Mountain Laurel

by Lori Benton

  Seona’s back protested as she bent for another bedsheet. Down the double clothesline, linen flapped like a wedge of white geese hurrying south. She was hidden between the lines save for when the wind gusted. She hoisted the sheet into place, then dropped her arms and was rolling her aching shoulders when hands slid around her waist. She stifled a yelp.

  “Easy,” Ian said. “It’s me.”

  He stroked the small of her back, thumbs pressing firm into aching muscles. Her legs went weak, but there was a buzzing in her ears like a swarm of frantic bees. We can’t. Mama or Esther or—God help—the mistress could come along any second. But she didn’t pull away.

  “Will ye come to me again tonight?” His mouth touched the curve of her shoulder, making her shiver. She leaned back against his chest and shook her head.

  His body jerked. “D’ye mean it?”

  Again she shook her head. He relaxed against her, bending low until his beard stubble rasped her cheek. “Say it, then.”

  “I will . . . if you shave first.”

  He nuzzled her with his bristles, then pressed a kiss to the corner of her mouth. “I’ll do that.”

  He gave her shoulders a squeeze, then slipped between the sheets, quiet as he’d come.

  She’d thought Lily asleep when she rose, quiet as she could manage, and crossed the cabin. It was too dark to see more than the outline of her mama’s cot, but when Seona reached for the cabin door, a dark shape loomed between.

  “Mama! You gave me a fright.”

  “Not half the fright ye’re giving me.” Lily took hold of her wrist. Her hair was down, tangled in her grip. Seona was about to say she was going to the necessary when Lily said, “I saw ye today, hanging out the wash. Girl-baby, don’t go to him.”

  “Mama, let go.”

  “Is he making ye do this?”

  “It ain’t like that. He promised—”

  “White men’s promises have a way of dying on the vine.” Lily’s hand slid down and clasped Seona’s, urgent, beseeching. “I’ll stand by ye. We’ll tell Master Hugh.”

  “Tell him what? Why oughtn’t I to go, when you went?” Something reckless had taken hold of her tongue. “What happened between you and Master Hugh? Anyone can see he cares for you. Why didn’t he ever claim me?”

  The questions rolled off her lips and clung there like tears.

  Lily’s hand went cold, then slipped away. Seona reached for her but she pulled back into the shadows. Beyond the cabin door Ian waited, and she knew her mama wouldn’t stop her going now. Still she stood rooted. “Why, Mama?”

  “Because,” Lily said from the darkness. “I never asked him to.”

  Ian reached for a candle, then changed his mind and closed the shutters. It was dark save for the hearth embers. He added wood. Barefoot, he paced the floor, casting glances of mingled longing and fatigue at the bed. Would she not come after all?

  If you shave first. He rubbed his smoothed chin, a smile tugging, until he minded the mute refusal that had preceded her teasing reply. Though retracted, it had shaken him. The deuce of it was he’d brought this on himself. He’d been on his way to the shop when he glimpsed her through the swaying sheets. He’d risked discovery—for a promise he might have secured any number of safer ways with the application of a little patience.

  Would she not come? Or could she not? Perhaps Dawes had been abroad and caught her out.

  Across the room in an instant, he wrenched open the door. Seona stood in the passage, hand raised as though to tap. Weak with relief, he pulled her into the room and shut the door. He snatched the taper off his desk and took it to the hearth to light.

  She’d brought another rose. She must have searched long for a proper bloom but in vain. Candlelight revealed the brown-edged petals, bitten by frost. He set the taper down. Started for her. Stopped.

  “Why did ye first say no?”

  He hadn’t meant it to come out so sharp. Or at all. No emotion registered on her face though he searched it hungrily. They were back to how it had been between them weeks ago, when he couldn’t fathom her, couldn’t reach her. Had he ever reached her? Uncertainty shook him.

  “D’ye not wish to be with me?” He tossed the wilted rose onto the counterpane, then took her face between his hands. Candlelight coppered her skin, throwing the bones beneath into sharp relief, heightening her resemblance to Lily. She seemed to him as remote as her mother as well.

