Mountain Laurel

by Lori Benton

  “Mr. Gottfriedsen. I’m sent to detain ye.”

  Wary blue eyes peered from the chink between felt hat and woolen muffler. Like a terrapin venturing from its shell, the man poked a red-tipped nose from the muffler’s folds. Recognition cleared his expression of alarm, if not puzzlement. “Ah—the nephew of Hugh Cameron who kills the snake. In his goodwife’s parlor I make your acquaintance, ja?”

  “Aye, and ye stand accused by that lady. Of thievery.”

  Gottfriedsen’s eyes rounded. “I—she—what are you saying? Of thieving you accuse me?”

  Ignoring the show of bewildered innocence, Ian reached into his coat for Rosalyn’s list. “I’ve an accounting of purchased items that vanished with your leaving. Ye may assist me in returning them or—”

  “No!” The peddler’s head wagged furiously. “There is no thievery. As Gott sees me.”

  “Or,” Ian resumed, “I’ll lash ye to the nearest tree while I do the searching. I cannot promise to be tidy about it, so if ye value your wares—and your time—ye’ll save us both the trouble and produce the items.”

  The mule stood placidly, puffing plumes of breath. The peddler gaped. “You—the nephew of Hugh Cameron—would rob me?”

  Ian drew Ruaidh level with the peddler. Before he could reach for the man, Gottfriedsen scrambled off the wagon, in such haste his round-brimmed hat tumbled to the mud. Ian vaulted from the saddle in pursuit, pistol drawn, but Gottfriedsen merely scurried to the wagon’s rear and flung wide its painted doors. Lifting placating hands, he stepped back from Ian, who towered over him. “For these things on the paper, you look. You will not find.”

  “I had better find—or have their price back in coin.” Feeling absurdly like an actor in a stage play—the villain, at that—Ian gestured with the pistol. “I want ye in there with me.”

  The elderly man ducked his head, features set in indignation, but complied. Grunting, stiff joints popping, he hoisted himself into the wagon. Ian climbed after him into a narrow confine of hanging tin and rag-wrapped stoneware, of crates and chests with innumerable drawers. Light fell across the clutter to a corner where blankets rested on an upturned crate. There Ian took a seat, pistol aimed, and consulted his list. Halfway through Rosalyn’s description of the brooch, the little man’s head began to bob.

  “Ringed with the seed pearls, ja. To the pretty daughter I sell.”

  “She claims she paid your price—”

  “She did.”

  Ian held up a hand. “But she left the brooch in the dining room with the things my aunt purchased. During the night ye entered the house, took back the brooch, a mold for six candles, a snuffer—” he consulted the list—“and a pierced-tin lantern, and were gone ere the theft was discovered.”

  Spots of color flushed Gottfriedsen’s sunken cheeks. “Why would I do such a thing? A false accusation!”

  “So ye say.”

  “I will show!” With small, half-flinching motions, the peddler took down the nearest chest, removed his mittens, and began rummaging within. The chest was stocked with soap. When the scented stuff lay heaped on the floorboards, Gottfriedsen turned the chest up for Ian’s viewing. His hands, red with chilblains, were shaking.

  “You see a brooch? No brooch.” He swiped a coat sleeve beneath his nose, reached for another chest, and began the process again.

  There were countless places in that wagon to stash an item as small as a brooch, places the uninitiated might never find—without dismantling the conveyance down to kindling.

  “Mr. Gottfriedsen,” Ian began, but the man had stilled.

  Slowly Gottfriedsen faced him, blinking at a thing in his hand. Moistening chapped lips, he placed the brooch he’d sold to Rosalyn between them on the wagon’s floor. He lifted his bewildered eyes only briefly to Ian, before he launched into motion again. Ian half rose, but the man seemed hardly aware of him as he stood to examine his pierced-tin wares, dangling from the wagon’s roof tree.

  The peddler took down a lantern and set it beside the brooch. Gray light edged his stricken face, and as he spoke, Ian’s own indignation crumbled.

