by Lori Benton
It was Seona he needed to speak to now.
Ian left the surgery as Lily inquired about the herbs Neil meant to mix with the honey. He found Maggie in the parlor, turning from the window. “Did ye find my sister?”
“She’s in the stable. They brought your horse for you.”
Ian frowned as Maggie headed toward the kitchen. With Seona on his mind, he went out to where Ruaidh was hitched but had barely reached the roan before he heard them.
“Let Joseph go after Crane,” Catriona was saying, voice carrying from the stable’s depths. “He caught the man once. He will again.”
“We’re already losing a day,” Matthew said. “Pa says I must go to Colonel Waring and round up others for the hunt. Crane’s trail will be cold. Don’t you want the man caught?”
“Not at the expense of another life. Especially yours.”
When Matthew spoke again, tenderness blunted his words. “I shouldn’t matter to you.”
His sister laughed. “But you do. And I’ll not tire of saying it. I’m going in. Maggie and I have planning to do. You’ll help Ian and Joseph finish the desks?”
“I said I would, though I think it’s a mistake, opening the school now.”
“If you’re so worried, ride in with us and stand guard.”
Matthew’s voice was a low growl. “Catriona . . .”
But his sister had said all she meant to on the matter. Ian was still standing at his stirrup when she swept out of the stable, shawl about her shoulders, hair in a swinging braid. She saw him, stopped, then with a look of resolution crossed the stable-yard. “I suppose you heard that?”
“Most of it, I think.”
She registered his lack of surprise. “You’ve been talking with Seona.”
“Listen, Catriona—”
“No, Ian. You listen. I’m not who I was in Boston, and Matthew certainly isn’t—”
“I know,” Ian said, stopping her before she worked herself into a lather. “And for what it’s worth, ye’ve my blessing, the two of ye. If God wills it.”
Catriona opened her mouth, still on the verge of arguing. His words must have sunk in finally, for tears welled and she threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Ian. I hope He does! And Matthew too.”
Ruaidh waited patiently as Ian patted his sister’s back. “If he has a scrap of sense in his stubborn head, he will. Matthew, I mean,” he added as she pulled from the embrace. “Have ye written to Da and Mam?”
“I didn’t see the point—yet. The day will come.” She seemed to will the smile she gave him before heading for the house.
She didn’t look back, didn’t glimpse Matthew retreating into the stable’s shadow, as Ian did when he turned to mount his horse.
36
It was late in the day before they completed the furnishings for the school. Matthew helped, smoothing the finished pieces with a rubbing of fine creek sand. In the afternoon Malcolm came out with his Bible to read while they worked. It was then Joseph asked about Mountain Laurel. “You spoke of your uncle and the farm he owned, that those with you—” he nodded at Malcolm, seated nearby—“were enslaved until you brought them north. Is it true Seona and Tsigalili were also enslaved?”
“It is,” Ian said, wondering if Joseph knew more than he let on. “Hugh Cameron, my half uncle, was Seona’s grandfather. His son, Aidan—Seona’s father—died before she was born.”
“Your uncle did not free his granddaughter?”
“He did, Lily with her. Just before Gabriel’s birth, a few months before his own death. The day after I buried my uncle, Seona and Lily left for Boston to live with my parents.”
“And this Aidan?” Joseph asked after a pause. “What was he to Seona’s mother?”
Ian understood the concern behind the question. “By all accounts he loved her. He wanted her freed. He didn’t live long enough to see it through.”
“He wanted us all freed, did Aidan Cameron.” They turned to Malcolm, who had stopped his reading to join the conversation. “But Aidan was done to death by a wicked man, and we stayed in bondage, ’til the Almighty sent another with a heart like his.”
Yet Ian’s plans, like Aidan’s, had been thwarted. “Seona and I were handfasted without the knowledge of my kin. I’d intended to see her free and safe to Boston, where I meant to join her, but she was snatched off the plantation and sold to strangers. I was made to believe she’d run from me, rejecting my plan to free her. By the time we found her again and I learned the truth—and that she carried my child—I’d already wed Judith, thinking to remain at Mountain Laurel, become my uncle’s heir.”
