by Lori Benton
He was all but certain no God existed who cared enough to grant it.
* * *
Along with those of five other Jacobites sentenced to transportation, Alex’s indenture was purchased by Roger Bingham, master of a merchant ship anchored in the Thames. The Charlotte-Ann and her cargo belonged to an Englishman in the Colony of North Carolina. One of their number, Bingham informed them, would owe his next seven years to that Englishman. The rest were Bingham’s to sell once they reached port in Wilmington.
On a morning in May, over a year since his capture, Alex was rowed out to the Charlotte-Ann. He was just turned four-and-twenty, nearly three stone underweight, with a rattle in his chest that had plagued him since the winter. The tar-laden air of the Thames was thick with the clamor of seamen and customs officials haggling and hallooing one another from shore and deck, raucous as the gulls wheeling about the forested masts. Alex eyed the lines of the vessel set to carry him across the sea. She was straight and blunt of stern, three masted, square rigged like the frigates he’d seen off Barra’s coast, the figurehead at her prow a lassie with yellow-painted hair.
Last of the indentures to board, Alex climbed the ladder to stand before the master and mate awaiting them on deck. Captain Bingham, hair clubbed back from a weathered face, had seen their bills of sale signed and locked away. Head and shoulders above the other prisoners, Alex drew stares from the crew busy about the rigging or stowing casks and crates. He made a lance of his spine, refusing to give an inch, as Bingham looked him over.
“Remind me—which are you?” Bingham’s speech was flat and faintly nasal. He’d been born, another of the Jacobites had said, in a place called Boston.
“Alastair MacKinnon,” Alex replied, with all the lilt of Barra he could infuse into the syllables.
Bingham lofted a measuring brow. “What are you, then, six inches shy of seven feet?”
“Seven inches shy, I’m told…sir.” Wind through the rigging made a riffling whine. The deck heaved under his feet. Alex closed his eyes and was back aboard his uncle’s ketch, off the coast of home. The pang of loss nearly doubled him. He opened his eyes.
Bingham stepped back, nodding to his mate. “See to their berths. Get them rations, water—and for pity’s sake, some decent clothing.”
Down into the hold they went. Not in chains or filth—or not barbaric filth. It was still a ship, cramped and dank. They’d hammocks, food enough, a ration of the rum. Whenever the seas were calm, they were permitted to walk under the sun, no more bound than was any man by prow and stern. Alex sometimes thought of the prisoners who survived the James & Mary—an outbreak of typhus after midwinter had again thinned their ranks. Of that original group that shared quarters with him and his uncle and hadn’t gone to trial, he knew of two survivors: Hugh Cameron and Archibald MacKenzie. Neither man was aboard the Charlotte-Ann.
One week out to sea, he felt strength returning. Two weeks out, four of the crew lay dying of the bloody flux, leaving Captain Bingham applying to his indentures to replace them. The chief mate, learning Alex had some acquaintance with sea-going vessels, sweetened the offer with the promise of more generous rations and a berth with the crew.
“I’ll take that offer,” Alex said. Moments later his hands were on the rigging.
It went hard those first days, rising with the watches to unaccustomed labor, but as the Charlotte-Ann cleaved the dark Atlantic, Alex found the rhythm of the work. He was hungry day and night; full sea rations weren’t enough to restore the weight he’d lost, but as his frame gradually hardened to whipcord, the rage in his soul was banked. Work filled his days, the salt air his lungs, and there were moments—watching the sun sink westward in a beribboned blaze, or the stars netting the black of night—when he recalled how freedom felt.
3
CAPE FEAR RIVER
Again restrained, Alex watched the passing riverbank. Moss-draped oaks and swampy lowland had blended with sandier soils studded with pines of a height he’d never imagined. Herons stalked the occasional mudflat in a river bend. Turtles sunned on half-submerged logs, sliding into the water as the barge passed. Once a snake, patterned in irregular bands of brown and black, came undulating through the water nearly under his nose.
Demas, lounging nearby, saw it glide beneath the brushy bank. “Evil,” he muttered, at which Phineas Reeves emerged from the cabin.
