Matthew sank back down with a muttered comment that such things were best handled by the young man in question on his own.
“Oh, I’m sure it is.” Alex’s brow furrowed for an instant.
“Will you let me get to the point of my tale?” Matthew said, somewhat irritated.
Alex nodded.
“Thomas didn’t go there for the food alone.” He sighed and shook his head. “She’s a pretty enough lass, and she knew him from before.”
“Poor Mary, she’s still in love with him.”
“Aye well, it isn’t that Thomas doesn’t love his wife. It’s just...”
“That he thinks her too old,” Alex finished. “It’s not as if he’s God’s gift to womankind, is it?”
Matthew chuckled. Thomas was a nondescript man, leaving behind a vague impression of grey and more grey. Grey eyes, grey hair, grey clothes and grey stockings, Thomas very much melted into the background unless he set out on purpose not to. Always had, he reflected, recalling the first time he saw him, back in 1659 in Scotland.
“But I didn’t tell you this to have you revise your impression of poor Thomas,” Matthew continued. “I told you because, as I sat waiting, I happened to see a former acquaintance.” He almost spat out the words. “Jones, Dominic Jones.”
“Ah.” Alex scooted closer to him. “That must have been difficult.”
Matthew stretched out one arm and clenched and unclenched his fist repeatedly. Difficult? Aye, that it had been.
“Did he recognise you?” Alex fiddled with his chest hair.
“Aye,” Matthew replied with a short laugh. “When he stood to go upstairs he saw me sitting in the corner, and it took some time for him to make the connection, but finally he did.” It still pleased him that Jones had looked as aghast as Matthew felt.
He shifted in bed. All of him was drowning in remembered blackness and despair, and with a strangled moan he turned to face her. He wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for Alex and her determination to find him and take him home, saving him from an existence that would have ended far too quickly in an anonymous grave on a Virginia plantation.
“That was a long time ago,” Alex soothed. “Ten years ago, more or less.”
Aye, very long ago and since then they’d had five bairns, lost one, been forced to leave their home and cross the sea once again to come here, to Maryland. And yet it could have been yesterday when he woke to find himself in chains, sold by his damned brother Luke into indentured labour on a Virginia tobacco farm.
“I’d totally forgotten about him.” Alex stroked Matthew’s hair. “I wonder if people here know he left Virginia under something of a cloud.”
“Nay, I would think not. Being suspected of murdering your employer is not something you would share with all and sundry, is it? I must be a very unwelcome reminder of his past.” He frowned at that. “He recently moved up from the south of the colony; I found that out the next day. He has a plantation just outside of Providence. Numerous children, I heard. And slaves. He trades in them – well, it would seem he trades in everything.” Matthew pillowed his head as close as he could to her heart, closing his eyes to concentrate on the steady thudding of her pulse. In through his ear, down through his spine, into his bloodstream and up to his heart... Her rhythm wove itself tight around his own strong beat, a familiar sound that lulled him to sleep.
*
Next afternoon Alex went to find Ian, and as they worked in the root cellar she gave him a brief recap of Matthew’s time in Virginia.
“We think – well, Matthew insists he knows – that Jones killed Fairfax, the plantation owner down in Virginia. Remember I told you about that? How your father almost was hanged for a crime he hadn’t committed? Strangely enough, Jones inherited Fairfax’s estate – as per a will dated the day Fairfax died.” Alex shook her head. “Too much of a coincidence, according to your sleuth of a father.”
Ian held out his hand for yet another plank, hammering it into place with a couple of strokes.
“He was very upset.” Ian stood back to admire his handiwork: a much improved door to the root cellar. “He kept on scanning the crowds for him. Difficult to miss, yon Jones, what with him being the size of an ox.”
“He has reason not to trust Jones,” Alex said.
“But they won’t run into each other much, will they?”
“No, I suppose not – a three-day ride makes it highly unlikely. Still, it’s good that you know, just in case.” She almost smiled at how Ian puffed up, chest expanding with pride at her confidence in him.
