The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn (22 page)

Maybe he’d let Cade deliver that news.

Back inside, he found Tamsen in her mismatched clothes, staring at the feast spread on the table.

“I was getting worried over you.” He longed to talk with her, hear what was going on in that pretty head of hers—better, her heart. “Want to sit and have us some pie?”

She grimaced, as if thought of eating soured her stomach, then chewed her lip in indecision. “There is something I want to talk to you about.” They sat across from each other. Neither touched the food. “You let them think we’re married.”

“I was minding your reputation, staying here with me …”

“And Cade?”

“Aye. He’ll be along.” Jesse paused, uncertain how to proceed. She looked unhappy, but like she was trying to choke it down. To go along. “We can tell the Allards the truth, down the road a piece.” He’d hoped to reassure her, but his words brought on a frown.

“What about my reputation when I leave?”

Beyond not liking her choice of words, Jesse felt frustration rising up. “We had us a plan, but it changed. I’m sort of making this up as we go along now. If you’d come out and talked to me before they arrived, we might’ve gotten all this straight betwixt us.”

They sat, staring at each other warily across his neighbor’s food, until her expression softened.

“I didn’t mean to make more trouble for you, Jesse.”

He wanted to reach across and take her hand, but she held them in her lap. “You’re no trouble.”

She gave him a look as if to say she knew better.

“No trouble I didn’t take on willingly, all right? And let’s not use that word. That’s not what you are to me.” He knew he’d best stop there or he’d be telling her just what she was to him.

“All right,” she said. “But I don’t mean to be waited on. I want to do my part, whatever that is, while I’m here.”

“Fair enough.”

Awkwardness hung between them. He needed to clear the air about one more thing, but worried how she’d take it.

“I want to be sure you understand. There was nothing to Bethany’s little tantrum last night. Not on my side.”

Her face closed up, so he couldn’t tell what she thought about the girl. “You don’t owe me an explanation, Jesse. We aren’t married.”

“No. But I promised the preacher to protect you, shelter you, for as long as you need me, and I keep my promises. But I’ve never made a single one to Bethany Allard.” Worried he was back on the brink of revealing too much, he reached for the pie.

She watched him slice into it with his belt knife. “Bethany isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”

He fetched a pair of spoons, setting one before her. “I’m listening—but eating too.” He smiled at her and dug in, but she didn’t join him.

“A bit ago,” she said, “I opened Mama’s box.”

Jesse had stopped eating after the first bite. “That crash? It worried me some.”

“I’m sorry. It was something I needed to do alone.” Tamsen found it hard to meet his gaze, still a little rattled by his letting the Allards think they were married—though she understood why he’d done it. “There was a letter to me, from my father.”

“Not Parrish.” It wasn’t a question. Even so, she shook her head. She couldn’t help the tears that welled, but her voice stayed steady as she explained.

She’d awakened with vague memories of the room she’d fallen asleep in, of crickets chirping beyond the logs, and the specter of a girl spitting-angry over her very existence. Sitting up in half light, in one of two narrow beds built into opposite corners, she’d had herself a look at her surroundings. Along with the beds, the room boasted a small table with a basin, tapers in wooden rings, the means to light them. A trunk at the foot of one bed. Pegs on the walls. More clothes. Her own things.

Her mother’s box.

She’d risen, lit a candle, then brought the box to the bed. Standing barefoot on the edge of the frame, she raised it high as the ceiling allowed and slammed it to the puncheon floor, bursting its rusty hinges.

She’d found the letter beneath the petition for her mother’s manumission and the General Assembly’s reply. Like the petition, it was written in her father’s hand.

To My Darling Daughter upon the Advent of her Birth …

Dated the week she’d been born, the letter told a story. Her parents’ story. How her father met her mother, enslaved on the plantation of a Spanish merchant, a man he had dealings with in his business. Struck by her appearance, he’d pursued her in secrecy, learning that she was, as he’d suspected, her master’s offspring.

Her mother, Mariah, had been a house slave. Though I never saw her, she being in her Grave some years before I encountered Sarah, Mariah was what is commonly referred to as a quadroon—a person of one-quarter African blood—which makes your Mother an octoroon. Such Distasteful Appellations I despise to use in connection with the Woman I love and call my Wife. Yet they may be of Importance to you one day, our Daughter, so I state them plainly here
.

Stephen Littlejohn went on to tell how, upon subsequent visits, he’d come to love her mother, and she him. How after a time he persuaded her master to sell to him his daughter.

He let her go as though she meant no more to him than one of his Carriage horses, though to me she is all the World, notwithstanding our Marriage is unrecognized in the State of North Carolina. Sarah was reared in the house of a Gentleman, serving his wife and legitimate offspring. She can present herself as polished as they, and so it is believed we met far off in Georgia, on one of my Sojourns, were married there, and she, bereft of Family, consented to travel North with me to Charlotte Town …

There was more to explain—or excuse—the elaborate courtship story Tamsen had grown up believing in, but too little of the truth the story concealed. Not even the name of the plantation where her mother had been born, enslaved, and sold. The name of a grandmother, a long-dead slave, was all she had.

