by Lori Benton
Esther leaned against her, crying tears for Ally, who’d hollered at first touch of the vinegar wash, then passed out cold. A mercy.
“Who was it brought him home?” Master Hugh asked. “He couldna have driven the wagon. Esther, ye spied no man near it?”
Esther jumped when addressed. “No, sir. I ain’t seen nobody. Just Ally.”
Master Hugh glanced at Seona. Something flickered in his eyes, and she wondered what he truly thought of her going away with Ian. Was he looking at her and thinking daughter? Or was he thinking about her being the one to finally give him his heir? She did not want to ask that.
“White . . . man.”
They all started and turned to the cot. Ally’s deep voice was muffled against the ticking, making them all lean forward to hear.
“Was a white man . . . brung me home.”
Finished washing the wounds, Lily went to the table to pound herbs in the mortar for a poultice.
Master Hugh knelt near Ally’s head. “What happened, Ally? Can ye tell me?”
The lamplight caught the flutter of Ally’s lashes. “Mule . . . done it.”
Master Hugh’s lips thinned. “No mule laid these stripes to ye.”
“It was on account of a mule, he means,” Malcolm said. “He’s told us that much. A man come to the mill had a mule take to fashing, and Ally’s way wi’ horses is kent. Mister Pryce called him to come deal wi’ the creature so they could be getting on wi’ matters.”
Ally’s voice came thick. “I telled ’em . . . don’t have no truck with mules.”
A grimace tightened Master Hugh’s face. “I ken it well, Ally.”
“Mister Pryce, he go red-faced . . . Men lookin’ on . . . Told his mill slaves get hold of me. One hiss at me, saying . . . ‘Don’t fight—it make him meaner.’”
“Did ye fight?” Master Hugh asked.
“Yes, sir. Ain’t never been whupped afore. It hurt.” A shudder went through Ally.
Esther gave a little whimper and gripped Seona’s arm tight.
Master Hugh wiped a hand over his mouth, pressing hard. “What did Pryce do wi’ ye, after?” he asked after a pause.
“Said . . . get on home, tell why I got my lickin’. But I couldn’t climb up on the wagon. I fell . . . woke up in the dark.”
A cabin in the slave quarter, Seona guessed. Or a shed out of the way. Someone had taken pity.
“Was a white man bending over me,” Ally said. “And Thomas.”
“Ian’s Thomas?” Master Hugh asked.
With all the focus on Ally, Seona had clean forgot about Thomas still being at Chesterfield. The mill wasn’t near the cooper shop, but word of such doings would have spread like a crop fire.
“Yes, sir. I hear the white man say he drive me home. Hear Thomas tell him where to go. That’s when I knew . . . it’d be all right.”
Esther wiped her streaming nose on the sleeve of her shift. “It ain’t all right, Ally. It ain’t!”
Seona squeezed her hand to hush her, but Master Hugh paid her no mind. “What of Thomas? Did he ride home with ye? Surely it’s time for him to be back.”
More than time, but after the scene at the mill, Gideon Pryce would have been in no fit mood to dole out traveling passes. Knowing Thomas, he’d risk it without one, especially in the company of a white man. Had he? If so, where was he now? And who was that white man? Not John Reynold, if Thomas had to tell him where to take Ally. Besides, Ally knew Mister John.
Then she wondered, Might it have been the Quaker Thomas once told her about? The one who meant to help him? Thomas had never named him.
Master Hugh sought the same answer. “Did ye hear talk between Thomas and this man who brought ye home? Anything to tell who the man might be?”
Ally’s back quivered beneath the web of welts, but he said no more. Finally Master Hugh stood to go, pausing in the doorway when Malcolm asked, “Ye’ll go to Mister Pryce?”
“Aye. Tomorrow.” Plainly Master Hugh hadn’t strength to mount a horse tonight. Seona hoped he would come morning. She hoped even more to see Ian come riding in to take care of this mess. Of everything.
Master Hugh said something more. She heard Dawes’s name but missed the rest, for just then Ally spoke again. She took a step closer to the cot, Esther moving with her like an extra limb.
“What did he say, lass? Did ye hear?”
