by Lori Benton
His breath raised gooseflesh down her neck. “Our marriage was real to me. But if ye spoke those vows and shared my bed because ye thought ye had no choice . . . then say so.”
Had she thought that? Ever? She couldn’t think now, not with him so close. “You can’t be coming to the cabins like this. You have a wife—”
“Ye’re my wife!”
His hold on her tightened, and like a wife her body had the memory of his, long muscles, wide shoulders, the hard planes of his chest. Her arms went around him, feeling his ribs and the line of his backbone through his shirt. Was he starving himself? Starving for her like she was for him? Then his mouth was on hers, warm and wanting and sweet.
Stop. The word seared through her, hissing as a falling star. Planting her hands on his chest, she pushed, breaking the kiss, and stepped back.
Ian stood tense as a painter-cat ready to spring. “I’ve tried to do what I must, Seona, but I cannot love her. Only when I’m near ye can I feel.”
He held out his hand. She stared at it, afraid her heart would come bursting free to meet him halfway and they’d take the fall together.
Then he said, “I’m leaving tomorrow. Thomas is going back to Boston.”
The breath went out of her like she’d been punched. It was a thing she’d never thought of, not in all her worrying. “You’re going too?”
“Part of the way.” He came a step closer. “Stay with me now. Let me be near ye—for an hour. That’s all.”
It seemed so little to ask, yet she knew if they took an hour, they’d want the night. And another. But if she went on holding him off, how soon until that love he professed wore thin? How soon until he started thinking of taking from her what was his to take? A fierce maternal need propelled her toward him, but only a step, before a knowing clear as light filled her. If she gave in and became what he wanted her to be, she’d be giving to him by pieces what wasn’t his to take now—her soul. And she wouldn’t save her child.
It felt like walking blind off a cliff, even knowing it was God asking it of her. Still she said, “No.”
“Seona.” His reaching hand was white in the darkness. “Please. Ye’ve my child inside ye, and my soul ye own until time should end. As I thought I owned yours. Do I?”
He was baring that soul to her now. The nakedness of it, and its poverty, was more than she could stand. She stepped back, shaking her head. “Master Hugh might own me on a paper, but my soul is God’s.” And God’s alone. Master Hugh was slipping away from them. She’d just denied Ian. There was no other covering left her, save the only one she’d ever truly had. “Go back to Miss Judith. Don’t come down here again.”
She ran for her cabin, acorns skittering under her feet, a hand muffling her sobs.
Benjamin Eden met them on the Cape Fear Road two days north of Mountain Laurel, driving a two-wheeled cart pulled by a bay horse. The man himself was immaculate in his plain Quaker garb as he halted his conveyance in a flood of morning sunlight. “There is an inn not a mile farther where we may find accommodation,” he told Ian. “Thee will bide the night with us?”
“I will not,” Ian said. Though assured by his uncle no harm would befall Seona in his absence, he was anxious to return.
The Quaker nodded, accepting his curt refusal, then addressed Thomas, not yet fully recovered and visibly drooping after the long ride. “Thee is resolved upon returning north, Friend Thomas?”
“He hasn’t a choice, as I explained in my letter.” Dismounting, Ian removed a bundle tied behind Ruaidh’s saddle. “Provisions.” The offering was accepted. Ian laid a hand to the cart’s wheel. “Swear to me that ye’ll not let him turn back.”
Eden’s brows lifted. “Thee knows little of Quakers to bid one swear an oath. I shall see Thomas reaches Philadelphia and supply introduction to those who can aid him on his journey. With that thee must be content.”
“Still fretting over me?” Thomas asked from the saddle.
“Aye,” Ian ground out. “Ye worry me no end. Go back to Boston or stay in Philadelphia—just keep your brown hide out of the South.” Ian dropped his voice as he turned back to the Quaker. “Convince him to give over the notion of freeing slaves, for his own good. What can one man hope to do?”
Eden smiled at that. “Nothing, if he does not try.”
