Mountain Laurel

by Lori Benton

  She found them in the curing barn. Except for some swallows nesting in the rafters, at first she thought it stood empty, doors open, gutted in the late-summer heat. The tobacco harvest was days away from filling it again. When she peeked inside, all she saw were bands of sunlight lancing through the siding, cutting up the dimness like a new striped shirt. Then Ian stepped into one of the bands, arms full of Gabriel. The air around them danced with the dust of last year’s leaf. He was talking to the baby, the murmur of his voice a river flowing sweet across her breaking heart.

  “. . . maybe not as good a crop even as last year, though I can make it better. I’ve studied on means to improve the land, restore it. But I won’t plant cotton. I’ll take care of ye without going to that.” As he bent his lips to the curve of Gabriel’s brow, Ian turned and saw her.

  She wondered did he know how he dazzled her. How the sunlight made crystals of his eyes, like there was no gray in them at all, only blue, clear and pure. Pulled like a tethered lamb, she crossed the empty barn, the tobacco smell a tickle in her nose, until the three of them shared the same spill of sunlight. Her need was plain. He put Gabriel in her arms. What had passed between him and the baby lingered on his face. A softness. An ache. Hope.

  “Thank ye, Seona.” Pain flickered in his eyes. She sensed he wanted to touch her, maybe say something more. With a breath like a groan, he moved past her, doing neither.

  When she knew he was gone, she kissed Gabriel’s brow where he’d kissed it. Breath filled her chest like she’d been running, deep and ragged.

  Lord, please. She left it at that, not knowing what else to pray. Seemed just when she’d steadied herself with a few days passing, keeping out of his path, Ian would come for the baby and with a single look send her reeling again.

  Gabriel let out a squawk. She sat on the tail of a cart shoved off to the side, held him against her, and watched the swallows swooping high among the rafters.

  Lily and Maisy had tidied Judith, taken away the soiled linens to boil, even left the window propped to the mild October afternoon. Judith lay in the center of the bed beside the bundle swathed in embroidered blue. Her labor had lasted through the night and into the following day; the bairn had come at last as the parlor clock struck the hour of three.

  Ian’s breeches bore the stain of fieldwork. His shirt hung in grimy wrinkles, open at the neck. He caught his image in the glass above the washstand. A good portion of his hair had escaped its tail. He tamed the tangle, then washed his face and toweled dry.

  Judith’s eyes opened as his weight sank the tick. She tried to sit up, but pain creased her brow. Instead she pulled aside the bairn’s wrapping. “Want to see?”

  “Of course.”

  And he’d thought Gabriel small. She was a wee elfin thing, their daughter. Her eyes were open, nearly invisible brows knit above them, as though she puzzled over some thought beyond her comprehension. He brushed a fingertip against her cheek and the little brows arched in surprise. She was beautiful.

  “I hope a daughter isn’t a disappointment?”

  “Not at all.” Ian smoothed back Judith’s hair, still damp with the sweat of her labor. “She’s a bonny girl. Like her mother.”

  As if to protest this exalted estimation, the bairn crumpled her face and mewled.

  Judith stroked the back of his hand. “So brown,” she said, then smiled. “Would you like to hold her?”

  “I’m filthy, Judith—my shirt.”

  “Take it off.” She’d bid him go about his labors while she tended hers, else he’d have stayed perched on the stair just outside the door throughout her travail. Lily, Maisy, finally even his aunt, had insisted he’d be of more use in the fields helping the hands bring in the last of the sun-dried cornstalks.

  Absurdly self-conscious, he tugged the stained garment over his head. While his arms and face were sun-browned, his chest and belly were the color of pale buckskin. “All right,” he said and scooped his daughter into his arms, by now well-practiced at the maneuver.

  The weight of her was surprising, bitty as she was. As he met her solemn stare, what rose in him was something apart from what he’d felt with Gabriel, as if this tiny girl-child, despite her security of birth, would prove the more vulnerable of the two. He held her as if she were porcelain, giving her the shelter of his body, and promptly fell in love.

  And in that moment he knew, with gut-wrenching surety, that Seona would leave Mountain Laurel. Gabriel with her.

  But not yet. Let there be a little more time. . . .

  Tears pooled in Judith’s eyes, running into her hair. He had to break the moment or he would break. His voice cracked as he said, “What shall we call her?”