He tucked the hammer into his belt, grabbed the wooden spade and turned to her with a smile. “Shall we plant your bitty trees, then?”
Alex jumped up. “You dig and I’ll fetch water. And maybe come autumn we can bake one apple pie.”
“I don’t think so.” Ian laughed, prodding the little saplings.
An hour later, Alex sat back on her heels. “There.” She patted the slender little trunk. “Grow and grow quickly, okay?” She sighed, her shoulders falling together. “Pathetic,” she muttered, running a finger up and down the smooth dark grey bark. “It’ll take years and years before they come even close to the trees back home.”
“But someday they will.” Ian dropped to one knee beside her. “And your grandchildren will bake pies and thank the Lord they had a grandmama wise enough to plant a tree – for them.”
“It’s always the worst this time of the year.” Alex craned her head back to look at the sky. “I miss the twilights, those long, blue hours where nothing is either light or dark, but something just in between.”
“We have twilights here,” Ian said. “This is twilight.”
“But it isn’t the same. They’re never as long, never as magical as they were up there, in the north. For him, the worst part comes later.” She crumbled a clod of earth between her fingers.
“Aye, for Da it’s harvest time.”
“And you? Do you miss it?”
“Not as much as I thought I would; this is home now. All of this is home.” He opened his arms wide, indicating their surroundings. “It is easier for us bairns: we have you to make us a home, wherever we go.” He kissed her brow. “It’s enough to have someone who kisses you and wishes you goodnight and know she loves you.”
“Most of the time,” she said in a dry tone, trying to disguise how touched she was.
“All the time,” he contradicted her with conviction.
Alex laughed. “Yes, you’re right; all of the time. But I don’t always like you.” As if on cue, an angry shriek flew through the air, followed by some heavy thumps, and suddenly there were two voices shrieking in unison.
“Sisterly love.” Alex got to her feet, tilted her head in the direction of the noise, listened for some time, and shrugged. “They’re too small to kill each other – yet. Let’s go and see if Matthew and the boys have caught any fish.
“Was there a letter from your mother?” Alex asked as they made their way down to the river.
“Aye. She’s breeding again. It’s all she seems to do, lie in bed and rest her way through pregnancy after pregnancy.”
“Well, five pregnancies in six years is pretty impressive,” Alex said. Luke and Margaret were definitely making up for lost time. Quite the strain on Margaret, and the late miscarriage last year must have been a painful experience. “Is she alright?”
Ian dug into his breeches and produced the letter. “You can read it yourself.”
Alex unfolded it and looked down at the spidery, unformed handwriting that crawled its way across the thick paper. Margaret spent a lot of time describing her three babies, two boys named Charles and James respectively after their father’s royal patrons, and one girl named Marie – and now mayhap yet another son, but it was early days yet; the babe was not due until early October. Luke was mentioned in passing, the odd dropped hint that he was continuing to do very well, how he had commissioned their portraits from Peter Lely himself, and how Margaret had spent hours choosing what to wear for the sitting.
“Well, of course she would,” Alex muttered, inundated by that childish jealousy she always felt when thinking about Margaret – Ian’s mother, Matthew’s first wife. The wife who had cuckolded him with his own brother, lied to retain custody of Matthew’s son, Ian, and stood by and allowed Luke to falsely accuse Matthew of treason. Not – in brief – Alex’s favourite person, and it didn’t exactly help that she was startlingly good-looking to boot.
“I suppose Luke must be very proud.” Alex refolded the letter and handed it back to Ian. Right at the end there was a cramped effort trying to put into words how much Margaret missed her firstborn, but otherwise the letter was one long gushing exposé over a life that no longer included Ian.
“Aye.” Ian came to a halt and turned towards her, eyes shining with unshed tears.
“Her loss, Ian, her very big loss, and our gain. Our eldest son, and look at you. What parents wouldn’t be proud of a boy – no, man – like you?” She grinned at him. “Even if you can’t hold a tune and still complain when I serve you vegetables.”
