“You said he’s been gone for two days,” she said. “Do you know where he went?”
“He done told us to finish de harvest and dat he’d be home again soon, but he ain’t come home yet. So’s like I already said, we put de harvested tobaccointo de tobacco barn and just stayed in our homes and waited,” he said. “Where have you been, Missie Lavinia?” He gazed at Wolf Dancer, then at Lavinia. “You’ve been at de Seminole village? Is dat where Dorey is? And Twila?”
“Yes, they are both safe in the Seminole village, and that’s where I am going once…once…I see to the burning of the mansion,” she said. “We brought enough canoes so that you can journey back to the village with us if you like.”
“But de white panther…de alligators…de snakes,” Nada said, her eyes wide. “Is it safe?”
“When you are with Chief Wolf Dancer and his warriors, you are absolutely safe,” Lavinia assured her. “We’re going inside the mansion now…Wolf Dancer, myself, and Joshua. By the time we leave, you must have made your decision, for we will leave quickly once we’ve set fire to the mansion.”
They all nodded.
Lavinia felt a weakness in her knees as she walked with Wolf Dancer and Joshua inside the house. It was dark and strangely ghostly inside. There was no lamplight or fire’s glow from the massive fireplace in the parlor.
“I’ll find a lamp and light it,” Lavinia said, knowing exactly where to look. She soon found a lamp and touched a flame to its wick.
With the lamp supplying enough light to see by, Lavinia looked around each room, and was stunned speechless by the destruction everywhere.
Hiram had left nothing of value untouched.
Beautiful crystal vases lay in splinters across the lush carpet.
Expensive paintings had been taken from the walls and slashed with a knife.
Lavinia was horrified by the damage that Hiram had done.
“My room,” she gasped out, looking up the winding staircase. “My clothes; my bedroom.”
Although Nada had said that many of her clothes had been cut and torn by Hiram, she wanted to see if anything was left.
Clutching the lamp, and with Joshua and Wolf Dancer following her, she went up the stairs and down the hall to her bedroom.
When she entered it, she saw the full extent of Hiram’s hatred for her. She realized now that she had been wrong to think he would want her as his woman after all that had happened.
No man who expected to bring a woman back to her own room would destroy everything he could, as Hiram had done to her personal belongings.
What clothes he hadn’t thrown out the window lay in shreds across the floor, and even her mattress had been slashed, until the cotton batting fell away from it and was scattered all across the floor.
“My Lord…” Lavinia gasped, feeling faint.
Wolf Dancer moved to one side of her while Joshua went to the other, both holding her until she was steady on her feet.
“And I thought he was looking for me,” Lavinia said, finding grim humor in all of this. “I had beenso afraid that he would do anything to find me, and all along, he hated me so much he would never want me near him.”
“He will return,” Joshua said in a growl. “Remember the harvest and the amount of money he will get from it. And…he probably plans to come back and kill de slaves if he has no interest in stayin’ here any longer. Dat’s sure how it looks, since he destroyed all dat he could get his hands on in de house.”
“We will finish what he started and make certain he has no place to return to,” Wolf Dancer said sternly.
“What ’bout de tobacco plants de slaves worked so hard to harvest?” Joshua asked, searching Wolf Dancer’s eyes.
“We will take the tobacco to my village and find use for it,” Wolf Dancer said, smiling.
“I just want to get out of here and put all of this unhappiness behind me,” Lavinia said as she once again looked at what remained of her clothes and precious belongings.
She went to the table beside her bed where she had kept her mother’s Bible.
Opening the drawer, she gasped with horror when she found it ripped to shreds.
“Even this?” she cried, reaching down and touching what was left of the Bible. “He knew I would come back for my mother’s Bible. He wanted to make certain I would never have it.”