“Are you my new massa, sir?” she asked him then, in remarkably good English.

“Overseer,” said Sour Billy. “You’ll meet Julian tonight, girl. After dark.” He smiled. “He’ll like you.” Then he told her to shut up.

Since the girl was afoot their pace was laggardly, and it was near dusk when they reached the Julian plantation. The road ran along the bayou and wound through a thick stand of trees, limbs heavy with Spanish moss. They rounded a large, barren oak and came out into the fields, red-tinged in the somber light of the setting sun. They lay fallow and overgrown from the water’s edge to the house. There was an old, rotting wharf and a woodyard along the bayou for passing steamers, and behind the great house a row of slave shanties. But there were no slaves, and the fields had not been worked in some years. The house was not large as plantation houses go, nor particularly grand; it was a stolid, square structure of graying wood, paint flaking from its sides, its only striking aspect a high tower with a widow’s walk around it.

“Home,” said Sour Billy.

The girl asked if the plantation had a name.

“Used to,” Sour Billy said, “years ago, when Garoux owned it. But he took sick and died, him and all his fine sons, and it don’t got no name now. Now shut your mouth and hurry.”

He led her around back, to his own entrance, and opened the padlock with a key he wore on a chain around his neck. He had three rooms of his own, in the servants’ portion of the house. He pulled Emily into the bedroom. “Get out of them clothes,” Sour Billy snapped.

The girl fumbled to obey, but looked at him with fear in her eyes.

“Don’t look like that,” he said. “You’re Julian’s, I ain’t going to mess with you. I’ll be heatin’ some water. There’s a tub in the kitchen. You’ll wash the filth off you, and dress.” He threw open a wardrobe of intricately carved wood, pulled out a dark brocade gown. “Here, this’ll fit.”