by Lori Benton
They walked in silence past the edge of the red pines to the lake, where blackbirds alighted on swaying cattail stalks, then flitted away with flashes of red amid their wing plumage.
At the edge of the reeds where the lakeshore opened, a heron waded the shallows, stalking its breakfast. Seona stopped to watch its gangly progress. Ian watched her, the flutter of her lashes as she blinked, hair unbrushed and tangled from sleep, until he thought of how best to address her still-knotted brow.
“Ye’ve done well with him, Seona. A boy can be a handful, I know—I was one. But I very much like the lad he’s becoming.”
The corner of her mouth twitched. “Even after what you just saw?”
“He’ll have to do a good deal worse than tip a washstand to disappoint his da.”
She met his gaze, biting that full bottom lip. “I been watching Mandy these past days. She’s got that sweet spirit I used to see in . . .”
Looking disconcerted by the near mention of Judith, she walked on around the stand of cattail reeds and stopped with a gasp.
Out beyond the heron, a mist rose off the water in a hundred skinny tendrils that swirled and dipped and swayed. As they watched, the rising sun found a chink in the clouds and bathed the scene until the misty tendrils glowed as if lit from within.
Seona drew a breath and let it out on a sigh. “It’s like angels . . . angels dancing on the face of the water.” She tore her gaze from the glorious sight. “Ian . . .”
He would long wonder what she might have said—and what might have followed—had there not come in the distance, back at the cabins, a crash of something breaking.
Seona sighed again, then grasped his hand and pressed it to her cheek. “Thank you. This was just what I needed.” Leaving him breathless, she started back toward the cabin at a run, only to turn and call, “And thank you for the flowers!”
Grinning, he gave the misty angels a lingering look before he followed her, determined that he would deal with his son that morning. More than deal. He would keep Gabriel by his side that day, let the lad help him finish the chimney. Even if doing so made the task take ten times as long.
26
July 1797
The sweet corn was ripening. Ian, Ally, and Malcolm were out in the field in the morning sunlight, picking what was ready before the day’s heat could gather its strength and drive them to more sedentary work. Seona felt wrong leaving them to it while she tagged along with Lily to visit Willa, despite Naomi’s readiness to mind Gabriel and Mandy.
“You minded them last time. The day we dipped candles.”
Naomi dismissed that with a puff of breath. “How long ago was that? Two weeks?”
“Two or ten, it’s not fair. Don’t you want to go visiting?”
“I’ll get off this farm again in good time,” Naomi countered, sharing a look with Lily, waiting at the cabin door. “You need to go today.”
“I need to?” Seona asked, wondering if everyone knew what Ian confessed to her after the day their cabin was finished—that he had told Neil MacGregor the story of Mountain Laurel and her and Lily being slaves there. Though relieved he had hidden nothing, unashamed of her and Gabriel, and assured that Neil hadn’t taken against her in the slightest, she thought surely by now he had told his wife and daughter.
And others?
“Seona,” her mama said. “Catriona’s invited ye to Maggie’s school and elsewhere half a dozen times since the candle dipping. Ye always find an excuse to say no. Not today. Put on your cap and let’s go.”
Ending the debate.
Having dismissed her students for the harvest season, Maggie was home when they arrived at the MacGregors’.
“She plans to go in and clean up the cabin in a few days,” Catriona said as they dismounted in the yard and unsaddled the horses. “Bring home the books and such. I’m helping. You should too, Seona.”
Seona managed not to roll her eyes. Why was everyone trying to get her off the farm every time she turned around? Wasn’t this visit enough?
“Ye should, girl-baby,” Lily said after the horses were in a paddock and Catriona and Maggie had gone into the cornfield, laden with hip-baskets, to pick sweet corn enough for everyone’s dinner—including Goodenough and her son, Lemuel, whom Willa spotted coming down the lane, each mounted and leading an extra horse.
“Colonel Waring’s colts,” she said, having donned a pair of soft moccasins over swollen ankles to join them in the yard. “They are for Matthew to gentle to the saddle.”