“A water viper, was it? They’re quite venomous. You may tell them from the harmless varieties by their head. Like so.” With forefingers and thumbs he shaped a triangle. “Though if you’re close enough to distinguish that, you’re likely to be struck. Or chased.”
“Chased?” Sheened with sweat though they were, Alex felt the hairs on his arms lift. “They do that?”
“Oh yes. The males along this river can be aggressively territorial.”
Reeves flashed him a grin, making Alex wonder if he’d imagined another implication in the words.
“We’ve made excellent time with the tide. With luck we’ll reach Severn before nightfall. You’ll have a proper look at the place.”
Alex shifted his gaze to the bank, wondering less about their destination than about how long it would take to acquaint himself with the perils of that alien landscape. He’d no intention of spending seven years sweltering in a smithy. Whether he signed his name in his own life’s blood mattered not. He was done keeping his word to Englishmen, or trusting a single promise out of their lying mouths.
JUNE 1747
ATLANTIC OCEAN
The sixth week out, after the Charlotte-Ann had weathered precarious seas for a night and day, Alex was on deck splicing lines in a rare moment of solitude when he grew aware of Captain Bingham come to stand near him at the rail.
“I’ve watched you, MacKinnon,” Bingham said after a silence. “You’ve sailed before—as you said.”
Alex cast aside several less gracious responses before replying, “I’ve been on the sea in boats since I can mind.”
“I cannot say the same for the other indentures.”
“Highland crofters, the lot.” Or they had been.
“Indeed,” Bingham said wryly. “Which means I’ll soon be needing crewmen. Wilmington hasn’t a port the like of Philadelphia, or even Boston. Pickings will be slim.”
Alex waited. Bingham cleared his throat. “It would seem life at sea suits you.”
“Well enough.”
“Over a life ashore?”
Alex ran a line through callused fingers as he measured his reply. “I begin to think so.”
The captain’s face creased with satisfaction. “As I’d thought. Of course the choice rests—”
The helmsman called out, pulling the captain away with the statement unfinished, leaving Alex shaking with relief. Bingham wanted him for the Charlotte-Ann. That must be what the man had meant to say. Crisscrossing the Atlantic, he would hear tidings of Scotland. Perhaps at the end of seven years he could even return to Barra. The croft by the crumble-down broch. The boat. The cows. Or whatever was left of it all.
Hope attached itself like a barnacle to his heart. Hope that he mightn’t, after all, perish in some remote corner of the world, clanless and forgotten.
He should have known better.
JULY 1747
WILMINGTON, NORTH CAROLINA
A pilot boat guided the Charlotte-Ann through the shifting sand bars guarding the Cape Fear River’s mouth before they anchored at Wilmington, thirty miles from the open sea. Alex didn’t accompany the small boats ferrying their cargo of British goods across the shallows to the quay, though he did his share of gawping. And streaming sweat. An enervating swelter blanketed the Carolina coast. Biting pests swarmed the air, thick as the forest rising behind the town. The timber structures comprising it looked vulnerable to Alex’s eyes, as though any moment the forest might rise and swallow it whole. He hailed from a world of open sk
ies and far horizons, and he didn’t like the look of the place. As often as his work above deck allowed, he put his back to that hemming wall of green, thankful he need never set foot therein.
The day passed, crewmen mingling with merchants coming and going from the commission houses. Toward evening a man boarded the Charlotte-Ann, little distinguished from those seen throughout the day. Alex was about to dismiss him when a second figure ascended the ladder behind him. A few enslaved Africans had come aboard the Charlotte-Ann during the day. After the first, Alex had ceased to gawk, but he couldn’t help doing so now. The man was a giant, as tall as Alex but easily two stone heavier than he’d weighed before Culloden, not an ounce of it spare. The African stood aloof while the rest of the indentured Jacobites were assembled for the white man’s inspection. Assuming him the ship’s owner, Alex turned back to his work, reassured when Bingham didn’t call him into line. He didn’t see the incongruous pair leave, nor which of his fellow Scots he took with him. By the morrow’s close the hold would be filled with tar, shingles, hides, corn—the trade stuffs of the Carolinas. The following day they would set sail again, bound for Kingston.
