#12–Snow
I fell out of bed, my feet freezing as they hit the floor. Yanking back the heavy curtain over the eastern window, I had a fleeting impression of a dark, devil shape splayed against the glass. As I recoiled, the shape sprang to the twisted ropes of ivy, scrambled down and bounded away over the snow.
Only a cat. I tried to laugh and realized I could see my breath. Despite Suli’s assurance that the wood would last, the stove was no longer putting out heat. With the antique poker that hung on the mantel rack, I cleaned out the stove, scraping the ashes into a bucket. I found a few embers still glowing in the heart of the wood and added the spare logs from the basket. Blowing gently on the embers, I coaxed them into flame.
The surge of adrenalin from the ‘apparition’ at the window had left me wide awake. I put on socks and shoes and pulled my oversized sweater over my sweats. Opening the curtains on the window that faced the carriage house, I looked out over a landscape that had altered overnight into a fantasy from an arctic saga. Judging by how close the snow came to the first floor windows, nearly two feet had fallen.
My cell phone was warm from the charger. I held it in my hand for comfort but it was too early to call anyone.
My gaze landed on the book. It now lay closed, the back cover uppermost. Had Susan come back to finish it? I shrugged into my coat and dropped the phone into the right hand pocket. Removing the chair from under the doorknob, I slipped into the frigid hallway closing the door behind me to keep the heat of the stove in the bedroom. I went straight to the ominous little room with the bar across the door. My hands shook as I lifted the bar from its socket. My knees trembled as the narrow space behind the door was revealed.
So help me, even knowing I was alone in the house and probably the only person awake for miles, I could not bring myself to step across the threshold. I looked in, at the drab walls and rough plank floor so different from the colored wallpaper and polished wood in the other rooms.
This wasn’t the sleeping quarters for a servant. This was a slave owner’s private prison, a place to incarcerate an unruly slave. I closed the door again and levered the bar in place and trotted downstairs to the brochure rack. Competing drafts swirled through from all directions and blown snow sparkled on the rug by the front door. Taking a copy of each of the items on the rack, I jogged back up the stairs and settled back in the warm nest of my bed.
While most of the text spoke of handsome chevaliers and beautiful belles, the diagrams told the real story. The upper class slaves, the house servants, had tiny huts behind the walled kitchen compound and were secured behind a locked gate at night. The stable hands were shut in the barn with the horses. Long huts out in the tobacco fields imprisoned the field hands. At night, Jenny would have been the only slave in the house and the little prison down the hall had been her container.
The brochure painted a charming portrait of Roderick Winslow greeting his slaves by name as he made all safe for the night. The tradition resulted from his father’s experiences as a rough-and-tumble tavern keeper on a bustling crossroads, it claimed. I thought it sounded like the nineteenth century version of prison bed check. ‘Jenny’ was only mentioned twice in the brochure, both times as Arabella’s dressmaker.
I tried to meditate, hoping to find Susan again. No luck. Maybe she had finished the book and had no further reason to come back. Maybe the last place she would come of her own accord was “Old Massa’s bedroom”. Maybe I needed to spend the night in the little prison in order to find her again. I tried a couple more times to cross the threshold. Each time my vision blurred, my ears roared, and I trembled violently in all my limbs.
This was not rational. I should have better control of myself. Furious, I retreated to the ‘Massa’ bedroom again. The throbbing in my shoulder reminded me and I resumed the sling. I looked at my charged cell phone, wishing Darryl had left me a number.
