Mountain Laurel

by Lori Benton

Brought up short, he demanded, “What are ye doing?”

  Her head came up. A hand fluttered mothlike to her throat. “Cousin. You gave me a start, creeping in soft as an Indian.”

  “I’d hardly creep into my own shop.”

  She widened her eyes. “Bristly as a porcupine still, I see. You positively brooded over tea.”

  The hour in the parlor with his kin and their guests had been a seething feat of endurance. He rounded the workbench, pasting on a counterfeit smile. “Better?”

  Rosalyn stared, then gave a spiraling little laugh. “Tolerably so. Come now, Cousin. Is it the turn of weather, or has Gideon’s visit put you out of temper? You don’t care for him, do you?”

  “Nor should ye.”

  She appeared taken aback. “Whyever not?”

  “Have ye taken a stroll through his slave quarters? The man cannot keep his breeches fastened.”

  His cousin flushed at the bald statement—with anger or embarrassment, Ian couldn’t have said. “Of course I haven’t. Nor ever shall.”

  “Aye, well. What d’ye want, Rosalyn?”

  She smoothed her hands over the pattern book, open on the bench. “Mr. Stoddard had such praise for your work over tea, I decided to come see what the fuss was about. If I might ask, where did you come by these designs?” She traced a fingertip across one of Seona’s drawings. “I’ve never seen the like. Are they all the rage in Boston?”

  He stiffened. “The book was given me by my Cambridge master.”

  “These are his designs?” she asked, still touching the morning glories.

  “Some of them.”

  “The vines and flowers?” she persisted.

  “My sister drew those.”

  Rosalyn’s mouth firmed before she managed another smile. “I must write to your sister and tell her what a lovely grace she has for ornamentation.” She closed the book. “By the by, Cousin, I happened to look out the window before Gideon’s arrival. I saw Seona slipping in here. I’ve seen her come and go before today. I’d thought she’d taken a fancy to your Thomas. Then Thomas went to Chesterfield, and still she came.”

  He shrugged. “Naomi sent her with a meal a time or two, when I was too busy to come to table. And speaking of busy, I must ask ye to excuse me. I need to get that mahogany sorted.”

  There was a glitter in her eyes he didn’t like, but she kept her voice measured. “How silly of me to intrude. I suppose, having gone off to live with savages, you’d prefer the company of Papa Hugh’s slaves to that of his stepdaughters.”

  This was getting out of hand. “Rosalyn—”

  “Say what you will of Gideon,” she continued, dropping all pretense of indifference. “He’s gentleman enough to show a lady preference. He even attends to Judith, for heaven’s sake!”

  “I meant no insult.”

  “Of course you did, but never mind. I’ve plenty to occupy me elsewhere.” She swept out, leaving behind a ringing silence.

  Blast the girl. He had meant to nettle her into leaving, before she worked out too much of the truth. As for that . . .

  He closed the shop and headed for the house, meaning to find his uncle and have that truth from him.

  Drops ticked at the window in Mister Ian’s room. Seona’s hands shook as she opened the clothespress and tucked away his clean shirt, snatched off the line before it took a soaking. She ought to have closed the press and left his room then, but the things he kept hid away were a fascination. That red wool shirt with its neck stitched round in flowers. She’d never seen him wear it. Did those Indians he lived with up north fancy gaudy clothes, or was it something Mister Ian fancied for himself? Sometimes it seemed he’d come from a lot farther off than Boston.

  “Maybe the moon,” she said, then peeped over the bed. It was quiet in the passage.

  Her eyes snagged on the half-breed coat hung behind the door, and the belt with the tomahawk. First time she came into his room to put up laundry, she’d touched those things, pressed her face to them. They smelled of smoke and horses. And something else she couldn’t name. Some bit of the northern wilds still clinging to them, maybe.

  As she moved to close the press, a roll of yellowed paper tumbled out, tied with the blue ribbon she’d last seen in the hollow. Heart banging, she slipped off the ribbon and spread out her picture. He’d put it up careful, but the ravens were smudged now.

  A breeze kicked up, pushing raindrops through the open window. She couldn’t sit there sorting her thoughts like so much laundry. She blew to scatter the charcoal dust so she could stash the drawing back in the press and finish her chore.

