Esther was bouncing like a worried flea, grinning to match Ally. “Come on, Seona. Let’s get shed of these worms!”
The girl grabbed her wrist and pulled. Seona let herself be tugged along the row, mute as a scarecrow, reeling from this rush of news about horses and colored coats and . . . Master Hugh’s nephew.
The boy with the angel-halo hair was back.
PART I
September 1793
What can I offer to set right that which lies between us, save myself, to spend as you deem fit? However dubious an Investment I have thus far shown myself to be, perhaps I may do some Good for Uncle’s People—unless North Carolina prove Oil, and I the Water that will not mix.
Nevertheless, my Duty to you, Sir, as Your Most Obedient Servant &c—
Ian Cameron
1
MOUNTAIN LAUREL
A wee bit earlier that day
At the creek that marked the boundary of his uncle’s plantation, Ian Cameron paused his horse. The creek’s water ran clear, chattering over a pebbled bed, no more than ankle-deep, yet for all his balking to cross it, it might have been the Red Sea.
Ian pressed a hand to the breast of his coat. For eight hundred hot and muggy miles he’d ridden with his uncle’s letter tucked there, yet still he hadn’t decided whether answering its summons had been an act of desperation. His father’s. Or his own.
A black gelding edged up alongside Ian’s roan to drink. Its rider swept a hand at the oak wood shading the creek’s far bank. “Kalmia Latifolia. This is it, then?”
“Aye, Mountain Laurel.” Ian shifted in the saddle, eyeing the man, half a year his elder. “Ye’ve the better head for Latin, Thomas, I’ll grant ye. But surely it’s unseemly in a slave to flaunt it.”
Thomas Ross twisted his mouth in amusement as he gazed down the carriage drive that crossed the creek and curved through the wood, beyond which a house was visible in white slashes. The big house, his uncle’s slaves had called it, with its two rooms belowstairs and three above. In the eleven years since Ian’s last visit to the place, his uncle had remarried, acquiring two stepdaughters in the process. What had seemed a big house indeed for a single man must have proved incommodious with the addition of three females, judging by the new wing jutting from the rear.
“First your uncle inherits it all,” Thomas said, his thoughts obviously fixed on the plantation’s past as well. “Next you. What’s wrong with the place that it goes begging for its heirs?”
Ian shrugged. An older man called Duncan Cameron—no near kin—had settled the place originally. He’d met Ian’s uncle, fresh from Scotland, exiled and homeless, down on the Cape Fear River. The elder Cameron had made Ian’s uncle his overseer, then left Mountain Laurel to him when he passed—forty years or more ago.
“Uncle Hugh at least had a son,” Ian said. “He died a long time back. I never met him.”
Thomas shot a pointed look at Ian’s garb. “I expect your kin’s bound to take you for a red savage come calling, rather than heir presumptive.”
It was a fair point. Over leather knee breeches—the thigh rent and stitched less artfully than the wound beneath had been—Ian wore a coat cut and collared in European style but pieced of buckskin and lavishly adorned with red, white, and black quillwork and an expanse of ragged fringe. In trade for it, the old Chippewa woman who made the half-breed coat had wheedled from him a twist of tobacco, several prime beaver pelts, and one very fine fox. He felt a mite foolish for wearing it now but had wanted to present himself as truthfully as possible, so there’d be no mistaking what sort of man his uncle was getting. Not the lad he would recall.
Ought he to have done the thing by stages?
And there was Thomas, tricked out in fawn-brown coat, fine linen breeches, and a pair of outlandishly striped stockings—dressed the dandy when he was meant to be a slave.
Which of them would prove the greater consternation to Ian’s kin?
“One way to know,” he muttered. Girding his will, he touched a heel to the roan’s side, where his rifle rode snug in its sling.
Thomas followed on the mount he called Black Huzzah, leading their pack mare, Cricket.
They dismounted in the oak-dappled shade of a stable-yard that appeared much the same as it had eleven years ago, with the stable itself, a long, clapboarded structure, standing quiet in the summer heat. The only creature to mark their arrival, a sorrel in a nearby paddock, whinnied and trotted to the split-rail fence.
Ian turned to the open stable doors to call a greeting and bit it back as a man, trimly bearded and slightly stooped in the shoulder, emerged from the shadows. Even with the stoop, he was of a height with Ian, an inch over six feet, with hair like sugared cinnamon tailed back from a scowling brow. His voice held the clipped snick of a rifle’s hammer being cocked, despite the familiar Highland cadence, as he addressed Ian. “I’ll ken your name—and your business here.”
Ian removed his hat. “It’s Ian, sir. Robert’s son. Ye sent for me and I’ve come.”
The man’s blue eyes snapped from Ian’s quilled coat to his face, brows lifting in belated recognition.
“Devil take me if it isna,” said Hugh Cameron, his father’s elder half brother. He crossed the stable-yard to Ian, who replaced his hat in time to meet his uncle’s outstretched hand with his own. The clasp was sure; before Ian saw it coming, his uncle had pulled him into a kinsman’s embrace, clapping a hand to his road-dusty back. He pushed Ian away but held him at arm’s length, taking in the sight of him with what appeared genuine approval.
“Forgive my brusqueness, laddie,” he said. “I kent ye were coming—your da’s letter reached us weeks ago—but I didna ken the day. And I must say ye’ve grown a mite since last I saw ye.” His uncle released him, chuckling at that. “Besides, just now I’m a wee bit distracted by goings-on.”
Still caught off guard by the warmth of the welcome, Ian gathered his wits to ask, “Did we interrupt ye in some work, Uncle?”
“No, lad, more’s the pity. I’ve a mare ready to drop a foal. Jubal thought she was finally making ready and got her into the double box at the end.” He bent his head toward the stable behind him. “But it’s proved another false alarm.”
Ian minded his uncle’s passion for horses. “So ye’ve taken to breeding?”
“Aye,” his uncle said. “A few years now—a couple of colts to show for it. Though I hadn’t meant to do so with this mare. I had her from a man in Cross Creek—Fayetteville, it’s called now,” his uncle explained. “She’s docile as a lamb and can pull anything ye hitch her to, but I’d meant her for a saddle horse—for the lasses, aye? We didna ken she was breeding out o’ season ’til past midwinter. The mare’s blood is of no repute, but the sire’s a grandson of Janus.”
Ian nodded, assuming Janus a name to impress among thoroughbred aficionados. He’d won his horse, Ruaidh—an Indian pony of uncertain origin—gambling with a Frenchman in Canada two years back, and wouldn’t trade the compact, unflappable roan for a dozen of his high-strung leggy cousins.