by Lori Benton
She lingered, admiring the table desk Ian had made, using the morning glory designs he’d asked her help with after discovering her secret love of setting down the likeness of things. She minded those days in his shop, the work they had done on this desk and others, before those contrary tides of heart and duty—and the meanness of some—yanked them hither and yon, eventually sweeping them apart.
Nothing had been simple then. Was it simpler now?
Maybe her mama was right. They should break free of the Camerons, no matter they had heard no final word from Ian.
“Seona?”
Startled, Seona turned toward the door to see Ian’s sister, tears streaming, rushing at her with arms outstretched.
“I’m sorry!” Catriona threw slender arms around her shoulders, curls pressed to Seona’s cheek. “I don’t know what came over me to say such horrible things. Please, please, forgive me.”
Seona held her, patting her back. “It’s all right.”
“There’s no excuse for what I said,” Catriona replied, sniffling. “But thank you.” They parted, smiling weakly at each other. Catriona searched her gaze. “Will you tell me what happened with that man you mentioned?”
“Gideon Pryce,” Seona said and wished she hadn’t. It seemed to conjure the man and the fear he had caused. Still she told how the master of the neighboring plantation had stalked her every chance he got. “Once Ian came, he saw right off what Mr. Pryce wanted. He stood between us and warned him off—calling me his uncle’s property.”
“Ian called you that?”
“It was a thing Mr. Pryce would understand—maybe respect. Later Ian told me if he ever laid a finger on me again, he’d skin Mr. Pryce like he’d do a wolf.”
Catriona plunked down on the edge of her bed, brows vaulted high. “That sounds more like my brother.” She bit her lip, looking at Seona. “Was this before you and he . . . ?”
Seona touched the morning glory vines carved across the desk’s drawer, knowing what was asked though the query hung unfinished. “It was.”
Catriona reached for her hand. “Please don’t be angry at my asking this. You know I love my brother—but how was Ian different from that horrible Mr. Pryce?”
The wood beneath Seona’s fingertips felt as smooth as the day Ian finished the piece. “I reckon friendship doesn’t know anything of slave and free, which is how it started with Ian. He was kind to me. More than kind. He saw me. Not just his uncle’s slave, but me. After a while . . . I saw him back.”
“That’s how I feel about—” Catriona broke off as Seona pulled out the desk drawer and, minding well its secret, sprang the latch to the hidden compartment within. Catriona released her hand and stood. “You knew!”
“Ian showed me.”
The whole upstairs was warm and stuffy. Back in the scullery, with the door open, the air had been rain-washed, like Seona wished her heart could be. She ought to tell Catriona to let Mr. Shelby alone. To let whatever had soured between him and Ned work itself out.
Before she could open her mouth, Catriona opened the lid of the desk, revealing her painting supplies.
“There’s a breeze in the garden,” she said as outside the window clouds parted and sunlight broke through. “Let’s do some painting, if Lily can spare you.”
With her mama keeping an eye on Gabriel while he napped, Seona and Catriona set up their easels at the garden’s edge, a table set between to hold their paints and brushes. Catriona favored the flowering borders of Miss Margaret’s vegetable garden as a subject, but Seona was drawn to the herb garden, expanded since she and her mama joined the household. Lily missed the fragrant shed off the kitchen at Mountain Laurel where she once prepared her powders, salves, and draughts. Seona thought about her mama’s idea of leaving Beachum Lane and wondered if she longed to be mistress of her own domain again. Of more than just an herb shed.
The thought tugged her concentration from the stalks of milk thistle, its purple-pink flowers just past full bloom, that she was capturing on the heavy paper clipped to the slanted easel. Brush suspended over the washpot, she thought about her mama, sixteen when she bore Seona. Aidan Cameron, Seona’s father, had died before her birth. They had planned to run away, find a place to be together. Be a family. All those years since, had her mama been longing for a husband, a home?
From the open scullery door, Gabriel burst into the sunshine, done with napping, and raced down the walkway to the gardens, Lily a step behind. Seona plunked her brush into the waterpot in time to scoop him up.
