by Alyssa Cole
“What are you making?” he asked before taking a bite of chicken, helpfully changing the subject. People not perceiving the obvious were a terrible bother to him, and he couldn’t risk pointing out this particular oversight on her part.
“There’s a fever going around in the children in nearby towns.” She didn’t take her eyes from the line of glass bottles she was filling. “I think they’re weak from hunger—so many of the farms have gone to seed because the husbands are either hiding in the woods to escape Cahill or off at war, by force or by choice. Conditions are perfect for a terrible sickness to set in, as if we haven’t had enough loss. Tobias will be carrying these out to families tomorrow.”
At Cahill’s name, Ewan couldn’t help but grip his wooden spoon more tightly.
“How has it been, with Cahill?” he asked. He hadn’t revealed his connection to the man. How could he explain that to Marlie? The last bit of his ego couldn’t have her thinking he was a monster. Not thinking—knowing.
Her shoulders rose on a sigh, and her posture was stiffer when they fell again. “It’s going as well as one could imagine. Melody treats him like a king while constantly berating her own husband for not joining the Confederate forces himself. She abuses poor Sarah every chance she gets, and hints at her Unionist leanings. It’s a miracle Cahill hasn’t questioned her, or worse.” Marlie paused in her work. “They say he does terrible things. Captures the wives and children of men who don’t report to muster and—”
She stopped and looked back at him.
Ewan swallowed the chunk of potato down a throat that had suddenly gone dry. He knew very well what Cahill did to get what he wanted. He’d allowed himself to be dragged down to the same base levels. He wasn’t proud, but the only regret he felt was that he had let Cahill live. If Ewan hadn’t, Marlie would have never encountered the man.
“I’ve borne witness to the type of terrible things you mention,” he said carefully. He considered telling her that he had witnessed such things because he had carried them out.
“Oh, how dreadful. I’m sorry.” Her expression was one of such tender concern for him that any idea of confessing was tossed aside. Telling her would only cause her to fear for her safety, and that wasn’t in question.
Not from you. But Cahill . . .
“A great many shocking things are carried out in the name of North or South. Sometimes, they’re necessary. I’ve had to inure myself to that truth.”
“Such cruelty doesn’t disturb you?” she asked. Her gaze roamed his face, likely searching for some indication that she had misunderstood him.
“Wanton cruelty disturbs me. Cahill acts not out of necessity, but because he enjoys hurting others. There is no logic behind his actions, simply a sadistic pleasure in the pain of others.”
Marlie’s eyes were wide, the muscles of her face tense. “Yes. You said he was dangerous, and I’m afraid you weren’t mistaken.”
Ewan had to take a deep, slow breath, as he had every time his mind traveled to the ugly possibilities Cahill’s presence had opened up. Marlie had the Lynch name, and her family, to protect her. He’d told himself that over and over again, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking. “I hope I’m not overstepping, but has he exercised such behavior toward you?”
Her lips pressed together. She shook her head, clutched the bottle in her hand a bit too tightly.
“Marlie.” If she had been hurt and hadn’t told him . . . His scalp began to prickle.
“He’s been . . . less than agreeable. That’s all.” She paused, considering her words. “It’s nothing I should say in polite company.”
“You just saw me without a stitch on above the waist. As you made clear to Tobias, we’re past polite,” Ewan pressed. Marlie turned back to her work.
“He said that the best place for a woman like me was working as a fancy maid.” Her voice was low and full of shame, as if she were somehow at fault for such distasteful behavior. “He’s taken to calling me ‘Fancy’ now, when he sees me around the house. And the way he looks at me . . . you’ll understand that I do not want to encounter him alone. That is why—”
Ewan dropped the utensil and it was only when he felt the twinge in his ankle that he realized he’d jumped to his feet as well. He lowered himself back into his seat when he saw the flash of concern in her eyes, but he didn’t pick up the spoon. He was worried he might snap it.
“Breathe in. Breathe out, Ewan.” His mother’s brogue drifted up into his mind.
He’d been sure that he had better control over himself—he’d worked so hard for every bit of that control—but the thought of Cahill degrading Marlie was too much to take, especially knowing what he knew of the man. But Marlie knew nothing, of either Ewan or Cahill, and he didn’t want to frighten her any further than he had.
Assuage her.
“I’ll kill him if he tries to hurt you,” he said. His words were calm, but her eyes opened even wider, and Ewan understood too late that death threats weren’t quite the way to make a woman feel safer with you. He was already imagining her telling him to leave, that she shouldn’t be cooped up in a house with two men she feared.
“You say that as if you mean it, and you know exactly how you’d do it.” She held his gaze.
“I’m sorry.” He looked down at his hands. He wouldn’t descend into Lady Macbeth’s madness, but his hands were stained with the blood of Rebels and traitors to the Federal cause. Some said that made him a hero, but Ewan simply felt empty.
“Did you?” she asked. “Mean it, that is?”
He couldn’t bring himself to meet her gaze, and the awful feeling was starting deep in his skull again.
