by Lori Benton
She was still watching him ride away when her mama spoke behind her.
“Why didn’t ye go with him?”
She turned. “Mama, don’t start—”
“No,” Lily said. “What I aim to do is finish this, if I can.”
“What?” Seona was too startled to resist when once again her arm was clasped and she was marched back to the house, past Maggie, Catriona, Matthew, and Lem, on their way out.
“Where did Ian . . . ?” A look at their faces, Lily’s determined, Seona’s stiff with apprehension, stifled Catriona’s question. “Never mind.”
Lily guided Seona down the passage to the kitchen, where Goodenough was scouring the table and Willa sat watching, bidding her to stop and sit down. She fell silent when they entered, then asked, “Lily? What is wrong?”
Lily released Seona to stand in the middle of the kitchen. “What’s wrong is this child of mine, keeping the man who loves her at arm’s length and hiding out on his farm, too scared to live this life she’s been given.”
“Mama,” Seona said with barely enough mortified breath to protest. “I’m here, ain’t I?”
Willa glanced at Goodenough. “Sit. Work can wait.”
They all sat, Goodenough at the table’s head, nearest Seona. She took Seona’s hand in her worn one. “Little sister, what’s got you afraid?”
Seona opened her mouth, but tears choked her. Sister.
Her mama saw and seemed to suppress a sudden smile. “How if I tell it plain, the way I’m seeing things?”
Tell it plain. How Seona longed for someone to do so, to make sense of the conflicting thoughts she had battled since coming to New York, to Ian, to this bright, free future he was offering. She nodded.
Goodenough squeezed her hand and released it.
“My girl-baby finds herself caught betwixt and between two lives,” Lily said. “The one we knew in Carolina and the one we’re making here. She cannot find her footing and is afeared to take a step—with feet or heart—until she knows where she and my grandson stand. Who they are. Maybe who they are to ye.” Lily looked across the table at Seona, who felt the tears come burning. “Am I right?”
“Reckon that hits nigh the mark,” Seona said, thumbing away a tear.
There was silence in the room. Waiting. Willa MacGregor had her eyes closed. Goodenough made a humming noise, then said, “Reckon either you or I could speak to this, Willa. Who’s it to be?”
“True.” Willa opened her eyes, brown and green. “I once did not know to which world I belonged, white or Mohawk. But I was never enslaved.”
“All right,” Goodenough said, as if accepting a mantle handed her. She looked Seona in the eye. “I’m going to tell you why you ought not fret over what I think of you or what Willa thinks or anyone else in Shiloh. But first you tell me something. What have you heard about me and my Lem?”
Seona glanced at Lily, who urged her on with a nod. “You were enslaved to Anni Keppler’s father, the man who owns those colts you brought.”
“That’s right. But we’re more than former slaves to Elias Waring. Lem’s his son as much as he’s mine. And before you ask it, no, I am not Elias’s wife—save by common law.”
Seona bit her lip, wondering why Goodenough thought that helped. “He freed you and Lem but never married you? Is it not allowed?”
It was Willa who answered. “Goodenough and the Colonel could marry in New York. No law forbids it, as in other places.”
“No written law,” Goodenough clarified. “But we all know there’s what’s legal and what folks will stomach.”
Seona looked at her fingers gripping the table’s edge. “I came here thinking to marry Ian, but I was his uncle’s slave.” Her own grandfather’s slave. “Why would it be accepted for us to marry but not you and Colonel Waring?”
She had journeyed farther than she once imagined possible—not far enough to outdistance slavery’s shadow. It lay over her still.
Goodenough’s full lips spread in a smile. “I was enslaved to the Warings as a girl. Everyone in Shiloh knows that. There’s some still think it their place to remind me of it—just better never let Elias hear ’em,” she added, a mischievous gleam in her eyes. “That man respects me. Needs me. Loves me, too. He treats Lem as a son and makes no secret of it. We eat at his table. I sleep in his bed. It took time for even Anni to accept it, but she has done. Others too. As for marrying, Elias and I spoke our vows before God, years back, witnesses looking on. That’s married enough for me.”
“I was one of those witnesses,” Willa said. “As was Neil.”
