Keturah Read online

  “Honestly, the way that child looks at us! ’Tis as if we were not English ladies but Guinevere and her maids, emerging from the fog,” Verity said.

  “And perhaps we are,” Keturah murmured. “For to his young mind, if Father ever spoke of us, we were but folklore, really. A made-up story of young ladies across the great sea. And now … here we are.” His half sisters. Did the child understand such things? Had his mother even told him who his father was?

  Both of her sisters were silent a moment. Keturah moved her horse across the field, aware that her sisters followed behind and Matthew waited her arrival. “How does it appear?” she asked when he was within earshot.

  “It appears well, Lady Ket,” he said, looking approvingly over the level plain of her father’s field. “If you can send us a meal and water come noontime, I think we can plant a good ten to twelve rows in this field today.”

  She nodded and scanned the field, finding heart in his words. It was perhaps fifteen acres in dimension. If they planted even twelve rows, that’d leave another two hundred to go. A month then to plant the whole thing, to say nothing of the two terraces below. “So,” she said, leaning over to stroke her mare’s neck, “we shall go to Charlestown tomorrow to purchase more slaves?”

  “We shall see, Lady Ket. We shall see. Slaves cost their owner a pretty penny, you see. The old ones—”

  “The old ones are our family’s responsibility,” Selah interrupted, pulling up alongside Keturah.

  “Yes, yes,” he said slowly, thoughtfully. “That’s right, Miss … ?”

  “Miss Selah,” Keturah supplied.

  “Miss Selah,” he said. “But new slaves add to the cost. I’m urging your sister here to be careful of the cost. We want to be wise in what we spend on labor in order to bring Tabletop the biggest profits.”

  “And your sister? Your nephew?” Ket asked tightly. “What do they cost us per day? And what of your own slaves?”

  “Less than labor you own, tha’s for certain, Lady Ket,” he replied. “Labor you own has its own expenses.” His dark eyes moved over to the three people he’d brought with him. “There are days that they pay for themselves; others when you must care for them, and they do not earn a ha’penny for their owner.”

  Keturah decided she liked his forthright manner, his gentle authority. “All right then, Mr. Rollins, let us see how things progress over the next few days.”

  “Very good, Lady Ket. Very good.” He put a hand to his lower back to stretch a mite. “And on the morrow, Sansa, Primus, Grace, and Cuffee could join us?”

  She stilled, shocked at his insinuation. “I think not, Mr. Rollins. We need a few to attend us. And Primus has been a house slave since he was little. He’d be of no use out here.”

  “Beggin’ your pardon, Lady Ket, but I can make use of most anyone out here. And given that time is short and the need for a profitable crop is great, would it not be wise to put everyone with two hands to work?”

  Ket’s eyes moved to Mitilda, who had paused, wrists crossed over the end of her hoe, and stared her way. How much did she know of her father’s financial woes? Had her father shared everything with the woman? And had she shared it with her brother? Or did he simply assume correctly about her needs?

  “Is there a soul on Tabletop land who isn’t counting on this crop?” Mr. Rollins asked gently.

  She bit her cheek and glanced at her sisters. “Very well, Mr. Rollins. I will speak to the remaining servants tonight. Given our circumstances, perhaps even we ladies must take regular turns in our fields.”

  That made his eyes go wide, and he hooted a laugh. “Oh, I did not mean you, Lady Ket. Or your sisters,” he said with a respectful nod to each. “But wouldn’ that set your neighbors’ tongues to waggin’? Hoo, boy!”

  But even as his laughter faded, Keturah began to ponder. Why should she not join them in the fields? Her fingers itched to do something useful, to dig into the soil, to compare it to England’s. She would not make her sisters do so, but would it not set a good example for Primus and Grace, who might feel themselves above such work? Was it not as Matthew said—vital for them all to be working for their common good, their future?

