Mountain Laurel

by Lori Benton

  Despite the wobbly beginnings of a paunch at his belt, Dawes was an imposing figure in his middle years, square-jawed and barrel-chested. “Fair enough,” he allowed, seemingly taciturn by nature as well as solitary.

  “Some of these men aren’t yours?” Ian surveyed the figures at work among the rows. Mountain Laurel managed with its own field hands most of the year, his uncle had explained. But at harvest more were hired on from Chesterfield, the only neighboring plantation with a workforce to spare. “Which are?”

  From the back of his sorrel gelding, his uncle named them. Aside from Naomi’s son, Ally—easily identifiable by his size—there were Will and Pete, both around twenty years of age, and Munro, a decade older. Others who could be spared had pitched in. Lily and Seona, and the girl, Esther, were among the rows. Jubal would have been, his uncle said, if not for needing to watch over the broodmare.

  “Could use another set of hands,” Dawes said, addressing Ian. “Your boy work the ground?”

  “He’s a cooper by trade.”

  “A cooper?” Hugh Cameron appraised Thomas with new interest. “Ye didna tell me that.”

  “I meant to, Uncle,” Ian began but, seeing Thomas dismount, followed suit, guessing his intention. “Ye don’t know the first thing about harvesting tobacco.”

  Thomas had already begun turning up his shirtsleeves, as Dawes sized up his thick shoulders and sturdy back. “I’ll learn, Mastah Ian.”

  Ian had lowered his voice. “If I ride off and leave, ye won’t be treated special.”

  Thomas flashed a grin. “Should I be?”

  Ian had rolled his eyes. Resignedly he’d shrugged off his coat, announcing his intention to pitch in as well—to his uncle’s approval.

  Tobacco was harvested with a long-bladed knife, slit up the stalk and laid in the sun. Once wilted, the stalks were piled in a cart and driven to the curing barn, a capacious ventilated structure, where the leaves were hung by slender rods high in the rafters to cure.

  “I avow it’s needful to study our means of living, Cousin,” Rosalyn had remarked at the end of that first day, wrinkling her nose at the pungent scent that clung to him despite having washed and changed his clothes. “But why wallow in the business?”

  From what Ian had observed, his aunt and cousins did precious little of the sort. Despite her reduced circumstances, Lucinda Bell Cameron still conducted herself like the mistress of a seaboard plantation, a charade his uncle maintained by the long-suffering of his creditors, as the ledgers on his desk plainly attested.

  But he’d had enough of his uncle’s finances for one sitting; it occurred to him to wonder what was happening with that foal.

  Pushing back from the desk, Ian stretched until his joints cracked, then headed through the house, meaning to join his uncle. At the parlor door he halted, spying Seona within. She was early back from the fields, though still at work, as the ash piggin at her feet attested. Neatly capped and aproned, she was cleaning out the hearth. Or she had been. At present she was simply staring at the mantel . . . no, at the painting above it. Several such oils hung throughout the house. This one Ian minded from his boyhood visit. What had been a splash of color in the room then was all but lost amidst the clutter of the present decor.

  Not lost on the girl staring at it, though, her back to him. Ian held his breath, afraid to break the spell she seemed to have fallen under.

  The back door opened, startling them both. Ian made to draw away, but Seona didn’t turn. She snatched up the piggin and hastened out through the room’s other exit, into the dining room. As she vanished from sight, Ian stepped into the parlor through the passage doorway. He heard the housemaid’s voice, then the back door shut.

  Silence descended belowstairs, though he heard his cousins’ voices from their room above, and knew his aunt was just across the passage in the smaller sitting room, where the women liked to sew. The parlor still contained the spell of Seona’s captivation. He let himself be drawn, coming to stand in her place.

  She’d have seen the painting countless times—a rendering of a stream running through a hollow, the birches on its mossy banks decked in autumn’s yellow-gold. Deeper in, partly obscured by the trees, a waterfall gleamed, spilling over tall rocks draped in scarlet creeper.

  He stepped closer, peering at a lower corner where the artist had signed the work: M. M. Cameron 1762. Not Duncan. Not his uncle. His uncle’s first wife?

  “Mister Ian?”

