A Place Called Freedom (1995)

What shocked Lizzie was a sense of being cast adrift. High Glen had always been her home. Although her life was here in Virginia with her husband and her baby, she had thought of High Glen House as a place she could always return to, if she really needed sanctuary. But now it was in the hands of Robert.

Lizzie had always been the center of her mother’s life. It had never occurred to her that this would change. But now her mother was a minister’s wife living in Aberdeen, with three stepchildren to love and care for, and she might even be expecting a new baby of her own.

It meant Lizzie had no home but this plantation, no family but Jay.

Well, she was determined to make a good life for herself here.

She had privileges many women would envy: a big house, an estate of a thousand acres, a handsome husband, and slaves to do her bidding. The house slaves had taken her to their hearts. Sarah was the cook, fat Belle did most of the cleaning, and Mildred was her personal maid and also served at table sometimes. Belle had a twelve-year-old son, Jimmy, who was the stable boy: his father had been sold away years ago. Lizzie had not yet got to know many of the field hands, apart from Mack, but she liked Kobe, the supervisor, and the blacksmith, Cass, whose workshop was at the back of the house.

The house was spacious and grand, but it had an empty, abandoned feel. It was too big. It would suit a family with six growing children and a few aunts and grandparents, and troops of slaves to light fires in every room and serve vast communal dinners. For Lizzie and Jay it was a mausoleum. But the plantation was beautiful: thick woodlands, broad sloping fields, and a hundred little streams.

She knew Jay was not quite the man she had taken him for. He was not the daring free spirit he had seemed to be when he took her down the coal mine. And his lying to her over mining in High Glen had shaken her: after that she could never feel the same about him. They no longer romped in bed in the mornings. They spent most of the day apart. They ate dinner and supper together, but they never sat in front of the fire, holding hands and talking of nothing in particular, the way they once had. But perhaps Jay was disappointed, too. He might have similar feelings about her: that she was not as perfect as she had once seemed. There was no point in regrets. They had to love one another as they were today.

All the same she often felt a powerful urge to run away. But whenever she did, she remembered the child growing inside her. She could no longer think only of herself. Her baby needed its father.

Jay did not talk about the baby much. He seemed uninterested. But he would change when it was born, especially if it was a boy.

She put her letter in a drawer.

When she had given the day’s orders to the house slaves she got her coat and went outside.

The air was cool. It was now mid-October; they had been here two months. She headed across the lawn and down toward the river. She went on foot: she was past six months now, and she could feel the baby kick—sometimes painfully. She was afraid she might harm the baby if she rode.

Still she walked around the estate almost every day. It took her several hours. She was usually accompanied by Roy and Rex, two deerhounds Jay had bought. She kept a close eye on the work of the plantation, for Jay took no interest at all. She watched the processing of the tobacco and kept count of the bales; she saw the men cutting trees and making barrels; she looked at the cows and horses in the meadows and the chickens and geese in the yard. Today was Sunday, the hands’ day of rest, and it gave her a special opportunity to poke around while Sowerby and Lennox were somewhere else. Roy followed her, but Rex lazily remained on the porch.

The tobacco harvest was in. There was still a lot of work to do processing the crop: sweating, stemming, stripping and pressing the leaves before they could be packed into hogsheads for the voyage to London or Glasgow. They were sowing winter wheat in the field they called Stream Quarter, and barley, rye and clover in Lower Oak. But they had come to the end of the period of most intensive activity, the time when they worked in the fields from dawn to dusk and then labored on by candlelight in the tobacco sheds until midnight.

The hands should have some reward, she thought, for all their effort. Even slaves and convicts needed encouragement. It occurred to her that she might give them a party.

The more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea. Jay might be against it, but he would not be home for a couple of weeks—Williamsburg was three days away—so it could be over and done with by the time he returned.