The King's Mercy

by Lori Benton

  Cameron canted his head toward Alex. “I mean to take him off this river afore he’s seen and kent for exactly who and what he is.”

  “Take him where?”

  “To the plantation where I’m overseer. Ye as well, if ye’re minded.”

  “Overseer?” She shot Alex an accusing look. “You never say that.” Jemma swung back to Cameron, wary. “Where it be, this Mountain Laurel Mister Alex tell me about?”

  “A fair distance. Near the Yadkin River.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “A sight nearer the Cherokees than ye are now,” Cameron replied with exasperation. “Dinna be looking a gift horse in the mouth, aye?”

  With her face lit at the prospect, Jemma was clutching Alex’s shirt. He pried her fingers loose and gave them a gentle squeeze. “What say ye, Jemma? Will ye go with me to Mountain Laurel?”

  Jemma freed her hand and clapped it across trembling lips, then uncovered them to say in wonder, “I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna find ’em. Yes, Mister Alex. I’ll go with you.”

  26

  On horseback it was a three-day hard journey to Mountain Laurel. Having none but the mount he’d ridden, Hugh Cameron put Jemma in the saddle, along with Alex’s knapsack—the weight of which made him grunt and lift a brow.

  “I didna steal the lass,” Alex said. “Not intentionally. I didna say I took nothing besides.”

  “Tell me no more.” Wearing the fringed hunting frock in the cool of early morning, Cameron took up the lead reins and they started out, leaving behind the copse a mile west of Cross Creek, where they’d arranged to meet. Alex wore the coat Joanna made him. Jemma wrapped herself in her blanket.

  Cameron led them through pinewood as the sun rose, streaking beams through the soaring trees. Eventually they joined a road of sorts, a set of ruts carving a northerly route through the vast tracts of forest belonging to the few plantations established so far upriver. Cameron had seen them provisioned, refusing the coin Alex offered. He’d a long gun with a rifled barrel and meant to hunt along the way. They would be a week on the road, afoot, depending on the weather.

  With time enough and the safety of distance, Alex asked to hear Cameron’s story. “I ken what happened after, but how came ye to the colony in the first place?”

  “I was meant to be transported,” Cameron said, settling into the tale. “Same as ye. But the guard bringing us along to be sold like fish at market, maybe he’d some sympathy—for us or for the Stuarts—I dinna ken. Somewhere in the streets of London, he turned his back on us and walked away. Took a moment gawping at each other to grasp we’d been set at liberty. There were three of us. Only me from the James & Mary.”

  “Ye might’ve gone anywhere,” Alex said. “Why not Scotland?”

  “I’ve a wee half-brother there still, and my stepmother, but they’ve her family nearby. My going back would have put them in jeopardy. I’m exiled like ye, MacKinnon, difference being I’ve no indenture to serve. Nor do ye, now.”

  “Aye.” Alex gazed ahead to trees stretching on in endless ranks, pushing away a pang at the thought. Not that he wished to be bound for seven years to any man. But he had wished it, briefly, for a woman. Joanna.

  “Twice I came nigh to being apprehended,” Cameron continued, “before I found a ship with a captain willing to take me on. I crewed my passage over, and at first chance, which happened to be Wilmington, I abandoned ship, with less to my name than what ye have now. Days later I went into a tavern with no means to pay for a swig of cider, much less the meal I was desperate for, when I overheard a fellow attempting to carry on some business in the Gaelic. The men he addressed hadn’t a word of the tongue, so I stepped up and presented myself as interpreter. So great was the man’s relief, he spent the next two hours feeding me while he scoured his family tree for how we might be related, for surely we must be, both of us Camerons.”

  “Did he ascertain as much?” Alex asked.

  “Some distant connection through a series of marriages. Duncan Cameron’s been in the colonies since the Stuart rising of ’15. But a clansman who spoke the Gaelic—if ye’ll credit it, MacKinnon, the man speaks English fine but has vowed never to let a word of it cross his lips again—was to him like meeting a prodigal son thought lost forever. He took me home with him and killed the fatted calf.”

  “How long since?” Alex asked.

  “Late September last,” Cameron said. “And ye? How long in the colony?”

