The eight years after the epidemic were not a healing. They were an occupation.
Hartwell worked because work kept his hands moving and left his mind less room to wander into the rooms where Eleanor’s laughter used to be.
He expanded fields, bought neighboring parcels, stored wealth he no longer had anyone to inherit it.
Invitations piled up and died unopened on his desk. He stopped traveling to the city. He stopped inviting anyone in.
Magnolia Ridge became a place where servants stepped softly and spoke in whispers, as if the whole house were a church with a coffin at the altar.
It was his overseer, Lucius Brewer, who finally broke the pattern.
“Colonel,” Brewer said one evening in early March of 1856, standing in the doorway of Hartwell’s study with his hat in his hands, “we’re short on hands for the next harvest. There’s a sale in New Orleans. Folks say some of these are the last shipments coming in through the gulf routes before the laws tighten again. We need to look.”
Hartwell didn’t lift his head from the ledger. “Send someone.”
Brewer shifted, stubborn in a way he rarely was. “You should go yourself. People take you serious. They won’t cheat the weights or hide the sickness when you’re the one looking.”
Hartwell’s pen paused. In the quiet between them, the house seemed to breathe, old wood settling, distant voices from the quarters riding the night air.
“You want me out of my own home,” Hartwell said flatly.
“I want you alive in it,” Brewer answered before he could stop himself, then swallowed hard as if he’d tasted his own audacity. “Begging your pardon, sir.”
Hartwell should have thrown him out for that. Instead he stared at the ink on his page until it blurred. There were days when he felt like a man who had already died and simply forgotten to lie down. Finally he stood, reaching for his coat as if it belonged to someone else.
“Fine,” he said. “We’ll go.”
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