Tag Archives: Excerpt

Like this fellow, for example, the one to whom she owed nominal obedience as a soldier to his officer.  Yes, she understood the necessity of obedience and discipline; she had been schooled in those notions since childhood, but now she … Continue reading →

And there was the other thing, as well. He had looked her up and down—well, not quite as blatantly as the soldiers eyeing up the Polish girls—with his pale blue eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles, and asked in a light tone … Continue reading →

There’s the motorized roar and the background roar of the sea.  There’s the greyed-out horizon, and the signs for the upcoming exits, Iceland coming up in a few hours and beyond that Denmark and Norway.   It’s a dream, of … Continue reading →

Charlotte didn’t know that Araminta fancied Scipio, and the other way round as well.  She didn’t know that Araminta knew by whom Sarah was pregnant and under what conditions.  She didn’t know the whispered conversations that the two sisters had … Continue reading →

The womb and tomb are the only authorized entrance and exit, respectively, into the condition of a slave.  In particular, no manner of self-initiated egress is recognized.  Which in plain language means: you are not to run away, and if … Continue reading →

Welcome to the wonderful world of perpetual servitude.  You won’t have gotten the orientation packet at the door, because you don’t read, not if you have any sense of self-preservation.  It’s worth anybody’s life to teach you that, so don’t … Continue reading →

The rain sluices down Hennepin Avenue and the bus to Utopia is nowhere in sight.  On the other end of that bus line, a crescent-shaped harbor looks out upon a blue sea, all the layers of color from sand-filtered emerald … Continue reading →

No, she won’t think about that, because ten years and five children later (two of them dead in their first year) her blank-slate, lily-white ignorance is so far away and so alien that it might as well be someone else, … Continue reading →

It was quite the rage in her parents’ circle to educate their daughters at convent school, for all that none of them were Roman Catholic.  It produced a demure, innocent and unworldly debutante, properly obedient to duly constituted authority, but … Continue reading →

“Thank you, Araminta,” Charlotte said.  She prided herself on the good manners of her house servants, Araminta and her sister Sarah and the footmen, Scipio and Hannibal.  Thomas liked his male slaves to have names out of the classics; it … Continue reading →