Toward the end of his life, old Earl amused himself by setting his descendants against one another, and he managed one last joke before departing this world: after his death, the family discovered seven wills, all bearing the same date and each naming a different heir.
On August 4, 1848, Earl’s numerous relations came rolling up the drive to his Louisiana plantation and spent the whole day inspecting the house, the gardens, the stables, and the endless black-and-white fields, where little clouds of cotton seemed to float just above the dark earth.
By evening, everyone had gathered on the veranda for tea and calming drops.
The conversation turned, naturally enough, to fairness.
Old Earl had seven daughters. All but Annabel had married and produced broods of noisy children whose futures had to be provided for. Annabel, having no children of her own—or so everyone believed—hardly entered into the calculations.
At sixteen, in the very height of her first season, she had caught smallpox and emerged from it a pale ghost, her once-pretty face badly scarred. Her sisters called her Curds and thought she had gotten what she deserved: before the illness, Annabel had been merciless about stealing their beaux.
In years past, whenever the family descended on the plantation for Christmas or Easter, Annabel would plead a headache and hide in the back rooms. But now she came out onto the veranda with the rest of them and listened hungrily as her brothers-in-law conferred with the lawyers they had brought along. Whenever the discussion turned to dividing up the slaves, the fan she held before her pockmarked chin began to tremble.
They summoned the overseer with his lists of field hands, craftsmen, and house servants and questioned him at length about health, age, temperament, and skill.
Larry, the horse doctor, was worth no less than a thousand dollars.
He was thirty, tall and supple, with a finely made bronze body that had never known the whip—old Earl had been a thrifty man and saw no sense in damaging valuable property.
Larry knew herbs, remedies, and the right words to whisper into a horse’s ear; even a half-dead nag seemed to come alive under his hands.
Earl’s sons-in-law scratched their heads and calculated what Larry might earn if hired out to farms that bred horses.
The number always climbed high enough for somebody to lose his temper.
“Why in God’s name should you get him?”
When Annabel was ten, Larry had shown her newborn foals wobbling upright on folding legs. Later he taught her to ride and would grumble at her little white mare, Spoonful of Milk, warning the creature that she had better not—God forbid—throw the young miss into the dirt.
Years later, Larry had cut Annabel down when she came to the stable one night to hang herself.
He had sat beside her for a long while, holding her hand and telling her that the Lord did not intend people to surrender to despair.
Of course somebody would love her.
Of course her life was not over.
Of course there was still something waiting for her farther down the road.
He smelled of strange herbs, and his secret words worked upon her the way they worked upon a foal that had fallen into a ditch and broken its legs.
Their daughter was three years old now, and she had taken after her father.
Annabel told everyone she had bought the child in New Orleans. No one thought it odd that she had grown so attached to her. Old Earl and the servants alike understood that poor Curds wanted a doll to play with.
And now Annabel’s sisters, their husbands, and their lawyers sat on the veranda deciding which of them would claim the man without whom she could not live.
Run?
But where?
And how?
If they were caught, the terrible secret would come out, and Larry would surely be hanged.
As for what might become of little Olive, Annabel could hardly bear to imagine it.
“Miss Annabel! Miss Annabel!” A maid’s shrill voice came from the yard. “Something awful’s happened!”
The girl was so frightened she forgot every rule of decorum and burst straight onto the veranda, her face gray with terror.
“I think the smallpox is back! Larry’s lying there covered all over in those—those things—”
Unable to find the word, she drummed trembling fingers against her cheeks.
Annabel flew down the steps.
“Where are you going?” one of her sisters called after her.
Annabel glanced back without stopping. “It’s all right. I can go. I’ve had it already.”
She ran toward the quarters, where rough stone cabins stood crowded close together.
Larry’s cabin, where he lived with old Fro and his younger brothers, sat a little apart from the others. A rail fence surrounded it to keep livestock out of the patch where he grew his medicinal herbs.
The field hands had returned from the cotton and now crowded the yard. Nobody seemed to know what ought to be done. Several women were crying. Old, heavyset Fro lay in the hot dust, striking the ground soundlessly with the flat of her broad hand.
“Oh, Missy, don’t you go in there!” someone cried.
Annabel seized the roughly carved door handle in both hands and pulled.
The cabin was dim, with the last of the sunlight falling through the window in a slanting square across the stone wall.
The room smelled of bean stew.
“Larry?” Annabel called faintly.
A tall, lanky shadow rose above the canvas hammock.
Larry’s face was covered in dreadful blisters. His eyelids were swollen. So were his lips.
Annabel stared at him. “That isn’t smallpox.”
If anyone in the world knew what smallpox looked like, she did.
Larry motioned with his eyes toward the window, toward the distant road where, one after another, the masters’ carriages were rolling away.
“They gone?”
Annabel nodded. She folded her arms around herself and began to cry silently.
“What have you done to yourself?”
“Poison ivy,” Larry said. “And a few other leaves. It’ll buy us several days.”
He paused.
“After that, I’ll have to die.”
Annabel looked at him.
“For real,” he said, “or just on paper. That’ll be for you to decide.”
“We’ll go North, won’t we?” Annabel whispered. “But what happens when we get there? They won’t have us there either. Not all three of us together.”
Forgetting himself, Larry passed a hand across his ruined face. He groaned at the pain, then smiled.
“Lord help us,” he said.
Annabel wiped her tears.
“He’d better.”
