by Lori Benton
“Fetch us water?” he asked as he laid the gutted fawn on the ground, preparing to make a fire.
“I ain’t eating that,” she muttered, but took the canteen and went upstream to crouch among ferns. He watched her dip her hands to drink, wishing she’d bathe or wash her filthy breeches and that shirt that hung like a tent. She filled the canteen, set it on a rock, then wandered into the bushes. He’d a haunch of venison over the flames, the smell of it filling the little camp, before she returned and hunkered near. Her stink enveloped him briefly before smoke wafted between.
“Smells good.”
“Changed your mind, have ye?”
There was bread left. He gave her half. She crammed it into her mouth and around it said, “Maybe.”
He cut off a portion already browned and handed it to her. She sniffed it and took a bite.
“It strikes me I’ll be needing another name once I find a place to settle. Maybe I’ll go by my mother’s clan, MacNeill.”
Jemma stopped chewing. “Settle where?”
“I dinna ken. Pennsylvania, maybe.”
“That ain’t where I aim to go!” Before he could say more, she’d shot to her feet and headed back into the brush.
“Jemma!” He half-rose to go after her, but subsided, thinking it best to let her be. She was canny enough not to wander far—from him or the food. He ate his fill of the meat, roasted what remained, set aside a portion for Jemma, then lay down under his blanket, his ears pricked until he heard her creeping back.
Clouds had parted, allowing moonlight. He could see her, hunkered on her blanket.
“Mister Alex?” she hissed, as if afraid he might be sleeping.
He sat up. “Aye, Jemma. Are ye hungry?”
“No. Yes. But…I need you to take me west.”
“I dinna mean to go west, but wherever I do go ye’ve a home with me—however long ye wish.”
“As your slave?”
“No. But a life with me wherever I settle.” He sensed in the silence she was thinking it through.
“I’d be free to part ways did I choose?”
“If ye’ve another place to go, a means to live, aye. I’ll not hold ye against your will.”
He heard her sniffle. “Let me think on it.”
Cautiously relieved, he said, “Let’s sleep, aye?”
“Can I eat first?”
“I left ye some venison by the fire.” He heard her rummaging as he drifted off to sleep, hoping by morning she’d agree to go north.
But in the gray predawn when he woke, Jemma and most of the venison were gone.
* * *
Along the stream he found the places she’d paused to rest. She followed the waterway no matter how it curved, but always it looped back westward, stubborn in its course as was Jemma.
By midday he’d reached the stream’s mouth, where it emptied into a larger watercourse he thought must be the Yadkin, swollen and swift. He doubted she’d have attempted to cross. After scouting the moist bank, he found her prints upstream.
A mile or so on, he pushed through a clump of brush below a stony rise to find a pool at its base and a sheltered beach—and Jemma, crouched with her toes in the mud, dipping a drink.
He lowered the knapsack to the ground. The iron within clanked.
Jemma shot up, spilling water down her front. She made a dash for the trees, leaving behind her blanket and the meat taken in the night.
He snagged her and dragged her back toward the river.
“What d’ye mean by running off like that, after I said I’d take care of ye?”
“I said I’d think on it. This is what I thought!”
She squirmed like a landed fish. He grappled and got her in a hold she couldn’t break. “That ye’re better off alone in the wilderness?”
“Not alone. With the Cherokees!”
He wrinkled his nose. “What would they think of ye, turning up smelling ripe as a skunk?” Inspiration dawned. He hauled her up the stony rise above the pool, her flailing feet off the ground. “If ye’re to be a Cherokee, then ye’ll at least be a clean one.”
“No!” While she bucked and kicked, he looked over into the water, six feet below. Plenty deep enough.
“Right, then. In ye go.” He swept her high and tossed her into the pool. She hit with a splash. He turned to descend the rise to be there when she came ashore, in case a dunking didn’t subdue her—and froze, taking note at last what the higher vantage point had revealed.
