Like every other child of the South, she knew the story as well as she knew the lines in her own palms. The story had no boundaries of creed or color. It had been told by rich and poor alike, by free men and slaves. How the South was saved in ten short days. As she rode toward the mill, she remembered…

It was the end of the eighteenth century, and the devil seeds were killing the South. Oh, you could talk all you wanted about Sea Island cotton with its long, silky fibers and smooth seeds that slipped out as easily as the pit of a ripe cherry. But if you didn't own sandy soil along the coast, you might as well forget that Sea Island cotton, because it wouldn't grow anyplace else.

There was tobacco, but it sucked the life out of the soil after a few years, leaving you with land that wouldn't grow anything.

Rice? Indigo? Corn? Good crops, but they wouldn't make a man rich. They wouldn't make a country rich. And that was what the South needed. A money crop. A crop that would make the whole world come banging on her door.

It was those devil seeds. The South could grow green seed cotton anywhere. It wasn't temperamental. It didn't need sandy soil or sea air. Green seed cotton grew like a weed. And it was worth about as much because those devil seeds clung to the short, tough fibers like burrs, they clung like glue, they clung like they'd been nailed in, they clung like the devil had put them there just so he could laugh at any man foolish enough to try to get them out.

A man had to work ten hours to separate one pound of cotton lint from three pounds of those devil seeds. Three pounds of seeds for one small pound of cotton lint. Ten hours' work. The devil was having a fine time in hell laughing at them all.

Where was the money crop going to come from? Where was the money crop that would save the South?

They stopped buying slaves and promised manumission to the slaves they owned. Too many mouths to feed. No money crop. The devil seeds.

And then a schoolteacher came to Savannah. A Massachusetts boy with a mind that worked differently from other men's. He dreamed machines. They told him about the devil seeds and those short, tough fibers. He went to the cleaning shed and watched how hard they fought to pull out the seeds.

Three pounds of seed for one pound of cotton lint. Ten hours.

The schoolteacher set to work. It took him ten days. Ten days to save the South. When he was done, he'd made a wooden box with some rollers and wire hooks. There was a metal plate with slots, and a crank on the side that turned like magic. The teeth hooked the cotton and pulled it through the rollers The devil seeds fell into the box. One man. One day. Ten pounds of cotton lint.

The miracle was made. A money crop. The South was Queen, and King Cotton was on the throne. The planters bought more slaves. They were greedy for them now. Hundreds of thousands of acres of land had to be planted with green seed cotton, and they needed strong backs for that. Promises of manumission were forgotten. Eli Whitney, the schoolteacher from Massachusetts, had given them the cotton gin. The miracle was made.

The miracle and the curse.

As Kit tied Temptation to the rail and walked toward the brick building, she thought how the gin that had saved the South had also destroyed it. Without the gin, slavery would have disappeared because it wouldn't have been economical, and there wouldn't have been a war. Would the spinning mill have the same disastrous effect?

Cain wasn't the only man who understood what it meant for the South to have its own mills instead of shipping the raw cotton to the Northeast or to England. And before long, there'd be more men. Then the South would control its cotton from beginning to end-grow it, gin it, spin it,, and eventually weave it. The mills could bring back the prosperity the war had stripped away. Bui like the gin, the mills would bring changes, too, especially to plantations like Risen Glory.

Jim Childs showed her through the mill, and if he was curious about why the wife of his employer should suddenly reappear after a two-month absence, he gave no sign. As far as Kit knew, Cain hadn't told anyone that she was the person who'd tried to burn it down. Only Magnus and Sophronia seemed to have guessed the truth. When Kit left, she realized one part of her was anxious to see the huge machines at work when the mill finally opened in October.

On her way homo, she caught sight of Cain standing beside a wagon filled with cotton. He was stripped to the waist, and his chest glistened with sweat. As she watched, he grabbed a full burlap sack from the shoulders of one of the workers and emptied it into the wagon. Then he took off his hat and ran his forearm over his brow.

The taut, sinewy tendons rippled across the sheath of his skin like wind over water. He'd always been lean and hard-muscled, but the backbreaking work of plantation and mall had defined every muscle and tendon. Kit felt a sudden, piercing weakening inside her as she had a vision of that naked strength pressed over her. She shook her head to clear away the image.

After she returned to Risen Glory, she indulged in a frenzy of cooking, despite the fact that the weather during these final days of August was oppressive and the kitchen heavy with heat. By the end of the day, she'd produced a terrapin stew, corn rolls, and a jelly cake, but she still hadn't managed to shake her restlessness.

She decided to ride to the pond for a swim before dinner. As she left the stable on Temptation, she remembered that Cain was working in a field she'd have to cross to get there. He'd know exactly where she was going. Instead of upsetting her, the thought excited her. She tapped her heels into Temptation's flanks and set off.

Cain saw her coming. He even lifted his hand in a small, mocking salute. But he didn't go near the pond. She swam in the cool waters, naked and alone.

She awakened the next morning to her monthly courses. By afternoon, her relief that she wasn't pregnant had been displaced by racking pain. She was seldom sick with her monthlies, and never this badly.

At first she tried to ease the pain by walking, but before long, she gave it up, stripped off her dress and petticoats, and went to bed. Sophronia dosed her with medicine, Miss Dolly read to her from The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, but the pain didn't ease. She finally ordered them both out of the room so she could suffer in peace.

