on the dark girls at Beulah Land. The experience of Clovis had taught him a lesson. Master’s son though he was when it happened, she’d had the upper hand. She had separated him from his friend Floyd, she had embarrassed and shamed him, and she had finally driven him from his home. The babe she bore, which everyone knew was his, was born misshapen. Light of skin when the birth redness faded, he was not regularly formed. There was something odd about his back that came to be a hump when he grew, and one leg was shorter than the other, which caused him to walk with a limp when he finally learned to walk.

Deborah wrote Leon in Savannah of the child’s birth: Clovis has had a son and named him Roman. He is lighter in color than she or Roscoe, and he is deformed. We do not expect him to live.

When he came home on his first visit from the Academy, Leon was careful not to venture much about the plantation, spending most of his time indoors, or over at Oaks, or riding and driving about the countryside with Bonard.

3

When Clovis was well along in her second pregnancy, Roscoe found a moment during one of Leon’s vacations from the Academy to ask for an interview with the mistress when she and “the young master” might find it convenient to be present together, since the matter he wished to broach was one of importance and general concern.

Deborah and Leon received the Overseer in the little sitting room which, in spite of having to accommodate the traffic of the stairs to the second floor, had become Deborah’s business office. When Roscoe knocked at the door, and Deborah asked him to enter, he did so. He was dressed in Sunday clothes, and his manner suggested the ceremonial, partly perhaps because he carried under one arm a box or casket with closed lid, the whole lacquered peacock blue. He bowed his head after he had briefly engaged Deborah’s eyes and said formally, “Mrs. Kendrick.” She nodded, and he appeared to be on the point of going into the business that had brought him to seek audience when he suddenly seemed to see Leon for the first time.

Turning to the young man, he bowed his head again, then addressed himself to Deborah. Leon flushed uncomfortably.

Roscoe said, “I have come to ask the mistress—and the young master—if I may buy my wife Clovis, seeing that she is with child.”

Deborah required a moment to go beyond her initial surprise, and when she had done so, she thought about it another few moments and then said, “I believe we can come to an agreement on the matter.”

“What would the mistress—and master—think a reasonable sum for me to pay?”