by Laura Frantz
“Stop!” She wanted to scream, but shock jellied her voice to a quaver and it was lost beneath Larkin’s startled howling. With the babe behind her, she tried to fight off her attacker, but he was far stronger than she, fueled by spirits and fury.
When he’d pushed past the limp hammock and climbed into the bunk, the cabin door slammed open. In breathless seconds, the ship’s surgeon was pulled away from her and sent sprawling into the nearest wall. The thwack of it signaled the frightful disturbance was done. Clutching her torn nightgown with one hand, Lark groped for Larkin with the other.
Through the darkness came Magnus’s winded voice. “Lark?”
Before she could answer, the second mate was in back of him, lantern held aloft. The seasoned officer surveyed the scene in grim disgust, toeing Blackburn’s inert form with his boot.
“Collapsed, more from an excess of spirits than yer pummeling, likely,” he said to Magnus before glancing Lark’s way. “My apologies to ye and the babe, Miss MacDougall.”
Magnus reached for Larkin while Lark tried to gather what remained of her modesty and composure. In mere moments, Blackburn was hauled away.
Magnus began pacing while Larkin, mayhap taken by the novelty of a man carrying him, began to quiet. Shaking, Lark sat on the bunk’s rough edge, arms wrapped round herself, staring at the floor planks polished yellow-gold by the lantern light. Queasiness climbed her throat and soured her mouth. To think she’d once been flattered by Blackburn’s attention. Her gaze lifted to Magnus, Larkin now fingering his shadowed stubble of a beard.
One arm dangled uselessly at his side. His hurt shoulder. She stood, noticing the sling on the floor along with his crepe armband. Picking them up, she knew the short scuffle had cost him dearly.
A question seemed to hang between them. “He didna—” Magnus left off, coming to a sudden standstill, his eyes asking the rest.
She swallowed, looking to her bare feet rather than meeting his compassionate gaze. “Ye came in before he could cause such harm.”
“Glad I am of that.” He resumed his pacing. “Larkin’s howling woke me. Betimes I ken ye were given the babe for yer own protection as well as his.”
She’d oft thought it too. “Just when I think yer lairdly duties are done, something new arises.”
“Mayhap. But we’ll soon be parted.”
He needn’t have said it. The day loomed like a thorn in her heart. Their lives were no longer their own. Years of servitude stretched before them both. Bleak. Barren.
“I fear for ye when we’re parted. Who will look after ye?” He was a handbreadth away now. In his intent gaze was a blaze of regret and something else that shook her completely. Something so raw yet so heartfelt it caused her stomach to flip. Reaching out, he touched her cheek, not quickly or carelessly but gently and lingeringly, as if wanting to mark her skin’s softness in memory and make the most of this very rare, private moment.
Larkin was drooping now, as if lulled by Magnus’s former motion. Lark took him back, laid him on the bunk, and tucked the blanket around him, praying the bump to his head was of no consequence.
She turned back to Magnus, noting pain skitter across his face as he fisted the hand of his injured arm. “Let me tend ye,” she said. “I’ll not let Blackburn touch ye.”
He stood patiently as her fingers explored his shoulder. Still tender. Still out of socket. She gripped his elbow as gently as she could and then placed a hand on his thick forearm with a whispered warning. A circular crank gave way to a satisfying if painful pop as the shoulder slid back into place. He set his jaw against a groan. Next, she knotted the sling to hold his arm in position, with a silent prayer for hasty healing.
“Are ye still able to keep the captain’s ledgers?” she asked, standing back reluctantly.
He nodded, his eyes holding hers. “Aye. He’s in a bad way, shaking as he does. But the palsy hasn’t affected his mind. Nor his courtship with Mrs. Ravenhill.”
His sudden wink lent him a roguish air. She gave him a sleepy smile, the events of the last two days catching up with her. Five weeks of the voyage remained. Never had time moved so slowly or been so fraught with danger.
She bent again, her fingers closing over the crepe mourning band. Now it brought back not only his loss but his heartfelt declaration. Tears pooled in her eyes. When she went to tie it on, he stopped her.
“Nay, Lark.” Taking the crepe from her hand, he fisted it. “God knows ’tis mostly a trapping. What’s past is past. Leave it be.”
