The King's Mercy

by Lori Benton

  With the eastern sky beginning to gray, he left the reverend asleep under both blankets, donned the knapsack, and set out to climb the ridge below which they’d camped. Using roots protruding from the steep-sided ridge, he heaved himself up, scrambling past tangles of rhododendron, hoisting himself over shelves of stone. After a half-hour’s climb, the burgeoning light showed him an opening in the pines and chestnut oaks growing thick along the ridge above. A bald, or maybe a meadow. He hoped it wasn’t so tightly hemmed by trees as to prevent view of the land round about.

  He was sweating by the time he broke through the final scrim, scratched and spotted with leafy debris, and stopped in startled wonder.

  Far below, a wide river coiled around the diminishing humps of the dawn-shadowed mountains that blended down into the lower backcountry, thickly treed with the fiery shades of autumn, the whole pocketed in mist still sheltered from the rising sun.

  The river had to be the Yadkin, which meant the headwaters were far behind them. They were nearer Mountain Laurel than he’d dared hope.

  With relief washing over him, he took in the lay of the land directly before him. While the wood he’d climbed through continued up the mountainside, before him was a treeless stretch that had its apex but an arrow’s flight to his left. Not steeply sided, save where the woods began, the open land spread gently down between the mountain’s shoulders to his right, broadening until it vanished into low-lying mist, while at its upper reach, issuing in a fall that burst from the trees, a creek of generous proportions carved its way down, doubtless to join the river below.

  It was a high cove, wide enough to support a modest spread of fields without felling the first tree.

  Once he’d taken in what the eye could see, he began to see what wasn’t there, but one day might be. Over on that rise where the creek took a bend away from the wood was a fitting site for a cabin, while that level spot downstream, overspread by a chestnut flushing yellow with the season, there he could envision a blacksmith shop. Higher up, at the fall, a mill.

  Turning this way and that to survey the land, he saw other sites for cabins, fields, their ghostly images glimpsed from the corners of his vision, built and thriving.

  As the mist crept along the creek’s course and kissed the first slant of morning sunlight breaking through clouds, he smelled the clean air and the pines and the autumn leaves, while behind him in the trees birds spoke, and knew…he’d found his place.

  A place for his people, once he had some. “God willing,” he said, the words a prayer.

  From his pack he removed the blacksmith tools, wrapped in oilcloth for the journey, carried them to the spot where he’d envisioned a forge, and buried them there beneath the chestnut. From the creek he gathered stones and raised a cairn to mark the place. Not that he needed the reminder.

  The stones were a prayer as well.

  * * *

  A slender man with a gray wig dressed in curls, Duncan Cameron had nattered on in the Gaelic since before he’d sat to supper with his overseer and his unexpected guest, who’d been too distracted to enjoy the meal prepared by Cameron’s slaves, a feast compared to his recent subsistence.

  The elder Cameron had required little explanation for Alex’s appearance, so thrilled was he to find a Gaelic-speaking Scotsman at his door, even an unwashed, bearded giant dressed as an Indian, cradling a very sick man to his chest.

  Since made as presentable as razor and a borrowed suit—inches short in the sleeve—could make him, Alex reined in his scattered thoughts to focus on his host’s latest question as the three removed to the adjacent parlor, glasses in hand.

  “So ’tis Barra in the Isles where ye were raised?”

  With the crackle of the hearth fire filling the room and worry for Pauling, in the care of the man’s slaves, filling his mind, Alex replied, “Aye. My mother was a MacNeill. I was brought up by her brother, my parents having passed. But I was born to the MacKinnons of Skye.”

  “Skye.” Duncan closed his eyes, inhaling fumes from the whisky in his glass as though its smoked-peat scent called up the ghosts of heather and gorse and rocky burns long since left behind. “I tramped the rugged Cuillins in my own youth. But tell me, in the town of Port Righ, does Angus Og MacNab still keep his inn?”

  Alex had never heard of Angus Og and said so.

  “I shall wager he does not,” Cameron said, grief shadowing his features. “Likely that devil, Cumberland, thrust him through on the field at Culloden.”

