Mountain Laurel

by Lori Benton

  “Do ye truly want to hear this, Mister Ian?” Lily asked.

  “I think I must.”

  Lily sighed in acquiescence. “I didn’t stay by to see what happened next. I was in no state—we were all distraught. Naomi told me later how Master Hugh and Mister Dawes strung Esau from that big chestnut by the house. Mister Dawes went to round up witnesses so the whipping would be done legal. But Master Hugh was taken wild with grief. We never were sure he kent what he was doing ’til it was too late.”

  “What did he do?” Ian asked, though by now he hardly needed to be told.

  “Before Mister Dawes came back, Master Hugh took up the whip and started in on Esau. He hadn’t struck more than a handful of times before Esau stopped hollering and went limp. He was dead.”

  “By a few lashes?”

  “Shock, we reckoned. Made his heart give out.”

  A door slammed somewhere out in the passage. It jarred Ian to recall a world disconnected from the grief and regret that seeped from his uncle, a hemorrhage saturating all it touched. But Ian suspected there was more, something darker that had twisted inside his uncle, a bitterness that had trailed him down the years. “Aidan was shot, ye said? How did Esau get hold of . . . ? What was it? A musket?”

  Sorrow shadowed Lily’s eyes. “They say Aidan was out hunting. He come upon Ruby in the fields, tried to . . .”

  Ian waited, then realized what she didn’t want to say. “He tried to violate her?”

  She nodded, pulling her shawl higher. “Esau seen it and come running. That’s what brought Mister Dawes, seeing Esau leave off his work. But Esau got there quicker and lit into Aidan, got hold of his musket and shot him. I think it broke Master Hugh’s mind as well as his heart, seeing his son murdered, hearing what he’d done to Ruby. Killing Esau made it worse. For days he wasn’t right in the head. He never saw Aidan put in the earth. Sometimes I think that’s why he forgets Aidan’s gone. He had a stone put up after a time, but he never saw his son go beneath it.”

  Ian straightened, back and neck protesting, tired mind sorting through all he’d heard. Lily had raised more questions than she’d answered. He could feel them piling in a jam behind his skull.

  Family . . . kin. His mind kept coming back to that.

  “I’m told my uncle’s wife—his first—cared for ye, that ye were like a daughter to her.”

  Lily’s brows rose like wings. “Did Seona tell ye so? I reckon I was, for a while.”

  “And my cousin—was he like a brother?”

  She fixed her eyes on the crumpled bed linen. “No.”

  “But, Lily, my uncle said something before, thinking me Aidan. ‘Ye were always after me to free them.’ Did my cousin want to give ye your freedom?”

  “Not just me. He didn’t want to own slaves at all. He and Master Hugh argued something fierce over it.”

  She yawned and covered her mouth. Not before he caught the yawn and gave it back tenfold. He bent forward in the chair and rested on the feather tick, head pillowed on his arms. Sleep reached for him, but something in Lily’s account wouldn’t square. Why would Aidan Cameron have pressed his father to free their slaves, then turn around and abuse one in such a brutal manner? He would rest a moment, then ask . . .

  When he woke, Lily was no longer in the room.

  Groaning at the throbbing of his head, Ian pushed up and rubbed his face, feeling the quilt wrinkles indented in his stubbled cheek. He blinked at the head of the bed. His uncle’s eyes were haggard, but open.

  “Uncle?” It came out a croak.

  “Ye look terrible, Nephew. Did ye no’ sleep well?”

  Ian barked a laugh. “I did not.” He thought his uncle jesting, but closer scrutiny revealed no memory of the night’s turmoil in his questioning gaze.

  “Feel up to helping me dress?” his uncle asked.

  “In a bit. Just now we’re going to speak of Seona.”

  Uncle Hugh raised a wary brow. “What of Seona? Though I’m sure I can guess.”

  Ian helped his uncle sit up, then took his seat beside the bed. “There’s no more room for guessing between us, sir. I’ll be as plain as I know how. Unless ye grant Seona her freedom, I will bid ye farewell the hour we return to Mountain Laurel and ye can do what ye will with your land and everything on it. I’ll have no part in it.”