In lifting spirits as twilight settled, Alex allowed himself to be distracted by the appearance of tiny yellow-green lights winking like faeries cavorting on the riverbank. Hundreds of them.
“Fireflies,” a seaman named them. It was the first thing about the place he’d found remotely charming.
He went to his berth at the end of his watch, prepared to endure another stifling, muggy night, but was barely asleep when he roused to voices. Rough hands gripped him in his hammock.
“You coming with us now,” said a cavernous voice, deep as the darkness.
The hammock tipped. He landed with his feet on the deck but staggered. “What?”
“You sold, man,” said the voice, disembodied in the dark but belonging, Alex sensed, to the owner of the hands still gripping him. “Bound upriver.”
He’d barely time to tense when a second set of hands took hold of him. Lashing out, he knocked them away. Others took their place. He was manhandled onto the deck, where the smell of salt marsh and rotting fish congested the soupy air. A lantern sprang to light. Before him was the man he’d taken for the ship’s owner earlier in the day, thin-faced, dark-browed. One set of hands grasping him, he now saw, were the size of dinner plates, black against his flesh.
Bingham was there, resignation in his gaze. Sick with understanding, Alex leveled a glare that made the captain step back. Then it was an all-out fight for his freedom. Or he’d meant it to be. In truth he never tore himself free of the giant African’s grip.
“Settle him, Demas,” said a mild English voice, threaded with a ribbon of mirth. “No lasting damage.”
A force like a hammer’s blow slammed Alex’s head. This time he never felt the deck that broke his fall.
* * *
Reeves called it the Big House. White and columned, two stories tall, Severn’s main dwelling was large enough his uncle’s croft might have fit within its walls five, maybe six times, with as many stacked atop. It was set back from the river by a sloping lawn, down which a walkway descended to one of the more substantial docks Alex had seen. The boatmen poled the flatboat past it into the wide mouth of a full-flowing creek.
Moments later they emerged from crowding woods to another dock. They’d rounded the Big House and were behind it now, where spread a veritable village of smaller structures. Alex had barely time to cast his gaze across the sprawl before a shout arose and the place erupted like an anthill overturned. Men, women, and children converged on the bank, dark faces contrasting with unbleached cloth shirts and short gowns. As fast as the boatmen unloaded casks, crates, and sacks, the people shouldered them away, chattering in accents difficult to grasp. Smells of cookery hung on the hot, heavy air. At midday he’d been given something called pone, a crumbly cornmeal bread. The sun was low in the west now, his head ached, and he was ravenous.
Demas gave a push as he stood to disembark. Hands bound, Alex half-stumbled onto the dock, catching the attention of those nearby. Bruised, blood-stained, sunburnt, clad in ragged breeches, he ignored the stares and followed Reeves up the crushed shell lane from the dock.
Reeves’s glance fell across the ogling slaves, alighting upon a young woman, slender and graceful as a deer. “Mari, bring enough supper to the smithy for two.”
Though its cast was foreign to Alex’s eyes, no man could mistake her face for anything but beautiful. She gaped at him, dark eyes wide with fear. “Yes, Mister Reeves.”
She hurried down a path, leaving Alex wondering, did he look that terrifying? Or had the lass’s gaze flicked away before it showed fear to the hulking slave who shadowed him?
They escorted him past gardens set well back from the Big House, past curious elders who paused their weeding to stare, knobby hands gripping hoes. Alex locked his gaze on the tail of Reeves’s hair curling below his cornered hat.
The overseer led him to a brick building, high-roofed but single-storied. Inside, the air was stale with the charcoal smell of a smithy, though the forge with its massive brick chimney stood cold. From rafters and walls hung all manner of worked iron, at least near the doorway where light spilled. Shadows crowded thick beyond. As Alex sidestepped a massive blocked stump topped with a broad anvil, the earthen floor heaved, or seemed to. He found his balance while Reeves strode confidently into the murky shop. As his eyes adjusted, across the space Alex saw an interior wall, rough-timbered, containing a doorway. Reeves halted before it.
