by Lori Benton
Ian replaced the brush-screen used to conceal the digging. What traces their boots had left, the snow would cover. Through it now 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. “Let me know when I’m to get back to it. Meantime, me and the dogs are going hunting.”
Ian declined John’s offer of a chat by his hearth, appealing though the invitation was. Instead they parted and followed their own paths back down the steep ridge, Ian keeping to the creek that dashed through a landscape obscured by slanting snow: shadowed pine and dark-leafed laurel, outcrops of lichen-speckled stone, the skeletal shapes of oak and hickory.
The going was slick in spots. Ian had only half his mind on where he placed his boots. The other wandered a more treacherous path, ahead to where the creek led: home, eventually, where Judith, his wife, and Naomi, their cook, were likely at work in the warmth of the kitchen, spared by last year’s fire. Between him and that snug refuge was the hollow, bowered in white-limbed birches, with the creek plunging in its glassy fall. And the memories, waiting to ensnare.
He hadn’t set foot there since Seona, his uncle’s former slave, left to live with Ian’s parents in Boston, taking with her their son, Gabriel, conceived in that hollow when he and Seona had been handfasted, his headstrong attempt to claim his heart’s desire—her heart—and give her what she deserved—freedom. Or the promise of it, since the Scots custom of handfasting wasn’t recognized in North Carolina.
Even that tenuous plan for a future together had been ruined through Lucinda Cameron’s manipulations. She had convinced Ian that Seona had run for freedom without him, leaving him devastated yet unable to abandon the rest of Mountain Laurel’s slaves to Lucinda’s harsh care. And so he had stayed, become his uncle’s heir. And he had married Judith, his uncle’s youngest stepdaughter, to assure his determination didn’t waver—months before learning Seona hadn’t spurned him, hadn’t run, but was sold into drudgery farther south, pregnant with his child. Too late to do anything about it except bring her back to Mountain Laurel, shelter her, and try to keep his distance.
He had failed at the latter, to Judith’s heartache, before he surrendered his will to the Almighty. Even then it had been a constant battle, day by excruciating day, until the house fire and the revelation that Hugh Cameron had already freed both Seona and her mother, Lily, months before his death.
With Seona, Gabriel, and Lily removed to Boston, Ian had set himself to love his wife as Scripture bade and banish memories of Seona to the far edges of his heart. All these months he had stayed away from that birch hollow with its spilling fall of memories, yet here he was, tempted as if no time at all had passed.
He ought to have accepted John’s invitation. Had his friend seen into his soul, back at the digging, and recognized the disquiet burrowing there?
It was the silence undoing him. He had had one letter from his sister, saying Seona, Gabriel, and Lily had reached Boston safely and been given shelter in the Cameron home on Beachum Lane. He had written back, enclosing what he could by way of provision for their keeping.
A year ago.
No further news was promised. He had asked for none. Yet the longer the silence stretched, the harder it grew not to wonder. Did Seona find life with his family agreeable? Or had she and Lily found a place for themselves and Gabriel? Were they flourishing? Surviving?
He would go to the birch hollow. Not to linger, he told himself, grasping at a stony outcrop to descend the creek’s bank. Merely to pass through and—
His boot came down on a moss-slick stone and shot from under him. Next he knew, he lay sprawled among jumbled rocks, scraped and bruised, snow landing cold on his upturned face.
He sat up, yelping as pain shot through his knee, twisted in the fall. With the help of those bruising stones, he pushed himself to his feet, hands scraped, coat and breeches stained by mud and moss. He hobbled to where his hat had fallen, shook it free of snow, shoved it back on his head.
He would never make it down the steep drop into the hollow now.
While snow sifted down and the creek chattered on, oblivious to his small drama, relief swept him. On its heels came a wash of shame. He closed his eyes against the throb of his wrenched knee, the aching of his heart.
“Right then,” he said. “I’ll go home by the straighter way.”
