In the end he hadn’t found it in him to resist the force of such conviction, no matter how reckless, and in quiet despair he’d wondered—was wondering still—if he was fated to be forever eddied along on the tide of other men’s zeal.
“D’ye need anything before I seek my bed?” he asked, discomfited by sight of the narrow bedroll on the dusty floor.
The question elicited a clucking noise. Before Ian could bristle at the mother hen reference, Thomas grinned. “I’m fine, Mastah Ian. Go on to bed. And sweet dreams on that feather tick they’ve given you.”
“Aye,” Ian said gruffly. “Thanks.”
His dreams, however, proved anything but sweet. In them he was a lad running down the cobbled streets of Boston’s North End, shoving through the door beneath the shingle that read Messrs. Cameron & Ross, Binders & Sellers of Fine Books. He flew past Thomas’s father—the Ross of Cameron & Ross—and ducked the counter flap to race past the great trimming press, past stacks of pasteboard and dye trays, while above his head marbled endpapers festooned air thick with the smell of binder’s glue . . .
At the rear of the shop a man bends over the sewing frame, hair clubbed, shirtsleeves turned high.
“Da! Da!”
His father rounds on him. “Have I no’ told ye, Ian? Dinna go haring through the shop like ye’ve a band of wild Indians after ye.” Da turns his back. “There now. D’ye see?” The sharp is gone from his voice; Ned is at the sewing frame. “Ye loop the threads through the folds, then bind them to the cords . . . so.”
“Aye, Da,” says dutiful Ned—insufferably smug Ned—while Ian backs away. He misjudges his footing and bumps a bench bearing an open tray of marbling dye, sloshing the contents onto the floor.
“IAN!”
He came awake, wincing at the echo of his da’s bellow. Reaching instinctively for his rifle, he felt empty bed linen, not smooth hardwood or cold gunmetal; the rifle wasn’t beside him where it had rested each night for most of the past five years. He’d left it propped beside the door, he remembered, as the shadowed contours of the room in his uncle’s house replaced the dream of his da’s shop. But the bellowing went on.
His heart thundered as he listened. The shouts were muffled. The banging that next erupted wasn’t, nor the woman’s voice that arose outside his room: “Lily—get you down here this instant!”
Ian clawed his way off the feather tick and sprang for the door.
Lucinda Cameron, swathed in a wrapper and candlelight, stood at the top of the back stairwell, where a door was thrown open to reveal another stair, twisting narrowly up to what must be a garret. Belowstairs that other voice called, the words still unintelligible. His uncle’s voice.
The door across the passage cracked open. Thomas peered out but had the sense to remain concealed as stair treads creaked and a slender figure in pale homespun descended from above, clutching a wooden box. Ian had a glimpse of coppery skin and a long black braid before Lucinda thrust the woman toward the stairs and the voice below, still raised in agitation.
“I feared his coming would bring this on,” his aunt snapped. “Quickly now. Calm him!”
Before she vanished down the stairwell, the woman from the garret glanced up, raising to Ian a familiar face—dark eyes above wide cheekbones, a graceful jaw.
Seconds later, the shouts from below grew abruptly comprehensible: “Lily! Ye’ll ken where he is. Aidan! Where have they taken him?”
“Aunt? What’s amiss?” Ian hadn’t seen his uncle’s wife since she’d left the table.
“We have it well in hand, Mr. Cameron.” Lucinda’s face pinched in disapproval as she regarded him. He’d emerged wearing the shirt he’d slept in and nothing more. It covered him to midthigh, but the open neck had slid to his shoulders.
“I was startled out of sleep,” he began, but she was already halfway down the stairs, no more attention to spare him.
The shouting had abated. The woman from the garret, or something from her box, was having the desired effect.
Thomas opened his door wider. “Your uncle?”
“Aye, but I’ve no idea what’s wrong.” The name his uncle had been shouting. Aidan. Had that been his cousin’s name? “I’ll see what’s to be known come morning. Speaking of which—have ye a notion of the time?”
More footsteps made them turn. The door in the passage to the front of the house had burst open. Through it came Rosalyn, golden hair streaming. “It’s three o’ the clock—oh, Cousin!” she wailed and threw herself into Ian’s arms.
Permitting a lass into one’s room in the dead of night was an act of pure folly, especially when one was barely clothed and the lass in only her shift. Rosalyn clung to him, carried away on a tide of weeping, forcing him to speak into her hair. “Miss Bell—Rosalyn—what’s amiss belowstairs?”
“It’s Papa Hugh. He’s had these spells of late. Mama said . . . But I’m not to speak of it!”
Gently he shushed her, as over her shoulder he watched the door, heart going at a gallop. Thomas had disappeared into his storeroom and shut fast the door. Had Ian any sense, he’d toss his fair cousin back into the passage and do likewise. But his arms were full of her now and . . . her waist was tiny enough to span with his hands.
“Rosalyn.” Her name came out a croak. “Who was my uncle calling? It sounded like—”
“His son! His dead son.”
He’d thought so. But why should his arrival make his uncle think his son, Aidan, was alive? Surely that’s what his aunt had been implying. “That woman from the garret—it was Lily?”
Rosalyn pulled away slightly, and he stifled the unthinking urge to draw her close again.
“It must have been. Mama wouldn’t call for Seona.”
He felt a jolt at the name. “Seona? I met her earlier. I thought . . .” He knew no delicate way to phrase it. “Is she some kin to ye?”
“Kin?” Rosalyn’s lip curled. “She’s Lily’s girl, born right here at Mountain Laurel—before Mama married Papa Hugh.” Saying her stepfather’s name recalled her distress. She gave a little sob and clung to him again.
Ian sought furiously to think. “I’m sure it’ll be all right. Ye said yourself this has happened before, aye? Should ye not return to your room?”
Preferably before her mother came back up the stairs.
“Oh.” It was a breathless sound, as though she’d just noticed the rumpled bed, or the fact they stood beside it, barely clad. And embracing. She extricated herself from his arms, leaving his shirt damp, his flesh burning. A strand of her hair snagged in the stubble of his beard. She reached to free it, then caressed his face and stood on tiptoe to brush her lips against the corner of his mouth.
Startled by the gesture, Ian grasped her hand and might have pulled her to him, save that in place of her moonlit face he suddenly saw another.
“Rosalyn. Go.” His voice croaked.
For a frozen second she stared, then stepped back from him.
“Yes—of course. I’m better now.” At the door she paused, a swirl of shift and flowing hair. “I’m glad you’re here, Cousin.”