“’Tis where I hid mine. Not that I set up clandestine flirts,” she hastened to add, as the butler grinned. “But when I was young my father considered political pamphlets inappropriate reading for well-bred girls, and I had my older sister’s beau smuggle them to me. Dreadfully badly written they were,” she went on reminiscently, easing down onto her stomach and reaching as far toward the head of the bed as she could. “And shockingly ill-reasoned, some of them. After a time my conscience grew so bad that I confessed the whole to—Ah!” Her fingers brushed what felt like the corner of a largish box. She flattened herself further, squirmed beneath the tall frame, reaching with both arms and thanking the heavens that Scipio kept the cham bermaids strictly up to their work: no nonsense about sweeping only as much of the floor as showed and letting dust kittens breed with abandon in the dark.

She drew it out, sat back on her heels. More quietly, she asked, “Did you ever try to tell their father that Tamar and Jeffrey were telling him lies about Rebecca? About her trying to convert them to Catholicism, or punishing them for not praying to the Virgin?”

Scipio opened his mouth, closed it, then sighed. “You’ll think me a coward, m’am. And I daresay I am. But I didn’t dare. None of us did. What man would believe his new young wife over his daughter? What man wouldn’t believe his daughter, if she—” He hesitated. “If she decided to lie about a slave? And a man-slave?”

Abigail thought about that, and felt her face heat with anger. Hotter, even, than when Rebecca had come to her weeping about the way her stepdaughter had used to twist her every action and word.

“He knew I’d been raised a Catholic,” Scipio went on gently. “Miss Rebecca spoke up for me, early in her marriage here, which was a mistake, when Mr. Malvern gets going on one of his rages. He said, we’d conspire, if one of us spoke for the other, after that. Then, too,” he went on, “there were those things Miss Rebecca truly did, that were unwise. Things she did for those she loved.”

Abigail sighed, and turned the box over in her lap. Twelve inches by twelve, and nearly that deep, with a little hasp and padlock. The sort of thing gentlemen kept case bottles of cognac in, locked away from their servants. When she shook it, both its heft and the dry, whispery rattle inside spoke of folded paper. “I think you’re right to tread carefully around Mistress Tamar,” she said. “For you, it isn’t a case of simply being turned out without a character and having to find a new employer, is it?”

“No, m’am.”

How dare the man buy and sell another? How dare any man put another in the position of being bought and sold like a donkey?