snap. He shrugged. “I might. The two of you seem to belong to each other. Much as a mother and daughter should.” He was pleased to see Grace’s tense shoulders relax.
“Aye. I may have been robbed of my mother, but I love Matu with all my heart, just as she loves me.”
As far as Giles could tell, Grace’s mother was no great loss. “She doesn’t say much, Matu,” he said.
“Father had her tongue cut out over twenty years ago,” Grace replied, without missing a step, as though it were the most common thing in the world to say.
Giles stopped dead in his tracks. “Good God! Whatever for?”
Grace paused, and for just a heartbeat of time, her green eyes darkened with anguish, seemed to look through him at some ghost in the shadows of the jungle surrounding them. Then she focused on him, and he felt an ache that pierced him through.
“It is a common practice, Captain Courtney. Matu is not the only slave on Welbourne Plantation without a tongue. The penalty may be inflicted for stealing a morsel of food that is intended for the overseer’s dogs or for knowing a secret that the master wishes to be kept at all cost.”
Giles didn’t have to ask which was the case for Matu. “What does she know that would cause your father to silence her forever?”
And again, that cynical, enigmatic smile. “If I told you, he might cut mine out.” She turned her back and resumed walking, leaving him behind to wonder what in God’s name he was getting himself into.
Ahead of him, Grace fought back the niggling sense of regret that plagued her. He had been shocked, of course. She had known he would be. She had forced herself to speak of these realities coldly, when in truth, they still had the power to shock her, too. What might Captain Courtney have done if she had told him these things with all of the sadness they made her feel? Might there be some comfort in sharing her pain with a kindred soul? Mayhap she should have allowed herself to find out.
He ran to catch up, and they came to a pair of neat little cottages among the trees. “We’ve four white guards who live here,” Grace said. “That one over there,” she pointed to a smaller cottage with a kennel and five barking dogs in back, “belongs to the overseer. The dogs are let loose at night. They make sure that none of the workers leave their huts after dark. They are also used to track and sometimes kill runaways.”
“Why track them only to kill them?”
“It is a rather unforgettable and therefore intimidating spectacle for the rest.”
Giles shuddered, and again, Grace found some solace in his reaction.
Several yards deeper into the forest, the foliage gave way to a clearing and the slaves’ quarters, tumbledown huts with dirt floors and thatched roofs in need of repair. The doorways and windows were wide open with no means of keeping out insects or rain and providing no privacy for the occupants. The place seemed like a small village, with ten or twelve of the structures. A dozen dark, naked children between two and five years old sat or chased each other unenthusiastically in the dirt. Their limbs were thin and their stomachs distended, the product of a diet comprised entirely of grain and cassava. Some chewed on bits of sugar cane, several were crying. Six older slaves, probably not much older than Giles, but weak and decrepit, and seemingly only alive by the grace of some miracle, sat on the ground with them. One woman, her crippled fingers shaking, mended a tattered garment hardly worth her efforts.
A man with leathery black skin and wiry gray hair looked out of one of the doorways and gestured to Grace. “Missy!” he called. “Missy!” Then he said something else, his words rapid and staccato, almost English and yet not. Grace moved toward him, through the squalor and despair.
“What’s he saying?” Giles asked.
“I don’t know. They speak a sort of combination of African languages, mixed with a smattering of English.”
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