by Lori Benton
“He’s wrong, Seona. I don’t care what anyone thinks about us. Or what they say. We’d face it together, our families around us. But he’s too stubborn to listen. He thinks he’s sparing me pain, but denying our love is a worse pain than anyone else might inflict. I cannot make him see that.”
“What about Maggie?” Seona asked, releasing her. “She hasn’t given up being your friend.”
“She has more sense. Or courage.” Catriona crossed her arms, hunching around them. “I don’t mean that. I think Matthew exceptionally brave—for himself.”
“He’s afraid for you,” Seona said. “Afraid he’ll bring you harm. That might be a pain too great for him to bear.”
Catriona groaned. “I don’t want to live my life afraid. Afraid of loving, of taking the risk—if it is one.”
Nor do I, Seona thought. Ian had promised to protect her and their children, but was any man, whatever color his skin, able to hold back all harm from the ones he loved?
She reached to rub Catriona’s shoulder. “Give Matthew time. Better yet, give the Almighty time.” The words sounded good, but it felt like someone else saying them.
“If it’s meant to be, it will be?” Catriona unlaced her arms. “I just wish it didn’t hurt so much, the waiting. But you’re right. I can pray. I will pray.”
Seona heard a note of strength in Catriona’s voice, a steadiness that hadn’t been part of her makeup back in Boston.
“So will I,” she promised before they rounded up the children and went back to the fires, knowing now this situation with Matthew was nothing like Catriona’s former infatuations. This felt grounded in something more than fancy. Which she knew didn’t make it less painful. Rather more so.
32
Seona awoke the morning after the corn shucking to find Lily had risen and taken Gabriel to breakfast in Naomi’s cabin. Carried him off asleep most like. Gabriel did not greet the day quietly.
She lay thinking over yesterday’s doings, rubbing hands sore from shucking, calling to mind Catriona’s tears. Heaviness filled her for Ian’s sister, heartbroken again in this place she had come to find healing. Her rubbing fingers found Ian’s ring. Stretching out full on the bed, she thought how it would be to reach out and find Ian lying beside her. The corn was in the crib now. Most of it.
Risen at last, she was rummaging for a petticoat to put on over shift and stays when she moved aside a pile of garments needing washing and found the red corn ear.
“Up at last, girl-baby?” her mama said from the doorway, coming into the cabin with nary a clinging child. “Working on their breakfasts,” she said before Seona could ask. “Catriona’s helping.”
Seona held up the red ear. “Mama, how’d you end up with this? Don’t tell me you kissed Lem? He’s the last I saw with it.”
“Of course not,” Lily said, lighting her a grin that nearly outshone the sunlight streaming into the cabin. “With all the awkwardness over the first, what would a second have done?”
“It’s another?” Seona supposed her mama had found it, then slipped it out of sight before anyone noticed. “Likely for the best.” She put it back to continue her hunt for a petticoat.
“You never told me what Catriona said when you went after her last night,” Lily said. “Though reckon I can guess. She’s in love again?”
Seona found the petticoat she was looking for, stepped into it, then tied it at her waist. “Truly this time. With Matthew.”
“That much was clear. Don’t know to how many—best keep whatever else she had to say between ye.”
While Seona fastened her workaday short gown, she studied her mama standing in the doorway, radiating happiness. “I ’spect everyone else is dragging their bones about, but something’s got you aglow this morning.”
Her mama clasped her hands before her heart, looking giddy as Catriona in one of her brightest moods. “Sit down, girl-baby. I got something to tell ye.”
“A sit-down something?”
Seona let her mama lead her to the rumpled bed. They sat side by side on the tick. Lily grasped her hand. “I wanted ye to know afore I tell anyone else—I been waiting for ye to wake. Last night after ye went off with Catriona and the babies, I had a chance to speak to Willa’s brother. Ye mind her telling us months back he might know some Cherokee, could maybe tell us the meaning of my name?”
Seona caught a breath. “I’d forgot.”
“I hadn’t. I been thinking of asking him nigh on a month. Last night I found my nerve.”