  “Since July.”

  “I’ve heard it’s verra hot then. Guess I’ll ken for myself soon.” Cameron strode on confidently, rifle at his side, leading the horse. “I was meant to purchase a brood mare in Cross Creek. Duncan and the mare’s owner exchanged letters, agreed on the sale. But I reached the place to find the mare a week dead of the colic. He’ll not be pleased, will Duncan.”

  He didn’t sound overly concerned. Duncan Cameron, despite his oddities, must be an easy man to serve.

  The day passed over them, clouded, cooler than it had been. Not long before darkness fell, they pitched camp near a creek like many such they’d crossed that day. They’d walked nigh thirty miles. Alex was glad for a fire and food in his belly.

  “I think it wise ye leave the colony quick as may be,” Cameron said after Jemma rolled into her blanket to sleep. “Head north, keep to the backcountry. Find a place in want of a blacksmith. Ye’ve enough knowledge of the trade to get by?”

  “I think so, but there’s the lass,” Alex said with a nod at Jemma’s form. “I’m not keen on the idea of traipsing the wilderness looking for Indians, aye?”

  “Nor should ye be,” Cameron said. “As you’re verra likely to find them. Take her north with ye. Pass her off as your slave. It’ll help ye look the man of means.”

  Alex didn’t comment. Such pretense didn’t settle comfortably on him. Sure enough Jemma wouldn’t fancy it.

  * * *

  The sixth day of their journey, they pushed on after sunset rather than camp again with less than half a day’s travel remaining, so it was by starlight Alex first saw Mountain Laurel. Cameron thought it best to conceal their presence from his employer. They were given beds in the tiny cabin, lit by a small fire in a clay chimney, of a slave who left it to sleep on the floor of Cameron’s roomier quarters. He laid an exhausted Jemma on a cot, where she was asleep in seconds.

  Cameron lingered at the doorway, peering in. “All well?”

  “Far as I ken.” In the blue after sunset, still on the road, Alex had spied in the distance a set of ridges, what appeared a mountain range in miniature rising from the rolling backcountry. The Carraways, Cameron called them. For days the land had pitched and rolled like sea waves, forested in hardwoods—chestnuts, oaks, beeches, hickory—interspersed with pines, cut by rushing streams, but the road had dipped and climbed more steeply those last starlit miles. Mountain Laurel must be tucked into those higher ridges.

  “Right, then,” Cameron said. “I’ll leave ye to sleep. Come morning dinna leave the cabin till someone comes to ye. There’s a chamber pot.”

  At the door’s shutting, Jemma sat bolt upright as if it had been a gunshot, peering wide-eyed at her surroundings. “Where we at?”

  “Mountain Laurel. Why are ye awake?”

  “Dreamt I was up on that horse. Fell asleep and toppled off. Woke up afore I hit the ground.” She gave a shudder. “Why does that always happen? Never hitting ground in dreams?”

  “I dinna ken, lass.” He lowered himself onto the opposite bedframe, a crude structure with a coarse linen tick. “But ye’ve seen the last of that horse, I’m thinking.”

  Wrapped in her tattered blanket, Jemma blinked like a golden-eyed owl. “How near are we to the Cherokees?”

  Alex dropped his head to rub his neck. “I’ve no notion.”

  Jemma yawned wide. “You think they’ll give me a name?”

  �
�A name for what?”

  “Me. Jemma ain’t a Cherokee name. It short for Jemima. If that mean something, I don’t know what. A Cherokee name’s got to mean something. I tell you my grandma’s name?”

  “A dozen times.” Jemma’s talkativeness surprised him. She’d grown sullen since leaving Cross Creek. More than once around their fire at night, he’d caught her studying him sidelong, suspicious. He raised his head to find her expression guarded. “Why must it be Cherokees? I’ll take care of ye, lass.”

  “I knew it! I heard you and Mister Cameron talking that first night on the trail. You thought I was sleeping, but I heard. You gonna tell folk I’m your slave!”

  “That was Cameron’s notion. Not mine.”

  “So what? You’ll take me to the Cherokees?”

  In the hearth the fire hissed, falling in on itself. Alex stared into the gathering shadows. In the crevice between two logs, a spider was spinning its web. “Cameron’s of a mind it would be the death of me.”

