Saskia had a sense of her mistake midway on the journey to America. She could have returned to her people in Tunck, but she still felt for him and thought all along the way that she would never be forgiven, might even be told just to return to her husband. At first, Thorbecke worked as a fisherman along the Hudson River, but the captain and his crew got the notion that Thorbecke was bad luck and he was sent on his way. He went to peddling in New York City after that, clothes, trinkets, fruits and vegetables. He failed again, as he had a viperous temper and drove away customers. Soon he began to live on just what Saskia was making as a maid with the wealthy in the city. One of those families was the one in the photograph that Calvin Newman owned. The frozen dog in the picture was named Otto, after Saskia’s own dog back in Tunck.

She did not make much as a maid. Room and board were part of what she made, and that could not be turned into money for Thorbecke. He sent her into prostitution and then, after more than a year, he sold her to a man who took her and three other women, all of them from Europe, south, first to Philadelphia and, finally, to North Carolina, where that man’s father and mother had a brothel. In that brothel, Saskia worked and put Thorbecke away, then she put her people and all of Tunck away.

It was there that Manfred Carlyle fell in love with her. By the time they met, a little less than three years before Henry died, love was not something Saskia cared about. She welcomed him each time he came, told him all that he wanted to hear, and though he forgot during the course of it that he was paying for the words, she did not. He came to her often, forever desperate to be near her. “I made the trip here in less time than I thought I would,” he said once, his face sweaty and red from the ride. “Then I will prepare your reward,” Saskia said.

Carlyle was twenty years her senior, and he was one of Counsel Skiffington’s creditors. John Skiffington’s cousin allowed Carlyle to “air out” at his plantation from all the whiskey and sex at the brothel. Counsel had always been pleased to accommodate a man he owed money to and he told his overseer, Cameron Darr, to stay by Carlyle and make him happy. In a little cottage at the northeast corner of Counsel’s plantation, Carlyle would air out, sleeping for some fourteen hours a day. On what would be his last visit, Darr made him happy by drinking with him. After the three days of airing out, Carlyle went the twenty miles to his own place, to his family who were gray things after his colorful time with Saskia. Like Thorbecke and Saskia, Carlyle, too, would not suffer a day from smallpox, and his family and his slaves were spared as well. On that last trip from Counsel’s plantation, someone stole his horse while he peed down at a riverbank. “That shoulda told me somethin,” he told a friend months later, back at the brothel.

Counsel Skiffington had suffered through three years of failed crops and then, in the fourth year, the year Saskia arrived in Johnston County, he began to prosper again. He considered it a good year if each slave produced $250 worth of crops but for those three terrible years, he got only $65 from each slave. The times had been so hard that the house servants, people with flawless skin and hands that had not known any blisters that mattered, were sent into the fields to work with the hope that more hands could wring more from the land. Carlyle was one of four creditors, only one of them a bank, and the creditors were kind to him during those years, though the bank sent a man out every other month to check on the health of the plantation. In that fourth year, the year of recovery, the profit from each slave was $300, and the bank man stopped coming. Counsel was on his way to an even better fifth year when, in the middle of a quiet night, Darr the overseer woke with a cough so loud that it woke Counsel’s wife, Belle, in their mansion a quarter of a mile away. Her husband slept on, being the kind of man-as Belle noted once in a letter to her cousin-in-law Winifred Skiffington-who could sleep through Jesus knocking on the door. Darr’s coughing woke the four Skiffington children, too, but Belle and two of the children’s slaves managed to get them back to sleep. She told the servants to return to bed and she did the same, but found sleep elusive even after the overseer’s coughing abated about an hour later.

There was no more coughing from Darr after that first night, but one slave after another began to fall ill with headaches, chills, nausea and an overwhelming pain in their backs and limbs. “They are not pretendin,” the overseer told Counsel. “I would know pretendin and this ain’t it.” Darr, a man with five children, had very little beyond the life he had on the plantation, and he had so liked hearing Carlyle talk of all the places he had been and all the women who gave him heaven and how he settled at last on Saskia. Darr was not a drinking man but he had drunk that last time with Carlyle because it made his tales all the sweeter to hear, all the sweeter to remember. He told Counsel about the slaves not pretending a day or so before the dusty red spots began to appear on the slaves and on his own children. Counsel decided to bring in the white doctor, knowing that what the slaves had was not a one-week stumble on the way to a profitable fifth year.

The doctor quarantined the place and it wasn’t long before word spread throughout the region that “A Child’s Dream,” as Belle had christened the plantation, was falling to pieces. The man from the bank, fearing that his employer would make him go out to Counsel’s even with the quarantine, quit his job.

By the time Manfred Carlyle had been home four weeks with his family, more than half of the slaves on Counsel’s plantation had died, some twenty-one human beings, ranging in age from nine months to forty-nine years; that number included one-year-old Becky, who was teething but whose mother had nursed her as often as she could with the hope that the disease would pass on by her child; seventeen-year-old Nancy, who was days from marrying a man she thought she loved, a man with enough muscles for two men; thirty-nine-year-old-Essie, who had just committed adultery for the eighth time; and twenty-nine-year-old Torry, who had a harelip but who had four days before he died swallowed whole two raw chicken gizzards, having been told by a root worker that they would cure his “affliction.” Then, after those slaves perished, Darr’s wife died, and so did three of their children. Ten more slaves died, and that same day the first of Counsel’s children died, the oldest girl, freckle-faced Laura, who played the piano so well. In the three days that followed her death the disease swept up nearly all the rest of them, down to the youngest slave, ten-week-old Paula, whose mother had died in childbirth. Only Counsel remained, as healthy as the rainy evening his mother gave birth to him.

The animals would live, too, managing somehow to get by even with all their caregivers dead. The creditors, weeks and weeks later, would not get much for livestock from a place God had turned his back on. A buyer’s place might be next if he bought a cow or a horse; if God could do that to Counsel Skiffington, one potential buyer noted, then what all would he do to poor me?

In the end, after Counsel had tried to drive the animals away, there was not much more than the land, and even that, more than a year later when creditors and others were brave enough to go on it, would be sold for a little less than 45 percent of what it was worth. Belle was the penultimate person to die, just hours before a slave, fifty-three-year-old Alba, wandered in delirium away from his cabin and sat down to death in front of Carlyle’s airing-out cottage. With Belle’s death, Counsel burned down the mansion. From the first death he had buried no one and all the people in his family, including the bodies of nine servants, were burned along with the building. He then went to the cottage where Carlyle had stayed and Darr’s place, and he burned those structures down. The barns. The smokehouse. The blacksmith shop. Everything was burned to the ground. The cabins of the slaves, many with the bodies of the dead still in them, resisted the fire and most of them stayed up, scorched but ready for more tenants. The mud and cheap brick structures would be standing when the first creditor’s accountant arrived to see what he had to deal with. Eight months later, in Georgia, Counsel would take note of a two-door cabin built for two slave families, and it would come to him that the cabins on his land stayed up because they, like the two-door place, had close to nothing in them. Even God’s mansion would burn easily if there were a piano in the parlor and 300 books in the library from floor to ceiling and wooden furniture that came from England and France and worlds beyond.