  He whirled to find Seona had come upon him as silently as he’d done her, catching him gaping at the painting. With no means of covering his startlement, he gave her a self-deprecating smile. “I thought ye’d gone out,” he said, warmth stealing into his face.

  “No, sir.” She dipped a slight curtsy, as if to hide the puzzlement taken hold of her features. “Maisy says Master Hugh wants you at the stable on account of that mare looks to be dropping her foal at last.”

  He couldn’t suppress his broadening grin. “I was on my way there, actually.” He paused, catching in her gaze an echo of his own eagerness. “D’ye want to come with me?”

  Those creek-water eyes flared. “I can’t, Mister Ian. I got chores to finish, then best get back out to the fields.” She glanced at the stairs behind her, then lowered her voice. “But Maisy say don’t tell the misses. Master Hugh don’t want a crowd pressing in. Just you.”

  Though neither as hot nor as muggy as it had been the day of his arrival, the sky was clear, the sun high and blazing. Stepping into the stable, Ian was enveloped by the nose-tickle of hay and manure before his eyes adjusted. Shadows resolved into the structure’s spacious center aisle bordered left and right by box stalls, their posts hung with tack.

  He minded his uncle saying the mare was stabled at the far end, but he’d walked into a pungent wall of horse sweat and ammonia before he reached the spacious box where his uncle stood peering over the gate, stripped to his shirtsleeves and sweating freely. Not only from the day’s warmth, to judge by the tension radiating from him.

  None of the neighboring stalls were presently occupied. The stable doors at that end were closed fast, as was the outer door of the box, creating a dim, womb-like atmosphere. The only source of light was a pierced-tin lantern hung from a nearby beam. It shed a fractured glow over heaving bay flanks and revealed Jubal, his uncle’s stableman, crouched with an arm elbow-deep inside the mare.

  “Ally will be sore he missed this when he comes in from the fields tonight,” Uncle Hugh said.

  Fresh from his uncle’s troubling ledgers, Ian felt the compulsion to head out to those fields directly after the birth, to work alongside Ally and the others until sundown.

  “Is it well?” he asked, low-voiced, frowning at Jubal still rooting around for the unborn foal.

  His uncle was about to reply when Jubal spoke, the strain of effort in his voice. “Got that hoof straight. Hold on . . . there now. Here the nose where it ought to be. Two front hooves coming first.”

  “Aye,” Uncle Hugh said on a breath that carried patent relief, as Jubal withdrew his arm and rose to wash in a bucket set outside the stall. “Aye, I think so. We’ll leave her to it. See how things progress.”

  Things progressed swiftly, as it happened. While his uncle spoke, Jubal had stood from the wash bucket and cast his gaze over the laboring mare.

  “Here she go,” he said.

  Forgetting conversation, Ian and his uncle turned back to the box to see the foal’s emerging hooves, encased still in its birth sac, followed by a muzzle as the membrane tore. Another contraction brought forth its shoulders. Ian gripped the box gate until the foal was out at last in a sprawl of slender legs, dark and seal-wet in the lantern light. The mare raised her head to view the creature she’d expelled and nickered, as if in surprise.

  Sensing the man beside him at once drained of tension and wound tight with joy, Ian softly laughed. “Congratulations, Uncle. Though I’m jiggered if I can tell from here whether ye’ve a filly or a colt.”

  At a nod fr
om Uncle Hugh, Jubal slipped back into the stall and ran fingers over the foal’s nostrils. The creature sneezed, sending a spray of mucus over the man. “Be a filly, Master Hugh. A fine one.”

  “A worthy scion of Janus, I dare hope. As will be the foals I get from her one day.”

  “Juturna,” Ian murmured, realizing he’d spoken the name aloud when he sensed his uncle regarding him. “In the Roman mythos,” he explained, “Juturna was the consort of Janus.”

  He’d mythic figures on the brain, apparently, after reading his da’s inscription in the Norse book.

  Uncle Hugh was nodding, thoughtful. “Aye. That’ll do.”

  Understanding took a beat to sink in. “I didn’t mean to presume to name her, Uncle. Wouldn’t my cousins wish to do so?”

  “No, lad. There’ll be others for them to name, God willing. ’Tis no coincidence, this one arriving out of season, practically on your heels. Juturna she’ll be called.” His uncle studied him in the lantern’s dim light. “Ye’ll be book-learned, then? Latin and Greek, if my memory of Robert’s letters serve.”