Overcome with a sense of failure in the parting, Ian studied Thomas, who was staring down the road, face as shuttered as any born slave’s. He wasn’t gazing northward, where his journey would take him, but back along the road they’d traveled, as if he’d taken Eden’s words to heart.
“Thomas,” Ian said, warning in his tone. Their ruse was known. Even if Ian wanted him there, Thomas wasn’t welcome at Mountain Laurel. His kin had made that clear. As had Thomas his opinion of Ian.
Thomas had made no secret of his disappointment upon learning of Ian’s marriage to Judith—or of his resentment for Seona’s sake—accusing Ian of having fulfilled every dark prediction gleaned from the slave narrative he once more carried in his satchel. But he hadn’t wasted breath arguing to remain. Ian had thought him come to his senses at last, at least about his own disastrous sojourn in the South. Now he found himself nearly as certain Thomas’s equanimity on that point had hidden another agenda—the same one he’d had all along.
Of the two of them, Thomas’s had always been the more reckless courage.
But responsibility for this friend once closer than a brother was passing out of Ian’s hands. He’d have to trust Benjamin Eden to do the sensible thing.
Aware of Ian’s scrutiny and likely his doubts—if not his guilt—Thomas pressed his mouth in a tight line before he murmured, “Aonaibh ri chéile.”
Let us unite. The embittered reminder shot heat into Ian’s face. Regret and frustration choked whatever words of warning, or farewell, he might have made.
Thomas glanced down from the saddle, his gaze cold, unreadable. “I cannot imagine we ever will unite. Still . . . reckon I owe you a shilling, Mastah Ian.”
Home after days on horseback, Ian paused outside his room, halted by the all-too-familiar sound of Judith’s retching. He started to open the door, but Lucinda Cameron’s voice on its other side froze him: “You’ve made a habit of losing your breakfast—supper nigh as often—for how long now? All of April to my reckoning, and here it is May. You’re thin as a rail.”
“I’ve been too ill to keep anything down.”
“When was your last monthly?”
“Mama.”
“For heaven’s sake, you’re a woman married.”
“I—I don’t remember. Why?”
“Because, Judith, you aren’t ill. You’re breeding. My guess is three months gone.”
Ian didn’t hear his wife’s reply. He barely made it to the top of the stairs before his knees gave way and he sat down.
When at last he descended, Lily was coming from his uncle’s room, tray in hand. Taking her by the arm, he steered her into the warming room. Garden greenery soiled her apron. She smelled of mint and rosemary.
“Master Hugh has a cough starting,” she said. “I’m on my way to make a chest plaster. There something ye need, Mister Ian?”
“Aye, Lily. I need ye to tell me what my uncle’s choice has done to ye.”
Light from the warming room window should have shown her age. She had to be past five and thirty, yet her complexion was still smooth, the bones beneath carved of a timeless grace. A grace with a wildness to it, alluring, mystifying. What power over a man might she have wielded with that allure, twenty years ago?
“I see ye caring for him, day after day,” he pressed. “Ye’re bound to it—I know that. But is it out of that duty alone? D’ye care for the man at all?”
Lily set the tray on a sideboard and regarded him. “No, Mister Ian. Not in the way ye mean.”
He searched the dark depths of her eyes but could read nothing of the soul they shielded. Was this what he could one day expect of Seona, should he make the choice his uncle had made? This c
alm, unreachable acceptance? Did he risk losing her piecemeal by not letting her go? Letting them go? Or could he somehow raise the child as his own, fully acknowledged, without taking it from Seona? Treat them with dignity, keep them near—but separate, for Judith’s sake?
“‘Cast out the bondwoman and her child.’”
He drew breath, staring at Lily. “What did ye say?”
“’Tis what will be said, Mister Ian, if ye do what it is I reckon ye’re thinking of doing. There’ll be some with brass enough to say it to your face. Ye maybe have the courage to face that. Seona may have it. But what of Miss Judith or her child?”
Judith’s child. Lily knew; midwife that she was, she could read the signs as well as could his aunt.