Goodenough cast her a smile, then addressed Seona again. “You hold your head high in this place. Be who you are becoming. But don’t ever pretend the first Seona never existed. That girl’s with you still. From time to time, she’ll need her wounds healed. But God Almighty loves every broken piece of you.”
“From what I saw on his face today,” Willa added, “so does Ian Cameron.”
Seona’s tears came fresh, but she nodded.
“Another thing,” Goodenough said. “All Shiloh need never know you and your mama were slaves. But if tongues wag, you pay them no heed, for they aren’t the ones worth troubling over. If you want to raise your boy with a mama and a daddy—sister, too—then do it. Never you mind another blessed thing.”
Lily reached across the table. Seona met her hand with her own, clasping tight.
“Mama,” she said, tears flowing hard. In Boston she had thought herself free, and in many ways she had been. But the house on Beachum Lane had been a place between. A halfway point of shelter. Of waiting.
Goodenough had it right. She felt like two souls in one body. The girl who was a slave. The woman who was free. Or learning to be. Could she find some solid ground for both to stand on long enough to know herself again?
Goodenough had done it. Willa MacGregor too. Each in her way. Done it right there in Shiloh. Surely she could too.
27
Back from Shiloh with Ruaidh freshly shod, Ian found Gabriel and Mandy crowded into the pen he had built for Ally’s calf, along with Lily, who held a canteen for it to suckle. “Helping Granny feed Ally’s wee bull, are ye?” he asked as he unsaddled the roan.
Helping amounted to each child keeping one small hand on the canteen, alongside their grandmother’s, the other fondling one of the calf’s ears, while between them Lily kept the canteen tilted so the milk flowed, holding in place against the calf’s vigorous sucking the rag stuffed into its opening for a teat.
“His name’s Blackie,” Gabriel said.
“His name is George,” Mandy said.
Ian had worried for the creature and the blow to Ally’s confidence should it die. While smaller than its twin, it appeared to be thriving. It also appeared his children were having the first serious disagreement he had ever witnessed.
“No, Mandy. Not Geooge . . . Geowage . . .” Abandoning the struggle, Gabriel glowered across the calf’s bobbing nose. “Blackie!”
“Ally told them they could give it a name,” Lily said. “We’ve yet to settle.”
“George’s eyelashes are loooong,” Mandy said, hands stuck fast to canteen and calf. “Like a girl cow.”
“Blackie is a bull,” Gabriel said.
“Aye,” Lily agreed judiciously. “A baby bull with long, pretty lashes.”
“Ganny,” Gabriel protested, “bulls awe not pwetty.”
Ian listened to the ongoing debate while he gave Ruaidh a brushing in his box, then opened the door to the paddock, where feed and water waited. He found the calf still suckling, Lily patiently enduring the children impeding the business with their efforts to help.
He paused at the pen. “D’ye know where I’ll find Seona just now?”
“Naomi’s cabin. Last I saw.”
He caught a message in Lily’s gaze as he turned away, one he couldn’t decipher. Seona’s near-panicked withdrawal when invited to go into Shiloh still troubled him.
Since that one brief excursio
n to the lake, cut short by Gabriel, he had failed to accomplish anything remotely resembling the courting he had intended. The demands of the farm—crops, building projects, stock to tend—ate up his days. Seona’s were spent minding the children or helping with laundry, cooking, mending, sewing, the endless chores of living. The sweet corn was mostly in, but the field corn for grinding meal and next year’s seed still dried on the stalk, awaiting harvesting later in the season. Other needs pulled at his thoughts as he crossed the yard to Naomi’s cabin. Its door stood wide in the warmth. Hearing Malcolm’s voice before he reached it, he paused, hesitant to interrupt.
“‘Esther had not shewed her pee-people nor her kindred: for Mor . . . Mord . . .’”
“You managed it yesterday,” Seona said. “Sound it out again.”
“Mor-deh-cay-eye.”
“There you go. Now read the next verse. Then I got to help Naomi with the wash.”
Ian had known Seona was spending her spare moments teaching Malcolm to read. This was the first he had caught them at it. He looked about, not wanting to be caught himself listening, but saw no sign of Naomi.
“‘And Mor-deh-cay-eye walked eh-ver-ee day before the court of the wo-man . . . women’s house, to know how Esther did, and what should become of her.’”