  As the man talked on as if he’d been present that April morn the Highland clans were shattered, Alex caught himself drumming his fingers on the chair’s arm. Pauling had received a dose of the Jesuit bark soon after their arrival, but Alex longed to know how the man fared. Forcing his fingers to still, he glanced at Hugh Cameron, drawn near the hearth in a matching chair.

  With a sympathetic tilt of his coppery head, Hugh quirked his mouth as if to say, What can ye do but humor the man?

  To be sitting in a parlor, whisky in a glass, listening to the old man bemoan the destruction of the clans as though he’d left Scotland’s shores but yesterday—the whole of it in the Gaelic—had Alex’s head spinning with a sense of unreality. His mind was taken up with different places and people. Pauling, aye, but the Careys as well, the more so after what Hugh told him before their meal.

  He grew aware of silence in the room. Cameron had asked another question. He’d no notion what.

  Hugh leapt to his rescue. “Well, Duncan, as MacKinnon here was stuck in that ship’s hold with me until we were separated, I am sure he will have no better notion than I what became of the rest of our number.”

  “Aye,” Alex said, with a vague idea now of what the man had asked. “The king’s mercy did not extend so far as letting us choose our path into exile. Hugh, here, being the exception.”

  “A sorrow to the bones is exile from one’s country,” Duncan Cameron said. “By whatever path. ’Tis natural to cleave to those one finds of his own people in a strange land, as I have found Hugh here…”

  As Cameron droned on, Alex nearly growled with impatience, until the thought arose that this man sitting in his parlor talking endlessly of a Scotland that no longer existed might very well be what he would have become had he clung resolutely to the past, refusing to yield to One greater than he and go forward into the unknown. A sorrow to the bones.

  Scotland was his sorrow as well, but it was also his past. While he mightn’t have planned or chosen it, this new land and its people were his future. More importantly, his present.

  The last words they’d exchanged while Hugh was seeing him shaved and fitted out with serviceable clothing darted about his mind: the ill-fortune that had plagued Severn hadn’t ended with the burning of the mill. It was no more than rumor, filtered the many miles upriver to Cross Creek, reaching Hugh’s ears but a fortnight past when last there on Cameron’s business.

  Rumor was enough to torment. What ill fortune? What of Joanna, and the wee lass, Charlotte?

  “Ye will surely ken,” Duncan Cameron was saying, leaning forward to pour himself more whisky from a decanter, “that North Carolina’s governor is a Scot. Governor Johnston is inclined to be generous with the tax exemptions when it comes to granting land to Scotsmen, and there is land aplenty as yet unclaimed, all around these hills.” Cameron went on to say how he would sell Alex a few of his own acres to begin, was he interested.

  “I thank ye for the offer,” Alex hedged. “But I canna yet say what the future holds for me. There are complications…”

  Cameron batted the air, as if whatever complications Alex eluded to were midges, but at last the talk wound down as the old man sipped his whisky, growing drowsy. When the glass fell slack in his lap, Hugh, watching with a practiced eye, caught it before the remaining liquid spilled. He set it on the side table and fetched a plaid from a settee, spreading it across Cameron’s knees.
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  Hugh nodded toward the front door. They went out into the chill October night to talk of Severn, and the journey Alex had still to make.

  * * *

  Sometime later he sat at Pauling’s bedside, a candle lit, watching the man sleep. He was grateful they’d a small store of the necessary bark at Mountain Laurel, but it wouldn’t be enough. Duncan Cameron knew a neighbor who suffered the same malady. Hugh would ride the miles to that homestead on the morrow to beg more.

  At some point Alex dozed, awakened by the candle’s guttering. Quickly taking up a spare, he lit it, then set it in the remains of the dying one. The faint light flared, showing him Pauling’s opened eyes, sunken, underscored by dark half-moons. His hand groped from the bed coverings.

  Alex grasped it. “We made it, Reverend. We’re at Mountain Laurel.”

  “Duncan and Hugh?” Pauling’s voice was weaker than Alex had ever heard it.

  “Both well.” He reached for a pewter cup filled with water and helped the man to drink. Over its rim Pauling studied him.