Mountains. Blue and hazy in the distance, but unmistakably mountains.
In an instant he was heart-struck, yearning for cool glens and splashing burns. Steep trails to craggy peaks. Mist and cloud and the wind forever blowing. And he was shaken with fear that gusted cold on the heels of yearning. Fear of what else those mountains held, perils unlike any found in Scotland.
Wild beasts. Wilder men.
“Mist—Alex—help!”
He’d been half aware of Jemma thrashing in the pool below. He tore his gaze from that beguiling rise of blue and realized…she couldn’t swim.
He jumped in after her, wrapped an arm around her, and was nearly to the riverbank before becoming aware of something very odd about her shape. Stunned, he let her go on the bank, and she sprawled on her back, gasping for breath, that voluminous shirt plastered to her form, exposing the shape of her belly poking up round. Even as he gaped at it, it moved.
He stood, his own breath short from shock. “Jemma. Who…who did that to ye?”
Jemma’s eyes flew open. She saw him staring and sat up, tenting the wet shirt away from herself. “Don’t look at my belly!”
He could look at nothing else.
Jemma’s knees came up, as if she could hide what he’d plainly seen. “I been looking, but I ain’t found what I need to get rid of ’em.”
Them? Was she carrying twins?
“Ye canna just get rid of them.”
She looked as if he’d grown a second head. “We always do. Miss Joanna see to it.”
“Joanna?” He was looming over her, nigh shouting. He squatted, lowering his voice. “Exactly what d’ye think we’re talking about?”
“Worms?” she said, sounding miserable and mortified. “Like the little ones get with their bellies all poked out?”
His head was spinning. “Jemma. That isna what’s ailing ye. I think ye ken what it is. Ye must ken.”
“Like Mari,” she said, sounding all of the eleven years he’d once thought she was. “I got a baby coming, don’t I?”
“Aye. Ye do. But ye canna be…what? Thirteen at most?”
“Mari says I was born in spring so I could be ten and four now.”
She was tiny for fourteen. All but that belly. By the look of her, he guessed she was six months along. What if the bairn was tiny too? Was she nearer her time than that?
“I know I don’t look it,” Jemma said, as if reading his thoughts, knees drawn up to her round belly. “Wish I did,” she added in an undertone dark enough to jar him again.
“Jemma, who have ye lain with?”
“You mean slept beside?”
“No,” he said, going cold all over as understanding sank deeper. “What man got ye alone and…hurt ye? Another of Carey’s slaves?”
Her color drained, but she wagged her head. “No slave ever hurt me, ’cept when Demas caught me in the swamp. Mostly he scared me. You saw.”
He had. As evenly as he could he said, “His name, lass.”
Jemma looked away. “I ain’t ever going back. Can’t we forget it?”
“Ye canna forget it. Not with a bairn on the way. Not when…”
He clamped his mouth shut, realizing he’d terrify her if he shared his rising fears. With her clothes clinging wetly, he could see how narrow were her hips. Plenty of small women delivere
d bairns fine, but he’d never had to midwife them. With a sinking of heart, he knew what they must do.
“We’ll go back to Mountain Laurel. I dinna ken what Hugh will say to—”
“Mister Alex, that ain’t what we’re doing.” Jemma got to her feet but made no move to run away. She stood over him, dripping river water, hands fisted against her belly. “Get that notion outta your head.”
She’d been bold with him since Cross Creek, but something was different now. Gone was her desperation. What had been merely childish obstinacy had transformed into the iron will of motherhood. It had entered her bones.
“We gonna be Indians, me and my baby, and that’s an end to it.”
27
MAY 1748
“Why did you run away, Jemma?”
Her sister’s plaintive question drifted down the passage, reaching Joanna in the sewing room where she and Azuba worked while the morning air was fresh.
Azuba sighed in resignation. “She at it again.”
