The King's Mercy

by Lori Benton

  “Jemma!”

  “I gotta find Mister Alex!” The girl ducked past her and made for the door.

  Two mill slaves, reeking of smoke, were leaving the study, distracting Joanna. As they left the house on Jemma’s heels, she looked in to see Papa, bent over his desk, hands splayed flat, desolation carved into his face.

  * * *

  The night air was clammy as Joanna made her way down the path behind the kitchen to the row of squared-log smokehouses at the orchard’s edge. The smell of curing hams spiced the air. At the last smokehouse, left empty all winter, she stopped and pulled her shawl tighter. Hardly knowing what to say into the darkness between the wooden slats, she drew a breath and released it.

  “I hear ye out there,” said the voice she craved like water.

  She took a step closer, raising a hand to the slatted wall between them. Always there were walls.

  “Is it ye, Mari?”

  She snatched her hand back. “No.”

  A space of silence in the dark. “Joanna? What are ye doing here?”

  The words felt like a sword’s thrust, pushing her away. So many losses, yet the loss of his love, his regard—whatever he’d felt for her—outweighed the rest combined. “Are you all right?”

  “Aside from being caged like a dog, d’ye mean?”

  Jemma had found her after she’d left the study. Alex’s injuries weren’t grievous. Minor burns, which Marigold had tended. A chest full of smoke that had left his voice raw.

  Her own lungs felt too tight for breath. “I tried to reason with Papa, but he won’t do anything until Mister Reeves returns.”

  The overseer’s name tasted bitter on her tongue.

  “MacKinnon is accused of starting the fire,” her stepfather had said before she shut the study door. “He was seen coming from the storeroom moments before smoke was spotted. Jim was found, burned almost beyond recognition—in the storeroom.”

  Those might have been the facts, but she wouldn’t believe the conclusion being drawn. “Jemma was there. She saw Demas lurking. Isn’t it more believable he started the fire? Or it was Mister Reeves—at his order? Why else didn’t he take Demas with him to help with the horse?”

  “Phineas?” Apparently she’d lost her mind, to judge by the look on Papa’s face. “It’s good he didn’t. Demas saved MacKinnon’s life. Did Jemma omit that detail from her account?”

  “No, but she also says Demas hid in the woods and watched the mill burn. He didn’t help save it.”

  “Perhaps the girl wants Demas sold away, or worse.” A notion Joanna hadn’t been able to refute with certainty. “It makes no sense, Joanna. Why would Demas start the fire, allow Jim to die, but save MacKinnon? Is there a friendship there of which I’m unaware?”

  Quite the opposite, she was sure. “Mister Reeves sent Alex to the mill—Elijah will verify that—and we cannot punish Alex unless it’s certain he committed a crime.”

  “I haven’t said I will punish MacKinnon. I’ll hold him bound until Phineas returns and can give account of his slave—and his reason for sending MacKinnon to the mill.”

  “Have you spoken to Alex?”

  “I’ve only just had the news.” The tremor in her stepfather’s voice told Joanna his calm was the result of shock, and it was passing. “I mean to keep MacKinnon safe under lock. And wait for Phineas.”

  “Why don’t you have Demas confined? That would be only fair.”

  “Do not speak of fair!” her stepfather said, temper exploding. “Life isn’t fair, Joanna. I’m minded to have Phineas take MacKinnon back downriver and sell his indenture, and we shall just…do without a blacksmith!”

  “Papa.” She’d held on to the vague hope that given time Alex might change his thinking, soften his heart. The prospect of him removed from Severn was a loss she feared she couldn’t weather. “After all you’ve invested in him?”

  “Nothing into which I’ve invested has proven sound. Should MacKinnon be different?”

  Joanna could only stare, cast back to the time of her mother’s death, and that dark place Papa had vanished into for nigh a year. Panic at the thought of losing Alex—and her stepfather to that darkness—was a screeching specter in her brain.

  “I’m sound, Papa. Charlotte is sound.”