“We’ve the new indenture, Moon. Come see to him. I’m off to fetch Captain Carey.” Movement in the shadows to the left, in the main shop, made Reeves pivot. “There you are.” He inhaled deeply, as one testing the air. “And sober? Excellent.”
At first the movement in the dimness held no form, as if the shadow itself had shifted. The shadow took a man’s shape, not tall but strongly built through the shoulders and chest. As the figure emerged into light cast by the doorway, shock coursed along Alex’s spine. Pity skittered in its wake.
“What good does sitting in the dark? You cannot hide forever.” Reeves found flint and striker and soon had a candle lit. He dipped it to a second, both in pewter dishes. “Elijah Moon, I present Alex MacKinnon, late of His Majesty’s custody. He’s a Scotsman but he speaks the king’s English—after a fashion.”
Reeves moved toward the door, pausing to address Alex. “Supper will be along. Don’t eat Moon meantime, if you can help it. You’re going to need him.”
Demas departed on the overseer’s heels, leaving Alex alone with, he presumed, Severn’s former blacksmith. Elijah Moon might have had thirty years on him, no more. He’d a full head of hair, light brown, untailed and tangled. His face had probably been well made in a rough-cut way. Difficult to judge with the livid scars of recently healed burns rippling down the right side of it. They didn’t mar his nose or mouth, and his eye appeared undamaged, but the reddened twists of flesh continued downward to vanish beneath the open neck of his shirt, the right sleeve of which ended in a knot where a hand ought to have been.
Alex looked up from that gaping loss. Beneath level brows pulled tight, the man’s eyes were a piercing blue, staring back with resentment, and raw despair.
“He called ye MacKenzie?” Moon’s voice was gruff, an accent less refined than Reeves’s. A Cornishman, perhaps.
“No. MacKinnon.”
Moon grunted acknowledgment, then circled behind Alex. A tug, then his bonds fell away. The relief was immense. So was his puzzlement.
“D’ye not fear I’ll abscond with myself before this Captain Carey gets a look at me?”
Moon stepped away, a knife tucked under his maimed arm. “Reeves will have set his watchdog on the door.” He gestured with a bristled chin at a smaller block stump by the forge.
Alex folded himself onto the crude seat. His hea
d throbbed from Demas’s settling of the night before, compounded by a day of battering sun. The skin across his shoulders prickled. His bruises ached. The dirt floor lifted and fell like a ship at anchor.
Moon crossed to a bank of shuttered windows, below which ran a workbench hung with tools. “I was heating a bar,” he said, answering the question Alex hadn’t dared to ask—brusquely, as if desiring to have done with it. “I pumped the bellows hard and the forge just…exploded.”
Wondering under what circumstances a forge might explode, Alex examined the chimney rising to the roof, the hearth and long bricked counter. Evidence of repair met his gaze.
The forge had been easier to mend than the man. Silence weighed heavier than the iron strewn about. Though banked, Moon’s grief and rage weighed heavier still. His might have been one of the suffering faces Alex had carried with him from the James & Mary. Faces of men who, in a way that galled him still with failure, had been his to keep, his to protect, though not a one had asked it of him.
They weren’t his now. Neither was this man.
At the crush of footsteps in the yard, he gathered himself to rise with what dignity his present state allowed to meet the man intending to be his master.
Only it was a woman who entered the smithy, and not the slave called Mari. She was white, barely more than a lass, dressed in a gown of buttery gold. An apron fronted it, fancifully embroidered for a servant, he thought. But he’d no notion of the actual wealth of Edmund Carey or what manner of servants the man possessed, aside from the slaves he’d seen. Her light brown hair appeared abundant, though a prim cap covered most of it. The color of her eyes was lost in the candlelight, but she’d a pretty mouth, gracefully bowed. And she bore a tray. Gripping it, she halted in the doorway as though surprised by the sight of him. She swung a look at Moon, who scowled at the tray.