“Good . . . ,” Seona praised, though she sounded distracted.
“‘Now when every maid’s turn was come to go in to king Ah . . . A-has . . .’”
Ahasuerus, Ian silently urged, willing the old man to decipher the name.
When Seona failed to speak up, he peeked around the doorframe. Malcolm sat on a bench at the table, Seona beside him, back to the door, gazing out the window.
Malcolm raised his head. “Something on your mind, mo nighean?”
Seona leaned toward the old man until their shoulders touched. “More’n I can shake a stick at,” she said, minding Ian of how she talked at Mountain Laurel. “Just now I was thinking of our Esther.”
“I think on her too,” Malcolm said. “And her mama and daddy.”
Seona’s profile was shadowed as she stared through the window again, the oiled hide that covered it at night rolled up, now the blackflies no longer pestered. The day was grown hot. He could see the sweat that rolled down Seona’s neck.
“How is it fair we’re here and she’s back where that man . . . ?”
She didn’t speak the name; still Ian knew and remembered like it was yesterday what Gideon Pryce—that man—tried to do the day he cornered Seona alone, on a visit to Chesterfield, his plantation. Esther lived there now, day in and day out. How old would she be? Twelve? Thirteen? Was there anyone to stand between her and Pryce, as Ian had for Seona? He had done what he could for Mountain Laurel’s slaves, but Esther and her parents had belonged to Lucinda Cameron. Not his uncle.
“Ye been praying for her?” Malcolm asked.
“I have.”
“Keep praying. The Lord sees Esther. He’ll keep her, see her through whatever comes. Just like the Esther in this book.”
“I wish she didn’t—” Ian must have made a noise, for Seona swiveled on the bench and saw him there.
Embarrassed to be caught skulking, Ian stepped inside, intending to apologize for interrupting. The change in Seona’s expression stopped him. A light had come into her face when she saw him. She didn’t look away. A smile was forming.
“Seona, I—” The patter of feet coming at a run reached him seconds before two little bodies scooted past and into the cabin.
“Mama, Mama! I fed Ally’s baby bull Blackie.” Gabriel all but slammed into Seona, who caught him in time to soften the blow.
Mandy halted short of her, giving place to Gabriel, but couldn’t seem to resist correcting, “Baby bull George.”
Still smiling, Seona shifted her attention to Mandy. “Did you feed Ally’s calf too, girl-baby?”
Like a puppy thrilled to be noticed, Mandy wormed her way in and leaned into Seona’s side, burying her face there. “Yes, Mama.”
Ian’s breath caught. It was the first he had heard Mandy call anyone but Judith Mama. By the look of her, frozen still and blinking at his daughter, it was the first Seona had heard it too. His heart thudded as she took one hand from Gabriel and, almost shyly, stroked his daughter’s curls. Mandy lifted her face and smiled. Seona’s features trembled. Then crumpled.
Ian jumped when behind him Lily said, “Go on, Seona. I’ll mind them.”
Somehow Seona rose without knocking over bench or either child, found a passage through the crowded doorway, and was out of the cabin before Ian realized she had burst into tears.
“Seona?” Ignoring him, she headed deeper into the beech grove. He started to follow, but Lily caught his sleeve. “Don’t stop me, Lily. I need to know what’s going on inside that head of hers.”
“I hope she tells ye,” Lily said. “But there’s a thing I need to tell ye first.”
Seona had come to feel affection for the old beech tree behind her cabin, its heavy branches reaching wide, trunk rumpled at its base as though someone had draped a mossy quilt around it for a skirting. And it was broad enough to hide her from peeping eyes. In its cooler shade, with her back wedged into one of those folds, she cried into the petticoat bunched around her raised knees, hardly knowing how she had got there. Hadn’t she just been sitting at the table, giving Malcolm his lesson, about to go help Naomi?
Then Ian had come. She had caught her breath at sight of him in the doorway, tall and lean, with that panther’s grace she so admired, the light behind him making a halo of his hair. She had gotten it nigh sorted in her head, the things she wanted to tell him soon as he was back from Shiloh. She and her mama had talked it over as they rode home from the MacGregors’, where Catriona had stayed behind.
“D’ye still want to be Ian’s wife?” Lily had asked.