“Have a good nap, baby?” She pressed her face to his damp curls, loving his smell, his solid, wiggling weight.
No more than a few feet away, Catriona glanced over, emerging from her painting trance—one of the few times she was ever disengaged—to notice Gabriel, squirming to get down again. “Where did you come from?”
“Go on with your painting,” Lily said. “I’ll mind Mister Mischief a bit longer.”
“Thank you, Mama.” With the chatter of their voices a background, Seona took up her brush and grew absorbed in painting the milk thistle, concentrating on capturing the pointed, white-veined leaves, until an outcry shattered her focus.
“Where did ye come from?” Lily’s sharp echo of Catriona’s question had Seona whirling, searching for her boy.
Gabriel was safe in his granny’s arms, the two crouched on the walkway, until he broke free to gallop toward the side of the house.
Seona put down her brush and took half a dozen steps before spotting the man who had entered the back garden from the street. With a cornered hat obscuring his face, he bent to intercept Gabriel, sweeping her boy up with the ease of one who knew his way around small children. At first she thought it was Ned, despite the unfamiliar coat and hat. Then he raised his face and sunlight caught his features, the wheat-gold tail of his hair spilling around his collar.
Seona stopped in her tracks.
“Ian!” Catriona all but sent her easel tumbling in her haste to cross the yard to her brother, who shifted Gabriel to one arm and with the other gathered his sister into an embrace.
“Cat,” he said, smiling down at her. “Look at ye . . . all grown up.”
“And done with Cat,” she said, laughing. “It’s Catriona now.”
“Is it then? And, Lily, it’s good to see ye.” Ian turned his gaze to Seona’s mama, who stood as frozen as Seona.
“Mister Ian,” Lily said, voice faint with surprise. “Good to see ye too.”
The last word had risen in a question. The same that beat with Seona’s blood. How was Ian standing there, when all this while she had pictured him at Mountain Laurel? Far, far away.
Ian. He was holding Gabriel with Catriona beaming at him, and all Seona could do was fight to keep her knees stiff enough to hold her up. Then his gaze fastened on her, and everything shifted.
Feeling like the scattered pieces of her world had snapped back into place, Seona started toward him.
8
By the time they sat to a table extended to accommodate twice the number Margaret Cameron had expected for dinner, Seona knew the pieces of her world, old and new, in truth no longer fit as they had. They never could. Miss Judith was dead. Mountain Laurel was sold to the Reynolds. Ian had returned north to stay.
“To make a new life.”
That last he announced to Mister Robert, home to his dinner—careful not to look at Seona as he said it. Still she felt the tension flowing toward her as if he had boldly stared.
With so many gathered, each with something to say, Seona found it easy to hold her thoughts inside. As if she knew what to think about seeing Ian again, hearing that voice so surprisingly deep, the rumble of his laughter.
Her heart raced to look at him, skipped a beat when he caught her at it, only to have her gaze drawn back again. And again.
Over the moon to see others long missed, she let Naomi dandle Gabriel on her knee before dinner. Grinned at Ally grinning back at her. Cried as she hugged Malcolm, whose accent was so
like Ian’s parents’ that, under the joy and shock of it all, it felt like two halves of a family come together after years apart.
The gathering of threads on a loom.
Though Naomi was relieved to be inside the house on Beachum Lane, every corner of which her curious gaze roved, being waited on by Catriona and Miss Margaret had rendered Mountain Laurel’s former cook mute. The ways of these Boston Camerons took some getting used to, like Ian’s had done when he first came to them. A lifetime ago, that felt.
Mandy clung to her daddy, shy with so many new faces trying to coax a smile. She was growing into a pretty child, with features maybe more like Ian’s but her mama’s tea-brown eyes, hair somewhere between Judith’s mousy brown and the richer shade Mister Robert and Catriona shared. Ian answered questions about the journey north while persuading Mandy to eat, casting looks across the table at Seona and Gabriel, taken onto her lap to keep his wiggling self still enough to feed.
Ian with his daughter. She with their son. Sundered by a laden table and a tide of voices lapping over them, talking about the land sale, the surprise of it all, how good it was to have Ian home and everyone with him welcome. No one asked the questions cutting deepest across Seona’s heart. How had Miss Judith died? What did Ian mean to do about Gabriel? What did he want from her?
