Susanna Fraser (6 page)

Chapter Six

For a wedding present Elijah bought her a new tent, far finer than the one Georgie Yonge had burned. It was almost as large as Lieutenant Farlow’s and certainly bigger than any enlisted couple’s tent she’d ever seen.

“More plunder?” Rose asked as Elijah arranged their gear to their mutual satisfaction and Jake scampered about the open space—this tent was big enough to
have
open space—chortling with glee after being set free from another day confined to a baggage wagon.

“Yes. I bought it off a man in the Fifty-Second who’s all but set up a dry goods shop of the French officers’ uniforms and gear he took.”

“It’s wonderful. I can’t thank you enough.”

He shrugged and, she swore, colored a little, though it was tough to tell when his skin was so dark. “If I’m to live with my family in my own tent,” he said, “I wanted one where I can stand up without knocking the whole arrangement down. And I will
not
miss the common tents.” He grinned crookedly at her. “I would’ve married you for that alone.”

A pleasurable warm shudder danced down her backbone. Dear God, but she loved his smile. “They’re that bad? I thought everyone was glad to have them.”

“We do have fewer men sick, especially in the winter,” he allowed, “but they pack us in so tightly we all have to turn over at once. With my size, I wasn’t a popular man.”

Before she could think what to say next, Jake ran up to Elijah and stared up at him. “Are you my papa now? And ’Tenant Farlow called Mama ‘Mrs. Cameron.’ Am I Jake Cameron now?”

Rose leaned forward from where she sat on her bedroll, her burned, bandaged foot propped on blankets, ready to step in if Elijah faltered. She needn’t have worried. He sank down to one knee so Jake could easily meet his eyes. “Your papa is in heaven,” he said, “and I think God lets him look down on you and see how well you are doing. And you’re still Jacob Merrifield, and always will be. I wouldn’t want you to change that. It’s a good name, for you to remember your good father by.” There was a faint edge to Elijah’s voice Rose couldn’t quite interpret. “But I’m your stepfather now,” he continued, sounding gentle and steady again, “and I’ll do my best to take care of you and your mother all through the war, and when it’s over and done, see you safely back to England.”

He didn’t promise anything beyond that, but Jake, with his child’s notion of time, didn’t question it. “What’s England like?” he asked. “Is it very safe?”

“It’s lovely and green,” Elijah said. “Safer than here, because the war isn’t there.”

“When we go back to England,” Rose said, “I’ll take you to Aspwell Heath, where your papa and I grew up, and you will meet your grandparents—your papa’s parents—and your Aunt Jenny, his sister. You’ll have a cousin there, too, maybe two or three by the time we get home.”

“What about your parents?” Jake asked.

“They died, years ago,” Rose said. “They’re in heaven with your papa.” They’d both died of a fever, not six months after her only sister had died in childbirth. She still didn’t like to think of that time, of how alone she’d felt. Everything familiar and beloved about home had only brought her more pain, without those she’d loved best and longest there to share it.

“What about you, ’Lijah?” Jake asked.

“My parents are both alive, and they live in London.”

Jake frowned. “Where’s London?”

Rose and Elijah exchanged smiles. It was easy to forget how much wasn’t obvious to a child. “It’s in England, too, dear,” Rose said. “The largest city.”

“So we’ll go to them, too,” Jake said with a firm, satisfied nod. “And they’ll be my other grandparents.”

Rose hid another smile behind her hand. What would Elijah’s parents think, to be presented with such a pale “grandson”?

Elijah looked nonplussed, though Rose couldn’t tell if that was for his parents’ sake or because he didn’t want to do anything so permanent with this temporary marriage as bring his bride and stepson home to meet his family. “I’m sure they’d be glad to have a grandson as nice and good as you,” he said after a moment, “though I doubt they ever expected one with blond hair.”

“Oh. Do they look like you?”

“Well, yes. My father has lighter skin than I do, because his father was a white man, but my mother is darker. Her skin is almost black, truly black, and not a medium brown color everyone calls black, like mine.”

“Why do people say it’s black, then?”

Elijah kept his mouth serious, though his eyes danced as he looked over Jake’s head at Rose. “A very good question. But, if you think about it, it isn’t like white people are the color of snow or—or clean linen.”

Jake studied his own grubby hands and giggled.

