'Til Morning Light

by Ann Moore

  She nodded soberly, accepting his thanks, then watched with the others as he disappeared down the bank to the creek.

  He moved quickly along the creek, crouching to remain hidden by the bank, and suddenly he was back in Ireland, running through the hills with the rest of his ragged band, evading the English soldiers who hunted them for insurrection. He stopped and shook his head—this was Quebec, not Ireland, and if he ever wanted to see his home again or the woman he loved, he needed to stay focused. He moved forward cautiously, listening for the sounds of men; hearing nothing, he slipped up the bank, then around front and into the tiny room. Quickly, quickly, he told himself, throwing his only change of clothes into a knapsack and then lifting the mattress off his bed. There was the Bible Gracelin’s gran had given him years ago in Macroom, and inside it a sketch of his mother made by his sister Barbara—the only things that had come with him on that frantic, secret trip from Ireland. Eejit, he scolded himself; stupid to risk coming back for these things, and yet how could he leave them behind when they were all he had left to remind him of who he’d once been. Not Mac, the Irishman who ran the supply wagon from town to settlement to trapper camp, but Morgan McDonagh, son of a proud poor man and a humble mother—both dead now; brother to eight sisters—dead, as well, for all he knew; best friend of Sean O’Malley—alive, God willing, and still in New York City; husband of Gracelin—alive, please God, please God, please God; and maybe even the father of a child who walked the earth thinking his father was dead. He mustn’t let himself become this new man, this Canadian Irishman, and he fought against it daily; he must remember where he came from, what brought him here, who he was. He looked around the cabin one last time for anything he might need. There was nothing. He had not allowed himself to make a life here.

  Aquash and the baby were climbing into a canoe at the river’s edge when he got to them. Behind it, another canoe waited—May’s, most likely—carefully balanced with their supplies and the travois. Nacoute motioned Morgan into this one and handed him the paddle.

  “You can?” May asked anxiously.

  Morgan had never been in a canoe. “I can,” he reassured her, then awkwardly maneuvered his vessel into position behind Nacoute’s.

  Once in the middle of the river, Morgan relaxed and let his body feel the motion of the water, the roll of the canoe, the rhythm of the paddle. The sun beat down on his head and warmed his aching shoulder through the cloth of his shirt; large black crows landed heavily on low-slung branches, cawing loudly as the boats worked their way upstream. To his right, a flash of silver caught his eye as a salmon jumped, startling the elk who’d come down for a drink, and overhead, an enormous bald eagle soared gracefully, following their progress.

  It was beautiful country, with an abundance of wildlife, but also cruel and unpredictable, and Morgan knew that the Indian village they sought might well be long disappeared. Winter could be months away or merely weeks; it was bitterly cold this far north, and there were no marked roads through the wilderness, no signs pointing the way to the nearest town. There were no nearest towns. He was traveling with an injured woman and her newborn babe, with a boy who could not speak, who had killed his stepfather and now ran from those who would make him pay; yesterday morning was a far cry from this one, and never had he dreamed this would be the day he finally moved on.

  Where are you taking me now, Father? Morgan asked silently, face tipped up to the sun. The answer didn’t matter; he was headed south and the Lord was with him. He did not look back.

  Three

  Grace leaned back against the wall into the looming shadows cast by lamplight. She listened to the toss and turn of anxious sleepers, experiencing an otherworldliness she had not felt since those long nights aboard the Eliza J, the endless voyage from Liverpool to Manhattan. Some nights, in the twilight before wakefulness, she even felt the ship sway, felt the salty winter sea damp against her skin, heard the calls and whistles of sailors, the clang of rigging against the masts. Awakening with a jolt, she would reach out for Mary Kathleen, who lay … not beside her in the narrow ship’s bunk, but on a cot in a row of cots lined up uniformly across the hospital ward.

  Grace checked her daughter—sleeping well, sleeping better every night, thank God, and talking during the day. She and Jack had stayed by Mary Kate’s side for nearly a week, and soon the girl would be well enough to leave this place, well enough to go home. Grace let the images of cabins, houses, rooms, inns, wagons, boats, ships, file through her mind—in how many different places had they laid down their heads, and where would they lie down now?

