Serpents in the Garden (36 page)

Luke frowned. As far as he knew, he had never laid eyes on this man before, but from the way the captain was staring at him, it would seem the captain had the advantage of knowing exactly who he was.

“This is Captain Miles,” Jacob introduced, “long since a friend of the family.”

“Aye,” Captain Miles said, “ever since I had the pleasure of helping Mrs Graham on her voyage to find and reclaim her abducted husband.”

“Ah.” Luke didn’t extend his hand, but kept them as clasped behind his back as the captain kept his own.

“Terrible,” Captain Miles went on. “An innocent man be carried off as an indentured servant.”

“Hmm,” Luke mumbled. It was Margaret’s fault that particular scheme to permanently rid this world of brother Matthew had failed. It had taken years for him to forgive Margaret for helping Alex finance her rescue mission. Even now, twenty years later and with a nephew before him he would never have known had it not been for the success of that expedition, a nasty coil of resentment shifted inside of him. It was best if they never met again, his brother and him, he reflected. Too much anger, far too much. And yet…Luke looked at his nephew and hoped that Matthew would understand that what he had done for Jacob, he had really done for him – his lost brother.

“I already know all that,” Jacob said, bringing Luke tumbling back to the present.

“You do?” Luke said.

Jacob hitched his shoulders. “They don’t talk about it, not much, but enough that we all know how our dastardly uncle had Da clobbered over his head and carried off to slavery.”

Luke squirmed, making Captain Miles grin.

“And still you wanted to meet me?” Luke asked, ruefully recognising that he wanted this young man to like him, even love him.

Jacob regarded him out of eyes that were uncomfortably like Matthew’s. “As I said, it wouldn’t be polite not to.” With that, he swept Luke into a long embrace, and Luke wrapped his arms around him and held him hard, so very hard.

Chapter 40

“Oh, for God’s sake, Ian, what do you expect?” Alex glared at him. “Seriously, you’re the worst patient I’ve ever had.”

“Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” Mrs Parson said, shoving Alex out of the way to inspect the healing wound.

Ian had been unconscious when they brought him in, and that was, in retrospect, a blessing. It had taken hours to clean out his gaping side wound, and then they’d had to open it again a few days later, pus spurting out of an abscess the size of an egg. But now the wound had closed, with Ian complaining more about the itch than the pain.

Mrs Parson prodded at the pink scar tissue and straightened up. “You stay in bed, at least the week out.”

Ian groaned, but subsided against his pillows.

“I don’t think I’d want to live if I can’t move,” Ian confided to Matthew one evening. He shifted his legs, a spasm of relief flying across his face at the verification that they seemed to be working.

“Mmm,” Matthew replied, moving his stool so that he sat very close to Ian. At Alex’s insistence, Ian was in the big house. At Ian’s insistence, he was in the parlour so that he could see his family going by.

Ian craned his neck to look at the overcast sky. “Raining?” he asked.

“Not yet, but it will – soon enough.” Not too much, Matthew hoped, not this close to harvest. He studied his son for a while, and took a big breath. Alex insisted he had to be told, now. “You’ll find it difficult to move at first.” Constant pain, Mrs Parson had predicted after seeing Ian’s lacerated back. Strong experienced fingers had dug their way along his spinal knobs, the crease between her brows growing deeper and deeper the closer to the pelvic area she got.

“I imagine so,” Ian said. “After four weeks flat on my back, I don’t think my legs will easily recall how to walk.”

“It may be that you’ll never walk as you once did.” Matthew’s heart shrank to the size of a walnut at the expression on Ian’s face.

“How do you mean?”

Matthew clasped Ian’s hand. “The damage to the back is severe, Ian.”

His son closed his eyes and turned his face away.

*

“He says he’ll never walk again,” Betty said to Alex. “That’s not what you told me.”

Alex sighed from the other side of the raspberry canes. “Honestly, I don’t know. None of us knows. I think he’ll walk. After all, he can move his legs and feet, but I also think he’ll find it painful at times.” As far as they could ascertain, two of his vertebrae had been damaged, and Alex suspected such injuries never fully healed – at least not on their own.

“No full days on the fields,” Betty said.

“No, probably not.” Alex switched baskets, filling the next one with blurring speed. “Swimming might be a good start.”

“Swimming?” Betty poked her head through the canes. “Why would that be useful?”

“Because you float, and there’s no weight to press down on the spine as you move.” She gave her daughter-in-law a thoughtful look. “Let’s try, this afternoon.”

Minister Allerton said he thought swimming was an excellent idea. When Betty had received news of Ian’s injury, the minister had offered to accompany her and Ruth home. Once at Graham’s Garden, he had been invited to stay and done so, an interested and supportive observer of everything Alex and Mrs Parson did. He bombarded them with questions, clearly very impressed by how clean everything was kept – knife blades held in fire and dropped into boiling water, bandages boiled and dried before they were used. Even if Alex was at times tempted to stuff his mouth, mostly she enjoyed his company and unfailing optimism.