She said nothing, melancholy overshadowing her relief to have escaped Blackburn.
He paused at the door. “I’ll ask to be moved nearer ye for yer safekeeping.”
“Will the captain allow it?”
“He’s agreeable to most anything I suggest.”
She opened her mouth to thank him, but he went out and shut the door firmly behind him, leaving the lantern and its comforting light behind.
25
Give me but one hour of Scotland,
Let me see it ere I die.
William Edmondstoune Aytoun
Years later, what would she remember? The gale that nearly sent them to the bottom of the sea? Their eventual landing in British America? Or Surgeon Blackburn’s brutal lashing?
At seven bells—half past eleven in the morn—all mustered on deck to hear the offense and resulting punishment read aloud by the captain. The charges were weighty. Drunkenness and lewd conduct unbefitting an officer. Beside the captain stood the boatswain’s mate holding the whip with its nine tails of knotted, waxed rope. Flogging Blackburn barebacked before the eyes of the entire ship after he’d been bound to a grating seemed harsh, when nothing happened except that she’d had a terrible fright and Larkin had bruised his brow. But had Blackburn had his way . . .
Lark looked away as the first of a dozen lashes was struck, hard enough to scar bare skin. She wanted to plug her ears. Turn her back. All she could do was avert her gaze and focus on Larkin as he played with the coral rattle, unaware of the grisly scene. When it was done, Blackburn would be taken below and salt rubbed into his wounds, a severe mercy to allay infection.
’Twas as much a punishment as a warning. The sailors’ sober faces bespoke it. But what irony. Were not most of the officers guilty of drunkenness and lewd conduct, having taken shipboard mistresses and indulging at the captain’s table? Sighing, she shut any sordid thoughts away, glad to escape to the plant cabin where a young lieutenant replaced Blackburn in his duties there.
Time passed. The air turned cooler as summer waned. Days became a succession of watches. Blessedly, nothing extraordinary happened till land was finally sighted.
Lark stood at the taffrail as the green edge of a new continent beckoned. Speechless, she stared, finding it immensely moving. Hard-won. Terrifying.
She craved land. Yet the wistful yearning, honed after eight long weeks at sea, was tempered by a keen sadness. The Bonaventure would dock, then sail on to the British sugar islands, the laird still aboard.
After the incident with Surgeon Blackburn, Magnus stayed busy with the captain’s ledgers and correspondence, eating with the crew on deck. Often he would send her a long, lingering look. Occasionally he would seek her out and speak with her or hold Larkin, but this was so rare it seemed almost remarkable when he did so. Eyes were everywhere. Never had they another private moment. Betimes it seemed she’d dreamed his revelation that stormy night of once wanting her as his bride. Such seemed to have little bearing on the present. What had he said to her below decks?
“What’s past is past. Leave it be.”
Soon they would say goodbye. Stern with her heart, she rehearsed a cool farewell in her head, not wanting to make a spectacle of herself once the time came.
Their port was Hampton, Virginia. British America.
Now she stood on deck, Larkin in her arms, staring at the fringe of green coast. Their entrance into the harbor was almost leisurely, this new land, so unlike Scotland, unfolding before her rivete
d gaze. She could not help but make comparisons despite the check in her spirit not to do so. Nothing compared with her beloved country, the land she knew best. Virginia meant a host of inconsolable things. An unfair verdict. Servitude. Irreparable loss. How would she ever look at it without this sick sinking in her stomach? This sense of taint and loathing? Her tangled thoughts gave her no rest as they sailed toward the unwelcome shore.
But any further ruminations were short-lived. Once they’d docked, the on-deck sale of convicts unfolded with haste, shackling them further to this new place. Before her very eyes, frowning, quarrelsome masters purchased contracts in exchange for years of labor or a possible sale to another planter. She herself was bound to Richard Osbourne’s Royal Hundred. ’Twas an odd name to her Scots ears.
The sweet scent of tobacco hung in the salt air, along with that of coffee, rum, molasses, and exotic spices. Though the sun played hide-and-seek with wispy clouds, it steamed on deck, dampening her bodice and sending itchy trickles of sweat down her temples.
