She stood apart from the main group, not chained in the same way, guarded by a trader who watched her like he watched his money.
There were five other women with her, dressed more cleanly than the field hands, their hair arranged, their faces scrubbed.
“House girls,” Brewer murmured beside Hartwell. “Luxury stock. Folks use them for entertaining, for showing off.”
Isabella did not look like she belonged to a category. She looked like a person trapped inside a category that was too small to hold her.
Hartwell felt something in his chest shift, not quite desire, not quite pity. It was closer to hunger, but not for her body. For movement. For sensation. For the strange proof that he could still be startled by life.
The trader noticed his gaze and stepped forward, lips curling into a professional grin. His name was Étienne Dupré, French by birth or by performance, broad in the middle, rings on his fingers.
“You have an excellent eye, Colonel,” Dupré said, voice slick with confidence. “She is… exceptional.”
“Where did she come from?” Hartwell asked, pointing with his cane as if distance could keep him clean.
“Born in Louisiana,” Dupré replied. “Raised in a fine house in New Orleans. Her mother served there. The master had… attachments. He saw to her education. Reading, writing, sums, even some French. Then he died. Debts. The legitimate family sold everything.”
Dupré shrugged like weather. “A shame, but business.”
“How much?”
Dupré’s grin widened. “For you, considering quality, twelve thousand.”
It was absurd. With that sum Hartwell could have purchased an army of field hands.
Brewer’s eyes widened, a silent plea for sanity. But Isabella lifted her gaze at that moment, just once, and met Hartwell’s eyes with a steady look that held neither pleading nor gratitude.
It held only recognition, as if she had seen men like him all her life and had decided long ago she would not be surprised by them again.
“Done,” Hartwell said, and hated himself for the speed of it.
The bidding at the yard was for show, a legal performance to put the sale in the books, but Dupré made Hartwell play it out anyway, perhaps to protect his own reputation.
Two other planters tried to compete, their bids rising like taunts. Hartwell outbid them with the calm of a man tossing coins into a fire, and when the hammer fell, the yard went still.
Isabella was his. By evening, she rode out of New Orleans in Hartwell’s carriage, not shackled like the others, sitting opposite him with her hands in her lap, looking out the window as the city’s gas lamps faded into swamp-dark roads.
Hartwell attempted to read a newspaper. The words refused to assemble into meaning. His eyes kept lifting, stolen glances he tried to disguise as boredom, studying the curve of her cheek, the unshaken line of her mouth, the way her posture refused to bend even when the wheels hit ruts.
For two days they did not speak. Silence became a third passenger, heavy and watchful.
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