  “My sister’s son . . . he has the broken leg what is slow to mend, and I am not having the memory so good now. ‘Do not go alone on the road,’ they tell me, mein Familie. A few more weeks, they tell me, the leg is mending. But a few more weeks is snow, ja? And the living must be made.” The corners of Gottfriedsen’s mouth clenched in a spasm of restraint. “Maybe I do this . . . this thieving, but it was by mistake. My mistake. For it I am sorry.”

  It was awkward business, witnessing a man confronted by the indignities of his declining years. Ian had had his fill of it with his uncle. To find it here on the road when he’d sought a thief was strangely disheartening. He handed over the list. As the little man searched his wares, Ian studied the back of his head, bared without his hat. Silvery hair ringed the base of Gottfriedsen’s skull, wisping over ears red with cold.

  Having gone from wanting to arrest the man for theft to pitying him in a matter of minutes, Ian rose, returning to the peddler what dignity he could. “I see that it was a mistake, sir. We’ve all made them, aye? Take your time.”

  At the front of the wagon Ruaidh stood communing with the peddler’s mule in a cloud of mingled breath. Ian retrieved the man’s fallen hat and turned it over in his hands. The brim bore a streak of mud. He wiped it on his breeches, then stood beneath the gray sky in the pine-scented air until Gottfriedsen descended the wagon.

  The peddler insisted on seeing the parcels into Ian’s saddlebag himself. Holding out the battered hat, Ian cleared his throat. “Ye’ll forgive my giving ye a scare?”

  “Natürlich—of course.” Gottfriedsen took the hat and offered him a self-deprecating smile that somehow made Ian feel worse.

  “May I ask your given name, sir?”

  “My name?” the peddler said, seeming surprised. “Ja. That much I recall. It is Karl.”

  With Karl Gottfriedsen and his wagon behind him, Ian opened his mind again to Seona, their future. He’d no hope of reaching her by nightfall. The sky had already begun to darken. Seized with resentment at the shortening days, at the slogging mud, at his aunt and cousin, he held Ruaidh to a trot. One more night and he’d be with her and they could stop pretending.

  Despite the chill and wasted days, the miles and threatening clouds, the thought brought a sense of release. He was smiling when the kier of a hawk caught his ear. He sighted the bird circling above, dark against the lowering gray.

  When he looked again at the road ahead, he saw the riders coming. Two of them, shapeless hats shoved low, cantering their horses. They broke stride as they neared, slowing to a trot. Assessing glances skimmed the roan, the rifle in its scabbard, the half-breed coat he wore. A clash of eyes with the nearest rider . . . and they were past, the slog of hooves receding in the widening gap.

  Their faces stayed burned in Ian’s memory: hungry, calculating faces. A vision of Gottfriedsen’s bared and vulnerable head flashed across his mind.

  He brought Ruaidh to a halt and turned in the saddle. The riders were gone round a bend in the road. After a moment’s indecision he continued southward. A quarter mile. A half mile. Trying to put the peddler out of mind.

  Another harsh kier tore the air, sounding like a cry for aid. And he knew. His conscience wasn’t going to let him go in peace.

  Ian swore and wheeled the roan, heading back the way he’d come at a gallop.

  He’d found Karl Gottfriedsen perched on his wagon like a treed possum, a rider to either side of the mule’s traces. The peddler had been cowed enough to hold his tongue when Ian hailed him as Uncle and made show of continuing the journey to Salem as companion and guard. Which, in the end, was exactly what he’d done.

  Though he’d imagined finding her watching for him, there was no sign of Seona as, days later than promised, he rode up the leaf-drifted lane of his uncle’s farm. He hitched Ruaidh, dropped the saddlebags on a bench, and peered into the stable’s depths.
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  “Jubal? Ye there, man?”

  There was no answering hail. Smoke from the house chimneys hung in the damp air. A gray thread wafted from the kitchen roof. Aside from such evidence, the place might have been deserted, but by the time he’d turned Ruaidh out to graze, he’d sensed the watchfulness, heavy and still, like the breathlessness before a storm breaks. Leaving saddle and bags outside the stable, he strode up to the house.

  In the entryway he paused. The same storm-charged atmosphere prickled the hairs on his neck. Movement down the passage caught his eye. Maisy and Esther stood outside his uncle’s door, bent toward the room as iron filings to a magnet.

  “Maisy? What’s amiss?”