  Jemma huffed but said no more, sinking back down onto the tick and turning her face to the wall.

  * * *

  Voices outside the cabin woke him. He lay with eyes closed, recognizing Hugh Cameron’s. The other was a stranger’s. It was a moment before he realized he was hearing Gaelic spoken. He sat up. Across the narrow space between their cots, Jemma was dead to the world, her mop of hair looking like some small disheveled animal peeking from her rumpled blanket.

  “Good, then,” Cameron was saying. “I will leave them to your care.”

  “How long will you be?” came the reply.

  “At least until midday. Maybe longer. Let them know where I have gone. I will come to them when I return.”

  The Gaelic was a feast to starved ears. Alex wanted to catch Hugh Cameron before he went wherever he was going, but hesitated. Was it Duncan Cameron out there too?

  He started at a tap at the door.

  “ ’Mornin’ in there. Ye be wanting some breakfast?” queried a male voice, clearly a native English-speaker though his speech had a faint Scots lilt. Alex rose and in two strides was at the door. He opened it to find a broad-featured African man, older than he but not by much, for his hair and beard showed no white.

  The man craned his neck to gaze up at him, dark eyes wide, before bobbing his head in greeting. “Tilly got the porridge warming in the kitchen. Would ye and the lassie come now to eat it? Ye can come,” he added, when Alex raised a brow. “Master Duncan and Mister Hugh gone to see about another horse.”

  “Was that ye talking to Cameron?”

  “Aye, sir, it was.”

  “Cameron said you have the Gaelic,” Alex said in that language, feeling a choking in his throat to hear it falling from his lips, astonished to find an African speaking it, no matter he’d been forewarned.

  The slave switched nimbly to the tongue. “We all do here. It is required. I am called Malcolm. You are Alex MacKinnon, yes? And the lass is called Jemma?”

  From behind Alex a sleep-thick voice murmured, “Mister Alex, who you talking to funny?”

  Alex stepped aside to reveal Jemma sitting up in a tumble of hair and blanket. “This is Malcolm,” he told her. Switching back to Gaelic, as hungry for it as he was the promised breakfast, he answered the slave. “This lass is called Jemma, yes, and I’m Alex MacKinnon.”

  Malcolm nodded. “And you have come from nigh the coast, a plantation called Severn?” When Alex hesitated Malcolm said, “Reverend Pauling mentioned the place, the people there.”

  “I was at a place called Severn.”

  Malcolm’s face lit. “The reverend talked to us of Jesus, as no doubt he did to you at Severn. Master Cameron allowed it.”

  Jemma joined them at the doorway. “I can tell you talking about Reverend Pauling. Talk so I know what all you saying.”

  “ ’Morning, little miss,” Malcolm said. “So ye’re acquainted with the reverend too?”

  “Probably the best white man I ever known.”

  “With that I must agree.”

  “Pauling was here in the autumn?” Alex asked.

  “Aye. Then he headed north. Reckon he spent the winter in Pennsylvania with his sister’s family.”

  Alex wondered if he shouldn’t try to find the man, his only acquaintance outside North Carolina. Might Pauling help him settle, or would he be of a mind to return him to the Careys?

  “What road did he take north?”

  “The old Warrior Path—the Wagon Road, some call it.” Malcolm stepped back and motioned them from the cabin. “Come get breakfast while it’s warm in the kettle.”

  The morning was overcast but bright. As they walked up from the slave cabins, Alex took in the situation where Hugh Cameron had landed so fortuitously. Fields lay to the northeast of the house, which was starkly white against the hogback ridge rising to the southwest. From the cabins they came up a wagon lane past an apple orchard, a washhouse and stable, to the kitchen. They were greeted by the cook, Tilly, the woman Malcolm called his wife, and their wee daughter, Naomi—six, by the look of her—and an older woman Alex supposed kept house for Duncan Cameron. Other slaves were about the place, field hands and a man for the stable. They’d had their breakfast and gone off to their work.

  Seated on a stool at the table, Jemma was still agog over that looming ridge. “That hill yonder. It one of them mountains where the Cherokees live?”

