The King's Mercy

by Lori Benton

  A frown troubled the smooth spot between her brows. “Have you spoken to her?”

  “She’s clammed up tight about it.” At her look of disappointment, he unbent enough to ask, “Is it Demas ye’re worried about? Is that the quarrel between ye and Reeves?”

  Joanna sighed. “Yes and no—to both questions.”

  He’d no idea what she meant. “Did ye resolve the matter?”

  “Yes. And no.” She gave him a wry look, then a hopeful one. “On the surface it would seem resolved but…may I be honest with you?”

  A man could drown in those sea eyes. “Aye,” he said warily. “Ye may.”

  Up rose that pretty flush as her lashes fluttered. Not playing the coquette—he doubted she knew how—but with shyness. Above the bodice of her gown her chest swelled as she breathed, the skin there smooth and white, dewed with the faintest sheen. He lifted his gaze to her eyes. Had they always been rimmed in a darker blue? Leaning closer, he saw the brown that flecked their centers; between the blue and brown, every shade of gray and green imaginable. He could stare at them as he once had the sea…

  Only the sea never noticed his staring, as she clearly had. Hastily he straightened, putting a few more inches between them.

  “Mister Reeves apologized,” she said, “but I don’t know whether to appease me for the sake of peace or if he really understands my perspective on…things,” she concluded, with a lift of her hand toward the outbuildings busy with the labor of slaves.

  “Have ye spoken to your stepfather yet?”

  She shook her head. “I mean to once he’s home.”

  He ran his bottom lip between his teeth, debating the wisdom of engaging her on the subject, but he was curious about a thing. “Should he consent to the notion, how would ye go about setting them all free? Are there laws to govern such things in this colony?”

  It seemed a thing she hadn’t yet given thought to. “I expect there must be. Papa will know.”

  “I’m sure he will.” If Edmund Carey was unlikely to embrace her notions, Alex had no doubt what Reeves would say. The man evidenced not a shred of the fellow feeling Joanna showed those beneath her in station. Was there a way for her hopes to be realized?

  He caught himself, too late. Something was shifting in his heart, making room for this woman and her concerns, as it had for Moon, for Jemma. What was it about her that had awakened this urge he longed to deny, more so than even Moon had done? “Ye’ve always had that about ye, a need for a purpose beyond yourself. ’Tis the Almighty knit ye so.”

  Rory MacNeill’s words, spoken in the dark as death hovered.

  He was still in the dark, but he’d seen in Joanna a light, a spark of that same defining quality. It made him want to shrink away from it—and rush to it to share in its warmth.

  He knew stepping between her and Reeves would do him no good. Still, he asked, “How much control has Reeves over Demas?”

  Another furrowing of her brow. “I wish I knew. I’ve wondered why Papa even allows—” Thunder broke like a whip’s cracking, cutting off her words. On its heels a breeze gusted, drawing their gazes westward.

  The distant line of clouds had altered most dramatically. Coming toward them swiftly now was the most ominous storm front Alex had ever seen—he who’d grown to manhood on Barra, witness to countless storms advancing upon the isles. While they’d been speaking, the approaching clouds had thickened, forming a shelf that stretched as far as Alex could see, the leading edge turned a sinister gray, dangling tendrils like groping fingers, feeling its way forward. Beneath it swept a curtain of rain and wind that bent the lofty tops of the pines.

  “Look at that, Joanna. Have ye seen its like?”

  “I have,” she said, voice small beside him. “The day after my mother died.” A raindrop struck the earth beyond the oak’s shelter. Thunder rolled, deep and deafening. In the pasture the horses were coming in briskly to the stable. “Alex, don’t stay beneath this tree.”

  Joanna scurried away from it herself, leaving him with the hairs on his arms rising, the breeze drying the sweat on his skin. He followed her, half-thinking to call out, ask her to wait out the storm in the smithy so they might talk as she’d wanted.

  She was already passing it, and there was Moon come to the doorway. Joanna didn’t slow. Moon turned a glower on him as he ducked within, head and shoulders wet with rain. The smithy was empty, save for the two of them. “Where’s Jemma?”