  His voice crackled along the passage and struck the pair like a bolt. They sprang apart as a rumble of voices rolled like returning thunder from his uncle’s room—three voices, four.

  Maisy and Esther scuttled from his path. In the doorway he stopped.

  Inside the room were his kin, arranged in a frozen tableau. A fire blazed in the fieldstone hearth, gilding their faces, imprinting each upon his mind—the pained, waxen features of his uncle, risen from his chair; his aunt in the center of the room, face frozen in fury; Rosalyn, mouth pulled into a moue of distaste; Judith, teary-eyed with distress. And in the midst of them Lily, hair unbraided, on her knees and clinging to his uncle in supplication.

  Uncle Hugh’s shoulders bowed. One hand stirred as though he would touch the sleek black head at his knee. “What more would ye have me do, Lily? I’ve sent Dawes—”

  “Please.” Lily rocked on her knees, clutching at his uncle. “Don’t let Mister Dawes be the one to find her.”

  Her. The word jangled through Ian, ringing with identity though no name was uttered, freezing limbs and tongue.

  His aunt, immune to the immobilizing power of the word, grabbed hold of Lily’s arm. “Promise her nothing! Jackson will find them—or he won’t. I wish this one was out of my sight as well.” She gave Lily’s arm a wrench, then drew back her hand as if to strike.

  Ian had no memory of crossing the room, only of his aunt’s wrist jerking in his grasp. He loosed her and reeled back.

  “Someone tell me what in blazes has happened!”

  Rosalyn came toward him, hand extended absurdly in greeting. He stared at it, then at her face. “Where is Seona? What have ye done?”

  Rosalyn halted, face contorting with incredulity. “What have I done? I daresay we all know what you’ve done. You and your half-breed doxy!”

  The blood beat in his head like a drum. “Where—is—Seona?”

  “That is not at present known.” Lucinda had taken Rosalyn consolingly by the shoulders. The two faced him together. “We’ve had word from Chesterfield. Your boy has run. It would appear he’s taken Seona with him.”

  Ian felt those words strike his heart like fangs. Then the slow spread of their venom. Thomas.

  “But I just saw Black Huzzah in the stable. Why didn’t . . . ?” He didn’t finish the question. If Thomas had been his slave, then the horse would have belonged to Ian. Was Thomas continuing the ruse even now, whatever he was up to? But why Seona? Why would she have gone?

  “What proof have ye Seona’s with him?” he asked instead.

  “One of my gowns is missing.” Rosalyn shook in her mother’s hold, small fists clenched. “And a pair of Judith’s shoes. Both were in the washhouse yesterday, and we know who does the washing.”

  Loathing and satisfaction distorted the features Ian had once thought beautiful.

  “I don’t believe a word of this,” he said, though the ground beneath that statement was more than a little shaky now. “What have ye done with Seona?”

  “It’s true—”

  “How dare you imply my daughter—”

  “Please!” Silence fell at the astonishing sound of Judith’s voice raised, imploring. “Why didn’t you tell him everything at once?”

  Ian fixed on her now. “Everything? What else is there? Judith—tell me.”

  Judith’s voice faltered. “T-Thomas left a letter addressed to you. It said . . . it said—oh!” She crossed to his uncle’s desk, snatched up a folded paper, and thrust it at him. “Read what it says.”

  “You wanted proof.” Lucinda’s voice rang with triumph. “Perhaps you’ll trust your own eyes—and recall it was you brought him here. You’ve yourself alone to blame for this!”

  Before he recognized the script or read a word, Ian knew the paper—a page trimmed from Thomas’s journal. The poison was spreading, striking deeper. He dropped to his knees, taking Lily by the shoulders. If a scrap of hope remained that it was some misunderstanding, that Seona hadn’t left them—left him—Lily’s devastated eyes unraveled it.

  “This smacks of forethought,” Lucinda said. “Did I not tell you, Hugh, no good would come of his bringing a strange Negro into our home? If he cannot manage even one slave, how will he—?”

  “Wheesht, Aunt!” Ian broke in. “Thomas was never my slave.”

  “Then whose is he?” his aunt snapped, an instant before the truth registered. Ian watched the horror of it blanch her face.