  The creak of a floorboard was all the warning she got that she’d been caught.

  “I knew it!” Miss Rosalyn rounded the bed and snatched the picture from her hands. “Those morning glory drawings are yours!”

  Seona shot to her feet. “Mister Ian’s sister . . .” Her voice, dry as dust, failed her.

  Miss Rosalyn narrowed her eyes. “You’re lying to me.” She tossed the raven picture onto the bed, shedding fine black grains on the counterpane. She grabbed Seona’s wrist and hauled her from the room.

  “I got laundry—”

  “Never mind that.” Miss Rosalyn towed her down the passage to the room she and Miss Judith shared, where she gestured at the plastered walls. “All this white is tiresome. I won’t bear it another day. Phyllida Pryce’s room has fancy borders around the door and windows. I want you to ornament my room with those same designs you drew for Cousin Ian. That’s all. No need for such dissembling.”

  “You want me to draw . . . on the walls?” Seona must have looked as thunderstruck as she felt.

  Miss Rosalyn narrowed her eyes again. “Did I not speak plainly?” She snatched a pencil off Miss Judith’s writing table and thrust it into Seona’s hand. “Use this to start with. I’ll ask Papa Hugh about getting some paint.”

  “I . . . I can’t.” If she did, all hope of her secret being kept was gone.

  But it was gone already.

  Miss Rosalyn’s mouth drew in small. “I can be on your side in this. I can speak up for you. You choose.” She pointed at the doorframe. “Morning glories. Exactly as you drew them in Cousin Ian’s book. Make a border all around. Like they’re climbing the wall. I’ll be back to check on you.”

  She went out, leaving Seona as stunned as if she’d taken a switch to her back. Miss Rosalyn . . . on her side? Her knees banged and she sat down, staring at the pencil rolling across the floorboards.

  She got herself in hand and did as she was told. She drew morning glory vines twining up the side of the door, standing on the bed stool when it got too high to reach. Miss Rosalyn came back once, grunted her approval, and went out again.

  Here Seona had thought pigs would fly afore she did a thing that pleased that girl. But the pencil nearly snapped in her hand when Miss Lucinda’s bottle-green skirt lashed by the open door. Catching sight of her, the mistress swished to a halt.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Drawing pictures, ma’am. Like Miss Rosalyn bid me do.”

  Miss Lucinda jabbed a finger at the floor. “Get down.”

  In her haste to obey Seona sent the stool crashing. She set it to rights and faced Miss Lucinda, who was staring at the wall, knuckles planted on her hips.

  “Rosalyn told you to do this? Why?”

  “She wants her walls to look like Miss Phyllida’s. I’m to do the drawing now and she’ll ask Master Hugh about paint.” The pencil had grown slick in her grasp. Seona went on talking, heart tripping like the sudden burst of rain against the window. “Pokeberry juice would work if no paint’s to hand. Makes a nice dark pink. Be right pretty . . .”

  Miss Lucinda whipped around to face her. “How are you able to do this?”

  Too late for lying. Seona drew a shaky breath. “I drew patterns for Mister Ian. For his work.”

  “Did he teach you to draw?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Who then? That Frenchwoman?”


  “No, ma’am. I taught myself to make a likeness. Long back afore you came here, I . . . I found an old slate and scratched on it with a rock.” Cold slipped down her back, hearing those words out of her mouth.

  “Is that all you’ve used? A rock and slate?”

  “No, ma’am. I’ve used other things.”

  The mistress glanced at the pencil in Seona’s hand. “My daughters’ belongings?”

  “No, ma’am. I never took nothing wasn’t thrown out as rubbish.”

  “Really?” Miss Lucinda’s eyes were stones. “You’ve managed to astonish me, Seona.”

  She could number on one hand the times Lucinda Cameron had called her by her given name. Not one of those times had ended well.

  “It occurs to me to wonder what I’d find if I went up to the garret right now.” Satisfaction drew Miss Lucinda’s features tight. “Let’s do that together, shall we?”

  His uncle’s pipe had gone out. Uncle Hugh knocked the dottle into the grate, then crossed to his desk and took out a tobacco tin. The smell of the leaf filled the room, pungent, cloying. Ian would have thought the man unruffled but for the trembling of his hands.