  Memories of the dismal ledgers back home in London, as well as the few gloomy journal entries from her father here that she’d forced herself to read, cascaded through her mind. Mr. Rollins had promised to tell her things as they truly were; he’d once been a slave and now owned slaves to work his own land. She had no choice but to trust him to give her wise counsel on that front. She’d been planning to spend a fair amount of her fortune on slaves, as an investment of Tabletop and her future profits. But might there be a wiser route? She’d seen enough to know that most other planters on the island with an estate her size—more than fifty acres—had two slaves per acre. Conventional wisdom told her she’d need a hundred.

  But was there a wiser way? Her father had nearly lost Tabletop over the two decades he ran this land. Yes, his endeavors to level out the two other fields had nearly bankrupted him. It had meant three years of but a portion of their normal harvest. But was there more to his financial woes than that? She’d seen the ramshackle buildings in Charlestown. The once-fine plantations, here and there, now falling into disrepair. Had those planters also made poor decisions—such as purchasing too many slaves—which would contribute to their own demise?

  ———

  That evening, as Grace and Sansa cooked and packed baskets for the field crew’s lunch the next day, Keturah found the courage to again enter her father’s study—so redolent with echoes of him all about her—and go to the leather-bound journal on his desk. She sat down and went back ten years, to before he had the madcap idea to terrace the fields. She wanted to know what he’d experienced then. His trials. His triumphs.

  There were long pages full of line items unique to the plantation but foreign to her English upbringing. Yet as her eyes ran over the numbers—captured in the meticulous double-entry method of bookkeeping—she slowly came to terms with the exorbitant expense of working this land. Her stomach clenched. She’d spent three years presiding over the household ledgers of Clymore Castle, but even running that old estate paled in comparison to running one here on Nevis. Importing almost every chicken, cow, hog, as well as every cask of flour, sugar, and salt from America added up to a staggering expense.

  She understood the pressures that prevailed. Sugar reigned. It was a far more valuable crop than corn or wheat. The returns on each sugar shipment were handsome indeed. But because they had to import all provisions in from the colonies, the Nevisians spent twenty times the amount that Londoners did for the same supplies. And what would happen if something kept Nevis from the imports of America? What would happen if they could not regularly receive livestock, flour, salt, and more?

  Worse, what if we could not receive tea from the Orient?

  She smiled at her own internal jest. But at last she understood it, staring at the ledgers that so clearly showed both profits and expenses. The draw that had kept her father here. It was a mad gamble, this island life. The idea that she could pay these sorts of expenses and yet make this land pay for itself in spades … Or be utterly decimated by the forces of either nature or market. But if she could somehow reduce expenses and bring in a new sugar crop—the best ever—would that not have made her father proud? It made her heart quicken as she strode to the window, the same window her father had stood near, and looked out.

  Keturah wondered what he had thought and felt while standing here. She ran her fingers over the sill, knowing his hands had rested there too once. She longed for the opportunity to sit and talk with him. Indeed, the last time she’d seen him, she’d been all of nineteen, her mother dead and buried a good year by then. Father had spoken of love, of duty, and she’d absorbed that fully. “And your mother always thought Lord Tomlinson a charming man,” he’d said. “She’d be proud of you, becoming a lady. As am I, Ket.”

  It was those words she focused on most as she walked down t
he aisle at St. John’s that fateful morn and moved from her father’s arm to Edward’s.

  Passed along like chattel. Controlled as if she had not a mind nor will of her own. Until now, she thought, looking out over Tabletop. Now it is all up to me.

  And in that moment she did not know if that was the worst or greatest thing to ever occur to her.

  Gray’s words came back to her. “All God asks of us is to do our best, from morning until night. He doesn’t expect us to do things that only He can accomplish—only what we’ve been given to do and to trust Him with the rest.”

  It’d been enough, this day. She’d done what God asked of her. And now she would rest.

  By the time her sisters found her the next morning, Keturah had emptied half of her father’s chests of clothes on the floor.

  “What,” Verity said, moving between the piles, “are you doing?”

  “Finding proper clothing,” Keturah said, straightening and tightening the sash around her breeches to hold them up. It was fortunate that her father had been a slender man, but they still were big on her.

  Verity’s eyebrows rose as she looked her over. “Are you completely mad?”

