Mountain Laurel

by Lori Benton

  The window curtain was in flames, floor to ceiling.

  He shoved Dawes aside to reach the fire, but the man tripped over the fallen chair and went sprawling up against the flames. The curtains fell, crumpling in a fiery heap over Dawes’s legs. The overseer swept them aside; the fire caught his oil-soaked sleeve. Flames flowed up his arm, alive and molten.

  Ian tackled him, intending to beat out the flames. Dawes threw a fist, catching a blow to Ian’s head that dropped him to his knees. The man was ablaze—screaming obscenities, thrashing. Reaching up, Ian snatched off the table linen, the smell of burning cloth and hair sharp in his nose. “Be still, man! Let me—”

  Dawes let out a bellow and struck him again. Intentionally or not, Ian never knew. Engulfed in flame, the overseer half fell, half ran from the room, roaring in agony.

  Ian lurched to his feet. Lucinda caught his shirt as he tried to pass her. “The fire!”

  It struck him then, with skin-crawling horror: Dawes’s bellowing had ceased, but the roaring hadn’t. The carpet had taken flame, as had the florid wall papering. Smoke curled at the high ceiling. He took his first harsh breath of it, expelled in a violent cough.

  Lucinda gaped, eyes reflecting flame. Ian shook her. “Get my uncle! D’ye hear me? Get my uncle and get out!”

  She bared her teeth at him and slapped his face. Gathering her skirts, she swept out through the parlor. Too panicked to be stunned, Ian beat at the flames but quickly realized the fire was beyond such measures. He dropped the scorched linen and raced through the warming room.

  Lily was at the door, breathless. Down the passage his uncle’s door was still shut.

  “Lily! Get my uncle!” He was on the stairs, grabbing for the banister. “Get him out of here!”

  When he burst into their room, Judith was on her feet, pale and barefoot in her shift. “Ian, there was shouting, and I smell—”

  “Fire! Wrap Mandy. Cover her face. Can ye walk?”

  “I . . . I think so.” Judith stared at him, frozen.

  “Move, Judith!”

  With a cry of alarm, she moved. Ian hauled his saddlebags from under the bed, then jerked open the desk drawer and stuffed its contents into the bags. At the press he snatched out clothes, his, Judith’s . . . Seona’s drawings . . . all went into the saddlebags. He slung them over his shoulder.

  Judith was ready, the baby bundled in a tiny quilt. He hustled them into the passage, but Judith hesitated at the stairs, gasping at the heat funneled up from below. The gasp became a cough. She swayed. Ian swept her up as she clung to the baby. Smoke rose up the stairwell.

  At the foot of the stairs he caught sight of Lily stepping from his uncle’s room. Seen through the haze of panic and smoke, there was something absurdly serene about her. She didn’t seem affected by the smoke stinging his eyes, strangling his throat. He might have been seeing the ghostly imprint of her standing there on a day long past, calmly awaiting instruction. Then his uncle was in the doorway, handing something to her.

  “No time for that! Get out!” Believing they’d heard him, that they’d be on his heels, he lunged through the door with Judith in his arms. He staggered onto the lawn, sucking air in gulps, nearly tripping over the rifle he’d dropped earlier.

  Naomi huddled back by the garden pales, staring. “Miss Judith all right? The baby?”

  Ian set Judith on her feet, but she crumpled, clutching Mandy. The saddlebags tumbled in a heap beside her as he caught his wife.

  Seona ran out of the dark, Gabriel in her arms. “Where’s Mama?”

  Ian whirled toward the house, expecting Lily and his uncle to be there, safe out of the fire. There was no sign of either of them. Flames licked at the open door.

  Seona clutched at him, terror in her eyes. “Ian!”

  Behind them Naomi was taking charge. “Fetch clouts from the washhouse, someone. Miss Judith’s bleeding and I can’t tell how much in this dark.”

  “Help them, Seona. I’ll find Lily!” Ian pulled loose and raced to the front of the house, past windows bright with leaping orange, thinking they might have escaped that way. In the loop of the drive, among a heap of gowns and bedding and sundry rescued effects, Lucinda stood barking orders at Maisy and Esther.