  He was bluffing, of course. He could never simply walk away now. But he kept that knowledge hidden far down in his soul as his uncle received his ultimatum unflinching. To Ian’s surprise he said, “I’ll petition the General Assembly for her freedom because I choose to, not because ye press me to it. And on two conditions of my own.”

  Ian’s heart began to pound. It wasn’t the answer he’d expected. Not without a fight. But he kept his voice level as he asked, “Why? Why now, I mean, if not because I press ye to it?”

  His uncle’s mouth twisted. “Lad, we both ken I’ll not live to make old bones. I never for a moment believed this—” he gestured at the room and beyond, to the river with its healing springs—“would be my cure.”

  “Then why trouble to come all this way?”

  “I wanted to see the mountains again. That’s all.” His uncle’s eyes, momentarily wistful, hardened against the pity that must have shown on Ian’s face. “So then. Let’s have this settled between us.”

  Ian swallowed, nodding once. “Ye spoke of conditions. Name them.”

  Uncle Hugh straightened against the pillows at his back. “Granted I do this thing ye ask, how d’ye expect Seona to survive? I ken ye thought to send her to Robert. I’m nowise convinced my brother will blithely take her into his home, though I ken he took in that soldier after the war, even let the man work in his establishment.”

  “That soldier saved Da’s life in battle, at Freeman’s Farm,” Ian said of Oliver Ross, Thomas’s father, who’d died before Ian returned from the frontier. “Da taught him his trade and made him partner. Not from gratitude alone. From friendship.”

  “I take it the man never made claim of kinship on Robert?”

  “No. But he was like an uncle to me.” And Thomas closer than his own brother. Once upon a time.

  Uncle Hugh’s flinch was barely discernible. “All I’m asking is that ye write to Robert, put the question to him. If he’ll take the lass, see her kept decent, educated, and in time a place—or a good match—for her found . . . that’s the first condition.”

  Ian knew the next already by the weight settling in his chest. “The second is that I remain at Mountain Laurel.” Trade his soul for Seona’s freedom.

  For a moment he thought he would be sick.

  “Ye understand, then,” said his uncle, watching him.

  “Aye.” He’d freed Seona—or as good as—and in so doing shackled himself. His uncle believed he stood at death’s door, but until the day he crossed that threshold, months from now, or years, Hugh Cameron would be master of Mountain Laurel. But after, as his uncle’s heir, Ian might do as he saw fit with the place and its people. Could he bear the waiting?

  He hated this, measuring his endurance against the span of a man’s life. Had such thoughts come into Aidan’s mind, all those years ago when he’d argued in vain for the freedom of his father’s slaves?

  But Seona would be free. Free to make at least a few choices for herself. Free in distant Boston, if his da would help him.

  “We’ll see this put in writing,” Uncle Hugh said, breaking into his troubled thoughts. There was ink and quill in the room for the purpose. Ian had paper aplenty in his own possession. “And we’ve witnesses beyond that door.”

  “Aye, we do.” Ian’s hand shook. He made a fist of it.

  His uncle sighed. “Set it down then. I’ll read it when ye’ve done.”

  “Ye maybe notice, I’m no’ insisting ye marry one of the lasses as part of this arrangement, though Lucinda would no doubt bid me do so.” Uncle Hugh eyed him from the chair opposite, having risen and wrapped himself in a banyan while Ian wrote. “But I have noticed ye spending a deal
of time with Rosalyn these past days.”

  Pausing to dip the quill, Ian raised a brow at that. “It could hardly be avoided, but I doubt she’d have me now.”

  “What did ye do, lad? Fend her off a tad too rough?”

  The quill jerked in Ian’s hand as heat smote his face. He didn’t mean to let on about that intrusion into his bed. No reason to widen the ring of shame—his own or Rosalyn’s. None of it mattered now. “I may have said a thing or two I oughtn’t have,” he admitted.

  Uncle Hugh snorted. “She’ll be after vexing a man, lovely as she is. Tell her ye didna mean a word of it. Buy her a bauble on the journey home—maybe that paint she’s wanted for her room, can such be found along the way. She’ll sweeten up in time.”

  Ian made a noise of assent and concentrated on his penmanship, willing the blood from his face before his uncle noticed.

