Into the Dark (Alexis Carew Book 1)

by J. A. Sutherland

  “Ignorant, idle popinjays?” Alexis offered.

  “Oh, they’re not all that bad.”

  “Grandfather, Hayden Diebach couldn’t read. Said he could hire it done when needful and would never pay good coin for books of stories.”

  Denholm shook his head. The lad’s grandfather, Seth Diebach, had landed on Dalthus with two university degrees earned and seen to the colony’s learning materials himself. Old Seth’s spinning in his grave at what his progeny’s turned into, sure enough. “Well …” he began, trying to think of something nice to say about the lad, then sighed heavily. “No, that boy’s an idiot.”

  Alexis laughed. “A man who’s learned to work his brother’s lands, but wishes they’d be his own. And who’s willing to work with me, not expect me to sit idly by. That’s what I’d like, if marry I must.” She paused and grinned. “Or an ignorant, idle popinjay, content to live in town while I work the holding. Perhaps that’s the best to hope for.”

  “I’d wish more for you, Lexi, I would.”

  The teasing brightness left her face, replaced by frustration. “It’s not fair, grandfather. It’s your land after all, and I’ve learned so much about how to hold it. ”

  “And what have I said you should do when you find the man who told you life would be fair, Lexi-girl?”

  “Kick him hard,” she answered, smiling sadly, “for he lied to me. But we’ve near a thousand hands and their families looking to us.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth, a habit he’d tried to break her of since she was a little girl. “The thought of them having to look to the Waithes or the Milners …” She crossed her arms. “Or the Coalsons, for that matter, from what you’ve said of them.”

  “Mayhap something will change, but for today… the young man’s to be here any time. And my issues with the Coalsons were with this boy’s grandfather, not the lad himself. There’s no reason to think he cares about it one bit. So upstairs and clean yourself as best you can in the time you have. Martha has your dress laid out, I’m told.”

  “Grandfather, I …” Alexis started to protest and then stopped. “Yes, grandfather,” she said and left the kitchen.

  “That girl has too much of you in her,” Julia observed when Alexis had gone.

  Denholm nodded in agreement, eyes still on the door Alexis had left through. “My fault, I suppose.” After his wife had died, he’d never remarried, thinking there’d be time later and feeling it wouldn’t be fair to a woman when his heart was still full for his Lynelle. Then, when his son and daughter-in-law had died soon after Alexis was born, he’d been too busy raising the child to even think of it. And once she was old enough, it had seemed so natural to bring her with him as he managed the holdings, just as he had his son before.

  He smiled sadly as he remembered when he’d first realized just how much Alexis was learning from those trips.

  * * *

  Alexis had been just ten years old when she’d burst into this very kitchen, covered in a layer of sweat-streaked dirt, to proudly announce, “I plowed the field, PopPop! Come see! Come see!”

  Denholm had followed her outside, expecting to find a disaster in his farmhouse’s yard, but instead Alexis had led him around the house, past the barn, past even the pastures, to the edge of the home fields. There, to his amazement, she had managed to wheedle his foreman into staking off a full half hectare of the field and harness a mule and plow for her. Though the holding had three large, solar-powered tractors for working the land, they were in constant use in the fields that grew crops for export. Both the home fields and those that the workers leased were generally farmed with mules or oxen.

  He could see the tentative starts she’d made, where the rows were wide and swerved back and forth, and they were shallow where she hadn’t the weight or strength to force the plow blade into the rich earth, but over the course of the field, this changed and, by the end, her rows were straighter and deeper than he’d expect from many of his hands.

  “These, here, are not so well done,” she’d told him quite seriously, “but I believe I did get better.”

  “You did, Lexi,” he’d agreed, examining the rows carefully. “You did a fine job. How did you get the plow to dig in so well here?”

  “Well,” she’d said, “I needed more weight, and so I paid Franklin, Thomas and Jenyd to stand on it while I plowed.”

  “And paid them with what, Lexi-girl?” he’d asked, wary at her naming three boys from the village who were around her age.

