by Lori Benton
“I’ve read Mr. Lawson’s A New Voyage to Carolina.”
“Have ye?” Ian said, surprised into interest.
Rosalyn cut in before he could pursue it further. “Why talk of tiresome books when here sits our cousin, who’s actually lived among the red men?”
Ian couldn’t help returning her admiring smile. “Aye, Rosalyn, I’ve stories I could tell.” Noting her sister’s crestfallen countenance, he added judiciously, “But I’m also a bookbinder’s son. Tiresome isn’t the word I’d use to describe books.”
That had both sisters beaming at him.
They talked for a while of Robert Cameron’s shop in Boston’s North End; then the conversation flowed on to Ian’s elder brother, Ned, who worked alongside their father, and whose second son had been born that winter past. But at the first opportunity, Ian turned back to Judith, silent since her sister’s mild rebuke.
“I’m familiar with Lawson’s survey. I understand many of the tribes he met with are regrettably vanished now. Or exiled from Carolina, like the Tuscaroras.”
His uncle’s wife had thus far taken small part in the conversation, but now Lucinda Cameron interjected, “I, for one, do not deem the absence of red heathens in our kitchen-yard cause for regret. Do let us not revive the subject.”
Judith drew her napkin into her lap. “But, Mama, we do have—”
“Judith.”
“I beg your pardon, Aunt,” Ian hurried to say. “My years in the wilds have undoubtedly roughened my edges and provided me many a topic of conversation unsuited to the table.”
Rosalyn’s delighted laughter broke the tension. “I daresay we shall make polishing your rough edges our mission, Cousin. To commence our campaign, might you be willing to escort us to meeting?”
“We wish to show you off to our particular friends, the Pryces, who—” Judith bit off her words, silenced by her sister’s quelling stare.
Ian swiped a napkin over his mouth to hide a grin. The lass had apparently committed the unpardonable sin of unveiling their feminine machinations. “Meeting?” he inquired.
“Since leaving Virginia for the back of beyond,” Lucinda explained, “my daughters and I have had no proper Anglican service to attend. However, we are lately privileged to have secured the offices of a visiting minister, one Sabbath in the month.”
“Which happens to fall Sunday next.” Rosalyn leaned toward her sister, adding sotto voce, “We must unearth our Book of Common Prayer, lest our cousin think us perfect heathens.”
Judith frowned. “But I read from it just this morning. It’s—”
With a delicate sigh, Rosalyn straightened. “Really, Judith. I was jesting.”
“Daughters,” Uncle Hugh said, “’tis all well for ye and your mother, this new meeting and its minister. But Ian willna have been raised Anglican, ye ken.”
“True, Uncle. Da went over to the Congregationalists years ago and hasn’t looked back. But I’ve no objection to my cousins’ plan.” Ian forbore mentioning how long it had been since he’d set foot inside a meetinghouse of any persuasion. He hoped his attendance after such a prodigal stint wouldn’t offend the Almighty. His lack of attendance was sure to offend his kin. At least the womenfolk.
“Young Mr. Pryce of Chesterfield Plantation has procured the minister, a Reverend Wilkes,” Lucinda was saying. “He’s distantly related to the Pryces, also formerly of Virginia.”
Was it the subject of religion or Virginia that had sparked his aunt’s volubility? Twice she’d uttered the name of the state, imbuing it with loving import. Ian recalled that her first husband, an old acquaintance of his uncle, had been a Tidewater planter in the state.
Rosalyn took a sip from her glass, held it aloft for the maid to fill, and said, “It’s a shame Papa Hugh isn’t a Quaker.”
“Rosalyn, such a thing to say,” said her mother. “A Quaker?”
Rosalyn’s silvery laughter met her mother’s half-amused, half-shocked expression. To Ian she said, “We’ve little to do with Quakers, of course, save for when we take our corn to mill. Such peculiar folk—I hear they simply sit in silence at their Meetings. But they do swarm like bees in these parts. There must be three of their meetinghouses within a day’s ride of our door.”
“Thomas and I met with a Quaker on our journey,” Ian said, again entranced by her lovely smile. “Traveled with him, in fact, as far as Hillsborough.”