  Neilson was called to witness as they set their signatures to words promising a petition of the General Assembly for Seona’s freedom, provided one Robert Cameron of Boston, Massachusetts, agreed to take her under his covering. And, in the event of that agreement, Ian’s vow to remain at Mountain Laurel. Heir apparent. As long as his uncle lived.

  19

  She was sick to death of entrails, of rendered fat and bacon slabs and hog bristles. And with finding Ally blubbering behind the kitchen when he was meant to be helping with the butchering.

  “I can’t, Seona,” he’d moan, snuffling tears behind fingers thick as sausage links. “Them helpless little things . . .”

  No sense reminding him them helpless little things were full-growed, beechnut-fed hogs that might’ve turned on her and Naomi and done their own butchering without the men by with their clubs. Every year Ally fretted himself over killing the hogs. “Just get busy with something. Don’t let the Jackdaw catch you idle.”

  Truth, though, they hadn’t seen the overseer for days. Naomi had directed them through the last of the scalding, scraping, cleaning, salting, and stuffing.

  Sunday had finally come around. With the smokehouse full to bursting, Naomi had given Seona leave to lie abed, but it wasn’t sleep she most craved. While Jubal drove Miss Lucinda and Miss Judith to their church meeting, Seona went to Ian’s shop, took the paper and lead he’d set by for her, then struck out through the orchard to where the ridge began its climb.

  She settled with her back to a tulip poplar. A few leaves had already drifted down. She twirled one by its stem, wishing for paints to put its yellow to paper. She’d never seen an artist’s paints. Did Ian’s sister have some? How many colors? How did it work, getting them onto paper or a canvas like the ones that hung in the big house?

  Letting the leaf fall, she took the lead from her pocket and set to drawing the view before her, long rows of apple trees sloping down to the house, rising white at the other end.

  She heard the crackle in the brush before she saw them, a doe and two big fawns come down the ridge, headed for the orchard to browse on windfall apples. With the paper against her knees, she drew quick, like she’d learned to do with Munin, and managed a likeness before they moved off into the trees.

  “Thank you kindly,” she said and nearly jumped out of her skin when a voice answered.

  “Aye . . . bethankit.”

  Spying the raven perched in a bough above, her heartbeat slowed. “You always find me when I’m drawing, vain thing.”

  Munin glided down to the ground and set to preening his wing feathers. Biting back a laugh, Seona obliged the bird, thinking on how she’d felt when Ian praised her drawings in the hollow—like something had broke open inside her and poured out light. Tiny at first, like a candle’s flame. Then he’d taken what she’d done and used it to make those desks, and the light blazed up a bonfire. How could she leave off thinking of him? Every way she turned, he was there in her head. Maybe when he came back from the mountains, she wouldn’t spend all her waking time trying to capture every word and look of him. Maybe she’d stop seeing him in her sleep. . . .

  What with the butchering and helping in the kitchen in Lily’s place, it seemed she couldn’t sit still long and stay wakeful, even to draw. Drowsy now, she lay aside lead and paper, leaned back against the tree, and closed her eyes.

  A rustling worked its way into her doze. The deer heading back up the ridge, or Munin scratching in the leaves. The rustle grew nearer. And stopped.

  “Lookit here what I done found.” The voice drifted through her sleep-fog. Munin’s, she thought, though it struck her as wrong . . .

  “Not now,” she murmured.

  Something hard prodded her thigh. Seona started awake, her hand coming down on the toe of a boot. Above her loomed the Jackdaw. A scratch scored his jowly cheek like a red thread snagged in the stubble of his beard. His clothes were filthy, the smell of him ripe.

  “A man might take a notion you was waiting here apurpose. Waiting on him to come along.”

  His slow, stripping appraisal raked a claw of fear up her spine. She was on her feet quick. It was rare these days she got so close to the overseer. He was big. Tall as Ian but barrel-built where Ian was lean. She shrank down, tried to make herself small, eyes on his boots.

  “I didn’t know you was coming along, Mister Dawes.”

  “But here I am. And your white knight’s gone and left you lonely, ain’t he?” The boots edged closer. They were caked with clay and pine needles. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  He spat a stream of tobacco juice into the leaves at her feet.

