by Lori Benton
What can I offer to set right that which lies between us, save myself, to spend as you deem fit? However dubious an Investment I have thus far shown myself to be, perhaps I may do some Good for Uncle’s People—unless North Carolina prove Oil, and I the Water that will not mix.
Nevertheless, my Duty to you, Sir, as Your Most Obedient Servant &c—
Ian Cameron
1
MOUNTAIN LAUREL
A wee bit earlier that day
At the creek that marked the boundary of his uncle’s plantation, Ian Cameron paused his horse. The creek’s water ran clear, chattering over a pebbled bed, no more than ankle-deep, yet for all his balking to cross it, it might have been the Red Sea.
Ian pressed a hand to the breast of his coat. For eight hundred hot and muggy miles he’d ridden with his uncle’s letter tucked there, yet still he hadn’t decided whether answering its summons had been an act of desperation. His father’s. Or his own.
A black gelding edged up alongside Ian’s roan to drink. Its rider swept a hand at the oak wood shading the creek’s far bank. “Kalmia Latifolia. This is it, then?”
“Aye, Mountain Laurel.” Ian shifted in the saddle, eyeing the man, half a year his elder. “Ye’ve the better head for Latin, Thomas, I’ll grant ye. But surely it’s unseemly in a slave to flaunt it.”
Thomas Ross twisted his mouth in amusement as he gazed down the carriage drive that crossed the creek and curved through the wood, beyond which a house was visible in white slashes. The big house, his uncle’s slaves had called it, with its two rooms belowstairs and three above. In the eleven years since Ian’s last visit to the place, his uncle had remarried, acquiring two stepdaughters in the process. What had seemed a big house indeed for a single man must have proved incommodious with the addition of three females, judging by the new wing jutting from the rear.
“First your uncle inherits it all,” Thomas said, his thoughts obviously fixed on the plantation’s past as well. “Next you. What’s wrong with the place that it goes begging for its heirs?”
Ian shrugged. An older man called Duncan Cameron—no near kin—had settled the place originally. He’d met Ian’s uncle, fresh from Scotland, exiled and homeless, down on the Cape Fear River. The elder Cameron had made Ian’s uncle his overseer, then left Mountain Laurel to him when he passed—forty years or more ago.
“Uncle Hugh at least had a son,” Ian said. “He died a long time back. I never met him.”
Thomas shot a pointed look at Ian’s garb. “I expect your kin’s bound to take you for a red savage come calling, rather than heir presumptive.”
It was a fair point. Over leather knee breeches—the thigh rent and stitched less artfully than the wound beneath had been—Ian wore a coat cut and collared in European style but pieced of buckskin and lavishly adorned with red, white, and black quillwork and an expanse of ragged fringe. In trade for it, the old Chippewa woman who made the half-breed coat had wheedled from him a twist of tobacco, several prime beaver pelts, and one very fine fox. He felt a mite foolish for wearing it now but had wanted to present himself as truthfully as possible, so there’d be no mistaking what sort of man his uncle was getting. Not the lad he would recall.
Ought he to have done the thing by stages?
And there was Thomas, tricked out in fawn-brown coat, fine linen breeches, and a pair of outlandishly striped stockings—dressed the dandy when he was meant to be a slave.
Which of them would prove the greater consternation to Ian’s kin?
“One way to know,” he muttered. Girding his will, he touched a heel to the roan’s side, where his rifle rode snug in its sling.
Thomas followed on the mount he called Black Huzzah, leading their pack mare, Cricket.
They dismounted in the oak-dappled shade of a stable-yard that appeared much the same as it had eleven years ago, with the stable itself, a long, clapboarded structure, standing quiet in the summer heat. The only creature to mark their arrival, a sorrel in a nearby paddock, whinnied and trotted to the split-rail fence.
Ian turned to the open stable doors to call a greeting and bit it back as a man, trimly bearded and slightly stooped in the shoulder, emerged from the shadows. Even with the stoop, he was of a height with Ian, an inch over six feet, with hair like sugared cinnamon tailed back from a scowling brow. His voice held the clipped snick of a rifle’s hammer being cocked, despite the familiar Highland cadence, as he addressed Ian. “I’ll ken your name—and your business here.”
Ian removed his hat. “It’s Ian, sir. Robert’s son. Ye sent for me and I’ve come.”
