His younger sister, Ruth, worked in the estate kitchen and had a habit of singing softly whenever she was frightened.

When their mother died, Ruth had been twelve, and Caleb had promised he would never leave her alone.

He had broken that promise the morning of his transfer, although he had been given no choice.

Eleanor Whitmore had been married to Colonel Nathaniel Whitmore for eleven years.

The colonel rarely stayed at Hawthorne for more than a month at a time, preferring political dinners in Richmond and business dealings along the river.

Eleanor handled the domestic accounts and used them as a weapon.

A missed task became a lost meal, an unanswered question became a reassignment, and a complaint could become a sale to a trader whose wagons traveled where families could never follow.

Caleb repaired the shutters outside her private sitting room during the first week of an autumn rainstorm.

She watched him from a chair near the fireplace while he worked.

“You have a steady hand,” she said.

“My father taught me, ma’am.”

“And a quiet tongue.”

He did not answer.

That night, a servant summoned him after midnight.

At first Eleanor asked him to fix a drawer that stuck in its frame.

The next night there was a loose window catch.

Soon the repairs disappeared, but the summons continued.

She used the threat of sale to force his obedience and the threat of punishment to keep him silent.

The choices she offered were not choices, and Caleb understood the difference even before he found words for it.

He learned to dread the sound of the small bell that summoned him upstairs.

During the day he moved between ordinary duties with the strange feeling that his own body belonged to the night.

Ruth noticed that his shirt hung loose and that he seldom finished breakfast.

“You’re getting sick,” she told him behind the bakehouse.

“I’m tired.”

“Then tell the housekeeper.”

“Please don’t ask.”

Ruth looked hurt, but she obeyed.

One evening the colonel returned unexpectedly and asked why a lamp remained lit in Eleanor’s rooms.

She answered calmly that she had been reading accounts.

Caleb stood behind a cabinet door holding an empty toolbox, hardly daring to breathe.

When the colonel left, Eleanor pressed her hand against the door.

“If he ever asks, you’ve been repairing the floorboards,” she told Caleb.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You understand what will happen otherwise.”

He did.

The next month Eleanor announced her pregnancy at supper while the colonel sat across from her.