Lily leaned close above Gabriel’s bobbing head and asked, “All right, girl-baby?”
Seona scarcely knew.
“Reckon this changes things,” her mama added under her breath as Ian glanced across the pickle bowl. A look Seona felt to her toes.
Since the lean days of the war, the Camerons had become a family of comfortable means, but they had always been rich in their library. With relief Ian shut the door of his da’s study and, among the calfskin spines recalled from his youth, grasped a moment in which to regather mind and heart. Both had frayed when he rounded the house, spotted Seona and Catriona painting at the garden’s edge, then was himself spied by his son.
Weeks on the road to brace himself hadn’t prepared him for the avalanche of emotion seeing Gabriel again had triggered, nor the sight of Seona coming toward him, green eyes stunned wide, bright in the sunlight breaking through clouds.
What was she experiencing behind that shuttered face—a skill in which his uncle’s slaves had been well practiced?
“I should have written,” he chastised himself as his da crossed the room. A hand rested warm on his shoulder.
“Aye, ye might have,” Robert Cameron agreed without recrimination. “But ye’re here now. Meaning to stay, I gather?” Seating himself in the high-backed chair behind his writing table, he motioned Ian to another.
“Not here. This house, I mean.” For now he had hired adjoining rooms at the Chestnut Inn and stabling for the horses. “I’d never ask ye to accommodate us all.”
“Tight fit or no, ye’re welcome. There’s always the attic.”
Ian thought his da had something else on his mind. No mention had been made of the request to adopt Seona and Gabriel. Ian supposed it the subject his da meant to broach, but when Robert Cameron spoke again, it concerned a different matter.
“When I arrived home to that kebby-lebby in the keeping room, everyone talking at ye at once, ye let it be brushed aside without much comment, your news of Judith.”
They hadn’t known his wife, even secondhand. He hadn’t written of her kind heart, her steadfast faith, her boundless patience. “I’d intended to tell ye more of it—of her. Just not then.”
His da nodded. “Was it childbirth?”
“Aye. I buried a son with her.” Ian fixed his gaze on a painted seascape hung above the mantel and breathed in the room’s familiar smells: book leather, his da’s pipe tobacco, the stale ashes of the last fire laid, yet to be swept. He had always liked that room. “She wanted him named for me. He lived barely longer than she.”
He paused, memory of those final moments with Judith still prone to choke off speech. Sympathy and sorrow softened Robert Cameron’s features. “’Tis the hardest thing I’ve ever kent, watching my sons grieve.”
Reminder of his brother’s loss weighed. Ned had left the shop and gone his way at the dinner hour, unaware of Ian’s return. A message had been sent. Ned hadn’t been home to receive it when the neighbor lad who bore it clapped the knocker.
“Have ye decided what ye mean to do, now ye’ve come back . . . to Boston?”
Had his da been about to say home, then thought better of it? Of his siblings, Ian was the rootless one, calling one place, then another home but somehow never quite meaning it.
“I’ve promised Malcolm and his family a place with me for as long as they need. Lifelong, do they wish it. Not just for the sake of what’s owed them.”
He waited for his da’s reaction. It came in an approving nod. “When I pressed ye to go south to Hugh, I confess I did so with one grave misgiving—that the life there would change ye.”
Ian forced a smile. “I thought my changing was what ye wanted.”
Though he smiled in return, Robert Cameron shook his head. “I meant in a way that would’ve been regrettable.”
Ian knew what was meant: the corruption of soul the practice of slave owning wrought in a man. He had seen it in his uncle. And others. “But I have changed, Da.”
“Aye, ye have. But not in the way I’d feared. I’d thought perhaps it was only Seona and Gabriel—and Lily—ye desired freed when first they came to us. Now I see that’s no’ the way of it.”
“Aye, Malcolm and his family are free now. I’ll hold no soul in bondage again. Even so, I might have become like Uncle Hugh in the end, if not for Malcolm. Between him and John Reynold, my neighbor, I’d slim chance of escaping without my knee, and heart, bowed to the Almighty at last.”
