Mountain Laurel

by Lori Benton

  At first he’d gone in dread of his master noticing the flirtation, but Pringle seemed blind to his wife. One evening she came to Ian in the library, where he often sat up late to read. In the course of conversation she placed a book on his lap and, bending over him, kissed him on the mouth.

  “The next time Pringle was away—a guild meeting, it was—she called me from the shop.” He leaned over Gabriel, speaking so low Seona strained to hear. “She led me to her bed and begged me to give her a child. She meant to pass it off as her husband’s. She told me so, bold as brass, as if it were the most reasonable proposition to be heard.”

  Anne Pringle hadn’t taken the answer he’d given. No.

  “She burst in on me packing my things to leave. She was hysterical. She had a knife. She attacked me with it.” He spoke as though he still couldn’t believe it had happened. “Before I got the knife away, Pringle was there. Next I knew she was crying rape. Pringle didn’t say a word, but I saw it in his eyes: the man knew exactly what his wife had done. He took her away weeping, and I sat on my cot and waited, covered in shame so thick I couldn’t move.”

  His apprenticeship had ended eighteen months shy of its term. Pringle gave him the set of tools and clothes promised in the contract and signed him as a journeyman—in return for keeping silent about Anne. You weren’t the first, Pringle told him, and Ian remembered the journeyman who’d left without a word. “I kept that promise, even when Anne Pringle spread it about that I’d tried to force my affections upon her, and her husband caught me in the act and tossed me out on my ear.”

  “That’s why you went to Canada?” Grief for the boy he’d been, for the hurt and shame still paining him, softened Seona’s voice. “With your uncle Callum.”

  “Aye. It seemed best at the time. But Callum was right. I was running away, hiding.” The fire had settled to embers. Gabriel had slept through his daddy’s confession. Ian’s hand cupped their baby’s head. “I’ll not ask d’ye think the less of me. I don’t suppose ye could think much worse of me than ye must already.”

  Seona shook her head, so full of love for him she could hardly speak. “She was Potiphar’s wife.”

  He gave a strangled laugh. “Maybe. But I was no Joseph.”

  She might have said a lot of things to that, but this was a weight he’d carried too long for any words of hers to lift. If only he’d told his daddy the truth, years ago. What a load of shame and heartache he’d have spared himself. But then he mightn’t have ended up at Mountain Laurel. She’d never have loved him, never had Gabriel. Might even be at Chesterfield now, at the mercy of Gideon Pryce.

  Malcolm’s words of last autumn came back to her. Your mama carries a mountain of grief along with her love for ye. Naomi wants to see ye spared that. She’d asked which they’d meant to spare her, the love or the grief. She hadn’t forgot Naomi’s answer. The two goes hand in hand for the likes of us. . . . There’s no future in you pining after a white man.

  Naomi had been right about the love and the grief. Not about her future. It wasn’t the future they’d hoped for, but she had one all the same. He lay sleeping across his daddy’s thighs.

  In Salem, Ian acquired a small covered wagon, provisions to stock it, a team to pull it, with instructions for his father to sell them to provide a living for Lily, Seona, and Gabriel. Such a sum wouldn’t stretch far. More must needs follow. He hitched Uncle Hugh’s sorrel, which Lily and Seona had ridden from Mountain Laurel, to the wagon box. The sorrel wasn’t young but the youth who’d agreed to drive the wagon was happy to take it as his hire.

  He’d gone about in haste, loading the wagon, checking every trace, hitch, and buckle, so the time of parting came upon him with alarming swiftness. While the farewells of Gottfriedsen’s kin took place some distance off, he stood with Seona under the fiery shade of a maple at the town’s edge, holding Gabriel asleep against his shoulder.

  It was late morning, the sun risen behind clouds that promised rain. Seona’s hair had grown over the summer. Though she’d pinned it up under a cap, wisps had escaped to curl about her face. “Ye’ve the letters to my da?”

  He knew she did. She knew he knew.

  “In the wagon box. With our free papers.” Tucked inside the long-promised desk for Catriona.

  He cradled Gabriel in one arm, freeing the other hand to reach into a coat pocket for the portraits of Aidan and Miranda Cameron. “I want ye to have these as well.”

