by Lori Benton
Praise for Lori Benton
“Mountain Laurel is the sort of book where you really hope there will be a sequel because you want to spend more time with the characters. It’s a fascinating story, rich in emotion and a sense of the time and cultures in which it takes place.”
DIANA GABALDON, New York Times bestselling author of the Outlander series
“Lori Benton’s epic family saga Mountain Laurel thoroughly immersed me in plantation life in the 1790s and in the moral dilemmas created by the evil of slavery. Her lush, descriptive writing made every scene vivid and real. This engrossing tale of love and sorrow and redemption kept me turning pages—and happily, there will be a sequel!”
LYNN AUSTIN, Christy Award–winning author of If I Were You
“Love forbidden, sacrificed, redeemed. Mountain Laurel casts long shadows of kinship through generations of a society that breeds slaves and secrets. Only divine wisdom can unravel this web of human passions and intrigue so tightly woven. Only divine mercy can pave a road to loosen the chains of bondage—those worn by the enslaved and those binding the hearts of slavers. Exquisitely penned, with all the beauty of a highland song, Lori Benton throws wide the door of a culture born in Scotland and wedded to the American South in years before that region dreamt of abolition. Stunning portrait of a past made real.”
CATHY GOHLKE, Christy Award–winning author of The Medallion
“Lori Benton is an extraordinary storyteller. She invites her readers into the 1790s of the Carolinas, where every character and plot twist speaks of bondage and freedom, kin and courage, choice and consequence. No skipping ahead allowed, though you’ll want to know what happens! But you won’t want to miss each fresh image weaving tender and surprising moments that deepen the characters as they face the cost of their secrets and all they’ve come to love and lose. Every page delivers a unique, satisfying, and enriching read, where faith and family exposes and nurtures the journey of the human heart. I loved Mountain Laurel! (And I’m so glad to know there will be a sequel.)”
JANE KIRKPATRICK, New York Times bestselling author of Something Worth Doing
“Masterfully written, Mountain Laurel is not simply a novel to read but to live. With a stunning array of complex characters whose raw, oft-redemptive choices and their consequences are as soul-changing today as 1793 North Carolina, you’ll never look at plantation life the same. A vibrant tapestry of good and evil, bondage and freedom, and the truest meaning of kinship. I eagerly await the sequel.”
LAURA FRANTZ, Christy Award–winning author of The Lacemaker
“Poignant. Impeccably researched. Tender and romantic but with a powerful message of clinging to faith over fear, Mountain Laurel is Lori Benton at her finest. An expertly woven eighteenth-century story line with topics of freedom, family, and characters grappling over intense choices—with potentially life-altering consequences—makes this a novel that is just as relevant in our world today. Benton’s latest solidifies her as a master of faith-based fiction, as well as a constant addition to my own favorites shelf. This is a stellar series debut!”
KRISTY CAMBRON, bestselling author of The Butterfly and the Violin and The Lost Castle
“Vivid and complex, Lori Benton’s newest offering is penned within the backdrop of yet another stunning setting that touches the senses. In the truest threads of Lori’s fiction, Mountain Laurel is an intricately woven tale of love and heartache, wrapped up in a sweeping family saga.”
JOANNE BISCHOF, Christy Award–winning author of Sons of Blackbird Mountain
“With a masterful pen, Lori Benton creates a poignant story that will have readers flipping pages late into the night. Filled with historical authenticity, heart-touching romance, and inconceivable circumstances, this book is a celebration of freedom—both the physical and the eternal. I finished Mountain Laurel with both a sigh of satisfaction and a longing of expectation for what comes next for these characters. I highly recommend this novel!”
HEIDI CHIAVAROLI, Carol Award–winning author of Freedom’s Ring and The Tea Chest
“Lori Benton’s Mountain Laurel is a compelling masterpiece, a stunning dance of romance, sacrifice, yearning, betrayal, and redemption. Benton weaves an exquisite tale that delves into the world of slavery while unearthing the treasure of what it truly means to be free. Seona and Ian’s story continues to captivate me long after the pages have closed.”
TARA JOHNSON, author of All Through the Night and Where Dandelions Bloom
Visit Tyndale online at tyndale.com.
Visit Lori Benton’s website at loribenton.com.
TYNDALE and Tyndale’s quill logo are registered trademarks of Tyndale House Ministries.
Mountain Laurel
Copyright © 2020 by Lori Benton. All rights reserved.
Cover illustration of raven from John J. Audubon’s Birds of America.
Author photo taken by E.A.H. Creative Photography, copyright © 2019. All rights reserved.
Designed by Libby Dykstra
Edited by Sarah Mason Rische
Published in association with the literary agency of Books & Such Literary Management, 52 Mission Circle, Suite 122, PMB 170, Santa Rosa, CA 95409.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, King James Version.
Mountain Laurel is a work of fiction. Where real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales appear, they are used fictitiously. All other elements of the novel are drawn from the author’s imagination.
