by Lori Benton
The going was steep, slick in spots. Ian had only half his mind on where he placed his boots. The other half wandered a more treacherous path, racing ahead to where the creek led: home, eventually, where Judith and Naomi were probably at work in the warmth of the kitchen, spared by last year’s fire. Between him and that snug refuge was the hollow, bowered in white-limbed birches, with the stream plunging in its glassy fall. And the memories, waiting to ensnare. All these months he’d stayed away. He’d been faithful to Judith. Strong . . .
Not strong enough. He ought to have accepted the invitation, gone with John into that spacious barn where the man taught from Scripture of a Sunday. He might have unburdened his heart to his friend, who knew Ian as well as he knew himself. Better, Ian sometimes thought. Had John seen into his soul, back at the digging—seen his growing unrest?
It was the silence undoing him. He’d had so little news—just the one letter from Catriona, his younger sister, to say that Lily, Seona, and his son, Gabriel, had reached Boston safely and been given shelter in the Camerons’ home on Beachum Lane, in Boston’s North End. He’d written back, addressing the letter to his father, enclosing what he could by way of provision for their keeping. That had been a year ago.
He’d reminded himself no further news was promised, that he’d asked for none, yet the longer the silence stretched, the harder it grew not to fill every idle moment with wondering. Did Seona, once his uncle’s slave—and granddaughter—find life with his family agreeable? Insupportable? If the latter, had she and Lily found a place in Boston for themselves? How were they living? Was Gabriel well, warm, full-bellied? Was Seona . . . ?
He would go to the birch hollow, where he and Seona had been handfast in the old Scots tradition—married in his eyes, if not legally. A glimpse was all he needed. He wouldn’t linger, he told himself, grasping at a stony outcrop to lower himself down the steep bank. He’d just pass through and—
His boot came down on a moss-slick stone and shot from under him. Next he knew he lay sprawled among jumbled rocks, scraped and bruised, mud and moss smeared down the half of him, snow falling cold on his upturned face.
He sat up too quickly, yelping as pain shot through his right knee, twisted in the fall.
With the help of the stones that had bruised him, he pushed himself to his feet. His hands were scraped. The point of one shoulder ached. The knee was wrenched but could bear a little weight, though he hissed through his teeth at the first step. He hobbled to where his hat had fallen, shook it free of snow, shoved it back on his head.
He’d never make it down the steep drop into the hollow now. Relief swept him as he stood in the sifting snow, breathing the cold, listening to the ice-edged creek chattering along, oblivious to his small drama. Relief, and on its heels, a wash of shame. He closed his eyes against the throb of his knee, the sharper ache of his heart.
“All right then,” he said. “I’ll go home by the straighter way.”
As expected, he found the women in the whitewashed kitchen house. Judith, slicing carrots at the worktable, looked up at the gust of cold he ushered in, expression caught between dismay and amusement as she took in the sight of him. “What on earth does John Reynold have you doing, Ian? Digging a new privy?”
He’d brushed the worst of the mud from his coat and hands but knew his foolishness had created more work for his wife. Even with Naomi doing most of the kitchen work and a share of the laundering, Judith was worn to exhaustion most days with a small child to tend, the endless task of keeping their household clean and dry.
“Nothing like that,” he said, hoping to stave off curiosity; neither Judith nor Naomi knew of the gold. “I took a wee tumble on my way home, is all.”
The half-truth made the blood burn in his face, which he hoped the kitchen’s dimness concealed. Not for the secret of the gold he was keeping, but the deeper secret he wished he could keep even from himself. He’d grown lax in his vigilance, let down his mental guard too often of late. It was a constant war he waged in the unquiet of his heart.
Gabriel. He would never cease thinking of him, longing for him, loving him. But to think of his son was to think of his son’s mother. He wanted to do right by Judith, to be a man of honor—worthy of the love she had for him. To be the man she saw when she looked at him, as she was looking at him now.
Naomi broke the silence, standing before the massive brick hearth, shielding its flame from the gusting air, one sturdy arm encircling his daughter, Miranda, who rode her broad hip. “Mister Ian, come you all in or go back out. You letting in cold.”