Seona was more interested in Goodenough than the colts. She wasn’t sure what she had expected of this former enslaved housemaid of Colonel Waring’s, but it wasn’t this tall figure with her head of graying hair carried proud as she dismounted in the yard. Though Goodenough’s skin was showing its age, the bones beneath were strong, beauty in their lines still.
Lemuel—Lem, they called him—was a handsome young man, of an age with Catriona and Maggie. Aside from his height, he barely resembled his mother, with dark, waving hair tailed back from an unguarded face no browner than Matthew’s, who came over to inspect the new colts, a black with a white-starred forehead and a dark blue-roan.
“What do you think?” Lem asked. “Colonel reckons they’re ready for the saddle.”
“Two years old, born a week apart,” Goodenough said, handing over the reins of the roan. “Same sire, different dams.”
Seona tensed, thinking how the same could be said of Ian’s children. But no one else, even her mama, seemed to make that connection.
“Black and Blue, I call ’em.” Lem’s sunny grin was infectious. Lily returned it, but Seona watched Matthew as he spoke in low tones to the colt called Blue, letting the horse nuzzle his hand before he rubbed between its eyes. The colt was edgy, surrounded by new smells and voices. Its ears twitched back.
Jamie and Liam appeared from the stable.
“Will you water these two?” Matthew asked his brothers. “Then stable Black. I’ll take Blue into the paddock right after and get acquainted.”
“Where’s Maggie?” Lem asked as the horses were led away. “We saw the school shut up on our way here.”
“Fetching in corn for dinner,” Willa said. “You both will stay and eat with us?”
“Yes, ma’am!” Lem looked ready to head off in search of the girls when Catriona and Maggie emerged from the hillocks—still a strange sight to Seona, used to corn planted in rows. The girls stepped nimbly over the pumpkin vines encircling the stalks, each clasping a basket heaped with fresh sweet corn in the husk. Lem ran to take Maggie’s basket, then hesitated as if realizing politeness demanded he take Catriona’s too. She laughed and shook her head.
“Put it on the porch, Lem,” Maggie told him.
Catriona deposited her basket there as Matthew led the roan colt toward an empty paddock. “Oh, he’s going to work now. Shall we watch?” Taking Maggie by the hand, Catriona hurried to the paddock, Lem trailing after.
Goodenough watched them go. “That boy of mine’s been puppy-dogging your girl around since the day they met,” she said to Willa. “I just hope . . .” Her brow furrowed. “Don’t know what I hope.”
Seona didn’t take her meaning until Willa replied, “I know. I want Francis back, but he will never be what Maggie hopes for.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” Goodenough sighed. “But Lem’s young yet, more boy than man, for all the work he do. Give it a year or two. Maggie might start to see him different.”
The women went onto the porch to better watch the proceedings in the paddock, a fenced circle, its ground well trampled. Matthew let the colt nose along its fence while he stood at the gate talking with Lem, the girls listening. Abruptly he broke off conversation and moved toward the colt, halting in the paddock’s center, shoulders squared—an aggressive stance.
The colt thought so. It took flight, breaking into a canter around the paddock, staying close to the rails. As far from Matthew as it could get.
“See how he uses his body, hi
s gaze, to make the horse retreat,” Willa said. “It is the way a wild mare, the matriarch of a herd, would drive away a colt if it had misbehaved. Matthew is telling it he is the one in charge and he wants it to go away.”
“Why would he want that?” Seona asked.
“A horse does not want to be driven from its herd,” Willa said. “Watch and see.”
In the paddock’s center, Matthew turned a circle, always facing the cantering colt. One hand gripped a coiled line taken off a fence post. He uncoiled it and flicked it at the colt, snapping the air. Seona felt the tension in the paddock as Matthew pressed the colt away. It went on for several minutes before she caught a shift in Matthew’s gaze. She thought he looked away from the colt, or maybe just away from its eyes, and was surprised when the animal slowed its pace. When Matthew’s eyes shifted back, the colt resumed its cantering like it wanted to fly away.
“Watch its ears,” Willa said. “That is what Matthew is doing.”