  She tilted her face up to him, creek-water eyes the living reflection of those in the paintings. “They’re your kin.”

  “And yours. Ye’re my family, Seona. Ye and Gabriel are as dear to me as my life’s blood. I don’t want ye to forget that.” He stopped himself saying more. So much more. “Please.”

  “I won’t forget.” She took the portraits. The green of her eyes seemed impossibly vivid in the gray of morning; they glistened with tears.

  “I cannot stop thinking of all the promises I broke,” he said.

  “I’ll mind the ones you kept,” she said.

  In no way did he deserve such grace. Ian bowed his head and touched his lips to Gabriel’s silky hair. The boy slept on, heavy in his arms. He wanted to see his son’s eyes a final time, alight with recognition of him.

  Maybe it was better this way. Better this boneless weight and the scent of sleeping innocence be the last memory he carried. For now.

  Time was a tide-pull dragging at his heart. The wagons were secured, the Moravians ready to embark. Lily found them. He encircled her with an arm, Gabriel in the other.

  “God keep ye, Lily.”

  She pulled his head down and boldly kissed his cheek. “And ye also, Ian Cameron.”

  Then she was gone, and he was bending his face a final time to Gabriel, filling lungs and memory with the scent of him, before he passed him into Seona’s keeping. His hand brushed a sleep-flushed cheek, then covered the hand that would cradle his son to Boston and through the years that followed. “They’ll open their hearts to ye, my parents. Not just their home. Don’t be afraid.”

  Seona nodded. “God’s watching over my lot. What was meant for evil, He’ll turn for good.”

  They were Ian’s words, those last, spoken on the creek bank the day of Gabriel’s birth. Words he’d feared she couldn’t receive from him.

  He reached into his pocket again and put into her hand the arrowhead she’d found that day. The words that went with it came hard. “I’m setting ye free.”

  “I know,” she said, uncertainty in her eyes.

  “No, Seona. I want ye to have a life—a whole life. I’m setting ye free of me.”

  Her eyes filled with understanding, but she shook her head and gave him back the arrowhead.

  “Keep it for me,” she said and was gone in a swirl of petticoats and shawl. Gone before another word could leave his lips.

  He watched as she was helped onto the wagon bench, clinging to the last sight of Gabriel being handed back to Lily, under the canvas.

  Drivers shouted. The wagons lurched forward, starting on their rumbling passage north. Ian pressed the arrowhead against his palm. Seona didn’t look back. He thought she didn’t mean to, but at the last moment she leaned out and he saw her face a final time, before the road bent through a stand of gold-leafed trees and took her from sight.

  Ian stood alone with the threads of his heart spooling out, unraveling after them and stretching thin, until it seemed his breath, his heart, even time, must stop. Or snap in two.

  He went on breathing. The pieces of his heart kept beating.

  He moved from the spot where time should have halted, relieved when Gottfriedsen, seeming to understand, held back from approaching. He rested a hand on Ruaidh’s head, drew comfort from his horse’s deep-brown eyes, then swung into the saddle and turned the roan southward.

  And on that road grace met him.

  He was half a day’s ride out of Salem when he spotted them ahead on the road. Two men in a horse-drawn cart, one a Quaker by his dress. Hearing his appr
oach, the one who wasn’t a Quaker cast a backward look—a man of Thomas’s coloring. Ian kicked Ruaidh to a canter to overtake them, which alarmed the pair into pulling to a halt.

  The darker-skinned man appeared to be about Ian’s age, well-muscled from work, but he wasn’t Thomas. The Quaker was an older man, bearded and grizzled. Not Eden. Ian lifted his hat and smiled, though disappointment twisted in his chest. “Sorry to give ye a fright. From a distance I mistook the pair of ye for acquaintances of mine.”

  The Quaker spoke, a gravelly voice at odds with his gentle nod. “’Tis no harm done. Thee made an honest mistake.” He glanced at his companion, who, though clearly shaken, whipped off his hat and bobbed his head.

  Ian stared at the bared forehead. A scar ran across it, just below the hairline, pale against the man’s dark skin. A scar shaped like a fishhook.