Ian burst out laughing and gave her a quick hug.
“All of us complain. Even Da complains. If we were meant to eat so much green...”
“I know, I know, you would’ve been born a cow.”
*
After supper, the younger bairns were sent to bed. Ian took Mark with him to see to the beasts, and Matthew and Alex retired to the parlour.
“Have you read the letter from Simon?” Matthew caressed Alex’s cheek in passing and went to sit in his chair, facing hers in front of the fire.
“Yes, although I’m not entirely sure if I understood it all. Simon’s handwriting is at times atrocious.”
“It seems all is well with them, even though Simon does complain that life is a trifle difficult.”
Alex shook out Sarah’s mended smock. “What was it he said? Thousands of Highlander soldiers let loose on Ayrshire?”
“Aye, and they have no reason to love us, do they?” He pursed his lips, washed by a wave of concern for his sister, Joan, and Simon, his brother-in-law.
“Well no, given the way the Covenanter armies acted in the Highlands. Bloody religion,” she said, making Matthew raise a disapproving brow. “Well, it is, isn’t it? Making Scots turn upon Scots, English upon English...and at the end of the day for what? For the right to proclaim your own interpretation of the Bible as being the valid one? God must roll His eyes in desperation at times.”
“Aye,” Matthew sighed. “He must. But it isn’t His fault, and as for the Bible, it’s all there. You don’t need an interpretation; you must but read it and reflect on it.”
“Not according to some of the ministers. Some ministers are of the firm opinion that it is them that can interpret, and we must but listen and obey – especially us featherbrained women.”
Matthew laughed and raised his foot to rest in her lap. “Obedience is an attractive quality in a woman, one unfortunately very lacking in you.”
“Watch it,” she mumbled, brandishing her needle. “You don’t want me to run this through your toe, do you?”
He laughed again and sat back with his pewter mug of whisky in his hands to look at her. In the glow from the fire and the light of the candle by her side, all of her was haloed, her dark hair throwing off glints of bronze and even gold. Not much grey in it, just the odd hair here and there and the little patch just off her right temple, creating an interesting streak of light in all that dark.
For almost fourteen years she had been in his life, and there were still days when he would give silent and fervent thanks for having her with him, for that random and miraculous occurrence a day in August that had thrown her from her time into his. 1658, he mused, on a Scottish moor, and he had found her after a terrifying thunderstorm, badly burnt and concussed, wearing the strangest garments he had ever seen. Breeches on a woman... And what breeches, narrow and blue they hugged her so close it had been like seeing her naked, her rounded arse straining against the tight cloth.
Now her bottom was hidden beneath modest skirts, her hair was no longer a wild short cap but fell to well below her shoulder blades. And only he saw her fully; she was for his eyes only when the hair tumbled in wild disarray, when her limbs were uncovered to lie pale against the sheets. Only his... He stood up and waited until she met his eyes. A small movement of his head, and she folded her work together and doused the candle with her fingers before moving in the direction of their bedchamber. He banked the fire and followed, his bare feet silent on the wooden boards.
Chapter 4
“It’s a bit sad.” Alex ran her hand down one of the ring-barked saplings. “All these beautiful trees and we kill them.”
“Aye, well,” Matthew said, wiping the sweat off his face, “it’s trees or fields. And we can’t eat the leaves, however bonny they may be.” He swept the area with his eyes and sat down in the long grass. “In a year it will all be wheat, a large field of golden wheat.” But first it would cost him weeks of toil – as had every square yard presently under the plough. At times he felt like yon Sisyphus, constantly rolling a boulder uphill.
Alex came to sit beside him. “Wheat, hey? No tobacco?”
“Never, not on my land.” He drew the sodden shirt over his head and threw it to lie on the ground.
“Oh.” Alex stretched out beside him, her head pillowed on her arms.
Matthew swigged at the beer bottle, set it down and stuffed a boiled egg into his mouth, chewing methodically while he studied his surroundings.