  “Asleep on your cot.” Rain drummed on the ground outside. Moon went to close the shutters. “What did ye say to vex Joanna?”

  “Has she need of something more to vex her this day?”

  Moon turned on him an unreadable look before the light in the smithy dimmed with the windows’ shuttering. “A black day in more ways than one. At least it seems the heat will break.”

  The breeze from the dooryard was cooler than anything Alex had felt since his arrival on that shore.

  Jemma slept through rising wind, drumming rain, even the thunder’s booming. Moon was in a blacker mood. It occurred to Alex he’d known Kelly longer than anyone else at Severn, save perhaps Edmund Carey.

  “Was Thom Kelly part of Carey’s crew when ye joined the navy?”

  “He hadn’t been for long.” Seated on his stool in the shadows, Moon drank from his flask, then offered it to Alex, who took a swallow before handing it back. The liquid burned its way down his throat as he watched the rain fall beyond the smithy door.

  “What of Miss Joanna and Kelly? Were they friends?”

  “Why do ye ask?”

  “Because she’s grieving and…who’s to comfort her?”

  Moon took a drink. “Joanna’s used to dispensing the comfort.”

  Alex took a moment to compose his next question. “D’ye think folk hereabouts see her as fully a person?”

  Moon shot him a blank look. “What does that even mean?”

  “She’s unusual for a mistress, d’ye not think? One with the heart of a servant, always tending to the needs of everyone around her. Dispensing the comfort.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Did I say was anything wrong?”

  “No.” Moon gazed at the flask, slump-shouldered. The fight drained from his voice. “All I ever wanted was to serve. To be of use.”

  “What d’ye think ye’re doing with me?”

  Moon’s head lifted. “This won’t last. One day ye’ll know all ye need to. But if I’m to go on…” Before Alex could seek to clarify the unfinished statement, Moon’s gaze shifted to the forge that had betrayed him. “Think ye that a man can remake himself?”

  “It’s what I’m forced to do.”

  “Ye’re a whole man, with two hands to serve ye. Bend a little, bear the seven years with patience, ye’ll be free to go or stay as ye will. But where can I go? What man would give me work?”

  “I heard Carey tell ye there’s no reason ye canna stay, if that’s what ye want.”

  “And be of what use?” Moon crossed to the scrap heap, knelt, and fingered a piece of cast-off iron. He swiveled to look at Alex. “Ye know well enough by now how a thing broken can be remade. Iron from a splintered wagon wheel shaped, hardened into an axe blade, that blade when it’s worn into something else. How many times, though, can that iron be pounded and reshaped before it grows brittle and crumbles to nothing?”

  “That,” Alex said, “ye’ll ken better than I.”

  Moon stood, facing him with the rain battering the yard. “I cannot slip my chains, MacKinnon. I’m more surely bound by this”—he held up his mutilated wrist—“than ye with your king’s mercy.”

  17

  OCTOBER—NOVEMBER 1747

  Reverend Pauling’s letter reached them in October, carried downriver on a barge bound from Cross Creek, addressed from a backcountry plantation near a river called the Yadkin. The rever
end wrote of the planter, Duncan Cameron, a reclusive Scotsman who permitted no language but Gaelic to be spoken in his presence.

  “Everyone has to speak it?” Charlotte asked.

  “Apparently, though it seems this Mister Cameron makes an exception for traveling clergy. He allowed Reverend Pauling to preach to his slaves, so they can speak English, just not in his hearing.” Of more interest to Joanna was the mention of the overseer the eccentric planter had recently acquired, also surnamed Cameron:

  They met in Wilmington. Upon discovering the younger Cameron, Hugh by name, could speak Gaelic, the elder Cameron insisted Hugh accompany him to Mountain Laurel, his plantation. The Situation of the place is unique, nestled among wooded Ridges quite steep, though I should not call them Mountains being many miles still from the high blue Peaks to the west.