  Alex, accepting a bowl of porridge, heard the lassie Naomi laugh and say, “These molehills ain’t even the beginning of them mountains.”

  “We see Indians now and again, but none live nearby,” Malcolm told Jemma, who looked so crestfallen not even steaming porridge drizzled with honey brightened her countenance.

  Naomi set a plate of corn pone on the table. She stood back, waiting for Alex to sample it.

  “Did ye make this yourself, lass?” he asked her.

  “I did, sir.” She turned to Jemma. “What you like best to cook?”

  Jemma made a sour face. “I don’t meddle in the kitchen. I work the smithy.”

  Naomi’s small mouth fell open. “You hammer iron? A girl?”

  Jemma nodded at Alex. “He do the hammering. I pump the bellows and fetch stuff. But now I’m gonna be a free Cherokee Indian.”

  Everyone in the kitchen laughed except Alex—and Jemma, who glowered at one and all, then jabbed a spoon into her porridge.

  It wasn’t until evening Hugh Cameron came to them, shut up in the cabin while a light rain fell. He’d brought supper from the kitchen, which they spread at the foot of Jemma’s cot and ate while they talked, conversation circling round the tobacco seedlings soon to be sown, the mare he’d ridden to see, his fortune in landing himself such a position when not long since they were little more than walking skeletons aboard a Crown prison ship.

  “Does it not bother ye, though?” Alex ventured. “Being overseer of slaves. I couldna do it, not after what we suffered at the hands of the English.”

  “Duncan would hire on someone to do it,” Cameron replied. “Better a man who kens what it is to lose his freedom than one who’s given such matters nary a thought, aye?”

  “Maybe,” Alex allowed, but the matter troubled him. “D’ye not worry ye’ll maybe grow used to it? That it will change ye?”

  Not for the better, he was thinking, and saw by the guarded look Cameron shot him that he’d grasped the implication.

  “We survive, MacKinnon. Ye and I ken that can mean doing things we thought beyond our scope. For me it’s overseeing slaves. For ye it’s breaking your oath, taking what that man, Carey, considers his property—the lass, your years of service, whatever else ye may have in that great pack of yours. We do what we must.”

  Alex couldn’t help wondering what Joanna thought of what he’d done. Did she curse his name as her stepfather must? Wish away even the memory of him? Or did
she understand his choice?

  “And with that in mind,” Cameron said, cutting into his thoughts, “what do ye mean to do?”

  He pushed thoughts of Joanna down deep. “If ye’ll grant us provision, we’ll be gone before first light, north toward the Wagon Road.”

  Jemma nearly choked on her supper. “No, Mister Alex. I mean, can’t we go west? I got to find—”

  “Jemma,” he said more harshly than he meant. “Enough about the Cherokees. Even if I kent they wouldna kill me, I dinna ken how to find them.”

  “Strike the Yadkin,” Cameron said. “Follow it far enough, they’ll find ye.”

  Jemma crossed her arms over the loose folds of her shirt. “That don’t sound hard.”

  “I’ll set ye on course for the Wagon Road,” Cameron said. “Ye’ll have a couple of days to decide whether ye mean to follow it, but there’s a path intersects it a ways northward, a wilderness path that would head ye westward through the mountains—if that’s what ye decide. Ye can always take up fur trapping.”

  Jemma went on with her supper in brooding silence, but Alex could almost hear the turning of her mind. She hadn’t given up her single-minded ambition—dire warnings notwithstanding.

  * * *

  They walked northwest, traveling in cover of woods when possible. The weather turned wet. They met with little traffic on the trail that, according to Hugh Cameron, would lead to the Wagon Road that traversed the middle colonies’ western edge. Since Pauling regularly traveled that road, Alex thought it likely they’d meet with folk who knew him.

  Cameron had provisioned them, but there had been no firearm to spare. Alex had, as chance occasioned, hunted with a makeshift spear—the smaller of his blades bound to a branch he’d whittled down. Deer roamed thick in the backcountry, bounding from copse and thicket, white tails high. He made a dozen failed attempts before, late the second day, he speared a fawn too slow in following its dam. Jemma was still cross with him over it when they camped that evening in the bend of a narrow stream.