“I suppose people say black and white because it’s simpler,” Rose put in. “Otherwise you’d have to go around saying that Elijah is medium brown, and Fernando is light tan, and Jemmy Whelan almost
is
as white as snow in winter, other than his freckles, but then he turns red in the summer sun.”

Jake gave her a superior look. “It’s all very silly. People are people.”

Elijah ruffled his hair. “You’re a very wise lad, and I wish more grown men and women thought the same.”

* * *

Later, after Jake fell asleep, Rose and Elijah sat up into the night—talking, nothing more. Not for the first time, Rose was glad of her burned foot. Just after it happened, the sharp, stinging pain of the burn had distracted her from all the grief and upheaval that had turned her life upside down. Now it bought her time and space to think. Her ankle and shin were covered in blisters. Though Luisa and the regiment’s surgeon pronounced themselves satisfied because the blisters were clear and their poultices seemed to be preventing infection, any sort of pressure on the foot still brought stinging, searing pain. While Rose supposed it would be possible to engage in coupling without bumping her foot against Elijah or the ground, it would be difficult, and the instant she literally put her foot wrong, the pain would drive all the desire out of her.

The desire was there now, a small, steady flame like the single candle that lit their palace of a tent as they talked. It didn’t consume her, not yet. The ache of missing dear, familiar Sam was still too strong. But the fire would only burn stronger, she knew. As they talked, she couldn’t keep her eyes off Elijah’s hands. They were of a piece with the rest of him, big but graceful, and when she pictured those strong brown hands with their long, elegant fingers exploring every inch of her body, her breath came faster.

When she wasn’t watching his hands, she studied his face for some sign of desire for her, of whatever it was that had made him kiss her so frantically. If it was still there, he hid it well. His dark eyes were steady, warm and kind, but nothing more.

She thought again of how Elijah had spoken to Jake when he’d asked about his name. Perhaps he wouldn’t want to talk of it—whatever it was—but she was his wife now. Surely she had the right to ask. “Where did your family get the name Cameron?” she asked. “I never thought to ask before.”

He smiled, but with a chill to it she’d never seen before. This one didn’t make her want to sway into his arms and kiss him. “The same place most people get their names,” he said. “My father got it from his father, who got it from his, and on up the line. At least, so I assume. I haven’t met them. I suppose our Major-General Cameron might be some sort of relation, but I don’t expect him to claim the connection.”

“Your grandfather’s name,” she said quietly. She’d already known Elijah had a white grandfather on a Virginia tobacco plantation. Somehow it had never occurred to her that the family—now including herself—bore the planter’s name. She would’ve changed it, in their circumstances, so she’d assumed they’d chosen Cameron to honor some friend or simply because they liked the sound.

“My father wanted to change it,” Elijah said. “He suggested Dryhurst, as a compliment to the colonel—only he was a captain, in those days—or perhaps George or King, in compliment to, well, England, because the army freed them. My mother talked him out of it. She said it would look odd to have the same name as our employer, because that was for slaves and they were free now, and that the others were silly. She wanted to keep Cameron, to always remember where we’d come from.”

“Your mother sounds...formidable,” Rose said. She hoped she got the chance to meet her, only she feared she’d be a disappointing daughter-in-law to so clear-sighted a woman.

“Both my parents are. It gives me so much to live up to, having two parents brave enough to run away from slavery. I don’t want to let them down.”

“I’m sure you haven’t.” How could they be anything but proud of such a capable, clever son, who’d risen to an NCO’s rank and was valued by almost everyone in the company?

“I hope not. They didn’t want me to go in the army. Daddy wanted me to be a clerk, or a private secretary to a gentleman, as he was to Colonel Dryhurst.”

“To follow in his footsteps.”

“Yes. I’m ashamed to say the argument I used to get round him was that I was a free man, and didn’t that mean I was free to be a soldier if I pleased?”

“Why ashamed?”

“It was fighting dirty. Because I knew, even at fifteen, that if I put it in those terms, he couldn’t do otherwise than say yes. And so he did.”

“Do you wish you’d done otherwise?”

“I don’t regret missing out on the life of a clerk. Sometimes I wonder what else I might have done outside the army. It’s all I know. I’ve lived in the Forty-Third all my life. But Colonel Dryhurst didn’t want me to enlist, either, though he spoke up for me when he couldn’t persuade me to change my mind. He was fine with my being a drummer boy when I was young, but he thought I ought to seek a different trade once I was grown.”