  “No one’s. His father was Oliver Ross, Da’s partner in his shop. Thomas is . . . like a brother to me.” Or he had been. Once.

  A recoil of silence met his words. Uncle Hugh sank into his chair. Judith’s hand went to her mouth. Rosalyn turned to her mother, shock giving way to matching horror.

  Lily’s was the only face devoid of reaction, but her eyes still held their desperate appeal. “I don’t know what she’s thinking, Mister Ian. I thought it was you she wanted. But please . . . don’t let Mister Dawes be the one to find them.”

  He minded Seona’s bruised brow, uncovered in the shop when he gave her the comb. “Has Dawes hurt her before?”

  “I’d have had the man hangit had he touched her!”

  His uncle’s outburst drew everyone’s attention save Lily’s. “She’d bruises fading when we come home from the springs. Said she fell in the wood. Now Pete and Will are telling me that’s not what happened.”

  “Lily,” his uncle said, lurching forward in his chair. “Tell me what they’ve said.”

  While Lily told a tale that raised the hairs on Ian’s neck, and skeptical protest from his aunt, Ian stood in their midst, braced and beset. All that had seemed solid beneath him was shifting, despite his attempt to hold it steady. And he knew the thing inside him now, spreading its red venom. It was rage.

  He went straight to the cabins to see Ally, recovered from Pryce’s lashing enough to sit up and tell his tale. But when the name Eden was spoken, he corrected no one’s guess. He didn’t say this Eden had a first name and wore the Quaker gray.

  While Jubal saddled his uncle’s sorrel, leaving Ruaidh at rest in the paddock, Ian leaned against a stall, forehead pressed to folded arms, dizzy with weariness, while Uncle Hugh—as much enraged as Ian now concerning Jackson Dawes—related the events of the past few days. The morning following the whipping, Pryce had ridden to Mountain Laurel to inquire after Thomas, gone missing from the cooperage at Chesterfield, and to offer the price of the lumber Ally was sent to fetch as recompense for his “damaging.”

  “As for Thomas,” Uncle Hugh said, “we’d settled the matter that he’d no’ been seen hereabouts, and so I told Pryce.”

  “Pryce knows nothing of Seona missing?” It felt like glass breaking in Ian’s chest, speaking her name.

  “He didna hear it from me. ’Twas after his going Lily came seeking the lass, and no’ ’til Esther ran to the Reynolds’ without fetching her home did we find the letter left for ye and put her together wi’ Thomas gone missing.”

  Ian nodded, but his mind spun with another possibility. Gideon Pryce wanted Seona, had made it known he would take her in trade for his uncle’s debt—and been refused. Had the man stolen her, creating an elaborate subterfuge involving Thomas to cover the act?

  He might have plunged down that path of reasoning had it not been for Ally’s memory of
Eden. It smacked of forethought, his aunt had said. More than she could know.

  Jubal led the sorrel out, ready to ride. Lily appeared as Ian mounted, marks of weeping on her face, and handed him a satchel of provisions. He met her look of pleading with a wordless promise. He would do everything in his power to find them.

  Dawes, his uncle told him, had ridden northwest along the creek, thinking that the route Seona and Thomas had taken.

  “Have ye aught for me to tell the man, when I see him?” Ian asked, though words weren’t what he had in mind for his uncle’s overseer.

  “Oh, aye,” Hugh Cameron said, face set with a fury that matched Ian’s own. “But it can wait. Bring him back to me. He’s done here and I’ll have him ken it well. As for Seona and your . . . Thomas, pray God ye find them safe.”

  “Do that,” Ian said, turning the sorrel’s head toward the road. But for all his rage against Dawes, there was another that went deeper. “And God save the soul of Thomas Ross when I do.”

  PART IV

  November–December 1793

  I have played the Fool, though some may say I come late to the Acknowledgment. Are you praying for me, Da, you and Mam? Am I fighting Heaven’s will, as well as yours?

  28

  At midday Ian dismounted to study the trail. The telltale prints in the moist earth he’d followed since yesterday were only hours old now. Dawes’s horse had a shoe working loose; his pace had slowed. Ian pulled his hat low and remounted, rifle across his knees, pressing on through ranks of hardwoods dripping from last night’s rain, while high clouds pushed along on chilling air.