Shiloh

by Lori Benton

  “There be time for sortin’ that out,” Malcolm said. “More pressing at the moment, to my thinking, is where we’ll all be beddin’ down tonight.”

  “My thoughts were running along those lines,” Ian said. “I’d thought Seona and Gabriel—and Lily—would sleep in the cabin with me and Mandy.”

  “Where does that leave me?” Catriona asked.

  “Aye. Ye.” Ian raised a brow at her but smiled.

  “Lily could come on in with us,” Naomi said. “Help thin out your crowd.”

  “Oh, Mama,” Seona said, frowning. “I don’t know.”

  Ian wondered what she found disagreeable—being separated from Lily or sharing a cabin with him?

  “You can’t all fit in here,” Naomi said. “That’s plain to anyone with eyes.”

  Ian was about to suggest they divide themselves by gender, males in one cabin, females in another—though that would have separated Seona from Gabriel—when Ally said, “Why don’t we put up another cabin? Reckon we got the hang of it by now. Won’t take us long.”

  “A third cabin?” Ian asked, wondering why he hadn’t thought of it himself.

  Seona leaned close to her mother, whispering. Lily straightened and looked at Ian. “Ye’ve taken days away to meet us and see us here safe. Have ye work waiting on ye—more urgent than raising another roof?”

  “Corn’s in the ground,” Ian said. “The cattle have spring grass for pasture. The stable needs a bit of work. Actually, I ought to build a bigger one before autumn . . .” They had just increased the number of their horses by three. “But we could do it, especially if Neil and his sons lend a hand.”

  “No,” Seona said. “Don’t go putting yourself and your neighbors to such trouble for us.”

  Everyone turned on her looks of disbelief. Ian felt the prick of her words like a splinter in his heart. “It’s no trouble, Seona. I mean to build ye an entire house, after all.” He laughed to cover the fleeting hurt. “I want us all comfortable, meantime. Winters hereabouts are long.”

  A dozen cabins couldn’t lend the sort of comfort he truly meant, but he was feeling just a little desperate to understand her hesitancy. Was she regretting having come to Shiloh, now she had seen the place? And him, again?

  It was Lily decided the matter. “A third cabin would be perfect. Thank ye, Ian. We’ll help however we can.”

  Not until Seona nodded assent did it strike him how her mother had addressed him. It was the first Lily had called him by his name without Mister or Master fronting it. “That’s settled then. We’ll raise a cabin straightaway.” He and Ally could sleep out-of-doors while it was going up, leaving Catriona, Seona, and Lily with the bairns. Seona and Mandy could grow accustomed to each other. A good thing.

  “I’ve but the one question more.” He addressed it to Seona, pretending no other unanswered questions lay between them. “Where would ye like it to be?”

  23

  She chose his favorite of the beeches.

  After supper in Naomi’s cabin, he had led Seona through those magnificent hardwoods to choose the new cabin site. With their broad trunks spaced so widely a wagon could be driven through their ranks, abundant sunlight shafted through the leaves, warming the beechnut-scattered ground. Birds’ trilling filled the boughs.

  Threading through the trees, they reached the final beech, corded roots spread wide, standing sentinel at the grove’s north edge. Seona had walked its circumference, trailing fingers over its grooved trunk, now smoothly pale, now carpeted in moss. From its shelter the view of the lake’s northwest corner was unobstructed. Would be until the corn planted between grew high.

  “Here,” Seona had said, taking in the view he meant their house to share. “I might have seen all this before, you described it so well in your letters.”

  “D’ye like the place?”

  She had turned, smiling softly, eyes haunted with some feeling he couldn’t read. “It’s beautiful.”

  He had wanted to take her hand, seal the moment with a kiss, but simply marked the corners of what would be her cabin with sticks driven into the ground, then walked her back to where the others were sorting themselves. He had set up a shelter in the yard, then fetched a shovel to start breaking ground while the light lasted.

  Four days later the new cabin’s walls were raised, chinked with debris from the notching, roof timbers set in place, door and window framed, a hole cut for hearth and chimney. The progress was thanks to a spate of dry weather and the help of all available hands, including those of Neil MacGregor and his youngest sons, Matthew having not yet returned from hunting.