Seona raised her eyes to Master Hugh, who’d turned back as well. “Yes, sir. But I don’t take his meaning. He said they—Thomas and the white man—was talking about the Garden.”
Master Hugh frowned. “The man was a gardener, d’ye mean? Pryce’s gardener?”
Seona shook her head. “No, sir. The Garden, like in the Bible. Ally says he heard Thomas and the white man speak of Eden.”
26
Mist hung low in the hollows east of the Yadkin River as the day folded in. Despite sporadic horse and wagon traffic on the road, Ian had had solitude for thinking, for casting ahead to the future, and for looking back. He’d had time to think about his uncle’s startling offer. Himself for Seona’s freedom, or a son for both. Most would call it a father’s duty to see a son well-settled. His da had tried his best with him, let him go three times. First to his indenture to Pringle, cabinetmaker. Then to Callum Lindsay, frontiersman and fur-trader. Then to Hugh Cameron, planter. Owner of other men.
But is not the slave trade entirely at war with the heart of man? And surely that which is begun by breaking down the barriers of virtue, involves in its continuance destruction to every principle . . . The words remained emblazoned upon his mind. Was any amount of land or inheritance worth that price? Perhaps he and Seona should run. . . .
He’d nearly forgotten Gottfriedsen and the stolen goods until he found himself at the crossing of the Cape Fear road, which cut north toward Salem. If he were to make for Mountain Laurel, he must continue east over the Carraways.
Ian drew Ruaidh to a halt. What if the peddler had changed his mind after leaving Mountain Laurel, had made directly for Salem instead of Salisbury? Had Salisbury been a ruse to begin with? An echo of Seona’s bewilderment reverberated through his thoughts. Gottfriedsen was a familiar bird, his roost well-known. The peddler he’d mistaken, sight unseen, for Gottfriedsen had been struck with hilarity by the error.
“Traveling alone? Herr Gottfriedsen? I vould not think he had the courage!”
“What makes ye say so?” Ian had asked.
“Herr Gottfriedsen is . . .” The man had stroked his beard, searching for the appropriate appellation. “Ängstlich. The mouse that flees at shadows.”
A canny mouse, indeed.
There came a rustle in the nearby undergrowth, the startled chit of some night creature. Though the hills he traversed were far from the mountain frontier, still he was smack in the middle of a good-sized track of virgin forest, its isolated farms no hindrance to the roaming of bear and catamount—neither of which he’d relish meeting after nightfall.
Ian leaned forward in the saddle, breath a barely perceptible plume in the twilight. Gottfriedsen had gained a day on him, but he mightn’t yet have reached Salem to tidy away all trace of his thievery. Finding out meant a day’s travel north, at least another back.
Ian ground his teeth in sudden, dual resolve. He couldn’t be the one to provide his uncle an heir, but he’d give him back his womenfolk’s trinkets. Then he would go, taking with him the treasure his uncle had failed to value. If Callum wouldn’t have him back, with all his rash promises broken and a runaway wife at his side, it was still a vast frontier stretching across the west. Two people could fall into it like drops in an ocean, never to be found.
“I’m sorry, Da,” he whispered and turned Ruaidh onto the Salem road.
Cold air stirred, raising gooseflesh up her legs, as Seona shut the back door and stood listening, heart banging at her recklessness. Only the faint ticks and pops of old timbers settling broke the house’s slumbering hush. She knew those back stairs, which ones creaked, how to come up them
quiet as a cat. Once in Ian’s room, she slipped between his cold bedsheets, drawing the hangings shut. Pulled into a trembling ball, she curled her hands round her icy feet. And held her breath.
Silence eased her fear as warmth stole into her limbs. Cosseted in clean linens and feather ticking, she pressed her face into Ian’s pillow and breathed the smell of him.
Deep in the night hours, huddled there like moths in a cocoon, he’d told her how it would be in the North. The home he’d build, maybe near a frontier village. Someplace they could go on working together, making crops, making furniture . . . babies. She would draw whenever she pleased.
She’d shook with disbelieving laughter at that last bit, thinking free folk must have more hours in a day than slaves heard tell of.
“I see it, Seona,” he’d said. “Our life. See it so clearly I could hold its shape in my hands.”