“Did he know?”
“Aye, he did. Tsigalili . . . it means ‘chickadee.’”
Seona laughed, partly at the name, mostly at her mama’s evident joy. “Oh, Mama. That’s downright pretty—and perfect. Your mama called you her chickadee. Reckon you had a little black cap of hair, too.”
Tears welled in Lily’s eyes. They coursed down beside her nose, over her irrepressible smile. “When Joseph said it—the way he said it—I could sense my mama smiling down on me. I could almost feel her touch.”
Seona pulled her into an embrace. “Now if only we knew her name,” she said into her mama’s neck.
“Sadie is all we have to go on,” Lily said as they parted. “And that’s just what Naomi thought it sounded like.”
“You could ask Joseph if it sounds like any Cherokee name he’s ever heard,” Seona suggested. “If not, he could maybe ask whoever it is he knows up in Canada and write it to you in a letter—can he write?”
“He says he can.”
“And is he leaving soon?”
“October sometime.” Lily’s smile wavered. “He and Matthew will be gone deep into the winter, hunting. It’s what they do.”
“They do,” Catriona echoed from the doorway, making Seona start. Ian’s sister looked tired, though not as if she had spent the night weeping. “I told Ian I’d help Lily watch the children this morning. He wants to spend it with you, Seona.”
She felt a rush of pleasure, then recalled a snatch of overheard conversation the night before. “Didn’t I hear Maggie say she wanted to teach you to make cheese from her goats’ milk? She could come here, show Naomi, Mama, and me as well.”
“I’ll ask when I see her again,” Catriona said. “Ian’s having breakfast. You should join him.”
They had gotten most of the corn into the crib, where it would finish drying though the autumn. What little was left in the field they could bring in today. Or tomorrow. Though Neil MacGregor warned winter could come in a hurry, there on the edge of the Adirondacks, the weather looked to be holding. Still bone-tired from days of harvesting, then hosting yesterday’s shucking, all Ian could think of was his next main objective: making Seona his wife. Legally. Before God. And every other way.
“I wanted to talk about our wedding,” he said as they walked along the lake after breakfast, hand in hand. “Now the corn’s put up.”
The day had dawned with a few thin clouds. Seona had wrapped herself in a shawl. Out on the water, migrating geese swam through a faint blanketing mist, while off at the lake’s southern end, toward which they strolled, came the eerie call of the loons that had nested on the islet where Willa MacGregor used to read her books.
Seona bumped her shoulder against his arm. “You aren’t letting any moss grow.”
Her hair fell braided down her back, hastily bound before arriving to breakfast. Her skin looked flawless in the morning’s light. She seemed rested, a stark contrast to his sister, who had offered to watch Mandy and Gabriel.
“‘Better to marry than to burn,’” he quoted and waited for understanding to color her cheeks. Then he stopped and pulled her close and covered her mouth with his in a kiss that left him very much in danger of desire’s flames.
They both pulled away smiling, promise in their eyes.
“Before we get too far down that trail,” Ian said, “and I forget . . . what’s amiss with Catriona? She left the fire last night and never came back, not even to say goodbye to everyone. I saw ye go after her.” Onc
e again Catriona had been abed when he dropped onto his own in the wee hours. Sight of her face that morning, pale and set, had discouraged his asking her straight-out.
They continued walking, passing beneath the tall red pines fringing the lakeshore, where their children’s feet had worn a footpath through the carpeting needles. They were past the pines and in among the maples he had tapped last spring before Seona answered, frowning at the ground.
“She was upset about the red ear Matthew found.”
“Because he didn’t ask her for a kiss?” It had been Lem who found the courage to ask for a kiss in exchange for that red ear, passed hand to hand like a potato off the embers. Lem had gotten it, too. From Maggie MacGregor.
Seona halted beneath a young maple, its boughs tipped with scarlet. “Catriona told me why she left the fire, but she spoke in confidence.”
Ian’s amusement lifted like the mist off the water, visible through the trees. “Is it serious between them, her and Matthew?”
