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that woman tucked under the covers ’fore she blinks twice,” Mellie promised when Charlotte delivered her father’s message. “I can see to the both of you. Come tomorrow maybe he’ll be bringin’ somebody else up to the house for her.”
    “He’ll dance to whatever tune she decides to play.” Charlotte didn’t try to keep the disgust out of her voice.
    “Ain’t no need gettin’ your dander up, Miss Lottie.” Mellie patted her shoulder. “That’s how he was with your mama too. You remember that. Whatever Miss Mayda wanted, that’s what we done. He’d a give his fortune to keep her happy.”
    “It was her fortune,” Charlotte muttered, but she knew Mellie was right. Her father had doted on her mother even after she withdrew from life with a multitude of health complaints. Charlotte had always thought the complaints were more in her head than her body, but then she’d been struck down in her garden. Charlotte sighed. “It’s all right, Mellie. You see to the new Mrs. Vance and keep everybody happy. I can take down my own hair.”
    “I ain’t hearin’ none of that. You best wait on me. You’ll get it all in a tangle for sure. And ruin that fine dress tryin’ to unbutton it.”
    In her room at last, Charlotte managed to reach a few of the tiny buttons up the back of the skintight bodice, but Mellie was right. To undo them all, she’d have to be a contortionist or rip them loose. She sat on the dressing stool and stared at her face in the mirror in the flickering lamplight. It was surely the most ridiculous thing in the world to wear a dress—no matter how lovely—that one could not put on or take off without aid.
    Of course Mellie had been helping her dress since they were both children, and Aunt Tish before that. Her mother said it was the only way for a lady to live. Cosseted and pampered. Waited on while engaging in refined activities such as poetry reading and that detested needlework. A lady couldn’t even lean down and pluck a stray weed out of her own flower garden.
    She had people for that. People for cooking and cleaning. People to open the door to guests and usher them into the parlor. People to empty the chamber pots and fill the lamps. People to drop the dresses over a lady’s head and fasten the buttons. People to work the fields and bring in the crops that made life in the big house so fine for the ladies and gentlemen who lived there. Her mother claimed it was how things were meant to be and that it was their Christian duty to take care of their people.
    The word slave never crossed her mother’s lips. Those who did her bidding and kept Grayson running were their people . But Charlotte knew the word from her father and from Aunt Tish and from Willis, the gentle black man who brought her pony out to her and taught her how to ride. Still, she was going on ten before she understood, really understood, what being a slave meant.
    At a festival in the town, she had gotten separated from her mother, and after wandering down the wrong street, came upon a crowd of mostly men, some dressed rough like her father’s overseer, Perkins, and others in gentlemen’s coats. A white man stood at a podium like a preacher, and to his side black men wore chains on their wrists and ankles that clanked when they moved.
    Charlotte stopped in her tracks and knew instinctively the scene before her was something her father would think unfit for her eyes. One part of her wanted to run from the sight, but another part of her couldn’t stop staring as a couple of men prodded a boy in chains up on the block. A black boy surely only a year or two older than Charlotte.
    He stared over the heads of the men eyeing him straight at Charlotte. She had expected to see fear on his face or perhaps dismay, but instead there was smoldering anger. Somehow she knew without a word passing between them that he hated her. Not because of anything she’d done, but because she had no chains to keep her from going where she