Gripping the veranda rail, Seona watched as Matthew lashed the line out, hitting the air, making the colt run. Six times it circled the paddock before its inside ear swiveled toward Matthew and fixed on him. When the colt ducked its head and ran along with its nose near the ground, Matthew turned sideways to it, coiling the line.
The horse slowed, came off the fence, and stood blowing breath. Then, like some invisible line drew it, step by step it approached Matthew, stopping at last with its nose just behind his shoulder, nostrils flaring, taking his scent. Matthew must surely feel its breath, but seeming to ignore the horse, he walked a slow circle away from it.
The colt followed, nose to shoulder. Matthew stopped, faced the colt, and gave it a stroke between its eyes. When he headed for the paddock gate, the horse followed him.
Willa smiled with pride. “He just made that colt want to be with him.”
“Puts me in mind of someone I once knew.” Lily caught her eye, and Seona realized with a start her mama was thinking of Aidan Cameron, who tamed a deer and taught a raven to speak. And captured her mama’s heart.
“Matthew will do that again,” Willa said. “Next time he will have a saddle and bridle ready, and the colt will let him put both on. He will be riding it before an hour has passed.”
All through her childhood, Seona had seen Hugh Cameron break horses to the saddle, but never like this, so swift and gentle. “How did he learn to do that?”
“Some of it he learned from Joseph, my brother,” Willa replied, “who was not called Tames-His-Horse as a young man for nothing.”
Thinking of Willa’s Mohawk clan brother, whom Ian had written about in his letters, Seona watched Catriona, Maggie, and Lem step back to let Matthew lead the blue-roan from the paddock. Catriona’s mouth hung open with the same stunned admiration Seona was feeling. Ian’s sister started toward the stable, following Matthew much as the colt had done.
“I doubt Neil will ever make of him a farmer,” Willa said with affection for her adopted son. “He never shirks the work asked of him, but right there—” she bent a nod toward the colt Matthew led into the stable’s depths—“that is where his heart is—when he is not hunting with my brother.”
“Elias wants him working full-time over to our place,” Goodenough said, “soon as Matthew’s of a mind to take up the offer.”
Elias. Colonel Waring’s name. Remembering when Ian first bade her stop calling him mister, Seona wondered how it had happened for Goodenough and the Colonel. She had assumed Lem had a white father but . . . Elias Waring?
Willa arched her back, rubbing at it and wincing.
“All right,” Goodenough said in a tone brooking no argument. “Time to give those ankles and that back a rest. Let’s get this corn shucked—except for you,” she told Willa. “You listen to your midwife and sit.”
Seona caught the disappointment that briefly crossed her mama’s gaze as they followed Goodenough and Willa to where the sweet corn waited. Two midwives. Goodenough had just asserted her place as Willa’s.
They dragged the corn baskets to a set of benches. Willa lowered herself onto a padded chair set beside the door. “I was never made to rest before while carrying,” she said in amused protest, “but worked right up to the day.”
“You’re ten years older than last time,” Goodenough countered as Seona settled on the top porch step. “Don’t tell me you aren’t feeling it.”
Glad for a familiar task to occupy her hands, Seona helped empty the corn into a pile. They worked for a time in companionable conversation, warm air and warm skin taking on the familiar scent of torn green husks, until Goodenough went inside to get a kettle on the boil and Maggie left the others at the stable to join them on the porch, sitting opposite Seona on the steps.
“What did you think of Matthew and the colt?” she asked.
“I’ve never seen the like,” Seona said. “When did he first try such a thing?”
“Uncle Joseph brought him a horse when he was Jamie’s age. A half-wild filly. He told Matthew she was his, if he tamed her to the saddle. For days he just watched her in the pasture with the mares we had then, watched how they treated her, how she responded. He had her saddled and was riding her in the space of an afternoon.” Maggie smiled, remembering. “Colonel Waring heard of it and had Matthew come to his farm to see if he could get a horse no one else could manage to accept a rider. That one took a day.”
Goodenough came back out. Maggie took the shucked corn into the house. Seona was about to get up and help when Goodenough said she had heard tell Lily was a midwife too.