  “But Severn isn’t! Do you think we can continue taking these hulling blows and remain afloat? We’re mired in a sinkhole of debt. I’ll need to sell the Charlotte-Ann to climb halfway out of it, which leaves us one failed crop from ruination and the loss of even this roof.”

  There had been little to say after that. Or no heart left to say it.

  Still shaken by that conversation, she realized why she’d come to the smokehouse. She needed Alex. The strength he’d lent her in months past had been a tenuous thing, but who else did she have? Papa was faltering. Reverend Pauling hadn’t replied to her letters. Elijah was lost in his own dark night. Mister Reeves might as well have existed on another continent, for all their sentiments aligned.

  “Alex, please.” Emotion she couldn’t stem thickened her voice, and tears fell. “Tell me what happened at the mill. I want to hear it from you.”

  Even that he wouldn’t give her. “I dinna ken how the fire started. I’ve my suspicions, but Carey willna want to hear them.”

  “You need to make Papa listen. I’ll stand with you.”

  The silence this time was long. When Alex finally spoke, his tone was cold. “Why?”

  “Because you wouldn’t burn down our mill. Not for any reason. That isn’t the kind of man you are.”

  “What kind of man am I?” She heard a subtle change in his tone, something softer threaded through the chill.

  “You’re strong—and stubborn—and kindhearted. I’ve seen how you encourage Elijah, how you shelter Jemma, the way others look to you. Even Reverend Pauling took to you, and I trust his judgment above all.”

  It had been the wrong thing to say.

  “A glowing endorsement,” he said bitterly.

  Her next words were the hardest she’d ever had to utter. “I’m not asking you to love me, Alex. Only help me as you’ve helped others. Help me save what’s left of all Papa has built. Maybe together—”

  “Joanna…” He was laughing, low in the darkness. It made him cough and clear his smoke-ravaged throat. “I’m no more good to ye than were I a side of beef hanging in here. If Severn means all that to ye, that ye’d come to me begging, Reeves is the man to stand beside ye. I canna help ye at all. Unless…”

  Hope didn’t die easily. “Unless?”

  “Ye’re ready to walk away. Find the life I ken ye long to live.”

  She leaned her forehead against the rough logs, thinking of her childhood, before her mother died. Simple days. Full days. Afterward, left with a plantation to run, a sister to tend, a stepfather sunk in despair, she’d thought they’d taken their worst blow. They need only heal. Happiness would visit them again. It hadn’t. Not as she’d hoped. But even those years seemed blissful to what their lives had become, a soulless slog through loss-crippled days, shadowed by an oppressive sense of doom to come. Yet the life she longed for was forever out of reach.

  She took a step back, hugging herself.

  When Alex spoke again his voice held no hope. “Go back to the house, Joanna. I can do nothing for ye. Ye’ll have to help yourself now, if ye have it in ye to do so.”

  “Miss Joanna? That you out here in the dark?”

  She turned with a bitten-off yelp to see Marigold on the path behind her, the bulk of her belly outlined in starlight. She’d something folded under her arm. “I was seeing if Mister MacKinnon had need,” Joanna said, then gathered up her shredded dignity and wrapped its scraps about her. “I leave him to you.”

  She brushed past the woman and made her way along the path to the kitchen. Not quick enough to miss Marigold’s
next words to Alex, or his to her.

  “I couldn’t sleep, thinking of you out here. Brought you a blanket. Think we can fit it through the slats?”

  “Lass, ye shouldna fret over me. Ye need your rest…”

  Joanna hurried her steps, not wanting to hear another word.

  * * *

  Compared to what he suffered on the James & Mary, his internment in the smokehouse was a light affliction. His wounds were tended, water and food passed through the slatted wall. Fury cut the deeper for it. He had, against his determination to the contrary, allowed himself to grow accepting of a life in this place, linked to these people. Not only through the skill of his hands.

  Dinna think of Joanna. Her wounded voice, begging him to be what he couldn’t—her knight in shining armor. He was no one’s knight. Yet he hadn’t been called to account for his actions at the mill. Never charged to his face with a crime. Carey had left him to stew. Joanna’s midnight visitation confirmed his speculations as to why—and the identity of Severn’s true master. “Papa won’t do anything until Mister Reeves returns.”

