Of course she made no response. After a sufficient silence, I tired of having her standing behind me. “Leave me,” I said. “Go and tell Peek to help you open the shutters.”
MOTHER’S ESTATE IS left entirely to me and is greater than I thought. She had set aside a small inheritance I knew nothing about, and it has grown impressively. So I am to have the house, the furnishings, sufficient income to live comfortably, and two slaves, Peek and a boy named Isaiah whom Mother has hired out to a baker in town. All this is mine, and yet it is not mine, because my husband can, and doubtless will, dispose of it just as soon as I can get it. “Is there no way to preserve this to myself?” I pleaded with the lawyer.
“Not unless you were to divorce your husband,” he said. “And that could take years. In the meantime he would have control of the estate.”
My aunt sat beside me, her lips pressed tightly together, trying to block out the word “divorce” by batting her eyes.
“Of course, when your husband passes away, the property will all come to you,” the lawyer reassured me.
“If there’s anything left of it,” I said.
As we left the lawyer’s office I observed to my aunt, “The laws in this state are designed to provoke the citizens to murder.”
She gave me a disapproving look. “It’s the same everywhere,” she said. “A woman’s property is her husband’s.”
“My husband won’t want Peek. What am I going to do with her?”
“Peek is a problem,” she agreed. “Come and have coffee with me, and we will discuss it.”
Mother’s will requested that Peek should not be sold at market, or hired to any establishment, and that she not be required to leave the city, as, Mother had written, “she has a terror of country life.”
“I have no wish to keep her,” I told my aunt when we were seated in her drawing room. “Would you want her for yourself?”
“No,” she said. “My Ines is an excellent cook. And the unhappy truth is that Peek is not an accomplished chef.”
“Delphine says she can spoil milk just by looking at it,” I said.
My aunt smiled. “Your poor mother used to borrow Ines for her dinner parties two or three times a month, whenever your uncle and I were dining out.”
“That was generous of you,” I said.
“It was an exchange,” she explained. “Peek spent the evening in my big kitchen making her medicines for all of us. No one can stand to be in the house when she’s at that.”
“Mother swore by her remedies,” I agreed.
“I continually derive benefit from her chest infusion.”
“She does nothing but cry,” I said. “She thinks I’m going to take her home with me and make her cook for the field hands.”
“That might occasion an insurrection,” my aunt chuckled.
“Do you know how old she is?”
“She wasn’t a girl when she came to your mother, and that was twenty years ago. She is fifty or fifty-five, I would guess.”
“She wouldn’t bring one hundred dollars at sale.”
“No,” my aunt agreed. “She has little value.”
We sipped our coffee. I felt at ease, lighthearted, as I seldom do, but as I once did. The furnishings, the paintings, the carpet in my aunt’s drawing room all reminded me of happier times. Even the leafy pattern on the saucer in my lap seemed designed especially to please me. “She should be with someone like Mother,” I concluded. “A widowed lady, living alone.”
“And one not particular about food,” my aunt added. “I can’t think of anyone in the family.”
“We’ll have to find someone to give her to, I suppose,” I said.
“That seems much the best course.”
“Is there someone in the neighborhood?”
After a few moments’ thought, my aunt replied, “I don’t know of anyone. But you might ask Peek. She may have some idea about what to do herself.”
AND TO MY surprise, my aunt was right. When I called Peek into the parlor, I was prepared for a scene of tears and lamentation, but as soon as I had related the stipulations of Mother’s will, she dried her eyes and showed a keen interest in her fate. “Miss Favrot will take me to nurse her mother,” she said. “Her house three blocks from here.”
“How can you be sure?”
“My cousin work in her house. He already spoke for me and his mistress say she take me, but she won’t pay no high price.”
“Are you acquainted with this lady?”
“I brought her a remedy for her son one time. He suffer from the croup. He got better when the doctors couldn’t do nothin’ for him.”