In the whitewashed kitchen house, Judith was slicing carrots. Knife arrested at the gust of cold Ian ushered in when he entered, she took in the sight of him, expression caught between amusement and dismay. “What on earth does John Reynold have you doing, Ian? Digging a privy?”
He had washed the mud from his face and hands at the well but knew his foolishness had created more labor for his wife. Even with Naomi doing most of the kitchen work and a share of the laundering, Judith was worn to exhaustion most days with the endless tasks of keeping their household clean, dry, and ordered.
“Took a wee tumble on my way home,” he said, hoping to stave off curiosity. Neither Judith nor Naomi knew of the gold—or the birch hollow.
The half-truth burned on his face.
Naomi stood before the massive brick hearth to shield its flames from gusting air. His daughter, Miranda Grace—whom they called Mandy—rode her broad hip. “Mister Ian, come all in or go back out. You letting in cold.”
Judith peered past him. “It’s snowing? I’ve wash on the line.”
Ian shut the door but knew as soon as he turned, Judith had noted his limp. She put down the knife and rounded the worktable, skirts swishing. “Ian, you’re hurt. Sit by the fire and let me see.”
“Knee’s bruised, is all. Sorry about the coat.”
“I’ll take it. I need to get the wash off the line before it’s soaked again.”
“I’ve work in the stable. Best let the mud dry, brush it off there.”
Judith searched his face, then with a smile that prettied her plain features, wrapped herself in a woolen shawl. “I’ll take Mandy, Naomi, so you can make some headway with supper.”
“Your mama gonna let you ride the toting basket, baby girl. You like that, don’t you?” Naomi skimmed a fingertip under Mandy’s chin, eliciting a giggle as she handed over the child.
It was early days yet, but it seemed Mandy hadn’t taken much from Ian in looks. Not the eyes, brown like Judith’s instead of his blue. Nor the hair. Mandy sported a cap of wisps darker than his wheat-gold shade, though now and then in sunlight he had caught a hint of russet in the brown. Like his sister’s.
Mandy’s head was covered now in a knit cap pulled snug to plump cheeks, to one of which Judith pressed a kiss. “Isn’t your daddy a sight? You’d think he was five, not five-and-twenty.”
She tucked a fold of shawl around their daughter and went out through the herb shed at the back of the kitchen. Over her shoulder Mandy grinned at Ian until the door closed between.
“Supper ain’t for a spell,” Naomi said. “Want something to tide you afore you go down to Ally at the stable?”
Since the house burned just over a year past—the day of Mandy’s birth—the kitchen had become the heart of Mountain Laurel. They all ate there, he and Judith and Mandy; Naomi, her grown son, Ally, and her aged father, Malcolm. Yet Ian never thought of this space with its ropes of onions and peppers, its perpetual smell of smoke and herbs and grease, its gleaming copper and oiled cast iron, as anything but Naomi’s kingdom, where she presided in her calico crown.
He told her he could wait for supper. “Is Malcolm with Ally?”
“Last I knew.” Naomi took over chopping the carrots. Potatoes lay in a heap next to the cutting board. It looked to be a vegetable stew. They were low on meat save for the hams and sausages put up in the smokehouse, meant to last until next autumn. He needed to take a leaf out of Charlie Spencer’s book, bring in some venison. Or a turkey.
“I’ll head on down. I need t
o work with Juturna,” he added, speaking of the two-year-old filly born days after he arrived at Mountain Laurel to take up his uncle’s offer of becoming his heir.
“You gonna work that filly in this snow?”
“This little skiff’s no proper snow. Ye’ve clearly never seen the likes of Boston in winter.”
Naomi dropped the carrots into a steaming kettle. “Reckon not. Ain’t been more’n five miles off this farm in my lifetime.”
Her words sent a stab through Ian—guilt of another kind. He had never grown easy with his uncle’s owning of slaves. That he now owned this woman, and her kin, was a fact he couldn’t reconcile. “Would ye like to?”
Naomi turned from the hearth, eyebrows vanished beneath her head wrapping. “Not if that mean leaving my menfolk behind. Who’d tend them—Miss Judith and Mandy, too—did I go traipsing off to wherever?”