“One day I suspect ye’ll ken how glad I am to hear that.” His da cleared his throat, studying him. “Did ye come awa’ a farmer as well?”
William Cooper had asked a similar question. Ian wondered should he tell his father of the congressman’s offer. He drew breath to do so—then shut his lips on the words, feeling it too soon. “I liked it well enough but mean to take my time deciding my course.”
“Ye’ve settled meantime at the Chestnut? That’ll prove no small expense, depending on how long ye stay. I ken ye sold my brother’s land—your land—but will ye no’ be needing those funds to resettle—if ye were paid in a form that might be used to buy land or shop?”
They were come to a subject needful of address. Robert Cameron could be trusted to keep a confidence, even from his mam, should Ian ask it. He did so.
His da’s countenance altered through stages of surprise as Ian spoke of the gold discovered on John’s land, the payments forthcoming which could, in Boston, be exchanged for coin.
“I may set up for cabinetmaking again. But not here. Or Cambridge.”
“No,” Robert Cameron agreed, memory of Ian’s unfortunate history with that guild no more than a shifting in his eyes. “But not too far afield?”
“A day’s ride at most. I don’t wish to be separated from Gabriel again, if I can help it.”
His da leaned back in his chair, bottom lip caught between teeth still strong and straight. “Which answers my next question.”
“Da.” Ian shifted forward. “I cannot let another man raise my son. Not even—”
He had meant to add ye, but a knock, heavy and insistent, had him straightening and turning toward the door.
The knock proved preemptory. The door pushed open and Ian’s brother came uninvited into the room. As tall as Ian, but thicker through the chest now than their father, Ned Cameron stood unmoving for a heartbeat, then shut the door on the hum of voices from the crowded house.
Their father stood. So did Ian. Ned refused to meet his gaze.
“Ned,” Robert Cameron said. “We’d hoped ye’d join us sooner. I sent a lad round to the house to fetch ye.”
“I dined at the Red Lion, then found the shop deserted. Catriona fetched me. So here I am—and h
ere I find you,” Ned added, acknowledging Ian at last. “What are ye doing back in Boston?”
Mister Robert’s study door wasn’t thick enough to drown Ned’s words. Not for someone hovering on the stairs a few steps away.
Soon as dinner was done, Seona had left Gabriel in Lily’s keeping and vanished into the scullery. By the time she emerged, Ian had gone to ground with his daddy in the study. Hearing the little ones upstairs playing, knowing her mama would be with them, she had left Naomi, Malcolm, and Ally with Miss Margaret and planted herself on the stairs, hoping everyone would stay put for a bit. She wanted to know what Ian and his daddy were saying behind that door.
The talk proved too hushed to catch, until Ned arrived. Seona shrank into the landing’s shadow as he barged into the study, shutting the door again.
“What are ye doing back in Boston? Did ye abandon your wife to come chasing after Seona?”
Every word out of Ned’s mouth came clear, but she had to strain to hear Ian’s reply: “I’ve abandoned no one, Ned.”
“Ye’ve dragged Judith along with ye?” Ned’s voice held no restraint. “What does she think of ye pursuing your bastard’s mother eight hundred miles north?”
Mister Robert intervened. “Ned! I’ll no’ be having that language in my home. And ye dinna ken anything about it.”
“I know enough, Da. Seona was Uncle Hugh’s slave. She’d no choice in what happened—I don’t care what she says now. My brother does as he wills, gets her with child, then banishes the inconvenient pair as if they were nothing. Ye’ll not suffer a misspoken word from me, but ye’ll have him under your roof?”
“Gabriel is everything to me,” Ian retorted. “He’s my son.”
“Da’s been more of a father to Gabriel than ye ever were! For that matter, so have I. At least he kens who I am.”
“Hold your wheesht, Ned,” Mister Robert said. “Ian didna abandon his wife or drag her across the country. He buried her.”
“He . . . what?”
“Judith is dead.” Ian’s words were so muffled Seona caught only a few that followed. “. . . the hour our son . . . months ago . . .”