  Presently it was himself and Neil perched high on the roof beams with piles of split shingles they were hammering into place, using mostly black locust thorns, long and hard as nails. Before leaving Mountain Laurel, Malcolm had advised collecting as many as he could. They had yet to spot the trees so far north.

  Malcolm and Liam were muddied to the shins in the pit dug to work the daubing, a mixture of clay, shredded cedar bark, and dried horse dung. Liberally watered, it squished between their toes as they trod the pit, making man and boy laugh.

  “Listen to you both,” Seona called from below Ian’s perch. “Giggling like girls.”

  Lily and Naomi were minding the children so Seona could help with the cabin raising, since Catriona had gone into Shiloh with Maggie to aid at the school—from which the boys had been excused. Ian looked down to see her at the pit, come to gather another basketful of daubing. Locust thorn clamped between his lips, he set a shingle in place and watched her.

  The day was warm but not overly sticky. White-billowed clouds sailed a blue sky. Seona’s plaited hair bared her neck. Her short gown and petticoat were those she had worn in Albany when they met on the street. He remembered them from Mountain Laurel. Grown threadbare in spots, dotted with spark holes, they fit her still. She rose with the basket and returned to the cabin, glancing up as she neared. Their gazes caught before she passed out of view to continue her work.

  Ian pounded in a thorn, then reached for another from the bag tied to his belt, but awareness of her made him call out, “Seona?”

  She stepped back from the cabin wall to look up at him, hands covered in daubing.

  “See that lone maple?” He nodded toward the westernmost tree comprising the hardwood stand, rising between them and the cornfield sprouting shoots in tidy rows. Set higher than the rest on a slight rise of land, its branches spread in a pleasing symmetry, leaves shimmering in the breeze. In the autumn, he knew, it would blaze into a conflagration of oranges and reds. “I aim to build our house next to it. I situated the other cabins so they can one day serve as dependencies of the big house.”

  Her shoulders flinched at the term—what his uncle’s family, and their slaves, once called the main house at Mountain Laurel. He made mental note never to use it again.

  Seona looked up, a question gathering in her eyes. She glanced along the roofline to where Neil MacGregor hammered shingles, then at the pit where Liam and Malcolm tromped the clay. Question unasked, she returned to the daubing, he to fitting shingles, wondering about their letters. Had she kept those he wrote through winter? He had kept hers. Treasured them. Ought he to bring them out, see if they might find their way forward by looking back?

  If a moment to do so presented itself. He had tossed each night beneath the canvas shelter, knowing she wasn’t at ease there but never a chance to speak alone, with so much needing his attention. Nor had he approached Neil MacGregor in private about the subject of Aram Crane. Other things had fallen by the wayside. He had intended to go on with his reading of Scripture of an evening, as he had done before Seona’s arrival, but corralling them all into a cabin at once was proving nigh impossible when some had chores calling and others were already abed or getting the children to sleep.

  “What of Gabriel?” Seona had asked that first evening while he marked off the new cabin’s corners. The westering sun had bejeweled her eyes. “You mean him to sleep in this ne
w cabin with me and Mama, or in with you and Mandy and Catriona?”

  Had she forgotten his promise never to take her son from her? Not even for a night, could he help it. “I’m sure he and Mandy would get on fine, but he’ll stay with ye and Lily until . . . we’re all more settled.”

  Until we’re wedded, he had wanted to say, but it felt too soon.

  “. . . then Maggie tried to make me go to school today,” Liam was telling Malcolm down in the daubing pit, voice grown loud enough to intrude into Ian’s thoughts. “Mama and Papa agreed that since Jamie’s been helping, I could too, now there’s this I can do.”

  Ian cast Neil MacGregor a look. In the eleven months since he had met the boys, Jamie had shot up in height, adding nigh six inches to his nearly thirteen-year-old frame, leaving his younger brother feeling abandoned in childhood.

  “D’ye no’ fancy it,” Malcolm replied, “having your sister as a teacher?”

  Liam scrunched his nose. “It’s not enough I pay her heed at school. Evenings at home, she’s after me to study more.”