She’d tried to hold it too but found the notion slick as moss on a river stone. No matter how she came at it, the shape slipped from her grasp.
Her hand slid between the sheets, shocked to feel the cold instead of Ian’s warmth.
Wilt thou go with this man? The line from a story Malcolm had told them over the years popped into her mind. An old story, set in Bible times. She couldn’t remember the names of those doing the asking or the answering, but that girl that got asked? She had known her mind.
And she said, I will go.
Had that girl never worried she wasn’t fit to live in her man’s world? What did Seona know about being the wife of a white man? She’d seen what went on between the mistress and Master Hugh, that cold battle of wills cloaked in brittle smiles when folk like the Pryces were by to witness. Almost from the start it had been that way.
There was Miss Cecily and Mister John. What they had, that was worth trying for. Miss Cecily and Mister John were matched like two fine horses, mind and heart. And spirit. For all her asking, she wasn’t sure Ian knew what it meant to be a child of God. Seona wondered if she knew. Did she believe the Lord was watching over her lot? Was that faith her own, or did she have faith in her mama’s faith? In Malcolm’s?
Wilt thou go with this man? Had she a choice? She was his wife now. For better or for worse. Those were the words they’d promised. A wife had to do what her husband wanted. Like a slave her mistress. Didn’t she?
Seona clutched the pillow, murmuring a prayer to hold back the dark of unknown threatening to sweep her away. “Thy will be done, Lord. Thy will be—”
The click of the door latch cut off plea and breath alike. For a second she thought it was Ian come home in the night, creeping like she’d done so as not to wake the house.
Cautious feet skirted the bed. Booted feet, and heavy. Not Ian’s.
She didn’t know how she knew, but she cringed under the counterpane, braced for the hangings to be yanked aside. Those on the window side hung open a crack. A shadow moved across the strip, so close the hangings stirred.
A boot scuff told her the man had paused in front of Ian’s clothespress. Hinges creaked. Cloth whispered as garments were shifted. The man muttered under his breath, too low to catch words or recognize the voice. Was it Jackson Dawes? Master Hugh?
The search moved to Ian’s desk: a rattle, a jiggle-and-scrape, a click as a drawer slid open. That desk had a locking drawer. This man knew how to pick that lock. Or knew where Ian kept the key. Papers crinkled for a time before the drawer slid shut and the lock clicked.
A key then.
The shadow loomed. Seona’s heart slammed like a frightened rabbit’s until she heard the turning of the door handle. When she could bear it no longer, she sat up and parted the hangings.
She was alone.
She kept her calm until she was outside. Then she broke and ran. She was passing the kitchen breezeway when hands shot out of the dark trellis tunnel and grabbed her. Strong fingers splayed over her mouth. She squirmed in the tangle of her shawl, freed an elbow, and jabbed it into a set of ribs. The hand over her mouth slipped. She bared her teeth to bite it.
“Relax, girl,” Thomas hissed in her ear. “It’s me.”
She wrenched loose, furious. “What do you call yourself doing?”
“Trying to pin a wildcat, seems.”
Seona fixed him with a glare, wasted in the dark. “You’re meant to be at Chesterfield. Was it you come into Ian’s room?”
Thomas grasped her arm and towed her into the kitchen. A faint glow came off the banked coals in the cooking hearth. Seona felt her way around the worktable while Thomas scraped bare an edge of hearth embers. A brighter glow splashed his scowling face red.
“Might as well saunter through the front door at noon as go sneaking in the back by night,” he said. “You and Ian the only ones think no one sees.”
“It’s not how you think.” Seona gripped the edge of the table, feeling a splinter prick her palm. “Ian’s my husband.”
“Husband?”
It jarred, the way Thomas flung the word back at her. Like he’d never heard it before. “We’re handfast. It’s binding for a year and—”
“I know how handfasting works. I grew up hearing the same tales of Scotland as Ian.” When she stared, dumbfounded, a smile played on Thomas’s lips like he was laughing. “And here’s me thinking Ian must’ve told you the truth long since.”
“What truth?”
“About me. I’m no slave. I was born to a free woman and I’ve known Mastah Ian since I was eight years old.”
