Eleanor realized in that instant that there was only one path through. Any lie that cast herself as victim would save her social body and condemn Josiah’s actual one.
“Yes,” she said.
Her father’s gaze snapped to hers.
“Yes,” she repeated, louder now. “And before you say another word to threaten him, know this: if there is guilt here, it is mine as much as his. I pursued nothing under force. I love him.”
Josiah made a strangled sound from where he knelt.
The colonel did not look at him.
“Leave us,” he said.
“Sir, please—”
“Now.”
Josiah rose like a man going to execution and left by the side door. Eleanor heard his heavy tread retreat down the corridor, then silence.
Only then did her father close the library door.
“What have you done?” he asked.
The question was quieter than shouting. More terrible for it.
“I have fallen in love with the man you placed beside me.”
“With a slave.”
“With a man.”
“A distinction the law does not acknowledge.”
“Then the law is obscene.”
He turned away sharply, one hand pressed to the mantel. When he spoke again his voice had roughened.
“I arranged this to keep you safe.”
“You arranged it because you believed no white man would have me.”
“That is also true.”
She stared at him. “Then do not speak to me of safety as though this house has ever protected me from humiliation. It simply made my humiliation elegant.”
That hit him. She saw it.
He paced once across the rug, then faced her again. “If this becomes known, you will be ruined beyond remedy. People already pity you. With this, they will call you mad, depraved, unfit for decent society.”
“I have no use for their society.”
“You will when I am dead and there is no money left to protect your principles.”
He said it not cruelly, but desperately, and she understood he was arguing not only with her but with a whole lifetime of assumptions collapsing underfoot.
“Sell me, then,” Josiah said suddenly from the threshold.
They both turned.
He had come back without being summoned. He stood in the half-open doorway like a man who had reached the limit of obedience.
“Sir,” he said, eyes fixed on the floor now because he dared not keep them raised, “if punishment is due, let it fall on me. Miss Whitmore should not suffer for what I allowed.”
Eleanor’s voice broke. “No.”
Her father stared at him with open disbelief. “You disobeyed me by returning.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And yet you speak of taking blame.”
“Yes, sir.”
The colonel crossed to the sideboard and poured himself a drink with hands that were no longer steady. He swallowed half of it and stood with the glass in one hand, looking first at his daughter and then at Josiah, whose entire body seemed braced for pain.
“I could sell you tomorrow,” he said.
The room went dead still.
Eleanor’s mouth opened, but no sound came.
“I could send you to the Deep South,” Whitmore went on, eyes on Josiah. “No one would question it. My daughter would recover in time. Order would be restored.”
Josiah closed his eyes once.
Then Whitmore looked at Eleanor.
“And I would watch her die by inches.”
The sentence seemed to surprise him as much as them.
He sank into the armchair by the hearth and suddenly looked old.
“I have eyes,” he said. “I have watched the last nine months. She smiles now. She argues. She works. She leaves her room without behaving as though entering the world is a burden laid on others. She has become more herself with you than with all the physicians and suitors and arrangements I ever purchased.”
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