Alex raised her hand to his bare back, running a light finger over his scarred skin. “Tobacco is a good cash crop.”
“I don’t care if it grows with gold foil leaves; I won’t touch it.” And especially not after having run into Dominic Jones again; not after having all those memories of his months on Suffolk Rose prodded back into uncomfortable life by laying eyes on his former tormentor. It would be best for all if he never met the man again, but he couldn’t help feeling a niggling curiosity about Kate, Dominic’s wife. Would she have aged as badly as her husband? Surely not, not pretty Kate with her honey-coloured hair and soft brown eyes. Not Kate, who had held him and loved him and thereby saved his life.
“What are you thinking?” Alex asked.
Matthew drained the beer flask and fitted the last piece of bread into his mouth, making it impossible to answer.
“It’s sometime since you bled,” he said as they made their way back home, the June sun warm on their shoulders despite it being late in the afternoon.
“Yes, about two months ago. It didn’t take us very long, did it?”
Matthew slipped an arm round her waist and drew her close, forcing her to do a series of small skips before her stride was aligned with his.
“A lad.” He smiled down at her, proud of his own virility and his wife’s fertility.
“And I suppose you already have a name for him?” she teased.
“Aye, I do.”
“So, what is it?”
“Ah no, you don’t find out until you’ve birthed him.”
“Unfair,” she muttered, “and, anyway, maybe I have an opinion.”
Matthew hitched his shoulders. The naming was his to do, and they both knew it.
They balanced their way over a couple of fallen trees, and Alex accepted Matthew’s hand to help her up a particularly steep bank.
“Fiona’s been in a vile mood all day,” she said, “what with it being laundry day tomorrow. Not her favourite chore – not my favourite day of the month either.”
“Fiona’s always in a bad temper when it comes to work.”
“Not always, and just the other day I actually heard her singing up beyond the kitchen garden.”
“Was she working?”
“No, she was taking a walk.” She frowned. “A lot of that lately, if you ask me.”
“You need to put your foot down. You’re allowing her to shirk work, and that’s not right.”
“I know,” Alex sighed. “But, frankly, at times I prefer to do things myself than have her sulking for a whole day.”
They walked in companionable silence, hands as always braided together. His thumb drew a circle over her skin; Alex returned the caress. She wiggled a finger insinuatingly where it was trapped between his larger digits, and Matthew tightened his hold, suppressing a smile.
Alex slowed her pace and gave him a blue look. “It’s nice here, don’t you think?” She sank down to sit in the grass. The birch leaves overhead rustled in the evening breeze; shadow and sun streaked the ground; and when Alex tugged at his hand, Matthew kneeled beside her. “I have to make you a new shirt,” she said as she undid his lacings.
“Do you now?” He leaned forward to kiss her, his tongue darting out to follow the contour of her lips. Alex kissed him back, her arms encircling his neck.
“Not right now, I don’t,” she murmured, rubbing her cheek against his chest. “Right now, I have other things to do.”
“Wanton,” he whispered in her hair, tightening his hold on her.
She kissed him between the clavicles. “It’s not as if you mind, is it?”
“Nay, not as such.”
She stretched out on her back, caught his eyes and winked as she pulled her skirts up, inch by delightful inch.
“Go on, uncover yourself for me.” He caressed her bare shin with his fingers.
“All of me?”
“All.” He cleared his throat, eyes never leaving his wife as she struggled up to sit up, impatient fingers working at the lacing on her bodice. It fell discarded to the ground. Through the sheer linen of her shift, he could see her breasts, and he couldn’t resist the temptation to brush his hand across her bosom.
“More?” She rose on her knees to undo her skirt.
“All of it.” He extended a hand to help her.
From somewhere to his right, there came a muted sound, somewhere between a sob and a honk.
“What was that?” Alex crossed her arms over her chest.
“I’m not sure.” He scanned the surrounding woods. A twig snapped, the resulting sound loud like a musket shot in the drowsy stillness of the forest.
