The King's Mercy

by Lori Benton

  Elijah scowled. “Were ye there when Captain Carey had the tale from Reeves?”

  “I was.”

  “What mean ye, then? That your intended’s telling lies?”

  “He’s not my…Elijah, why would Mister Reeves lie?”

  If Elijah had an answer in mind, he didn’t share it. “Tell me what he said.”

  She clenched her teeth to stave off a return of the tears shed while listening to the overseer’s account. “Micah was gathering lightwood for the tar-burning with two others from the work gang, out near Mister Simcoe’s boundary line. Or that’s what he was meant to be doing. The other two returned without him, claiming they’d no idea where he’d gone since they’d ranged widely. Mister Reeves had the whole gang stop work to search for Micah. It took them two days scouring the woods. By then…”

  “I saw,” Elijah said, face grim.

  She hadn’t seen the body and didn’t want to imagine. “He was found on Mister Simcoe’s land. Mister Reeves has no notion whether Micah knew he’d crossed the line, though I’d think by now they’d be well acquainted with it. Do you know why he might have done so?”

  “No. Nor does Mari, in case ye mean to question her.”

  The words stung. “I’d never be so unfeeling.”

  “Joanna…” Elijah’s gaze softened. He started to reach for her but aborted the gesture, looking away from the tears she couldn’t stem.

  “Mister Reeves sent the slaves back to camp with Micah’s body,” she went on, wiping at her cheeks, “while he and Demas had a look round. They found boxing on the trees at the edge of Mister Simcoe’s land and met some of his slaves, who maintained they hadn’t done it. Papa will ride out to investigate. And he means to go downriver to Wilmington and speak with his solicitor before things get out of hand.”

  Elijah’s gaze narrowed. “All right. I expect the truth will out eventually.” He turned on his heel and went back into the smithy. She heard him speak brusquely to Mister MacKinnon.

  The hammer’s clang started again.

  * * *

  Neither Papa nor Mister Reeves thought she should attend the burial. “It’s their time to grieve,” her stepfather said. “Let them be. If David isn’t back within the hour, I’ll go myself and fetch him.”

  “They won’t want you there,” Mister Reeves said.

  Joanna didn’t heed them. She waited for a chance to slip away unnoticed, through the back hedge, past the gardens, and into the bordering peach orchard where the air was clammy on her neck, cooling from the day’s heat. Twilight had fallen by the time she reached the orchard’s far edge, bordering the burial ground. Lanterns had been lit and set between crudely marked graves, splashing light on bare feet and worn hems. The slaves had gathered round a narrow gaping in the earth into which Micah’s body had been placed. At its head stood Reverend Pauling, beside him Marigold, leaning on Azuba. Joanna remained rooted beneath the boughs, where shadows thickened.

  “They won’t want you there.”

  “They’re slaves, Joanna.”

  As she watched, Reverend Pauling stepped back from the open grave and moved to Marigold’s side to speak. Men came forward with shovels while women stood back, children clinging.

  A wail went up, unleashing a flood. The sound of abandoned grief sent shivers along Joanna’s arms. At first it was cacophonous, but after a time a rhythm formed as voices transitioned into song, the words lost to distance. The slaves milled about as they sang, filling the grave, comforting one another, swaying as they mourned. Joanna lost sight of the reverend, found him again, only it wasn’t the reverend. The shape was wrong, too thickly set. The man moved into the knot of bodies gathered around Marigold. Elijah.

  Uncertainty carved a moat around Joanna’s feet. Dared she cross it? What if she did so and Mister Reeves was proved right?

  The reverend would be her excuse. She would say she’d come for him. Grasping this thread of nerve, she left the orchard’s shelter. A few paces off to the right, another figure separated from the trees—a looming figure in a pale shirt with a stride so long it carried him swiftly to her side.

  She yelped in startlement.

  “Wheest,” Alex MacKinnon said. “Dinna let them hear ye.”

  His hand was on her shoulder, the encompassing reach of it making her feel as diminutive as Charlotte. “Mister MacKinnon. What…what are you doing?”

