The trip to New Orleans took three days by carriage and riverboat, and Hartwell filled the hours with silence.
He traveled with a driver and two armed men, not because he feared bandits more than most planters did, but because wealth made a man visible, and visibility invited trouble.
When they reached the city, the streets smelled of damp brick, fish, spilled beer, and the sweet rot of the river.
Hartwell took rooms at a hotel near the Garden District, a place with clean sheets and polished floors that tried to pretend the city’s filth could not climb its walls.
That night he stared out at the dark trees and wondered why he had agreed to come, as if he didn’t already know the answer: because Brewer had named the truth, and because Hartwell had been tired of haunting his own life.
The next morning, he rode to the sale yard with a perfumed handkerchief pressed against his nose.
The market was crowded, men in heavy coats and muddy boots, merchants with careful smiles, clerks holding pens like weapons.
People were lined up and examined like animals, muscles tested, teeth checked, scars noted with the same disinterest one might bring to counting barrels.
Children were grouped and priced with the cold arithmetic of convenience.
Hartwell moved through it all with a dull, practiced detachment, as if he had put his soul on a shelf years ago and forgotten to retrieve it.
And then he saw Isabella.
Read more on the next page ⬇️⬇️⬇️