  Eyeing him quizzically, the Quaker made introduction. “Amos Fisher of Lexington, Kentucky. My friend here once called Carolina home but resides now with me and works in my smithy.”

  Ian reassessed the younger man, his heartbeat quickening. That scar . . .

  “Whereabouts in Carolina was your home?”

  “Place called Mountain Laurel, sir. Planter by name of Cameron sold me and my brother off long time back. We fetched up together in Kentucky. I free now, got myself a free wife.” At a rumble of throat-clearing from Fisher, the man’s eyes widened. “I got papers. . . .”

  But Ian was grinning, as he’d thought he never would again.

  The young man stared at him, wary, puzzled. “Does I know you, sir?”

  It was Sammy had the scar, he could hear Naomi saying in the shadowed kitchen that first morning. “Aye,” he said. “Leastwise ye did, Sammy.”

  Dark eyes widened again, this time in surprise. “How you know me, sir?”

  “We were lads together, for a brief while—at Mountain Laurel. D’ye not remember me?”

  Ian waited until a spark lit the man’s searching eyes. “You that boy come visit with his daddy? Kin to Master Hugh?”

  “I’m Ian Cameron. Mountain Laurel’s mine now.”

  Eagerness and fear crowded the face of his uncle’s ex-slave, now clutching his hat into a mangled ball. Sammy drew a shaky breath and said, “If you’d be so kind as to tell me, sir, seeing we come all this way . . .” He faltered. Amos Fisher placed a steadying hand on his shoulder. Sammy swallowed. “Might you remember my mama at all? Her name be—”

  “Ruby,” Ian said, awash in the light that blazed from Sammy’s face at the name. “Aye. She’s been expecting ye.”

  Sammy and the Quaker were effusive in their joy after Ian told of finding Ruby, of the neighbors who sheltered her, but when the three finally got underway again, he found himself riding beside the cart in silence, isolated from the two by the grief he carried. What was certain to be an interminable parting was only just begun, whereas Sammy was visibly restraining himself from taking the reins out of the older man’s hands and whipping the cart horse into a hurried frenzy. As if his heart threads, like Ian’s, spooled out northward, pulled him irresistibly toward his long-lost mother.

  Grief cut the deeper, until Ian looked ahead down the road to the joyous reunion Sammy anticipated and remembered there were those awaiting his return as well. Not all the threads of his heart were stretched out taut behind him. There was another. There were two. They gave his heart a quieter tug, leading him home.

  1

  NORTH CAROLINA

  December 1795

  The crevice in the earth, broadened recently by pick and shovel, was wide enough to permit an average-sized man to hunker inside it. Ian Cameron was taller than average, broad through the shoulders. The sleeves of his woolen coat brushed the moist, red-clay sides of the fresh digging that tunneled into the creek bank marking his plantation’s boundary. Near its spring-fed source high on the ridge above Mountain Laurel’s rolling fields, the creek was narrow enough for a man to bestride it. That small distance placed the vein of gold the tunnel contained on his neighbor John Reynold’s land. Not Ian’s own.

  John and another neighbor, Charlie Spencer, crouched outside the tunnel, hat brims spotted with the snow sifting down like fat goose feathers from the laden clouds.

  “Aye, I see the problem.” Ian ran his hand over the tunnel’s clammy roof, fingers exploring the large stone embedded above, some three feet back from the entrance. Charlie’s pick had exposed all but one edge of the roughly rectangular mass. No telling how much deeper the fourth edge went into the undisturbed earth of the bank. A few feet and it might pose no threat. A few inches would be another matter.

  Though the stone above his head wasn’t likely to fall that instant, thought of being buried alive sent Ian crab-walking out into the frigid gray of a snowstorm’s leading edge.

  “Was I right?” Charlie Spencer’s breath clouded before his whiskered face. “That rock about to drop and bring half the ridge down after it?”

  “Ye’re right to leave off digging.” Ian knelt to dip his hands in the ice-rimed creek. He stood, chafed reddened fingers together, then cupped them to his mouth and blew to warm them.