  “Sweets from our kitchen, PopPop. I’ve told Julia that they’re to have my sweets from dinner and supper for three days, and Martha’s as well, for I’m to do her evening chores on three Fridays, so that she may be free to see her Branddun Hulse down in the village. Now, PopPop, how may I get some grain to plant in my field?”

  And so had begun Alexis’s education in the economics of running the holding. Denholm had explained to her the rents both tenants and indentures paid for use of a field, as well as the cost of the wheat to plant one, both paid from the harvest at season’s end. Alexis had agreed and gone to the foreman to draw forty kilograms of seed grain the next day, then hurriedly arranged with her three hired hands to sow her field in exchange for another three days of sweets.

  Denholm had watched her discreetly as she rushed from boy to boy, ensuring that they did the job properly, even bellowing across the field in a surprisingly strong voice for one so young and tiny. “Thomas Pore! You get that seed in the furrow or I’ll take every wasted grain out of your pay, you just see if I don’t!”

  She’d kept her little crew at work all season. Asking him, sometimes thrice a day, for the latest from the colony’s weather satellites. Watching the green sprigs grow, turn golden, ripen and finally become ready for harvest. Then more work for the reaping, the threshing, and at long last, after a long season of difficult labor and turning her treats over to the three boys, the weighing.

  In the end, her forty kilograms of seed had become a little over thirteen-hundred kilograms of grain. Not the best but certainly not the worst yield Denholm had ever seen. For the rents of the mule, plow, thresher and all the associated equipment on the farm, came back twenty percent of the crop, leaving Alexis with just over a thousand kilograms of grain. Denholm had explained that the tenant families would keep some of that for their own use over the next year and to use as seed the next planting season, though some holders insisted their tenants take seed from the holding instead and charged higher rents as well.

  Those thousand kilograms, delivered to market in Port Arthur and loaded onto a ship for transport back to the hungry Core Worlds, had gotten Alexis thirty shillings, from which Mister Doakes, the merchant factor and Royal Representative, had collected three shillings tax and one shilling sixpence in fees for storage.

  Alexis had looked at the handful of coins, a great deal more than she’d ever held as her own, but not a great deal of return for the amount of labor put in on that half-hectare field.

  “I do believe that it would be quite a hard life for someone without a great deal of land,” she’d said seriously.

  Denholm had agreed. “We settled first and have great tracts of land under cultivation, Lexi, but even so, it’s hard. The equipment to farm that much land is expensive to get and maintain. And there’s always the risk of a bad season. For the tenants and indentures, it’s worse. They have the work they owe their holder, and only then can they work for themselves and try to put a little extra by.”

  Alexis had nodded quite solemnly. “PopPop?” she’d asked. “Do you suppose Franklin, Thomas, and Jenyd could come with us to Port Arthur the next time? I should like them to enjoy some of the profits as well.”

  “Even after giving them all your sweets?”

  “Well,” she’d said slyly. “Julia always does make extra, you know.”

  * * *

  Odd, Denholm thought, I don’t remember when it was she stopped calling me PopPop.

  “Aye, your fault,” Julia said, pulling him ou
t of his reverie. Busy sliding butter and herbs under the chicken’s skin, she still took the time to glare at him. “Dragging the girl off to mines and forests and what-not, never giving her a chance to learn how to be the proper lady all these young men expect. Then you go and buy her that horrid dress.”

  Denholm threw his hands up in exasperation. “I bought that dress at the finest shop in Port Arthur. Height of current fashion, they told me!”

  Julia shoved a quartered orange into the chicken’s cavity with just a bit more force than Denholm felt warranted. “Yes, Denholm, ‘height of fashion’ for those hothouse flowers who never see sun unless they’re covered in linen. Your Alexis is brown as you are, not some pale creature. She needs deep, vibrant colors not …” She stopped at the footsteps on the stairway, and a moment later, Alexis stepped into the kitchen.