Joseph’s expression remained unreadable. “The wife you took, she gave you the little daughter.”
“Aye,” Ian said, the grief still there but no longer near the surface. “We’d another wee girl who didn’t live. And a son who died with his mother. Afterward, I came north. To Boston first. To Seona and Gabriel.”
Joseph eyed Malcolm again. “You and your kin chose to stay with him?”
Malcolm nodded. “We might’ve kept to Boston, but farming is what we ken, no’ a city crammed full to bursting with folk.”
Joseph gave a shudder. “It is better you are here, Grandfather. And good,” he added, addressing Ian, “that you and Tsigalili’s daughter are to be joined at last. But when I arrived today, I saw she was much worried.”
“Can you blame her?” Matthew cut in from across the shop, pausing his sanding.
While Ian had been watching Joseph’s arm being stitched, Ally and Malcolm had discovered the extent of Crane’s intrusion. After the man had broken into the smokehouse, undoubtedly in a search for gold, he had moved on to the corncrib and springhouse before trying the stable. While Seona minded the children, the rest had spent the morning setting things to rights until Joseph arrived with Matthew. Now Ian ignored the younger man’s question and gestured at the pile of furnishings. “It’s too late today for getting all this into Shiloh and getting the work there done,” he added, knowing the pronouncement would strain Matthew’s patience. “We’ll load the wagon now. Catriona and I will be at your door at first light tomorrow.”
Matthew and Maggie would accompany them, Matthew to ride to Colonel Waring while the girls saw the school sorted and Ian returned the emptied wagon to the farm. Matthew would escort the girls home. That was the plan.
“Then you and I have a man to catch,” Joseph said.
“We do, Uncle.” Matthew hoisted a bench and took it out to the wagon, while Ian began tidying the shop.
Malcolm headed for his cabin, from whence supper smells wafted. Joseph watched him go. “Once you have finished in Shiloh,” he said, voice low, “hurry back. I will meet you and we will go after our enemy.”
Arrested in sweeping sawdust, Ian asked, “Did ye not agree to Neil’s plan?”
Joseph’s gaze was firm. “He is cunning, that one we hunt. All his traps are set for men now. It would be unwise for many unknowing of his ways to go into those hills searching. But that one—” he nodded after Matthew—“should do as his father bade. While he is doing it, you and I will go after Crane.”
“He’ll be angry.”
“But alive.” Joseph’s attention shifted past Ian, who turned to see Seona silhouetted in the doorway, fingers knotted in her shawl.
“What about you both?”
Ian couldn’t read her shadowed face, but her tone was clear enough. Would they survive the hunt for Crane?
“I will help shift these things,” Joseph said and hefted one of the narrow writing tables, biting back a hiss as it bumped his stitched wound. He had taken only willow bark for the pain.
“Ye and Matthew stay for supper,” Ian called after him. “I can smell Naomi’s cooking. Or maybe it’s Lily’s tonight.”
Joseph halted in the shop’s doorway—to refuse the invitation, Ian thought at first. Then he smiled, showing teeth bright against his skin. “I will stay.”
When he was gone, Ian put aside the broom and crossed to S
eona, whose eyes were full of the same dread that had his own heart gripped.
“We need to talk, Seona.”
Seona found her mama after supper, sitting outside their cabin on a bench, stitching on what was to be her wedding gown. She had just given Gabriel a bath inside, as Catriona was doing for Mandy in Ian’s cabin. Gabriel had run off wet-headed to his auntie and sister, warned not to dirty himself before bedtime.
Though Matthew hadn’t stayed for supper, Joseph’s pretty dun mare grazed in their paddock. Ian was likely still talking with him and Malcolm in Naomi’s cabin. How long she would have alone with her mama, she didn’t know, so she came straight at what she wanted to say.
“Mama, do you see any way we could go back to Boston?”
Lily jerked her head up and gasped—at what had just come out of her mouth, Seona thought, but turned out her mama had pricked a fingertip. She whipped it to her lips before spotting the gown with blood.
