Mountain Laurel

by Lori Benton

  “Dr. Marcus Rawlins,” the lad announced, beginning to roll up his shirtsleeves. “I’m told there’s a man here needs my attention?”

  Stripling though he appeared, the doctor knew his business. Muttering at sight of his patient’s shorn head, Rawlins counted Thomas’s pulse, listened to his breathing, looked inside his mouth and under the lids of his eyes, then with practiced efficiency stripped him of fouled shirt and breeches.

  The sight of Thomas’s back was a shock. O’Sullivan’s strapping had been vicious enough to break the skin.

  Rawlins set about making an infusion with a cinnamon-colored powder Ian recognized for Jesuit bark. Raising Thomas, they managed to get most of the liquid down his throat. Water was then sponged over his flesh and dribbled between his peeling lips.

  “I’ll leave you some bark,” Rawlins said, brusquely tidying away his powders. “Keep him bathed and cool. Get as much water down him as you can. If he wakes and will eat, feed him. Dose him again come morning. If you’ve spare clothing, cover him decent, else wash out those filthy rags. Can you manage?”

  “Aye,” Ian said, taken aback by the man’s terseness. “Thank ye . . . Doctor.” The title felt absurd on his lips. Rawlins couldn’t be older than nineteen.

  Ignoring the thanks, Rawlins shut his case and stood. Lantern light reflected off his spectacles, obscuring tired eyes. “Be thankful I’ve another patient nearby or your man might have been dead by morning.”

  Ian rubbed a hand through his unbound hair. “I haven’t coin to pay ye but can offer one of the horses. The black. A fine animal, sound as you’ll come by.”

  Rawlins’s glance took in the horses, the saddlebags heaped nearby. “And how distant is home for you, sir? A day’s journey? Two?”

  “More than two.”

  Rawlins’s mouth tightened. “Doubtless you’d make him walk. I cannot in good conscience take your spare horse and jeopardize the life I’m meant to save.” The physician glared up at him, not the least intimidated by their substantial difference in size.

  Ian drew a calming breath. “I’ll give ye something for your services, all the same.” Struck by inspiration, he went to his shot bag, untouched since the muster at Chesterfield.

  Rawlins left the stable with Gideon Pryce’s silver-ornamented powder horn slung over his shoulder. Ian watched the absurdly young physician vanish into the night, wondering was it something in the local tea-brown water that made these swamp dwellers stubborn as mules.

  When he returned to their corner, Thomas’s face still gleamed with unhealthy sweat, but his eyes were open, swiveling to take in the stable rafters illumined by lantern light. They shifted, settling on Ian, flaring in recognition.

  “Welcome back.” Ian settled in the straw and began pulling off a boot.

  Frowning, Thomas blinked. “You’re not a dream. How did you . . . ?”

  “Spirit ye from under the nose of your Irish overseer?” Ian pulled off a second boot. “I didn’t. I bought ye.”

  Thomas’s eyes flared again. His cracked lips twisted. “You enjoying this . . . Mastah Ian?”

  “Not much.” Not at all.

  Thomas raised a hand to the marks shaved into his head. He started to speak, then went still. The pulse beat fast at his throat. “Seona?”

  Ian tensed. “Aye. What of her?”

  Moisture gleamed in Thomas’s eyes. “I lost her.”

  “And I found her. Or John Reynold did. He was in Fayetteville and happened to spot—” Struck by how close he’d come to never knowing she hadn’t gained her freedom, his mouth hardened. “She’s chosen ye over me, has she?”

  Thomas met his glare. Unrepentant. “She never got the chance.”

  “She left with ye!”

  “She was taken with me. Not the same.”

  Ian opened his mouth, then shut it as understanding shimmered at the edges of his thoughts. Taken. Seona hadn’t left Mountain Laurel willingly, despite all the evidence to the contrary? Thomas’s note, the stolen garments . . . Even as it blasted his soul with a warmth he hadn’t felt in months, he flinched from the notion, unwilling to embrace it. Thomas was lying.

  “Someone forced ye to go? That’s what ye mean me to believe? Forced the pair of ye?”

  “You said you found Seona,” Thomas said. “Didn’t she tell you?”

  “No.” The denial came too quickly.

  “Or you didn’t let her.”