  “Miranda . . . if that’s agreeable.”

  He studied his daughter, considering. “Miranda Cameron.” Spoken aloud, the name evoked a memory: cold granite, wreathed in mist. “Wasn’t that the name of—?”

  “Papa Hugh’s first wife.”

  “You want to name the lass for her?” With infinite care he laid the bairn on the bed beside her mother. “Ye never met her, Judith. Why would ye want our daughter to bear her name?”

  “I’ve seen her,” Judith said.

  A chill prickled the hairs on his arms though no breeze came through the window. “What d’ye mean, seen her?”

  “In Papa Hugh’s room. He has a little portrait. She was beautiful.”

  As often as he’d been in his uncle’s room, he’d never seen a portrait of the man’s first wife—though there was no reason he mightn’t have one tucked away somewhere. Still, doubt gave him pause. The name might be less agreeable to his aunt. And to his uncle?

  No matter. If Judith wanted the name, she’d have it. “And so will our Miranda be. Beautiful.”

  Judith closed her eyes. “If she looks like her papa.”

  He eased his weight off the bed and knelt beside it. “I don’t deserve ye,” he whispered, head bowed over her small hand. “God knows ye don’t deserve me.”

  There was no stir of movement, only Judith’s voice drifting into sleep. “What has deserving to do with our blessings?”

  Two striped kittens, one orange, one gray, follow him down the row of ripened corn, twisting round his ankles, threatening to trip him. Exasperated, he faces the whiskered duo and addresses them in Callum Lindsay’s broad speech. “Awa’ wi’ ye. Canna ye see I’ve the crop tae put up?”

  The kittens mewl. Somewhere a hammer commences to bang. Someone is dismantling the corncrib. He’ll have nowhere to put the corn . . .

  He started awake, blinking at the washstand across the room. He was abed beside his wife . . . who’d just borne him a daughter. Her middle name will be Grace.

  The thought crystallized as he fixed the time by the window’s light. Sunset. And it was his daughter doing the mewling, the sound he’d dreamed was kittens’, so soft and unobtrusive it hadn’t disturbed Judith’s exhaustion.

  The banging had followed him into waking too. He lifted his head, then let it sink back on the pillow, too tired to care. And too troubled.

  Hours earlier, before returning to rest beside his sleeping wife and daughter, he’d found his aunt and uncle in the parlor. Hugh Cameron had appeared confused when Ian announced his daughter’s name; then understanding eased his brow.

  “Miranda. ’Twas Judith’s choice?” Smiling but distant-eyed, his uncle had stood and crossed the parlor, passing Ian by.

  Lucinda had been less sanguine. “Miranda Cameron is dead!”

  His uncle hadn’t even flinched. Ian had likewise ignored his aunt. “Uncle, wait. I need to speak with ye about Seona and my son.”

  It was time to make his decision known, no matter how grievous the speaking of it.

  His uncle had paused in the passage. Illness of heart and mind had left him shrunken from the imposing figure who’d emerged from the stable’s gloom to greet Ian that late-summer day, more than a year past, but there was a steadiness about him Ian hadn’t seen for months, as if something he’d
long wrestled over had been resolved—much as it had within Ian.

  “Seona has been my care for nigh twenty years,” his uncle said. “Lily much the longer. I ken ye think I’ve no’ done well enough by them, and ye may well be right, Nephew. But I’ve at least made certain ye willna repeat my mistakes.”

  Alarmed, Ian had grasped his uncle’s arm, disconcertingly thin beneath the sleeve of his banyan. “What have ye done?”

  His uncle had pulled away. “Never ye mind. In time ye’ll ken. Your place now is wi’ your wife. Go to her.”

  Hugh Cameron had seemed less to walk away than to drift, like the ghosts that had so long haunted him. Ian had pressed his teeth into his lip to stem the bitter words flooding his mouth. As though he’d heard them anyway, his uncle had paused at the door of his room.

  “Ye maybe think, too, I’ve taken no account of your conduct since ye came back to us, last winter. I have, lad. And I’ve no worries leaving Mountain Laurel in your hands, to do wi’ as ye see fit. I trust ye.”

  The banging’s sudden cessation jarred Ian from the memory. Voices had replaced it—one molasses-thick, the other high and sharp. Both urgent.

