Still, it seemed a fitting name, Janus: Roman god of gateways. Of beginnings. He hoped his da would have thought it a propitious sign.
By all that’s holy, lad, dinna throw away another chance to settle. Robert Cameron’s parting words weeks ago, delivered with beseeching sobriety, had dogged him south these hundreds of miles to hover in the heat-weighted air of his uncle’s stable-yard. ’Tis the last I have to offer ye.
It was the pack mare letting out an impatient whinny that recalled them to Thomas, who’d stood by unacknowledged, holding the bridles of both their mounts.
“I see ye’d help along the way,” Uncle Hugh said. “Did ye engage yon mannie for the journey then?”
“Ah, no,” Ian said, casting Thomas a quick glance. “He’s mine actually, not hired. Will that be a . . . a problem?”
His uncle’s brows flicked high before he answered, “Not at all. But let’s get these horses settled, aye?” Turning, his uncle called toward the stable, “Jubal—and, Ally, if ye’re there—ye’ve three new horses here to tend!”
In quick order two of his uncle’s slaves exited the stable. The first, a wiry dark-skinned man of middling height, was a stranger to Ian—Jubal, his uncle named him, making introductions. The second man to emerge was several inches taller than either Ian or his uncle and muscled like a blacksmith, though Ian knew he was not.
“Ally,” he said, grinning in recognition.
The man halted, peering down at him, eyes soft as a doe’s gone wide as he took in Ian’s quilled coat. “Yes, sir. You know me, sir?”
“Ye know me too, Ally. Or ye did. I’m Ian Cameron.”
Ally’s lips pulled wide, showing large white teeth. “I hear you was coming back. But law! I mind you a spindly thing. You done growed up, Mister Ian.”
Ian remembered then that, despite his hulking stature, this man of his uncle’s had never grown up. Not in mind. There’d been an accident when he was a boy involving . . . what had it been? An ox?
“’Tis a momentous day,” his uncle was telling Ally, who was eyeing Ian’s roan and Thomas’s black gelding with an eagerness to make their acquaintance. “Go on and help Jubal, and Mister Ian’s lad there, get these horses unsaddled. Show them to the boxes we have free. Then go tell your mama in the kitchen we’ll need a special supper tonight. She’ll ken what to do.”
“Yes, sir!” As Ally followed Jubal toward the horses, sunlight breaking through the oaks caught the side of his head, revealing the slight concavity behind his left ear, not quite concealed by a cap of woolly hair.
Mule-kicked, Ian minded.
He took a half step after them, thinking to snatch his rifle from its sling before the others got their hands on his gear, until it struck him to wonder whether toting a rifle into his uncle’s house—as if he were entering a British-held fort—would cause offense.
He hesitated, feeling off-footed in this place both remembered and strange.
“Ciamar a tha thu, a mhac mo bhràthair?”
Ian started at his uncle’s question, taken aback by its perception as well as the language of its phrasing. How are you, Nephew?
“Tha mi . . . gu math—tapadh leat.” No lie. He was well enough, all things considered. “Tha mi beò co dhiù,” he added. I’m alive, anyway.
“So ye are,” his uncle agreed. “And ye’ve the Gaidhlig still. And is it the faint bells of Aberdeen I’m hearing in your speech? That’ll be from your mam.”
“And her brother—Callum Lindsay. Ye’ll mind I was in Upper Canada with Callum ’til the spring?” Ian eyed his uncle, dappled in the sunlight. How much had the man been apprised of the happenings in the intervening years since their last meeting? He’d have no joy in the telling but best to have it out—in case his da hadn’t beaten him to it. “I’m obliged to mention, sir, that it wasn’t by my choice I left Boston. When I went west with Callum, I mean, five years back. I don’t know whether Da—”
An upraised hand checked him.
“Lad,” his uncle said, “who doesna have deeds he’d as soon put behind him? What say we leave the past where it belongs?”
The roan and the black were unsaddled now, the pack mare unloaded. As Jubal, Ally, and Thomas each led a horse away to stable, his uncle added, “That dun mare carried a respectable load. Might ye have brought the tools of your trade along?”
“Aye,” Ian said, unsure whether he was more relieved or disconcerted by the change of subject. “It’s been a while since I’ve practiced my cabinetmaking, but I’d hoped, if ye have a shed standing empty, I might set up by way of a shop. Nothing extensive, only there’s a bit of work I’ve promised to do.”
The suggestion seemed to please his uncle. “I dinna see why not.”
Suddenly overwhelmingly hot, Ian shrugged his way out of the half-breed coat and draped it over his arm. What he wore beneath only reinforced the impression of a man well on his way to gone native—fringed hunting shirt, tomahawk and knife thrust through a beaded belt girding his waist. And those worn leather breeches with their stitched rent, still faintly bloodstained.
“Ought I to change, Uncle? I’ve clothes more befitting . . .” He gestured toward the house, white and commanding beyond a spreading chestnut.
His uncle’s gaze had lifted past it, over a scattering of outbuildings to the leafy apple orchard rising toward a hogback ridge. Beyond it rose the higher ridges of the isolated Carraways, rolling westward in thick-wooded waves like a rumpled counterpane.
“The Camerons were first, ye ken.”
Ian frowned. “First?”
“To answer the Stuarts’ call. I went down from the glen wi’ my da and the lads. All but wee Robbie, your da.”
“Ye mean the ’45?” His uncle spoke of the rising of the Highland clans for Charles Stuart, son of the exiled King James, which had ended in slaughter on a frozen moor—a slaughter that claimed Ian’s grandfather and two uncles. Nigh fifty years ago. “What made ye think of that?”
Gazing at the ridge rising beyond his orchard, his uncle didn’t seem to hear. “By the spring we’d lost all. Lands, clan, honor. Hope. I was all of twenty at the time. Younger than ye.”
Hugh Cameron’s voice had gone as hazy as the rising hills. The man himself seemed hazy compared to Ian’s memory of him. On closer scrutiny, his complexion was no longer the burnished bronze of a redhead well acquainted with the sun. There was a hint of something sickly in its hue, like copper begun to green.
“This land is ours now,” he said with sudden fervor. “Cameron land—and none shall take it from us.” His uncle’s eyes held the blue of distance and a grief as raw as new-dug earth—until behind them a voice spoke.
“Mastah Ian? Where you want all your tools and things to go?”
Thomas had joined them.
Uncle Hugh blinked at the intrusion, then turned to Ian. The distance in his eye diminished. His beard-framed lips softened in something near a smile.
“Here I’m forgetting my manners, Nephew, keeping ye standing in the yard. Your things can bide where they are for now. Come away in—ye and your man.” Facing the house, Hugh Cameron firmed his jaw. “’Tis time ye made the acquaintance of your auntie.”