  He hadn’t, and now his gut writhed like a nest of snakes as doubt assailed what he’d thought was bitter truth. “Ye left that note! I know your hand, Thomas. It was ye wrote it. Ye meant to take her away.”

  “It was. . . .” Thomas closed his eyes. “And I did.”

  Ian gripped him, merciless. “Don’t ye dare sleep! Tell me what happened that night or so help me, I’ll sell ye to the first dupe fool enough to buy ye—for half the shilling ye cost me.”

  That roused him. Fixing Ian with a bleary glare, Thomas asked, “You bought me for a shilling?”

  “I did,” Ian said. “So start giving me my coin’s worth—now.”

  After another long drink from Ian’s canteen, Thomas obliged. “I hadn’t meant to speak to her at all that night, but she was hiding in your bed when I slipped in to find where you’d put my papers. Thought I heard breathing but was too set on getting out without being caught to pull back the hangings to see. I waited near the kitchen and sure enough, out she came on my heels. I told her I was leaving, wanted her to come too. Knew I’d some convincing to do, but we hadn’t got past the washhouse before the Jackdaw caught us.”

  During the long recitation Thomas’s voice had sunk to a rasp. Ian reached again for the canteen and put it to his lips, supporting his head while he drank. He still couldn’t half believe the tale. “D’ye tell me Dawes subdued ye both single-handed and took ye off my uncle’s land without rousing anyone to see or hear? Ye didn’t put up a fight? For yourself or for her?”

  “Never got the chance. Must have come out of the dark . . . clubbed me over the head first thing. I woke trussed in a wagon driven by men I’d never seen before, bound and gagged. Even after they took that gag off me, they kept watch so we didn’t talk. Seona managed to tell me just the one thing before O’Sullivan took me off. It was Dawes.”

  The shock of it had his head spinning. Why would Dawes abduct and sell Seona and Thomas, then lead them all on a wild-goose chase, pretending to hunt them down? Surely his uncle knew nothing of it. But what about . . . ?

  Shock was passing. Some of the spinning pieces were falling into place. The robbery that had sent him away from Mountain Laurel for days, chasing down a peddler. It hadn’t been a robbery, true enough. Nor had it been a mistake. It had been very much intentional, though not on the part of Karl Gottfriedsen. “Lucinda.”

  “Maybe,” Thomas said. “Probably. I never heard her named. Maybe Seona did.”

  “Sounds as if Dawes had a buyer ready,” Ian said, struggling to reason past the rage. “O’Sullivan?”

  “He came into it later . . . pure chance.”

  Ian shivered, though the stable air was by no means chill. Recalling one piece to this puzzle Thomas hadn’t yet offered, he asked, “And where does Benjamin Eden come into it?”

  The hesitation was brief. “He doesn’t.”

  “It was Eden drove Ally and the wagon back to Mountain Laurel, after Pryce beat him. Ally saw him. Heard his name spoken.”

  “Ally got it wrong.”

  Ian’s jaw tightened as he clenched his teeth. “Ye’re lying to my face, Thomas. I’ve a letter from the man. He admits intending to aid ye in helping slaves to run. Ye’d an assignation with him that night. Ye were taking Seona to meet him.”

  “Sounds like you got it all figured, Mastah Ian.” Thomas shifted under the blanket and winced, closing his eyes.

  Pity and fury surged. “Why did ye have to meddle? I meant all along to see her free. I thought she lov—”

  “Loved you?” Thomas’s breath came labored now. “How could she kn
ow . . . a slave? How could you?”

  Regretting his revealing words, sickened by the bitter truth in Thomas’s, he said, “I’m sending ye back to Boston. Soon as ye’re fit to go.”

  Thomas didn’t blink at that. After a pause long enough to prick Ian with concern, he asked, “And Seona?”

  “She stays at Mountain Laurel for now.” Memory of Seona running to him across Gibbs’s yard filled his mind, with new and gutting import. Thomas had said she hadn’t made up her mind to go with him before Dawes intervened. Would she have stayed, given the choice?

  What if Thomas had it wrong, and she’d never for a moment meant to leave Mountain Laurel, or him?

  Then Ian was the one who’d broken their vows. Not Seona.

