Angelique ventured into the forest around Collinwood. A basket on her arm, she made the acquaintance of the unfamiliar herbs in the strange and foreign land. Dry twigs cracked beneath her shoes. Fallen leaves were brown and darker brown. Everything was rough and prickly, forbidden to touch. The trees had coarse bark. The bushes had brambles that snagged on her cloak. Even the wild fruits of raspberries and blackberries had wicked little thorns that scratched her hands when she picked them.
Eyes haunted the foreign shadows. They did not speak Creole or French; they whispered the echoes of a sort of pidgin English as a thin layer over a much older foundation. Ancient words fertilized the deeper soil that held the forgotten bones of those who spoke other languages long ago. The ghosts of men, who were neither white nor black, drifted between the trees. Men with ruddy brown skin had black hair as straight as horse tails. They wore buckskin trousers and capes of moose hide adorned with owl feathers and porcupine quills twisted into beads. The women carried straw baskets woven as intricately as crocheted lace—much superior in craftsmanship to the maple slats of the basket she carried. The old ones hunted for meat with longbows and feathered arrows. Before this place was Collinwood, it was called something else—a name known only to the dead, and the dead were not sharing the secret.
Angelique picked a path warily through the fragile underbrush of dry leaves that crumbled beneath her. Frost glistened like sugar on the black leaves. The air was incredibly cold the longer she stayed outside. When she had remarked upon the weather earlier, the governess Phyllis Wick had laughed mockingly, "It's going to get much colder than this, dearie! Why, it's only November!"
One by one, she stroked the leaves of unfamiliar herbs and politely asked its name. The tender leaves introduced themselves, I am sage... I am rosemary... I am clover... She was drawn to the herbs with a darker soul and strayed off the footpath to seek them out. She crouched over to each one, bowing respect for the deadly power that slept in the underside of their leaves. I am hemlock... I am wolfsbane... I am snakeroot... I am nightshade.
Returning to the house, Angelique hummed a Creole lullaby and swung the basket at her side. Spells and recipes of potions scrolled through her mind, the various concoctions that she could easily slip into Josette's tea. How sad it would be for a mysterious illness to make her face break out in warts or perhaps slimy pox that oozed green pus. She imagined Josette awakening to find her body fattened like a pig, no longer able to squeeze her bloated belly into her slender gowns. Barnabas would be repulsed, or would he? Was his infatuation so blind and foolish that he would overlook any physical fault?
"Hey you!" a man called.
Angelique stopped for the brawny servant named Ben to lumber into her path. He was one of the tallest men she had ever seen, taller by several inches than any of the Collins gentlemen who were his masters. He had broad shoulders, a barrel chest, and arms that bulged the seams of his coarsely woven sleeves. His pale face had dramatically large features—a jaw like a bear and fierce hazel eyes.
"What you got there?" he asked.
Smiling sweetly, she answered, "I've been picking herbs for supper."
He pointed with his large, sausage-like finger at her basket . "That's nightshade! That's a deadly poison, don't you know?"
"Oh!" Angelique pretended surprise. She turned her basket over and dumped the leaves out around her feet. "I had no idea, thank you! I'm from Martinique, you see, and the herbs are so different from what grows around here."
"Well, be more careful next time. If you're not sure, you can..." His squinty eyes roved downward to assess her. Angelique felt her blush rise at the intimacy of his gaze. "...you can ask me anything, missy, any time."
"Thank you, I'll keep that in mind."
They were close enough to the house that the voices of other men and the creaking of wagon wheels distracted his attention. Fear of his master's wrath clouded over his momentary daydream of desire and Ben excused himself. "I've got work to do."
He jogged off away from her, each stride a powerful slam of a fence post into the earth. Angelique watched him, a marvel, the strongest man she had ever seen—more raw muscle force than any of the ship's sailors or dock workers or slaves on the sugar plantation. Here was a man who had labored with his hands for his entire life, yet he was not the master of his own destiny.
She strolled slowly behind his footsteps.
A wagon arrived near the back of the house and parked there. Several men already had a fire going in a brick tower like a chimney with no house around it. They fanned the oven door with branches to increase the smoke. The wagon held a dead hog recently killed, still the mark of a spike driven into its forehead. The animal was as large as a man and promised enough marbled meat to last the Collins family for at least a month.