  “Keeping ye this side of the burying ground.”

  He stood so close she was forced to crane her neck to look into his face, what she could make of it in the dark. “Why should you?”

  “Ye’ve no business among them now, aye?”

  It was the third time she’d been told as much, and the third time was a charm—if the man’s intent was to crumble her defenses and smash all barriers of decorum. “Who are you to tell me so? You overstep your bounds, Mister MacKinnon.”

  He made no immediate response. She could see his chest expand against his pale shirtfront. Before she could think what more to say, he stepped back, dropping his hand from her.

  “Ye’re right, Mistress. I beg your pardon. Ye’ll do as ye wish.”

  Turning, he strode back into the orchard, leaving her at its edge.

  Joanna glanced at the lantern-lit mourners, then bolted into the trees, arms raised to fend off branches springing back in Alex MacKinnon’s wake. She sighted his broad shoulders catching starlight between the trees.

  “Wait…Mister MacKinnon!”

  He rounded on her so abruptly she nearly collided with him. Leafy boughs hemmed them in. His proximity, and their seclusion, set her heart to pounding.

  “Why don’t you want me to go to Mari?”

  “I wouldna want ye there, were it me laying my kin to rest not knowing by whose hand he met his death.”

  That took her aback. “Are you saying Mari blames us—Papa or Mister Reeves—for this?”

  “I canna say, Mistress.”

  He thought it, though. She heard it in his voice. Was that what Elijah thought?

  “You meant to shield me from them?”

  “Aye—and them from ye. I dinna fault ye pitying the lass, but mind who she is to ye. If ye draw lines between yourself and folk, the least ye can do is keep to your side of them.”

  Joanna flinched against the jab at that old bruise. “You’ve been here how long, Mister MacKinnon? A month? What do you know of the lines between us—Mari and me? You’re not a slave.”

  He stood silent, looking down at her, then asked, “Am I not?”

  “Indenture isn’t slavery,” Joanna maintained, hardly knowing why she argued. From within rose that vision of a life without the distinction of slave and free. Where did a man like Alex MacKinnon, not slave but not free, fall into that vision?

  “What would ye call it, then?” he asked.

  “Opportunity.” She’d snatched the first word that came to her. “I realize in your case it’s also punishment, but it’s a merciful one, isn’t it?”

  She felt his stiffening. The night’s humidity drenched her in clamminess even before Mister MacKinnon spoke again.

  “Is that what ye think?” His voice pelted like rain in the dark, though it was hardly louder than the breeze in the boughs, or the mournful singing of the slaves. “I was taken forcibly from my country, sent half a world away, and told never to return—even after I serve my sentence. Whether I manage to return despite all—and I mean to try—what I was, the life I had, is gone forever.”

  Joanna desired him to speak of that life, but couldn’t bring herself to ask, not with the loss of it thick in his voice. “Mister MacKinnon,” she began, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

  “After Culloden I was put wounded aboard ship and sent to London. There I rotted for a year with some twenty other men in another ship’s hold. I watched those men die of their wounds, of disease, hunger, desp
air—including the uncle who raised me. We suffered in more ways than I care to say, Mistress, so believe me when I tell ye that I do grasp what those slaves yonder feel—a helplessness and rage the like of which ye dinna ken. Never mind they’ve full bellies, clothes to wear, cabins to sleep in. None of it is by their choosing. Listen to them.”

  With her own heart aching, Joanna did so. The singing reached them through the trees, unadorned, uninhibited. Not even in singing her favorite hymns that week past had she lifted her voice with such fervor. That didn’t mean she hadn’t the need. Was that what had drawn her to the burial, her own need? Not to comfort Marigold but to be comforted.

  She blessed the darkness that hid her tears, until she sniffled, giving herself away.

  Mister MacKinnon’s fingers curled round her arm. His touch seared, as though he’d come straight from the forge and hadn’t been lurking on the edge of the burying ground as she had been. “I heard ye and Moon talking earlier. I ken ye care for Mari, that ye weep for her. I heard it in your voice.”

  “Mari was my companion. As Jemma was Charlotte’s.”