  He was out of bed and pulling on a shirt when Judith roused. “Ian? What . . . ?”

  “Yet another stramash of some sort. I’ll see to it. I think our Mandy’s hungry.”

  “Mandy?”

  The name had slipped out, but he found it suited their wee lass. “Aye, if ye don’t mind it.” With a fleeting smile at her shaking head, he stepped into the passage.

  Footsteps clattered on the stairs. Maisy, round-eyed and breathless, met him on the landing.

  “Mister Ian, come quick! Ally saying the hands done run off toward the creek and it’s your Thomas taken ’em. Come back like Moses to lead ’em over Jordan!”

  42

  Ian had taken time to step back into the room for his rifle and tomahawk before leaving at a run for the creek, thinking all the while it couldn’t be Thomas. It wouldn’t be.

  But there was no mistaking the players in the creekside tableau that greeted him as he came through the trees, despite the gathering dusk. It was indeed Thomas Ross. And holding him at musket-point was a filthy, bearded Jackson Dawes.

  Ian had tomahawk in hand, ready to throw, as the man whirled to see him coming. Dawes shifted the musket, aiming instead for him.

  Thomas charged, ramming Dawes’s shoulder as the musket fired. Ian heard the ball whine past his ear. Half-obscured in powder smoke, Dawes threw off Thomas and bolted for the wood spreading upslope along the creek.

  Hot with rage, Ian drew back the tomahawk, but Thomas lunged across his path, grabbing his raised arm. He staggered to a halt, catching the rifle that flew forward off his shoulder.

  Thomas locked eyes with him across the blade between them. “Well-timed, Ian. The man meant to abduct and sell me yet again. Looks like he could use the proceeds. Or never tell me your uncle’s taken him back?”

  Ian jerked his arm free. “Never mind Dawes. Ye’re meant to be in Boston!”

  A shiver of leaves in the windless air drew his attention to a nearby thicket. Dark faces peered out, heads pressed close. His uncle’s field hands: Pete, Will, Munro. A woman and boy he didn’t recognize.

  Thomas spread his hands. “Eden took me north to Philadelphia as promised. Introduced me to some folks who were pleased to help me from there.”

  Dawes, still running, had reached the trees. A calm corner of Ian’s brain noted the spot where he plunged into cover. “Help ye? Not back to Boston, I take it.”

  “To set the captives free. Unless you aim to stop me.”

  The half-hidden faces watched them, some terrified, some defiant. Likely the woman and boy were those Thomas knew from Chesterfield. Ian was of no mind to hinder their escape, but his uncle’s farm was doomed to fail without men enough to work it.

  Breathing hard, he glared into Thomas’s challenging gaze as frustration and alarm at the knowledge filled him . . . then drained away, leaving the sweetest sense of release he’d known since coming to Mountain Laurel. As if he were himself one of that huddled company in the thicket, a step away from freedom, a desperate certainty came surging through his soul. If failing’s what it takes to set us free . . . give them wings.

  Ian shoved the tomahawk into his belt. “Tell me, Thomas. When have I ever stopped ye doing a blessed thing ye set yourself to do?”

  “Never yet.” There was the slightest easing of Thomas’s shoulders. “I hear you’re a daddy now. Twice over. My congratulations.”

  Ignoring the remark, Ian jerked his chin at the woman and boy. “Think Pryce will let them go without a hunt?”

  “I’m betting I can keep Amy and Jo a step ahead—if you don’t dither in giving me your blessing.”

  His blessing? “That still means something to ye?”

  “It does.” The challenge bled from Thomas’s features, and Ian saw he meant it. He didn’t want permission to follow his reckless scheme—he needed none. He wanted Ian’s approval.

  There passed between them then a rush of feeling Ian had thought lost forever. “Aonaibh ri chéile,” he said and held out his hand. “Get ye gone then, and God keep ye.”

  “And you.” As Thomas gripped his hand, Ian felt something hard pressed into his palm. He grasped it and looked down. A shilling.

  Thomas backed off, teeth gleaming in the dusk, then slipped into the brush.

  Ian heard feet splash in the creek shallows but didn’t stay to see them cross over. Pocketing the shilling, he gripped the rifle and headed upslope after Dawes.

