“What you want to talk about?” Denmark asked her, keeping his head downcast. But in the tone of his voice she could hear his hostility toward her.

“You’re looking for me,” she said.

“Am not,” he said.

“Oh, that’s right. It’s Calvin you’re looking for.”

“That his name?”

“His name won’t give you any power over him greater than what you already have.”

“I got no power over nobody.”

Margaret sighed. “Then why do you have a knife in your pocket? That’s against the law, Denmark Vesey. You have other hidden powers. You’re a free Black in Camelot, doing account books for—let’s see, Dunn and Brown, Longer and Ford, Taggart’s grocery—”

“I should have knowed you been spying on me.” There was fear in his voice, despite his best effort to sound unconcerned. “White ladies got nothing better to do.”

Margaret pressed on. “You found out where I lived because the valet at Calvin’s former boardinghouse led you. And you have a woman at home whose name you never utter. You nearly drowned her in a sack in the river. You’re a man with a conscience, and it causes you great pain.”

He almost staggered from the blow of knowing how much she knew about him. “They hang me, a Black man owning a slave.”

“You’ve made quite a life for yourself, being a free man in a city of slaves. It hasn’t been as good for your wife, though, has it?”

“What you want from me?”

“This isn’t extortion, except in the mildest sense. I’m telling you that I know what and who you are, so that you’ll understand that you’re dealing with powers that are far out of your reach.”

“Sneakiness ain’t power.”

“What about the power to tell you that you have it in you to be a great man? Or to be a great fool. If you make the correct choice.”

“What choice?”

“When the time comes, I’ll tell you what the choice is. Right now, you have no choice at all. You’re going to take me and Calvin and Fishy to the place where you keep the name-strings.”

Denmark smiled. “So they still some things you don’t know.”

“I didn’t say I knew everything. The power that hides the names also hides from me your knowledge of where they are.”

“That be the truth, more than you know,” said Denmark. “I don’t even know myself.”

Fishy scoffed aloud at that. “This ain’t no White fool you can play games with.”

“No, Fishy,” said Margaret, “he’s telling the truth. He really doesn’t know. So I wonder how you find your way back?”

“When it time for me to go there, I just wander around and pretty soon I be there. I walk in the door and then I remember everything.”

“Remember what?”

“How do I know? I ain’t through that door.”

“Powerful hexery,” said Margaret, “if hexery it be. Take me there.”

“I can’t do that,” said Denmark.

“How about if I cut off your balls?” asked Fishy cheerfully.