  Seated on the dressing bench at the foot of his uncle’s bed, Ian rubbed a hand down his face. “How have ye borne it, Uncle, watching Seona grow up a slave? Why haven’t ye freed her—if not for Lily’s sake, then for the sake of your own blood? Our blood.”

  Uncle Hugh eyed him as though he’d lost his head. “D’ye think it that simple? That I pen the words and the lass is free? Aye, I suppose ye do.”

  Ian was momentarily silenced. He hadn’t thought past his outrage for Seona’s sake to the particulars of the process. “Tell me, then. What’s to be done?”

  His uncle sighed as he sat. “First a man must petition the General Assembly, giving cause for any slave he’d see manumitted. Meritorious service, it’s called. Should the assembly deem such service worthy of freedom and grant the request, a freed slave is obliged to leave the state within months of manumission—or risk reenslavement.” He shook his head at Ian’s frown. “Aye, Nephew. Where would Seona go? She might pass for white, but what manner of living would she have with no man to protect her or provide?”

  Ian read the grim possibilities in his uncle’s strained face. “I’d let nothing of the kind befall her.”

  “Easy to say. But ’tis never so simple as what ye will or no’.”

  “It can be. Let me take her north, see her settled in Boston with Da and Mam. I’ll come back to ye then—and remain here.”

  Uncle Hugh closed his eyes. “No.”

  “Why? Because ye’d not be parted from your last surviving child even if it means she stays a slave?”

  “Dinna put words into my mouth, Ian. I never claimed the lass was mine.”

  He thought his uncle meant to say more, but voices had risen beyond the door, checking them both.

  “Mama . . . cannot this wait until Seona’s finished?”

  “I’ve made my decision. I’ll have them out of this house today.”

  13

  Seona sat on a trunk beside her rolled pallet, absorbing yet another shock. “How long have you known, Mama?”

  Lily’s hands stilled on the bundle she was tying up. “Since the day we moved into this garret.”

  The day Master Hugh returned from Virginia, bringing his new family with their carriage and slaves and hired wagons heaped with house plunder.

  “I took up your pallet to see had ye dusted these old boards afore putting it down, and there they were, your beautiful drawings.”

  They didn’t seem beautiful to Seona now the mistress had put them both from the house.

  “Take your things to the cabin next to Naomi’s,” Miss Lucinda had ordered, standing over Seona’s pallet flung aside to reveal scattered scraps of paper bearing likenesses of ravens, deer, foxes—all manner of wild things from the woods—and faces done from memory. She’d spied Mister Ian’s boyhood likeness staring up at her and put her foot down on it a second before Miss Lucinda’s eyes swept over the mess. “You and your mother will sleep there now—where you have always belonged.” She’d curled her lip at Ally’s face, grinning up at her from the floor. “As for this rubbish—burn it!”

  As the rain drummed overhead, Lily sat beside her on the trunk and rubbed her back like she was still small enough to comfort so. “I’ve been so proud, girl-baby. Peeking at your drawings over the years, seeing them getting better and better.” Her mama was quiet for a space, then in a different tone asked, “How long has Mister Ian known?”

  “Since the day he caught the Reynolds’ pig.” Head aching, heavy with the garret’s heat, she told how Mister Ian learned her secret, then got the notion for her to help with his cabinetmaking. “It’s all Munin’s fault, I reckon.”

  “That old raven.” Lily gave her hand a squeeze. “Well, we’ve trouble enough for one day. Best get our things shifted.”

  They heard the voices as they reached the foot of the garret stairs, several talking over each other, down below in the passage. All of them angry. Seona froze, but Lily put a hand to her shoulder. “Never fear what man can do, girl-baby. The Lord’s watching over our lot.”

  Seona tried to believe it, but each step down the back stairs was harder to take for dread, like she was Daniel going down into that den of hungry lions. Mister Ian’s voice was the first to come free of the snarl: “What she’s done was at my bidding. It’s no cause for casting them from their place.”

  “Their place is where I say it is!” Miss Lucinda snapped.

  “My room, Mama,” Miss Rosalyn cut in. “Let Seona finish what she started.”