“There’s that.” He tried to smile but was blindsided with longing. For his kin in Boston. For Gabriel. Seona . . . He jerked his head, dispelling such thoughts for what seemed the hundredth time that day.
Naomi hadn’t shifted the kettle over the flames. “You ain’t had but the one letter from your sister.”
“No” was all he said.
Naomi turned to swing the kettle-crane but got the last word in, loud enough Ian heard it at the door. “It gonna help things, us pretending they never drew breath here?”
Behind its fence pales the kitchen garden lay in repose. The trellised walkway that ran beside it led to a looming emptiness where the house once stood.
Mountain Laurel was a shadow of the plantation it had been the day Ian and his boyhood friend, Thomas Ross, first rode into the stable-yard. Ian and Judith were living now in the old overseer’s cabin, out by the tobacco barns. He had expanded the cabin to two rooms, while Naomi and her family had their cabins nearby in what had been the slave quarter, all but the soundest two dismantled.
Besides a full smokehouse, they had garden produce and corn put by to see them and the stock through the winter, but the fire and the flight of his uncle’s field hands—with Thomas leading them to freedom—had reduced them to subsistence farming.
Last year’s tobacco harvest had amounted to less than half of what the tired land once yielded, and he had only Ally to help in the fields come spring. Malcolm never shirked his work in the garden, but he was beset with rheumatism. Judith needed Naomi in the kitchen and yard. The last thing Ian wanted was to acquire more slaves. He would rather free those he had inherited, but his responsibility toward them wouldn’t end with manumission granted by the North Carolina Assembly. Freed slaves were required to leave the state else be subject again to enslavement. With Seona, Gabriel, and Lily to help support, he was stretched thin already.
Chasing worries and gathering snow wouldn’t accomplish any of the tasks demanding his attention. Shaking off both, Ian rounded the kitchen and caught sight of Judith taking down the wash as snow blanketed the yard. Nestled in the toting basket, Mandy played in the mound of garments piling up around her.
Judith’s shoulders bowed as she worked. She had always been thin, left fragile from a childhood bout with yellow fever, yet in the gray of afternoon, obscured by snowfall, she appeared exhausted.
She looked up as he neared, brushing at a snowflake that landed on her nose. He moved her hand away from a petticoat as she reached for it. “I’ll finish this. Take Mandy down to the cabin where it’s warm.”
She gave way, bending to scoop their daughter from the basket, not quite stifling a groan as she straightened. “There’s mending I can see to.”
“Never mind the mending. Rest yourself ’til supper.”
He glimpsed her relief before she covered it with a smile. “All right, Ian.”
He woke in the dark, disturbed by a sound, thinking it only moments since he had drifted to sleep. Or had he overslept and left Ally to tend the stock alone? Hard to tell, these long nights.
The sound came again. He pushed up on an elbow. His wife knelt beside the bed, retching into the chamber pot. Moonlight slanted through the room’s window. The clouds had cleared. The cold air smelled of sick.
He waited while Judith washed at the basin, then came silently back to their bed. Across the chilled sheets he reached for her, sick himself with knowing. Softly, so he wouldn’t wake Mandy in her cradle, he asked, “How far along are ye?”
“I didn’t mean to wake you.” Judith’s voice was small in the winter dark.
“How far?”
“Three months.”
That would make it . . . June. If she carried this one to term. The lingering effects of childhood illness weren’t all that had taxed Judith’s strength. She had been carrying again two months after Mandy’s birth but lost the babe in late spring. Mourning the tiny girl they named Elizabeth, he had dug another grave on the ridge beside his resting kin.
The bedtick rustled. Judith turned toward him. “Are you pleased?”
A tightness gripped his throat. He found her brow in the dark and kissed it, nose pressed against her ruffled nightcap. “Of course. Try and sleep a bit longer.”
Ignoring his own advice, he lay thinking. Perhaps he ought to head out to his cabinetmaking shop, whatever the hour. Work awaited him there as well. Beside him Judith’s breathing deepened. He thought her asleep until her whisper rose in the dark.
