Mountain Laurel

by Lori Benton

  Pity had robbed Ian of the mare. He’d only Huzzah with which to bargain now. And no more pity to spare.

  “Steady on—Seona!”

  John’s shout jarred Ian from his brooding in time to see Seona, dismounted, dashing back down the road to where the slave coffle had halted in a mill of confusion. Bodies parted to reveal the woman at the coffle’s end slumped on the road. One of the riders had dismounted and was prodding her to rise. When she didn’t, he kicked her in frustration.

  Seona ran into their midst, tripped on her trailing skirt, and sprawled over the fallen slave. As John grabbed Huzzah’s reins, Ian heeled the roan into a canter and swung down as the slave trader made a grab for Seona.

  “Get your hands off her—she’s mine!”

  The man whirled, hat knocked askew in the scuffle. He reached up to clap it straight, glaring at Ian from beneath an overhanging brow. “Yours, is she? Then get her in hand!”

  While dirty bare feet shuffled around them, Seona hovered over the fallen slave, hands cupping the woman’s head, staring into her face.

  Ian bent over Seona but didn’t touch her. “Seona, let her be. Come away now.”

  She raised her eyes to him. “Ian . . . it’s Ruby.”

  The force of her imploring gaze hit him square in the breastbone. Instead of pulling her off the prostrate woman, he went down on a knee beside her. “Ruby?”

  “Esau’s Ruby. You played with her boys, that time you came to us.”

  A boot scuffed the dirt beside him. “For pity’s sake, man—”

  “Give us a moment, aye?” Ian snapped.

  The slave was conscious, breathing heavy through dirt-caked nostrils. She lifted suffering eyes to him. Ruby was a pretty gal, Lily had told him. Emaciated, filthy, and exhausted, there was no beauty left this woman, nor hint that she had ever possessed it.

  “Is that her name, then? Ruby?” he asked the scowling trader.

  “Do I ask their names? Worthless is what I call her.”

  “Yes, suh,” came a shaky voice at Ian’s knee. “I’s called Ruby.” The woman frowned at Seona. Her lips drew back from what remained of her teeth. “I know them eyes . . . You Lily’s girl-baby, ain’t you?” The woman’s own eyes flicked to Ian. Her dusty brow furrowed deeper. “You done got you a white man? He a good man?”

  “He is, Ruby. He’ll help you.”

  When Seona looked at him again, pleading, Ian knew he’d been wrong. He still had pity to spare.

  The coffle departed, leaving Ian grappling with the fact that the crumpled heap of humanity in Seona’s arms belonged to him—and he now had even less hard coin to spare. Ruby had proved slightly more than worthless to the trader, after all. “Can she sit a horse, d’ye think?”

  John, kneeling by the woman with a canteen, reassured him with a nod. “They can double on Huzzah.”

  “My boys.” Ruby’s hand gripped Seona’s arm. “Sammy, Eli . . . they with you still?”

  “Ruby . . .” Tears tracked Seona’s face. “Master Hugh sold them off a few years after you. We don’t know where they wound up.”

  Ruby hung her dusty head. “Mastah Hugh. Ain’t never think to hear that name no more in this life. He still drawing breath?”

  “He is,” Ian said, thinking it time he joined the conversation. “I’m Ian Cameron, his nephew, and I suppose ye . . .”

  “I be yours now . . . Mastah Ian.” Ruby seemed to notice the bruise on Seona’s cheek, her ragged clothes. “You free now, Seona, or . . . what?”

  Seona glanced at Ian as if expecting him to answer. When he didn’t, she said, “We’re going home, Ruby. Can you get up on that horse with me?”

  The woman’s eyes rolled white with dread. “Can’t see that comin’ off good. T’ain’t no other way?”

  “Only shank’s mare,” John said. “And we’ve far to go.”

  John aided the slave to her feet. Frightened and growing voluble, she peppered Seona with questions about Mountain Laurel and its people, questions Ian had no wish to hear. He focused on Ruaidh, checking cinches that were perfectly adjusted, until they were ready to mount up. He was coming over to hold Huzzah’s bridle when Ruby balked, leaving John standing with his hands cupped to give a hoist into the saddle.

  “Then I ain’t goin’ back there—no sir, no ma’am!” Ruby stood on the verge like a wind-bent scarecrow. “Leave me die right here on this road. I can’t go back there—not while he there.”