  “Aye, sir. I can manage some of both. The man who held my indenture had a proper library to hand. I put it to use.”

  “Ye’ll have seen what passes for my own library?” his uncle asked. “Ye’re welcome to borrow any book that catches your fancy.”

  “Thank ye, Uncle,” Ian managed. Talk of his indenture had cast a shadow; while by day Ian had been taught the cabinetmaker’s art in Wilburt Pringle’s Cambridge shop, by night those books that lined the man’s parlor shelves had been a consuming passion, though the master cabinetmaker whom he’d served hadn’t shared his literary interests. Pringle’s wife had.

  And that put Ian in mind of a further detail about Janus. The pagan deity was a two-faced god, looking to the future, aye, but also to the past. A god of endings, as well as beginnings.

  Jubal went to fix a bran mash for the mare, but Uncle Hugh lingered. They’d been leaning on the box gate, observing the filly’s first attempt to stand. The gangly creature had pitched and buckled three, four times, before its tiny hooves bore up its weight. Now Ian caught the man eyeing him again, his smile over the filly’s success fading into thoughtful furrows, as though he sensed Ian’s troubled thoughts.

  “So,” his uncle said. “Ye’ve had a keek at the ledgers?”

  Ian straightened. “Aye, sir. We should talk about them.”

  “And we will.” His uncle reached for his coat, draped over an empty stall, his voice recapturing some of its earlier glow as he added, “But not just now, with a new filly to toast. Let’s go share a wee dram—and tell the lasses about our Juturna.”

  Our Juturna. He followed his uncle from the stable, thinking that the man seemed certain this arrangement would work, that Ian’s mere presence at Mountain Laurel had sealed it. He hadn’t wanted to speak of Ian’s past transgressions, as though they could be brushed aside and left behind. But Ian was still the man he was. The man those transgressions had made him.

  He might presume to name his uncle’s filly, but he dared not presume to own his uncle’s heart—or respect. Not yet.

  He nearly missed them as he and his uncle strode beneath the chestnut at the yard’s edge, crossing the lawn to the veranda; movement caught from the corner of his eye drew his attention to the two slender figures darting from the washhouse across the lane to the stable—Seona and the wee lass, Esther.

  Maisy’s daughter ducked inside the stable doors, but Seona hesitated long enough to slide a glance their way—and caught Ian looking straight at her.

  Before his uncle, mounting the veranda steps ahead of him, could notice, Ian gave the lass what he hoped she’d read across the distance as a conspiratorial grin. Then he turned his back, pretending he hadn’t caught her in an act of flagrant deceit.

  5

  Head hung over the box gate, Master Hugh’s sorrel was nuzzling the last of the turnip tops from Seona’s hand when she heard them ride in, back from their Sunday meeting. Mister Ian spoke to Jubal in the stable-yard, where he left his roan horse. She waited, expecting to hear the mistress getting down from the carriage, but the next to speak was Thomas.

  “No reason I cannot help. They’re my master’s horses.”

  “But my stable to keep.” Jubal’s dismissive words fell like slaps. “’Sides, wouldn’t want you sullying them fancy trappings.”

  Hurrying from the stable, Seona spotted Thomas heading for the house, stiff-backed and discouraged in his stride. She called to him before she saw the figure climbing the front porch steps—Mister Ian. They both swung round at her call.

  Thomas’s set features softened. “Where you bound, Seona?”

  “The kitchen.”

  Thomas fell in beside her. Mister Ian still stood on the steps, watching them—just like he’d seen her that day the filly was born. Did he think she’d lied to him that day? Truly she hadn’t meant to go to the stable, but that Esther . . . she could pester a body into doing what she never meant to do just to gain a little peace.

  Mister Ian hadn’t told on her, far as she knew. Hadn’t even questioned her about it. She wondered at that but just now thought it best she give Thomas her attention. “You get near enough the meetinghouse to catch anything the new preacher man said?”

  “Nothing worth hearing,” Thomas muttered.

  “‘Slaves, obey your masters,’ or the like?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Thomas said no more, but she knew it wasn’t preaching words that had him glum. “Don’t pay Jubal no mind. He’s jealous over his place, is all.”