  “Did it end for ye and Mari as it has for those two?”

  The man was too discerning by half. “My mother died—I was twelve. I took over the running of the house and kitchen. That’s when Mari…” She couldn’t continue.

  She feared Papa would dismiss her longings for a different life without consideration, tell her she was foolish to think it possible. Would Mister MacKinnon agree, or might he know how to bring it to pass? Had his life in Scotland resembled the one she longed to live?

  His grip on her tightened. “Mistress? Are ye all right?”

  It was said so gently she’d the startling sense he was about to do what Elijah hadn’t outside the smithy—draw her into his arms. Until Reverend Pauling’s voice spoke from the darkness, practically beside her.

  “Joanna? Is that you?”

  Mister MacKinnon released her. Mortified at their discovery, she raised a hand and sought the reverend instead. “Yes, Reverend, I— Are you well?”

  Leaves rustled. A pale face emerged in the space where she and Mister MacKinnon stood embowered. Reverend Pauling grasped her reaching hand. “Forgive my interrupting. I heard your voices…”

  Joanna felt the sag in his grip, but Mister MacKinnon was faster to react, getting an arm around the reverend before he buckled. Reverend Pauling stayed on his feet but leaned into the blacksmith’s strength.

  “I believe you needn’t carry me…this time,” he said, a smile threading the exhaustion in his voice. “But an arm to lean on as we go would be welcome.”

  Despite his words, Reverend Pauling seemed near collapse, but Mister MacKinnon proved able to judge between the man’s need and dignity, finding a path between the two. He let the reverend make it to his bed on his own feet. Joanna saw him settled, aware of their blacksmith lingering in the room, gazing at the maps on the walls. The reverend lay back upon the pillow, drained as Joanna feared he would be by the evening’s exertions. He let out a long breath, closed his eyes, and drifted into needful sleep.

  Sitting on the side of the feather tick, Joanna looked up to see Alex MacKinnon gazing now at the reverend, a frown pinching his brows.

  “Thank you for your help, again.” Seeming to take her words as dismissal, he dipped his head and stepped back. Joanna stood. “I’d like to continue our conversation.”

  “Aye, Mistress. I’ll await ye in yon passage.” He bowed and left the room.

  When she turned back to the reverend, she found he wasn’t sleeping after all but regarding her through slitted eyes. “Joanna…what were you doing in the orchard with that man?”

  As she groped for answer, voices reached her from the passage. One of them was Papa’s.

  “Having my motives called into doubt,” she said, then hurried out to find Alex MacKinnon standing by the study door, Papa coming toward him wearing an expression not best pleased.

  “He’s here by my leave, Papa. He was helping…” Her words died as she registered the second man in the candlelit passage. Not Mister Reeves, as she’d assumed, but a slightly older man with a seaman’s weathered face, his dark hair touched with silver. Thom Kelly, former first lieutenant of her stepfather’s last command, now master of his second merchant ship, the one that bore her name, the Joanna.

  “Captain Kelly.” She came forward to greet him with a hand outstretched. “When did you put into port?”

  Thom Kelly took her hand as she curtsied. “We anchored at Wilmington three days ago, a fortnight ahead of schedule. Might I say you’re looking in good health, Miss Joanna. Spritely as a woodland elf with leaves in her hair.”

  “Leaves?” Reaching up to touch the portion of her hair not covered by her cap, her fingers came away not only with a leaf, but the twig to which it was attached. Blushing, she recalled the man left waiting by the study door. “Forgive me, this is Papa’s…”

  But when she turned to introduce Alex MacKinnon, the passage behind her was empty, his departure so soft-footed she hadn’t heard the door.

  13

  “Then the preacher said his piece and up start the singing, dirt rattling down, and I couldn’t bear to see poor Mari…” With the sun barely up, Jemma was nattering on about the burial, in lurid detail. Preoccupied with his own memories of the previous evening, Alex checked the forge fire.

  “Less air out of ye, mo nighean, more through the bellows, aye?”