  When the shift had happened he couldn’t say. Before ever he stepped onto Severn’s dock? Right under his nose in recent days? Regardless, the master of Severn was no longer Edmund Carey.

  Yet it was Demas who’d rescued him from the flames.

  Through a second day Alex waited, replaying those moments at the mill before he was overcome with smoke, until in the dark of his second night in the smokehouse, he awoke to the scuff of a man’s tread approaching his musty prison. There came the thump of something dropped onto the ground, then the click-and-grate of the lock opening by key.

  A low voice spoke through the wooden slats. “Now, MacKinnon. It’s all I can do.”

  He’d sat up, wincing at his burns, forcing his mind to clear. “Who is there?”

  Silence answered. The speaker had crept away, or was pretending he had. He’d known the voice in any case. Reeves.

  Fearing a trap, he approached the smokehouse door, waited, then gave a push. Where before it had held fast, now it yielded to his touch. Outside moonlight spilled, showing plain the knapsack lying at his feet. Still he kept to shadow, gazing along the row of smokehouses, eyes long since dark-accustomed. Not even a breeze stirred.

  He knelt and fingered open the sack. Inside he felt the rough weave of his coat, a long, nut-brown garment made by Joanna’s hands. His belt, coiled beside it. Bread wrapped in a cloth, a canteen, razor and strop, his eating knife, no bigger than a sgian-dubh, the wee blade his clansmen kept tucked in a stocking.

  What was Reeves playing at?

  As he stood, enlightenment swept the last of sleep’s cobwebs from his brain. Reeves had deduced he’d never possess Joanna’s affection, much less her hand in marriage, so long as Alex stood in his path. He’d sent Alex to the mill intending him to die in that fire, willing to sacrifice part of his hoped-for inheritance to remove him.

  At once his certainty unraveled. Jim, Alex figured, had had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but if Reeves had set his slave to kindle that fire in hopes of killing him, why did Demas rescue him? Maybe he was ascribing too great a crime to Reeves. Perhaps he’d intended Alex to take the blame for only the fire, inducing Carey to sell his indenture—or have him arrested. Demas had taken things too far. Was Reeves now attempting to get his plan back on a less perilous track?

  The more Alex circled the tangle, the more impenetrable it became. Of one thing he was certain: it was to Reeves’s advantage that he disappear.

  Fully prepared to oblige the man, Alex breathed deeply, tasting freedom on the air. He’d but to snatch up the knapsack and run—as he’d known since waking on the flatboat headed upriver he would do, though for a time he’d lost sight of that goal, allowed attachments to complicate his thinking.

  He’d found something more inside the knapsack. A pouch. He fingered the contents through thin leather.

  Why would Reeves give him coin?

  It didn’t matter. He was being offered freedom at the price of a fugitive’s life. He’d take it, and more besides. What he had at his fingertips was enough to survive, but he could better the odds.

  He reached the smithy unchallenged, where all was silent. Moving softly, each motion measured, he took a hammer from the rack of tools, tongs, iron for nail-making, a few scraps besides, a small tinder box. He took up a hatchet, shoved it through his belt, added a sheathed blade beside it.

  They thought him a murderer, an arsonist. Why not add thief to the list?

  Out in the yard he compiled it all. The pack was preposterously heavy, but he was strong from the forge. Stronger than he’d ever been. As he donned it, regret stabbed deep enough to penetrate the hardening shell around his heart, but he refused to let his gaze linger on the house rising white in the moonlight.

  He passed down the lane between stable and shops, the orchard and burying ground, to the creek where it turned upstream toward the ruined mill. There he waded across, moving carefully for fear of snakes, or worse, prowling the brush at night.

  Maybe this was all a game to Reeves. Maybe he’d every intention of recapturing Alex and adding runaway to his list of crimes. There would be a hunt. Alex hoped he’d be expected to head for Wilmington, to board a ship before they could prevent him. But he wouldn’t.

  He wasn’t friendless in that colony.