  “Don’t tell me what ye think I want to hear. Tell me what’s true . . . here.” He pressed his hand flat above her heart, wanting desperately to understand it.

  It beat swift beneath his palm, a struggling, trapped thing. She didn’t raise her eyes. “Mama saw us today. Out by the wash.”

  He swore softly, then drew her into his arms. The night’s chill clung to her clothes, her hair. “Will she speak of it to my uncle?”

  “I don’t reckon. It might cause trouble.”

  He frowned at the bitter reply. They’d been handfast less than a fortnight and already the strain of secrecy was tearing at them. Turning from her, he planted his hands on the desk, resolve hardening like a weight in his chest. “I’ll do it. I’ll tell him I’ve taken ye to wife, that I’ll have no other whether he bequeaths Mountain Laurel to me or no. And when he’s freed ye, we’ll leave—together.”

  Silence. He turned back. Seona was clutching her shawl tight, knuckles white.

  “Master Hugh means to free me?”

  “Aye. He does.” This wasn’t how he’d planned to do it, but he told her now of the bargain struck at the springs, the signed agreement. Her promised freedom. “We’re waiting on my da to say he’ll welcome ye. I believe he will, Seona.”

  Her eyes were wide. Stunned. “And you didn’t see fit to tell me ’til now?”

  He drew closer, speaking low, willing her to understand, to trust him. “When I pressed my uncle for your freedom, I was prepared to let ye go to live in Boston while I stayed here. And then . . . we came back, and I saw ye again—and knew I couldn’t send ye away with nothing spoken between us. I didn’t want to lose ye.”

  “But you will. If what you say is true.”

  “Only for a time. ’Til my uncle . . .” Until his uncle died. He’d thought it a hundred times yet still couldn’t voice it. “Then I’ll find a man to oversee the land. Not Dawes. John Reynold, maybe. I’ll come back to Boston. I’ll marry ye.”

  A line had formed between her brows. “We are married.”

  “Before a minister, I mean. So none can dispute it. Ye could pass, easily.”

  She blinked at him. “Pass?”

  “For white. Not that I care about—”

  “But if you tell Master Hugh what we done,” she cut in, shaking her head as if to clear it of everything save what mattered most to her, “he might change his mind. Send you away and keep me here.”

  “D’ye think I’ve not considered that?” Since returning from the mountains, he’d thought it through from every possible angle—from letting things play out as agreed upon, trusting Robert Cameron and the General Assembly to come through for them, to defying his family’s sensibilities and living with Seona openly, his wife by common law, to stealing her away and making for the frontier. Leaving behind the complications of kin, lands, laws.

  The latter option was gaining fast appeal. If he took Seona away, without the blessing of the General Assembly or his uncle, it would have to be Canada and Callum and little hope of ever making things right with his da.

  Could he live with that, if he had Seona?

  It hurt to see her now, wrapped in her shawl, face bowed in shadow. Unable to bear the constraint between them, he drew her to the bed. The rose he’d tossed onto the counterpane might have wilted, but its perfume was still potent, stirring memories.

  “I told ye of my mother’s brother. D’ye mind that?” He followed her glance toward his quilled coat, hanging by the door. She nodded. “Callum has a wife. She’s Chippewa. Full blood. They were married by a French priest ten years ago.
They’ve three little boys. He’s never told my parents.” He recounted for her his shock the day he first rode into the trading settlement with his uncle to see the trio of black-haired boys racing toward them, shouting their greeting. Noos abi! Daddy’s home.

  “Your cousins?”

  “Aye.”

  “And no one in your family knows?”

  “Only me. And ye now.”

  Seona sat in silence. Ian turned her chin so her face caught the candlelight. Her eyes pleaded. “Can’t we keep on in secret like your uncle?”

  “Callum isn’t living with his wife under the noses of his kin.” He touched her face, but she pulled back.

  “He’s ashamed of her?”

  Ian felt a stab beneath his breastbone. “Seona . . . listen to me. ’Tis naught to do with shame but with a man protecting what he cherishes. I spoke of them so ye’d see there’s more for me than Mountain Laurel or Boston. More for us, if ye’ll go with me.”