Some while back he had observed the pair out in the MacGregors’ paddock and had a vague notion something more than a shared love of horses was developing between his sister and Neil’s adopted son. With no definitive proof, it had been easy to dismiss.
“It is,” Seona said, most definitively.
“How serious?”
Seona heaved a sigh. “Ian . . . her heart’s broke.”
“Again?” Ian asked, stunned to find the thing had gone on under his nose without his grasping the half of it. “Matthew doesn’t seem the type to carry on with a lass without speaking to her next of kin—me. And Catriona . . . is she so foolish as to make the same mistake twice over in a few months’ time?” He had worked himself from surprise to affront and had all but forgotten his purpose for this morning stroll with Seona. “I best talk to her.”
Seona stopped him with a hand to his arm. “Ian. Don’t.”
Though gently spoken, her opposition was unexpected enough to bring him up short. “Why? Seona, what is going on?”
“Nothing they have cause to regret. No wrong done.”
Ian frowned. “What are ye saying? Either it’s serious between them and he’s done something to hurt her, or it’s not and . . . why is she upset?”
He hadn’t meant to corner her, but he had. He saw it in her eyes as she said, “I hope she’ll forgive me telling you. No, I hope you’ll let things be so she never knows I did. It is serious, like I said, but your sister isn’t the same girl who fell prey to Morgan Shelby. And Matthew is an honorable man. As I said, they’ve done nothing wrong.”
“All right,” Ian said. “What have they done?”
“Fallen in love. Not so unlike how it was with you and me, at the start.”
“How so—aside from the secrecy?”
She blinked at that, not quite a wince. “Something you—we—ought to understand better than most. Secrecy aside, you and I bonded over a thing we did together: making Catriona’s desk. Me drawing, you working the wood. Don’t you mind it?”
“Of course I do.” Her eyes, wide and green, searched his. Melting into them, he half smiled with the memories stirred. The spice of fresh-cut wood and beeswax, Seona seated on the low stool drawing morning glories. “So with those two it was the horses. Aye . . . but what went agley?”
“Maggie’s school cabin. After that happened, Matthew pulled away.”
He didn’t need Seona to tell him the rest, though he let her do so. How Catriona confronted Matthew over his distancing. How Matthew, in a moment of frustration and pain, confessed his love, his wanting to marry. And his absolute refusal to do so.
“To spare her pain.” Ian felt his heart squeeze not with anger now but sympathy. His sister loved a man who saw himself standing on the other side of a line he could never cross. “Or cause a little pain now rather than a lifetime of it.”
“But, Ian,” Seona said, taking his hand, “Catriona’s not despairing. We talked it through last night. She’s hurting, but she’s praying and waiting for the Almighty to work things out for her and Matthew. She’s not trying to force something into being.”
As he had done at Mountain Laurel. He touched the face of the woman whose heart had shown its courage, crossing its own lines. Because of him. For him. He pulled her into his embrace again, thankful beyond measure for their second chance.
“All right,” he said, cheek laid atop her head, breathing in the scent of her that mingled with the morning smells of earth and water. “I’ll let it be. And I’ll trust Neil and Willa to counsel their son. Leastwise to listen as ye did to Catriona. Thank ye for that, mo chridhe.”
Only then did it hit him. What he had allowed to happen last night, that foolishness over the red ear. He had compounded his sister’s hurt.
“You were just funning,” Seona said, pulling away to look at him when he confessed as much. “Like they did to you at the Reynolds’ shucking. You couldn’t have known. I only figured it out from the way she reacted. You had your back turned and didn’t see.”
“Still,” he said, unwilling to be let off so easy, “I should apologize—if she gives me opening. I won’t let her know we talked. But I’m glad to know of it.”
In that bold way he loved, Seona stepped close and, going up on her toes, kissed him. He got his arms around her quick enough to kiss her back. It was some time before they continued along the lakeshore.