“It will be all right. I’m not afraid.”
Which of them she sought to comfort, he couldn’t have said.
2
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
March 1796
As she stepped into the book-lined shop, Seona Cameron reveled in knowing she could tell one shelved volume from another just by opening their covers. She had been reading words on a page for a sixmonth now. Rarely did she need help sounding out a new one, though plenty kept coming at her.
Opening book covers was a thing Seona’s companion had been doing since they passed under the wrought iron sign proclaiming Cameron & Son, Binders & Sellers of Fine Books. From across the shop Catriona Cameron waved a slender volume. “Da’s got in Freneau’s new collection! Wouldn’t you think he’d have mentioned it over breakfast?”
Catriona’s raised voice drew a frown from a cloaked woman waiting at the counter spanning the shop’s front, dividing the bookselling business from the binding. Seona feigned interest in a copy of Mr. Franklin’s Almanack displayed near the window, hoping Catriona would bring the book over—away from the woman at the counter. Never mind she could read, had even tried adapting her speech to better blend with the people of that northern city, it still came as second nature to deflect attention. To go unseen.
To hide yourself away, her mama had noted.
I’m out of the house, Mama, running errands for you, she thought back in imaginary argument, shifting the basket of purchases made earlier as Catriona approached, riffling the book’s crisp pages. Their fresh-inked scent mingled with the shop smells of leather and dye and binding glue.
“Listen,” Catriona said. “This is from a poem called ‘The Indian Student’—
“From Susquehanna’s utmost springs
Where savage tribes pursue their game,
His blanket tied with yellow strings,
A shepherd of the forest came.
Not long before, a wandering priest
Express’d his wish, with visage sad—
‘Ah, why (he cry’d) in Satan’s waste,
Ah, why detain so fine a lad?’”
Listening to her read, Seona minded her surprise at first hearing Catriona speak with none of her parents’ marked Scots lilt. Born in Boston, Ian’s younger sister had never set foot in Scotland, unlike the rest of the family.
Now Seona cut in, “Satan’s waste?”
Beneath a trim jacket, Catriona’s shoulder bobbed in a shrug. “All that wilderness to the westward, I suppose, waiting to be conquered and set to order.”
The rise of voices made Seona aware of Catriona’s father at the counter, attending his customer. Her
heart gave that little trip of recognition it did whenever Robert Cameron smiled, with the corners of his mouth turning up just so. Ian’s smile.
Catriona nudged her. “Listen—
“‘In Yanky land there stands a town
Where learning may be purchas’d low—
Exchange his blanket for a gown,
And let the lad to college go.’
“Hmm,” she murmured, skimming the next verses. “The Indian lad goes to Harvard decked in skins and feathers and impresses everyone with his fine mind. But he isn’t happy. He misses the forest. . . . Do you think they’re as Freneau paints them, the western Indians? They cannot all still be wild men in feathers. Does Lily truly know nothing about your people? The Cherokees?”
Your people. Faces rose in Seona’s mind. Not the bronzed faces of Cherokee Indians. Darker faces with broader features. “Mama never knew her mama, much less her daddy. He was the Cherokee, far as we know.”
In the eighteen months they had shared a roof, Catriona had wheedled many such details out of Seona, until she doubted anyone in Boston, saving her mama, knew more about her past, which wasn’t something she meant to discuss in the middle of Mister Robert’s shop. No matter what she and Gabriel looked like, there were plenty who would view them askance were the truth of her past widely known.
The woman at the counter left with her book purchase, casting them a raised brow Catriona was too absorbed to notice.
“A shame Lily doesn’t know.”
Seona was seeking to change the subject when Robert Cameron beat her to it, coming from behind the counter to join them. “Ye’ve found Freneau then, mo nighean?”
Seona’s heart warmed to the cadence of his Highland speech, though it brought an ache of missing others who spoke the same. Malcolm. Master Hugh. Ian . . .