  “I best get back to work.” She didn’t glance at the drawing left under the tree, but as she made to step past him, the Jackdaw’s big hand closed over her arm. Seona caught a fresh whiff of his reek before his other hand knotted in her hair, forcing her face up. She yelped.

  He shushed her with his mouth.

  His breath was a foulness. She struggled to get free and when she couldn’t, she bit. His bellow hollowed out her lungs before he shoved her away. Her head hit the poplar’s trunk in a burst of white stars. She was on the ground, bits of leaf stuck to her cheek. Blood and tobacco chaw were in her mouth. She got to her knees, gagging, while Mister Dawes stood over her, wiping his lips.

  “Tarnation, girl! Was just having some fun with you. Thought you fancied a white man. Like your mama done.”

  She tried to crawl away. He got hold of her from behind, hoisted her off the ground like she weighed nothing. She kicked, but her bare heels made no impact on his booted shins. His voice rasped in her ear. “Think all he wants is pretty pictures? I could show you what he wants.”

  The Jackdaw pulled her tight against him, an arm crushing her ribs. She writhed to get a breath.

  “That’s it, wildcat. You got the idea.”

  Her stomach heaved and she prayed to be sick on him. Before that happened, she felt his body jerk. Then she was back on the ground, gasping like a landed fish.

  “Mister Dawes.”

  Seona raised her head. Thomas was standing at the orchard’s edge. Behind him like a fence row stood the field hands, Will, Pete, and Munro, feet planted wide, arms crossed. It might’ve seemed funny had she not been so relieved.

  The Jackdaw didn’t think it funny either. “What you boys doing?” His voice was a snarl, yet Seona heard the fear in it.

  Ignoring him, Thomas took a step toward her. “Can you stand?”

  The Jackdaw whipped a pistol from the back of his waistband. Its hammer snicking into cocked sounded loud as a shot. “Not one step closer, any one of you boys.”

  Thomas didn’t flinch. “Seona, how bad’s he hurt you? Can you stand?”

  He didn’t need to ask a third time. She lurched to her feet and ran into the orchard like a rabbit for its hole.

  Had she been thinking straight, she’d have gone to earth in Naomi’s cabin, not the one Thomas was using now. But there was water in the cracked pitcher. With shaking hands she splashed her face, filling her mouth and spitting out the taste of Jackson Dawes.

  Her breath made a ragged w
himper as she sat on the edge of Lily’s bed. She heard feet scuff the dirt, saw breeches and bare brown shins. Jerked when Thomas touched her. He pushed the hair from her forehead.

  “You got a pumpknot coming up.”

  “Threw me up against a tree,” she got out, then clapped a hand over her mouth.

  “Was he drunk?”

  They’d all thought Mister Dawes off on one of his drinking spells, taking his time about it with Master Hugh and Ian away. But she hadn’t smelled a hint of spirits on him.

  A shadow in the doorway made her jump. Will stepped in, winded from running. “Jackdaw got some things out his cabin. Now he gone back up the ridge.”

  Thomas stared. “Back up the ridge? Why?”

  “Hanged if I know. But we gonna be in a heap of trouble over this.”

  “Look what he’s done to her. You think Cameron would keep him on if he owned to it?”

  “What’s he gonna hold over us to make sure we don’t talk?”

  Seona groaned. Their fussing was making her sicker. She made it to the basin before she retched.

  “She needs tending,” Will said. “Come on, Seona. I’ll take you to Naomi.”

  Thomas didn’t try to touch her again but said, “Will’s right. Besides, Master Ian told me to look after you.”

  Will crowded forward, jaw set. “I said I’d take her.”

  Seona wiped her mouth. “I know where the kitchen is. I’ll take myself.”

  She set out, pretending not to notice the footsteps on her heels. One set. She got as far as the chicken coop before Esther caught sight of her and came running out. “Seona—look at the knot on your head! And blood. Who done that to you?”

  “She fell in the woods,” a voice said behind her. Thomas.

  “I hit a tree,” Seona added, sounding almost normal.

  Esther hopped around for a better view. “Hit it with your head?”