  The reverend described Mountain Laurel in some detail before returning to the subject of Joanna’s interest:

  I have learned that Hugh Cameron is but recently arrived in the colony. While not admitting to taking part in the Jacobite Rising lately extinguished, much less to having been a Prisoner of the Crown, a certain light in his eyes at my mention of Alex MacKinnon leads me to surmise your Scotsman may be acquainted with this one.

  Eager to inquire, Joanna chose a moment when the clanging from the smithy stopped to head in that direction under a sky of autumn blue, the reverend’s letter in hand. Alex and Jemma were alone when she entered the smithy, having abandoned anvil and bellows for their dinner. Both looked up when she entered, Alex with a cup to his lips. He set it down and stood, surprise shifting to a look so quickly smothered Joanna would have thought she’d imagined it, but for her own stomach-dropping response.

  He was glad, maybe even relieved, to see her.

  She hadn’t spoken to him since that September day by the pasture fence, when the storm rolled in. In that time Papa had returned from Wilmington, grieved by Captain Kelly’s death, disheartened by the Joanna’s loss, mired in a mood she’d known blacker only once. She’d yet to broach the subject she’d twice now spoken of with their blacksmith. While she longed for a life that didn’t include such rigorous trade across oceans—and the need for slaves to facilitate it—she’d wanted the divesting of their ships to be by choice, carefully executed, so the proceeds could be used in other ways. Such as providing for the slaves she longed to see manumitted.

  At least she might bear good news for one soul on that plantation. “I’ve a letter from Reverend Pauling.”

  Jemma swallowed a mouthful. “Where he writing from, Miss Joanna?”

  “North Carolina still, a place in the backcountry called Mountain Laurel.” She swung her gaze back to Alex, who, though still appearing pleased to see her, seemed to regard the letter she bore with some misgiving. “He writes of a newly hired man there, a young Scotsman called Hugh Cameron. Might you know him?”

  Misgiving yielding to startled interest, Alex said, “Aye, I kent a man by the name. Does Pauling say more of him?”

  Joanna, flushed with gratification, read aloud the part pertaining to the Camerons, then glanced up to judge his expression. Pleased, intrigued, yet with a distance of memory in his gaze.

  “It could verra well be him, though I’d thought he was indentured—most of us kept at Tilbury were.”

  “What’s Tilbury?” Jemma asked, the very question in Joanna’s mind.

  “A place in London they put traitors to the Crown,” he told her, glancing at Joanna as he did so, as if recalling their conversation out by the pasture fence. “How far is this Mountain Laurel? From here, I mean.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Cross Creek is maybe fifty, sixty miles upriver. Mountain Laurel is farther still—overland, it seems. Near the Yadkin River, the reverend wrote.”

  Alex’s gaze sharpened. “Have ye a notion where that river may be?”

  “No. Perhaps one of Papa’s maps shows it. You should come for another book.”

  “Aye. Maybe. Thank ye for bringing me word.”

  He was smiling softly, the tilted curve of his mouth holding her gaze. “Shall I write to the reverend, in case he lingers at Mountain Laurel? Bid him tell the man of your connection?”

  “If ye wouldna mind the trouble.”

  Those blue eyes pulled at her. “It’s no trouble,” she said, and had to look away again. Jemma was watching them. “I should let you return to your dinner.”

  She’d eaten hers with Charlotte, alone in their room save for the Annas. She, Charlotte, and Papa hadn’t sat down to a formal meal together since his return from Wilmington. Each day she asked Mister Reeves, who was permitted into Papa’s room of a morning to discuss business, whether to expect him at table that evening. Always the answer was a sad shake of head. “I doubt it, Miss Carey.”

  She was turning to leave when Alex said, “I havena seen your stepfather since his return. Have ye had opportunity to speak with him?”

  Joanna turned back, reading the unspoken communication in his gaze, what he wouldn’t say in front of Jemma. Had they spoken of her hopes for Severn’s future?

  “I’ve barely seen him. It’s hard to know how much to intrude when he doesn’t leave his room.”

  “I’d heard he’d taken the losses hard, but he hasna come out in a fortnight?”

