The King's Mercy

by Lori Benton

  It would never again be Alex.

  Papa’s uneaten breakfast lay scattered. Swiftly she gathered up utensils, bowls, as much of their spilled contents as could be scraped up. When she entered the kitchen and set the tray on the worktable, the three women present didn’t look her way or break off their conversation.

  She cleared her throat. “Phoebe, I’d like to try some broth for Papa’s dinner.”

  Phoebe, Azuba, and Marigold sprang apart, startled as a deer in the woods.

  “Miss Joanna. Thought you was Sybil come back.” Phoebe came forward, hesitating when she got a look at the tray’s disheveled contents.

  Marigold crossed to Jory, nestled in a basket, waving tiny hands.

  Azuba hadn’t moved.

  The kitchen’s warmth hummed with tension as Phoebe bustled about the hearth. “You want broth for Master Carey?” She reached for a kettle and sent it clattering across the bricks.

  Marigold jumped at the noise. Jory squawked.

  Joanna fixed her gaze on Azuba. “What were you discussing when I came in? Had it to do with Papa?”

  Nodding, Azuba turned to Phoebe. “You keep an eye on Jory whilst Mari and I speak with Miss Joanna?”

  Marigold looked up, seeming to know what Azuba intended.

  Phoebe made a strangled noise and went after the dropped kettle. Whatever Azuba meant to tell her, Phoebe was afraid for her to know.

  “Come out to the orchard,” Azuba bid her. “We can talk more free.”

  * * *

  Under the leafy boughs of the peach trees, Marigold shared what she’d witnessed that morning. “Sybil took breakfast to Master Carey in his room. After she go I spied a bowl of porridge on the worktable meant to be on his tray. I run it to the house, passing Sybil coming back. She tell me Master Carey sleeping, so go quiet. I did. Doubt he heard me open the door.”

  “Papa?” Joanna asked.

  Marigold shook her head. “Master Carey was sleeping sound. Mister Reeves was in the room. He weren’t when Sybil went in—I asked her.”

  “I suspect he was checking if Papa was awake.”

  Marigold shook her head more forceful this time. “He weren’t looking at Master Carey. He was bent over the breakfast tray. I couldn’t see what he was doing.”

  “Looking to see if Papa had eaten?”

  “Seconds after the food was left and him sleeping?” Azuba asked. “Go on, Mari. Tell the rest.”

  “My foot creaked a floorboard,” Mari said. “Mister Reeves spun round. He snatched the porridge away and told me to get out. So I got out.”

  “When Phoebe heard what happened,” Azuba said, “she told us this ain’t the only time Mister Reeves either took Master Carey’s food to serve or else was hovering once it was set out.”

  Joanna scrambled to rearrange the details of Marigold’s account into a more innocent pattern than they portended. And couldn’t. She felt a pit open beneath her, and the horrible sensation of falling.

  In that moment an infant’s hungry cry erupted. Phoebe came around the side of the kitchen, Jory screaming in her arms. At Joanna’s nod, Marigold hastened to her child, leaving her and Azuba at the orchard’s edge.

  “Azuba, what do we do?”

  “When Master Carey’s food’s served,” Azuba said, clearly having thought on the matter, “do your best to be there until he’s eaten it or says he wants no more. If not you, I’ll be. Give it time, and we’ll see what happens. That’s all I’m saying, but I know you understand me.”

  * * *

  Though his back was turned and he was making a din at the anvil, Demas seemed to sense her in the smithy doorway.

  “Is Elijah in back?” Joanna asked when the hammer stilled and he turned.

  Demas held her gaze.

  “Mister ’Lijah at the stable, last I know.” That well-bottom voice rumbled through Joanna like thunder. “Master Reeves at the house?”

  “He’s gone to the tobacco fields. If I see him, do you—”

  “Where your sister at? Someone with her?”

  This time that thunder-growl trailed lightning in its wake, striking Joanna’s nerves. “Why would you—”

  Footsteps scuffed to a halt behind her. “Joanna?”

