Desire in the Sun (8 page)

The caliber of slaves Kevin was interested in for Heart’s Ease would be sold on the upper side, so they headed toward the courthouse’s porticoed front. Lilah shortly found herself standing near the front of the crowd gathered before a narrow wooden platform raised perhaps three feet off the ground. On it stood the nattily dressed auctioneer extolling the virtues of a stripped-to-the-waist field hand, age, the auctioneer swore, no more than nineteen. Damon, as the auctioneer named him, was ebony-skinned and heavily muscled, and Lilah was not surprised when Kevin jumped right into the binding. When Damon was knocked down to Kevin for the
princely sum of five hundred dollars, the slave grinned from ear to ear, proud of the price he’d brought. He was tagged and at a signal from Kevin led away, to be picked up later that day.

The auction passed swiftly. As it neared the end Lilah lost what little interest she’d had in the proceedings and wandered away. Kevin had bought ten prime field hands for Heart’s Ease, as well as a likely-looking mulatto girl who he said could help Maisie, the cook, in the kitchen. His bidding completed unless something that looked exceptionally good should come along, he had fallen into conversation with the gentleman standing next to him, and they were deep in discussion about alternate methods of irrigation. Lilah made her way around the crowd toward the back of the courthouse. No one could accuse Kevin of a lack of interest in his chosen line of work, she thought.

Without any destination in mind, Lilah found herself skirting the edge of the far different crowd attending the auction on Cheapside. The people here were less prosperous farmers and merchants and even white trash who had scraped together enough money to buy an inferior slave or two. Unlike his counterpart on the upper side, this auctioneer was shabbily dressed and raucous, extolling the virtues of a stooped old man with a weary look in his eyes.

“Amos here got a lotta years left in him. And he’s stronger than he looks. Why, he can still lift a hoe with the best of ‘em, cain’t ya, Amos?”

Amos nodded his grizzled head dutifully. But the bidding was unenthusiastic, and in the end he was knocked down for only a hundred dollars to a burly farmer with a mean look in his eyes. Lilah felt a vague pity for Amos as she turned around to head back to the front, where she felt more comfortable. The noise level on this side was giving her a headache, and there was a definite smell
of unwashed bodies emanating from the crowd. Besides, Kevin would be wondering where she had gone. …

“Now here we have a fine young buck, Joss by name, strong as an ox. Just needs to be broke to bridle a little bit. What am I bid?”

“Why, that’s a white man!”

“Nah, he’s high yeller. Don’ you remember hearin’ …?”

“Lookit the chains on ‘im! He must be a mean’un! I wouldn’t have ‘im at any price!”

“I’ll give fifty dollars!”

“Fifty dollars! Come on, Mr. Collier! Once he’s broke, he’ll be worth five hundred sure!” The auctioneer refuted the low bid indignantly.

“Yeah, if he don’ kill somebody in the breakin’! Or if ya don’ end up havin’ to kill him!”

While this exchange was going on between the auctioneer and a man in the crowd, Lilah glanced up at the auction block and froze. He was dirty, his hair matted and tangled, his mustache gone. Instead what looked like a two-week growth of beard darkened his jaw. He was barefoot, clad only in a pair of tattered breeches that Lilah realized with a shock were the remnants of the buff ones he’d been wearing that fateful night, with something that was more rag than shirt clinging to his shoulders. His chest was mostly bare, revealing corded muscles and glimpses of rib, with a thick wedge of black hair in the center. His mouth was swollen and there was a crust of dried blood at the corner. At the moment it was distorted by a feral snarl. A livid purple bruise extended across his left cheekbone, and there was a half-healed cut on his right temple. Lilah felt her heart stop as she looked at the muscles popping out of the nearly bare arms because his hands were tied so tightly behind his back. A chain linked his ankles, and another chain secured him to a post at the rear of the auction block. Despite his changed appearance, there was no mistaking
Joss. Staring helplessly, Lilah felt nausea rise up in her throat, and had to swallow to hold it back, Oh, dear God, that he had been reduced to this. … The reality of Amanda’s revenge was more dreadful than what she had ever imagined.