Seona had been drawing blood left and right, starting with Ian’s before the supper she hadn’t been able to eat, not after the conversation that had curdled her belly. The worst of it kept running through her mind, what they had said to each other after she pleaded with Ian not to follow Joseph’s plan to go after Crane, just the two of them.
“I know ye’re afraid,” he had said, having led her to that very spot outside her cabin, away from listening ears. “Joseph knows the man’s ways better than anyone. I trust him.”
“We barely know Joseph!”
“Then for the love of . . . ,” Ian had begun, only to continue more calmly. “Trust me, Seona. Ye must have, back in spring, to have come to me here.”
She had stood twisting the ring he had put on her finger—I Am My Beloved’s—while a wedge of geese flew over, heading for the lake, calling to each other. A sound that made her think of Mountain Laurel and plans gone awry. She stiffened when Ian touched her, then told him the one thing she had meant never to speak aloud. “I don’t know anymore why I did.”
The words had cut him deep. She had seen the color leave his face, the guilt and anguish fill it. “I cannot do enough to give ye peace, can I?”
Now her mama laid the needle aside, dangling from its thread. “Go back to wandering the wilderness when the Almighty gave us Canaan? Ye think nothing evil ever happens in Boston? Catriona might say different.”
“Mama, this isn’t the Promised Land. And I can’t eat or sleep for fear of it.”
“Aram Crane will be dealt with. Joseph and Ian—”
“What if it goes the other way,” she cut in, “and Crane deals with them? We ought to have stayed back east, found a way to live, us three, like you wanted. Or maybe I should’ve let Mister Robert have his way?”
Lily was frowning and not in concern. “Seona, d’ye hear yourself talking? Forget Boston or any other place and scheme. Look around ye at where ye’re standing. This farm is a gift to shelter and sustain ye. Work for your hands with no overseer to drive ye or your children into the ground. Look at that rise of land yonder and that pretty tree where Ian means to build a home to suit your every need.”
Seona didn’t look. “It could all vanish tomorrow!”
Lily’s gaze fixed her. “It could. That doesn’t mean we ought to quail at every shadow.”
“What then?”
“Name our blessings. Hold them while we can. And, girl-baby, ye have blessings aplenty to name. Ian, for one. About to go hunting a wicked man to keep ye safe.”
“I know, Mama,” she whispered. “I know he wants to do right, but I just don’t trust him anymore.” She put a hand over her mouth, willing back the tears that burned her eyes.
“Is it only Ian ye’ve stopped trusting?”
Seona shook her head—in denial or agreement, she hardly knew—before she heard footsteps approaching. Fearing it was Ian, she thought to slip inside the cabin and shut the door. But it was Joseph Tames-His-Horse who rounded the cabin into the westering sunlight. He smiled down at Lily, taking in the gown draped over her lap.
“I have heard of your skill with the needle. Is that to be for the wedding?” he asked, looking up to include Seona in the question. His smile dimmed as he caught her troubled gaze. “You did not come for your supper,” he said. “Is it because you fear what the morrow will bring?”
Seona couldn’t speak. Mutely she nodded.
Joseph studied her, features bathed in golden light, fierce and nigh as beautiful as her mama’s, who sat on the bench at his knee, waiting for him to speak. “This man we hunt was once before my quarry. Had I not lost him, much evil would have been spared many—my sister and her family among them. Now yours. I will not let him slip from my hand again.”
“Thank ye, Joseph,” Lily said. “How’s that arm of yours?”
He looked down at her, mouth curving in a crooked half smile. “It will be fine. I will leave you now.”
Seona found her voice. “Not on my account,” she said, having heard the children in the yard, Catriona calling after them. “I best tend my babies afore they need another bathing.” Which was one true thing, she thought as she left her mama and Joseph outside the cabin in the day’s last golden light. Gabriel and Mandy were both her babies now. Whatever happened tomorrow, that couldn’t be undone, no more than she could stop loving their daddy.
If only love alone could safeguard them all.
37
While Ian hitched the wagon in the dark of morning, Catriona took Seona aside to ask, “Why don’t you come? Bring the children. Maggie and I can use the help. And it might be good to get off the farm for the morning.” She glanced from Seona to Ian, aware all was not well between them.
