In the quiet, breathless moments after their physical joining, they would lie in the darkness and talk. Joshua, utilizing the education he had secretly acquired, would softly recite passages from Shakespeare and John Milton, his deep voice wrapping around the complex poetry. Margaret would lie beside him, listening in absolute awe, deeply marveling at the horrific, cruel injustice of a society that could look at a man possessing such vast intellect, such profound emotional depth, and legally classify him as nothing more than livestock. She fell completely and utterly in love with him. It was not the simple, pure, romantic love found in storybooks; it was something vastly darker, incredibly complicated, and heavily tainted. It was a love inextricably mixed with profound guilt and deep, abiding shame. She loved him deeply, yet she knew with terrifying certainty that her love placed him in constant, mortal peril. She loved him, yet she still possessed the legal paperwork that declared she owned him. Joshua, in turn, loved her back, but Margaret could occasionally catch a glimmer of dark, insurmountable doubt in his eyes. How, after all, can an enslaved human being ever truly, fully trust the love of the person holding the whip?
But on the specific night that everything changed, as Margaret carefully crept across the moonlit yard toward the shed behind the stables, she was not thinking about the dark complexities of their socio-economic reality. She was thinking only of the heat of his hands, the taste of his mouth, and the desperate relief of forgetting, even for an hour, that she was Margaret Ashford. She pushed the heavy wooden door open, the pale moonlight filtering through the cracks in the walls to illuminate Joshua waiting for her. He smelled deeply of the forge, of coal dust and honest sweat.
“You shouldn’t come,” he whispered, his eyes scanning the darkness outside. “It’s too dangerous.” “I know,” Margaret replied, stepping into his arms. “I don’t care.”
But she absolutely should have cared. Because up in the massive main house, gazing down from a second-story window where he sat nursing a heavy crystal glass of amber brandy, Nathaniel Ashford was wide awake. He had seen the unmistakable silhouette of his young wife slipping out the back door and moving stealthily toward the outbuildings. Driven by a dark mixture of suspicion and a sudden, uncharacteristic burst of jealous resolve, Nathaniel made the fateful decision to follow her into the hot summer night.
What happened next would irrevocably alter the foundations of the plantation, but it would not unfold in the way one might expect. The ensuing drama would not come from the horrific, bloody violence that Joshua so deeply feared, nor would it come from the massive public scandal and social ruin that Margaret had anxiously imagined. It would, instead, emerge from something infinitely stranger and vastly more twisted: a genuinely shocking proposal from a broken, defeated man who had reached a highly desperate, unthinkable conclusion about the absolute only way left to save his failing marriage, protect his fragile public reputation, and salvage what precious little remained of his masculine dignity.