“Who’ll go a hundred? A hundred dollars for a fine young buck!” The auctioneer, keeping a wary distance from the goods he was trying to sell, scanned the crowd. “He’s a bargain at the price!”

“I’ll go sixty!” a man called.

“Sixty dollars! Why, that’s almost crime! You’ll get arrested if you take him away for that, Sam Johnson! Come on, folks! I want a hundred!”

“Let’s see his back, Neely! I’ll wager he’s been whipped within an inch of his life! Who needs a troublemaker, huh?”

“Yeah, Neely, let’s see his back!”

Reluctantly, the auctioneer yielded to crowd pressure.

“Turn around, boy!” he said to Joss.

“Go to hell!” was the growled response. It was clearly audible even to Lilah, who stood in the back row. The auctioneer, scowling, motioned to a couple of burly men who stood on either side of the platform. They climbed up and wrestled the recalcitrant victim around, stripping off the tattered shirt in the process. The exposed back was raw and red, marked with crisscrossing welts. Lilah felt nausea threaten again. She pressed a hand to her mouth, afraid she might actually vomit.

“I withdraw my bid!” yelled the man who had gone sixty dollars.

“Mine stands!” said the fifty-dollar bidder, who added in an aside to the crowd in general: “Hell, you can’t buy hog slop that cheap! And if he gives me too much grief, that’s just what he’ll be—hog slop!”

There was a murmur of sympathetic agreement from the crowd as Joss, released by the burly guards, turned to face them. His face was livid with fury, and with the
muscles of his arms and chest tensed and bulging he looked dangerous. In no way did he resemble the dashing, laughing stranger who had flirted with her so boldly and almost stolen her heart. They had made him into a beast, and her heart bled for him.

Her eyes had remained fixed on him from the time she had first recognized him, while his had scornfully challenged the crowd. As they swept the assemblage, daring anyone to bid, they passed over where she stood toward the rear. Then, as if in slow motion, they returned. Those green eyes whose color she remembered more vividly than she did her own fastened on hers.

VIII

J
oss was snarling out over the mob like a wild beast at bay when he saw her. She was standing near the edge of the gawking crowd staring up at him, the deep frilled brim of her pale yellow sunbonnet casting a shadow over her face. She was exactly as he remembered her, more beautiful than any young woman had a right to be, looking cool as spring water in the sweltering August heat. The masses of silvery hair that he had seen first in charming disorder were tucked up primly under the sun-bonnet, which was trimmed with a narrow ribbon in a soft grayed blue almost exactly the color of her eyes, if his memory served him correctly. She looked as insubstantial as a sunbeam in a pale yellow dress secured under the sweet high curve of her breasts by a ribbon in the same shade of blue that trimmed her bonnet. The long end of the ribbon fluttered down the front of her narrow skirt. The dress itself was made of some gauzy material apparently designed to reveal as much as conceal the delectable curves of her slender body. Below short puffed sleeves her arms were bare, tantalizingly slim and pale in the bright afternoon sunlight. Her expression was hidden from him, but even at that distance he could sense her revulsion, feel her pity for him. Rage flooded through him, covering a tide of humiliation deeper than anything he had ever known.