Judith looked past him, her expression changing to one of mild alarm. “It’s snowing? I’ve wash on the line.”
Ian took a step inside the warm kitchen and shut the door but knew as soon as he turned, his wife had seen his limp.
“You’re hurt.” Judith put down knife and carrot and rounded the worktable, long skirts swishing. “Sit by the fire and let me see.”
She grasped his muddy sleeve, but he pulled it gently free. “Knee’s a bit bruised. Nothing to tend. Sorry about the coat.”
She blinked but nodded. “I need to get that wash off the line before it’s soaked again—or frozen. I can take your coat to the washhouse.”
“No, I’ve work to do in the barn. I’ll let the mud dry and brush it off there.”
He’d only meant to save her the work, but she searched his face, uncertain, as if she sensed his guilt—deeper than that over a muddied coat. He avoided her gaze, glancing back at her only when she looked away, covering her hesitation with a smile that made her plain face pretty.
“Well then . . .” She turned to Naomi. “I’ll take Mandy so you can make some headway with supper.”
Once Judith wrapped herself in a woolen shawl, Naomi handed over the child. “Your mama gonna let you ride the toting basket, baby girl. You like that, don’t you?” Naomi skimmed a fingertip under Mandy’s chin, making her giggle.
Ian’s sense of guilt receded with the sound. It was early days for telling, but so far it seemed Mandy hadn’t taken much from him in coloring. Not the eyes, tea-brown and clear like Judith’s, instead of his blue. Nor the hair. Mandy sported a cap of light-brown wisps, darker than his own wheat-gold shade, though now and then in sunlight he’d caught a hint of russet in the brown and wondered would her hair be like his sister’s.
Mandy’s head was covered now in a knit bonnet pulled snug to her plump little cheeks and solemn eyes that seemed always to be searching for something or someone. Now they fastened on him. She leaned out from Judith’s arms, reaching, showing tiny new teeth behind drooling, rosebud lips. For a moment the empty places in Ian’s heart were filled. “I’d take ye to the barn, sweeting, but I’m too filthy to be toting ye around.”
Judith jiggled the child, then pressed her head to Mandy’s so they were cheek to cheek. “Look at your daddy. Isn’t he a sight? You’d think he was six instead of six-and-twenty.”
She tucked a fold of her shawl around their daughter’s small form and took her out through the door that opened to the herb shed at the back of the kitchen. Lily’s old domain. Mandy didn’t fuss but blinked at Ian over Judith’s shoulder until the door closed between them.
He hadn’t read his daughter’s gaze but had seen the tiredness in his wife’s. And the love. The one caused him no end of worry, the other no end of astonishment. Both brought him often to his knees before the Almighty, humbled, beseeching.
“Supper ain’t for a spell, Mister Ian. You want something to tide you afore you go down to Ally at the barn?”
Since the big house had burned a little over a year past—the day of Mandy’s birth—the kitchen had become the heart of Mountain Laurel. They all ate there now, he, Judith and Mandy, and Naomi, Ally, and Malcolm. Yet Ian could never think of this space with its hanging strings of onions and peppers, its perpetual smell of smoke and herbs and grease, its gleaming copper and oiled cast iron, as anything but Naomi’s personal kingdom, where she presided in her calico crown.
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He told her he could wait for supper. “Is Malcolm at the barn with Ally?”
“Last I knew that’s where Daddy went.” Naomi had taken over chopping the carrots. Potatoes lay in a heap next to the cutting board. It looked to be a vegetable stew for supper. They were low on meat save for the hams, bacon, and sausage put up in the smokehouse, which they were rationing with care. He needed to take a leaf out of Charlie Spencer’s book, bring in some venison.
“Guess I’ll head on down. I need to work with Juturna,” he added, speaking of the two-year-old filly born days after he’d arrived at Mountain Laurel to take up his uncle’s offer of becoming his heir. A lifetime ago, it seemed.
“You gonna work that filly in this snow?”
“Ye’ve never seen Boston. This little skiff isn’t a proper snow.”