  The dress, all white and pink with heavy lace and thick ruffles, was truly not appealing on Alexis. The girl’s tanned skin looked out of place and her long, straight chestnut hair, pulled back in a tight ponytail, was far from the elaborately coiffed blonde curls one would expect to see above such a garment. Even the green of her eyes seemed to clash with the pink in some disturbing way.

  “Oh, Miss Alexis, why don’t you have a seat in the parlor?” Julia said. “I’ll just wash up and bring in a tray of biscuit, then the tea when your young man arrives.”

  “He’s not my…” Alexis began, then sighed. “Yes, thank you, Julia. I’ll do that.” She left the kitchen again, closing the door softly behind her.

  Julia placed the prepared chicken into the coldbox and washed her hands. “Not, sweet heavens, that,” she whispered over her shoulder.

  “I …” Denholm hesitated. In all honesty, he found the dress ridiculous in its own right, but how was he to know? Alexis spent most of her time in the same linen shirts and denim pants he and all the hands wore. It was hard to picture her in anything else. “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right. And it’s all a bit of nonsense that she’s in this position in the first place — whatever were you thinking? To have made that silly law to begin with?”

  Denholm cast his thoughts back to the founding of the colony. Julia had arrived with a wave of indentures some five years after the colony was settled. She hadn’t been present for those hardest years. Hadn’t watched as the last of the shuttles lifted from the landing site that would become Port Arthur, leaving behind three-thousand first settlers, the majority of their supplies still packed in transport cases and all of the housing tents not yet raised, leaving to rejoin the hired ships that would begin the six month round-trip to the Core Worlds and return with the second wave of settlers.

  By the time Julia had arrived, after those who had the wealth or skills to buy shares in the colony without signing away years of their own labor, most of that had been over. But Denholm had lived through the years when the colony’s limited medical equipment, kept at Port Arthur, had been half a day away on horseback. When, if you could gain the use of the colony’s single antigrav hauler for an emergency, it was still so busy and the holdings so far flung that help was still hours away.

  That was how Lynelle had died. An early, complicated birth, beyond the skills of the local midwife, and a night spent praying that the doctor would arrive by buggy or the hauler would be released from its tasks – and neither happening before it was too late, leaving him to raise a son alone.

  And then Harlyn and his Katlynne gone to an overturned buggy, with Alexis but three years old. He sometimes wondered if the family were cursed. Hexed by some unknown enemy.

  “It was a hard time, Julia,” he said. “The deaths those first years were … shocking.” Horribly shocking for a group of colonists straight from the Core Worlds, where advanced medical care was so accessible. “A miss-swung axe, a horse’s kick … knowing it could be fixed if you could only get him to Port Arthur. And knowing you wouldn’t make it in time. The girls and the babes were the worst, though.” He closed his eyes. “That’s a thing for joy, not …”

  He felt Julia close behind him and her hands on his shoulders.

  “We brought our wives here,” he said. “Wanted to work the land, provide for them, keep them safe …” He shook his head and scrubbed at his eyes. “Made sense when it came up at the conclave. The lands already went to the first-born, to keep the holdings together. Why not to the first-born son? Let the girls stay safe at home.”

  “You can’t keep someone safe by putting her in a cage, Denholm,” Julia said.

  Denholm snorted. “And isn’t that just why so many of us came out here in the first? Tired of new laws that put us in a cage for our own good? And now it’s my Lexi that has to pay the price for me not seeing it.”

  Julia started to speak, but the arrival of one of the boys from the village interrupted her.

  The lad burst into the kitchen, panting heavily. “Visitor come through the village!”

  “How far, lad?” Denholm asked, trying very hard not to laugh, the boy’s enthusiasm cheering him.

  “On the road, maybe halfway.” The boy grinned, clearly quite pleased with himself. “I come through the fields and woods to beat him here.”

  “Good lad. Julia, do you have an appropriate reward for our young messenger while I go and greet the visitor?”