  “Something isn’t,” he said once he’d lain back again.

  “Hugh’s been to Cross Creek. He heard…rumors. The Careys are all but bankrupt. They’ve lost nigh everything.”

  Pauling closed his eyes, brow furrowing. “And here I lie…unable to go to them.”

  Alex leaned forward. “I can go. And will go, if ye’re sure ye mean to live.”

  Pauling breathed a faint laugh. “As much as it lies with me, but it will be some time before I’ve strength enough to follow you.”

  Alex studied the man, thinking it must be the dimness of the candle’s light that made it seem Pauling had almost instantly made his peace with what amounted to another captivity. “How can ye be so sanguine? Clearly ye wish to go with me.”

  “Long practice,” the reverend said lightly, but more soberly added, “If Christ wishes me in the prison of this flesh, then that is where I’ll learn to trust Him more.” He paused, then asked, “You’re worried still about what will happen if you return?”

  “I am,” Alex admitted. “I stole from Carey. Not just my years of service. He may well clap me in irons the moment I show my face.”

  Even if Carey did no such thing, what if Reeves hadn’t touched Charlotte, or done anything against the Careys that could be proved? He was canny, that one. There was nothing Alex could do to the man for what he’d done to Jemma. Nothing legal.

  He remembered the Tuscarora warrior, dying beneath his hands, and knew he would never take a life thus again, in vengeance, cold or heated. But to protect the innocent?

  Aye. He would do what he must.

  “What is it your heart desires, Alex?” Pauling asked.

  “A second chance,” he said, unthinking. His mind flooded with the choices he’d made amiss, the crossroads at which he might have taken a different path. One less self-serving. “To be whatever it was I was meant to be for the Careys. For Joanna most of all,” he added, for it was in his heart and the Almighty knew it well. He might as well confess it.

  “That sounds a good thing to me,” Pauling said. “A thing to bring glory to the Almighty and set right what was done amiss.”

  “I’ll answer for the thievery. But aside from myself, I dinna have what I stole. Jemma would say she wasna mine to return, but the tools were. I buried them back along the Yadkin.”

  “So you could carry me?”

  “In part, aye.” He didn’t speak of the high cove above the river or what he’d envisioned there. It was too precious. A thing between him and the Almighty, for now.

  “Let me think on that.” Pauling regarded him. “You know that what you desire isn’t against the Almighty’s Word or what you know of His nature?”

  “I dinna believe so.”

  “Then go in confidence. As you go, pray. Listen. He’ll guide you—deliver you, need be. Shut every door you aren’t meant to pass through. He’s practical, our God. But you’ll never know what good may come if you don’t take the first step of faith.”

  Pauling’s voice had faded to a whisper. He was asleep almost before the last word left his lips, leaving Alex alone in the dark but for the candle’s light.

  “Aye,” he said, breath buffeting the tiny flame. “I’ll take that step.”

  * * *

  He would take it afoot. Though Duncan Cameron wasn’t prepared to lend a horse on such short acquaintance—even to a fellow Scot—he was pleased to provision Alex from his kitchen. Saddling up to go beg Jesuit bark from their neighbor the next morning, Hugh Cameron bid Alex farewell, promising to send Pauling on his way to Severn as soon as he was able. “Take ye care, man,” he said, “however it unfolds. But seeing as ye survived the Cherokees with your scalp intact, I reckon ye’ll handle whatever ye find at Severn.”

  “If Severn doesna handle me,” he’d murmured, then grasped Hugh’s hand. “Tha mi fada nar comain,” he said; I am greatly indebted to you. “For your friendship—and your clothes,” he added, with a wry glance at his coat sleeves.

  Pauling was awake in the bed when Alex came to take his leave. He lowered the knapsack, battered now after its long travels, onto the chair he’d occupied the previous night.

  Pauling eyed it. “Has that pack of yours room for a letter?”

  “If not there, on my person. A letter to whom?”

  “Edmund.” Pauling indicated a desk pushed to the wall, where lay a sheet of foolscap, freshly inked.