“Was it your mama taught you or your mistress?”
Silence followed the revealing question. Not only did the MacGregors know she and Lily had been enslaved, Goodenough knew.
Her mama had reached the same conclusion. “My mistress, who raised me more like a daughter, taught me until I was nigh grown,” Lily said. “After her death, I learned on my own. I never knew the mother who died birthing me.”
Goodenough had taken her seat again, but it was Willa who asked, “But you know who she was, your mother?”
Lily shook her head. “My mama was found by soldiers who went west to fight the Cherokees, back in the old French war. She got caught in a raid, mistaken for a captive. They got her away, only later realized she was mixed blood. African, white, maybe Indian. We don’t know because she never spoke English. Only Cherokee.”
Willa nodded. “She would have been with them a long time. Maybe a captive once, but one of the People then. How did she end up at . . . Mountain Laurel, was it called?”
Strange hearing the name spoken, so far from Carolina. If her mama thought it so, Seona couldn’t tell.
“When the soldiers passed,” Lily said, “the mistress took in my mama—for a price. A runaway slave, they were calling her then. I came along days later and thrived. My mama didn’t. Afore she died, she said a word over me they thought was meant for a name. It was shortened to Lily, but what she said was Tsigalili.”
“That a Cherokee word?” Goodenough asked.
“We think so.”
“Tsigalili,” Willa said, gazing at Lily. “The name my Mohawk mother gave me means Burning Sky. Do you know what Tsigalili means?”
“I’ve never met anyone who speaks Cherokee.”
Willa brightened. “My brother has mentioned a Cherokee man who came north and settled at Grand River and taught him some of that language. Joseph will come to us again in the autumn. Perhaps he can tell you.”
With everyone gathered on the veranda to eat the freshly boiled sweet corn, the conversation was lively. Lem and Matthew talked of the horses. Catriona talked of wanting to paint Matthew while he worked with the horses. That made Jamie and Liam roar with laughter until Maggie explained what Catriona meant.
“Would you like to, Seona?” Catriona turned, grinning, to ask. “Maybe Ian will make new easels for us.”
They had brought their paints and brushes to New York, but not their easels, too bulky to transport so far.
“Oh, Seona,” Maggie said, looking at her with deepening interest. “You’re an artist too?”
“I like to draw. Painting’s still new to me.”
“Don’t be modest,” Catriona said. “You’re already better than I am, and I’ve been painting for years. But look.” Seona nearly dropped her last ear of corn half-eaten when Catriona nudged her and pointed down the track that led to the MacGregors’ house. “There’s Ian coming to join us.”
Maggie, Goodenough, and Lily had gone inside. Seona was about to follow when she heard Willa tell Ian, at the foot of the veranda stairs, that Neil was up in the high foothills north of their land. “An old man, Hector Lacey, lives up there alone.”
“Is he ill?” Ian asked.
“He was. A bad cough he could not shake. Neil means to talk him into moving down into Shiloh before winter.”
Seona tried to slip inside the house to help clean up after their feast, but Ian spotted her and mounted the steps. “Seona, I’m heading into Shiloh. Will ye ride with me?”
Her chest tightened at his hopeful gaze. “I best head home. Naomi has the children and Ally’s calf to tend.”
“Ally was feeding the calf when I left. The bairns were napping.”
“It’ll need feeding again and Ally has work to do.”
Feeding the calf was a task Malcolm could handle. The thought was there in Ian’s eyes, but he didn’t voice it. Seona heard the door behind her open and knew her mama had stepped outside.
“Can I have at least a moment?” Ian reached for her arm. Seona let him lead her off the veranda, down to where Ruaidh waited. Turning her to face him, he asked, “Is that truly why ye don’t want to go with me?”
“No.” It wasn’t, but she couldn’t find words to explain.
He looked at her, searching. “Did I do wrong, telling Neil about us?”
“You didn’t. I just . . . want to go home. I’m sorry.”
She watched his throat work as he smiled. “Nothing to be sorry about. I’ll see ye at supper, aye?”
