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herself to stay calm, the better
to negotiate with him. “That’s a powerful lot of metalmen, Mr. Charles. I might
need some help to get it all done.”
    He frowned. “Could the metalmen help out?”
    “I’d have to make ones more flexible than the ones for
planting and harvesting. It takes more coordination to do what I do.”
    “Do that, then. A machine making a machine. A fine idea. While
you’re at it, make some that can serve tea and other house chores.”
    Jasmine bristled at the term “machine.” She spent too much
time with the metal creatures to think of them as something like a plow. But
she kept her disapproval out of her voice. “And I’m gonna need more gold, sir.
We don’t have near enough to make the inner workings of that many metalmen. I’ll
need more steel and wire, too.”
    “Gold is expensive. I don’t want to get any more than you
need.”
    “No, sir.” Jasmine already had a stash of gold she’d set aside
from each set of metalmen she’d made, but she’d been careful not to take too
much.
    “Make me up a list.” He had lost his temper years back when
he found out she was learning to read and write––yelled at his wife, threatened
Olivia with being sold down south, and banished Jasmine from the house and her
position as a playmate to his legitimate daughters. But now he acted as if it
had been his idea all along.
    “Yes, sir. And sir, you will free my daughter along with me,
won’t you?”
    “She’s still a baby, right? Not working age?”
    “Oh, no sir. She’s barely three years old.” Little Alexandra
was almost five, but younger was better. If he thought she was old enough to
work, he’d keep her.
    He nodded.
    “And we’ll need a bit of money, just ’til we can get
settled.”
    “I swear I don’t know why I put up with you. But, yes, I’ll
give you a few dollars. There’s just one other thing, though. I don’t want any
of these metalmen ensouled. Not the ones you’re making now, not the other
hundred. You get me.”
    Now that was odd. As far as she knew, the metalmen she had
made for the Calverts’ use had never been ensouled. The Calverts were Catholic
and the pope had banned ensoulment. The man she’d learned the trade from hadn’t
been Catholic—hadn’t been much of anything—but he’d never cared whether the
metalmen had souls. To him they were just machines. To him Jasmine had been
little better than a machine, albeit one he could use for pleasure as well as
work.
    She wondered why Calvert would mention ensoulment, but she
wasn’t foolish enough to ask. It didn’t matter. He was offering her freedom. “Whatever
you want, sir.”

    The meeting was held out in the field where the Calvert
slaves had their gardens. It was a safe place for a meeting; anyone seeing the
fires they’d made would assume the slaves were working their plots. There was
never enough time during the day. You could grow greens in the winter in
Maryland, if you put your mind to it, and most people did.
    Olivia and the cook were the last ones to arrive. “I didn’t
think that woman would ever go to bed,” Olivia whispered to Jasmine. “It’s like
she knew she was keeping me from something.”
    Benjamin cleared his throat. “Davy’s gonna read us the
proclamation.”
    Davy was a few years younger than Jasmine, and her
half-brother. She’d taught him to read and write to solace him after his mother—another
house slave—had been sold south because she’d made Charles Calvert mad one too
many times. It was an open secret on the place that both Davy and Jasmine were
Calvert’s children, though he never acknowledged it. Perhaps the freedom deal
was his way of recognizing it, Jasmine thought. But that didn’t make a lot of
sense, given the kind of man he was.
    “This is what President Lincoln said. ‘That on the first day of
January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three,
all persons held as slaves, including
both human beings and ensouled