“I can help carry him.” He was still in his prime, the minister told her, not yet thirty-five. He flexed his arms and straightened up to his middling height.

“I think he’ll prefer to walk,” Alex said.

“Walk?” Mrs Parson said. “That’s a fair bit, Alex.”

“I don’t propose that he walk all the way down there today, but he must make a start.”

“There are moments when I’m right grateful you’re not my real mother, and this is one of them,” Ian hissed through gritted teeth. He was covered in sweat, his legs trembling after having crossed the yard on his own two feet, with Betty propping up one side and Alex the other.

“Bullshit.” Alex grinned, helping him to sit on the stool that David was carrying for them. Bad idea: he whitened with pain. “Lie down instead.” She spread her shawl for him in the grass. “On your front.” She pulled his shirt out of his breeches before tugging them down to bare his buttocks.

“Mama!”

Alex ignored him and beckoned Betty over.

“Oil,” she said. “That, and warm hands.”

She showed Betty how to massage the rigid small muscles along his spine, how to work her way down to the gluteus. Under their hands, Ian at first relaxed; then began to fidget in a way that made Alex smile.

“Everything else on him is in working order,” she said to Betty before getting off her knees. She winked and motioned for David to come with her and leave them alone. “Call me when you need us, okay?”

“Witch,” Ian murmured from where he had his head pillowed on his arms. “She planned this, didn’t she?”

Betty looked about and had to laugh. Alex definitely had, ensuring Ian had made it all the way to her primitive bower, a mass of mock oranges and rose brambles left to grow as wild as they wished, but very secluded. Betty kept her hands on Ian’s sun-warmed back, moving them in a way that made Ian groan. Clumsily, he rolled over to look at her.

“Everything else is in working order,” he mimicked with a smile. “I don’t want to know how she knows that.”

“But it is.” Betty closed her hand round his cock.

“Aye,” he said, and his eyes widened at what she was doing to him.

“Betty,” he moaned, and his fingers twisted into her hair.

*

“See?” Alex said, watching Ian bob up and down by the river shore. “Just what he needs.”

Matthew snorted from where he stood beside her. “There are other things he needs more.”

“And he has had them as well.”

Ian had looked blissfully content when Betty had called for them, had even allowed Matthew and the minister to carry him down to the river for his bath and swim.

“He
is
nice,” Alex said, nodding in the direction of the minister, who stood close to the water’s edge shouting encouragements to Ian.

“You shouldn’t sound so surprised,” Matthew chided. “Are you implying most ministers are not?”

“Prigs, most of them, inflated, bigoted, and surprisingly ignorant.”

“Alex!”

“Richard Campbell, need I say more?”

“Hmm,” Matthew replied, his cheeks shading into an uncharacteristic pink. Well, they should – after all he’d sided with that obnoxious minister against her.

*

It was a bright-eyed Ian who joined them for supper that evening, even if he had to excuse himself halfway through.

“You okay?” Alex asked, half rising from the table.

“Aye.” Ian motioned for her to sit down. “I just need to lie down.” Slowly, he made his way from the kitchen, the cane thumping against the floorboards.

All the same, Alex hurried through her meal, delegated the cleaning up to the girls, and went to find Ian. He was lying very still, his jaw clenched, and it took Alex some time to work through his back. Once she was done, she helped him into a clean shirt and busied herself plumping up his pillows, smoothing down quilts and sheets. Ian was nearly asleep when she kissed him on the brow and tiptoed for the door.

“Mama?”

Alex stopped at the door to look back at Ian, a dark blob against his pillow.

“Yes?”

“I move back to my cabin tomorrow,” he said in a voice that left no room for discussion. “Betty will manage.”

“Oh, I’m sure she will.” Alex made to turn away, but his voice stopped her yet again.

“Mama?”

“Mmm?”

“Thank you.” It came out very gravelly.

“You’re welcome, son.”

*

For a man who had never before spent more than his nights in bed, the sudden immobility was a chafing fetter. Ian woke and began the automatic roll out of bed, only to be painfully reminded of the fact that any movements now had to be considered and planned. The wall opposite his bed became dented as he vented his frustration by throwing whatever he had at hand to fly unerringly across the room.

“At least both your aim and your arm are good,” Betty said when he crashed yet another earthenware mug. “But maybe you could throw something that doesn’t break?” He glared at her, but when she used a piece of coal to draw what he thought was a cow, but she sulkily informed him was a catamount on the wall for him to aim at, his lips twitched into a smile.

