Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

but we had a few good years together, my Courtney and I. It took some time for us to forget that he was my Master. He surely forgot it quicker than I did. But we lived together in his house and I took care of things for him and I was the only person in the world he could talk to. I was his wife in every way but one, and in the end it was up to me to show him that I could be his wife in that way, as well.
    I think it wasn’t just Mister Courtney’s leg that was weak. I think it was his heart, too. When he left us, it was sudden. He came riding in from the fields, holding his chest. I tried to help him off his horse, but he fell. I was a skinny thing in those days, but I’m proud to say I caught him.
    I fixed him a bed out on the porch where it was cool and he was comfortable there, but right away he sent me inside to look for a box hidden in his desk.
    “It’s your Christmas present,” he said, “but I think I need to give it to you now.”
    It was a chatelaine, all made out of gold. It hung at my waist and held my keys and my scissors and my thimble—everything the lady of a great plantation needed to get through the day. I said I couldn’t think of any gift I’d like better, then he pulled a gold ring out of his pocket. He’d had it made with a funny little loop on the side.
    “You can wear it on your finger when it’s safe, but you know that little ring could put you in jail. The law won’t let you be my wife. When strangers come around, you wear that ring on your chatelaine. You understand, don’t you?”
    His voice got stronger when he talked about that little ring, and I began to hope he would pull through. But when I said, “Yes. I understand,” he settled down and got weaker again.
    He put the ring on my finger and said “I do,” and made sure I said it, too. Then he said, fainter still, “A wedding present. What shall I give you?”
    The word “Freedom,” came out of my mouth before I thought and he said, “Oh, Cally, I tore up your paper long ago.”
    “Not just for me,” I said. “For everybody.”
    So I fetched the papers out of his desk and helped him write “Freed in consideration of years of faithful labor,” across the face of every one of them.
    The next day, my precious Courtney left me alone, five months pregnant and responsible for a hundred new-made freedmen.

Chapter 29
    Faye closed the journal and closed her eyes. She was so very tired and so very proud of Cally.
    She was startled awake by noises downstairs that couldn’t possibly be Joe, because he never wore shoes with hard soles. It was over. No matter who owned the feet stomping up the sneak stair, those footsteps signaled the end. Joyeuse was gone. She had let the family down.
    The door opened and Magda stood on the other side. She stood at the shelves of artifacts by Faye’s bed, each of them numbered, labeled, and cross-referenced with a dated field journal—except, of course, for the shelf that had its glass and all the treasures hiding behind it blown away by the storm. Lifting a rusty flatiron, Magda examined it, and said, “This is professional-quality work. It would be a shame for the archaeologist who did it to go to jail. What are we going to do about it?”

    Sheriff Mike was amazed and grateful that he and Dr. Stockard had found Joe and Faye and Douglass Everett, all three of them alive and, as far as he was concerned, innocent of any serious crime. After a night of emergency room commotion and a course of intravenous antibiotics apiece, Douglass was out of intensive care and Faye was laid up at Dr. Stockard’s house, worrying over how she was going to pay the hospital bill.
    Try as he might, Sheriff Mike had not been able to convince her to save her worries for later. Claypool was in the throes of organizing a county-wide fundraiser to pay her medical bills—an all-day bluegrass concert and fish fry, headlined by Claypool’s mandolin quartet. Everybody for miles around would turn out and the money would be found. That was the way of things in this neck of the woods.
    Sheriff Mike had grown up along the Florida coast. He knew the people and he knew the currents. He had been pretty sure he knew where Senator Cyril Kirby would wash up. Sure enough, after a few days of waiting, he had found him, lying on his back, with Joe’s flint point still protruding from his throat.
    It wouldn’t do to arrest young Joe for this killing. Senator Kirby’s deeds were already plastered all over the papers. Even