  “Might it be shored, or ought we to leave off digging altogether and let be?” Worry made John Reynold’s voice more crisply English than usual. Nose red-tipped, he cast a dubious glance at the raw gape in the earth. “I’ll not put Charlie in harm’s way for gold,” he added with an air of disregard that made Ian laugh.

  “That’ll be why the Almighty saw fit to put it on your land, John. Ye’re the only man in the Carraways who’d cover that vein and put it out of mind if one of us half urged ye to it.”

  John’s brown eyes lit with humor. “I won’t go so far as to say it’s more trouble than it’s worth . . .”

  After the decision to keep the diggings, discovered the previous year, a secret between the three of them—and John’s wife, Cecily—a quandary had arisen. How were the Reynolds to turn the gold Charlie scraped from between the stones into a more spendable form without arousing curiosity as to its source? To the best of Ian’s knowledge, it was the first of its kind to be found in the state of North Carolina. Possibly in any state of the Union.

  Between planting, harvesting, and the ongoing work of farming, John had made two trips east, one to Wilmington, one to New Bern—long-established coastal towns—where he found men with the means to exchange the gold for coin that could be spent more discreetly for the improvements he wished to make to his farm. He’d enlarged his cabin, bought glass panes for the windows, another horse, a wagon. He’d portioned out wages for Charlie, who’d agreed to mine the site.

  “That vein ain’t more’n a thread in spots.” Charlie swiped off his hat to knock away snow as he spoke, then snugged it back over thinning hair. “Looks to run back into the hill a ways more. No telling for sure apart from diggin’.”

  “Ye needn’t abandon it. Look.” Ian knelt at the entrance, motioning John to join him. He ran his hand once more along the tunnel’s ceiling. “I’m not sure the stone would fall even without support, but I’d feel better about Charlie chipping away up here if ye let me do a bit of framing first.”

  They rose to their feet in agreement. Charlie reached down to pat the head of one of his hunting dogs that had come nosing up along the creek, clouding the air with its panting, paws muddying the snow sugaring the ground.

  “Right then,” John said. “I’ve some pine down to the barn . . .” Ian’s frown had been brief but John caught it. “I don’t intend taking anything needed in your shop.”

  “I’ve wood to spare. It’s not that.” Ian fetched his neighbor a half smile, tempered by the reminder of his reduced circumstances since last year’s fire claimed his uncle’s life and home and marked the desertion of all but one of his uncle’s field hands. “Pine’s too soft, is all. Ye want a wood that won’t rot straightaway. I’ve some hickory curing. Give it a few weeks, be sure the green’s gone out of it.”

  John grasped his shoulder in thanks, then turned to the smal
ler man still scratching the dog’s ear. “Hear that, Charlie. No more digging ’til we’ve that stone supported. This has been a boon to Cecily and me, but your friendship is the greater blessing, and your safety my main concern.”

  Charlie’s eyes lit with an impish grin. “Won’t say I’m not gratified by the share ye’ve staked me, but truth to tell I’m having as much fun keepin’ the secret from the likes of folks got no business pokin’ their noses into it.”

  Though her name went unmentioned, Ian knew who Charlie meant: Lucinda Cameron, his uncle’s widow—and Ian’s mother-by-law. Since the night of the house fire Lucinda had removed herself to Chesterfield Plantation, distant enough to exclude her from daily reckoning. Still the woman cast a long shadow.

  Ian reached for the brush-screen used to conceal the digging. What traces their boots had left, the snow was busy covering. Through that snow came a distant baying: another of Charlie’s hounds. Ian knew the sound of a dog with a critter treed. So did the hound at their knees. With a joyous yelp it raced off to join the hunt.

  Charlie hoisted pick and shovel, slung in canvas, and grinned. “Let me know when I’m to get back to it. Meantime, me and the dogs are goin’ hunting.”

  Ian declined John’s offer of a chat by the hearth, in company with Cecily and their toddling son, appealing though the invitation was. Instead he followed the creek that divided their properties back down the ridge, keeping close to the watercourse dashing cold through a landscape obscured by slanting snow: shadowed pine thickets; dark-leafed laurel; outcrops of lichen-speckled stone; the ghostly shapes of poplar, oak, chestnut, and hickory.