  “Get everything back from the house—shift it over the shrubbery! No, wait, we might make another—”

  “Uncle Hugh!” Ian bellowed over the fire’s swelling roar. “Where is he?”

  Lucinda’s face held a savage resolve. His uncle was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Lily. Down at the stable? But the stable was dark. And there was Ally, lumbering up into the light of the burning house. Ian shouted, “Is my uncle at the stable? Lily?”

  “No, sir. Jubal gone to Chesterfield and ain’t nobody else there.”

  Ian lurched into a run again, eyes streaming, back around the house. He found them by the garden as he’d left them, Naomi and Judith, now Malcolm with Mandy in his arms. Seona came rushing from the washhouse, still holding Gabriel, arms full as well of clouts and linens. Staring past him at the burning house, horror on her face, she screamed. “Mama!”

  He turned as Lily came leaping through the flames barring the door. She fell on the steps, picked herself up, and ran, the hem of her skirt aflame.

  Ian bore her down, beating at her skirt as they hit the ground. The smothering weight of the fabric aided him, but his hands were scorched before the flames were snuffed, leaving a ragged hem of smoking char. Lily hadn’t made a sound but clutched to her heart the thing his uncle had given into her keeping: a flat, leather-bound bundle.

  His uncle. The sting of his hands was nothing to the pain that gripped his chest. He took Lily by the shoulders. “Where is he?”

  Lily’s eyes held the calm of shock. She shook her head.

  Ian wrenched to his feet and took two running strides toward the wall of flame that had been the back door, before a weight plowed into him from behind. Brawny arms encircled him, pinioning his own. He twisted and fought, but he might have been locked in irons.

  “Loose me, Ally! He’s in there!”

  “Mister Ian, can’t you see?”

  The windows of his uncle’s room were alive, lurid with flames, bathing the yard in a hellish twilight. The fire had spread to every room belowstairs.

  “No.” Ian slid down in Ally’s arms until his knees struck earth. Transfixed like the rest of them, he watched the floor of his and Judith’s room collapse. With a swell of noise like cackling laughter, the fire reached upward, engulfing garret and roof.

  As sparks sprayed high, bright as fireflies against the night, Ian watched in helplessness as Hugh Cameron’s house became his funeral pyre.

  43

  “It was a few steps to the door,” her mama said, “but he wouldn’t take them.”

  They numbered four at the kitchen worktable, each red-eyed, faces blank with loss. Ian had come in last, finding Seona there with Lily and Malcolm. His blistered hands were salved but his poor face . . . one eye swelled half-shut, a bloodied knot on his brow, lower lip split. Tears had tracked the grime on his cheeks.

  As cold came down the ridge in the night and the ground whitened with autumn’s first hard frost, they’d watched over the dying house, drifting off one at a time to see to hurts, to babies, to Miss Judith. Drifting back to stand and watch the last of its walls standing fall with a whoosh like a final breath, leaving timbers poking up like black ribs between the chimney stacks.

  Ally had gone down to the stable in the dark of morning. He was there still, seeing to the stock—his now to tend, what remained.

  Lucinda Cameron hadn’t waited for daylight to shake the ash of Mountain Laurel off her shoes. Soon as Jubal came back from Chesterfield, she’d had him hitch up the carriage and off they went rattling to Miss Rosalyn in her grand abode. She’d taken Maisy and Esther too.

  “They’re mine,” she’d said, standing by the carriage while the plunder from the fire was stowed. “Maisy and Jubal came with me from Virginia and were never Hugh’s. As
k Judith, if my word counts for naught.”

  Miss Judith, worn from childbed, fear, smoke, and grief, had been asleep down at the cabins, and what Miss Lucinda said was true enough. Ian seemed relieved to see her go. Esther had been so dazed by it all she hadn’t said a word. Seona had kissed her but hadn’t cried at the parting. She wasn’t ready for that grief.

  She was glad now for the bundle her mama had placed on the table once Ian joined them, its leather worn in the light of two candles. A needful distraction.

  “He meant it for ye,” Lily said, looking at Ian in the gray of morning. “Will ye open it?”

  Clumsy on account of his burns, Ian unwrapped the bundle. Seona leaned forward, understanding Master Hugh in death less than she’d done in life. What could’ve been of more value to him than his own self?