  The man had left a heedless path, skirting field and orchard. The harvest moon was rising over the ridge, crickets singing in the grass, before Ian spotted him silhouetted on the back steps of the house, musket slung at his shoulder. In the doorway stood Maisy, holding a Betty lamp, evidencing no surprise at the sight of the long-vanished overseer on their doorstep.

  Maisy disappeared inside, to be replaced by Lucinda Cameron. Ian crossed to the garden palisade and, rifle cradled, crept within range of their voices.

  Lucinda descended the back steps. “Where is he?”

  Dawes’s breath came short. “Don’t know—didn’t come after me.”

  “He saw you? Why are you here? Have you discovered the source?”

  Ian frowned, uncomprehending. The source?

  “I was coming to tell you,” Dawes said, “but came across that boy of his first—with the field hands and some slaves from over Chesterfield, I think. Making a run for it.”

  “We are apprised of the situation,” Lucinda said. “I’ve sent Jubal to inform Gideon. But the loss of a few hands hardly matters—not if you’ve found it. Come inside before you’re seen.”

  Alarm coursed through Ian. Pryce would be after Thomas and the runaways he shepherded within hours, unless Jubal took his time bringing word. The man was canny enough to give them a lengthy start, if he was so inclined; Ian couldn’t be sure he would be.

  Lucinda had stepped back into the doorway, Maisy giving her room. The lamp’s light moved to the dining room. Dawes raised a foot to the bottom step.

  Ian crept forward to the last fence pale, a plan forming.

  “Is it too much to hope my nephew’s doxy and her brat have gone with them?” Lucinda asked, motioning Dawes inside.

  Dawes moved up another step. “Not that I saw.”

  “How I wish I’d left well enough alone last autumn,” said his aunt. “Let her run off with Thomas, as it seemed was her aim, and saved myself the trouble of getting rid of them both.”

  “I’d have gotten that buck again,” Dawes said, “if not for—”

  The import of their words burst through Ian, but he was already rushing the door. Lucinda saw him in time to move out of his path, too late to utter warning before he rammed a shoulder into Dawes’s back and shoved him bodily into the house.

  Dawes slammed into the frame of the warming room doorway, but momentum sent them barreling through, banging sideboa
rds, sending dishes crashing. In the dining room Maisy had set the Betty lamp on the table’s edge. She sprang back with a cry as they staggered in, a tangle of grappling limbs.

  Ian had meant merely to apprehend the man and force him to face his uncle. Now, as Dawes fell over a chair, rage at what the man and his aunt had done to Seona, to Thomas, to them all, consumed reason and restraint.

  “Get up, Dawes! Ye’ve a thing or two to answer for to me.”

  The overseer kicked himself free of the chair. Lurching to his feet, he looked wildly for his musket. Ian had dropped his rifle in the scuffle as well. At the back door? In the yard?

  Fury showed red through the dirt ground into Dawes’s face. “I only ever did what she bid me do.” He jabbed a finger toward the warming room door, where no doubt his aunt hovered. “‘Get rid of the pair of them,’ she says. But it all goes to blazes when that self-styled preacher-man Reynold went nosing about in Fayetteville. I had to run for the hills, while she’s living it up in the big house, cooing her innocence, letting me take the blame!”

  A smile stretched Ian’s lips. “No doubt she has. But it’s ye I mean to deal with now.”

  He saw it in Dawes’s eyes, the choosing of fight over flight, an instant before the man came at him like a bull charging. Ian landed a fist to Dawes’s gut, then was borne down in a grappling hold. He took a chair with him in the fall, entangling his assailant long enough to scramble from reach. Dawes was up again fast. Ian’s fist crashed into teeth; then he was thrust back toward the window. Dawes grabbed the Betty lamp from the table.

  “Jackson!” Lucinda screamed.

  Ian dodged the lamp. It hit the window with the tinkle of breaking glass and a gush of cooler air as he rushed at Dawes, who went staggering against the opposite wall.

  The smell of lamp oil was strong above the man’s sour stink. Ian’s grip on Dawes’s ragged shirt slipped. The sleeve was saturated.

  He was aware of Lucinda’s voice, shriller than before . . . an unsteady light behind him . . . a spreading warmth at his back. Then Dawes heaved him around and the light was in his face.