Page 58 of The Beautiful Ones

My hand slid from the door.

The words made no sense at first. They entered my mind as numbers without objects, a sum awaiting its proper column. Then I remembered the ships Father sometimes inspected near Norfolk, the unexplained journeys, the money that had arrived faster than cotton or timber could earn it. I remembered men coming to the kitchen after midnight with mud upon their boots and seawater whitening their coats.

Five hundred souls.

Not passengers. Not immigrants. Human beings brought through hidden inlets years after the trade had been outlawed, sold so that my mother might order French mirrors and my father might pour brandy from Waterford crystal.

My blue silk tightened around my ribs.

“The papers died with him,” Father said.

“Did they?” Reuben demanded. “The Fairhavens know the ship. They know the landing. Adrian looks at me as if he watched us dig the grave.”

The corridor tilted beneath my feet.

“Vale did not survive,” Judge Dewey said. His voice was quieter than the others and therefore more terrible. “That is the only certainty we possess.”

Silence followed.

I could hear my own pulse. Each beat seemed loud enough to travel through the door.

Then Father spoke.

“No one knows where we put him. The lime took everything.”

A floorboard complained beneath my slipper.

Inside, a chair scraped violently backward.

I gathered my skirts and fled two steps down the hall before shame stopped me. I was not ashamed of listening. I was ashamed that some childish portion of me still wanted to enter the study and demand that Father deny what I had heard.

The men who had arranged my life, corrected my manners and measured my worth had murdered Nathaniel Vale because he objected to the purchase and sale of human beings.

And Commander Vale had spoken of my voice.

Had he tried to protect me from the truth? Or had Father used my future—as Reuben’s frightened words suggested—to excuse what could never be excused?

The thought sickened me.

A soft rustle sounded behind me.

Octavia stood at the crossing of the halls.

No door had opened. No footstep had announced her. One moment the corridor had been empty; the next she occupied it completely, pale against the dark paneling in her cream gown. Her fan was closed now. She held it loosely at her side like a narrow ivory blade.

I tried to say her name.

The O formed easily. The first hard consonant did not.

“O-Oct—”

My throat seized.

The miracle had vanished with Adrian’s gaze.

Octavia watched without pity. Somehow that was worse than pity and better than kindness.

“You heard them,” she said.