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took to her bed but got almost no sleep, spending the night living and reliving the events of the day. Bull’s arm had been set right as quickly as it had been hurt. Louis and the overseer needed merely to pull it hard and twist it proper for the bone to pop back into place—just as they sometimes did when a slave dislocated his shoulder in the field. The arm would be fine again in time, but it would be weeks before Bull would be fit to whip anyone. No one could quite explain what had made his whip slow the way it had, but most people reckoned it had simply been caught by the wind or a muscle had seized up in his arm. Bull himself was in too much pain to think about the matter much.
    Cal was flogged as Lillie knew he would be, but it was Louis, with his much lighter lash, who administered the punishment. What’s more, with the appraiser still on the grounds, the Master wanted to appear stern but humane, so Louis was told to apply just three strokes. The pain was still terrible—judging at least from the way Cal cried out—but any damage to the skin of his back was small and would heal quickly.
    Far, far worse was the matter of Plato. No one knew precisely what happened to slaves who vanished into the Cuban shipping trade, mostly because they were almost never seen again. They led a hard life that—with the threat of shipwreck, drowning and disease—often ended early. Plato himself had not understood the day’s goings-on and had chattered for much of the afternoon about the fine jumping he’d done. He now slept peacefully beside his sister. Mama refused to discuss the matter, but she did close the curtain in the cabin tonight after getting in bed.
    As Lillie lay awake, her thoughts finally turned to her papa. If he’d come back from the war, they would all be free today. And if he’d not been found in possession of the coins at his death, the same freedom would at least have come to his family. Instead, the family—like the coins themselves—remained the property of the Master. But that was a terrible injustice. Of all Papa’s qualities, he was first of all an honest man, one who’d come by the coins in an honest way. If someone could prove that, Lillie, Mama and Plato could leave this place together—and Papa’s name would be cleared.
    Lillie herself was not the person to try such a thing. She was just a child—and a slave child at that—one who could never set foot off the plantation without the Master’s permission, and could barely set foot outside the cabin without her mama’s. But who else was there? Plato was too small, and Mama was Mama. Like all slave mamas, she had more than she could manage surviving day to day and seeing that her children did the same. So it fell to Lillie. If she herself did not set things right, they would always be wrong.
    At that moment, in the silence of the cabin, she resolved that setting things right was just what she would do. She would prove Papa’s innocence, she would free her family—and if she did it soon, she would keep her brother out of the appraiser’s hands. Lillie had no idea how she was going to do all that, but she had no doubt that she was going to try.

Chapter Four
    LIKE ALL SLAVE CHILDREN, Lillie began working around the time she turned seven, fetching water or carrying tools in the field or, much better, chasing off birds that would swoop in to gobble up seeds as they were being planted. Small children loved being assigned to bird-chasing work, a job that kept them running and giggling and would usually turn into a game after the birds were gone—something that was fine with the overseer. Enough slave children engaging in a loud enough chase was more than was needed to remind the birds not to return for the rest of the day.
    Lillie’s mother did the more serious labor of a field slave, sometimes working alongside Plato, who was only beginning his seasons as a