“Indians?” Alex whispered.
Matthew peered into the shadows of the nearest shrub. Something light caught his eyes: a man, the shirt hanging untucked as he flitted away.
“Hey!” Matthew picked up his axe and rushed after. There was a loud crash, a brace of birds rose screeching towards the sky, and the white blob picked up amazing speed, darting off like a wild stag down the incline.
“Matthew! Wait for me!” Alex came charging after, still half undressed, her hair falling to her shoulders.
Matthew had by now reached the wee stream that burbled its way across the valley’s floor. In the mud was a clear imprint of a hobnailed boot.
“Not an Indian.” Alex stared at the huge footprint.
“Nay.” Most definitely not an Indian, but why would a white man rush off like that?
“Could it be Jones?” Alex asked, head swivelling as if she expected Jones to appear from behind the nearest stand of trees.
“Jones? Yon fat bastard could never move as fast as this one did.” He studied the imprint. “And this is too big to be Sykes.”
“Sykes? Oh my God, Sykes!” She turned to face him. “It was him, the man I saw.”
“You saw him? Where?”
“I told you. How I recognised one of the men who abducted those two girls. It was him, Sykes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure! Men that ugly don’t exactly grow on trees, do they?”
It made him laugh; it shouldn’t, but it did, because she was right. Sykes was a right ugly character and, as he recalled it, equipped with balls the size of peas unless Jones was nearby to back him up. He was tempted to set off at a run after the trespasser – should it be Sykes, it would bring him the greatest enjoyment to bash his head in with the axe. But it wasn’t; he knew that. He frowned, staring in the direction in which the man had disappeared.
“A trapper, mayhap,” he said out loud. Aye, that was probably it, although why a trapper should flee instead of requesting bed and board was beyond him. He waved away this disturbing thought, took Alex’s hand and led them back home.
*
As expected, Fiona looked most put out next morning, muttering that never had she lived in a home where linens were changed as often as they were here. Alex ignored her grumbling, concentrating instead on keeping the lye at a safe distance from her body.
“I saw one of the girls up at the Leslies’ the other week,” she said. “Her whole arm was badly blistered on account of having the lye spill over her.”
Fiona shrugged; such things happened. “Are they English, the new lasses?”
Alex had no idea. None of them had opened their mouth. “One of them is pregnant. She must’ve been with child before she boarded, and her contract’s been extended with a full year. She didn’t seem too happy about that.”
“Nay, she wouldn’t be. Five years is quite enough.”
“Only two left for you.” Alex found this difficult to talk about, even knowing that Fiona had chosen this as the only way she could start a new life for herself. A brave young woman, Alex thought, to cross the world all on her own. Brave or desperate, and despite having lived at close quarters with Fiona for three years, she still didn’t know which.
She studied Fiona as she lifted the steaming linen from the cauldron into the rinsing trough: black hair pulled back in a strict braid, eyes a warm chocolate brown, and a nice figure. Fiona had no idea how old she was, but thought she might be twenty-five or thereabouts, insisting she had recollections of the uneasy times back in the War of the Three Kingdoms, fragmented images of hiding from the Commonwealth army that rode into Scotland in pursuit of Charles Stuart.
“What will you do?”
“Do?” Fiona gave Alex a blank look.
“You know, once your term of indenture is up. Will you stay up here or will you go south to the towns?”
“The towns, I think.” Fiona wrung the shirt in her hands, shook it out and hung it on the clothes line. “I’m not a country lass.” She threw a disgusted look at the woods that stood thick and dark around them. “I miss the sound of people. And I miss the sea.” She turned to Alex. “And you, mistress? Are you happy here, up in the wild?”
Alex surveyed her home, a fragile man-made clearing in the encroaching forest. This was a safe haven, a new start far away from a country where her man was constantly persecuted on account of his faith.
“Yes I am, even if it’s a bit far away from everything. A town half a day’s ride away wouldn’t have come amiss.”
“You have the Chisholm place, and on account of them being so many, that’s like a wee village in itself.”