Mister Reeves had returned after a fortnight’s search for Alex and Jemma, not with their fugitives but with the doll he’d promised Charlotte. Joanna had been thankful he’d remembered, but gratitude proved short-lived.
“What shall you call this one?” she’d asked, as her sister hugged the doll with its miniature gown of pin-striped blue, ruffled cap, and flowing hair a few shades darker than Charlotte’s. “What Anna name haven’t we used? Julianna? Marianna?”
Charlotte had held the amber-haired doll at arm’s length, gazing into its painted wooden face. “This one’s Jemma.”
Since then Charlotte had played exclusively with the new doll.
“Jemma! You’re a very bad girl!”
Joanna had bent to her sewing again, but lifted her head at her sister’s scolding tone.
“You cut off your hair!”
She and Azuba rose and crossed to the room she and Charlotte shared. Her sister sat on their bed, holding the new doll out before her. Its ruffled cap lay tossed aside, along with a set of Joanna’s sewing shears, and a pile of amber horsehair curls. What hair remained on the doll’s head was cropped to ragged hanks.
“Now I can’t braid it!” Charlotte burst into tears and threw herself across the bed for what seemed the hundredth time in the month since Jemma had run away. Wishing Mister Reeves had never found that doll, Joanna cast a mute appeal at Azuba, hovering with her in the doorway, and with half-ashamed relief took her leave.
Another need pulled at her. Papa was also abed.
Azuba’s soothing tones trailed her down the stairs as she lifted another prayer for Charlotte. Joanna had done her own share of weeping in the silence of the night, holding her misery close, gazing at the corn-husk doll she and Alex had made together, which Charlotte had yet to notice she’d moved to her side of the bed.
Even if Alex was captured and returned, it would change nothing between them. He’d made it clear what he thought of her. She was too weak to follow after what she truly wanted.
Around that memory frustration swirled, relentless as a hurricane. Did following her heart’s desire have to mean abandoning those she loved, leaving them in the bondage she longed to escape? Or was Alex the shortsighted one, unable to see beyond that stark choice, or abide in patience until a better way was shown?
Heart-heavy, Joanna knocked on Papa’s bedroom door and entered at his bidding. A more private sanctum than the study, the room was spare and masculine, all traces of her mother long since removed.
Papa was abed, the breakfast tray on the rumpled coverlet barely touched. For a week he’d suffered a stomach ailment, though the pain hadn’t driven him to his bed until yesterday. The room’s chamber pot had been emptied, but the odor of troubled bowels lingered. She opened the curtains and raised the window. The breeze wafting in was already tinged with warmth.
Sunlight showed the thinning of her stepfather’s cheeks. “How are you feeling?”
“Better today,” he said, contradicting the evidence of that unfinished breakfast. “Phineas was by. I know about Simcoe.”
Joanna sighed. Their troublesome neighbor, with his perpetual discontent. “Is it terribly complicated?”
“Apparently it needs my presence in Wilmington.”
“Papa, I don’t think—”
He waved aside her concern. “Phineas is going with a letter of authority to act on my behalf, should it be needful. He’s leaving soon. You haven’t seen him?”
“I’ve been upstairs. Charlotte is having a bad morning, missing Jemma.” She clenched her teeth so she wouldn’t mention Alex. But Papa caught the welling of her tears.
“And are you?” he asked.
She blinked the tears away and tried to smile.
“You might as well say his name.” Papa studied her, blue eyes pained. When she sat on the feather tick beside him, he reached for her hand in a rare show of attentiveness. “You still pine for him, and I don’t like seeing you thus.”
Of course he didn’t. She was the one who held things together.
But that was unfair. He cared about her unhappiness. He simply had a different idea about what would cure it than did she.
“He left without a word.”
Her stepfather let go her hand. “Not one word of his intentions?”
“I’d have told you if so. Did Mister Reeves say something to make you suspect I knew what Alex planned to do?”
He looked surprised. “Why should he?”
The man had asked her to marry him, and she’d given her heart to another. Reason enough.