Nearby was a crude table of planks with an array of cleavers and butcher knives. White men wearing leather aprons stood by sharpening the blades on blocks of stone.
Two slender fellows heaved and tugged at the back legs of the dead hog. They strained and dug in their heels. At last, they managed to slide it off the back of the wagon. "Damnit all, that's a load of bacon!"
Ben Stokes tromped over. "Gimme room." He grabbed the rear legs, squatted himself for balance, and hauled the dead hog off the ground. Alone, he slung it up and across his shoulder like a branch full of bananas. The others marveled to watch him lugging the load across the yard.
He brought the hog to a large oak tree with a horizontal limb. There he hooked the hog's ankles to a dangling rope and let it swing off his shoulders. Hanging upside down, the hog dangled there pathetically with its blinded dead eyes and its tongue lolling out of its open mouth.
Other men came with a large tin washtub and slipped it underneath the hog's head. Ben Stokes himself, with a large knife, sliced into the carcass. Starting at the groin, he tugged the blade straight down, releasing bucketloads of dark blood that gushed into the tub and splattered the dry brown leaves on the soil. Entrails tumbled out like pale snakes.
"Careful," said one man. "Don't pierce the sausage casings."
"I'm bein' careful," Ben growled, obviously offended by the suggestion. His hands manipulated the knife expertly opening the hog's belly like a lady's silk purse. Angelique watched with fascination, from afar, as he sliced out the hog's heart and held it in his hands.
He is strong. He has no qualms about butchery. His soul is already trapped in servitude. How easy it will be to saddle and ride a horse that is already broken. First, she had to know his full true name.
#
Angelique went into Joshua Collins's private library, after the master had taken a journey up the hill to survey the construction of the new house. Collinwood Manor should have been completed by now, but Jeremiah Collins—in charge of the project—was "too lenient with the workers," according to his older brother. Now Joshua intended to crack the whip, literally, so that his family could move into the grander mansion by the Twelfth Night of Christmas come the new year. The plan was for Barnabas and Josette, once married, to continue living in the current house and begin work on the next generation of the Collins dynasty.
Someday this library will be yours, my darling, and it will be filled with your books not your father's. But this house will not belong to you and Josette, no, it will be our home where we will live as husband and wife, Barnabas and Angelique forever.
She opened several heavy-bottomed desk drawers of mahogany. She pulled out ledger after ledger of accounting books, contract folios, inventory lists, property deeds, and yellowed maps of the surrounding countryside. She found a recent log of the household servants and the amount of salary paid to each one. To her disappointment, the servants were listed in abbreviations: J. Riggs, P. Wick, B. Stokes.
Frustrated, she clawed into a deeper drawer and found a metal box containing folded contracts stamped with wax seals and blue ribbons. One was titled, "Last Will and Testament of Joshua Collins." One was a marriage contract with Naomi Rousseau dit Benet—his mother, a native of Quebec. So that is how Barnabas learned his French with a Canadian accent. A similar paper was a marriage contract between Barnabas's uncle Jeremiah and a woman with the maiden name of Laura Stockbridge. Another paper was a disposition of personal belongings after the tragic death of Laura Collins in an accidental fire; there were no children from the marriage. So, Jeremiah was a widower who apparently felt reluctant to marry again.
At last, she found the contract of indenture which showed his full, complete name: Benjamin George Stokes. The signature of Joshua Collins was a large dark swirl of ink, grandiose and full of flourish. Ben Stokes's printed name had the mark of an "X" above it; so, he was illiterate. More powerful than a personal object that belonged to him, or a lock of hair, was the paper that made him belong to someone else. With her fingernails as tweezers, Angelique carefully ripped off a small corner of the paper. She only needed a small bit.
Footsteps lightly skipped down the corridor and approached the door. Angelique dumped the contracts into the drawer and closed it with her foot.
Sarah Collins danced into the room while reciting a little sing-song rhyme to herself. "One two, away they flew. Three four, by the door. Five six, count the bricks."
"What are you doing here?" Angelique asked.
Sarah quickly put her arms behind her back, but not before Angelique noticed she held a small leather journal. "I'm playing."