  Ian turned on Seona. “What the devil did ye say to her?”

  She took a step back. “She asked about Mister Dawes. I told her he was there that night but that you must know about it now, so it’s all right—”

  “All right?” He was struggling for calm as the wound of her betrayal broke open afresh. “D’ye know what I’ve just done for ye? Likely thrown away any chance of buying Thomas out of slavery—if I can find the wee fool! Does that not concern ye at all? Or did ye use him, too, ’til he no longer served a need?”

  “Ian,” John cautioned.

  Seona shook her head. “Use him?”

  “Aye—did ye?” Three sets of eyes stared at him as if he’d grown horns. Fine then. He’d behave like the fiend they seemed to think him. But he’d have his answers.

  Taking Seona by the arm, he marched her off the road, headed for a break in a thicket beyond the verge.

  “Where are you going?” John called after them. “Ian!”

  “Bide ye there, John. We’ll not be long.” He shouldered his way through the thicket, dislodging twigs. Seona resisted as he dragged her up the wooded incline beyond, limping on bare feet, but his grip on her was iron. He sloshed through a trickle of creek, then halted and yanked her around to face him. And he kissed her. It was a mouth-bruising kiss, until he woke to the feel and taste of her and the anger went out of him. He cupped the back of her head, then tugged at the rags that covered it, wanting his hands in her hair, wanting all of her.

  She twisted away. “No—”

  He jerked the rags loose and buried his fingers in her hair, but the feel of it was wrong. Very wrong. He pulled back, catching her by the shoulders. And stared, dumbfounded.

  Her hair was gone, hacked away to ragged ringlets.

  He released her and she staggered, catching herself against the nearest tree, its bark a peeling, mottled white. He’d paused at the edge of a birch grove. Around and above them leafless branches trailed the downy tails of winter catkins.

  He wouldn’t—would not—let himself recall the gold of autumn. Not while dismay and grief were running riot through him, colliding off his ribs, squeezing his heart—for the months that lay between them, for doubt and betrayal and pain, and—irrationally—for the loss of her glorious hair.

  “Did ye do that to yourself?”

  Seona bent for the fallen rags and wound them round her ravaged head. “Mister Gibbs did it, after I ran the first time.”

  “Seona—” But he could find no words to render a single thought in his head. I love ye. And ye’re lost to me. Lost. There was but one thing left to ask. And one thing left to tell her. He chose the lesser of those evils. “Thomas. Where is he?”

  She told him what she knew in a voice as pale as winter. Thomas had been sold to a man headed east, a man buying slaves to build some sort of waterway through a swamp.

  “A canal, he called it.”

  “Did the man have a name?”

  “O’Sullivan. I made sure to mind it, in case it might help.”

  “O’Sullivan? D’ye know how many Irishmen there are back east? How many swamps, for that matter?”

  “No. But I know this one’s name. Dismal Swamp. Ian, why . . . ?”

  She didn’t finish the question. She’d a look about her he recognized, as though she gazed at him across a sea of incomprehensible loss, baffled that it should be there. He stared helplessly back at her across that sea, with the one difference. He could name it.

  “Seona, I have to tell ye . . . I’m married.”

  Color drained from h
er face. “To me.”

  As she said the words, he sensed the fraying thread still linking them. Betrayal, abandonment, separation, even marriage to another hadn’t unraveled it completely. His fingers curled convulsively, as though it were a thing he might latch on to. “Never legally. After ye left, we—Judith and I—were wed. She’s been my wife these two months and more.”

  Seona didn’t blink. Her expression didn’t alter. Tears tracked the grime on her cheeks like water over stone. “Oh,” she said, then linked her arms across her belly as if containing a spilling wound.

  The sun had set. The road was a patch of lighter gray beyond the darkening wood. John Reynold was quick to register Seona’s expression when they emerged. Whatever he saw seemed to reassure him. Still Ian said, “We talked, John. That’s all.”

  “Of course. I didn’t think—”

  “John.” Ian didn’t wish to know what his neighbor had or hadn’t thought. He couldn’t bear another moment of this. “Ready to ride?”

  John halted him with a hand. “I’ve talked to Ruby. It’s your uncle’s overseer has her terrified. Something the man did nearly twenty years back.”

