“Oh, yes, m’am. Back home, my mistress liked to be read to. And one of my mistress’s sons would write me poems—one of his friends, too. That’s all I thought these were: young gentlemen’s foolishness.” She looked aside slightly, and down, her bronze lips tightening in a way that told Abigail that these offerings were probably not the only young gentlemen’s foolishness that Philomela had had to put up with in her old mistress’s home. She wondered how much those first poems had had to do with the decision to sell Philomela . . . far away from Virginia.

“I did show Miss Lucy,” Philomela added quickly. “And I asked her, Should I show Mrs. Fluckner? I didn’t want to do wrong, yet I did fear Miss Lucy’s mother might blame me, for having an admirer, though I didn’t know who this man was.”

Lucy Fluckner put in, “Mama would have said, Philomela was encouraging him, and would have asked Papa to sell her. I thought as long as I knew, it was all right.”

Abigail pinched her lips on the words, And what possible business could it have been of yours or your mother’s? If Pattie had acquired an “admirer” in Boston, she herself would certainly want to know if the man was a thief who only wanted access to the household. She settled for, “Of course. You both acted very properly. Did you keep the poems?”

“At first I did,” said Philomela. “Though they weren’t very good, I didn’t think. The first two were just about how beautiful he thought I was—” Her voice stammered a little over the words. “Then he started writing how I came to him in his dreams at night, and the things I said . . . and things we did.” The room was too dim, and her complexion too dark, to show her blush. “Not the way some gentlemen write, that they dreamed of me lying in their arms and how beautiful I was in the moonlight and all how it would be a good idea if I’d make their dream come true. You know that kind of poem—”

She caught herself a little guiltily, but Abigail smiled, and said, “I have received such, yes. And very tiresome I found them.”