The man’s blue eyes snapped from Ian’s quilled coat to his face, brows lifting in belated recognition.
“Devil take me if it isna,” said Hugh Cameron, his father’s elder half brother. He crossed the stable-yard to Ian, who replaced his hat in time to meet his uncle’s outstretched hand with his own. The clasp was sure; before Ian saw it coming, his uncle had pulled him into a kinsman’s embrace, clapping a hand to his road-dusty back. He pushed Ian away but held him at arm’s length, taking in the sight of him with what appeared genuine approval.
“Forgive my brusqueness, laddie,” he said. “I kent ye were coming—your da’s letter reached us weeks ago—but I didna ken the day. And I must say ye’ve grown a mite since last I saw ye.” His uncle released him, chuckling at that. “Besides, just now I’m a wee bit distracted by goings-on.”
Still caught off guard by the warmth of the welcome, Ian gathered his wits to ask, “Did we interrupt ye in some work, Uncle?”
“No, lad, more’s the pity. I’ve a mare ready to drop a foal. Jubal thought she was finally making ready and got her into the double box at the end.” He bent his head toward the stable behind him. “But it’s proved another false alarm.”
Ian minded his uncle’s passion for horses. “So ye’ve taken to breeding?”
“Aye,” his uncle said. “A few years now—a couple of colts to show for it. Though I hadn’t meant to do so with this mare. I had her from a man in Cross Creek—Fayetteville, it’s called now,” his uncle explained. “She’s docile as a lamb and can pull anything ye hitch her to, but I’d meant her for a saddle horse—for the lasses, aye? We didna ken she was breeding out o’ season ’til past midwinter. The mare’s blood is of no repute, but the sire’s a grandson of Janus.”
Ian nodded, assuming Janus a name to impress among thoroughbred aficionados. He’d won his horse, Ruaidh—an Indian pony of uncertain origin—gambling with a Frenchman in Canada two years back, and wouldn’t trade the compact, unflappable roan for a dozen of his high-strung leggy cousins.
Still, it seemed a fitting name, Janus: Roman god of gateways. Of beginnings. He hoped his da would have thought it a propitious sign.
By all that’s holy, lad, dinna throw away another chance to settle. Robert Cameron’s parting words weeks ago, delivered with beseeching sobriety, had dogged him south these hundreds of miles to hover in the heat-weighted air of his uncle’s stable-yard. ’Tis the last I have to offer ye.
It was the pack mare letting out an impatient whinny that recalled them to Thomas, who’d stood by unacknowledged, holding the bridles of both their mounts.
“I see ye’d help along the way,” Uncle Hugh said. “Did ye engage yon mannie for the journey then?”
“Ah, no,” Ian said, casting Thomas a quick glance. “He’s mine actually, not hired. Will that be a . . . a problem?”
His uncle’s brows flicked high before he answered, “Not at all. But let’s get these horses settled, aye?” Turning, his uncle called toward the stable, “Jubal—and, Ally, if ye’re there—ye’ve three new horses here to tend!”
In quick order two of his uncle’s slaves exited the stable. The first, a wiry dark-skinned man of middling height, was a stranger to Ian—Jubal, his uncle named him, making introductions. The second man to emerge was several inches taller than either Ian or his uncle and muscled like a blacksmith, though Ian knew he was not.
“Ally,”
he said, grinning in recognition.
The man halted, peering down at him, eyes soft as a doe’s gone wide as he took in Ian’s quilled coat. “Yes, sir. You know me, sir?”
“Ye know me too, Ally. Or ye did. I’m Ian Cameron.”
Ally’s lips pulled wide, showing large white teeth. “I hear you was coming back. But law! I mind you a spindly thing. You done growed up, Mister Ian.”
Ian remembered then that, despite his hulking stature, this man of his uncle’s had never grown up. Not in mind. There’d been an accident when he was a boy involving . . . what had it been? An ox?
“’Tis a momentous day,” his uncle was telling Ally, who was eyeing Ian’s roan and Thomas’s black gelding with an eagerness to make their acquaintance. “Go on and help Jubal, and Mister Ian’s lad there, get these horses unsaddled. Show them to the boxes we have free. Then go tell your mama in the kitchen we’ll need a special supper tonight. She’ll ken what to do.”