  “You mean run away? To Canada?”

  “If every other avenue closes, aye.”

  “With Mama not knowing what’s become of me?” Panic made her voice rise.

  He put his fingers to her lips. “I didn’t say we would run. But I have to do something before the truth is plain for all to see—not just Lily.”

  When he took his hand away, she shook her head. “It won’t be plain . . . if we stop.”

  He nearly laughed. “We tried that, remember? Bid me stop my heart beating. It’d go easier.”

  She bit her lower lip, a gesture of awareness that drew him irresistibly. He leaned close to kiss her, but again she pulled away.

  “D’ye not trust me to keep ye safe?” he asked.

  “When you can’t see where to put your foot next?”

  Her lack of confidence burned. “So ye don’t trust me. I haven’t exactly earned it, have I?”

  “It’s the Lord we need to trust.”

  He strained to keep his voice low. “Ye’d have me wait, then? Do nothing?” He pressed his fingers to his temples and sighed. “It oughtn’t to surprise me. Ye’re used to having your decisions made for ye.”

  “I best go back.”

  She was off the bed and heading for the door before she’d finished speaking, but he’d seen the hurt in her face. He caught her before she reached the door, pinning her in his arms.

  “Seona . . . I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I spoke in frustration, but it wasn’t with ye.”

  She might have been a woman carved in stone, indifferent to his touch. “Maybe it’s true. Maybe I can’t think for myself.”

  “It isn’t true. Listen. Ye were a wee girl when ye picked up that slate. Ye thought it was forbidden, yet ye did it—kept doing it all these years and look what’s come of it. We’ve given beauty to people neither of us know and found our way into each other’s souls. Haven’t we?”

  He wanted her to agree. Needed her to. In silence he held her, despairing that he’d harmed her with his ill-chosen words, until softly she said, “It was your likeness.”

  “What was?”

  “That first time, with the slate. It was while you were here I found it. I hid under the kitchen lilacs and drew your face.”

  His heart leapt, then eased into rhythm with hers. He was awash in a sense of connection with her so powerful it left him trembling, as though they’d been this way forever, mind and heart entwined.

  “Flesh of my flesh,” he whispered against her hair, then pulled back to see her face. The candle cast a sheen against the moisture on her cheeks. “There’s a way for us, Seona. We’ll find it.” He traced his thumb across the curve of her lip. “Stay with me. I won’t tell my uncle yet.”

  He’d have promised the sun, the moon, any star of her choosing, to go on holding her, to let the sweet, reckless tide they’d held at bay sweep over them. He bent his mouth to hers, and she was living woman in his arms again, pliant and warm.

  24

  A crackling beneath his ear woke him. Opening his eyes to blinding sunlight, Ian squinted and raised himself to an elbow, shedding stray leaves and twigs. Some yards off, a figure bent to lift a stone from the earth. “John? What’s the time?”

  John Reynold staggered upright with the stone, found his balance, and headed for the field’s edge. With a grating chunk he dropped it onto a pile—which had grown since Ian last saw it.

  “Sleeping Beauty of the Wood awakens,” his neighbor said, sauntering over, features mild with amusement. “You nodded off whilst I was recounting our Robin’s latest prodigy, so I wrapped what you didn’t eat. If you’re lucky, the ants haven’t got it.”

  A haversack lay in the shade of the shedding maple under which he and John had paused to eat their dinner—a good two hours past, judging by the sun. “Ye shouldn’t have let me sleep.”

  “You looked to need it. Still do.”

  Ian minded the image staring back from the glass that morning, that of a man who’d tasted little of sleep in days. Stifling a grin—and a yawn—he hauled himself to his feet, determined to make up for time squandered.

  It was a good day for the work, chill enough for laboring in shirtsleeves under a sky of aching blue, glorious against the autumn patchwork of the hills. He felt John scrutinizing him as he set to grubbing out the nearest stone with a long-handled spade.

  “What is it has you fagged? Something troubling you?”

  “No.” Ian tossed the stone onto one of the cairns marking the field’s boundary, then turned his face into his shoulder to blot away a trickle of sweat. “Unless ye count a peddler stopped over with a wagon full of house-clutter my aunt doesn’t need and my uncle cannot afford. Which won’t stop the women buying their trinkets and fancies, mind.”