“Ye came by way of Hillsborough?” Uncle Hugh leaned forward, putting aside his napkin. “I’d assumed ye’d passed through Salem.”
“I’d planned to, sir. But Hillsborough was where the Quaker was bound.” He was regretting having mentioned the man—another topic better left alone. After all, it was largely the Quaker’s fault that Ian hadn’t sent Thomas Ross straight back to Boston with his tail between his legs, when he’d last had the chance. He shrugged against the confines of his coat, casting for an explanation that wouldn’t reveal too much. “The man requested our company on the road. He was traveling alone, and as I owed him something of a debt by then—”
“Not a gambling debt?” Rosalyn asked in feigned astonishment.
“I don’t think Quakers gamble,” Judith said.
Rosalyn threw Ian a wide-eyed appeal. “Am I the only one at this table with a sense of humor?”
“I’m sure your sister’s sensibilities do her credit,” Ian said. Even if she doesn’t share your wit, he allowed his eyes to add. “It wasn’t to do with gambling, no. Still, it’s not the tale to place me in the most flattering of lights, I fear.” He paused, hoping Lucinda would again object to their conversation, but the lady remained unhelpfully silent.
“Dinna press your cousin, lass,” his uncle admonished. “He may no’ wish to speak of it.”
“Then he shouldn’t have let fall such an intrigue.” Rosalyn flashed her dimple. “Do be a gentleman, Cousin, and tell us everything.”
Ian’s mind spun at the notion. He couldn’t tell the half of it. What he did tell, as far as it went, was the truth—that he’d taken a fall in Pennsylvania, landed on his head, and knocked himself senseless, letting them believe it had been from the saddle he’d fallen, not the steep hillside where he’d been attempting to ambush the friend who would not stop trailing him south. He told of waking, bruised and battered, in a camp he’d no memory of pitching.
“Oh, Cousin,” Judith said, a pale hand fluttering to her mouth.
“Who was by to aid ye, lad?” his uncle asked.
Ian was touched by their concern, though he hadn’t meant to elicit it. “Thomas was . . . near to hand by then,” he said with only the slightest hesitation, the irony of that statement his alone to savor. He wondered briefly if Thomas had found his own supper. Perhaps in company of the green-eyed girl?
“But where does the Quaker come into the tale?” Rosalyn prompted.
“He was there in camp, too, when I woke—sipping coffee from my cup,” he added, hoping to lighten the account. A stranger clad in sober gray, a chance-met traveler who’d come upon Thomas attempting to revive Ian after his fall, Benjamin Eden had introduced himself as a schoolmaster from Easton Town, on his way to join his cousin’s Meeting in Hillsborough. “After inquiring most solicitously after my injuries and noting the condition I was in—commotio cerebri, he called it—the man offered to physic me, him being well-read in texts of a medical nature. I resigned myself to his ministrations but might have done without his telling us of the fever epidemic in Philadelphia, which I’d unwittingly avoided, having skirted the city.”
Attempting to shake Thomas off his trail, he didn’t add.
In the silence that followed, he heard the clock ticking on the mantel through the open parlor doors. All sounds of eating had ceased. His aunt’s glass had halted midway to her lips.
“Epidemic?” she echoed in a voice stripped of its firmness. “Coastal cities such as Philadelphia are plagued with fevers every season. Was it merely the summer ague?”
“No, ma’am. The Quaker said yellow fever
. He was quite descriptive of its presentation—gleaned from travelers he’d met on the road, fleeing to the countryside. Languor and nausea, vomiting, delirium, yellowing of the skin, livid spots on the body akin to the bites of . . .”
Ian fell silent, noting that though his cousins still hung upon his every word, it wasn’t with fascination or sympathy. Rather with expressions of dawning horror.
Lucinda Cameron’s complexion had blanched to the shade of chalk powder. The glass in her hand seemed to tremble. “You traveled in company with a man exposed to yellow fever?”
“No,” Ian hastened to say. “As I said, the man never—”
His reply was cut short as the glass slipped from his aunt’s lifted hand, spilling its contents in a thin cascade before shattering on the hardwood floor.
