A shrill whistle erupted from the rafters, snapping Laura’s attention. “I know ya’re up there,” she cooed, scooting into the black depths of the barn. She peered expectantly into the loft half-filled with racked and withered tobacco leaves, the remnants of last season’s harvest. “Little birdie, vere are ya?” she called, an impish smirk escaping. The short whistle repeated louder this time. She grimaced. “That’s the verst attempt at a varbler I’ve ever heard!” she cried. She glided quietly to the corner near the scythes. When Sonja giggled behind her, Laura glanced back to see her baby sister standing on the milling floor, eyes fixed on the loft above. Her father, also smiling, remained focused on winding a spool of hemp between his knees. The whistle came again, followed by a loud rustling immediately overhead. She spun and looked up only to see a figure leaping down to the ground directly behind her.
“Aurrrgghh!” growled the young man as he landed, arms stretched wide and menacing, dust swirling all around.
“Ah! My word!” she exclaimed, backing to the corner. The man, now kneeling on the floor, was doubled with laughter. “James Annesley!” she scolded. “Ya shouldn’t scare me like that!” She stomped past him dismissively, her eyes cobalt fire.
James was still chuckling as he came to his feet and trotted after her. “Can ye ever forgive me my lady? Can ye?” His affected grin disclaimed all sincerity.
“Go away,” she chirped, running out of the barn. A fleeting look back assured her that he was following at a hormonal pace.
“Are ya helping me no more?” Bjorn asked haplessly.
James whirled to a stop. “Aye, Mr. Johansson. Quite right,” he said, looking first at Bjorn, then out the cavernous opening where Laura had disappeared, vanishing into the brilliance of the day. He slowly returned his gaze toward her father. “Shall I wind that for ye?”
Laura peered around the massive door, shading her eyes to see the men in the dimness. “Papa!” she scolded.
Bjorn frowned grudgingly. “Go on. Nothing here my old hands can’t manage.” James held his breath as tight as his angst, his eyes shifting between Laura and her father. A multitude of proprieties and improprieties flashed through his mind as he sorted them, trying to pick the best for the circumstance. Bjorn’s frown dissolved into a round smile, now forming its truer self. His eyes fixed on his impetuous daughter. “On with ya, son. Aya, on with ya. I want no trouble with dat one.”
Already moving, James blurted, “Thank ye, sir!” as he pivoted around the corner and was gone. Behind him he heard Bjorn’s bass chortle filling the barn.
*
By the time they reached the ox-grass road that led to Palkin Spring, James had slowed his half-hearted run to keep from passing the prey of his pursuit. She was laughing uncontrollably, her hair having fallen from its combs now fluttered behind her, an enchanting golden pennant swirling in the air. He stayed close. Finally, she slowed, then collapsed against a birch, breathless.
“Ya’re a rogue, James Annesley,” she panted. “To chase a lady such.”
He bowed handsomely. “No more a rogue than ye’d desire of me.”
“Ha!” She pushed him away.
He approached again, glancing quickly to confirm they were unobserved, then took her hands and eased her toward him. Where she had practiced keeping polite space—room enough for Mama to see daylight—she now let him in close, his waistcoat brushing her breasts. He willed himself not to look down. Be a gentleman, he admonished himself. He forced his eyes not to leer as they otherwise wished, down into the warmth of her cleavage which rose and fell against him with each of her easing breaths. He knew of its presence, her smell, her warmth, so close. He wouldn’t look down. He let go of her hands and embraced her, encircling her small waist with his arms, his hands careful to stay north of the forbidden line, his eyes focused where they belonged and inhaled, filling himself again with her sugary smell.
As she had done so many times, she reached up and silently traced the three-inch scar on his right cheek, touching it, deciphering it, as if to construe its story, reveal its true origin. As if by her caress she could extirpate it from his past.
“I love ye,” he said, confidently and soft.
She withdrew her hand. “I know,” she replied, affecting the coquette, the brooding look that turned away.
“Ye’re wicked.” He smirked softly, keeping a firm, almost carnal hold of her.
“Nay,” she whispered, her ocean-blue eyes meeting his directly. “It’s just—”
“Aye? Just what?”
“I just don’t know if I can love a man who can’t visal a varbler. It was pitiful James!”
“Ah, ye’re a mighty fine one t’ be sayin’ such! What about me? Eh? I’ve fallen for a lass who says ‘visal’ for ‘whistle’ and ‘varbler’ for ‘warbler,’ so I have!”
“What’s it my concern if da Irish or da English, whatever ya are, can’t speak with da tune of a Swede.”
He marveled, slowly shaking his head, befuddled, bemused, altogether in love. She was right—he loved to hear her talk. It was as if listening to a melodious, graceful song. She daunted him, mystified him. She was his world. He studied her eyes, those pools of glimmering blue, watching her gaze glide gradually down the length of his nose to where it stopped and lingered on the creases of his smile. He eased in and kissed her deeply.