“I don’t want you to be afraid, particularly because you and I are in much closer quarters than you and he.” Ewan forced himself to pick up his spoon from the ground, to hold it normally. “I wouldn’t hurt you, Marlie. Ever. But him? Yes, I mean it.”
Better for her to know what kind of man she was dealing with. He owed her that, at least.
He felt something light on his shoulder and almost shrugged it away until he realized it was her hand. It was warm through the rough fabric of his shirt, and when he looked up at her she wasn’t frightened. Her dual-toned eyes were glossy, but she regarded him as she always had.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Do you want to help me clean the still when you’re done eating? I could use the help.”
Ewan had been struggling against rage and anger but he was abruptly inundated with a dizzying combination of warmth and gratitude. She was giving him something to do with his hands, a distraction he desperately needed.
Like running them up over the curve of her hip, pressing your fingers into the softness there . . .
Ewan blocked those thoughts away. He recalled a line of Epictetus. “Destroy desire completely in the present. If you desire that which is not in your power, you will be wretched.” He already felt like a mangy wretch, plagued by impure thoughts that alternated between violence and passion. He’d not entertain such thoughts in Marlie’s presence.
He should have gone back into the drying room, but he nodded instead.
“I would like that.” He ate the last bites of his food, not because he was hungry, but because she had given it to him, and then moved to stand beside her as she began dismantling the still. He watched her carefully, helped her lay the pieces down, and tried to remember how to put them back in the right order. She spoke as she took it apart, her low voice calming him as she explained the pieces and what they did. He already knew for the most part— he’d already begun thinking of ways to improve the device after reading her books and hand-drawn schematics in the flyleaves. But as he listened to her talk, he realized she was already aware of every improvement he would have suggested and had come up with alternatives that he would never have been able to synthesize.
“It’s a pleasure to watch you work,” he observed as she refit the final tube back into the body of the still. He had nothing to do with it, but he glo
wed with a sense of pride at her knowledge and ability. “You’re so very . . . competent.”
Ewan blushed as he said the word, for truly he could think of nothing he held in higher esteem. He felt as if he’d just admitted everything, but she simply glanced at him with a grin.
“This is my life’s work, so I’d hope so,” she said. “I’ve spent more hours working in this room than I can count.”
“Didn’t your studies take up your time?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I had a tutor for a bit. I couldn’t continue my education otherwise; there was no school for free Negroes nearby, and I was too Negro for the others despite the family name. I don’t quite fit in anywhere but these three rooms. I don’t mind, though, so no need for the pitying look.”
Ewan didn’t think he was capable of pitying looks, but perhaps he had been mistaken.
“How did you make friends?” he asked, then wished he hadn’t. It was the way her smile faltered before she caught herself, like a bird with a hobbled wing trying to take flight.
“I have Sarah and Tobias and Lace and Pearl,” she said simply. “I have everything I need here at Lynchwood.”
Ewan had seen the way she moved through the prison camp, smiling at surly men, offering aid to everyone without judging whether they deserved her kindness, or even appreciated it. Her smile had made even the worst men among them respond in kind. He wondered now how many people besides the prisoners had ever been lucky enough to see it.
“I’ve never been terribly good at making friends,” Ewan commiserated.
“You had that Irish fellow chasing after you like a puppy at the prison, and I saw men stop and talk to you all the time.” She paused. “Not that I was paying much attention.”
A little bud of warmth opened in Ewan’s chest, and he tried to crush it. She was friendless and that was the only thing she saw in him—a friend.
“I suppose,” was all he said in response. He didn’t like to think of what had become of Keeley. “Why do you have a Polybius square?”
There was generally only one use for such a thing—decrypting private messages. Marlie had just said she didn’t have friends outside Lynchwood, yet the square sat at her desk beside correspondence. Ewan couldn’t imagine what use she would have for it though; Marlie was too open, too naive, to be engaging in espionage. Then again, she was brazenly sheltering him in an occupied home. Ewan considered that perhaps it was he who was the naive one.
She glanced at the corner of the decoding ring sticking out from under a pile of papers. “Oh, is that what this is? I found it in the pages of a used book. Are you in the habit of examining a woman’s personal belongings so closely?” Her words landed lightly, cushioned by her teasing smile. Ewan might have believed her if she hadn’t tried to distract him by pointing out his tactlessness—it was unnatural for her, even if she was correct.
He bowed his head, deciding not to press her. She owed him no explanation and demanding one would be bizarre, no matter how his curiosity was piqued. “I apologize. I have a hard time not noticing things, but that doesn’t excuse my rudeness. I saw it sticking out from under that account of a slave revolt.”
“You mean this?” She picked up the stack of papers, her gaze jumping back and forth between it and Ewan. “You speak French?”
Ewan shook his head. “I can’t speak it, really. I can read it, though. And Latin. One of my teachers gave me a set of books he no longer needed, and I found the exercises to be quite soothing.”
She was staring at him now—not really at him. Through him. She handed him the top page and then took up a pen and a fresh piece of paper. “What does that say?” she asked.
Ewan should have felt put on the spot, but this was an interaction he wouldn’t have to worry about. This was something in his control.