3
“Of course I didn’t tell them everything,” Ian said, tamping down his exasperation—and the level of his voice; though he’d bid his uncle an awkward good night after the girls had helped their mother to her room abovestairs, only a short passage and a door separated the newer wing of the house from the rooms in which the women slept. He’d come up the back stairs to find Thomas in his cupboard of a room, tiny window propped, a breeze stirring the warmth of the house’s upper story. “I’d have left out the yellow fever had I known mention of it was enough to cause a swoon.”
His uncle had insisted he wasn’t to blame for his aunt’s indisposition. Ian couldn’t have known yellow fever had claimed the lives of Lucinda Cameron’s first husband and two young sons, or that Judith, who had survived it, shared her mother’s mortal terror of the disease.
Chagrined regardless, Ian loosened the confines of his neckcloth and sat on a nearby trunk, disregarding its layer of dust. “Ye should’ve heard me skating around every subject that arose, with the ice cracking under me all the while. There’s not a chapter in the narrative of my life fit for civilized conversation.”
He winced, regretting his choice of words. Thomas, who’d unearthed a low stool to sit on, glanced at a slim brown volume, corners rubbed and pages well-thumbed, that peeked from his satchel below the window: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.
Ian could justly impugn the author of that narrative with inspiring Thomas to risk life and liberty by following him to North Carolina, attempting to overtake him and join the journey south. Thomas had revealed the book after the Quaker, Benjamin Eden, had examined Ian’s head wound—a wound he’d taken in a last attempt to elude the pursuit.
More gravely injured than he’d let on to his kin, Ian had been muddled enough to think he could get up on his horse and continue his journey, leaving Thomas and the meddling Quaker behind. He’d gotten as far as the picketed horses before Thomas caught him and thrust the book under his nose.
“One of my da’s?” Ian had asked, though he’d no need. Even with a battered skull he’d have recognized his father’s work. Or Ned’s. The volume was bound by neither Cameron. Then he’d taken in the title. “Olaudah Equiano. What sort of name is that?”
“African,” Thomas had said with pride. “He was stolen from his tribe, made a slave. He bought his freedom and wrote of his enslavement. Listen.” Turning to a marked passage, Thomas read, “‘Indeed, on the most trifling occasions, they were loaded with chains; and often instruments of torture were added. The iron muzzle, thumb-screws—’”
“Thomas,” Ian cut in. “My uncle doesn’t commit savageries against his slaves. I’ve been there, aye? I’ve seen them.”
“As a boy. You probably didn’t notice.”
“I’d have noticed iron muzzles!” He’d been twelve that spring he visited Mountain Laurel, giddy with the adventure of traveling nigh the length of their new-won nation with his da, smug in thinking for once he’d been chosen over Ned. It was years before he understood Robert Cameron hadn’t asked him along purely for the pleasure of his company. “It’s no concern of yours. Nor is my business.”
Thomas squared his jaw. “A slave goes where his master goes, so your business is mine.”
“Ye’re not my slave!”
“I could be.” Thomas’s eyes had burned with a dark fire. “I mean to see if what Equiano writes of those Southern plantations is true. See with my own eyes. Your kin need never know who I am.”
Ian glared now at the narrative tucked into the satchel below the window. As though he minded that fraught conversation as well, Thomas started to reach for it, then caught Ian’s glower and refrained.
“Spot any iron muzzles lying about the kitchen?” Ian asked.
Sweating in the warmth of the house, Thomas regarded him. “Do you still not understand why I had to do this?”
Ian snorted as he rose, pausing in the doorway. “I barely understand what I’m doing here.”
“That I don’t doubt. But thanks to Benjamin I’m certain of playing my part.”
Within hours of making their acquaintance, the Quaker had called out Thomas on his playacting. Instead of siding with Ian to convince Thomas of his foolishness, the man had offered to tutor him in the Art and Mystery of Acting the Slave—should they agree to his company on the road to Carolina.
It had been two against one, and that one with his wits knocked agley. He’d stalked off alone, seeking solitude to cobble together an argument with force enough to turn one stubborn, brown-hided cooper back north to the free life he should be leading. He’d burdens enough to bear on that journey without adding Thomas Ross to the load.