  “That ain’t long, not for Master Carey,” Jemma interjected but promptly clamped her lips shut as though remembering it was Joanna there with them.

  “That’s true,” she said, and watched Jemma relax, realizing she wasn’t to be scolded. “Jemma, how is it with you? Are you getting along all right here in the smithy?”

  “Yes ma’am. Just fine. Better than fine. Right, Mister Alex?”

  “Aye, mo nighean,” Alex said. “Ye’re doing a braw job.”

  “That’s good?” the girl asked.

  “Verra good.”

  To outward appearance, Jemma seemed to be thriving. Though she still wore her ragged boy’s clothing, she was cleaner, that amber thicket atop her head pulled back into a stubby tail. Mo nighean, Alex called her. Joanna would have liked to inquire what it meant, but when she met his gaze again she simply mouthed, “Thank you.”

  His slanted smile as he glanced down at Jemma, stuffing her mouth with corn pone, was answer enough.

  Joanna went straight from the smithy to pen a reply to Reverend Pauling, informing him of the Joanna’s loss and Alex’s connection to Hugh Cameron. A day later it was borne upriver by a merchant headed for Cross Creek, with a prayer that it would find the reverend before he departed Mountain Laurel.

  October passed with work to tend as the last of the field and garden produce was harvested. Papa joined them on occasion at table, where he appeared so grim and exhausted Joanna hadn’t the heart to press him with her thoughts on Severn’s management.

  Winds and rain on the Carolina coast ushered in November but brought no reply from Reverend Pauling. Joanna sent a copy of the letter to his sister in Pennsylvania, where she trusted he would receive it eventually.

  That letter was barely launched upon its journey when Azuba, who’d heard it from Marigold, related the news that Alex had injured himself at the forge.

  * * *

  “It’s none so bad as burns go,” Moon said, inspecting the palm of Alex’s right hand, blistered and aflame as though he’d grasped a live ember and couldn’t release it. What he had grasped was a heated rod left on the counter to cool. He’d known better than to touch it, had put the rod there himself. It had happened in an instant’s distraction, his thoughts on Joanna Carey. That was all it had taken for the damage to be done.

  “I’m surprised ye went this long,” Moon said. “I cannot show ye, but my right hand was covered in burn scars.”

  “Still, best he don’t wield a hammer for a bit,” said Marigold, come to tend the burn. “Let this heal up some.”

  Alex
did his best not to wince at the pain of what was, by comparison to Moon’s healed burns, a minor injury. He sat by the anvil, injured palm upturned on his knee, as Marigold scooted another block chair close.

  “Fetch me their basin,” she told Jemma, who was hovering in concern. “See they got water on hand. If not, I use what’s in that drink barrel.”

  Jemma emerged with the basin as a shadow darkened the smithy doorway.

  “I see we’d similar notions, Mari.”

  Marigold dropped his injured hand as Joanna entered with their supper tray. “Oh, Miss Joanna. I ought to have brought that.”

  Setting the tray on the bench below the shutters, Joanna turned to survey them, holding a salve pot and a linen towel. “It’s all right, Mari. Have you need of these? Azuba told me what happened. Is it bad?”

  More than the present situation seemed to haunt her gaze, Alex thought, watching it flick to Moon. They were all thinking of his accident.

  “You want to see to him, Miss Joanna?” Marigold nodded at the forge counter. “There be what I brought. I’ll just go on back to the kitchen.”

  Joanna took in the other pot of salve and roll of bandaging. “You needn’t…,” she began, but Marigold was already making for the smithy door.

  Moon followed her out.

  “Ye dinna need to,” Alex said, awkwardness thick in the air. “I can manage.”

  “I want to,” Joanna said. She gathered up the salve and bandages, instructed Jemma to set the basin nearby, and settled on the block chair Marigold had vacated. While Jemma went to examine the supper she’d brought, Joanna poured water into the basin, took up his right hand between hers, soaked a cloth, and began cleaning dirt and soot from around the burns on his palm and across the pads of his fingers.