Naomi scooped up a double handful of carrots and dumped them in a pot of water. “Reckon that’s so, seeing as I ain’t been more’n five miles off this farm in my lifetime.”
Her words sent a stab through Ian. Guilt of another kind. He’d never grown easy with his uncle’s owning of slaves. That he owned this woman now, and her kin, was a fact he could never reconcile. “Would ye like to?”
The question surprised them both. Naomi turned from the hearth, eyes rounded, eyebrows nigh vanished beneath her head wrapping. “Take myself off someplace new? Not if it means leaving my menfolk behind. Who’d look after them—you and Miss Judith, too—did I go traipsin’ off to see the wide world?”
“Aye. There’s that.” He tried to chuckle, but the sound fell flat; he’d gone and done it, let himself be blindsided with a longing for his own mother in Boston. For his father, his sister. His son and . . . He jerked his head to drive away thoughts of Seona for the hundredth time that day.
Naomi hadn’t moved the pot over the flames. “You ain’t had but the one letter from your sister.”
“No,” he said.
Naomi waited a beat, then turned her back to swing the pot on its crane, but she got the last word in, loud enough for Ian to hear as he reached for the door.
“It gonna help things, we all pretend they never drew breath here?”
He woke in the dark, disturbed by a sound, thinking it only moments since he’d lain down to sleep. Or was it late into the morning? Had he overslept and left Ally to tend the stock alone?
The sound came again, one of strain and illness. He turned over and pushed up on an elbow. His wife knelt beside the bed, vomiting into the chamber pot. Moonlight slanted through the room’s single window. The clouds had cleared, the snow gone away eastward. A feeble light came from the dying fire in the hearth of the old overseer’s cabin, where he and Judith had lived since the fire. The cold air smelled of sick.
Ian waited while Judith covered the pot and moved to the basin, washed, then came silently back to their bed. Across the chilled sheets he reached for her, sick himself with knowing.
“How far along are ye?” he asked, softly so he wouldn’t wake their daughter, asleep in her cradle at the foot of their bed.
“I didn’t mean to wake you.” Her voice was small in the winter dark.
“How far, Judith?”
“Three months . . . I think.”
He thought over that in silence. Three months would make it . . . June. If she carried this one full term. She’d been carrying again two months after Mandy’s birth but lost the baby in late spring. He’d mourned the tiny girl they’d named Elizabeth, as he’d dug another grave on the ridge beside his resting kin.
“I didn’t want to say ’til I was sure.” That she wouldn’t lose it. The bedtick rustled as she turned toward him. “Ian . . . are you pleased?”
A tightness gripped his throat. “Aye, of course.” He found her brow in the darkness and kissed it, nose pressed against her ruffled cap. “Try and sleep a bit longer.”
Ignoring his own advice, he lay thinking over all he needed to do, wondering if he ought to head for the barn, whatever the hour. Beside him Judith’s breathing deepened. He thought her asleep until she spoke again, voice barely a whisper.
“It’ll be all right. I’m not afraid.”
Which of them she sought to comfort, he couldn’t have said.
A Note from the Author
Once upon a time, somewhere in the American colonies, someone chose to aid an escaped slave along the road to freedom. Perhaps he hid the fugitive in his barn. She might have offered food or told of a friend, miles to the north, willing to shelter the runaway for the night. Maybe he just turned a blind eye when the laws of the day dictated otherwise. Whoever was the first to aid a runaway slave, by the mid-1800s an organized network of such people extended from the southern United States into Canada. My research into the grassroots beginning of what would become the Underground Railroad uncovered many compelling characters who played a part in ending slavery, one man, woman, or child at a time. Levi and Vestal Coffin, North Carolina Quakers, established the earliest known system for conveying fugitives north to the free states. Josiah Henson, once a slave in Maryland, became a conductor for other fleeing slaves. Giles Pettibone, justice of the peace and state assemblyman, helped hide a family of slaves for weeks. Isaac Hopper, a tailor’s apprentice in Philadelphia, assisted the first of many fugitives to freedom with directions to a sympathetic Quaker’s house. They and many others merit further study. Toward that end I recommend Fergus M. Bordewich’s Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Movement.
