The appearance of the militia at our plantation frightened me.
What would happen when Nat Turner was caught? Would they go through his possessions? Would they find the map with my initials on it? Oh God, I prayed, don’t let them go through his things until I can see him.
For if I was the Paul Revere who had saved them all with my warning, I was surely also the Benedict Arnold who had betrayed them all to begin with.
I had every intention of asking Violet and Owen about Margaret’s death that afternoon. And I knew what they had to tell me was bad. Nightmare fodder. The stuff of hauntings. Because, since I’d been home, both of them had never quite been able to look me straight in the eye. And whenever Margaret’s name came up, as it often did, they either gave the subject a new turn, or excused themselves and left the room.
I now took all my meals at a small side table in the parlor. I could not bear to sit alone at the long, polished table in the dining room with the crystal chandelier dripping its blessing down on me. The chairs and place settings for the family were all there, and I tried, a few times, to sit in my place, but I could not eat for seeing Richard at the head of the table and Mother Whitehead to his right.
So I started eating in the parlor. Sometimes before a glowing fire in the hearth, now that October had come.
October. I should be at my lessons. But that would remind me too much of Pleasant, so I didn’t go near my schoolbooks. I read for my own pleasure.
Owen kept the fires going for me, and hovered near, keeping a conversation going.
It was Owen then, who told me about the last of the flowers in the small garden to the right of the house, a sort of horseshoe-type garden.
“Sad to see the last of the flowers,” he said.
“I’ll visit them right after lunch,” I told him.
And I did. And that’s how I found out how Margaret died.
Punch and Judy were tagging after me. The weeds were high in the garden. I must assign someone to pull them. I had never been much on flowers. It was one of Mother Whitehead’s complaints about me, and when she wished to punish me for something, she’d send me out here to pull weeds, or lug water in a watering can from the well to water them. Red, blue, or yellow, I didn’t know their names.
“You disgrace yourself,” she’d told me. “All proper Southern girls know and love flowers.”
I was thinking of having Violet pick a bouquet of those purple and pink ones in the far corner when Judy came over to me with a fat stick in her mouth. She was whimpering, as she did when she was especially proud of herself and wanted praise.
“What is it?” I asked her.
She dropped the stick at my feet.
It was actually more than a stick. It was as round and fat as a man’s upper arm, and what was that all over it?
It was blood, that’s what it was. All over it.
I bent down and picked it up. It was rather heavy. I held it in both hands and brought it into the house, into the parlor where I sat and read of an afternoon, where the fire crackled and I took tea, where I was mistress, and where I could seal out all bad memories.
I called for Violet and Owen.
Owen saw what lay on the Persian carpet between us and looked down at it, shamefaced. “I should have gotten rid of it,” he said.
“I thought you did,” said Violet.
They spoke of the piece of wood as if it was a murder weapon, which indeed, it was.
“Is this what killed Margaret?” My voice was low, but somehow I couldn’t make it any louder.
“No,” Owen said.
“Yes,” said Violet.
I looked from one face to the other. “Well, which is it? Tell me.”
Owen did the telling:
“We were behind the door of the servants’ stairway and we could hear and see what was going on down here. They had just killed Mother Whitehead and Emilie. Then they killed Pleasant, who’d come down upon hearing the commotion, and then they went upstairs to baby William. When Nat came down after Hark killed baby William, he asked for Margaret. Where was she?
“She’d run outside to hide in the garden. Violet and I were in the attic again by then, and we looked out the window down on the garden. Margaret was hiding behind the rose trellis and he’d come out looking for her. He was holding a long sword he got from your father’s gun room.
“He saw her and started chasing her. She ran and ran in that garden, from the rose trellis to the pussy willow tree to the zinnia patch and then she slipped and fell and he, he . . . he slashed her with his sword.
“But she didn’t die immediately. She wouldn’t cooperate. And I saw him leaning over and patting her head and then, of a sudden, he picks up this piece of wood and raises it high and slams it down on her head, how many times I don’t know, but enough to kill her. Then he leaves her there and takes off with his men around back. To get some horses, I suppose. Because everyone else he wanted to kill was dead.
“I wanted . . . I wanted to go down and stop him, but Violet said he’d kill me, too. I had no weapons, and all his men were downstairs, looting and drinking.
“And then I heard, after it was all over, that fifty-seven were killed in the uprising, but that Margaret was the only one Nat Turner killed himself. He killed no other.”
I nodded my head. “Thank you, Owen. Now if you could burn this log.”
He picked it up and started toward the hearth.
“No,” I said. “No. Not in here. Take it outside and burn it. Please.”
He did as I said. I was left with Violet.
“I couldn’t let him go down and try to rescue her, Harriet,” she told me. “Nat’s men would have killed him in a minute.”
“Fifty-seven dead,” I said dully, “and Margaret the only one he killed himself.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I wonder, did he love her that much?”
“The servants all say he—” and she stopped there.
“Yes, Violet, tell me.”
“They say he lusted after her.”
I sighed. I was not surprised. Margaret had sashayed around in front of him every time he was here. So he personally punished her the only way he could. He killed her.
“I have a headache, Violet,” I said. “Would you get me a powder and some water?”
She fetched it. She gave me the powder and water and I lay back on the divan and she covered me with an afghan that Mother Whitehead had crocheted. “You must promise,” I said, gripping her wrist, “to tell me the minute Nat Turner is captured.”
She said she would, and I fell asleep and dreamed of running through the garden and hiding behind the rose trellis with Nat Turner in pursuit.