The Seeker (10 page)

Charlotte’s face lost all pretense of a smile. “No. The Shakers don’t believe in marriage.”

“I thought that was the case.” From the smug look on Selena’s face, it was obvious she had known that all along but had merely been baiting Charlotte. “Then, my dear, don’t you think it is time to look in a new direction? Find a new plan for your future? I’m sure your father shared with you the opportunity of going east for a while. That would save you the embarrassment of being the subject of many whispered conversations at all the spring gatherings.”

“Grayson is my home,” Charlotte said.

“Of course it is. I certainly don’t mean to imply any differently.” Selena’s voice was honey-coated but underneath was steel. “But you do have to realize it is no longer your home only. Your father has a new family now. I’m sure he’s told you about his plans for Landon.”

“Plans? It was my understanding he’d not yet met the child.”

“That’s true, but I’ve naturally enough shared a great deal about Landon, and your father has generously offered to adopt him. He says my son is his son. Just as his daughter is my daughter. And of course we have hopes of having a child of our own.” Selena smoothed her hands down over her midsection and raised her eyebrows knowingly at the girl.

Two bright red spots burned in Charlotte’s cheeks as she looked down at the floor and spoke barely above a whisper. “Of course.”

Selena let out a short burst of unladylike laughter at Charlotte’s evident discomfort. Adam was sorry he hadn’t left the room earlier in spite of the woman’s orders to the contrary. He could have simply walked out. He wasn’t her slave. It was painful watching the calculating woman attempting to dismantle the world of the girl in front of her. A few days ago the girl had been the senator’s beloved daughter with all of Grayson at her feet. Now all she could claim as her own was the box of jewelry clutched so tightly against her side the wooden corners had to be digging into her ribs. Ribs that were obviously free of the type of tortuous corset Selena had immodestly mentioned earlier.

Charlotte had no need of the slimming stays. She had no need of any beauty enhancements. In her everyday blue flowered dress flowing about her legs without multiple petticoats and her red hair falling free down on her shoulders, she easily outshined the polished woman he was painting. Even with no hint of a smile on her face.

He suddenly wanted to cross the room and put his arm around her. To protect her from the hard truths of life. He wanted to see her smiling, embracing life. Embracing him. The thought pulled him up short. He couldn’t let himself get carried away by a pretty face. He didn’t need those sorts of complications in his life. What he needed to do was paint faster and get away from this house. He needed to be back searching out the scenes to capture the truth of the country’s current upheaval. He needed no upheaval in his own life. Especially not the kind a girl like Charlotte Vance could bring him.

When the girl mumbled some words of thanks for the box and almost ran out of the room, he told himself that was good. With her out of sight, he could concentrate on finishing the loathsome portrait and be gone from the senator’s house. He was no knight in shining armor ready to rescue every damsel in distress he met. Especially not when the dragon in question was only the damsel’s stepmother. It wasn’t as if her life was in danger. Merely her immediate happiness.

9

Selena was right. Most of the tangled pile of necklaces and brooches were old and tarnished and of little value other than to Charlotte’s heart. She remembered playing with some of them when she was a child. She fished out an emerald ring and a strand of pearls that had belonged to her Grandmother Grayson and held each of them for a long moment as if testing their weight and value.

Then she carefully freed a locket on a fine gold chain from the other strands of jewelry in the box. Inside was a wisp of baby hair clipped from her baby brother’s head before he was laid in his tiny casket. Her mother had never taken the locket off after that day. Charlotte thought her mother had worn it to her grave, but now here it was tossed aside in a box and forgotten. Charlotte shut the locket and held it tightly in her palm.

Be strong. Miss Mayda would want you to be strong.
Aunt Tish’s words echoed in Charlotte’s mind. And that had been easy for Charlotte to do in spite of her mother’s sudden death, because everybody had helped her. Everybody knew Grayson would be hers. In time. Even if she had thought about her father remarrying, she would have never considered Grayson passing to someone who didn’t carry Grayson blood. Her whole life centered around that belief.

But now she’d been betrayed. By her own father. They were going to ship her off to Virginia and do what they willed with Grayson and their people. No, not what they willed. What Selena willed.

She couldn’t let it happen. But what could she do? She had sent the letter to Edwin demanding to know his intentions. Willis had carried it to Hastings manor house at noon. She had to know. She couldn’t just hide in the shadows and hope without knowledge. If Edwin stayed true to their agreement, then she could wait out Selena. The flattery of the woman’s attention had obviously blinded her father, but his eyes would clear and he would see through the woman’s pretense in time.

Meanwhile. That was the problem. Charlotte had never been one to sit on the side and simply let things happen. Not the way her mother had. Charlotte made things happen. But now nothing was working. She closed her eyes and held the locket against her cheek. Perhaps she should pray about it. Ask the Lord to make things come out right, but that hadn’t worked for her baby brother. His life had ended on the day of his birth. It hadn’t worked for Aunt Tish. Her husband had been sold down the river.

Charlotte had no doubt Aunt Tish prayed then. Aunt Tish believed in prayer. She had taught Mellie and Charlotte to pray over their food as soon as they could sit at the table. She had prayed over Charlotte’s mother. She probably covered Charlotte with prayers every morning now. But that didn’t mean things were going to turn out right. Aunt Tish told her once that a person couldn’t expect God to hand out favors on a silver tray.

“Then why pray if you don’t think the Lord is going to answer?” Charlotte had asked.

“I never said the good Lord don’t answer. He always answers. That don’t mean his answers is gonna match up with the answers you think you’re wantin’. But the one thing a child of his can count on is that, no matter the answer, the Lord is right there with you. Walkin’ through them valleys right along ’side you. Liftin’ you up when you fall. Helpin’ you bear up under the trials.” Aunt Tish had put her work-roughened hand on Charlotte’s cheek. “And we all, ever’ last one of us, has trials and tribulations.”