But she wasn't left alone for long. Near dinnertime, her door banged open and Cain strode in, still dressed from the fields.

"What's the matter with you? Miss Dolly told me you were sick, but when I asked her what was wrong, she began twitching like a rabbit and ran to her room."

Kit lay on her side, her knees clutched to her chest. "Go away."

"Not until you tell me what's wrong."

"It's nothing," she groaned. "I'll be all right tomorrow. Just go away."

"Like hell I will. The house is quiet as a funeral parlor, my wife is locked away in her bedroom, and nobody will tell me anything."

"It's my monthly time," Kit muttered, too sick to be embarrassed. "It's never this bad."

Cain turned and left the room.

Unsympathetic lout!

She clutched her stomach and moaned.

Less than half an hour later, she was surprised to feel the bed sag next to her. "Drink this. It'll make you feel better." Cain lifted her shoulders and held a cup to her lips.

She swallowed, then gasped for breath. "What is it?"

"Lukewarm tea with a heavy dose of rum. It'll take the edge off."

It tasted foul, but it was easier to drink it than to put up a fuss. As he gently laid her back on the bed, her head began to swim pleasantly. She was dimly aware of the smell of soap and realized he'd bathed before he'd come back to her. The gesture touched her.

He tugged at her sheet. Beneath it she wore only a plain schoolgirl's cotton chemise from her days at the Academy and a pair of expensive, delicately ruffled pantalets. Mismatched as usual.

"Close your eyes and let the rum do its work," he whispered.

Indeed, her eyelids were suddenly too heavy for her to hold open. As they fluttered shut, he touched the small of her back and began to massage her. His hands climbed gently along her spine, then down again. She was barely aware when he pushed the camisole out of his way and touched her skin directly. While she drifted off to sleep, she knew only that his touch seemed to have dulled the knife edge of pain.

The next morning, she found a great bunch of field daisies thrust into a drinking glass at her bedside.

17

Summer glided into fall and an air of tense expectancy hung over the house and its inhabitants. The harvest was in, and soon the mill would spring alive.

Sophronia moved belligerently through the days, increasingly snappish and difficult to please. Only the fact that Kit wasn't sharing Cain's bed brought her any comfort. It wasn't that she wanted Cain for herself-she'd gratefully relinquished her hold on that idea. Instead, it was a feeling that as long as Kit stayed away from Cain, Sophronia wouldn't have to face the awful possibility that a decent woman like Kit, a decent woman like herself, could find pleasure lying with a man. Because if that were possible, all her carefully arranged ideas about what was important and what wasn't would become meaningless.

Sophronia knew she was running out of time. James Spence was pressing her to make up her mind whether or not she'd be his mistress, safe and well protected in the small doll's house he'd found in Charleston, away from Rutherford's gossiping tongues. Never one to be idle, Sophronia now found herself staring out the window for long stretches of time, looking in the direction of the overseer's house.

Magnus waited, too. He sensed that Sophronia was coming to some sort of crisis, and he steeled himself to face it. How much longer, he wondered, could he be patient? And how was he going to live with himself if she left him for James Spence with his fancy red buggy, his phosphate mine, and his skin as white as the underbelly of a fish?

Cain's problems were different, and yet the same. With the harvest in and the machinery installed in the mil!, there was no longer any reason for him to work so hard. But he'd needed the numbing exhaustion of those long workdays to keep his body from realizing the great joke he was playing on it Not since he was a kid had he been so long without a woman.

Most nights he was back at the house in time for dinner, and he couldn't decide whether she was deliberately driving him mad or it if was unintentional. Each night she appeared at the table smelling of jasmine, with her hair styled so that it reflected her mood. Sometimes she wore it impishly high on her head with wisps of curl framing her face like soft, inky feathers. Other times she'd arrange it in the severe Spanish style so few women could wear successfully, parted in the center and pulled into a heavy knot at the nape of her neck that just begged for his fingers to undo it. Either way, he had to struggle to take his eyes off her. It was ironic. He who'd never been faithful to a woman was now being faithful to a woman he couldn't make love with, not until he could put her in the proper place in his life.

Kit was as unhappy as Cain. Her body, once awakened, didn't want to go back to sleep. Strange, erotic fantasies plagued her. She found the book Cain had give her so long ago, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. At the time, the poems had confused her. Now they stripped her bare. Never had she read poetry like this, sprawling verse stuffed with images that left her body burning:

Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love-yielding,

love climbers, and the climbing sap,

Arms and hands of love, lips of love, phallic thumb of

love, bellies press'd and glued together with love…

She ached for his touch. She found herself rushing back to her bedroom in the afternoons for long, soaking baths and then dressing for dinner in her most attractive gowns. Before long, her clothes grew too tame. She cut off a dozen tiny silver buttons from the bodice of her cinnamon silk gown so that the neckline fell open to the middle of her breasts. Then she filled in the space with a string of glass beads the color of juniper berries. She replaced the belt on a pale yellow morning dress with a long swath of vermilion-and-indigo-striped taffeta. She wore bright pink slippers with a tangerine gown, then was unable to resist threading lime-colored ribbons through the sleeves. She was outrageous, enchanted. Sophronia said she was behaving like a peacock spreading its tail to attract a mate.