Amélia breathed a deep sigh of relief. The lie had stuck. Benedita, hidden in the pantry, heard it all. She covered her mouth with her hand to let no sound escape, her tears flowing silently. The Mistress had lied perfectly. The colonel believed it, and now the dark-skinned baby she had abandoned in the forest was officially non-existent. A ghost, a secret buried before his life was even recognized.
Benedita felt a shiver run down her spine. She had obeyed the Mistress’s order, but that wasn’t just obedience; it was complicity in a crime that would never be judged, and the weight of it was like a chain around her neck.
The following days were of apparent normalcy. Lady Amélia recovered in her room, surrounded by house slaves who fanned her with straw fans and brought chicken broth in porcelain bowls. The twins, Benedito and Bernardino, were nursed by a wet nurse named Rosa, a young enslaved woman who had lost her own child weeks earlier.
Colonel Tertuliano walked through the farm with a puffed-out chest, inspecting the coffee harvest, shouting orders to the overseers, and drinking cachaça on the veranda. He did not know that his blood ran in the veins of a third child abandoned in the woods, condemned to certain death—or at least, that is what everyone believed.
Benedita worked from sunrise to sunset, washing clothes in the river, cooking in the Big House, serving the Mistress, but her mind was always at the shack, on that baby she had left behind. Every night she prayed softly, asking forgiveness from God and the Orixás. Her daughter Joana noticed the change in her mother. Eyes always red, a heavy silence, deep sighs. “What is it, mother?” the girl would ask. But Benedita would only shake her head. “Nothing, my daughter, it’s just tiredness.”
But it wasn’t tiredness; it was guilt, remorse, and a void growing inside her like a weed. The secret burned within, and she knew that sooner or later, it would come to light. Three days after the birth, Benedita could take it no more. On a moonless night, she fled the slave quarters and ran to the shack, her heart beating wildly. She expected to find a dead baby, devoured by animals or frozen by the cold.
But when she arrived, she heard a faint cry. She pushed open the rotting wooden door and saw him. The baby was still alive, wrapped in the blanket, shivering, hungry, but alive. Benedita fell to her knees, tears streaming down. “A miracle,” she whispered. “It’s a miracle!” She took the boy in her arms, felt the warmth of his skin against hers, and made a decision that would change everything. She would not abandon him again. From then on, she would visit that boy every night in secret, raising him in the shadows, and she gave him a name: Bernardo.
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