  Off-footed by Demas’s interest in Charlotte, she turned to Elijah, recalling the conversation in the orchard, and its precedence. “Here you are. Good. I need to speak to you.”

  Elijah nodded her toward the pasture beyond the smithy yard. Joanna followed him to the railed fence. Demas’s hammer rang again.

  “How is he getting on?”

  “He doesn’t balk at the work, but he’s not happy away from Reeves.” Elijah scrutinized her. “Speaking of…has Reeves done something amiss?”

  “You know about it?” Joanna asked, startled.

  “Do ye?”

  She’d the sudden suspicion they were speaking of different things. “Elijah, did something happen between you and Mister Reeves?”

  “I thought ye must have heard of it, from Mari.”

  “I haven’t—not about you.” She crossed her arms, waiting, and listened while he told her how Mister Reeves had come to the smithy soon after she’d refused his proposal and asked Elijah if he was the reason behind it.

  “And to warn me away from ye, whether I was or wasn’t, that your plans for Severn were…I’ll not repeat the words he used, but he made it clear that if I helped ye further them, I’d be sorry for it.”

  “He threatened you?”

  “Not in so many words, but I got the message.”

  Her heart was pounding, her hands gone chill. And she hadn’t even told him her suspicions. “Does Papa know?”

  “Not from me. Mari does. And Demas, as he was there in the smithy pretending like he couldn’t hear a word.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He looked at her, scarred in so many ways beyond the physical, but feeling again like the brother she’d thought of him before the accident. “Ye’ve enough weighing on ye, Joanna, and what difference would it have made?”

  “I don’t know. But now I’m going to tell you something, and I need you to listen until I’m through before you question.”

  Elijah’s brows plunged low. “Go on.”

  She related the conversation in the orchard and judged by his expression he’d been told nothing of the matter as yet.

  “Joanna, I’ll tell ye what I think, but ye won’t like it.”

  Had she ever thought she might?

  “I don’t believe Reeves has had our best interests in mind. Not from the beginning.”

  She grasped for understanding. “Severn owns his devotion, you mean? Not Papa?”

  “Devotion?” Elijah barked a laugh. “No. The very opposite.”

  “What are you saying? He hates the place?”

  “Aye. And ye. Me. Even Captain Carey.”

  Joanna blanched, even as she shook her head in denial—of that last assertion, at least. “What has Papa ever done Mister Reeves but good?”

  Elijah’s stare was bleak. “That I cannot answer, but I think he does hate us all, Joanna.”

  “Elijah…” She reached for him, as if the ground she stood upon would topple her for its shaking. But Elijah wasn’t done speaking upheaval to her soul.

  “Another thing. I’ve no way to prove it…” He raised the arm that ended short of a hand, running the stump of his wrist down the scarred side of his face. “But I’m fair certain it was Reeves did this to me.”

  32

  AUGUST 1748

  That Pauling was Blackbird’s slave was undoubted. That Jemma and her bairn were not was equally clear. Murkier in that regard was Alex’s status.

  The three were out beyond the edge of Crooked Branch’s town, in the cornfield belonging to Blackbird’s Longhair Clan. For the
past two days Pauling had been sent to gather in the ripening corn. Jemma lent a hand when not tending the bairn, though no one asked it of her. Blackbird had asked Alex to help the reverend but in such a way he might have refused had he wished. Though Pauling remained cheerful no matter how he was treated, the ordeal of his capture had taken a toll, and Alex felt compelled to help the man whenever he could.

  Pauling had accounted for his presence there that first night together in Blackbird’s lodge.

  “I left Mountain Laurel in early November and was nigh the Wagon Road when that old thorn in my side overtook me. A band of Cherokees found me as I was rather feebly attempting to saddle the horse you shoed for me—which is no longer in my possession, alas. My apologies to Edmund for the loss,” Pauling had added with a glance at Alex.

  A glance too rife with questions for Alex to hold.

  Pauling had later learned from Runs-Far that the warriors who captured him had intended him for torture, a fate Pauling had suspected. Too weak to escape, he’d determined to make the most of what time he had.