“Few men are accomplished in expressing such sentiments, but I believe Phineas is fond of you.”
Mister Reeves was occasionally amused by her. Often frustrated. And in the matter of his proposal of marriage, beyond patient. But fond?
“I know he’s fond of Severn,” she said. Ruthlessly so, she thought, wincing inwardly at memory of a flashing whip.
“That he is,” Papa agreed. “Yet despite all MacKinnon has done, it’s him to whom you would trust your heart?”
“Trust, Papa? No. Though he yet has it in his keeping, I fear.” Tears slid down her cheeks despite her willing them away.
“Joanna, I loved your mother, and the loss nigh undid me,” her stepfather said wearily. “But love isn’t essential for a marriage to succeed. Mutual need or concern will suffice.”
Joanna couldn’t push words past the ache that swelled in her chest at the bleak prospect.
Papa closed his eyes. “I sometimes wish I’d given Elijah leave to court you. At least there was once true affection between you…”
His voice trailed off, and she didn’t try to rouse him again. Better to end another conversation destined to go in circles. She took up the tray and left the room, shut the door quietly, and turned.
Standing in the passage behind her was Mister Reeves. By the sharpness of his gaze, she was certain he’d heard Papa’s last words. He pretended otherwise, mouth pulling into a stiff smile.
“Miss Carey. I wished to see you before starting downriver.”
“You’re headed back to Wilmington, Papa said. Something about Mister Simcoe?”
He brushed the matter aside. “Nothing to concern you. However, I do mean to leave Demas behind.”
“Again?”
Far from annoyed at her questioning, Mister Reeves looked eager. “I had a notion that Moon might train Demas for the forge. I almost mentioned it to Captain Carey this morning but decided not to trouble him. What do you think? Might it be a workable solution for Severn’s loss of a blacksmith?”
She blinked at Mister Reeves, taken aback that he would seek her opinion. She wanted no one at that forge but Alex. Still, they must do something. “I’ll speak to Papa about it.”
Though clearly the answer he sought, Mister Reeves continued to regard her, hazel ey
es piercing. “You wish it could be MacKinnon. You needn’t deny it,” he added quickly, as she’d been about to do that very thing. “Miss Carey, there’s something you should know. I was the one—”
A flurry of knocking had Joanna turning toward the door to the yard. “Papa. He’ll be disturbed.”
Mister Reeves reached the door first and flung it open. On the threshold Sybil stood. The gaze she darted past Mister Reeves as Joanna joined him was urgent with need. “It’s Mari, Miss Joanna. Her baby coming. She wanting Azuba—and you.”
* * *
Ten hours later they were still in the thick of things, Joanna, Azuba, and Marigold. The air inside the cabin was muggy with the pans of steaming water Sybil periodically brought, and all were streaming sweat, when Marigold’s labor at last progressed to its final stage. Still the baby was long in coming.
“I can’t go on to glory without telling you.” Grasping Joanna’s hand, Marigold pulled her close with a strength that belied talk of impending expiration. “I’m sorry!”
“For what, Mari? No, save your—”
“Listen!” Marigold’s fingernails dug into her palm. “Elijah…I never meant to take him from you!” The need to push overwhelmed and she strained, then with a whoosh of breath said, “He wanted you! Said Master Carey wouldn’t let him ask. That’s why he don’t claim this baby. He still wants you!”
Joanna wagged her head. “Elijah is like a brother. He doesn’t love me in that way. But you and I, weren’t we once like sisters?” Her voice broke, and she changed her tone. “Never mind that now. Let’s get this baby born. Then we’ll talk.”
Between the next two pushes, the second of which brought the baby’s head to crown, Marigold nodded, then focused all her being on the job at hand.
* * *
Though the sun hadn’t finished setting, inside the smithy the air hung dim and stale. Gone was the molten earth-and-fire smell of an active forge. It pained Joanna, yet it couldn’t douse the flame ablaze in her heart.