  Ket smiled. “I do not think so. But I can well imagine that you think it true.” She stepped forward, lifted a pile of shirts from yet another trunk, and sifted through them. Finding a good option, she pulled it from the stack and set the others aside. “We need to offer these to the house servants or field slaves. They’re not doing Father any good.”

  Both of her sisters gaped at her. “Ket,” Selah began quietly, “are you aware that you are in nothing but breeches and stays?”

  “And stockings,” Ket said, turning this way and that before the tall mirror she’d brought with her on the Restoration, never imagining she’d see herself dressed in this manner. “I believe I need a shirt, do you not agree?” She turned left and right to examine her imperfect wavy image. “Although the stays alone would be ever so much cooler.”

  Her sisters continued to gape, only pausing to glance at each other. Keturah edged past Verity and dug through another trunk of Father’s that appeared to hold older shirts. She lifted one up and hesitated, wondering if she remembered it on him when she was but a child. She pulled it close, inhaling deeply, hoping she could still smell him somewhere within the folds, but it was no use. All that remained was dust and mold. Blinking rapidly, before her sisters could detect her tears, she pulled it around her body, laced up the front, then rummaged around for a belt. Finding one, she wound it around her waist and fastened it. Hands on hips, she faced her sisters.

  “And … you are dressing for a costume ball?” Verity asked, arms crossed.

  “I am going to work,” Keturah said.

  Both of them stared at her, not comprehending.

  “I want this plantation to succeed,” she went on. “A vital part of it succeeding is getting cane in the ground as soon as possible. I have wasted precious days waiting for an overseer, waiting for help. Now we have him.” She shrugged. “And I can be a part of the solution by digging in that soil myself. Cutting cane. Fertilizing, watering it. Do you not see?”

  She moved to her sisters, her excitement brimming over, making her hands tremble. “I am done waiting on others. Becoming a victim of another’s choice. This is mine.”

  Verity continued to stare, her mossy-green gaze hard and concerned.

  Selah only looked wan and frightened, rubbing her small hands together in agitation.

  “Do you not see?” Keturah repeated with a grin. “I am finished waiting. For the right man. For the right help. I want to do what I can with the two hands God gave me,” she said, furiously rolling up one of her father’s sleeves and then the other. “I want to dig in the soil we call ours by making it ours. By working it, planting it, growing our crop. I do not wish for this to be Mr. Rollins’s crop. I wish for it to be ours.”

  She looked from one to the other, desperate for them to make the leap that she had. To understand the import of this. But with each passing breath, she knew she wanted more of them than they were capable of giving her. She knew what she did because of what she had experienced, because of what Edward had been, and what he had not.

  “It is all right, dear ones. Do not be alarmed. Stay here and continue with your efforts with the house. I shall return come sunset.”

  She practically fled the room and hurried down the stairs. Primus and Grace, obedient as ever, had changed into their least fine and stood in the front hall, looking upon her just as her sisters had.

  As if she were three steps shy of the madhouse.

  Or—and this shook her to the core—as if she were herself, truly who she was meant to be … as Keturah Elizabeth Banning Tomlinson, for the first time in her entire life.

  Not posturing for society.

  Or her husband.

  Or her family.

  Only Keturah … all she was and could be in the moment. Utterly herself.

  For a moment, she hovered there, halfway down the rickety stairwell, and she was glad for every bit of it. No matter if she succeeded or failed at Tabletop, she would praise the Almighty for bringing her here to this place. To remember—or discover at last—just who she was, deep within. To think for the first time, I am enough. Just as I am. Because God has made me so.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Philip had been working with the Teller’s Landing slaves on the far side of the fields, closest to Tabletop, while Gray worked on a stubbornly rusted-shut irrigation sluice. He’d been at it all day and was about to give up and create an entirely new channel when he saw Philip riding hard toward him.

  Warily he rose, then glanced around for his own new horse, a chestnut mare named Mariah, happily munching away on the greenery of the jungle. Philip pulled up and looked down at Gray. “’Tis Lady Ket,” he panted, brows furrowed in concern. “Angus Shubert and his men are there, and they appear to be arguing with her.”