He tired easily. The walk across the yard to the stable was enough that he had to catch his breath, but once there, among the animals, he was comforted, because these were things he still could do, even if it all took much longer than it used to. Pain became his constant companion: at times, a dull, throbbing ache; at other, short, sharp twinges that had him doubling over. But he refused to let the pain rule him, and so he curried, he milked, he shooed the beasts out to graze once he was done, he fed the piglets and the sow, and spent hours verbalising his frustration to the pigs. The sow twitched her ears now and then, occasionally stuck an inquiring snout into his crotch or nibbled at his wooden cane, but Ian was sure she understood.

It was hell at times. Ian swore and cursed; he cried when no one saw, hating this body of his for no longer moving as fluidly as it once had done. He did the strange exercises Mama had set him, lying on his front while he lifted arms and legs, ignoring the warning twinges when he overdid it. Stubbornly, he extended his walks, waving away offers of help, and there were days when Betty would have to go out to look for him and find him half lying, half sitting, incapable of moving as much as a toe.

He resented them all sometimes: from Da, who so casually bent to swing Maggie up to sit on his hip, to Mark, a carbon copy of himself as he used to be, agile and strong. But it was getting better, and the day he struggled all the way to the river by himself, Ian whooped with joy. For a long time, he stayed in the water, swimming lazily back and forth and relishing the fact that it didn’t hurt – not at first. Afterwards, he barely made it out, and when Betty found him, he was shivering with cold in the grass, unable to crawl to where he had left his clothes.

“Don’t overdo it,” Mama warned one afternoon, coming to sit beside him under the oak.

“I have to. I must be back on my feet.” He nodded his head at the ripe fields. “The harvest is in full swing.”

“And you’ll not take part,” Alex said, “not this year.” She helped him to stand and handed him the cane. “You have many years before you. Either you recognise your limitations and live a good life within them, or you ignore them and push yourself so hard you permanently damage yourself.”

“I’m already a cripple,” he said bitterly.

“Ian…” Mama took a firm grip of his arm. “You’ve been up and about three weeks, no more. And look at you: you stand, you walk, you can sit, have sex with your wife.”

Ian was somewhat flustered, but nodded a grudging agreement.

“This’ll take a long time to mend,” she continued, “and it will never mend entirely, but it will get better – much better. Will you ever be able to work four weeks in a row from dawn to twilight harvesting? Probably not. Will you be able to work at all? Probably yes.”

“Probably yes,” he reminded himself later that evening. “Probably yes, probably yes.”

“Yes what?” Betty yawned beside him.

“Nothing,” he replied. “Don’t mind me, love. I was just thinking aloud.” He rolled over on his front, shoving the pillow out of the way. “Will you please?” He fell asleep under her hands, a cloud of peppermint scent around them both.

*

It had been a strange homecoming for Daniel: none of the happy loud welcome of last year, even if Mama hugged him until he thought his bones would break. And then there was Ian, a pale, strained version of the brother he remembered, and Da, who looked haunted.

On top of this, Daniel was very confused to find Minister Allerton at Graham’s Garden, and even more when the minister stated his intention to stay and help through the harvest now that the eldest Graham son was injured.

“But you’re not a farming man!” Daniel blurted. The Allertons he had met were merchants, and the minister’s brother was a prominent man in the Boston community.

“We all are to begin with,” Minister Allerton said cheerily. “
When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman
, as John Ball said.”

“For which he was hung, drawn and quartered,” Mama pointed out.

“Yes, unfortunately.” Minister Allerton looked grave. “But then, very many men have met with a similar fate for similar reasons. Besides, he was right: all men are born equal in the eyes of Our Lord. It’s the life he leads that should distinguish a man, not his ancestors.”

“I totally agree,” Mama said, “which is why I have major issues with all this predestination stuff.”

“Stuff?” Minister Allerton raised a brow.

Daniel shifted from foot to foot, throwing a pleading glance at his da. Could he please nip this discussion in the bud?

“All that blather about how some men – and a smattering of women, I suppose – are offered grace depending on God’s whim, not their actions, while the rest sink into perdition…” Mama shook her head. “Strikes me as a most unjust God.”

“God is unjust,” Minister Allerton said, “at least from a narrow human perspective. We can never attempt to comprehend his infinite mercy and wisdom – which is why we must assume he knows best. As is stated in the Holy Writ:
Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not unto thine own understanding.
”

“Huh,” Mama snorted, “then what’s the point? If already at birth it’s predestined whether you will go to heaven or hell, why bother?”

“Firstly, because you never know to whom God will extend grace,” the minister said, “and secondly because even if God has chosen you as one of the saved, you must prove yourself worthy.”

Mama mulled this over for some time. “No, sorry. I still can’t accept it. That means that your actions can only count against you, never for you, so once damned, always damned, no matter how saintly a life you lead.” She stood to fetch the pies from the pantry, and Daniel took the opportunity to steer the conversation elsewhere.