They were nearing the point where the track to Shiloh passed before he asked, “Have ye thought about whether ye’d like a minister to marry us? Down in German Flatts?” Thought of leaving the farm shot a bolt of uneasiness through him. They would be vulnerable, traveling downriver. So would whoever stayed behind—should Aram Crane choose to cause mischief. Or was he fretting over nothing?
“I don’t know,” Seona was saying. “I’m not sure everyone could travel so far. Not Malcolm. He’s been so tired of late.”
Ian leaned back against the trunk of a tree fronting the lake, watching the loons glide around the far side of the islet. “Wish I could say I hadn’t noticed.”
“Is there another way?”
“Colonel Waring is still a magistrate. He could marry us. At his house. Maybe here at the farm.”
By her brightening he could tell the notion was more agreeable. “I want them all with us. Mama, Naomi, Malcolm, everyone.”
“Everyone?” he asked with a grin, then pulled her close for another kiss before she could say a word. They were thus engaged still moments later when he caught movement from the corner of his eye. His hand dropped to his belt knife, then stilled.
“What?” Seona pulled back to ask.
He had a finger to her lips before she barely got the word out. There was someone on the track, heading away from the farm. He glimpsed a petticoat.
“It’s Mama,” Seona whispered as the figure passed an open spot and he caught sight of a long braid, raven black, falling below a linen cap.
Lily was alone. Heading for the MacGregors, he presumed.
Neither said a word until she was past hearing; then Seona turned, a smile blooming on her lips. “She told me something this morning. Last night she got a chance to speak to Joseph. He knows a man up in Grand River. A Cherokee man. Willa told us some time back Joseph might know the meaning of Mama’s name, Tsigalili.”
“What does it mean? Did Joseph know?”
“Chickadee!” Seona laughed, and he with her. “Isn’t that the sweetest thing? Maybe Mama’s going back to ask what we thought of this morning, whether the name Sadie sounds like any Cherokee word he knows.”
Ian nodded. “That’s what Naomi and the others called your grandmother.”
“You remember?”
“Of course. I hope Joseph can satisfy her.” And that she reached him safely. It wasn’t quite half a mile to the MacGregors’ door but he didn’t like it, Lily going off alone on foot, no doubt unarmed.
He ground his teeth, wishing that if Aram Crane was in fact lurking somewhere, he would show himself. He couldn’t ask them all to
hole up like refugees in a fort. “Now the corn’s put up, I need to fill the smokehouse, since we cannot be slaughtering all our cows. I mean to get a deer—better an elk, if I can find one.”
Seona’s face clouded. “When?”
“Today,” he said and felt his stomach tighten.
“How long will you be gone?”
“As short a time as possible.” He forced a grin when she pushed out a pouting lip, then kissed the pout away. “When I’m home from the hunting, we’ll go talk with Colonel Waring and choose a date to wed.”
33
Ian didn’t hunt with Ally, whom he had tried to interest in the notion, thus far without success. Instead Neil MacGregor came along.
“Ye chose the rare day I’d nothing else pulling at me,” Neil told him as they made their way into the hills rising north of their farms. “Save the need to fill my own smokehouse.”
Ian held aside a fir bough to pass a tight spot on the trail they followed. “I thought Matthew kept ye well supplied in meat.”
“He does, for the most part. But once he leaves with Joseph, we’ll no’ see hide nor hair o’ him ’til after the New Year. It’s up to me, and Jamie, to supply us for the winter. Unless ye mean to slaughter some cows to sell beef to your neighbors?”
“One,” Ian said. “If that. I cannot spare more until the herd’s grown.”
“I’ve heard Ally talk o’ those cows,” Neil said. “To them, for that matter. They’re like pets, aye?”
Ian shook his head as they passed through a stand of beeches, carpeted in rich mast on which a herd of pigs would have happily gorged. “What Ally means to do with his cattle, aside from naming them, is a conversation I need to think through.”
They tramped on in silence after that, using their breath for the steep terrain. After spotting a distant herd of deer, they spent half the morning stalking it, never getting near enough for shooting before something spooked the animals into bounding away.