  36

  Light from the cabin licked over the doorway where Seona stood. She hadn’t moved since Esther rushed up to say Ian was come home with Thomas, who looked about half-dead. Thomas had been brought to their cabin instead of the big house. Her mama had come to tend him. Seona had watched the to-and-fro like it was all a dream, until Esther came panting out of the dark again.

  “They stewin’ like to boil up at the house, Seona. Mister Ian sent me for to fetch you.”

  Lily spared attention from Thomas, lying fevered on her cot. “Go on, girl-baby. It’s going to be all right. The Lord is—”

  “I know, Mama.” Watching over our lot.

  Her lot was grief and it hurt all over. In her chest. Her throat. Low at the back of her head. Grief was the burden in her belly too. She was hiding it still with her own winter clothes layered on, the drawstring petticoat let out to its full extent, and a shawl—an old blanket—wrapped just so. Like the head-rag hid what was left of her hair.

  So far only Lily and Naomi knew her secret. Maybe that was all about to change. Maybe that was why she was being sent for.

  Heaviness dragged her steps along the track. Sent for. Was this how it was to be, Ian handing down orders from the house, sending to fetch her like a proper master would?

  That proper master’s wife was coming down the passage as Seona came through the back door. She’d avoided Miss Judith since her return, feigning ill the one time she’d sought her out at the cabins. Esther had heard Miss Lucinda berating her daughter for it, telling her a master’s wife shouldn’t make friendly with the servants. “Especially that one.”

  Maybe Miss Lucinda was right. It wasn’t lost on Seona that she carried inside her what was meant to be Miss Judith’s. Meant to be . . . or would be? She trembled before the girl who once read her stories. Who blacked her eyebrows and giggled at the silliness. Who cried and pleaded when Seona got punished for it. Who could take from her the very child of her body to raise up for her own, if she wanted and Ian was willing. And why wouldn’t Ian be willing? The child was his.

  She dropped her gaze before Miss Judith could meet it.

  “You’re wanted in the parlor, Seona,” Miss Judith said, then passed her by and started up the stairs.

  “Ye’ve the evidence of your eyes, Aunt. He made a botch of it—didn’t even see the papers burnt proper. I found them in the ashes.” Ian’s coat cuffs and tails were begrimed, his hair down in straggles, unwashed. Esther had told them how he’d run to Dawes’s cabin soon as he flung himself off his horse. Jubal tried to tell him Dawes was gone, lit out for parts unknown, but he’d acted deaf.

  Seona hung back in the parlor doorway while Ian thrust the burnt remains of whatever he’d found—Thomas’s free papers, she reckoned—under Miss Lucinda’s nose.

  “Tell me where Dawes is hiding, Aunt, or so help me—”

  “Hugh!” Miss Lucinda snapped at Master Hugh, sitting in his chair by the fire. “Will you say nothing while your nephew threatens me?”

  Master Hugh appeared unmoved by the appeal. “Ye’ve held your wheesht about Dawes, letting me think he was about the place. Answer the question Ian put to ye.”

  Miss Lucinda’s mouth tucked in like she’d taken hurt. “I held my wheesht, as you put it, to preserve your health and peace. Jackson has always returned from his truancies in the past.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “No one has seen him since the muster—or admits to it.” Miss Lucinda spied Seona in the doorway. “There’s the one to question! Come, girl. Tell what you know. I hadn’t a thing to do with your misfortunes of late.”

  Ian turned, showing her his face for the first time since he left her, John Reynold, and Ruby on the road north of Fayetteville. It was a leaner face, and agonized. Across that river spread between them again, his sunken eyes reached for her as he said her name. “Seona . . . Thomas was knocked senseless that night, but ye weren’t. Did my aunt have anything to do with your being taken?”

  Aching for his arms to do what his eyes were doing, she took a step toward him.

  Confusion crashed over her and she halted. He belonged to Miss Judith. Married by law. He oughtn’t to be reaching for her, even with his eyes. Nothing could span that river now.

  She looked to Master Hugh. A shock it was, seeing him after months. He seemed aged a year, maybe two, for each. Pity and resentment tangled in her throat. Would he want to know she carried another child of his blood? Would he care any more for its well-being than he ever had for hers? Still she spoke to him as if he’d been the one to ask. “I never saw Miss Lucinda that night, nor heard her name spoke.”