“Yes, sir!” As Ally followed Jubal toward the horses, sunlight breaking through the oaks caught the side of his head, revealing the slight concavity behind his left ear, not quite concealed by a cap of woolly hair.
Mule-kicked, Ian minded.
He took a half step after them, thinking to snatch his rifle from its sling before the others got their hands on his gear, until it struck him to wonder whether toting a rifle into his uncle’s house—as if he were entering a British-held fort—would cause offense.
He hesitated, feeling off-footed in this place both remembered and strange.
“Ciamar a tha thu, a mhac mo bhràthair?”
Ian started at his uncle’s question, taken aback by its perception as well as the language of its phrasing. How are you, Nephew?
“Tha mi . . . gu math—tapadh leat.” No lie. He was well enough, all things considered. “Tha mi beò co dhiù,” he added. I’m alive, anyway.
“So ye are,” his uncle agreed. “And ye’ve the Gaidhlig still. And is it the faint bells of Aberdeen I’m hearing in your speech? That’ll be from your mam.”
“And her brother—Callum Lindsay. Ye’ll mind I was in Upper Canada with Callum ’til the spring?” Ian eyed his uncle, dappled in the sunlight. How much had the man been apprised of the happenings in the intervening years since their last meeting? He’d have no joy in the telling but best to have it out—in case his da hadn’t beaten him to it. “I’m obliged to mention, sir, that it wasn’t by my choice I left Boston. When I went west with Callum, I mean, five years back. I don’t know whether Da—”
An upraised hand checked him.
“Lad,” his uncle said, “who doesna have deeds he’d as soon put behind him? What say we leave the past where it belongs?”
The roan and the black were unsaddled now, the pack mare unloaded. As Jubal, Ally, and Thomas each led a horse away to stable, his uncle added, “That dun mare carried a respectable load. Might ye have brought the tools of your trade along?”
“Aye,” Ian said, unsure whether he was more relieved or disconcerted by the change of subject. “It’s been a while since I’ve practiced my cabinetmaking, but I’d hoped, if ye have a shed standing empty, I might set up by way of a shop. Nothing extensive, only there’s a bit of work I’ve promised to do.”
The suggestion seemed to please his uncle. “I dinna see why not.”
Suddenly overwhelmingly hot, Ian shrugged his way out of the half-breed coat and draped it over his arm. What he wore beneath only reinforced the impression of a man well on his way to gone native—fringed hunting shirt, tomahawk and knife thrust through a beaded belt girding his waist. And those worn leather breeches with their stitched rent, still faintly bloodstained.
“Ought I to change, Uncle? I’ve clothes more befitting . . .” He gestured toward the house, white and commanding beyond a spreading chestnut.
His uncle’s gaze had lifted past it, over a scattering of outbuildings to the leafy apple orchard rising toward a hogback ridge. Beyond it rose the higher ridges of the isolated Carraways, rolling westward in thick-wooded waves like a rumpled counterpane.
“The Camerons were first, ye ken.”
Ian frowned. “First?”
“To answer the Stuarts’ call. I went down from the glen wi’ my da and the lads. All but wee Robbie, your da.”
“Ye mean the ’45?” His uncle spoke of the rising of the Highland clans for Charles Stuart, son of the exiled King James, which had ended in slaughter on a frozen moor—a slaughter that claimed Ian’s grandfather and two uncles. Nigh fifty years ago. “What made ye think of that?”
Gazing at the ridge rising beyond his orchard, his uncle didn’t seem to hear. “By the spring we’d lost all. Lands, clan, honor. Hope. I was all of twenty at the time. Younger than ye.”
Hugh Cameron’s voice had gone as hazy as the rising hills. The man himself seemed hazy compared to Ian’s memory of him. On closer scrutiny, his complexion was no longer the burnished bronze of a redhead well acquainted with the sun. There was a hint of something sickly in its hue, like copper begun to green.
“This land is ours now,” he said with sudden fervor. “Cameron land—and none shall take it from us.” His uncle’s eyes held the blue of distance and a grief as raw as new-dug earth—until behind them a voice spoke.
“Mastah Ian? Where you want all your tools and things to go?”
Thomas had joined them.
Uncle Hugh blinked at the intrusion, then turned to Ian. The distance in his eye diminished. His beard-framed lips softened in something near a smile.