  “I don’t aim to take his place,” Thomas said as they passed under the big chestnut. “Long as I’m here, I aim to do my part. That’s all.”

  “Long as you’re here? You leaving anytime soon?”

  “Just a manner of speaking.”

  His answer came quick enough, but she wondered . . . had Mister Ian decided not to stay after all and Thomas knew it? She was surprised to find she hoped that wasn’t so.

  “Give it time,” she said, watching him close. “You’ll find your place here.”

  Thomas paused at the kitchen breezeway, smiling at last, though her words held more hope than truth. Staying on at Mountain Laurel or going back to Boston aside, Mister Ian could up and sell Thomas tomorrow if he took a notion. Their lives hadn’t been torn apart that way in many a year. Not since Ruby and her boys. Still the possibility always lurked. Like a spider in a corner beyond the reach of a broom.

  “For now,” she added, giving her voice starch as she eyed his brushed coat and striped hose, “change out of that frippery afore you dirty it and come whining to me to get it clean. I’ve laundry enough without you making extra.”

  Thomas’s eyes sparkled. “Yes, ma’am,” he said and swept his hat off to her.

  Never mind his coat was worn and his buckled shoes scuffed—he made such a dandified picture, standing on the back stoop grinning, she went laughing down the breezeway thinking how maybe she’d like to draw him in those clothes.

  She did hope they stayed. It was nice having cause to laugh.

  His uncle was napping, Maisy informed Ian. “We having a nice supper this evening for Miss Judith’s birthday, but I laid out some pickin’s in the warming room. Miss Lucinda done stayed for tea with the Pryces?”

  “Aye, they all did.” Ian had evaded the invitation to take tea with the widow Pryce and her daughter at the conclusion of the church meeting by accepting one for the following Sunday, when the presently absent Gideon Pryce—the son and master—would be at Chesterfield to receive him.

  Grabbing a biscuit from the sideboard, he headed for the stair. The heat hit him halfway up, a suffocating shroud. He propped open the window in his room, closed again in his absence.

  Halfway through a change of clothes he heard the door across the passage open.

  When he crossed to the storeroom, Thomas was sitting on the low stool, stripped to the waist, back glistening as he hunched over the trunk he u
sed for a table, writing in what appeared to be a journal. Ian had seen the little book before, during those last days of their journey. Had the Quaker given it to him?

  He leaned in the doorway, sweating in his thinnest shirt. “Ye’re welcome to use my desk.”

  Thomas dipped the quill. “This suits me.”

  “Fine. But ye’d do well to keep the door shut while ye’re at it. Ye’re probably safe at present, but I doubt my kin would much regard the notion ye can read and write.” He got no answer to that and frowned at Thomas’s hunched back. “Thought you meant to see to the horses.”

  “Jubal has it in hand.”

  “What’s wrong? Aren’t my uncle’s slaves welcoming ye to their bosoms?”

  Thomas swiveled on the stool, scowling, but his brows rose as he took in Ian’s appearance. “You’ve left off the tomahawk. That intentional?”

  Ian grinned. “Didn’t want to alarm the housemaid.” Along with a plain linen shirt, he’d donned the buckskin breeches, beaded belt, and hunting knife. “We’ve a few hours to ourselves before supper. We could traipse the wood. Explore some. It’d be cooler than inside.”

  Thomas gestured at the journal. “I mean to write for a spell.”

  “Suit yourself—but don’t think ye’ve dodged my question. Ye’ve been in a sulk since we left the meetinghouse.”

  So had Ian, for that matter. As they’d approached the small frame meetinghouse that morning, on the edge of Chesterfield land, something in him had hoped for . . . what exactly, he still couldn’t say. A sense of welcome? Acceptance? From whom? Had the congregants known his past or the state of his soul, they’d have quick enough tossed him out on his ear. At least no lightning bolts had fallen for his brazenness at being in their midst.

  “I’m fine, Ian,” Thomas said. “I’ve been told I’ll find my place here in time.”

  “Did Seona tell ye so?” He’d seen them talking, coming up from the stable, but regretted mentioning the girl when what might have been a smile twitched Thomas’s mouth. “At least she’s taken a liking to ye.”