Page 84 of The Beautiful Ones

“You still have it?”

I drew the pages from my bodice.

We carried them into the chapel. The parson had returned while we spoke, an elderly man named Bell whose hands shook until he began reading. He knew enough of the Lebons to fear the names upon the page and enough of God to make fear a poor excuse for silence.

“This must be copied,” he said.

He brought paper, ink and a sand shaker from the small room behind the pulpit. Lucien copied the letter in his neat school hand while I compared each line to Nathaniel’s original. Dinah watched from the nearest pew, correcting the spelling of two names belonging to people she knew.

Philip George’s name did not appear.

Neither did Warren Dewey’s.

The sins of a house might shape every child beneath its roof, but the letter understood what our elders too often did not: guilt was not inherited merely because wealth was.

When Lucien finished, we made a second copy.

The parson sealed one for a federal magistrate in Norfolk. Lucien placed the other inside his coat. I returned the original to the book of Exodus in my mother’s Bible.

“What will you do?” I asked him.

“Take this to Norfolk. Find Philip before his father sails. Make certain the magistrate receives Vale’s words from someone who cannot be bought by a Lebon.”

“You are still a Lebon.”

Pain moved across his face.

“It is all I have left.”

“Then make it mean something else.”

He considered that before folding the copy more carefully.

Night entered through the broken chapel windows. The farmers returned with two wagons, blankets and enough cornmeal to feed us until morning. Families began arranging their journeys. Some would leave together. Others had nowhere certain to go but refused to call uncertainty bondage.

Dinah intended to travel with a niece in Petersburg.

“Come with me,” I said. “There is money enough to bring you as far as Norfolk.”

She smiled. “I got people this side of the water, Miss Elin. You go find yours.”

“And if I do not find them?”

“Then you find out who you are without somebody telling you.”

It sounded like freedom when she said it.

I slept beside my trunk beneath the old oak. Sometime after midnight, I woke to the smell of gardenias.

The chapel yard lay quiet. Lucien slept near the steps with Vale’s copy beneath his coat. Beyond him, the road shone pale under the moon, empty in both directions.

A blue butterfly rested upon the lid of my trunk.

I sat up slowly.

Its wings opened and closed while I unlocked the brass clasps. The butterfly remained in place until I raised the lid, then flew into the branches above me.

My belongings had been rearranged.