  “I set myself to learn their speech, and as we journeyed and the fever lessened its grip, I began to tell them of a God who walked the rocky trails of this earth.” But it was Pauling’s willingness to obey their menial commands despite his suffering that won respect from the warriors—enough that by the time they’d reached Crooked Branch’s town, they’d changed their minds about him. “I was given to Blackbird, whose husband wasn’t long deceased.”

  “We know,” Jemma said. “But not how.”

  “He died on a hunting foray near the end of the previous winter, killed by Tuscaroras. Cane-Splitter led the hunt. He’s Wolf Clan, as was Blackbird’s husband.”

  Alex had seen little of Cane-Splitter since their arrival. Those few times, he’d sensed the man’s dislike of him simmering. “So Blackbird took ye. Why a slave, though?”

  “She’d hardly see me as a replacement for a husband. She needed someone to help with chores, and for the boy,” he added with a fond look at her son, Little Thunder, asleep on a bench built into the lodge’s wall, under which belongings and provisions were stored in an array of baskets woven of canes. “She’s to be made ghigau. Soon, I believe.”

  It was a word Alex didn’t know. “Ghigau?”

  “It means Beloved Woman. Blackbird will become the head of the women’s council, have a seat with the chiefs, and a voice on any matter of importance. It’s the highest honor a Cherokee woman can attain.”

  Alex was suitably impressed, but as he’d listened to the reverend, it had struck him—the strength he’d seen Blackbird display from their first encounter wasn’t so different from what he’d glimpsed in Joanna Carey. Though if Joanna was a fledgling tottering on the edge of her nest, wary of trying her wings, Blackbird was an eagle soaring high. But give Joanna time and freedom to spread those wings…

  Not verra likely among the folk on the Cape Fear.

  “So here ye’ve been since,” he had said, attempting to banish thoughts of Joanna, “serving Blackbird and trying to convert the Cherokees into proper Christians while ye do? Did ye never attempt escape?”

  “I’m fed and clothed,” Pauling had replied. “I’ve work to do and souls to love. Although it burdens me, missing those I’ve left behind. My sister. The churches I meant to visit on my journey. The Careys.”

  “I know they wishing you was there.” Needing no prompting, Jemma had spilled every woe befallen the Careys since Pauling’s visit. Hearing it poured out in a troubling stream, Alex felt the losses they’d suffered as he hadn’t since the Cherokees found them, distracting him from his warring sense of relief and guilt.

  “Then the mill caught fire,” Jemma said, gasping in a breath, “and killed poor Jim, and Mister Alex got blamed, never mind it weren’t his fault. They shut him in the smokehouse, and I don’t know what would’ve come next if he hadn’t got away. When I seen Mister Alex set on running, I took my chance and hightailed it after him. He let me come along once he caught me. We went to that place you know, Mountain Laurel, then moved on, and I’d about talked Mister Alex into taking me to the Cherokees when they found us, like that Mister Cameron said they would.”

  It was a tale of many plans in shambles, Jemma’s the sole exception, to hear her tell it.

  Pauling had cut troubled eyes toward her bairn, the same question in his gaze that had been in Alex’s mind for weeks. But instead he asked, “What of Joanna? Did she believe you set the fire?”

  “He don’t like talking ’bout her,” Jemma supplied when Alex remained tight-lipped.

  “We must,” Pauling insisted. “Setting aside that you broke your indenture, you made a promise to me concerning her.”

  “I said I’d bear your concerns mind,” Alex said, bristling. “Ye kent as well as I how little I could do for her.”

  “Was friendship beyond that pale?”

  “Did ye not hear Jemma tell the tale? They locked me in the smokehouse—bound for worse. I’d become another weight upon Joanna’s shoulders, a stumbling in her path. So I removed myself.”

  Little Thunder had stirred on his bed, disturbed by their voices. Alex lowered his. “I’d have taken her far from Severn and its miseries, but she wouldna come.”

  “Joanna is committed to those entrusted to her care, Charlotte first among them. Would you have taken both Edmund’s daughters from him? Broken his heart as well as his trust?”

  “Told you,” Jemma said when Alex merely glared. “He don’t like talking ’bout Miss Joanna.”