  On the other side of Severn Creek, he paused. Trees obscured his view of the house. He’d never seen the room Joanna shared with her sister. Never been abovestairs. He imagined her sleeping, long hair in disarray across her pillow…then firmly put the vision aside. Even should every accusation against him be swept aside, he wasn’t what she needed, an indentured exile long since stripped of the faith she stubbornly—or desperately—clung to. In a kinder world they might have suited one another like hand to glove, however unlikely a pairing.

  “Not this world,” he whispered.

  Still, a weight like an anchor dragged at him as he turned into the darkened forest and took his first steps into freedom—fugitive and thief, foresworn and unrepentant.

  24

  The smokehouse was empty, Alex vanished. At the end of an exhaustive search and a flurry of interrogations, Joanna was sequestered with Mister Reeves and Papa, no nearer knowing who had aided his escape, if anyone had; the smokehouse key, along with nearly every other to Severn’s domestic locks, resided in Joanna’s keeping. It was found where it was meant to be, in her room. Suspicion had fallen briefly upon her, but she’d maintained her ignorance of his flight, her distress apparent enough they’d chosen to believe her.

  “He’s a Jonah, sir—if you take my meaning. That’s what I make of MacKinnon.”

  Staring bleakly at Mister Reeves, Joanna perched at the foot of the bed in Papa’s study. “A Jonah? That’s a foolish superstition.”

  Mister Reeves, pacing like a restless panther, halted and cast her a condescending glance. “Do you know what a Jonah signifies, Miss Carey?”

  “A person who causes ill luck. But I don’t believe it of Alex. Surely you don’t, Papa. It’s God who ordains…” Her own doubt silenced her. Had the Almighty ordained the tragic events of the past few days? Months? Or allowed them? She no longer knew. She was utterly at sea. Storm-swept, like the prophet, Jonah.

  “I’ve seen it in my day,” Papa said. “Still, what is to be done but raise a hunt for the man?”

  “Yes sir,” Reeves agreed, then more tentatively added, “Or we might let him go.”

  Joanna didn’t know which struck her as the more anguished course, hunting Alex like an animal or this suggestion. Let him go.

  “It’s the thing to do with a Jonah,” Mister Reeves maintained. “Put him off the ship—or plantation. Let whatever whale awaits him swallow him whole.”

  The man’s unconcern fell across Joanna’s senses like a whiplash, yet for on
ce in their acquaintance, she wished she could be more like him, to care so little about Alex as to shrug at his defection and carry on. They’d yet to make sense of what happened at the mill. Upon Mister Reeves’s return late the previous night, he’d been told of the fire, Demas’s purported actions, and the suspicion fallen upon Alex.

  “I can tell you only what was told me,” Mister Reeves had said, paled by the catastrophe. “It was brought to my attention there was need at the mill. I relayed the information to MacKinnon—and Moon. As for Demas, should he not be commended for his actions rather than placed under suspicion? Let us hear what he has to say for himself.”

  Demas, with his cavernous island lilt, had made Papa’s study seem small in a way even Alex hadn’t. He’d heard about the need of a smith and, lacking Reeves’s guidance, went to the mill on his own volition in case his strength could be of use. “When I get there the mill was burning. I found MacKinnon in the storeroom, overcome by smoke. I carry him out.”

  “What of Jim?” Mister Reeves pressed.

  “Him I not see.”

  “You say you arrived and at once rescued Alex,” Joanna interjected. “Yet Jemma saw you lurking in the woods, beforehand.”

  “I know not of that girl or what she claim,” Demas replied.

  “No one else claims to have seen Demas until he came forth carrying MacKinnon,” Mister Reeves said in his slave’s defense.

  “Who told you there was need of a smith at the mill?” Joanna asked the overseer, who thrummed with suppressed impatience.

  “Do you realize how many slaves I speak to in the course of a single day, Miss Carey? How varied the minutia of their concerns? I was preoccupied with getting that mare safely downriver and honestly cannot recall. Had I known it would become of issue, I’d have made note.”

  Frustrated, Joanna had turned to her stepfather. “Isn’t it past time to let Alex speak for himself? You listened to Demas.”