  Ian’s hands trembled as the last flap of leather peeled away. Papers. Her heart sank at the sight. What had she hoped for?

  “It’ll be his will,” Ian said in his smoke-ravaged voice, but he didn’t break the seal of the top paper or take up any beneath it. He moved them aside. There was something besides papers. Two tiny portraits set in oval frames.

  “’Tis his wife,” Malcolm said, as if there’d never been more than one to claim the title. “Miss Miranda. And, sweet heaven—that be Mister Aidan.”

  Miranda Cameron’s hair had been dark, but with a touch of warmth in it, as if it might have glinted bronze in the sunlight. That wasn’t what held Seona’s stare. It was the eyes. The woman’s eyes—and those of her dark-haired son—had been painted as green as her own.

  Seona wanted to snatch up the two bright ovals and run with them out into the dawning light, to stare at the painted faces no bigger than the palm of her hand. But it was for Ian to touch them first.

  He lifted his eyes to her. “Look at them, Seona. I was wrong. My uncle—” He cleared his throat, a painful sound. “He couldn’t claim ye as his child because he wasn’t your father.”

  “No, Master Ian. He wasn’t.”

  People tended to pay heed when Lily spoke. Maybe on account she kept so much to herself. Or maybe this time it was what she’d called Ian—the first of them to call him what he was now. Master. But there was something more. Something had changed in her eyes. Something long sealed was cracking open. “The same hand painted both of these,” she said, touching the portrait of Aidan Cameron with a fingertip. “Mister Gottfriedsen.”

  “The peddler?” Ian asked in surprise.

  “Aye. But Master Hugh had them done at different times. Hers was first,” Lily said of the face of the woman who’d raised her from a weaned child. “She died afore Aidan was a man grown. This one—” again she brushed a fingertip over Mister Aidan’s face—“was finished just afore he died. He was eighteen years old,” she added, turning to Seona, “your daddy.”

  “Mama—” Seona’s throat shut tight over a dozen things she might have said. Her eyes didn’t know where they wanted to rest—on her mama, on Ian, on that young man’s face staring from the table. That green-eyed face with its straight nose and its Cameron chin. Her face.

  “It wasn’t Aidan who hurt Ruby in the fields that day,” Lily said, “and it wasn’t Esau who killed Aidan. It was Jackson Dawes.”

  Seona shut her eyes, trying not to see the body they’d found after the fire. They still didn’t know where the Jackdaw had hid himself all those months or why he’d come back to see Miss Lucinda, though Ian had told them of their puzzling words on the back stoop. Maybe it no longer mattered. He could no more trouble them.

  “Ruby took that knowledge with her,” Lily said, “when Master Hugh sold her.”

  Sold for the reminder she was of what Master Hugh had done to Esau. And what he thought Esau had done to Mister Aidan. And what he’d thought Mister Aidan had done?

  “Ruby told me the truth the night John Reynold brought ye home, Seona,” Lily said. “Not that I needed her to. I knew your daddy would never have tried to hurt her. Aidan had gone out to the fields and taken his musket and happened to see Dawes trying to have his way with Ruby. Aidan tried to stop it. In the scuffle his musket fired. It might have been an accident. But there was Aidan dead and the only one Dawes could blame was Esau, who’d come running at the shot.”

  They were silent for a time, staring at each other round the table. Then Ian asked, “Did my uncle know, at the last? Did ye tell him the truth of it?”

  Lily met his gaze. “Your uncle never stopped carrying his grief and guilt or his doubt about Aidan. Least I could do was put to rest his doubt.”

  Half a lifetime of it, and needless.

  “Didn’t he know his own son?” Seona asked the table at large, thinking it would be her mama who answered. But it was Ian.

  “It takes only the hearing of a reproach, false or no, to forever mar a person’s character in your thinking. No matter how ye try to forget it. I know . . .” He paused, then shook his head.

  Seona frowned, wondering what he’d meant, thinking for some reason of his Boston kin. Of his daddy, Mister Robert, who would have to be told his last living brother was gone.

  It was then she felt it—sudden and warm as encircling arms. They were there, her kin. The woman and the young man. As vivid in her mind as ever Master Hugh had been, as Lily and Ian and Malcolm were to her now. She thought if she raised her hand, she’d touch a sleeve or a face she couldn’t see. Daddy.