Off toward the mountains came a faint rumble. The sky hung low beyond the ridge, though above them fading stars still showed in patches between the clouds. Their breath ghosted on the air.
“I don’t know . . .” Thought of traveling the miles into the village kindled unease, but after yesterday so did staying put. Then she noted Ian, looking ready to object to the suggestion. As impulsive as Catriona for once, Seona asked him, “Why not? You wanted me to go into Shiloh. And it was never truly safe, was it? It’s not safe anywhere.”
She knew Ian hadn’t ground to stand on to argue. His words from yesterday lingered in his eyes. I cannot do enough to give ye peace . . .
Before the sun had cleared the treetops, Gabriel and Mandy were in the wagon with their daddy, Seona and Catriona mounted. Strain marked the half mile to the MacGregors’, where Maggie and Matthew joined them.
Neil MacGregor was saddling his old horse, Seamus, needing to visit several patients, including Hector Lacey, despite Joseph’s protest that today was no time to be heading into the hills. But Neil had his own brand of stubbornness.
“I finally deduced the fellow’s sticking point. He feared being tossed into gaol by Colonel Waring for squatting on land he doesna own, did he show his face in Shiloh. But I found someone willing to put up wi’ the scoundrel for a few months—Elias Waring himself. So auld Hector has run dry of excuses. Besides,” he added with a nod toward the foothills, “that’s likely our first snow in the high country. He needs to come down today.”
Matthew called to them, impatient to be away, still thinking Ian and Joseph meant him and half of Shiloh, could he raise them, to come along when they went after Crane. Seona was tempted to set him straight.
Catching Joseph’s warning gaze, her nerve to speak up fled.
The morning seemed to darken rather than brighten as the rising sun lost its battle with the advancing clouds, but no rain fell in Shiloh, where a surprise waited. The school cabin had been swept clean, scoured top to bottom.
While Seona watched Gabriel and Mandy explore the schoolhouse where their auntie would soon help teach, Ian made quick work of the broken door hinges. Anni Keppler and her daughter came up from the mill—perpetrators of the tidying. They helped unload the furnishings into the cabin-yard while Seona tried not to catch Ian’s eye. She heard him admonishing Matthew, set to
ride to Colonel Waring to tell of a manhunt that would not unfold like he expected it to.
“By time ye’re back, the girls should be done here. Promise ye’ll ride with them to the farm. I don’t want them on the road alone.” Matthew promised and rode off on his errand. Ian stepped into the cabin doorway and spotted her within. “Did ye hear me, Seona? Don’t start for home until Matthew’s back.”
She nodded, not meeting his gaze. Gabriel and Mandy gave their daddy a kiss farewell. Ian lingered in the doorway. “Seona, look at me.”
With her face set like a shield, she looked.
“It’s going to be all right,” he said.
Hearing the others in the yard, she dropped her voice. “Wish we both believed that.”
Never mind Aram Crane and what he might do to Ian, she had just wounded him afresh.
“I have to go.”
“Go,” she said, wanting to tell him Godspeed. Wanting to say more, she didn’t know what. She took a step in his direction as Catriona nudged him out of the doorway, walking backward with one end of a table in her grasp, Maggie at the other end.
“Watch out, littles,” she called. “We don’t want to run you over.”
Gabriel and Mandy stood against the log wall, wiggling with excitement as Anni and her daughter followed with another table. When the doorway finally cleared, Seona hurried out.
Ian was up on the wagon bench, slapping the lines over Cupid’s back. The wagon lurched into motion. The sky in the east had darkened with clouds. Thunder rumbled as the curving track along the creek bore Ian out of sight.
“I expect you’ll have some new pupils this autumn,” Anni Keppler said as the last table was arranged to Maggie’s liking. “Word’s gone round Catriona is teaching, too.”
Seona looked up from lifting Mandy and Gabriel onto a bench so they could pretend they were “getting schooled,” as Mandy put it.
Maggie stood at the front of the room, surveying her domain. “You spread the word, you mean,” she said.