When Venus presented herself in a red-and-green cotton dress and bandanna, Theo felt no inclination to laugh, for the girl had the lithe grace of a tiger cat. Her skin, not black but copper-tinted, covered a face far different from the splaynosed, thick-lipped Gullahs. She was a Foulah, the Arabic strain plainly written in her aquiline nose and delicate bones. Her parents had been abducted, not from Angola like the Gullahs, but from the wild North African interior, twenty years ago, before Venus was born. After the first wild misery and rebellion they had accepted slavery in the strange new land, but Venus, who knew nothing else, had not.

She burned for freedom, her heart festered with resentment against the buckra. She hated them, and she hated her stupid companions in the 'street' of negro cabins at the Oaks, because they accepted their degradation so placidly. Almost she hated her parents, who had been chieftains in Africa, despising them for their quiescence.

She had come now under orders from the overseer to be maid to the new white mistress from the North. Her first rebellion had quieted when she realized that there would be advantages. She would learn buckra ways, she would insinuate herself craftily into their smug lives, until the time came when she could strike for freedom, perhaps even—far sweeter thought—for revenge.

Theo, knowing nothing of this, yet saw that her welcoming smile was tardily answered. She saw the look in the long sensual eyes slide from hers, while something inimical flickered in their depths. She felt rather than heard the hypocrisy in the slurring submissiveness of Venus's speech, and she knew from that first moment that her maid hated her. It scarcely mattered, she could dismiss the girl tomorrow: it was foolish to mind. But she did mind.

Like the black trees outside writhing amongst their spectral moss, like the fever-breeding swamps whose tainted air even now seeped through the windows, like Maum Chloe's conjuh, this slave girl's causeless hostility added to her desolation. She reasoned with herself, quoted Aaron's brisk sensible maxims, yet she could not shake off a sense of foreboding, formless fears which rendered sleepless and miserable her first night on the Waccamaw.

CHAPTER TEN

THEODOSIA continued to have new experiences in the next few weeks at Clifton—most of them unpleasant. The family were kind, but there were so many of them, even after the uncles, aunts, and cousins, who had come only to view the bride, had packed up and left for their respective plantations.

There was no privacy anywhere, even in her bedroom. Maria Nisbett assumed that Theo would be grateful for her company at any time, and Charlotte followed her around wideeyed and admiring in the throes of an adolescent infatuation for the beautiful new sister-in-law.

The children swarmed all over the house like monkeys, chattering, screaming, and quarreling, eternally eluding their fat mauma, who waddled after first one and then the other, scolding and blandishing by turns, but powerless to control them.