  “Of course, I do.” She placed few more biscuits on the tray she was preparing and held it out to the boy. “Would you take this into the parlor for Miss Alexis, Richard? And then would you like ice cream or cake?” She bent close to the boy’s ear, whispering loudly enough for Denholm to hear. “Or perhaps, ice cream and cake?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Denholm chuckled at the boy’s eager nod and left the kitchen. He walked across the large, open farmyard, where a few geese and chickens had returned after Alexis’s arrival in the hauler, to the simple fence and open gate that marked the road to the village a kilometer away. Midway up the road, bordered by the fields he shared with those in the village, he caught sight of an approaching buggy.

  Oh, this’ll not go well. The lad had flown into Port Arthur the day before and would have had to rent transport to arrive at the holding, but if Alexis were the one visiting, she’d have rented a horse and ridden. Mayhap the lad thinks to squire her on a ride ‘round the countryside.

  Denholm leaned against the gatepost and waited for the buggy to arrive. He closed his eyes for a time and enjoyed the warm sun and the sounds of the farm behind him. He was curious to meet the lad, Daviel Coalson’s first son, as Denholm had not had much contact with the Coalsons since the colony ships had landed sixty years before — when the time had come to divide the system’s land, Denholm had drawn the position just before this boy’s grandfather, Rashae. It seemed that every round where Denholm chose first, he’d chosen the plot that was atop Rashae Coalson’s list, and the other man’s anger had grown with every turn.

  By the end of the choosing, Coalson’s rage had been obvious to everyone, the man seeming to take each of Denholm’s picks as a personal affront. Even the off-planet parcels Denholm chose infuriated the other man, claims in the system’s asteroid belt where it would be decades, if not generations before the colonists could begin exploiting. Some had even been concerned that Rashae might call Denholm out and the colony would have its first duel before they’d ever set foot on the planet. That first duel had come eventually, but not with Rashae — another holder had called Denholm out for some imagined slight, one of Rashae’s cohort. Denholm had always suspected that the elder Coalson had put the other man up to it.

  Well, Rashae’s long dead, but Daviel’s done his bit of carrying that grudge. Must’ve been fifteen years or more since ever I spoke to the man.

  And so it had been quite unexpected when he’d received a polite, if brief, note expressing Daviel’s understanding of the situation. Him suggesting, perhaps, it might be time for the two families to bury their differences, and wondering if his son, Edmon, might call upon them.

  Never had no differences to
bury, for my part — and there’s not so many young men her age as are unattached.

  Soon he heard the hoof beats and the creaks and rattles of the buggy approaching and opened his eyes.

  Oh … dear.

  “Hoy! You there!” The young man driving the buggy pulled back on the reins to stop it. “I’m looking for the Carew estate — they told me in the village that it was up this road, have I missed it somehow?”

  Denholm studied him closely. A young man, only seventeen, but tall and slim, probably handsome in a way — and that was the last of anything Alexis was likely to appreciate. As for his elaborately curled blond hair or his dress, a long scarlet jacket over a rich brocade waistcoat in a startlingly bright green, if Alexis didn’t like the dress Denholm had gotten her, then he couldn’t imagine her being impressed by this lot.

  Not a bit of it made here on Dalthus, I’ll wager.

  While the colony had a thriving textile industry for local consumption, it was mainly plain cottons and linens, not the richer fabrics this young man wore. Denholm himself dressed not that much differently from his workers, preferring the rough, sturdy fabrics he’d worn when first settling the world.

  “Are you deaf man? The Carew estate, if you please!”

  “You’ve found it, lad,” he said, stepping forward briskly. “And himself, as well.”

  The young man looked around, bewildered. “Mister Carew?”

  Denholm laughed, extending his hand up into the buggy. “Not what you expected, lad?”

  “Well, no, sir.” He grasped Denholm’s hand. “Edmon Coalson, sir. I do apologize for my tone — I… well, your dress, sir.” He cleared his throat.

  Aye, and you’ll take that tone with a common farmhand easily enough. But much as he might not like it, Denholm knew it had become a common trait amongst the younger holders and their families. “No harm, I suppose — and you’re welcome, lad. The house is just across the yard. I’ll have someone see to your horse and buggy.”