Prologue
MOUNTAIN LAUREL
September 1793
Seona had been minding chickens the day Master Hugh’s nephew rode away north with his daddy. She was minding chickens the day he rode up again. The tobacco had been suckered and was days from needing cutting. Near-about every morning Miss Lucinda told her to save the washing for later and go with Esther out into those long green rows to pick the worms off the leaves. Some folk let turkeys at their tobacco to eat those worms. Master Hugh didn’t keep turkeys, so they made do with chickens—and Seona and Esther and any other hands to spare to catch the worms the chickens missed.
“Eee-ew! Will you look at this nasty thing?”
The crinkly leaf she’d been peering under sprang back as Seona straightened to spot Esther. Some of the plants topped her head; still it took a deal of stooping to be sure the chickens hadn’t left any worms down low. They’d hear about it come cutting time if worms ruined the leaves. Master Hugh didn’t hold with beating his slaves anymore, but the overseer, Jackson Dawes, was known to strap a back on the sly.
Never Seona’s, but it was a thing to bear in mind.
She spied the younger girl hunkered among the plants, gaping at a fat green worm. “Quit thinking on it, Esther. Just pick it off and stomp it.”
“I can’t. It’s the king-granddaddy of the lot.” Esther’s face popped up between the plants. She pushed her skinny self through, mischief in her dark-brown eyes. “What you reckon Miss Rosalyn would do was I to slip that one into her bed?”
Miss Rosalyn Bell, Master Hugh’s oldest stepdaughter, thought right high of her clean sheets and fine white skin. Not that Seona’s skin was much darker. Or wouldn’t be if she spent as much time as Miss Rosalyn did indoors, embroidering linens and arranging her shiny blonde hair.
“Directly after Miss Rosalyn sends that worm on to glory, guess who gonna have to wash those sheets?”
“You?”
“Uh-huh. So put the notion out of your head—and mind those worms.”
Esther giggled, then flipped the hem of her petticoat up to fan her face, baring knobby knees. “How much longer we got to do this?”
“’Til it’s done, what do you think?”
Esther rolled her eyes. The girl wasn’t used to field work. Miss Lucinda had just that spring judged her old enough, at nine, to lend a hand beyond house and yard. That didn’t mean she’d have to put in a full day’s work with the men.
Early on Miss Lucinda tried to force that on Seona and her mama, but Master Hugh nipped that notion in the bud. Seona could be spared for days at a time, but her mama already spun flax and wool and wove cloth from it. She made shirts and shifts, petticoats and breeches. Even some for white folk. On top of that her mama tended the ailing and delivered babies for miles about. And she helped Naomi with the cooking. Taken altogether it was enough for one woman to be getting on with, most days.
“House-spoiled is what you are,” Seona told Esther, but not meanly. Esther’s mama and daddy were dower slaves, come from their old place in Virginia with Miss Lucinda and her daughters. Since Esther had been born to them, she’d been something of a pet to the mistress. Until lately.
It comes hard, that season a child begins to know she’s still a slave, no matter how favored.
Sweat trickled down Seona’s neck. The stink of ripe tobacco hung thick in the sticky heat. They’d been at the job since breakfast, save to grab a bite of dinner when the sun was high. A couple of the hands were working toward them from the field’s far end, but there was a fair piece to go before anyone reached the middle.
Esther scuffed a grimy toe in the dirt, wrinkling her nose as the hen perched on the mound beside Seona pecked a fat worm in half and gulped down the pieces. The hen was a scrawny, speckled creature, unlike most of their plump, shiny-black chickens. It had come as payment for a baby her mama caught two weeks back, on a farm upcreek.
Seona bent to grasp a leaf of the plant under which the hen was feeding. Lightning quick it darted at her, neck stretched low. Seona kicked out and sent that chicken squawking down the row, leaving a cloud of spotted feathers and herself sitting on the ground, fingers pressed over a sting at the base of her thumb.
Esther, gone up the row a ways, rushed back to her side. “You hurt?”
“Just a nip.” Seona sucked at the heel of her thumb, bitter with tobacco juice and blood.
“Wicked ol’ biddy-hen.” Esther slapped a mosquito on her arm, then scratched between the tight plaits of her hair, up under her shade hat.
Seona’s braid hung heavy down her back. She wound it up and tucked it under her kerchief, hoping it would stay. Her hair wasn’t straight like her mama’s crow-black Indian hair, or wiry like Esther’s. It was somewhere between—long, springy curls that defied the taming of brush, braid, and head-rag.
She got up off the ground, thinking how Mister Dawes would be making his rounds to see they weren’t sitting idle. She bent to the worm-picking. That’s when the shouting started up and she straightened again. Shielding her eyes, she spotted Ally, their cook Naomi’s son, galumphing through the oaks, calling to her and Esther, waving them in.
Esther put a hand to a skinny hip and hollered, “We ain’t near done yet, Ally!”
From a distance Seona saw the grin splitting a gleam in Ally’s face. Though a great ox of a man, about her mama’s age, inside, Ally was still the age he’d been when a mule kicked him in the head and he didn’t wake up for a night and a day. When Seona was small, Ally would wade the creek with her on a Sunday, when they had time to themselves. Other times he’d make a present for her out of something he found—a pretty feather, a shiny rock, or an arrowhead turned up with the plow. Now, when he wasn’t working the fields or helping Jubal with the stock, he favored Esther, who’d reached his inside age.
“Maisy want you cleaned up to serve, Esther,” Ally hollered back. “Seona needed in the kitchen with our mamas!”
Esther turned to Seona, eyebrows scrunched. “What for? Dinner’s done passed.”
When they didn’t budge, Ally broke into a run again, heading toward them like a charging bull. They stood and waited, too hot to move more than needful. Ally lumbered to a halt, bent over between the tobacco plants, dinner-plate hands splayed on broad knees, gulping breath. “Big supper . . . planned. We gots . . . comp’ny.”
“Bound to be someone important,” Seona said, “if we’re being called in to help.”
“Hope it ain’t them uppity folk from over Chesterfield,” Esther said.
With all her heart Seona said a silent amen. Chesterfield was the biggest plantation for miles. Miss Lucinda and her daughters went visiting there more than to any other place. Like moths to a flame, she’d heard Naomi grumble. It was something rarer for the flame to come to the moths. But it happened, now and then.
Not today apparently. Ally was wagging his head. “Ain’t them. You never guess who it be.”
“Who then?” Esther demanded.
“That boy what was here before—Mister Ian. He done said yes to Master Hugh’s letter and come back, all growed up! Got hisself a roan horse, red as strawberries with cream on the side.” Words tumbled out of Ally like rocks rolling downhill. “He come wearin’ this coat-o’-many-colors like Joseph from the Bible, with his own manservant on a fine black horse, and another horse loaded down with I-don’t-know-what-all. Look like they here to stay.”