Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [135]
Care had been taken with her dress: the calico new, with a pale flowered pattern, and it almost looked to have been made to measure, cut to flatter the full breasts and slender waist. If she’d made it herself, she was a good seamstress. Recalling the neat small stitches that hemmed the boy’s smock, he opened his mouth to ask her if she sewed, then shut it without saying anything.
Mary Ann would quiz her on all such points. He squeezed the idea of that interview out of his head with the rest. Hell, he thought, she was young enough—she could learn whatever she didn’t know. From the grace of her stance alone he felt sure this girl would not be clumsy at anything.
He looked at her hands, long-fingered and slim. If she’d worked the fields of Terrebonne Parish, her palms would be scarred with a thousand cuts from cane leaves, but they looked smooth from where he stood. Maybe Duffy was guessing right or even actually knew something. A fancy girl wouldn’t normally sell upriver. But this one was mighty black for the New Orleans bordello trade, where there were plenty of women for sale you couldn’t tell from white without a keen look at the fingernails and ankles, without a special occult sense for what the Frenchmen called jenny say quoi.
Willis took out his riding crop, flicked the loop against the heel of his hand, stooped slightly to raise Catharine’s skirt from her calf.
“Let that alone,” Forrest said. “I can see all I need to.”
Willis shrugged, withdrew the crop.
You ought to at least look in her mouth, Forrest told himself, knowing that he wasn’t going to. He’d seen a shackle on her left leg when Willis picked up her hem with his crop, and that offended him because you didn’t use more restraint than you needed—start with less and edge up to what you might turn out to really need—and that went for a slave as well as a horse. Only a fool would ruin the mouth of a good horse with yanking a bit on it too hard, too often, and what kind of fool put iron on a leg like that?
As if he were explaining it to someone, he thought, there’s some things ye jest cain’t explain. He didn’t want that skirt to be raised to his eyes till she might be willing to lift it for him herself. But then he realized he couldn’t imagine a circumstance when that would ever happen. Cain’t afford to think about it, he told himself. That thought crossed his mind from time to time, in the business of buying and selling folks. I’ll jest figger it out oncet I’ve bought her.
“Twelve hundred dollars for her and the boy,” he heard himself say.
Now it was Willis’s turn to spit tobacco. “Ain’t for sale,” he said.
“What?”
“Been sold a’ready.”
“Who to?”
“Mister Hill,” Willis said. “Left me his note and tolt me he’d stop back today with the money.”
“Well, Hell,” Forrest said. “That’s Forrest and Hill, ain’t it? That’s the same like you already sold her to me.”
“If you say so,” Willis said. “Must be I lost count of the firms you’re involved in.”
Forrest searched his face for insulting intent and decided it wasn’t worth finding it there. It was easy enough to stare Willis down, much easier than the black girl on his chain. And it wouldn’t be the same, not really, he knew that. If he wanted her now he’d have to buy her back out of the partnership, and that would be noticeable, on top of the rest.
“I ain’t never said Hill bought the boy,” Willis remarked.
Forrest looked at him. He and Hill had an understanding not to bust up families, or at least he thought they had it, though it hadn’t been written nor spoke too plain. Breaking