  From the roof’s opposite slope came a snort from Neil MacGregor.

  Malcolm leaned on the stick he used to steady himself as he trod the daubing. “As a laddie, I hadna the means to read or write or study aught but what I could see o’ the world wi’ my eyes, hear wi’ my ears, and touch wi’ my hands.”

  Liam crumbled more cedar bark into the pit, then added clay and water to the mixture. “Because you were a slave?”

  “Aye. I’ve always hankered at least to read. Move o’er a mite, lad. Let me help tread in that new bit.”

  Liam moved aside so they could work in the additions together. “Some men who were never slaves don’t read.” The boy glanced at the cabin’s roof. “Papa doesn’t.”

  Malcolm stopped his treading. “Your daddy’s a doctor. Surely he reads.”

  Liam shook his head. “He can’t.”

  Neil stopped his hammering to call down, “It’s true, Malcolm. I canna read—on account of a blow took years ago.” He tapped the graying hair tailed back from his brow, where an old scar traversed his hairline.

  “Like my Ally,” Malcolm said, straw hat bobbing. “Though he didna lose anything when that ol’ mule kicked him as a lad. Just never grew past a child in his mind.”

  “I once hoped it would come back to me,” Neil said, catching Ian’s gaze. “That doesna look like happening, but I’m gettin’ along all right, with Willa and Maggie’s help.”

  “Mine too,” Liam said.

  “Aye, lad. Ye pen a bonny hand when ye put your mind to it. Though it’ll be a few years before I let ye record my case notes—at least the more gruesome ones,” Neil added in a lowered tone. The man had a vast capacity for memorizing the details of his patients’ maladies and his treatments, routinely recited for his wife or daughter to write in his casebook—the same way he had written his field guide, he’d explained to Ian.

  Seona had approached the pit for more daubing when an outcry from Naomi’s cabin pierced the air—Gabriel’s. She peered in that direction, no doubt evaluating the tone of the crying as Ian could do Mandy’s. It didn’t take long acquaintance with his son’s cries to hear the anger in it now. When it ceased, Seona filled her basket. They returned to their tasks.

  After some while Neil called down, “If ye wish to learn to read, Malcolm, I’m sure Maggie would teach ye—and ye dinna need travel all the way into Shiloh or sit in wi’ the bairns. She’d come to ye here. Some evenings, perhaps.”

  Before Malcolm could answer, Gabriel’s cries erupted again.

  Seona had been pouring water into the pit. She set down the bucket and frowned toward the cabin where Naomi, Lily, and the children were ensconced. When silence fell once more, she turned to Malcolm and said, “Soon as we get this cabin raised, I mean to teach you to read that Bible, Malcolm. And—”

  She broke off as Gabriel’s crying commenced a third time, soaring on a note of pain. Abandoning the daubing, Seona snatched up her skirts and raced for Naomi’s cabin.

  “D’ye need me?” Ian called after her.

  Seona didn’t break her stride to answer.

  Lily found her in Ian’s cabin, holding her boy, who had finally cried himself to sleep after putting his hand to the embers Naomi had raked beneath her spider pan to fry up ham for their dinner.

  “Everything all right?” she asked, pitching her voice soft at the sight of Gabriel sprawled limply across Seona’s lap.

  How many times had she been asked that question since Albany? How many times had she ducked it, saying she was fine? She nearly did so again before realizing her mama meant Gabriel.

  Seona rocked him, sitting on the edge of Ian’s bedtick, hands still spotted with daubing. Gabriel sagged in her arms, lashes tear-spiked, brows puckered. The pain of his burns trailing him into sleep. “The salve helped.”

  Lily peered at the slack little hand dangling from Seona’s arm. “No blisters raised?”

  “No.” Three of Gabriel’s fingers were scorched an angry red, but no skin had broken before Naomi caught him at her fire—gone behind her back for the third time in a half hour.

  Lily sighed. “He won’t do it again.”

  Seona regarded her boy with tender exasperation. “He’s stubborn.”

  “So were ye,” Lily said. “But ye didn’t do it a second time.”

  Seona raised a brow. “When did I ever put a hand in the fire?”