“ ‘The master beat another man that day,’” he began. His cadence was slow as he eased back into language. He’d translated a few intercepted correspondences in the last year, but they had been completely different from the vivid personal tale he was reading. “‘They wanted us to be afraid. We were not. When that is everyday life, fear becomes useless. All they beat into us is hope, because hope is our only chance for survival.’”
He looked up to see Marlie bent over her desk, dipping and writing, dipping and writing, her hand moving furiously but the expression on her face torn between happiness and something like wonder.
“Should I continue?”
“Please.”
They worked like that for the next two hours, stopping only when the sound of a carriage pulling up alerted them that the house would soon be occupied by the enemy once again. She rubbed her ink-stained hands against her apron. “Time for you to go back inside.”
Ewan reluctantly followed her. He was a refugee, not a guest, and he had been lucky to get out of that space for as long as he had. He still wished they’d had more time. It seemed he always wanted more when it came to Marlie.
“If you want to give me those papers, I can translate the rest,” he offered after he’d slipped back into the secret room. “A paltry repayment of your kindness. And I wouldn’t mind a task to keep me occupied.”
It was more than that. A light, unfamiliar sensation suffused his veins. His French had been one of the many courses of study he’d been told would serve no purpose, and now it had one—and no one was hurt in the deployment of it. Being able to read the text clearly pleased Marlie. He wanted to please her.
“No.” Her voice was harsh, but then she said more gently, “Perhaps you can help me again tomorrow. But I prefer to keep my mother’s papers with me. They’re all I have left of her.”
Something throbbed in his chest at the fact that those were her mother’s words, and she’d shared them with him. The door started to close, but then the thin line of light widened again.
“Ewan?”
“Yes, Marlie?”
“Thank you.”
Then there was only the soft scrape of the desk and darkness. Ewan didn’t want to conjecture why her thanks filled him up like an amphora. He was wretched enough as it was.
CHAPTER 10
It was so strange to me. Back home, I could go for days without seeing a white face. There were so many of us slaves, and although the laws that held us in bondage were strictly and harshly observed, we lived our own lives amidst the terror. I learned that life was different for the American slaves. They were watched always, by master or overseer. Some were even made to sleep on the floor of the master’s room, not given the opportunity to even dream freely. Even their magic, their healing, had become a shadow of what I had learned on the island. And now I was one of them. Why had fate chosen this path for me?
Marlie placed the quill down and looked at Ewan. Three days had passed since he’d begun helping her with the translation work; Marlie spent even more time in her quarters than ever. Her world had for so long been no larger than Randolph County, and even the trips into town to shop and bring her wares to the pharmacy, and the occasional visits to the small farms to minister aid, had been few and far between. Sarah had always thought it safer for Marlie to stay at Lynchwood.
When the Fugitive Slave laws had been enacted, making free Negroes even less safe in their daily lives, those trips every couple of months had ended. She’d spent mornings in the nearby woods collecting roots and plants, but with bands of soldiers and impressment gangs wandering about, even that had become too risky. Her world had been scaled back to the house; the trips to Randolph had only been approved because Marlie had forced Sarah to see their utility to the Cause. Her utility. The arrival of Melody and Cahill had taken away that last freedom, and more; her days and nights were now spent in the three rooms that comprised her quarters.
She should have been more disturbed by that, but there was Ewan. His presence softened the blow of her undeserved punishment, quite a bit more than it should have. He was actually interested in her work, and helped her without complaint. She could talk to him about the different spe
cies of sassafras, and the difference in extract of bark and root and leaf. She could talk and talk, more than she ever had it seemed, and when she was done, he wanted to know more.
She had learned much from him, as well, about philosophy and politics, and anything except the War Between the States—that had fallen into the category of things they didn’t discuss after those first few days. Because discussing the war meant discussing the cause of it, and even if they were both on the same side, that didn’t mean there wasn’t still a hierarchy between them that was enforced with brutality in every corner of the land.
“I must go show my face or Sarah will come around looking for me to make sure nothing is amiss,” she said with a pang. Marlie felt no small amount of guilt that she hadn’t told her about Ewan’s presence, but Sarah was so very put upon every time they spoke that Marlie couldn’t bring herself to give her more reason to worry. And perhaps, just perhaps, there was a part of Marlie that enjoyed having one thing in her life that Sarah had not sanctioned or provided for her.
There was also the fact that every moment Marlie spent with Ewan, she was also spending with her mother. He’d become Vivienne’s mouthpiece, speaking her words into being. She’d thought it would be a simple exchange of words, but she quickly realized how wrong she was. Translation was an act that revealed as much about the person doing it as the text. The way his expression grew tense with anger as he parsed certain lines, or solemn with respect. The way he smiled when he came across a particularly sharp observation. How the passages sparked memories in Marlie, and her resulting stories had the reciprocal response in him. He learned about her childhood in a small shack in the piney woods. She knew all about his mother, older brother, and younger sister. Little was ever said about his father, but that empty space in his stories spoke volumes, and she was sure the spaces in her stories did, too.
Their translation felt like a greater intimacy than if he had pressed his mouth to hers, though she couldn’t help but wonder what that would feel like, too.