  In the passage outside Master Hugh’s room the mistress and her daughters confronted Mister Ian like hounds with a possum treed. When Seona stepped off the last stair, bundle clutched to her chest, Mister Ian put his back to Miss Lucinda and came to her, face tight with anger, hair rumpled like he’d scrubbed his fingers through it, forgetting it was tailed.

  “Ye and Lily take your things back upstairs,” he told her, but when she started to obey, her mama put a firm hand on her shoulder.

  “Mister Ian, no. Let this happen.”

  “For once, Lily, we are in agreement.” Miss Lucinda thrust between them and Mister Ian, forcing Seona and Lily practically into the warming room. She yanked open the back door. A breeze swept into the house, moist with rain and a flood of watery light. “My decision stands, whether or not you agree, Mr. Cameron.”

  Seona reached for Lily. Her mama was no longer beside her. Probably ducked into the warming room when the mistress pushed them aside. She didn’t steal a glance to see.

  “I gave her permission to draw,” Mister Ian said, still arguing against the inevitable. “If that was wrong, then it was my wrong. Not hers.”

  “I don’t want her punished—not yet.” Miss Rosalyn seemed cross at everyone. Miss Judith, clearly distressed, raised a hand to her sister’s sleeve but Miss Rosalyn jerked away. “She’s meant to finish my room!”

  “Neither of you appear to understand,” Miss Lucinda said, “that the girl has admitted to years of lying. No doubt thievery as well. Putting her from this house is the least she deserves. It’s within my rights to have her whipped.”

  “If I hear ye speak again of whipping, madam, ye will regret it.”

  Seona shrank back at the hard set of Mister Ian’s jaw, his harder words. She clutched at the warming room doorway, almost wishing she’d never picked up that slate, never spied on a blue-eyed boy with hair pale as moonlight.

  “Put the notion of whipping out of your head, Lucinda—as I told ye once long ago.” Every eye turned to see Master Hugh standing in the doorway of his room. “Seona’s drawing is no news to me.”

  “You knew?” The mistress sounded strangled.

  “I’ve kent it since Seona was a wee lass—I saw her at it, though she didna ken I was watching.” He looked her way, in his eyes a mingling of warmth and sorrow that wrenched her heart somehow more than hi
s startling confession. “’Twas my choice to let her alone to draw as she wished. Your coming here didna alter that.”

  “It would seem,” Miss Lucinda said with shaking fury, “that my coming here altered very little whatsoever.”

  For an instant Seona felt a stab of pity for the mistress. But she hadn’t room in her spinning head to hold such a thing. Master Hugh had known her secret all this time too.

  He didn’t acknowledge his wife’s bitter words. “As Ian has explained, there’s no need for casting Seona and Lily from this house.”

  “Let me be the judge of need.” In the weighted silence that followed her words, Miss Lucinda thrust out her chin. “You don’t want them removed because you don’t wish to suffer the inconvenience of having Lily so far from your bed.”

  “Mama.” Miss Judith took a timid step forward and touched her mother’s arm. “I’m sure that isn’t true. Lily can care for Papa Hugh no matter where she sleeps.”

  The mistress drew back her hand and slapped her daughter’s face. Miss Judith sat down hard in the middle of the passage, petticoats a-billow, hand over her cheek. For a second no one moved. No one spoke. Miss Lucinda raising a hand to one of her girls had stolen the air from all their lungs—even the one who’d done the slapping.

  Then Mister Ian made a noise like a growl. He pushed past Miss Lucinda and bent to help Miss Judith to her feet. “Are ye all right, lass?”

  Miss Judith’s stunned face crumpled. She clung to his shirtfront, forcing him to hold her while she sniffled and sobbed.

  “This is utterly ridiculous!” Miss Rosalyn glared at her sister in Mister Ian’s arms.

  Miss Lucinda’s face had gone stark white. “Oh, Judith. Do get control of yourself!”

  But at her mama’s words Miss Judith sobbed louder.

  Master Hugh stood braced against the doorframe of his room, watching his kinfolk quarrel. Then his face lifted, going ashen. Or was it just the light? Seona tried to tell as he stared past them all, through the open back door, a distance in his eyes like he was trying to spot something away up on the ridge. The skin across his brow broke out in beads of sweat despite the breeze trickling in.