And then, Nelson stopped coming. This happened right around the time her sisters died, so she didn’t notice at first, too busy with the calamity of seeing everything she’d known collapse. Too secretly ashamed of how tired she’d been of being the oldest girl, of how often she’d chosen to slip off with the boys into the trees instead.

When she finally missed him, Rosalie worried that Nelson had also died in the cholera. She sought out Ann in the kitchen to ask. No, none of the other children had died, Ann told her. About Nelson she simply said, “Sold.”

Rosalie was relieved.

“Sixty-five dollars,” Ann said.

Rosalie was impressed. At nine years old, she was unable to imagine his life much changed. She assumed that wherever he was, Nelson was building forts, streaking his face with war-paint mud, smiling his gappy smile. If someone paid sixty-five dollars, she thought, they must love Nelson very much.

But perhaps she had doubts, because of what she’d asked next. “He’s happy, don’t you think?” she’d said and then, to prompt Ann into the right answer, added, “Nelson’s always happy.”

“Children can snatch happiness from even the darkest times,” Ann said. “That’s God’s gift, that’s how God loves children. You grow up, you can’t do that no more. You don’t have that gift. God’s taken it back.”

And, just as they would again all those years in the future, Rosalie’s losses crowded into her heart, a heavier weight than she could bear. Frederick and Elizabeth, Mary Ann and Nelson. Mother’s happiness and Father’s sanity. She was too big now for Ann’s lap, but Ann sank into one of the dining table chairs and gathered her in anyway, rocking her and humming something church-like, as if Rosalie were still a child, which she now, in her deep unhappiness, understood for the first time that she was not.

She’d lost that, too.

—

And still, even with this all everywhere about her, Rosalie had given little thought to slavery—slavery was a thing that just was—until they’d made that terrible trip to England with Hagar accompanying them. One day in school Rosalie mentioned her. Hagar, Rosalie had said, was a slave. She could feel the shock this caused. “Not our slave,” she’d clarified quickly, but the damage was done.

Soon there was a lesson in which they all learned that slavery was a decision a country made, and that a country could always make a better decision. No one should be a slave to anyone else, one of the other girls said during this lesson, and the teacher agreed. It wasn’t Biblical, the girl said. “That’s what we think, too,” Rosalie told her, though she was pretty sure it was Biblical even if it was also wrong.

Back in America, back in their sad, depleted home, Hagar had unexpectedly asked Father for permission to return to the estate of Dr. Elijah Bond. She was owned by Dr. Bond, and had been raised on that large and prosperous property, though she’d been working for Father and Mother for years now.