“Really? But he seems to value you so.”

“I didn’t understand then. He said that in the army any common soldier could only rise so far, and that it would be all the harder for me because of my race, but that if I went into some kind of trade or service with a family who favored abolition and could see past my skin to my mind, there was no reason I couldn’t be a rich man with a shop or even a factory of my own, or a trusted steward with many estates to manage. I thought all of that sounded a dead bore compared to wearing a red coat, carrying a musket and fighting the Frogs.” He chuckled ruefully.

“I suspect a good many boys of fifteen would say the same.”

“Yes. And it’s only the last few years that I’ve wondered if I chose poorly. I’m a good soldier, I know that, but a corporal is all I’ll ever be. Farlow told me he’s heard Colonel Dryhurst say he can’t make me a sergeant—there’s been too much trouble over just the corporal’s stripes. Oh, they have black sergeants in the West Indies regiments, but that’s all they’re used for—to guard the colonies there because white troops sicken in the climate. I wouldn’t want that
.
And even if I could be a sergeant, I could volunteer for every forlorn hope from now till the end of my days, and they’d
still
never let me be a lieutenant. They’ll let a few white sergeants have a commission, for the sake of a brave deed or if they serve long and faithfully enough, but a
black
officer? Unimaginable.”

Rose thought about her own dreams, the ones she’d given up on and was now just beginning to hope for again. She knew something about frustrated hopes. “I’m sorry. It isn’t right. Everyone in the company who’s any good knows you’re the best NCO we have.”

“Really?”

Rose nodded earnestly. “I’m no soldier, but even I can see it. You manage this company, as much as a corporal can. You even taught Lieutenant Farlow how to be an officer, as far as I can tell.”

“He’s learned well,” Elijah said judiciously. “He couldn’t have managed that business with Yonge and the fire any better.”

“I wish you could be more than a corporal.” She remembered something Sam had said, a month or two after their arrival in Spain. It had seemed odd to her at the time, but was now so obvious she was embarrassed she had ever thought differently. “Sam told me once he thought if you’d been part of an army in Africa, you’d be a general and command the lot.”

Elijah laughed aloud, then glanced aside to make sure Jake still slumbered on. “A general, at my age? I’d be a captain by now, though,” he added meditatively. “And a colonel, at the least, before I was done. But it’s no use wishing for the impossible. I’ve risen as far as ever I can, at five-and-twenty, and there’s nothing to be done about it.”

Nothing to be done about it in the army, at least. “What will you do once the war is over?” she asked. “Do you want to stay in the regiment?” What kind of life would that be, to serve as a corporal for decades, for a man who dreamed of an impossible world that let him be a colonel and possibly more?

“I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “Just because it’s the only life I’ve known doesn’t mean I have to stay in it forever. But what else could I do? I suppose I could still be a clerk or a secretary—Lieutenant Farlow pays me to do that sort of work for him, sometimes, because his handwriting is so terrible he makes mistakes in his sums—but I still don’t want to do that, and only that. I don’t think I’d be happy to be always under an employer’s direction, with no one for
me
to teach or manage. And it’s late days to go into service and think of becoming a butler or a steward or anything of that nature.”

“I know of something you might be good at,” she said diffidently. The idea had only just occurred to her, and she wasn’t sure what he’d think. But if he liked it...maybe it would be a first step toward convincing him their marriage should be real.

“What’s that?”

He sounded genuinely curious, so Rose forged ahead. “Whenever I thought about having an inn someday, I only imagined myself in the kitchen. But if I’m to keep an inn, I need to have someone who could run the stables and manage all the grooms, not to mention keep up the rooms and such. There’s so much to manage in a place like that, but I don’t want to do it. I only want to cook the best food in England, and not trouble myself with the rest. I think you could do it well, though. It wouldn’t be so unlike what you do now—you’d have people to manage and train and books to keep—but you’d be on the top of the ranks instead of toward the bottom. I know it isn’t exactly being a colonel, but...” She let her voice trail off, because she wasn’t sure what to think of the way Elijah was staring at her. He looked wide-eyed, amazed, but was he happy or horrified?