  She tightened her grip around Jack, slipping from her lap with the sweaty weight of a four-year-old gone dead-to-the-world asleep. He struggled briefly in protest but did not wake up, and Grace was glad. It was hours until morning, and she needed the rest that came when Jack was down for the night. He twitched occasionally, kicked his heels, and Grace knew that he dreamt of the pony left behind, of cowboys and lawmen, the revolving gamblers and preachers who had peopled his life, gunfights and horse races in the middle of town, cattle drives and Indian parties passing on the outskirts. Jack—with his dark sweep of hair and glasses, his little swagger and his true fearlessness—stirred something in everyone and anyone he ever met.

  He stirred now, and she kissed the top of his sweaty head, closed her eyes, and breathed in the particular smell of him. She loved him almost more than she could bear, especially when he threw back his head and laughed, when she saw in him the essence of his father. Imprisoned for insurrection, Morgan had never seen his son, though he’d known a child was on the way and had managed to get a letter to Grace before he’d died. That letter, and the knowledge that he was lost to her forever, had brought on an early labor. With no hope of a life in Ireland and wanted by the guards, Grace had been forced to leave behind the tiny infant at a convent in Cork with Morgan’s sister and Grace’s father; she’d hoped her da would come with the baby in the spring, but instead she’d learned that all in the convent had perished of fever. She bit her lip hard, knowing that the breakdown she’d suffered then had been yet another bane for Mary Kate to endure. Thank God for the Ogues; she owed Dugan her life in more ways than one and had been loath to leave him and Tara. The last time she’d seen them had been in Boston when they came to celebrate Jack’s arrival. Dugan had taken her aside and asked her to consider Peter Reinders’ proposal, for wasn’t he a fine man and wouldn’t young Jack need a father’s hand in the years to come?

  Peter was a fine man, a good man—she’d known it the day she set sail from Liverpool on his ship; he’d watched out for her, making sure that Liam would disembark as part of her family rather than ending up in the orphans’ asylum. He’d proved himself over and over again during the years in New York, and she had very nearly married him. Her excuse for not doing so had been her brother, whom she’d wanted so much to find; her excuse had been the children and the treacherous voyage around the Horn; her excuse had been time—she’d needed more of it—but here she always stopped, because the truth was that she loved the memory of a dead man more than the presence of one who lived and breathed and loved her as no dead man ever could.

  “Your mam’s a great eejit,” she murmured against Jack’s damp head. “Only you look more like him every day.”

  Grace had wed her second husband in secret, in the wee hours of a misty Irish morning, only to watch him disappear moments after. He’d told her to go to America, that he would follow, but instead he’d died and she had come alone. Grace kissed her boy again and accepted that in coming here to San Francisco, in asking Peter for help, she was resuming their courtship; she was agreeing to the consideration of marriage should he still want it. And she did love him, perhaps not with the passion of her youth, but she was twenty-five now, and wiser. With two children to raise, she could not afford to cling to memories; Morgan was dead and Peter was not. There could be no more excuses.

  “Ah, Missus Donnelly. Awake and on guard, as usual, I see.”

 
Grace hadn’t heard the doctor approach and looked up, startled but pleased. “Are you still here, then?” she whispered over the top of Jack’s head.

  “Apparently so.” Wakefield stifled a yawn. “How’s Miss Mary Kate this evening?”

  “Sleeping well enough. She took some broth earlier and spoke to us a bit.”

  “Color’s better, too.” The doctor felt Mary Kate’s forehead. “You can be thankful it wasn’t worse,” he said soberly. “A year ago, we wouldn’t have had a bed available. Four thousand immigrant men arriving each month, and I swear, most of them sick as dogs.” He regarded the woman before him. “One person in five dies before their first year here is over—you are quite determined to stay, are you, Missus Donnelly?”

  Grace nodded; she’d known far worse odds than that in her lifetime.