*
They first saw each other at a Mayday celebration in Philadelphia eight years before. James was nineteen, a thin attempt at cutting a dashing image, and Laura was a radiant fourteen-year-old lass, as mischievous as she was charming, a devilish combination. Her family had come to town with a group of other Swedes from their community in Elkton, Maryland. Among their group were three stableboys, one of whom was known to George Brooke. After one stunned glimpse of Laura, James quickly made his request, George made the arrangements, and the stableboy made the introductions. Despite the brevity of their encounter—she was whisked away by her officious father—it was magical to James. He was spellbound. In that single moment his world transformed. Up became down, right was wrong, and nothing else mattered but her.
Within a week of meeting her—the one, the rapturous smell, the curves, that face, those teeth—James did the one thing he would most regret for the rest of his life: he ran away from the Drummond Iron Furnace. He had convinced himself that the loveliest girl he had ever seen was worth all risks, all chances, was beyond all disregarded sensibilities, all logic, all glaring impossibilities. Or so he told himself. In truth his decision to run had been founded on far less noble grounds. That May he had been at the Drummond Furnace six years and ten months. He was a collier at the charcoal hearths, running a crew of ten. In a mere two months the hell would end, his seven-year servitude would be over and he would regain his freedom. He would be an English citizen, a free man. Free to own land. Free to marry. Free to charge a wage. Free to have property. Free to have that property taxed by an English government an ocean away. Free to be a full subject of that Crown. Free to return to Ireland if he chose and if he were to afford such a passage. All he had to do was wait, to bide his time. For two months. But two things occurred first: he met the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and five days later his Methuselah master, the insufferable Colonel William Drummond, finally died.
That May night after the hearsay of Drummond’s painful death was cheerfully bandied about, every indentee and slave alike wished to lift a pint or two in remembrance. By midnight, the Wolf and Hen Tavern in Coatesville was stuffed with swilling servants staggering about bellowing chanteys, two urinating just beyond the back door, many more comatose and sprawled on the tavern’s ale-slick floor. Though James and George were also on the floor, they had somehow managed not only to remain conscious, but were sitting up against the far brick wall, each into their twelfth tankard of ale. It is precisely in such moments that the gods amuse themselves with mankind. Perhaps these lesser gods, these gods of fate and subterfuge, are weaker than might be expected. Suc
cess for them is only assured when a young man has just puked and is now swaggering in his ale-and-vomit-soaked-waistcoat, adrift in that sublime state of voluble courage and confused vision. It was no different for James, for it was precisely then that divine opportunity came into focus, like a golden chalice handed down through the thick clouds floating through his mind. This was his time, his moment. Now. With Drummond dead, James saw himself free to pursue both his Swedish passion and the shiny promised spoils of an ocean adventure (as spiritedly described by George who was no less drifting). It was the convergence of promise where his dreams collided hard, muddling him, unmercifully beguiling him. Though in later years he would be loathe to admit it, he was the one who decided that morning would be too late. No, he and George should go now. They rose and stumbled from the Wolf and Hen, supporting each other as they lurched into the cool Pennsylvania night. Swearing at the moon, they went away, all along screeching a grievous rendition of Rule Britannia at the top of their voices.
In principle, their ill-devised and poorly executed plan might have worked. With only a few months remaining in their terms and no master to announce their escape to the newspapers, few would notice or care. Only a man as virtueless as Colonel Drummond would more than scold an indentured servant who ran away under the pall of drink. Drunk servants often wandered away only to be quietly returned the next morning. It was staying away that got the man in trouble. If he planned to stay away, he had better get far away, fast. So, the incapacitated James reasoned that they had nothing to fear, no reason for speed as Drummond was dead and soon to be buried. They would make their way to Norfolk and sign on with the Royal Navy. And along the way they would pass through Elkton where he would call on Laura. George promptly agreed to the plan once James imagined Laura’s friends aloud.
It was George’s second run. His first attempt had failed when both he and Kelly, his Scot friend, were caught just as they arrived at the Chesapeake. A merchant had identified them from their descriptions in a runaway announcement and alerted the dockmaster, who also served as the sheriff. They were arrested, jailed, and sentenced to serve seven more years. Their original owner had not wanted them back, so he bargain-sold the unruly pair to Drummond, in Chestertown, on the same day James first came ashore, the same day Kelly was killed attempting to escape.
George Brooke had been transported to Maryland at the age of fifteen for lifting six pence of white bread from a London bakery. Or so he had told James. James was never certain of the truth in any of George’s accounts, like the story about George’s transport ship sinking off the coast of Cape Henry—an account which never fit, like an errant piece forced into the wrong puzzle. But the truth of George’s tall tales mattered little. Their veracity was of no value. They were entertaining and that was enough. George’s friendship helped mask James’s blackness, the emptiness of the ever-passing, never-ending days. The friendship was the balm to his emotional cuts, slices extracted by those razor-edged images James carried with him—childhood pictures of his mother, of Seán and Fynn, of Juggy dying. The friendship served them well. It served to pass the months and years. The clubbing was long forgiven, though never forgotten. Fodder for unceasing jesting. And George never questioned James again about peerage or claims. James never brought it up. They became the kind of fleeting friends that only difficult circumstances can construct, hardships, suffering and war, years of struggle, imprisonment, the brotherhood of the oppressed, the chorus of the enslaved. Yet they knew the truth. They could sense it, feel it. Such friendships are accursed by the circumstances of their creation. Albeit unspoken, they knew it had its own span, its own term inextricably tethered to the adversity that fed it. Not like a life-long friendship that carries the hope of endurance beyond an immediate environment of privation. Someday they would go their separate ways, most likely never to see the other again. But it didn’t matter. For that period they had their fleeting friendship, that class of brotherhood, and they clung to it with clenched determinism. Because it was all they had.