“Lily. Did ye never think of running away? Of taking Seona and leaving?”
The sigh that came from Seona’s mother might have started at the root of her soul. “I came to the edge of doing it a hundred times.”
That caught him by surprise. “What stopped ye?”
Lily regarded him with something like compassion, and he saw the choice had been simpler for her than for anyone else caught in this tangle of bondage and kinship.
“Where were we to go,” she asked, “the two of us alone?”
Hunkered in the tree-shadows under the oaks, Ian watched his uncle’s slaves file toward the flowering apple orchard, lying like a ribbon of mist beyond the cabins. They moved in silence, carrying no visible burdens. He crept to the edge of the oak grove in time to see the last of them swallowed in a fall of blossoms. He’d no notion where they were bound in the middle of the night; yet stronger than suspicion or alarm, the ever-present ache of isolation swelled at their going. They were a circle closed, into which he could never find welcome. Even his child was part of that circle. One of them.
No longer seeing the night around him, Ian stared down the passage of years at a curly-haired youth, fair and clean-limbed, with a face uncannily his own. But the eyes that gave him back his stare were cold, the features blank. The lad turned his back, showing him a livid web of scars.
A breeze stirred, clammy against his skin. Alone at the edge of the grove, Ian watched the last of the apple blossoms disturbed by the slaves’ passing drift to the ground like snow.
Before the final one settled, he’d risen to follow.
He emerged from the orchard alone, thinking he’d lost them among the gnarled boughs and silvery petals, until a flash of movement caught his eye—there and gone in the starlight. The slaves had issued from the orchard farther to the west, making for the ridge.
Guided by a glimpse of shirt or kerchief, he crept in their wake. The ground sloped upward as he snagged through thickets, blundered through spiderwebs, tripped over roots. Higher up the ridge, the pinpoints of a pierced-tin lantern sprang to light. The figure in the lead held it aloft to illumine a footpath, which they’d been following all along.
Scratched and muddied, Ian made his way to it and afterward gained ground on the slaves, strung out along the upward-winding path. From the front of the procession, a male voice chanted low. Snatches floated back, borne on the breeze that whispered through the laurels.
“I know moon-rise, I know star-rise,
Lay this body down.
I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight
To lay this body down.”
He followed, passing through the insect-humming dark, echoes of half-forgotten Scripture thrumming an undertone through the chant: And the Lord spake unto Moses . . . say unto Pharaoh . . . Let my people go, that they may serve me. A sense of being swept along in the wake of exodus lay heavy on him, though he was sure this nocturnal wandering hadn’t to do with some sort of mass escape. Not of the body.
Something stirred in his chest, unnamed, insistent. One more ache among the many. He gave himself to the pull of it, ceasing to wonder.
“I go to the judgment in the evenin’ of the day,
When I lay this body down.”
They were come to a level stretch, a notch running behind a shoulder of the ridge. The slaves had reached the farthest headstone before he recognized the place. The graveyard of his kin. Beyond it the lantern veered aside. The slaves passed shadowlike into a clearing separated from the burying ground by a scrim of dogwood spotted with blossoms, disembodied in the starlit dark. Discarded petals lay on the ground, a shroud for the dead.
Ian cast about for a place of concealment. There was none, save the stones rising from the damp earth in straight-sided ranks. He crept forward, chose a grave, hunkered behind it.
A fire was lit—so quickly there must have been wood laid by for the purpose, sheltered from the damp—while Ally seated his grandfather on a stump chair. The slaves gathered near, ringing the small blaze, now and then one of them feeding it more fuel.
After a time Malcolm prayed, though few heads bowed and fewer eyes closed. Before the old man ceased speaking, a hum like bee-drone rose. A rich alto voice—Naomi’s—crooned a low note, and the singing began again.
“Jesus Christ is made to me
All I need, all I need;
He alone is all my plea.
He is all I need.”