  Minded of Lily’s revelations last autumn at the inn concerning Ruby’s man, Esau, and Aidan Cameron, Ian frowned at the slave, clutching again at Seona, who seemed barely aware of her now. “Can ye do me a favor, then, and shelter the woman ’til I return? I’ll pay ye for her keep.” Somehow.

  John’s brows rose. “Of course. But where do you mean to go?”

  “I know where Thomas was taken.” True only in the broadest sense, but he hurried on, sensing impending protest. “Don’t try to talk me into going back with ye, John. I won’t. Not ’til I’ve found him.” He had Ruaidh’s reins in hand, ready to mount. “I must take Huzzah. He’s all that’s left to barter. I’m sorry to strand ye with one mount—”

  “Never mind that.” John grasped Ian’s shoulder. “Listen to me. Seona’s safe, and what harm was done her will heal, by the grace of the Almighty. Go for Thomas for his sake, but for your own . . . remember mercy.”

  His neighbor had read the hunger for vengeance in his heart.

  Ian swung himself into the saddle. “I don’t like to disappoint ye, John, but that’s a promise I cannot make.”

  35

  Making his way eastward across half the state, then locating the canal works amidst the timbered sprawl of coastal swampland aptly named Great Dismal, proved simplicity itself compared to finding one particular Irishman among the warrens of shanty camps dotting the snake-infested landscape. Every other white male Ian encountered, it seemed, was Irish; a disproportionate number of those answered to O’Sullivan.

  The fourth O’Sullivan bossed a slave gang for the southern portion of the state-straddling canal project, their ranks hired from neighboring plantations or—more hopeful to Ian’s purpose—purchased outright with company funds. O’Sullivan’s gang was employed in a yard some distance from the diggings, splitting off shingles from the massive cypress and juniper being felled along the canal route. Others stacked the riven boards on horse-drawn carts and guided them away, rattling along corduroy causeways.

  “Bound for the nearest navigable ditch in this pesthole of a bog,” O’Sullivan explained. A mosquito landed on the man’s bull-like neck. He dispatched it with a slap, leaving it stuck to his flesh in a bloody smear. “’Tis vexing early for the skeeters.”

  The weather had warmed nearer the coast, bringing on an early hatching of the insect hordes, but Ian hadn’t come all that way to talk of mosquitoes. He turned the conversation to the hands that did the labor, giving a description of the one he sought.

  “Ah . . . him.” Eyes gray as winter seas were frank in their scrutiny of Ian, stained and bedraggled after days of rain and road dust. “And what would yourself be wanting with the sorry likes o’ that boy?”

  “He ran off from me November last,” Ian said with matching bluntness. “Got himself taken up and sold without my leave—to an Irishman by name of O’Sullivan, bound for these parts.” He swept a hand at the camp, teeming with workers, flora crowding dense and green on all sides. “His name is Thomas Ross, and he’s mine.”

  “Thomas he’s called, right enough.” O’Sullivan’s Irish lilt softened. “But would you be coming round t’ calling me a thief, Mr. Cameron?”

  “Nothing of the sort,” Ian replied in kind. “Ye couldn’t have known how the matter stood.” He glanced beyond the hodgepodge of open-sided pole sheds and rickety shanties that made up the shingle camp, to the shingle cutters themselves. He didn’t see Thomas among them.

  O’Sullivan’s voice snapped his attention back. “I expect you’ll want to see the blighter.” He shouted to one of his gang, then stumped off.

  Surprised by, and faintly suspicious of, this sudden cooperation, Ian followed, boots squelching through a porridge of mud and wood chips—not toward the yard but down a path between slope-roofed shanties, pausing before the last in the row.

  “Boy claimed he’d no skills at all, didn’t he? But when I set him to cutting, ’twas clear as me granny’s blue eyes he’d handled a piece o’ wood before. I put the rest under his charge, and that was when me trouble started.”

  Hit full force by the stench from within the shack, Ian suppressed a gag and followed the man inside. At first he thought the dirt-floored shanty deserted, save for a heap of rags in a corner, speckled with what appeared to be inkblots. The heap moaned; the blots took wing to buzz about in agitation. The fat body of a fly struck Ian’s hand.