Still prone to tears, she had heaved in a quavering breath and said, “I do. Why hasn’t he asked me?”
“He’s not blind, girl-baby. He can tell ye’ve things to get sorted in your head. Heart too.”
“He must not know what to make of me.” She had been so much surer, writing to him over the winter. The things they had told each other had felt right and good. Even the things not quite said. With all those miles between them, they could bare their souls to one another. Face-to-face was a struggle. “I know I been fearful, hiding out on the farm. I don’t want to be that way.”
“Good,” her mama had said as their horse clopped along the wagon track between the farms. “Ye’ll find a way to let Ian know ye’ve got those things sorted now?”
Say what ye feel. Not what ye think I want to hear. Ian’s plea, long ago at Mountain Laurel.
Truth was what she had meant to give him, next chance that came. She thought it had come, there in Naomi’s cabin, until Gabriel and Mandy rushed in, which might have been all right had Mandy not chosen that moment to call her Mama for the first time ever, looking up with her sweet smile and her real mama’s tea-brown eyes warming with love. It made everything tangle up inside Seona again, stabbed through with an ache of loss and guilt.
So she had run from it all. Again.
“No more.” She pressed a wad of petticoat to her face, then planted her hands on the tree’s sheltering roots, determined to find Ian . . . who stepped around the tree and found her first.
She hadn’t heard him coming.
“Seona?” His eyes were pained, his hand outstretched.
She took it and he raised her up. She didn’t think too hard about it before she wrapped her arms around his lean waist. His arms encircling her was the sweetest thing she had felt in too long.
“I’m sorry,” he said, voice a rumble beneath her ear, breath warm on the crown of her head. “I’ve been thinking so much about what I hoped for, I lost sight of how hard this would be for ye, coming to a strange place, braced for people’s judgment. I want ye to have a place in Shiloh. Not just here on the farm with me. But I’ve been impatient for it. And with ye. Will I ever
learn?” Sliding his hands to her shoulders, he held her away so he could see her tear-wet face. “I’m an idiot. A gowkit simpleton.”
Seona couldn’t help it. She laughed. “Mama talked to you, didn’t she?”
“She did.” He smiled, but ruefully. “I understand now, how it might have seemed these past weeks. Like I didn’t see ye struggling or was too busy with all that needs doing to care. I do care, Seona. I want to give ye a life here where ye can grow like this bonny tree.” He took one hand from her and laid it on the beech’s trunk. “Strong and reaching for the sky, with Gabriel and Mandy flourishing in your shade.”
She could still hear Mandy’s sweet voice calling her Mama. See Judith looking out through those eyes. She slid her hands up over Ian’s chest. He wore no hat and had shed his coat before coming to find her. The linen of his shirt was soft and a little damp, the man beneath it nigh as warm as the summer heat. A faint sheen of sweat gleamed across his brow and upper lip.
“Can ye forgive me?” he asked, fingers tracing her cheek.
She pressed her face to his hand. “I can. I do. If you forgive me not telling you what’s been troubling me.”
“Ye’d have done so could ye find the words, aye?”
“I almost had them; then Mandy . . .”
“Come here.” He drew her down to sit with him, their backs against the tree, facing the cornfield stretching toward the ridgeline, the sky above grown thickly clouded since the morning. “D’ye not want her calling ye Mama?”
“I do. It melted my heart. Then she looked up at me and . . . I saw Judith!” The name came out half-choked. “How can I just step into her shoes, let Mandy love me in her place?” Even if that was what she wanted.
Ian’s breath released on a sigh. Seona risked a look at him—knees raised like hers, hands clenched around them. Staring out over the cornfield.
“I told ye, in our letters, that I loved Judith, but I’ve wondered . . . did I ever truly know her? She’d a strength and faith it took a deeper heart than mine to fathom.” Seona wanted to protest the part about his heart not being deep enough, but he went on, “Before she died, she tried to tell me something about grace. ‘It is enough,’ she said. I thought she might have been speaking of Mandy. Or maybe she was offering grace to me, yet again. I’m still not sure what she meant, but . . .” He turned to her. “Ye knew Judith as well as I. Maybe better—ye knew her longer. What do ye think she’d want for us now?”