Narratives such as that of ex-slave Olaudah Equiano, which inspired the character of Thomas Ross to put feet to his convictions, began appearing in print in the mid-eighteenth century and continued to be published throughout the antebellum period, educating white Americans and persuading them of slavery’s cruelties and horrors and its immorality as a system. “Argument provokes argument, reason is met by sophistry. But narratives of slaves go right to the hearts of men,” wrote a northern reviewer of a slave narrative in 1849. Hearts as well as laws must change in the face of such an entrenched evil as slavery. Individual slave narratives like Equiano’s played their part in affecting that change.
The main setting of this story, a range of mountains considered the oldest in North America, ancient, worn, isolated in the central Piedmont—called the Carraways on my mid-1700s map of North Carolina—today encompass the Uwharrie (yoo-WAH-ree) National Forest, the Birkhead Mountains Wilderness, and other recreational areas. During my childhood a family acquaintance lived on the edge of this landscape, near the town of Asheboro, North Carolina. After I set eyes on the collection of arrowheads and knapped stone chips his tractor turned up each spring in the long furrows of his garden, he let me do some digging of my own. I spent an enjoyable few hours in the pursuit, never knowing I was unearthing—in the very soil the plows of Mountain Laurel might have turned—the seeds of a novel I’d one day write.
While I didn’t find any gold nuggets, Ally’s discovery of the shiny yellow rock he gave to Seona, and which Lucinda Cameron subsequently identified, is not a far-fetched story element. The first documented gold discovery in the Unites States occurred in 1799 in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, five years after and fifty miles southwest of Mountain Laurel’s setting. A boy, Conrad Reed, spied a shiny yellow rock like Ally’s in a stream on his family’s farm—only Conrad’s rock weighed seventeen pounds. The family used it as a doorstop until, in 1802, a Fayetteville jeweler recognized it for gold. It was worth over $3,500. Gold was eventually discovered in the Carraways/Uwharries as well. Along with the remnants of old homesteads, mining sites mark these ridges and hollows today. In the pages of this novel I’ve imagined how it might have been if gold were discovered there in the 1790s and its existence carefully guarded. Who can say such a thing never happened? History is full of secrets.
A brief note concerning anachronisms—something out of its proper or chronological order. For the sake of verisimilitude, I avoid anachronisms in my stories. My editors help me greatly with this beca
use despite due diligence, they still slip in, usually in the form of language, words that had their verifiable origins later than the story’s setting. However, there is an anachronism in Mountain Laurel that I included intentionally. One of the songs sung by Mountain Laurel’s enslaved people, at the clearing on the ridge, had a date of origin later than the last decade of the eighteenth century. Its first line, “Jesus Christ is made to me all I need,” said exactly what I wanted to convey in that moment of Ian Cameron’s spiritual journey. This is a work of historical fiction; the choice between Ian’s journey and precise historical accuracy was an easy one to make.
Speaking of historical accuracy, it’s often impossible to trace a novel’s development back to the initial spark that ignited it, but in the case of Mountain Laurel that moment remains vivid in my memory. In the late 1990s I read a novel by Diana Gabaldon, set in 1760s North Carolina. In the novel a minor character—an enslaved young man on a plantation who appeared in just a few scenes—left an indelible impression on me. Having grown up living with a family of Scottish immigrants, hearing that manner of speech, he spoke with a Scottish accent too, though his ancestors were African. Having not yet begun my own writing sojourn into the eighteenth century, I asked Diana whether this character was purely her own creation or she’d found evidence of someone like him in her research. (It proved the latter, and I read the source for myself.) Along with a few other factors, that unusual historical tidbit sparked my interest in the eighteenth century and my storyteller’s imagination and eventually led to my writing Mountain Laurel. But before I had crafted more than the faintest outlines of a story, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and stopped writing altogether. After a six-month battle with cancer and a much longer one with chemo fog, I finally felt ready to write again (not able exactly, just ready). The story that was calling to me was the one sparked into being after reading Diana’s book.