  “I understand your friend has not yet returned and in fact isn’t due back for quite some time.” Wakefield tipped his head in the direction of the nurse bent over a patient at the end of the row. “Courtesy of Sister Joseph,” he revealed. “She who sees all and knows all.”

  “He wasn’t expecting us, nor had I any way of knowing he’d be away. Where is Panama City, Doctor? Can you tell me?”

  “South, madam,” Wakefield said wryly. “Plenty of ships are still coming around Cape Horn, but the advent of the steamship has meant an ever-increasing number are dropped at Chagres, on the Gulf side, and they then travel by canoe and mule across the isthmus to Panama City on the Pacific side, in order to hitch a ride up the coast to San Francisco. It’s been a lucrative business for ship owners,” he continued, “though I hear the steamer trade is cutting them out now. The weather down there is unpredictable this time of year—hence the question of when your friend the captain will actually arrive.”

  Grace bit her lip, pondering the situation. “Well,” she decided at last. “I can take care of my own.”

  The doctor laughed despite himself. “That goes without saying, Missus Donnelly. Goes without saying.”

  Wakefield liked this woman; despite the gravity of her situation—quite desperate when she’d arrived with the child—she had maintained her dignity, never succumbing to hysteria, which he admired. Grace Donnelly was more than likely an attractive woman beneath the sun-reddened skin and flyaway hair, the battered hat she never removed, the mud-crusted cloak and—shocking, though he appreciated the practicality—those trousers, but it was the sound of her voice that drew him into conversation time after time; it was like speaking with his mother all over again. Granted, the Sisters of Mercy were all from an Irish order but were also more than a little intimidating with their no-nonsense air of duty and unblinking focus on the will of God. Certainly, they did not remind Wakefield of his witty, flirtatious Irish mother, who had been the epitome of Southern womanhood even though she rode the estate as boldly as any man and jumped her beloved horses at the drop of a hat, much to the mortification of the doctor’s father, older brothers, and younger sister.

  Missus Donnelly seemed to have the same confident disposition and, like Wakefield’s mother, did not back away from lively discourse with a man, no matter how heated it became. When engaged, the young widow had answered his various questions with succinct tutorials on Ireland’s fight for freedom and the plight of the reluctant immigrant, the sin of slavery and the brewing warfare in Kansas Territory. Lingering at the end of a day, Wakefield had heard about the overland walk to Oregon, the valley camp, and the illness that brought the Donnellys sailing down the coast to San Francisco, where it appeared the one person they knew was at present in absentia. Wakefield’s comfortable life—even the eternal voyage from his family’s plantation to the harbor of Yerba Buena with a distraught and, at times, hysterical sister—paled in comparison to the life this woman had led.

  “Would you like to sit down, then, Doctor?” Grace broke into his reverie. “Or will you keep on sleeping where you stand?”

  Wakefield grinned sheepishly. “Can’t let Sister Joseph catch me napping, now, you hear?” He winked. “In point of fact, I was caught up in a reflection of your remarkable travels, and I was thinking how much you remind me of my dear departed mother. She was Irish, you know.”

  “So you’ve said,” Grace reminded him. “Came away from Dublin with her family as a wee girl, grew up to charm your stodgy old da ’til he would go mad or be wed.”

  The doctor laughed, delighted with her summary. He crossed his arms and leaned against the post, settling in.

  “I’m flattered you remembered. However, my point is that my mother was a truly self-reliant, independent-minded, tough-as-nails kind of woman, but I don’t imagine even she could have survived half of what you all did.”

  “Not on her own, of course,” Grace allowed. “But if she’d friends as good as mine, she could’ve. I’d’ve never made it this far without Captain Reinders, the Ogues and the Livingstons, my friend Lily, and all her family.”

  “Ah, yes, the magnificent Free family.” Wakefield peered over the top of his spectacles. “Runaways, I believe you said?”

  Grace bristled. “I’d never call them that. Running away sounds cowardly, and the Frees are the bravest people I know.”