  “Then tell me of Edmund,” Pauling pressed.

  “What of him?”

  Pauling briefly reminded him of Carey’s struggle after the death of Joanna’s mother and their son, Jemma nodding all the while. “In the end his faith in the Almighty sustained him. Does he hold to it still?”

  Alex was struck by a memory of the man, detaining him in his study after the tar kiln’s explosion and the death of the old slave, Grandpa Jo. Carey had offered a tentative trust, or the beginnings of it, allowing Alex to glimpse his inner battle. The man had seemed determined then to conquer that shadow.

  That was before the mill fire and his internment in the smokehouse. Who could say what Carey or Joanna or any of them had endured since?

  “I dinna ken the workings of the man’s mind,” Alex said, stabbed by a sense of guilt he’d no wish to feel, “much less his spirit. I ken ye care about him…”

  “But you do not?”

  Alex had had no chance to reply, for the door-hide—a buffalo’s—had swept aside. Blackbird entered the lodge, curtailing the conversation.

  Now, hearing the reverend’s voice raised in near-fluent Cherokee, Alex left his capacious basket half-filled with corn and moved through the stalks to see the man conversing with Crooked Branch. Also a Longhair Clan member, the peace chief was in the fields harvesting corn. While fieldwork was ordinarily left to the women’s tending, during the busiest times all but those off hunting or making war lent a hand. Even some too aged to stoop in a field found ways to be of use.

  Atop a scaffold erected near the field’s center, an old woman perched, her task to screech at birds, deer, and other woodland foragers bent on ravaging the crop with their nibbling. A basket of stones rested beside her, should screeching prove ineffectual.

  Perhaps sensing Alex’s scrutiny, she opened eyes nearly lost in wrinkled folds and peered down. She still had most of her teeth, he saw when she bared them in a grin. She called down words to him in a voice reedy and cracked, a few of which Alex recognized.

  Big. White. Grub. He returned a smile, hoping that wasn’t a name they were calling him now.

  After three weeks among the Cherokees, few he encountered in the fields or near Blackbird’s lodge held him in fear, though some still went wary of him. Fewer went wary of Pauling. Among those who did were Runs-Far’s parents. Fishing Hawk
and Squash Blossom were none too pleased their son had become a follower of Pauling’s God. The raid during which Blackbird’s band found them had been Runs-Far’s first, and according to Jemma, his reluctance to join it had disappointed Fishing Hawk, as had his refusal to kill their enemies. His flaunting of the blood taboo during Jemma’s travail, when he’d prayed for her, had been one more strike against Pauling in their minds.

  Leaving off trading grins with the old woman on the scaffold, Alex went back to picking corn beneath the westering sun. Pauling must have done so as well. Alex no longer heard his voice. He soon heard others he recognized. Jemma and Blackbird, chattering in Cherokee.

  Blackbird had brought an empty basket, capacious and half her height. She eyed the one he was filling. “You make full another?”

  At his nod she set down the empty basket and took up the full one, settling the tumpline across her brow, surprising him with her strength. The basket was as large as the empty one, heavy with its bounty.

  Jemma had the bairn in his sling. Alex cast the rounded bundle a soft glance. “Have ye settled on a name, mo nighean?”

  “I’m waiting for Runs-Far to come back.”

  The lad had been gone a fortnight, having taken it upon himself to search out a woman Blackbird thought might better remember the Looks-At-The-Sun she vaguely recalled.

  “Little girl memory, long ago,” she’d said and cautioned Jemma not to raise her hopes that the woman still lived, or that Runs-Far could locate her if she did.

  “Bid the wind cease blowing while ye’re at it,” Alex had muttered.

  Jemma meant to leave the naming of her bairn to kin, if any could be found. Someone of her clan, whichever that was. She was hoping it didn’t turn out to be Runs-Far’s Longhair Clan. Apparently members of a clan never married one another no matter how distant the blood relation. That the Cherokees divided themselves into clans felt familiar to Alex, though with the Cherokees—Aniyunwiya, they called themselves, the Real People—clan affiliation came through the mother, not the father.