  Then like a breath exhaled, the sense of them was gone. She blinked at the faces around her. Ian was staring at Lily like he was trying to read her thoughts. But that was a trick only her mama knew.

  “I understand the doubt,” he said. “And the grief. But why did my uncle carry guilt over Aidan?”

  Lily sighed, and Seona reached for her hand. There was more truth to tell.

  “Master Hugh and Aidan quarreled. I’d told Aidan I was carrying his child.” Lily laced their fingers together. Seona hardly breathed. “Aidan went to Master Hugh, asked him to free me. We were going to leave Mountain Laurel, make our way in the world. Aidan wouldn’t own slaves. He’d set his mind to that.” But Aidan had come away furious from that talk, making little sense to Lily at the time. “I suspected Master Hugh refused me my freedom in order to keep Aidan here. I never knew for certain. Aidan said he needed to get his thinking straight, then he’d come talk to me. He went out to the fields and came upon Ruby and Dawes . . .”

  “And my uncle never told ye, all this time, why he refused?” Ian rubbed his neck, then winced and laid his blistered hand on the table.

  “After Aidan died, he never spoke of him again,” Lily said. “Except those times his mind slipped and he forgot.”

  Ian frowned. “Did he know ye were carrying his grandchild—before Aidan died?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know,” Lily said. “He did soon after.”

  They sat in silence, and Seona heard more than one belly set to growling. No matter their griefs, old and new, time kept moving on, and the living with it. It was getting on to breakfast time after a long and wakeful night.

  Ian picked up Master Hugh’s will but set it aside in favor of a paper underneath. He stared at it as if, for him, time had all but stopped. Without a word to prepare them, he started to read.

  “Whereas Hugh Cameron, of Randolph County, has by his petition represented to this General Assembly, that he is desirous of procuring the emancipation of Lily, a woman of mixed blood, and her daughter, Seona, heretofore his property, as a reward for their Meritorious Services: Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina, and it is hereby enacted by Authority of the same, that from the passing of this Act, the said mixed-blood women, Lily and Seona, the property of Hugh Cameron, be emancipated and forever set free from slavery, and henceforward be called and known by the names of Lily Cameron and Seona Cameron.”

  The meaning of those words worked over them in breathless silence.

  “Mama,” Seona said, still gripping Lily’s hand.

  “Does it say more?” Malc
olm asked.

  “‘Read three times and ratified in the General Assembly, the nineteenth day of July 1794.’ And here at the bottom . . . ‘A true copy, by Ruffin Lewis Puryear, Secretary.’” Ian’s broken mouth trembled as he added, “It’s dated a week before Gabriel’s birth. Ye were already free that day, the both of ye.”

  Lily was gripping her hand hard enough to hurt. Seona squeezed back, unable to speak.

  Ian smiled at her, shakily, and a drop of blood beaded on his lip where it had split. “God bless the pen of Mr. Puryear.”

  “Amen,” Malcolm said into the silence, as Naomi came through the door with Gabriel riding her shoulder.

  “Daddy,” she said, taking in the sight of them. “What we got to be amening on this dark morning?”

  Seona laughed, then clapped a hand over her mouth. Not until she saw Ian’s hand shaking did it hit her what else this meant. Six months from the middle of July. Before the spring they would have to go, she and her mama, and Gabriel with them, though he’d been born free.

  Ian had promised. He would never take her baby.

  His eyes were reaching for her, full of that very knowledge—reaching across the table like he’d pull her to him. But that work-worn space was a distance neither he nor she could cross, no matter they were both free persons now.

  There was no more amen in her soul. She took Gabriel, who was waking hungry, and left the kitchen.

  44

  Gold and scarlet canopied the graves on the ridge above Mountain Laurel. The solemn conversations of fellow mourners making their way down the footpath drifted back to Ian, alone at his uncle’s grave. A simple cross marked the raw mound beneath which Hugh Cameron rested near his wife and children. In time there would be a proper stone for this kinsman who had welcomed him, flaws and all—had offered him a settled life and legacy, flaws and all. Though heir to his land, chattel, and heartache, unlike his uncle he clung to a more enduring light than the shades of thought and memory. One that time and distance, even death, could not extinguish.