Alex laughed. Fiona was right: their neighbours were numerous, three brothers who’d come out twenty years ago, and now with their sons and daughters a small community numbering fourteen families or so. She liked the Chisholms, but they tended to keep themselves to themselves, an enclave of Catholicism in an area mostly settled by Protestants.
“A man,” Fiona said out of the blue a few moments later.
“A man?”
“A husband,” Fiona clarified. “Most of all I’d like a husband.”
“That won’t be too hard, will it? Not here, where unwed women are as rare as sweet water pearls.”
Something flitted over Fiona’s face, a smugness quickly suppressed that made Alex throw her a long look.
“Mayhap not,” Fiona said, and there it was again, a satisfied little smirk.
*
As a treat after an entire morning hanging over the laundry cauldron, Alex succeeded in wheedling Matthew’s permission to visit their new neighbours – as long as she took Jonah and his musket along. She was curious about the Waltons, the wife and children having come but recently from the east to join the husband who’d been here since spring. Not that she’d met him either, being far too busy at home to do more than send along the odd pie with Matthew on those few occasions when he’d ridden over to help.
“You think it’s safe, mistress?” Fiona sounded nervous.
“As safe as it was yesterday. Anyway,” Alex grinned, “it’s you the Indians will go for, not me.” That made Fiona wipe her palms on the dark cloth of her skirts. Jonah chuckled and made a show of brandishing the musket he was carrying.
Alex swept the forest with her eyes; four years here, and they’d never seen an Indian. A couple of years ago, she and Matthew had come upon a sizeable clearing, with overgrown mounds showing where buildings had stood. Among the weeds, Alex had found shards of pottery and, growing in a corner, a few stands of maize, apparently the result of spontaneous germination in seeds left behind when the inhabitants moved away. The maize she’d taken care of, and now there were several rows of Indian corn growing in her kitchen garden.
Fiona gripped Ruth harder and hurried them on, muttering that this was a fool’s errand in times when Indians were abroad, but Alex turned a deaf ear. She wasn’t unduly worried by the news that Indians had been sighted, and so far all they’d done was steal a horse or two off Andrew Chisholm. No, she was made far more uncomfortable by the humid heat that made clothes stick to damp skin and brought out small beads of sweat along the bridge of Alex’s nose. She tilted her straw hat so that it shaded her face, and examined her new skirts. Matthew had brought back several bolts of fabric from Providence, and this time he had spontaneously added yards of pale green cotton to the standard linen and dark wool, for which she was very grateful – especially on a day as hot as today.
Alex adjusted Sarah’s cap and called Daniel back from his brutal inspection of an ant hill.
“Remember,” she said, “they might not speak English.”
Fiona looked at her with incredulous eyes. “Not speak English?”
“Quite a lot of people don’t.” Alex bit back a little smile.
“Da says only very few speak English,” Ruth piped up, skipping by Fiona’s side. “It is too bad, on account of them not being able to read the Bible.”
“Of course they can,” Alex said. “The Bible was written in several old languages, and it’s been translated into English, just as it’s been translated into Swedish or German or Spanish.”
“But it’s only us that have the true Bible,” Fiona said to Ruth. “Only us of the Scottish Kirk, aye? Ask your da,” she added with a triumphant look in Alex’s direction.
For a moment Alex considered throwing herself into a religious debate with Fiona, but instead she smiled at her children and told them that she wasn’t a Presbyterian, and yet she was quite convinced that she had access to just as valid a Bible as any member of the redoubtable Scottish Reformed Church.
“Is it much further?” Sarah whined. “I’m hot and hungry.”
“I’m not quite sure,” Alex said. The riding trail meandered in a rough westerly direction, but all around the woods stood thick, gigantic chestnuts, sycamores and oaks, and here and there stands of dark pines. The air hummed with insects, and from the surrounding undergrowth came the chirping and rustling of birds. Alex smiled at the bright orange of the orioles, darting from one shrub to the other.