“Here I’m forgetting my manners, Nephew, keeping ye standing in the yard. Your things can bide where they are for now. Come away in—ye and your man.” Facing the house, Hugh Cameron firmed his jaw. “’Tis time ye made the acquaintance of your auntie.”
If a woman less inclined to welcome the address of Auntie existed, Ian was hard-pressed to imagine her. Straight of carriage, pale of skin, and dark of hair and eye, twenty years younger than his uncle, Lucinda Bell Cameron met them in the parlor prepared to offer tea—judging by the maid stationed at a serving tray. It had been good Scotch whisky his elders partook of in that room years ago. Swift reassessment forced Ian to admit that tea better suited the environs now. The once-masculine sparseness of his uncle’s parlor was transformed. Pillowed settles and needlepoint chairs vied for space with delicate tables cluttered with bric-a-brac of the fragile-looking sort.
He halted in the doorway, mindful of road dust and the dirt that caked his boots. His uncle’s wife gaped at him for a frozen second; then her gaze swept past him to Thomas, who’d followed them into the house. Her nose, both narrow and long, pinched in disapproval.
“Mr. Cameron, it is not our custom for servants to enter through the front door. Your boy may go around to the kitchen door. In back.” She cast a pointed look at Ian’s uncle—eliciting support or offering reproof, Ian couldn’t be certain.
His uncle smiled. “Aye, Nephew. Naomi will see him settled.”
Ian cleared his throat. “Settled where, exactly?”
Lucinda’s slanted brows rose. “The servants’ quarters, of course.”
“Aye,” Ian said, hating the need to test the woman’s forbearance so soon. “But if it’s no inconvenience, I’d prefer Thomas stay near me. In the house.”
“Slave quarter be fine,” Thomas murmured, loud enough for all to hear.
Mindful of the indignant color staining his aunt’s cheeks, Ian caught Thomas by the arm and marched him down the passageway, out of earshot of a whisper. “Ye don’t get a say in this. Not in front of them. We’ll discuss it later. Meantime keep your mouth shut.”
Thomas set his jaw. “I don’t need a nursemaid.”
Ian tightened his grip. “Look. Ye wanted this. Ye hounded me from Boston ’til ye got your way. Act like ye’re meant to.” Releasing Thomas, he added in a carrying tone, “Fetch our bags up to the house, all but what the mare carried.”
In the front hall his uncle’s wife took matters in hand. “Maisy
, see Mr. Cameron’s boy finds the back door.”
“Yes’m.” The maid sidled out into the hall, headed their way. “Come with me,” she said to Thomas, with an echo of her mistress’s censure.
Uncle Hugh frowned after the pair retreating down the central passage that ran the house’s length, past a wide set of stairs leading to the rooms above, to a narrow back door at the far end. “Ye’ve not had him long, ye said. A body servant, is he?”
“No, sir,” Ian said as he rejoined them. “I don’t need a man to dress and shave me.”
Too late he heard the criticism implicit in the words, but his uncle’s expression showed only faint amusement. “Nor do I, though Mrs. Cameron has done her best to cure me o’ the sin.”
He cast his wife a wry smile. She failed to return it. “If he is not a body servant, why keep him in the house?”
There was no admitting the truth of the matter. Latching on to the implication his uncle had voiced, Ian managed a tight smile. “Considering he’s been in my service but a short while, I think, ma’am, it would be best I keep him close.”
His uncle showed him to a bedchamber above the back stairs, and to the storeroom across the passage, where Thomas, with some rearranging of trunks, might spread a bedroll on the floor. “Unless ye’d rather he had a pallet in your room?”
“This will do, Uncle.” At least for now it would. Ian turned from the cramped space and asked, “What of your stepdaughters? Are they not at home?”
“Rosalyn and Judith are verra much at home but ye willna see them before supper. No doubt the lasses wish to arrange themselves proper to greet ye—first impressions being a vital thing.” His uncle’s mouth twitched when Ian raised a brow in acknowledgment of his own failings on that front. “I take ye gladly as ye come, Nephew—quills and all. My wife, now . . . she was once accustomed to a grander living than she presently enjoys, but I dinna expect ye to bow to her airs and fancies should they go against your grain. This is your home now. I mean ye to be at ease in it.”