Seona stood speechless while Thomas told how his daddy saved Ian’s daddy on a battlefield somewhere up north during the war. How afterward Thomas and his daddy—his mama having died—came to live with the Camerons in a part of Boston called North End. How he and Ian grew up like brothers, their daddies working together in the bookbinding trade.
As he talked, she quietly broke inside. Ian had kept this from her. Let her go on thinking Thomas was his slave. After all his talk of trusting?
“Why?” she asked. “Why come here pretending?”
Thomas grinned, eager, like he’d hoped she’d ask. “My daddy acted like his life started the day his master died and freed him in his will. After a time I quit asking about his slave days but I never stopped wanting to know. Couple years back I met some folk, call themselves abolitionists. It’s slavery they want to see abolished—all of it, everywhere, but especially places like right here and deeper in the South. So do I, but I needed to see for myself how bad it is—before I decided what to do about it. But I couldn’t come even this far on my own. When Ian came back from the wilds and the letter came from Hugh Cameron, I saw Providence was handing me the chance.”
Seona clenched her arms over her ribs, afraid the brokenness would cut her from the inside if she didn’t squeeze tight. The things Thomas told her that day in the herb shed after Dawes had roughed her up. Talk of running. She’d thought it was the bitterness talking, like it did for all of them when things got bad. But Thomas was no slave.
“And Ian went along with it?”
Thomas chuckled. “Not at first. He played me a game of cat and mouse from Boston nigh to Maryland. When he couldn’t shake me, he brought me along to muck it up for him. That’s my guess—though I doubt he knows it himself. Not yet.”
Seona was trying not to breathe, to keep the jagged bits inside her still. All those stories from Ian’s childhood . . . how many had he told her, all the while cutting Thomas out, careful as her mama snipping pieces for a gown?
“What did you tell Ian you meant to do?” she asked.
“Told him the truth. That I wanted to see if what I’d heard and read about slaves in the South was true. Now I’ve seen. I’m ready to act.”
So many things about Ian made better sense now. Why he let Thomas speak to him so uppity. And those lines he’d crossed with her, like he never even saw them. He’d been living a lie. He and Thomas both. Her thoughts were dazed and bruised, like her body had been after Dawes caught her under the poplar tree.
“How long has Ian been
dallying with you?” Thomas asked.
The question pulled her head up sharp. Dallying. She didn’t believe it. Not this part. “Ian loves me. He—”
“This ain’t Scotland, Seona, and bedded ain’t wedded. Not for a slave, which is what you are—in case you need reminding.”
She struck with her open palm, catching him across the mouth.
Thomas flinched. Then his eyes softened, reflecting back the hearth glow. “Reckon I deserved that. But I hate what slavery’s done to our people,” he said with renewed fervor. “To you. Making you desperate enough to trade your purity for freedom—my bones ache with hating it.”
Trading her purity. Was that what he thought she’d done?
“If it’s freedom you want, there’s other ways—without compromise.” Thomas took her by the shoulders. “There’s something you need to hear. Come with me down to the creek. He—someone’s there waiting on me.”
How many folk were creeping about Mountain Laurel this night?
“Who’s waiting? That Quaker? We know from Ally you had a white man helping you at Chesterfield.”
Thomas stepped back. “Come see. Then decide how you want to be free. It doesn’t have to be Ian’s way.”
“What about Mama?”
“I told you I’d take her, too. But you got to decide. Tonight.”
Her heart rose into her throat. If there was a chance she could see Mama free—not someday maybe, but now—along with herself, did she dare dismiss it out of hand? What harm could there be in going to see?
Wilt thou go with this man?
The question echoed in her mind, even as she nodded and Thomas smiled. And suddenly, like a random spark spit from the hearth, she remembered. Rebekah. That was the name of the girl in the story who’d said, I will go.
27
Even from a distance Ian knew the small, lumbering, high-bowed wagon for Gottfriedsen’s. With his pistol shoved into the back of his waistband, he overtook it swiftly, bringing the roan to a halt across the wagon’s path. The startled peddler jerked back on the mule’s traces. With a jangle and clank of wares, the wagon creaked to a standstill, wheels sinking into the miry clay road. The backdrop of wooded hills made the man perched on the box seem even smaller than the slight, diffident figure Ian recalled sipping tea in his aunt’s parlor.