"What do you have there?" Angelique pointed at her, at an angle, aiming for whatever she hid behind her frilly pink skirts.
"Nothing."
"It's a sin before God to tell a lie, you know."
Pouting, she brought her little arms around to the front and showed Angelique the journal. "I came to put it back."
"What is it?"
"Secrets. My father's secrets. He writes down rhymes to remember them. He likes to hide a lot of things where no one will ever find them, and I..." Sarah's blue eyes twinkled with mischief. "I like to find them."
Angelique watched with fascination as the little girl crawled behind an upholstered chair. She pulled out a couple of bricks from the wall, down low, close to the floor. She replaced the journal in the hole and carefully put the bricks back into place.
"You certainly are a clever little girl."
Sarah stood up. "Merci beaucoup. That's French for thank you."
"I know."
Sarah skipped to the door but paused at the threshold. "Don't tell anyone I was in here. The truth is, I'm not really allowed. My father will be very angry with me."
Angelique smiled to put her at ease. "I won't tell, if you won't."
#
Back in her room in the servants quarters, Angelique mixed her brew in a mortar of coarsely glazed stoneware. She crushed the dried herbs into powder with her pestle. She added a few strands of her golden hair, and clippings of her fingernails, and pricked her finger to add a drop of blood. Finally she added the little scrap of paper from the indenture contract. Into the sweetened cream of a hot rum toddy, she sprinkled the contents of her mortar and pestle.
Sitting before the fire, she whispered to the inhuman eyes between the flames. The brightness was a gateway to places beyond the simple walls.
"Ben... Ben Stokes?" Her voice echoed beyond the reach of her throat. Like the howling winds of November, the words of her spirit traveled through the dark trees, penetrating the leafless branches, finding the path to the brawny servant.
She knew, without seeing, that he was wielding an axe and splitting firewood.
"Come to me, Benjamin George Stokes. I am calling you. Come to me."
The toddy's cream fizzled and darkened to the color of coffee, and she knew that he had heard her beckoning. Angelique strolled across the room with all the grace and somber ceremony of a priest bringing the wine to the altar at high mass. By the time she poured it into a pewter tankard, Ben Stokes knocked on her bedroom door.
"You're here!" Ben was panting with the exertion from running the whole way. "I hoped you would be."
"I'm delighted you've come to visit. You must be very cold from working outside."
"Aye, that I am."
She held forth the tankard to him. "Would you care to join me in drinking a hot toddy?"
"Thanks." Ben Stokes gulped it down in one chug-a-lug. Soon, a golden shadow of cold firelight passed over his eyes.
She removed the tankard from his limp grasp before he might drop it. "How do you feel?"
"Drunk but sober." His eyes looked about the room with wonderment as if he had never seen a spinning wheel, or a table, or a fireplace before.
"You belong to me, now, Benjamin George Stokes. Your will is no longer your own. I shall guide you through the darkness and protect you from all evil, yes, anyone who would harm you will feel my wrath. In return, you will serve me." She reached for his large hand, her own pale fingers like a child's in his broad calloused palm. "Yours is the hand I will use when mine is too small. Your arms will be my strength when mine are too weak."
"You... you..." His eyes widened with the fear of a sailor watching the approach of a storm at sea. "You're a witch."
Fury blazed in her eyes. "I don't want you to ever say that word again! Nor any other word that means the same thing. It offends me."
Ben Stokes bowed his head. "Forgive me."
"You are forgiven." She strolled away, slow and grand, with the air of command that the Countess duPres used for ordering her servants about. "Now, I need you to do two things for me. First, get a shovel and go dig up a pound of potter's clay."
"There's a potter's workshop behind the stables. I can get..."
"I said, I want freshly dug clay that no other human hands have touched! Put it from the shovel into a bucket and don't touch it yourself. Listen to my orders carefully, Ben, and follow them exactly."
He nodded with a sigh. "I'm listening."
"Next, you must find me a spider's web and take care not to break a single thread of it. Uproot an entire oak tree, if you must, but do not damage the web."
"I understand." Shoulders slumped, and seeming to lose a bit of his height, he shuffled out of the door.
Angelique sat down by the fire. She whispered from her mind's eye to the bright shadows, Prepare yourself, my friends, for I will call upon your help very soon.