  “Ye were smaller than this boy,” her mama said, fingers brushing Gabriel’s damp curls. “Toddling around the kitchen at Mountain Laurel. Charmed by those pretty embers, just like he’s been of late.”

  Seona shifted Gabriel on her lap, freeing her right hand to view the patch of shiny skin on her middle finger, across the center joint, the hint of one on the third. “Is that where these old marks come from?”

  Lily took her hand to study them. “Likely so. I’ve wondered did ye hold the memory.”

  “I don’t.” Lily released her hand. Seona laid Gabriel on his daddy’s bed, then whispered, “Did you ever?”

  Lily shook with silent laughter. “Naomi says I did. Ally too. Must be the same, back to Cain and Abel playing at Eve’s fire. Part of being human—and fallen. We all put our hand to the flames at some point.”

  “I wonder if Mandy’s done it.” She had toted Gabriel between the cabins, bawling his head off, in part so Naomi could calm Mandy, who set to wailing when her brother was burned.

  “Naomi says she’s stayed clear of the hearth. So far.”

  Maybe Mandy would learn from Gabriel’s mistake. Maybe her tempting flames would be another sort. What that might prove, Seona hadn’t a clue. Though Judith’s daughter was starting to warm to her, it was still Naomi’s comfort she wanted in such moments.

  She had been thinking more about Judith since coming to Shiloh, looking after her daughter along with Gabriel. They might be gathering eggs, fetching water from the springhouse, or just sitting on a coverlet in the shade, and she would catch a glimpse of Judith in the child—a look in her brown eyes, a shy cant of her head, the sound of her laughter—and feel a pang. Judith was missing her growing up, looking like a perfect little blend of her and Ian.

  But if Judith had been there, where would she be? Back in Boston, she, Lily, and Gabriel, maybe making a go of living on their own by now. Gabriel never knowing his daddy.

  She wasn’t regretting coming to Shiloh—despite the blackflies that pestered them if they dared go near the creek any time but midday. They had about run their course for the year, Ian assured her.

  What hadn’t run its course was her shyness with Ian, though she liked catching sight of him about the farm, working on the cabin, coming from the stable, headed off to tend the cattle with Ally—and Nip and Tuck. Ally went about his work with those dogs with a confidence he had never worn at Mountain Laurel. She admired Ian for trusting Ally with his own herd to build, was proud of Ally for rising to the level of that trust. They were taking meals in Naomi’s cabin or s
itting in the shade around it. It felt almost like being at Mountain Laurel again, but better. A body could rest when she needed without fear of some overseer coming along to scold her, or worse. And there was laughter. She ought to be content as a cat in cream.

  “Ye talk to him yet, girl-baby?” her mama asked.

  “When he wakes, I mean to, though I think you’re right. He won’t go messing with a fire again.”

  “I meant Ian.”

  Seona moved to the cabin door, where the sun shone bright and the breeze made little puffs of dust in the swept yard. Lily followed. They stayed on the side of the cabin facing away from the one being raised. She could hear Ian and Neil MacGregor hammering away.

  “Too many people around, too much to do.” She always had a little one clinging or a task to get done whenever Ian was by. Maybe a time or two she had only pretended to be so busy . . .

  “Finding time and space isn’t the problem,” Lily said. “Looks to me the pair of ye are too chary of each other to bare your hearts. What I’m wondering is why—when ye shared so much in your letters?”

  Seona hesitated for words. “I . . . guess I’m feeling shy of him. Scared. And I know what you’re going to say next.”

  “Ye do.” Lily slipped a hand around her shoulders. Pulling her close, she kissed her temple where the curls sprang loose of their pins. “No need to fear. The Lord’s looking after our lot.”

  Somehow it had been easier to let the Lord be in control—or take comfort from the thought—when they had no say in matters, big or small. They had freedom now to choose. That meant they had to look after themselves to a point, didn’t it? Shouldn’t she be looking ahead to see trouble coming, doing what she could to head it off? She saw trouble coming when more people started putting together that she and Ian shared a son but not a daughter. That they were never married save for that handfasting business. But which was best, pressing Ian again about how he meant to handle things or waiting to see how she was treated, accepting whatever came of his choice—a lie of omission or the plain truth?