  Breathing through his mouth, he crouched and turned the prone figure’s unresisting head, revealing Thomas’s face, gaunt but recognizable even in that gloom. The heat of fever radiated off his skin, but Ian had barely time to utter an oath of dismay before he saw what had been done to Thomas. His head had been shaved to the scalp in a strip running ear-to-ear, another from forehead to nape, forming a cross.

  “’Tis how we mark the troublemakers.” O’Sullivan’s voice punched the fetid air. “But he’s nay trouble t’ anyone now, is he? Audacity’s no guard against the ague.”

  Ian’s scalp prickled as if the swarm of flies had descended to crawl on him. The putrid air was liquid, bathing him in sweat. “Ague? Not yellow fever, then?”

  “’Tis no such catching thing.” O’Sullivan sounded appalled by the suggestion. “Swamp fever, is all. But once they go down with it, most aren’t worth their feed again. Nor the cost o’ physicking. Not slaves, anyway.”

  Thomas’s eyes rolled behind their lids. He moaned again but didn’t waken.

  “Ye mentioned trouble,” Ian said. “What sort of trouble has he caused?”

  “Only inciting half me gang t’ go slipping off t’ the gators. Not a one made it past a day before the dogs found ’em.” O’Sullivan scratched at the small bite mark rising on his neck, dislodging the dead mosquito stuck there. “One named him the instigator, so I took him off the yard and set him t’ digging—and prettied up his woolly head.”

  The scenario had promptly repeated itself. Within a week’s time two prime ditchdiggers made a break for the swamp’s interior.

  “Never went off task himself, mind,” O’Sullivan said. “But ’twere him right enough—putting notions o’ freedom in their fool noggins. Had him strapped, hoping it would do for him. ’Twas the next day he came over fevered.”

  Ian stood, a motion O’Sullivan took as cue to exit the reeking shanty. Ian followed him out onto the path and the relatively breathable swamp air.

  “Still want him, now ye’ve had a look?”

  “I’ve no papers to prove he’s mine.” Nor free papers to prove Thomas was no slave. Ian gave a jerk of his chin. “That black horse though, tethered with my mount—ye’ll take it in trade, with its saddle and tack?”

  Thomas, if he survived this, wasn’t going to be pleased with him for trading away his horse.

  Neither, it seemed, was O’Sullivan. The man drew himself up, neck inflating like an indignant bullfrog’s. “What so
rt of thieving pirate do you mark me for? I’ll not be taking a fine piece o’ horseflesh for a good-as-dead slave, and you saving me the trouble o’ putting him in the ground.”

  “Ye’ll take a shilling for him, then, and write me a proper bill of sale.” A shilling he could spare, though little more.

  The Irishman raised a sardonic brow. “You’ll be after driving a hard bargain, won’t you?”

  It began to rain, a drizzle that cast a pall over the camp, turning afternoon to dusk.

  “If ye’ve paper and ink to hand,” Ian said, dispirited and beyond cross, “let’s be about it, aye? And I’ll beg of ye a few of those cedar poles I saw in the yard, so I can haul my shilling’s worth out of here.”

  In a village south of the canal works, Ian found a tavern with a proprietor who could tell ague from yellow fever and allowed them a space in his stable for the night. Ian inquired after a physician and a lad was sent to fetch a Dr. Rawlins, could he be found. He saw to the horses, then settled in the straw next to Thomas, whose stink was an assault on the senses, overpowering the stable’s pungency. He’d lost more flesh than it had appeared in the shanty. Sweat poured off him as if it were the heat of summer.

  “In for a shilling,” Ian muttered, drawing up his knees and laying his forehead to them.

  Straw rustled and he whipped his head up. Thomas’s eyes were open wide, fever-blind in the lantern light. “Seona . . .”

  Ian heard his own breath, unnaturally loud. The guilt and longing that had clotted Thomas’s voice might have been his own. He lurched to his feet.

  Outside, the air was thickly damp. Ian heaved lungfuls, trying to ease the clench of jealousy around his heart. What had gone on under his nose all those months? How had he not seen it?

  The yard behind the inn lay thick with night shadow, until from the direction of the tavern a light intruded. Another lad, dressed in breeches and rumpled shirt, came striding toward Ian bearing lantern and case, spectacles glinting in the swinging light. At the stable door he set down his burdens and briefly jerked a hat from atop a mop of curly brown hair.