“Oh, Cousin,” Judith said, a pale hand fluttering to her mouth.
“Who was by to aid ye, lad?” his uncle asked.
Ian was touched by their concern, though he hadn’t meant to elicit it. “Thomas was . . . near to hand by then,” he said with only the slightest hesitation, the irony of that statement his alone to savor. He wondered briefly if Thomas had found his own supper. Perhaps in company of the green-eyed girl?
“But where does the Quaker come into the tale?” Rosalyn prompted.
“He was there in camp, too, when I woke—sipping coffee from my cup,” he added, hoping to lighten the account. A stranger clad in sober gray, a chance-met traveler who’d come upon Thomas attempting to revive Ian after his fall, Benjamin Eden had introduced himself as a schoolmaster from Easton Town, on his way to join his cousin’s Meeting in Hillsborough. “After inquiring most solicitously after my injuries and noting the condition I was in—commotio cerebri, he called it—the man offered to physic me, him being well-read in texts of a medical nature. I resigned myself to his ministrations but might have done without his telling us of the fever epidemic in Philadelphia, which I’d unwittingly avoided, having skirted the city.”
Attempting to shake Thomas off his trail, he didn’t add.
In the silence that followed, he heard the clock ticking on the mantel through the open parlor doors. All sounds of eating had ceased. His aunt’s glass had halted midway to her lips.
“Epidemic?” she echoed in a voice stripped of its firmness. “Coastal cities such as Philadelphia are plagued with fevers every season. Was it merely the summer ague?”
“No, ma’am. The Quaker said yellow fever. He was quite descriptive of its presentation—gleaned from travelers he’d met on the road, fleeing to the countryside. Languor and nausea, vomiting, delirium, yellowing of the skin, livid spots on the body akin to the bites of . . .”
Ian fell silent, noting that though his cousins still hung upon his every word, it wasn’t with fascination or sympathy. Rather with expressions of dawning horror.
Lucinda Cameron’s complexion had blanched to the shade of chalk powder. The glass in her hand seemed to tremble. “You traveled in company with a man exposed to yellow fever?”
“No,” Ian hastened to say. “As I said, the man never—”
His reply was cut short as the glass slipped from his aunt’s lifted hand, spilling its contents in a thin cascade before shattering on the hardwood floor.
3
“Of course I didn’t tell them everything,” Ian said, tamping down his exasperation—and the level of his voice; though he’d bid his uncle an awkward good night after the girls had helped their mother to her room abovestairs, only a short passage and a door separated the newer wing of the house from the rooms in which the women slept. He’d come up the back stairs to find Thomas in his cupboard of a room, tiny window propped, a breeze stirring the warmth of the house’s upper story. “I’d have left out the yellow fever had I known mention of it was enough to cause a swoon.”
His uncle had insisted he wasn’t to blame for his aunt’s indisposition. Ian couldn’t have known yellow fever had claimed the lives of Lucinda Cameron’s first husband and two young sons, or that Judith, who had survived it, shared her mother’s mortal terror of the disease.
Chagrined regardless, Ian loosened the confines of his neckcloth and sat on a nearby trunk, disregarding its layer of dust. “Ye should’ve heard me skating around every subject that arose, with the ice cracking under me all the while. There’s not a chapter in the narrative of my life fit for civilized conversation.”
He winced, regretting his choice of words. Thomas, who’d unearthed a low stool to sit on, glanced at a slim brown volume, corners rubbed and pages well-thumbed, that peeked from his satchel below the window: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.
Ian could justly impugn the author of that narrative with inspiring Thomas to risk life and liberty by following him to North Carolina, attempting to overtake him and join the journey south. Thomas had revealed the book after the Quaker, Benjamin Eden, had examined Ian’s head wound—a wound he’d taken in a last attempt to elude the pursuit.
More gravely injured than he’d let on to his kin, Ian had been muddled enough to think he could get up on his horse and continue his journey, leaving Thomas and the meddling Quaker behind. He’d gotten as far as the picketed horses before Thomas caught him and thrust the book under his nose.
“One of my da’s?” Ian had asked, though he’d no need. Even with a battered skull he’d have recognized his father’s work. Or Ned’s. The volume was bound by neither Cameron. Then he’d taken in the title. “Olaudah Equiano. What sort of name is that?”
“African,” Thomas had said with pride. “He was stolen from his tribe, made a slave. He bought his freedom and wrote of his enslavement. Listen.” Turning to a marked passage, Thomas read, “‘Indeed, on the most trifling occasions, they were loaded with chains; and often instruments of torture were added. The iron muzzle, thumb-screws—’”
“Thomas,” Ian cut in. “My uncle doesn’t commit savageries against his slaves. I’ve been there, aye? I’ve seen them.”
“As a boy. You probably didn’t notice.”
“I’d have noticed iron muzzles!” He’d been twelve that spring he visited Mountain Laurel, giddy with the adventure of traveling nigh the length of their new-won nation with his da, smug in thinking for once he’d been chosen over Ned. It was years before he understood Robert Cameron hadn’t asked him along purely for the pleasure of his company. “It’s no concern of yours. Nor is my business.”
Thomas squared his jaw. “A slave goes where his master goes, so your business is mine.”
“Ye’re not my slave!”
“I could be.” Thomas’s eyes had burned with a dark fire. “I mean to see if what Equiano writes of those Southern plantations is true. See with my own eyes. Your kin need never know who I am.”
Ian glared now at the narrative tucked into the satchel below the window. As though he minded that fraught conversation as well, Thomas started to reach for it, then caught Ian’s glower and refrained.
“Spot any iron muzzles lying about the kitchen?” Ian asked.
Sweating in the warmth of the house, Thomas regarded him. “Do you still not understand why I had to do this?”
Ian snorted as he rose, pausing in the doorway. “I barely understand what I’m doing here.”
“That I don’t doubt. But thanks to Benjamin I’m certain of playing my part.”
Within hours of making their acquaintance, the Quaker had called out Thomas on his playacting. Instead of siding with Ian to convince Thomas of his foolishness, the man had offered to tutor him in the Art and Mystery of Acting the Slave—should they agree to his company on the road to Carolina.
It had been two against one, and that one with his wits knocked agley. He’d stalked off alone, seeking solitude to cobble together an argument with force enough to turn one stubborn, brown-hided cooper back north to the free life he should be leading. He’d burdens enough to bear on that journey without adding Thomas Ross to the load.