“Your papa only said that because he’d heard that pirates on the high seas look especially for freckled ladies, to haul away into captivity,” Sally informed her gravely. “He just didn’t want to scare you by saying so.” And when Polly gave her a suspicious look, she laughed and said, “Sugarbaby, when your papa sees you, he’ll be so glad he won’t care if you’re covered all over with spots like a bird’s egg.”



For three weeks after Miss Patty’s death, Mr. Jefferson kept to his room. Passing the door, Sally had heard him weeping, or pacing incessantly, like an injured animal trying to outwalk pain. It was whispered in the slave-quarters that he would follow his beloved into her grave, from the sheer shock of his grief. Often Patsy would be with her father in his room nearly all night, as she was most of the day. Then it would fall to Sally to tell Polly stories, and hold her in bed until the little girl slept.

One afternoon he went through the whole of the house, gathering every letter, every list, every scrap of his wife’s handwriting, and burned them all in the kitchen fire; cut to pieces the single small likeness of her that had been painted the year before. Sally remembered waking one fog-wrapped dawn, hearing a door close softly somewhere in the house, and Patsy’s voice downstairs call hesitantly, “Papa?” Long familiar strides, first in the hall, then grinding on the gravel outside, heading toward the stables at the far end of Mulberry Row. Sally slipped out of her blanket and ran to the window in time to see Mr. Jefferson plunge down the drive on his fast bay stallion Caratacus. Tall and thin and stiff in her rumpled dress, Patsy stood by the back door with her rufous hair hanging down her shoulders. The pink of her shawl in the gray fog had been like the last flower of a summer gone.