At dawn, Overseer Harlan Pike arrived with two armed riders.
Pike did not ordinarily enter the woodshop without knocking. This morning he kicked the door wide and told Daniel to stand against the wall. The riders were local men who sometimes escorted purchases from the county market. Neither met Daniel’s eyes.
“A bracelet is missing from the lady’s dressing room,” Pike announced. “She says you threatened her.”
Daniel remained still while Pike searched the shelves. He pulled out the cabinet’s tools, overturned a box of fittings, and yanked the left drawer completely free. In its back corner lay a silver bracelet shaped like a twisting vine, its clasp bent and bright.
“There,” Pike said.
Daniel had never touched it. He had seen it on Catherine’s wrist at dinner when he carried a repaired chair into the dining room. But the bracelet itself was not the detail that stopped him. Under the drawer was a crescent of pale sawdust, fresh against the darker walnut shavings he had swept there the night before. Beside the bench, in the soft dust by the leg, a boot sole had pressed a distinctive diamond with a missing corner.
Catherine had worn soft slippers. Daniel wore boots with flat repairs on both heels. The third print belonged to neither of them.
Pike grabbed Daniel’s arm. “Now you can explain yourself to the master.”
Daniel looked once at the drawer. Its underside had a new gouge, made by somebody using a blunt chisel rather than the thin awl kept in his tray. Whoever planted the bracelet had been clumsy, hurried, or certain that no one would care about an enslaved carpenter’s observations.
“What time was it found?” Daniel asked.
Pike tightened his grip. “After you stole it.”
“That is not a time.”
One rider coughed to hide a laugh. Pike hit the workbench hard enough to send the brass pins scattering. “You will answer questions, not ask them.”
As they took Daniel outside, he spotted an empty barrow beside the bakehouse and saw the same diamond print stamped in the mud. Someone had walked from the woodshop toward the carriage shed before dawn. He could not examine it with Pike pushing him forward. But he could remember.
The bracelet, he realized, was an accusation. The sawdust was a direction.
2. THE MAKING OF A LIE
Master Alden Wexley received Daniel in a breakfast room where an untouched plate sat beside a newspaper. Alden was not an old man. His hands were soft, his temper uncertain, and his recent enthusiasm for modern machinery had left the plantation indebted to people he preferred not to name. His wife stood at the window, face composed.