When he had met her he had been cockily sure of his power over her sex; sure that, if he wished it, he could have nearly any woman he wanted. Females had always found him attractive, and he had managed to take full advantage of that fortunate circumstance more times than he could remember. Then Delilah Remy had gone tumbling into a bush, baring a pair of slender, thrashing, white-stockinged legs to the thigh to pique his interest. When he had done nothing more than the gentlemanly thing by attempting to adjust her skirt for her, she had tried to punch his nose. At first he’d merely been vastly amused. But then, after he’d gotten a good look at her and discovered that the spitfire was a staggering beauty, he’d been enchanted. And had stayed enchanted until this nightmare had caught him in its thrall. There’d been something about her that had appealed to him, something beyond the delicate perfection of her face and form. He had liked her, really liked her. And he had wanted her. Just as she had wanted him, though she was probably too innocent to put what she had felt when he had touched her in those terms. Even that baby’s breath of a kiss he’d given her had caused her to catch fire. …

But that was in the past. Harsh reality was standing on a platform in the broiling sun, his tongue swollen from thirst and his arms throbbing from being bound so tightly. The rest of his body ached in too many locations to enumerate. He’d been hit and kicked and whipped and beaten so many times that he’d lost count. He’d been stripped of his name and identity and even his race, reduced to the status of a beast to be bought or sold simply because his grandmother had been the great-granddaughter of a gullah, and enslaved.

Impossible to believe—it had taken him some days to become convinced that the whole thing wasn’t a hideous mistake—but horribly true. His own ancestry was thirty-one parts white to one part black, a mere teaspoonful of blood, and yet it was enough in this colonial backwater
to condemn him to the ranks of the inhuman. His education, his background, even the successful shipping business he had built up, counted for nothing against that soupçon of blood. Never in his life had he imagined being brought so low, or being so powerless to do anything about it. Even his protestations that he had the funds to buy his freedom at that farce of a hearing availed him of nothing. They would not even permit him to send a message to his ship. Slaves had no rights, and could claim ownership of nothing, he had been told as they dragged him away in chains.

He’d been visited in the shed that was his prison by that crazy old woman, Amanda Barton, who had told him—as if she were discussing the weather—that she meant to see him broken. He’d raged at her, spewing profanity that he’d been shocked to find himself using toward any female, even her. She’d cackled with delighted laughter, and left him, chained and ranting, in the dark. Later someone—it had been too dark to make out his assailant’s identity—had come in and, without a word, beaten him senseless. He’d been starved and deprived of water, beaten and humiliated and left to wallow in his own filth until he felt himself to be less than human. Ever since the nightmare had started he’d been treated like an animal, no, worse than an animal, with malicious cruelty. And he had, finally, been driven to responding like an animal, earning for his pains more beatings with fists and cudgels, and a bout with a bullwhip.

Eventually he had learned to husband his anger, hoarding it like a miser with his gold, promising himself that if he waited he would have an opportunity to escape. He had not guessed that the old witch planned to sell him like the unwanted property she claimed he was, or that he would be taken from the tumbledown shed where he’d been kept chained and filthy for weeks, only to find himself chained and filthy on an auction block.

To be put up for public inspection and bid on like a damned horse—he’d not thought he could sink to any greater depths. Then to find her eyes on him, knowing that she was seeing him dirty and stinking and half-naked and that the shaming marks of the whip were clearly visible to her eyes, … He wanted to kill. The blood-lust that rushed through him was so intense as to sweep every consideration of prudence or even survival before it.

He roared with rage, baring his teeth and throwing every ounce of his strength into the lunge that was intended to break the chain that held him to the post. The post groaned and quivered, and for a moment, just for a moment, he thought he might break free. Though if he did he would likely be shot for his pains. …

The more fearful in the crowd cried out while the auctioneer spun around so fast that he tottered and almost fell off the block. Immediately two burly guards were upon Joss, their cudgels falling thick and fast around his head and shoulders. With his arms tied behind him and his ankles chained, there was no way he could protect himself, but he tried, ducking and dodging as best he could to escape the worst of the blows. Inevitably he was beaten to his knees. Then a heavy boot crashed into his ribcage. Pain sharp enough to penetrate the fog of rage that enveloped him stabbed through his chest. He gasped, doubling over so that his forehead touched the dusty wood of the block. Another boot caught him in the lower back. He gasped a second time, and cold sweat break out on his forehead.

“I’ll bid a hundred dollars for him!”