  “You see!”

  Apart from Miss Lucinda’s vindicated outburst, there was silence. Seona lifted her eyes to the painting over the mantel, the one the first mistress painted long ago. Water flowing over mossy rocks. Yellow birches. Could she but step through those put-on colors and disappear . . .

  Ian’s voice pulled her back. “Seona, are ye sure?”

  “I never saw Miss Lucinda, nor heard her name spoke.” She’d nothing more to say. What she suspected hardly mattered.

  “Verra well,” Master Hugh said. “Ye can go, lass.”

  No one had said a word about her baby. Her secret was still safe. She would keep it so, for as long as she could.

  “Very well?” Miss Lucinda’s face was all bone and stretched skin as she glared at her menfolk. “Her word satisfies you, where mine does not?”

  Seona fled the parlor, not wanting to hear more. Let the white folk fight it out among themselves. She wanted her mama.

  Ian burst out the back door in time to see Seona start down the kitchen breezeway.

  “Seona, wait!” He plunged after her, thinking she meant to ignore his plea, and all but collided with her in the near dark of the arching trellis, where she’d paused. Her arms were crossed below her breasts, fingers clenching the ragged blanket that wrapped her so tight it hunched her shoulders. “I tried to find ye when first we knew ye gone. I did try, Seona. I was injured. There was—”

  “A painter-cat. Mama told me. She said you near about died of it.”

  Her voice was lifeless. No hint of pardon or concern. It was all he could do not to pull her into his arms. “Still I oughtn’t to have given up, let myself believe ye didn’t want to be found. Between that blasted note, the missing gown and shoes, and Dawes—if ever I set eyes on him again, he’s a dead man. That I promise ye.”

  She unlocked her arms and touched him, a grip on his hand that sent a thrill surging through him. Until she spoke. “No, Mister Ian. No more promises.”

  Pinioning her hand in his, he tried to pull her closer. She tugged, trying to break free.

  “Seona, please . . .” He took her forcibly in his arms, holding her tight against him, an arm snaked around a waist no longer slender. Her body had changed, grown full in the belly. But she was so thin.

  He’d a moment of surprise, another of confusion; then blinding comprehension rocked him.

  He backed away, clinging to her still, a hand spread over the unmistakable curve of her pregnancy. “Seona?”

  Darkness cradled them. An eternity passed. Then she said, “It’s yours.”

  “It . . . You—” Joy exploded through him, robbi
ng him of speech. There was a child. His. Theirs. For a moment he could only breathe and wonder. Then he remembered Judith, and guilt and remorse heaved against his joy like a bitter wave. “Do they know?”

  “Mama and Naomi do,” she said. “Reckon others suspect.”

  Not his aunt. Not his uncle. Not yet. And Judith . . .

  What his kin would say or do warred with the sheer wonder of the life inside Seona, one he welcomed with all his terrified heart. Did she?

  Thought that she might feel otherwise left him shaking.

  “I swear to ye, Seona, I’d never have forced ye to be with me if I’d believed that’s what I was doing. This child—our child—was conceived in love. My love at least. Everything I promised beneath the birches, I meant. I’ll keep ye—”

  She pushed away from him. “Keep me? Do whatever—punish me like Mister Gibbs—but I will never be that to you.”

  He stared at her shadowed face, stunned, until her meaning registered. That—his mistress, kept in plain sight behind Judith’s back. A second family, a shadow family, seen but unacknowledged. For a sickening moment he understood how such a thing might come to be. And be borne. Then what else she’d said hit him. Punish me like Mister Gibbs . . .

  “What did the man do to ye?” Rage boiled up in him, unreasoning. He wanted to hear every word of it, for his heart to be flayed raw by all she’d suffered. “Seona, tell me.”

  Perhaps she wanted that too, for she spared him no detail. She told him how she’d run from the Gibbses, how they caught her and hauled her back, cut off her hair as punishment, then tied her to a pine tree and beat her with a strap. She’d run again, and again they’d hauled her back and strapped her worse. “’Til I feared they’d beat the baby out of me. I didn’t run a third time.”

  The ache in his chest robbed him of breath. He could hardly speak. “Seona . . . I am so sorry. For—for everything.”

  “Even for Miss Judith?”