  “Did ye get up from that bed to write a letter? What were ye thinking, man?”

  Clearly delighted to be chastised, Pauling grinned. “Only that if I cannot go to Edmund, my words can do so. Kindly seal the letter, see it reaches his hands? It may be of service.”

  Alex went to the desk and found a stick of sealing wax. He folded the page, tempted to read the words in Pauling’s inelegant script. Conquering the urge, he warmed the wax over the candle’s flame and dripped a dollop across the letter’s seam. He found Pauling’s seal, and pressed it to the wax.

  “Whether or not Edmund receives you,” Pauling said, “this he will receive.”

  Alex slipped the letter into an inner pocket of his coat. He retrieved his pack, hoisted it to his shoulder, and started to bid Pauling farewell. The man’s eyes were closed. With a rush of fondness and a silent prayer for healing, he turned to go.

  “Alex MacKinnon…”

  At the door he turned back. Pauling was sitting up, blue eyes full of light and hope. He stretched a hand toward Alex, who stepped back into the room and took it in his own. The man’s grip was surprisingly firm.

  “The Lord goes before you to part the waters. To make the way for you, for those to whom you go. Grace and peace be with you.” Pauling subsided back onto the pillow, eyes already closed, on the edge of healing sleep.

  Alex squeezed his hand a final time. “And remain with ye, Reverend.”

  And whatever happens now, he added silently to heaven, make my path straight.

  40

  Charlotte and Azuba had come pounding down the stairs when Joanna shouted for help. There had been no preventing her sister seeing her father in his diminished state—right side bereft of mobility, speech mangled through drooling lips. Perhaps most disturbing, his frightened and defenseless stare. They’d gotten Papa into the bed in the study, where Joanna, Mari, and Azuba cared for him in turns through that day and the night following. Charlotte, despite the fright it caused her, begged to see her father again, but Papa’s mortification was only worsened by her witnessing it. One look in his eyes had told Joanna as much. They kept Charlotte away.

  Mister Reeves had returned the following day from his ride downriver to sell the mare. “An apoplexy.” He’d appeared as stunned as Joanna over this appalling turn as they stood in the passage. “I cannot tell whether he knows what he’s trying to say.”

  “He knows,” she said, mout
h trembling over the words. “Didn’t you look into his eyes?”

  “I did. I saw fear.” The corner of Mister Reeves’s mouth twitched, then he seemed to shake himself as a man coming out of a trance. He narrowed his eyes. “Where is Azuba?”

  “I…don’t know.” She’d been about to say Azuba was upstairs with Charlotte, but stopped herself in time. “Why?”

  “Surely you see this is poison again. Who else has access to Captain Carey’s food? Mari? The cook? Are they here still?”

  “Where else would they be?”

  “Half your stepfather’s slaves have run off to the swamps. Carpenters, coopers, stable hands.” Scorn twisted Mister Reeves’s face. “Hadn’t you noticed?”

  She’d not gone beyond the kitchen for days. It hardly mattered now. Papa mattered, and poison wasn’t to blame for this. Not directly. She’d pushed too hard; Papa had been too frail. She and Mister Reeves together had done this to him.

  “Why do you look guilt ridden?” Mister Reeves asked, scrutinizing her with narrowed eyes. “You wouldn’t harm your precious papa.”

  “Whatever is the cause of this, he needs a physician.”

  “As it happens, I know where one is, or was this morning. Whether he’s skilled at his craft or merely a backwoods quack, I couldn’t say.”

  “Where? If you know—”

  “A fellow was attending a sick child downriver. Where I sold the mare.”

  She grasped his sleeve, uncertain if he meant to help Papa or let him languish. “Will you go?”

  He drew his arm away. “I’ve just returned.”

  “Mister Reeves, someone must.”

  A muscle in his jaw bulged, as though he ground his teeth. “I’ll send two of your garden hands. But a physician will only confirm it was poison.”

  Was Azuba next in his sights? Marigold? Phoebe?

  Mister Reeves turned his back and headed toward the door. As she watched him retreat, Joanna knew a moment of pure rage. Had she been strong enough, and a suitable weapon to hand…