The morning after their “glorious” escape, they were discovered by one of the local constables. They had fallen asleep in a roadside ditch only two miles from Coatesville. As bad as it may have been, the horror of that morning was not the blinding sun, or the pulsating fire in their heads, or even the nauseating wagon ride back to the furnace—it was the sight of the man who met them at the gates of the Drummond Furnace that snapped them into a state of immediate sobriety. Colonel Drummond had in fact not died, but had fallen seriously ill. By the following morning, he was feeling entirely too well and was now at the gates glowering at those servants who had fled, those random souls being brought back, forced back by constables, by wagon, by horse, by capture, by guilt, by fear.
Both James and George were sentenced to nine additional years of servitude, seven for the escape and two more because it was George’s second attempt. The fact that it was not James’s second flight was of no concern to Drummond, and thus of no concern to the local judge who, for reasons unknown, felt behooved to impose whatever sentences Drummond demanded. Within the month George ran away again. But this time alone. This time sober. And this time he never returned. Now, years later, James still found himself scanning the crowds for his friend. He added George to his imagination, the realm where Seán lived, his imaginary friends. In this realm George met Seán, and the two of them were happy, alive, and waiting for James. Both were in the Royal Navy, capturing pirates, discovering new Caribbean islands, enjoying the impure exuberance of the island’s native girls.
James could scarcely remember the three years following his foiled escape. Resigned to his fate of apparently endless servitude, he abandoned himself entirely. He deemed himself unworthy of Laura and tried to forget having ever met her—albeit an impossible task, he was aided by copious pints of ale and by bedding any half-pretty prostitute to be found or afforded. Occasionally, a distraction could be mustered by rallying himself into a pub fight (drawing his sword once too often he received another long scar, this one across his chest). Miserable and despondent, he lumbered aimlessly through those dismal years.
*
Then, one December day in 1738, under a light falling snow, a miracle happened. Ben Clowes, the old woodcutting foreman James had not seen for nearly seven years, strolled into the collier’s hearth, giving James such a start that he nearly fell into the pit. Once James regained his composure and properly greeted the man, Mr. Clowes explained his return. As he listened, James’s knees buckled and he dropped into the charcoal-stained snow, his eyes welling with joy.
Mr. Clowes had left the Drummond Furnace one frozen grey January morning three and a half years after James’s arrival, his back straight with pride as he passed through the iron gates, his indentured term finally over. James could still see it clearly. Mr. Clowes had left as a free man, vowing to claim his portion of the rich colonial land. James had heard from him through occasional letters. Clowes had gone to Virginia, built a small tobacco farm and started a family, then eventually founded his community’s little church. But the years passed and the last letter James sent to Clowes was one he wrote the day George disappeared. James told everything, venting and shouting with his pen, raging at everyone. He didn’t hear back from Mr. Clowes for a little over a year. The letter he received was in a shaky hand, smeared, telling of Ms. Clowes burning to death in their small farmhouse, and that two of his girls had died from prolonged fever. He had gone on to say that he was moving, that his surroundings held too many painful memories. That last letter pushed James even deeper into his personal black abyss.
Then, many months later, this miracle happened: On December 3, 1738, three and a half years after James’s second term began, and in the thick of James’s seemingly incurable despair, Mr. Clowes walked into the Drummond Furnace and summarily purchased James’s remaining five and a half years. Though James was elated to be freed from the monstrous Drummond, what was truly miraculous was where they were heading when they whipped the carthorses
into action that afternoon. Mr. Clowes had recently remarried and was managing his new wife’s tobacco farm near the mouth of the Susquehanna River, at the northern end of the Chesapeake Bay, only three miles from the Swedish community of Elkton, Maryland.
*
A small bird chirped angrily as it flittered through the tobacco barn seeking a path of escape. Finally, it swooped by James and Laura’s heads and disappeared. “James?” Laura whispered.
“Aye?” James eased Laura away and frowned when he saw a tear on her face. “What’s the matter, Acushla?” he asked, calling her by the Irish endearment. “Did I say something wrong?”
“Nothing. My sweet James.”
He was baffled, a state not unfamiliar to him, especially when her feminine emotions were swirling about, capricious winds that held him off balance. They had kissed until their mouths ached. When Sonja found them they had convinced her to scurry home and resumed their embrace. But when Pehr and Gunnar, Laura’s tenacious little brothers, discovered them, James and Laura retreated to the vacant tobacco barn, climbed to the loft, and sat in a draft window, dangling their entwined feet high over the open expanse of empty air. Now the sun was disappearing, sweeping a royal blush across the tops of the pines bordering the Johansson farm. James pulled Laura close.
Fortunate Son Page 16