In the end he hadn’t found it in him to resist the force of such conviction, no matter how reckless, and in quiet despair he’d wondered—was wondering still—if he was fated to be forever eddied along on the tide of other men’s zeal.
“D’ye need anything before I seek my bed?” he asked, discomfited by sight of the narrow bedroll on the dusty floor.
The question elicited a clucking noise. Before Ian could bristle at the mother hen reference, Thomas grinned. “I’m fine, Mastah Ian. Go on to bed. And sweet dreams on that feather tick they’ve given you.”
“Aye,” Ian said gruffly. “Thanks.”
His dreams, however, proved anything but sweet. In them he was a lad running down the cobbled streets of Boston’s North End, shoving through the door beneath the shingle that read Messrs. Cameron & Ross, Binders & Sellers of Fine Books. He flew past Thomas’s father—the Ross of Cameron & Ross—and ducked the counter flap to race past the great trimming press, past stacks of pasteboard and dye trays, while above his head marbled endpapers festooned air thick with the smell of binder’s glue . . .
At the rear of the shop a man bends over the sewing frame, hair clubbed, shirtsleeves turned high.
“Da! Da!”
His father rounds on him. “Have I no’ told ye, Ian? Dinna go haring through the shop like ye’ve a band of wild Indians after ye.” Da turns his back. “There now. D’ye see?” The sharp is gone from his voice; Ned is at the sewing frame. “Ye loop the threads through the folds, then bind them to the cords . . . so.”
“Aye, Da,” says dutiful Ned—insufferably smug Ned—while Ian backs away. He misjudges his footing and bumps a bench bearing an open tray of marbling dye, sloshing the contents onto the floor.
“IAN!”
He came awake, wincing at the echo of his da’s bellow. Reaching instinctively for his rifle, he felt empty bed linen, not smooth hardwood or cold gunmetal; the rifle wasn’t beside him where it had rested each night for most of the past five years. He’d left it propped beside the door, he remembered, as the shadowed contours of the room in his uncle’s house replaced the dream of his da’s shop. But the bellowing went on.
His heart thundered as he listened. The shouts were muffled. The banging that next erupted wasn’t, nor the woman’s voice that arose outside his room: “Lily—get you down here this instant!”
Ian clawed his way off the feather tick and sprang for the door.
Lucinda Cameron, swathed in a wrapper and candlelight, stood at the top of the back stairwell, where
a door was thrown open to reveal another stair, twisting narrowly up to what must be a garret. Belowstairs that other voice called, the words still unintelligible. His uncle’s voice.
The door across the passage cracked open. Thomas peered out but had the sense to remain concealed as stair treads creaked and a slender figure in pale homespun descended from above, clutching a wooden box. Ian had a glimpse of coppery skin and a long black braid before Lucinda thrust the woman toward the stairs and the voice below, still raised in agitation.
“I feared his coming would bring this on,” his aunt snapped. “Quickly now. Calm him!”
Before she vanished down the stairwell, the woman from the garret glanced up, raising to Ian a familiar face—dark eyes above wide cheekbones, a graceful jaw.
Seconds later, the shouts from below grew abruptly comprehensible: “Lily! Ye’ll ken where he is. Aidan! Where have they taken him?”
“Aunt? What’s amiss?” Ian hadn’t seen his uncle’s wife since she’d left the table.
“We have it well in hand, Mr. Cameron.” Lucinda’s face pinched in disapproval as she regarded him. He’d emerged wearing the shirt he’d slept in and nothing more. It covered him to midthigh, but the open neck had slid to his shoulders.
“I was startled out of sleep,” he began, but she was already halfway down the stairs, no more attention to spare him.
The shouting had abated. The woman from the garret, or something from her box, was having the desired effect.
Thomas opened his door wider. “Your uncle?”
“Aye, but I’ve no idea what’s wrong.” The name his uncle had been shouting. Aidan. Had that been his cousin’s name? “I’ll see what’s to be known come morning. Speaking of which—have ye a notion of the time?”
More footsteps made them turn. The door in the passage to the front of the house had burst open. Through it came Rosalyn, golden hair streaming. “It’s three o’ the clock—oh, Cousin!” she wailed and threw herself into Ian’s arms.