Virginia was naught but a bake oven. Tidewater, they called the surrounding land. Countless vessels rode at anchor. There were more Africans than whites. Her whole being rebelled at the difference.
Osbourne’s colonial factor stood before her. He looked from her to a babbling Larkin, whose fat fist was in his mouth, face ruddy beneath his humble bonnet. Did this man not like children? His scowl told her nay.
Might he take the babe away from her? Did he have the right?
She swallowed hard. Fear had a terrible taste. Rarely had she known it on Kerrera. But since leaving Scotland . . .
The factor finally spoke. “I pray to heaven you’re not one of the sorners so common on these shores.”
Anger stiffened her spine. She was not a shirker, a shiftless vagabond who avoided work, no better than a beggar.
“Your son is the image of you,” he said.
She held her tongue, long past explaining Larkin’s beginnings.
His clipped British tone was dismissive. “Though he survived the voyage, he’ll not likely survive the seasoning.”
The seasoning?
He looked down at the documents given him by the captain. She tried not to stare at his gentlemanly garments, his ribbed waistcoat stretched taut over a middle rounded by ham and biscuits, his tobacco-brown features pitted with smallpox scars. They lent him a hard air along with his hard words.
“Your term of service is three years hence in exchange for sufficient meat, drink, apparel, lodging, and all other necessaries befitting a servant bound to Richard Osbourne or his heirs at Royal Hundred.”
He thrust the papers toward her with a bit of lead to write her name or mark the more common X. Shifting Larkin to her left hip, she signed her full name. Boldly. Proudly.
His brow lifted in surprise, but he said nothing. Again he riffled through his papers. “In the list of rebel prisoners imported by Captain James Moodie is Magnus MacLeish, transported for adhering to the Stuart cause and violating the Dress Act, becoming factor to the West Indies plantation of Richard Osbourne in Jamaica.”
Lark stared at the papers. A bottomless sense of loss began poking holes in her composure. She looked toward Magnus, where he stood talking with Captain Moodie. She saw no sign of Rory.
A wagon waited on the dock below, quickly filling with the remaining straw skeps and contents of the plant cabin, all secured for travel. The factor gestured in irritation for her to start walking. Four other convict women followed her down the sun-soaked gangplank, their scant possessions with them. But ’twas no simple task gaining one’s land legs after so long at sea. The earth seemed to sway and send her into a spin, making her grip Larkin all the harder lest she spill him onto the dirty wharf.
A burly man, black as printer’s ink, helped them into a second wagon, its bed filled with sweet-smelling straw. Noisy gulls circled, drawing her notice to the cloudless September sky. Her gaze shifted to the Bonaventure’s deck, mostly empty now.
Magnus came toward her and took a seat beside the factor, atop the wagon box that held the bees and plants. Would her breath always catch in anticipation now that he’d unburdened himself about his former feelings for her? Why was he going with them?
Both wagons rolled away, dodging cargo and sailors, slaves and roustabouts. Shops along the King Street wharf were as many as ships. Taverns and storehouses and shipfitters abounded. A rutted road led inland, pushing past fences and ditches to the surrounding countryside.
Lark sat in a sort of trance as they bumped along, Larkin in her lap, her senses shifting from the azure of the ocean to endless emerald fields made bright with blue lobelia and red cardinal flowers. These she recognized. The rest, nay. Nary a stem bent nor a leaf stirred, the heavy air was so still. ’Twas almost too much to take in. She inhaled a sticky breath. No pesky midges like in Scotland, but an abundance of long-legged mosquitoes and persistent horseflies.
Her fellow convicts, all oakum pickers, were quiet. One nodded off like Larkin, lulled by the wagon’s motion. Magnus’s voice floated on the air, but mostly the factor did the talking. She caught little except a mention of the Bonaventure. Watering and provisioning the ship took time. Days, mayhap. Likely their departure for Jamaica wasn’t imminent. Some of the officers had left the ship soon after docking. Magnus was coming with them when he didn’t have to, to Royal Hundred, the plantation that had made Osbourne a Tobacco Lord.
Hope began building inside her. Since he’d professed his former feelings, she’d sensed a new sort of bond between them, something fresh and even more heartfelt.