“But is that any reason to collect them like charms and gather them close and moan over them without trying to do something about them?” Charlotte said.

“No, I guess not, child. You ain’t much a one for moanin’.” Aunt Tish had smiled at her as she patted her cheek. “The good Lord done give you a fightin’ spirit and the freedom to use it.”

A fighting spirit. That’s what she needed now. Charlotte opened her eyes and stood up. There was a time for praying and a time for doing. This was the time for doing. Edwin had her letter. She had her mother’s jewelry. And Mellie’s path to freedom. She slipped her hand in her pocket and felt the paper. She hadn’t given up. It might have seemed that she had lost the battle in the parlor. She was sure Adam Wade thought so. She’d felt him looking at her with pity. But she didn’t need pity. Pity or prayers. There’d be a way. She just had to find it.

She’d make her father see that Grayson was meant to be hers. The same as he had realized Mellie was hers. Of course, if he had known her plans to free Mellie, she doubted he’d have given her the paper. He claimed freed slaves did nothing but foment trouble and unrest if not made to leave the state. That was why he’d supported the Kentucky Colonization Society that up until a couple of years before had worked to buy passage back to Africa for emancipated slaves.

Mellie wouldn’t want to go to Africa. Her home was here at Grayson the same as Charlotte’s. That shouldn’t mean she couldn’t be free to decide her own fate. Free to fall in love as she wanted. Actually Charlotte was beginning to suspect it wasn’t only a dream of falling in love for Mellie. She’d been volunteering to carry the leftover food from their dinner to the slave quarters nearly every night before Selena began to demand so much from her. And hadn’t Charlotte caught a worried look in Aunt Tish’s eyes more than once when she looked at Mellie?

One thing at a time. She had the paper. She’d figure out the rest eventually. First there was the locket warm in her hand. Charlotte pulled the top off a nearly empty powder tin and dropped the locket down inside. It should have been buried with her mother. She would rectify that first thing in the morning.

She slipped the emerald ring on her finger. She’d never seen her mother wear it. It would have been too large for her mother’s dainty fingers. She had favored an opal ring in a ruby setting. Charlotte searched through the jumble of jewelry. That ring wasn’t in the box. So perhaps she had worn it to the grave.

Charlotte stuffed the box of jewelry up on the top shelf of her wardrobe. She started to hide Mellie’s paper under the box, but changed her mind. It was too important to let out of her sight.

When Mellie came in a few minutes later to help her dress for dinner, Charlotte slipped the paper out of her pocket and down into the top of her camisole when Mellie had her back turned. She couldn’t show it to her yet. Not until she had a plan, and before Charlotte could make a plan, she had to know her future with Edwin.

If she didn’t get an answer from him by noon tomorrow, she would ride over to Hastings Farm. She’d make him state his intentions. But tonight she would go down to the dining room and listen to Selena’s false chatter at the table. She would pretend there wasn’t a battle drawn up between them. Just as many in the North and South were pretending the same thing. It was better to keep the illusion of peace as long as possible.

Even as they ate their dinner that night with a pretense of good humor and fine manners, the illusion of peace for the country had already been shot down at Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

A messenger brought the news the next morning. Charlotte didn’t see the messenger ride up. After breakfast she had stopped in the kitchen and hid a heavy stirring spoon in the folds of her skirt before going out the back door to the family cemetery. She didn’t want help from anyone for the job at hand.

The ground was soft from a late afternoon shower the day before, and she had no trouble cutting out a circle of the greening grass and scooping out a hole at the base of her mother’s stone. She pushed the metal powder box down into the hole and tamped the dirt back in around it before carefully replacing the bit of grass sod. When she stood up and looked down, the disturbed ground was barely noticeable.

Charlotte ran her hands over the carved letters in the stone. MAYDA GRAYSON VANCE. BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER. AUG 5 1816–MAY 24 1857. Her baby brother’s small tombstone was beside her mother’s. In behind were the stones for her grandparents and her mother’s sisters, Alice and Emma, taken by cholera in 1833. Another stone that towered higher even than her grandparents’ stone bore the name of their one son, Richard Grayson III, in deeply chiseled granite letters. He had gone west to seek adventure and broken his parents’ hearts by getting killed in an Indian skirmish. His body wasn’t actually under the stone but was instead in an unmarked grave somewhere on the prairie.

Charlotte thought how different her life might have been if her uncle Richard had lived to come home and marry. His family would be living in the Grayson manor house. His son the descendant to carry on the Grayson name and tradition. But there were no Grayson sons. No sons at all. Up until now.

She raised her head to look out between the tall oaks that shaded the graveyard. Grayson land stretched as far as she could see in every direction. Good land. Her land. She could almost feel the roots attaching her feet to the ground as strongly as the roots holding the towering oaks around her. It would take a mighty storm to break her free.

She was so immersed in her thoughts that she didn’t notice the artist walking up behind her until he spoke.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said.

She whirled to face him.

“I must beg your forgiveness once again, my lady,” he said with a smile as he stopped a couple of paces away from her. “I really didn’t intend to startle you. This time. I should have whistled a tune or something to warn you I was coming.”

“Can you whistle a tune?” Charlotte asked to give herself time to recover her poise. She hid her hands in her skirt so he wouldn’t see the dirt under her fingernails.

“Of course,” he said and began whistling “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

She couldn’t keep from laughing even as she wondered if such joviality was proper in a graveyard. “You are a man of many talents, Mr. Wade.”