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Tyndale House Publishers at [email protected], or call 1-800-323-9400.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Benton, Lori, author.
Title: Mountain Laurel : a Kindred novel / Lori Benton.
Description: Carol Stream, Illinois : Tyndale House Publishers, [2020] |
Series: Kindred ; 1
Identifiers: LCCN 2020013157 (print) | LCCN 2020013158 (ebook) | ISBN
9781496444318 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781496444325 (trade paperback) | ISBN
9781496444332 (kindle edition) | ISBN 9781496444349 (epub) | ISBN
9781496444356
Subjects: GSAFD: Love stories. | Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3602.E6974 M68 2020 (print) | LCC PS3602.E6974
(ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013157
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013158
ISBN 978-1-4964-4434-9 (ePub); ISBN 978-1-4964-4433-2 (Kindle); ISBN 978-1-4964-4435-6 (Apple)
Build: 2020-06-29 17:05:30 EPUB 3.0
This book is for Wendy Lawton
For never giving up
Contents
Prelude
Prologue
Part I: September 1793 Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part II: September–October 1793 Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part III: October–November 1793 Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part IV: November–December 1793 Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Part V: January–May 1794 Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Part VI: June–October 1794 Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Preview of the next Kindred novel by Lori Benton
A Note from the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Discussion Questions
Mama was the first of Mountain Laurel’s slaves to know about the letter. Before Master Hugh posted it away north, he called Mama from her spinning and read that letter to her. You could’ve knocked me over with duck’s down when it happened, but that’s how we came to know early on that Master Hugh was asking his half brother, up Boston-way, to send his youngest son back to North Carolina.
Master Hugh’s nephew came here once before, but he never paid me no mind that I can recall. He was twelve years old then, the age a boy, whatever color his skin, gets to fancying himself a man. Me, I was half his years and, what was surely worse, a girl. I was nothing to the master’s kin. But he was something to me.
Even now I can close my eyes and see him as he was then. Tall for his age. Skinny as a fence rail. Eyes the blue of a jaybird’s wing and hair like Mama’s spinning flax. It was on account of that flax-pale hair I made my first picture, hunkered under the kitchen lilacs so he wouldn’t spy me scratching his likeness on a piece of broken slate.
Rubbing out that drawing lest I get caught with it came hard, but it was only the first. I’ve made many pictures since then but only one other of him—on a scrap of old paper we was made to strip off the parlor walls, that summer Master Hugh up and married again. It shows his nephew looking off to the side, with that moonbeam hair curling over his brow like the halo of an angel. No one has laid eyes on it but me. Not even Mama.
Every slave keeps to their heart a secret. This one is mine.
Prologue
MOUNTAIN LAUREL
September 1793
Seona had been minding chickens the day Master Hugh’s nephew rode away north with his daddy. She was minding chickens the day he rode up again. The tobacco had been suckered and was days from needing cutting. Near-about every morning Miss Lucinda told her to save the washing for later and go with Esther out into those long green rows to pick the worms off the leaves. Some folk let turkeys at their tobacco to eat those worms. Master Hugh didn’t keep turkeys, so they made do with chickens—and Seona and Esther and any other hands to spare to catch the worms the chickens missed.
“Eee-ew! Will you look at this nasty thing?”
The crinkly leaf she’d been peering under sprang back as Seona straightened to spot Esther. Some of the plants topped her head; still it took a deal of stooping to be sure the chickens hadn’t left any worms down low. They’d hear about it come cutting time if worms ruined the leaves. Master Hugh didn’t hold with beating his slaves anymore, but the overseer, Jackson Dawes, was known to strap a back on the sly.
Never Seona’s, but it was a thing to bear in mind.
She spied the younger girl hunkered among the plants, gaping at a fat green worm. “Quit thinking on it, Esther. Just pick it off and stomp it.”
“I can’t. It’s the king-granddaddy of the lot.” Esther’s face popped up between the plants. She pushed her skinny self through, mischief in her dark-brown eyes. “What you reckon Miss Rosalyn would do was I to slip that one into her bed?”
Miss Rosalyn Bell, Master Hugh’s oldest stepdaughter, thought right high of her clean sheets and fine white skin. Not that Seona’s skin was much darker. Or wouldn’t be if she spent as much time as Miss Rosalyn did indoors, embroidering linens and arranging her shiny blonde hair.
“Directly after Miss Rosalyn sends that worm on to glory, guess who gonna have to wash those sheets?”
“You?”
“Uh-huh. So put the notion out of your head—and mind those worms.”
Esther giggled, then flipped the hem of her petticoat up to fan her face, baring knobby knees. “How much longer we got to do this?”
“’Til it’s done, what do you think?”
Esther rolled her eyes. The girl wasn’t used to field work. Miss Lucinda had just that spring judged her old enough, at nine, to lend a hand beyond house and yard. That didn’t mean she’d have to put in a full day’s work with the men.
