"Then I must bid you farewell, Miss Bedford. And lose you to more worthy companions."
She looked at him dumbly, her blood still pumping from the dance. The exhilaration and release were the very thing she'd been needing.
"I have no intention of missing the grand start-up." She
tried to catch her breath. "It's to be history in the making, don't you recall?"
"That it truly will be." He shrugged. "But are you sure the sugar-works is any place for a woman?"
"As much as a man." She glared back at him. "There's a woman there already, Captain. Briggs' mulatto. I heard him say she's in the boiling house tonight, showing one of the new Africans how to heat the sap. She supposedly ran one once in Brazil."
"Maybe she just told him that to avoid the dance." He turned and watched the planters begin filing out through the wide rear door. "Shall we join them, then?"
As they walked out into the courtyard, the cool night air felt delicious against her face and sweltering bodice. At the back of the compound Briggs was opening a heavy wooden gate in the middle of the ten-foot-high stone wall that circled his house.
"These Africans'll make all the difference, on my faith. It's already plain as can be." He cast a withering glance at Katherine as she and Winston passed, then he followed them through, ordering the servants to secure the gate. The planters were assembled in a huddle now, surrounded by several of Briggs' indentures holding candle-lanterns. He took up his place at the front of the crowd and began leading them down the muddy road toward the torch-lit sugarworks lying to the left of the plantation house.
Along the road were the thatched cabins of the indentured servants, and beyond these was a cluster of half-finished reed and clay huts, scarcely head high, that the Africans had begun constructing for themselves.