Maybe that was as her father had wanted it.

“Oh, Papa.” Even with her hands shaking and the truth—the little of it he’d given her—washing over her in waves, she missed her father with a love that had survived these revelations unscathed. She remembered Stephen Littlejohn as a tall man, slender, with dark hair and kind eyes. Hazel eyes, she thought. Lighter than hers and Mama’s, anyway.

Jesse was gazing at her, pie forgotten. “I understand wanting to know where it is you come from. Reckon you wish there was more. But you have his letter. You have that much, at least.”

So much more than he had, from his parents.

“Yes.” She wondered if he realized what her father’s letter implied. Two days ago she’d asked Reverend Teague whether their marrying would be legal. Her blood was no longer at issue, though of little consequence now.

“There was something else in the box,” she said. “I don’t know how Mama managed to hide it.” A leather wallet had been hidden under a false bottom, which had sprung open as the box hit the floor. Pressed inside the wallet were more than twenty silver dollars. All whole. “I can repay the Teagues. I’d have done so at once had I known about the coins.”

Jesse’s mouth firmed. “Those coins are yours to keep.”

“I mean to pay my way. You weren’t expecting this … me.” Despite her protest, his face remained set. She couldn’t budge him to accept her money. “If not that, what can I do to be of help?”

Jesse glanced around. “What do you want to do?”

She followed his gaze, looking about the cabin. They had food in front of them. Nothing needed cleaning—Bethany had seen to that. There was no stock to tend save Jesse’s horse. “I haven’t much experience with cooking.”

She could have added to that washing, scrubbing, and sweeping. She’d rarely been allowed to do those things after her mama married Mr. Parrish. Surely an able-bodied woman could take care of two men and a cabin.

“But I’ll learn. For now, I suppose I should finish my gown. And then …” She bit her lip, unsure where best to begin her domestic education.

“Never mind
and then
.” Jesse took up his spoon as if he’d remembered the pie in front of him. “And never mind the gown—for the present. Pick up that spoon and eat. I insist,” he added with mock severity.

She complied. It really was good pie.

After they polished off the pie, Tamsen bent over her sewing until her neck ached, finishing the petticoat and making a start on a plain serviceable jacket. The main cabin was empty when she stepped from the room. Embers glowed in the hearth. Over them a pot of water steamed.

She went to the door.

Jesse was down at the stable, along with another man in leggings and a long blue shirt. He was as tall as Jesse, maybe a tad taller, with a tail of black hair falling below his hat. Though busy unloading packhorses, one with a cow hitched to it, both sensed her watching and glanced up toward the cabin. Jesse raised a hand, beckoning.

“I don’t aim to tell Tate about it,” Cade was saying as she came within hearing. “His share’s what it would’ve been had we got the whole cow to market, ’stead of just the hide. Tate don’t need to know.”

“He won’t hear it from me.” Jesse was unhitching the cow, a brown creature with gentle eyes and a full udder. Holding the lead, he turned to her. “Tamsen, this is Cade, my pa. ’Course, you saw him in Morganton.”

He didn’t explain her uncertain place there or that their neighbors thought she was his wife; Tamsen guessed he’d done so before she came down to them. She met Cade’s gaze and found herself riveted. His was a strong face, with a broad brow and eyes that were, surprisingly, near the same shade as Jesse’s, arresting in his darker face, arched over by brows as sweeping as crows’ wings. What the mind behind those striking features made of her, she couldn’t say.

Cade nodded, touching his hat, which had a hawk’s feather thrust through the brim. “I’ve news for you,” he said. “About your stepfather.”

Jesse watched her with eyes that asked a dozen silent questions. “We mainly put supplies in the loft. But put them wherever suits you, since you’ll be taking over the cooking.”

Tamsen caught the smile tucked into the corner of his mouth but pretended to survey the bundles and casks heaped near the loft ladder, as if she knew what to do with it all.

“Won’t Cade mind?”

Gone now to deliver the Allards’ supplies, Cade had assured her he’d seen no sign of Mr. Parrish in Sycamore Shoals. But somehow word that a piedmont merchant was roaming the French Broad River settlements, seeking his abducted stepdaughter, had reached as far as Jonesborough, where Cade had parted company with his settlers.

“What of my mother?” she’d asked, freshly stabbed with grief. “Who took care of her? Where has she been buried?” But Cade had had no answers to those questions. “Am I truly safe here?”

Cade had gripped her shoulder. “Listen. You are under the wing of this man who is a son to me.” He’d bent a nod to Jesse, one that spoke of confidence and deep affection. “And he is under the wing of the Almighty. Mine too. You are safe here.”

The intensity of his gaze was disconcerting, yet the words had reassured.

“Let’s put everything where you’re accustomed to keeping it,” she told Jesse now. “If it seems better to change things, I can do it later.”