All of a sudden, he looked back at her as if confirming it. This was no careless glance. She met his gaze, all else falling away, and was overcome by his attention and the force of feeling behind it, as if he’d reached out and touched her. She held his look till he faced forward again, wanting to impart all that she could not say.
I feel like a girl again when ye look my way. Not an indentured spinster with a babe not my own. More a princess or a queen.
With effort she returned to looking at the landscape, her thoughts still firmly anchored to him. A gate crafted of brick and scrolling ironwork led to a lane of trees she had no name for, thick and majestic and stretching to the sky. At its end was a house the rival of any she’d seen in Scotland, a masterpiece of Flemish bond brickwork and a mansard roof crowned with a cupola. She fixed her eye on the idle weathervane atop it as they rumbled past the circular drive and welcoming porch to more fence and field. Up close she could see that Royal Hundred possessed a rich if somewhat neglected grandeur.
Beyond them stretched a wide river, blue as watered silk. She wondered its name. Wondered why they’d come to what looked like a village of wooden huts, dark children running hither and yon. The burly black man set the brake and got down, then helped the women down and pointed to their lodging. In moments, the factor bid Lark join them in the wagon holding the bees and plants. Magnus helped her up onto the seat, and they took yet another lane, looping to the back of the mansion house.
Here she felt less out of place. A walled garden. A glass hothouse. Small, well-kept outbuildings running the length of the lawn, connected by crisscrossed shell paths, herbs and flowers between.
“You’ll lodge here,” the factor said, gesturing to a cottage the size of Granny’s croft, but of brick rather than stone, a chimney at both ends. “The stillroom is to one side.”
A double purpose then. Magnus eyed it approvingly, she thought. Pleasure rose up to sweeten their strange surroundings.
They began unloading the wagon, avoiding the stirring bees. She pushed open the door to her new dwelling. Clean. Spare. It smelled damp, walls holding the tang of a vinegar wash.
She eased a sleeping Larkin onto the bed’s woven coverlet and passed through a connecting door to the stillroom. Overcome, she shut her eyes, savoring the cool shadows and scents of a great many beloved herbs and simples, like old friends. They crowded the rafters, dried bouquets of lavender and everlastings, all
faded but lovely.
“Ye fancy it?” Magnus’s voice sounded at the room’s threshold.
She turned toward him. “I do.”
“Wait till ye see the bee garden.” He sounded satisfied. Even relieved.
Excitement carried her to a window. The great house cast a tall shadow over the rear lawn at what she guessed was four o’clock. “If Osbourne doesna live here, who does?”
“The mansion stays empty till he comes. There’s a housekeeper who will oversee you, according to Osbourne. Yer here to solely keep the stillroom and tend the bees. Not a poor position for ye and wee Larkin.”
Nay, not poor. Providential. Yet he dashed her fragile contentment when he said, “Take care with the factor, Granger. He’s a hard man and he’s unwell.”
His words were punctuated with a distant coughing fit as the wagon rumbled away.
“Are American factors like Scottish ones, like yer Mr. Chandler?”
He ran both hands through hair in need of trimming. “More or less. Granger deals mostly with the indentures and enslaved. Field hands. He lives elsewhere. Ye’ll likely see little of him and more of Mistress Flowerdew.”
“Flowerdew?” Lark brightened. “Ye jest.”
“Nay,” he replied with a wink. “Let’s hope Royal Hundred’s housekeeper is as bonny as her name.”
The castle’s servants flashed to mind but seemed from another world. Was he remembering them too? The fleeting thought toppled when he closed the distance between them and took her hands. She stared down at their entwined fingers, moved by a more distant memory of holding hands and running across the island as children, young and free.
His fingers tightened about hers ever so slightly. “We’ve not much time, ye ken. I’ll not be so foolish as to wait three more years with what weighs on my mind and heart.”
She looked up at him, more than a wee bit shooglie. There were no words for the way he made her feel. He even spoke what was on her own mind and heart. Bending his head, he brought her hands to his lips and slowly kissed them. She leaned in slightly, wanting to bury her face in his wealth of hair, unkempt yet clean and still carrying a hint of the sea.