  Gray’s eyes narrowed. Hidden among the narrow strip of jungle that separated their two properties on the ridge, he’d taken to looking over each evening to see how she fared. For weeks now he’d been fretting, covertly observing them make progress on refurbishing the mill and repairs about the house, but no planting in the fields. Then yesterday his heart had leapt, seeing them below, planting at last. At long last …

  Until he noted whom Ket had finally found as an overseer.

  A Negro.

  And if Angus Shubert was taking issue …

  He ran to his mare, swung up into the saddle, and gestured for Philip to follow him. The overseer of Red Rock was a brawler. He’d seen him pick a fight in a Charlestown tavern, and he’d seen how he eyed Selah that first day in town like he might a tavern wench rather than a gentlewoman. While he’d patiently done his best to wait for Keturah to call on him for aid, he would not wait through this.

  He had a pistol in the saddlebag, as well as a sword, taking stock as he rode. And he’d taken to tucking a dagger in his boot, ever since Captain McKintrick urged the Banning women to do the same. Still, he managed to rein himself—and his horse—in a bit as he reached the ridge. The best way to intervene was through the art of subtlety, resorting to physical force only if required. It was the way of gentlemen. The way he’d been bred from boyhood.

  But as he eased over the ridge and rode down toward Tabletop and her highest field, where Keturah gathered with the slaves to face Shubert and two others from Red Rock Plantation, he knew how little he resembled a gentleman. He ran a hand through his hair to try to slick it into some sort of proper order. Not that Shubert was a gentleman himself. Why did he bother? For Shubert, or for Ket?

  As he neared them, he discovered that Keturah was not in a brown day dress as he had expected. Nor were Selah and Verity, whom he had not recognized as present at all given their field hats and … men’s clothes? His stomach twisted. Of all things …

  All three of the Banning sisters were in breeches, stockings, and shirts, covered with mud to their elbows an
d knees! He did his best to swallow his surprise as he came near, hearing Keturah’s voice rising in anger and seeing her hand rise, index finger pointing Angus Shubert away.

  “Go home, Mr. Shubert,” he heard her say. “This is no concern of yours.”

  “Well now, Lady Tomlinson,” the man sneered, ignoring Gray’s arrival, “I believe it is my concern, with you here hiring a Negro to run your land, land that borders our own.”

  “A Negro, sir, with manumission papers,” the tall, bare-chested man at her side quietly corrected him.

  Shubert caught sight of Gray then, with Philip right behind him. “Go on home, Mr. Covington,” he said in his Carolina drawl. “This here conversation is between my neighbor and me. It doesn’t involve you.”

  Keturah turned, her pretty mouth gaping open in surprise. He saw her run her hands down her shirt and then glance down, as if she’d forgotten what she wore. She blushed—out of embarrassment? Or was it anger that he was here uninvited? Mouth clamping shut, she turned back to Shubert.

  Gray bit his cheek, forcing himself to stay in the saddle and appear relaxed. He looped the reins around the saddle horn and crossed his wrists atop it, listening, ignoring Shubert’s demand that he leave. He wasn’t going anywhere, not unless Keturah asked him to do so.

  “This … man,” Shubert said, looking at Keturah’s companion with distaste, “is not allowed to work for you.”

  “Why not? He is a freed man with papers. He has every right to work for whomever he pleases.”

  “Listen to me,” Shubert went on in rising agitation, as if speaking to a wayward child rather than his superior, “we simply do not do such things here.”

  She drew herself upward. “Well, it is the way it shall be done here on Tabletop. Because I choose to do it this way, and I am mistress of these fifty acres, not you.”

  He lifted his square stubble-covered chin and considered her. When he let his eyes drift down her body, slowly, then flick over toward Selah, Gray had had enough. He swung down from his saddle and strode over to Keturah, intent on demanding Shubert face him like a man. But as he reached her, Keturah raised a hand, stopping his progress. “No, Gray. Allow me to do this,” she whispered. She turned back to her neighbor. “Be on your way, Mr. Shubert. You have said your piece.”