  “I’ve known many Negroes, myself, Missus Donnelly. We have all kinds where I come from—slaves, bonded servants, freemen—and, yes, some can give the appearance of bravery. But no matter what their status, they are not like us. They may pretend to be—and, indeed, the Negro is an expert mimic—but beneath their civilized dress runs the hot blood of the savage, and eventually, like it or not, blood will out.”

  Grace thought of Lily’s husband, January; his silent brooding and rage seemed to come out of nowhere. Lily had been overjoyed at their reunion, but even she had confessed once that Jan was not the man she’d married. The heart had been beaten out of him, she’d said; the beating had cost him his arm and hobbled him, but the worst was the loss of joy that had seeped into the ground with his blood. Solomon, their son, was an angry one, as well, Grace remembered; he was as wary of the white settlers as they of him, and he fought at the drop of a hat.

  “Do you not think ’tis slavery itself makes a man savage?” Grace asked then. “Are we not all the less for turning a blind eye to the buying and selling of people?”

  “What you’re implying, Missus Donnelly—and I grant that it’s a debatable point—is that we free the slaves. But you’re forgetting that these people are in no way prepared to feed or clothe themselves. And, frankly, if every worker had to be paid, the plantations would fail. Everyone would go under—white man and colored alike. And then where would we all be?”

  “Equal,” Grace answered without hesitation.

  Wakefield shook his head. “Not equal. The white man, with his greater civility and ability to reason, would be able to prosper once again, while the Negro would sink further into vice and degradation.”

  “Man’s character lies in the state of his soul, Doctor, not in the color of his skin.”

  The doctor frowned. “Believe it or not, Missus Donnelly, most slaves do not wish to be free. They are housed, they are clothed and fed, they are given work until they are too old, and then they are cared for until the end of their lives. They have their own families, their own private communities, and most masters are not the ogres portrayed by Northern abolitionists, most of whom have no real interest in the advancement of the Negro, by the way, only political aspirations.”

  Grace thought of Florence Livingston and her friends, who worked tirelessly in New York to raise money, who lectured and educated the masses about slavery, who had brought hundreds of men, women, and children up from the South and provided the means for them to live a life of freedom and dignity.

  “I can’t agree with you there, Doctor, though I’ve no doubt there are slaveholders who are well-meaning people. Only they can do nothing about those who aren’t, those who maim and murder, who assault the weak and vulnerable, simply because they have the power to do so.”

  “You are of the ‘power corrupt
s’ school of thought, are you, Missus Donnelly? Let me tell you that power in the hands of good Christian men is exactly what God intended.”

  “I think the word you’re looking for there, Doctor, is compassion. ’Tis the other fellow doles out power, knowing men will become drunk on it and use it to hurt the very people they’re meant to look upon as brothers.”

  Wakefield shook his head. “Assault and murder are not exclusive to the white man, madam. Plenty have suffered at the hands of those we’ve spent a lifetime caring for, who have betrayed our caring and kindness toward them in the most terrible manner known.”

  “And so, Doctor”—Grace finished carefully, hearing the personal note of anger in his voice—“have we not come back round to the beginning of our discussion? Slavery brings out the worst in man. Every man.”

  Wakefield nodded, though his acceptance of what she said was grudging at best. “Well, Missus Donnelly, I know many men—educated, professional men, by the way—who don’t argue a point half as well as you do. But I want you to know that I am not an advocate of slavery and do not wish to argue for its continuation. I hope to see in my lifetime a resolve that will not destroy an entire way of life—for the white man and the Negro alike.”

  “But one has already been destroyed,” she said quietly, Solomon’s face floating before her. “And now the whites have become slaves themselves—to money. As you’ve said before, good and decent people own slaves because without them they would lose everything and they cannot bear it, even though it will be their children who pay for it in the end.”

  Wakefield squinted at the floor as if he’d felt a twinge of pain. “You may be right, madam. Certainly my own family has built its fortune on slave labor and could not survive if forced to pay wages—our plantation is one of the largest in our state.” He looked up at her. “I confess it was not a life I could pursue with any kind of heart, and I was grateful to be released from family obligations so that I might come out here to practice medicine.”