Free Sapphire's Grave by Hilda Gurley Highgate

chattering as she moved about the little house, cooking, feeding, and fussing over him. Lilly’s absolution made these paternal visits endurable for Prince. “My girl—Lilly. She wants to see me.”
    Queen Marie sucked her teeth and turned her head to stare at the
    wall. Prince continued. “She my baby girl. She don’ ask much. I be dere for her dis time.” Prince moved toward the door.
    Queen Marie sprang to her feet, her small breasts bouncing as she rushed toward the door and flung her back against it. “An’ nex’ time?” she asked. “Nex’ time I wanna do suh’m, you gon’ go runnin’ off to dem and leave me by my lonesome?”
    They stared at each other for a long moment, Queen Marie pouting and insolent, Prince realizing with a start, as he often did, that Queen Marie was, after all, still a child, albeit in a woman’s body. He lifted her gently and placed her beside the door. She looked up at him, sadly, but said nothing as he opened the door and bounded down the stairs.
    FISHING CREEK, WARREN COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA
    CHRISTMAS EVE, 1880
    It was snowing when Queen Marie arrived at the roadhouse near Fishing Creek, her backside sore from the buckboard ride she had hitched with a stranger. The door was wide open despite the chill, and inside, Queen Marie could see sweating bodies flailing and spinning to the song of a local celebrity, who swung her great bulk from side to side as she belted out a half-angry, half-forlorn song. Squeezing into the small wooden structure, patched in several places with sheets of tin, Queen Marie removed her coat and shook it vigorously, holding it outside the door, and attracting the attention of several young men who stood in a cluster in the red mud outside. One of them whistled. Queen Marie frowned, squinting at them through the delicate curtain of snow that fell between her and her admirers. She did not notice the boy with the hazel, hooded eyes, younger than the rest, with a thinly veiled excitement and expectancy not possessed by his companions.
    She turned to navigate her way through the crowd, refulgent in a drop-shouldered dress she had appropriated from her mother, a relic of a years-ago past but still fashionable, more than conspicuous in this lackluster gathering of the county’s poorest and least refined. A young man offered to hold her coat. Another offered her his chair, and yet another brought her a drink, and another—151-proof whiskey with no ice.
    Queen Marie danced, her throat burning as she fought back tears. Her Prince was with Sister, at Sister’s house, probably in Sister’s arms. That wench and her daughter—that Lilly—had conspired to lure Prince from her. And Prince was cooperating with them, dim-witted in his wish to be near Sister under any pretense that his wife devised.
    And Queen Marie—childless after years of effort—was left alone on Christmas Eve, no child to even the score between Sister and herself, no family to entangle Prince in a web of loyalty and love and tradition during this holiday season. She whirled in the space on the dance floor that had opened for her, her eyes half-closed and her skirt billowing around her, giggling foolishly, not certain that she had a partner. She said this aloud—“Don’t know if I even got a partner”—although she was sure that no one could hear her above the din.
    But when she opened her eyes, miraculously, he appeared, standing just outside the door: a young man with wide, thin shoulders, and intriguing eyes; eyes that seemed to make love to her from across the room. Queen Marie blinked. This was not her Prince. Her Prince was heavier, more substantial. She began moving toward him, her eyes fixed on him, making him shift his weight nervously from one foot to the other. Delicate hairs darkened his chin, she saw as she came closer and stopped directly in front of him, staring up into his narrow face. His friends grinned at her, knowingly at Prince Junior and each other before wandering away