  Perched on a block, Jemma pulled the lever, gusting air through the forge’s inner workings that flared the charcoal with a muted roar. “Then I tell Azuba, ‘Lookit—Mari gone wobble-legged!’ But afore she slumped Mister ’Lijah come out the shadows to prop her up…”

  Alex raked the charcoal, judging its heat by glow and hue. Not as expertly as Moon would have done, but Moon wasn’t in the shop. If his tidy cot was any indication, he hadn’t lain in it the night long.

  They’d gone together to the burial, but upon seeing Pauling at the grave, such bitterness had filled Alex as to render him no fit company for those who sought the reverend’s comfort. If four-and-twenty years had provided human carnage enough to glut him for a lifetime, how did a God who purportedly saw everything, for all ages, sit enthroned in heaven while men created in His image butchered one another continually? Even were Micah’s death by mischance, the man had been enslaved lifelong. How could any reasoning soul come to this place and preach of God’s goodness yet do nothing about the festering stink these planters perpetuated for their own ease and wealth?

  “Mister ’Lijah!” Jemma exclaimed. “You was up and gone afore I got here. Mister Alex ain’t said where.”

  Alex turned to see Moon striding into the smithy, clutching a bulging linen towel. He set it on the bench beneath the shutters, which Alex had opened for the day, then turned with a glare forbidding further mention of his absence. “Breakfast,” he said. “I’ll check that fire.”

  * * *

  Throughout the morning, as he tackled the mending or dressing of every axe, draw knife, plane, and adze routinely used in the cooperage, Joanna Carey troubled Alex’s thoughts. He’d been unfair, the things he’d said in the orchard. Not about the slaves spurning her presence at the burial, hard as that might be for her to swallow. But the rest. He’d taken out his anger on her when nothing about his exile, Micah’s death, or the institution her stepfather embraced were of her doing. Worse, he’d battered down the door barring her own private pain; the loss of her friendship with Marigold—an illusion of friendship to his thinking, but real to her.

  As he gripped the hammer and felt the forge’s heat, the burn of hard-worked muscles, his fingers recalled the slenderness of her arm…and he nearly missed a stroke when a voice spoke at the smithy door.

  “Elijah Moon. Have you time to greet an old comrade?”

  Startlement flared in Moon’s gaze. His features stiffened, but he
went to greet the man Alex had glimpsed last night by candlelight, up at the house. While Jemma manned the bellows, he finished hammering a chipped adze. By the time the lass climbed down and went to the water bucket, Moon and the man were deep in conversation.

  Alex took the drinking gourd from Jemma, who trotted out to the yard where it was cooler. While he drank, Alex assessed the newcomer. A man nearing forty, not tall but straight of bearing. To judge by his gaze, he was coming to grips with Moon’s disfigurement, landing between tacit sympathy and acknowledgment that the man he’d known—and valued, Alex sensed—wasn’t to be dismissed as lost.

  Moon’s posture eased. “What brings ye upriver?”

  “Aside from wanting to see you?” Beneath one arm, clamped to his side, the man carried a long bundle wrapped in canvas. This he laid on the bench, unrolling it to reveal objects Alex recognized. Marlinspikes, slightly curved in mimicry of a dagger’s blade though none so sharp, used for working heavy lines aboard ship. These were over a foot in length from tapered tip to looped handle.

  Moon leaned in to finger one. “Happen they need repair, or be ye looking to supply the Joanna?”

  “The latter, if your apprentice is up to the task.”

  Moon made introductions, after which the man, Captain Kelly, gestured at the spikes. “I’m told you’re acquainted with the use of these, MacKinnon. I’m in need of several dozen.”

  “How soon?” Alex asked.

  “With the Spaniards lurking I mustn’t let the Joanna anchor overlong. I leave tomorrow, early.”

  “Spaniards?” Alex asked.

  “Indeed,” Captain Kelly said. “They’d the temerity to sail into the mouth of the Cape Fear, just after the Charlotte-Ann’s departure in July. The militia held them in check, and they turned tail, but I doubt we’ve seen the last. So. The spikes. Think yourself equal to the task?”