It had been Ian’s impression that the slaves sang unreservedly at the autumn’s corn-shucking. He’d mistaken skill and long practice for abandon. This blending of voices, clapping hands, stomping feet, was unlike anything he’d have thought them capable of, restrained as they were by day.
His surprise reproached him. He’d seen early on Seona’s spirit struggling to free itself, finding outlet in her clandestine drawing. Had he assumed she was the only one among his uncle’s slaves who possessed such hunger?
There was Ally, voice booming like a drum as he shuffled to the song’s rhythm. Beside him Naomi swayed with palms raised high. Malcolm, normally stooped, had risen to his feet and now stood straight as a garden pale as he sang, doubtless a sacrifice of praise.
There were the field hands, Pete and Munro. Across from them Lily, graceful as her name as she harmonized with Seona.
“Jesus is my all in all,
All I need, all I need,
While He keeps I cannot fall,
He is all I need.”
These were the floodwaters dammed behind the masks they showed his kin. Washed in the flow, an urge came over Ian to join in, to lift both hand and voice.
He didn’t. The one was heavy as lead, the other strangled mute.
“He redeemed me when He died,
All I need, all I need,
I with Him was crucified,
He is all I need.”
The headstone that hid him smelled of decay. He longed to recoil to his feet, plunge in among the living, soak up whatever it was that gave them joy. That gave her joy.
Sparks from the fire fountained upward, obscuring his view of Seona. When they vanished, his chest constricted at sight of the growing bulge beneath the knotted tails of her shawl. Seona shut her eyes and joined in a new song.
“You may talk of my name all that you please and carry my name abroad,
But I really do believe I’m a child of God as I walk in the heavenly road.
O, won’t you go with me? O, won’t you go with me?
For to keep our garments clean.”
What was it his uncle’s slaves grasped of the Almighty to make them throw off their fetters and worship like this? How much could they understand, forbidden even to read? Ian knew Holy Writ well enough, had spent plenty of Sabbaths in a pew. Yet it hadn’t been enough to capture him, heart and soul. Instead he’d run from the Almighty, thinking his failings an insurmountable barrier to grace.
The vision that had propelled him on this midnight trek flashed through his mind, this time with deeper revelation. Had it been his and Seona’s future child grown he’d seen . . . or was he the lash-marked boy, the son who turned from a longing Father in whose image he was made?
Perhaps two fathers, only one of them on earth.
“Da,” he whispered to the
m both and bowed his head against the gravestone while the slaves sang on.
Seona got up off her knees to find only Malcolm left in the clearing. He must have sent the others on without a word while she’d been lost in prayer and weeping. The fire had sunk to embers.
“Mama and the others go and leave you?” She held out a shawl-draped arm. “Reckon we can make shift to get down off this ridge, if we take a torch.”
Malcolm made no move to rise. “The Almighty and I have further business tonight, lass. But mind ye take a stick and beat the path as ye go. There be snakes.”
“Who’s gonna knock those snakes in the head for you? Or you aiming to sprout wings and fly down off this ridge?”
In the fire’s dying glow Malcolm smiled, stubborn as the stump he sat on. “Go on now. Though did ye lay a few sticks to the fire first, I’d be obliged.”
No use arguing. Sooner she did as he bid, sooner they could both get off that ridge. She laid the wood and left, but she didn’t go far. Malcolm might be set on solitary praying, but she wasn’t about to leave him there with a thousand roots and stones ready to throw him down in the dark and break his old bones. Never mind snakes.
A mosquito whined near her ear. She swiped at it. Waited.
The baby grew restless. Her bladder was full enough to take unkindly to being squirmed against. She was about to head back to the fire when Malcolm’s voice lifted.
“‘O, won’t you go with me? O, won’t you go with me?’”
It was a comfort, his creaky voice chanting that song—but he did go on for a tiresome time, repeating the line like he was calling someone to the fire.
A beat before the shadow rose up from the graves, she understood what was happening and clapped a hand to her mouth to keep from blurting Ian’s name. As if it rang like a bell inside her, the baby kicked hard. She squeezed her thighs tight, willing it still.