  “That’ll be Gottfriedsen, out of Salem.” John moved past him, scouting the torn earth and matted grasses. “He’s passed through with his wares since before the war, I’m told. Stay for supper. Cecily and I will walk you home. She’ll want a look.”

  “Aye. I’d appreciate it.” Ian inserted his spade beneath a stone and with a grunt pried it free. Sunlight cast the field in bands of gold, each alive with the flutter of insects. Ian’s shirt clung in patches. His hand came away slick when he wiped his neck.

  John was watching him still. “Cecily misses Seona’s company. Especially after the loss of Rebecca Allen . . .”

  Hefting the stone spared Ian the necessity of a reply. He heaved it onto the cairn, which shifted with a clack like giant marbles. He’d meant to give Seona a few hours with Cecily while he worked with John, but the household had been in high fettle that morning, his aunt and cousins eager to spend the day examining the peddler’s wares. Seona had been needed to help prepare a dinner to mark the occasion. Taking her away for the better part of the day would have roused protest.

  He loosened another stone but didn’t bend to wrest it free. “Listen . . . I spoke too careless of my uncle’s affairs.”

  John was quick to raise a hand. “Dinna fash, as you Scots say. It stays between us—depend upon it. Lend your back to this one?”

  As John levered a large stone from the earth with his pick, Ian got his fingers round its edges, gripping through moss and clinging earth. He hoisted it free, muscles knotting with the effort.

  His first indication of anything amiss was John’s cry.

  He stepped back by instinct even before he saw the banded canebrake in the hollow the stone had capped. As the snake rattled its warning and tightened its coils to strike, John lunged backward, caught a heel on a tussock, and went down.

  With the strain of it arcing like fire across his shoulders, mouth open in a roar, Ian wrenched the stone above his head and slammed it down.

  “It was half again my arm’s length and thick as my fist.” Seated on his uncle’s dressing bench, Ian described the canebrake at his uncle’s request, though by his count the man had heard the tale at least twice already. “It missed John’s shin by a breath when it struck.”

  He’d have made no mention of the
incident at all had John and Cecily not recounted the episode to the family the previous evening, casting Ian in the role of dragon-slayer. Practically asleep on his feet, he’d endured the attention from his kin, acknowledged the purchases the womenfolk had made and the peddler who sold them—a diminutive, elderly Moravian, grateful for the offer of a bed in the stable for himself and his mule—before escaping to his room.

  “I once saw a slave die of a canebrake’s bite.” The fire had overwarmed his uncle’s room, yet Hugh Cameron sat filling his pipe at his desk, robed in a banyan wrapped snug. “Ugly business. The Almighty bethankit for keeping ye, lad. And Reynold, forbye.”

  Ian rose to bring a splinter of kindling from the hearth. Uncle Hugh set it to the pipe’s bowl, drew, and grunted satisfaction. Ian snuffed the kindling and sat again, watching thin smoke ascend from its charred tip. “Uncle, have ye penned the petition for Seona’s manumission?”

  Ledgers cluttered the cherrywood desk. So did scattered quill scrapings and the canebrake’s severed rattles. No freshly inked letters. No document bearing Seona’s name.

  “I didna see the need as yet, since Robert hasna written.”

  “It’s the General Assembly will take the longer. I’d hoped ye’d petition at the November session.”

  His uncle eyed him narrowly. “And do ye hold to it, should the assembly grant her freedom, that ye’ll see the lass to Boston and return to me, content?”

  “I mean to, Uncle . . .” Clenching the bit of kindling, burnt black at the tip, Ian steadied his breath. “But is there no way Seona may return to Carolina? No way around the manumission law . . . even if she returned as my wife?”

  His uncle stared, momentarily blank. “Did ye say wife?”

  “I did, sir.”

  “What are ye saying? Ye and the lass . . . ?” Uncle Hugh gripped the arm of his chair, suspicion flooding his gray face with color. “Have ye gone and done the very thing ye nearly came to blows with Pryce over?”