Early on Miss Lucinda tried to force that on Seona and her mama, but Master Hugh nipped that notion in the bud. Seona could be spared for days at a time, but her mama already spun flax and wool and wove cloth from it. She made shirts and shifts, petticoats and breeches. Even some for white folk. On top of that her mama tended the ailing and delivered babies for miles about. And she helped Naomi with the cooking. Taken altogether it was enough for one woman to be getting on with, most days.
“House-spoiled is what you are,” Seona told Esther, but not meanly. Esther’s mama and daddy were dower slaves, come from their old place in Virginia with Miss Lucinda and her daughters. Since Esther had been born to them, she’d been something of a pet to the mistress. Until lately.
It comes hard, that season a child begins to know she’s still a slave, no matter how favored.
Sweat trickled down Seona’s neck. The stink of ripe tobacco hung thick in the sticky heat. They’d been at the job since breakfast, save to grab a bite of dinner when the sun was high. A couple of the hands were working toward them from the field’s far end, but there was a fair piece to go before anyone reached the middle.
Esther scuffed a grimy toe in the dirt, wrinkling her nose as the hen perched on the mound beside Seona pecked a fat worm in half and gulped down the pieces. The hen was a scrawny, speckled creature, unlike most of their plump, shiny-black chickens. It had come as payment for a baby her mama caught two weeks back, on a farm upcreek.
Seona bent to grasp a leaf of the plant under which the hen was feeding. Lightning quick it darted at her, neck stretched low. Seona kicked out and sent that chicken squawking down the row, leaving a cloud of spotted feathers and herself sitting on the ground, fingers pressed over a sting at the base of her thumb.
Esther, gone up the row a ways, rushed back to her side. “You hurt?”
“Just a nip.” Seona sucked at the heel of her thumb, bitter with tobacco juice and blood.
“Wicked ol’ biddy-hen.” Esther slapped a mosquito on her arm, then scratched between the tight plaits of her hair, up under her shade hat.
Seona’s braid hung heavy down her back. She wound it up and tucked it under her kerchief, hoping it would stay. Her hair wasn’t straight like her mama’s crow-black Indian hair, or wiry like Esther’s. It was somewhere between—long, springy curls that defied the taming of brush, braid, and head-rag.
She got up off the ground, thinking how Mister Dawes would be making his rounds to see they weren’t sitting idle. She bent to the worm-picking. That’s when the shouting started up and she straightened again. Shielding her eyes, she spotted Ally, their cook Naomi’s son, galumphing through the oaks, calling to her and Esther, waving them in.
Esther put a hand to a skinny hip and hollered, “We ain’t near done yet, Ally!”
From a distance Seona saw the grin splitting a gleam in Ally’s face. Though a great ox of a man, about her mama’s age, inside, Ally was still the age he’d been when a mule kicked him in the head and he didn’t wake up for a night and a day. When Seona was small, Ally would wade the creek with her on a Sunday, when they had time to themselves. Other times he’d make a present for her out of something he found—a pretty feather, a shiny rock, or an arrowhead turned up with the plow. Now, when he wasn’t working the fields or helping Jubal with the stock, he favored Esther, who’d reached his inside age.
“Maisy want you cleaned up to serve, Esther,” Ally hollered back. “Seona needed in the kitchen with our mamas!”
Esther turned to Seona, eyebrows scrunched. “What for? Dinner’s done passed.”
When they didn’t budge, Ally broke into a run again, heading toward them like a charging bull. They stood and waited, too hot to move more than needful. Ally lumbered to a halt, bent over between the tobacco plants, dinner-plate hands splayed on broad knees, gulping breath. “Big supper . . . planned. We gots . . . comp’ny.”
“Bound to be someone important,” Seona said, “if we’re being called in to help.”
“Hope it ain’t them uppity folk from over Chesterfield,” Esther said.
With all her heart Seona said a silent amen. Chesterfield was the biggest plantation for miles. Miss Lucinda and her daughters went visiting there more than to any other place. Like moths to a flame, she’d heard Naomi grumble. It was something rarer for the flame to come to the moths. But it happened, now and then.
Not today apparently. Ally was wagging his head. “Ain’t them. You never guess who it be.”
“Who then?” Esther demanded.
“That boy what was here before—Mister Ian. He done said yes to Master Hugh’s letter and come back, all growed up! Got hisself a roan horse, red as strawberries with cream on the side.” Words tumbled out of Ally like rocks rolling downhill. “He come wearin’ this coat-o’-many-colors like Joseph from the Bible, with his own manservant on a fine black horse, and another horse loaded down with I-don’t-know-what-all. Look like they here to stay.”
Esther was bouncing like a worried flea, grinning to match Ally. “Come on, Seona. Let’s get shed of these worms!”
The girl grabbed her wrist and pulled. Seona let herself be tugged along the row, mute as a scarecrow, reeling from this rush of news about horses and colored coats and . . . Master Hugh’s nephew.
The boy with the angel-halo hair was back.
PART I
September 1793