The Seeker (30 page)

“Do not be so quick to find fault with her plan, Sister Martha,” Sister Altha said without looking over at the older sister. Instead she was smiling slightly at Charlotte. “We do not talk of bondage here. We speak only of commitment. Do we not each commit to working with our hands for the good of all? It would not be right of us to deny our sister the blessing of giving the gift of self for such an honorable reason. To do so might hinder the growth of her spirit.”

“Your thinking is faulty, my sister,” Sister Martha warned.

Charlotte put her hand on Sister Martha’s arm. “Please, Sister Martha, let Sister Altha approach the Ministry with my request.”

“It is not right,” Sister Martha insisted.

“Yea, it is. Many years ago I promised Aunt Tish her freedom if ever I had the means to provide it. I beg you not to deny me this means.” What was one short year of her life to live in bondage to a promise when Aunt Tish had lived so many years in bondage to chains?

“It is not a decision for me to make,” Sister Martha said with a little sigh. “The Ministry will so decide. In the past they have chosen to purchase the freedom of some—not for the guarantee of a return but only out of kindness.”

“You speak truth. And because of Sister Charlotte’s willingness to bend her spirit, I will speak in favor of the kindness of rescuing this poor woman from the evils of slavery.” Sister Altha almost smiled as she looked at Charlotte. “You will need to fetch the necklace,” she said as if the decision had already been made by the Ministry. She reached for the money in the overseer’s hand. “What price has been set on this woman of whom we speak?”

Perkins surrendered the money willingly. “Eight hundred. She is an excellent cook and knows many domestic skills, but her age has lowered her price.”

“Very well. Come with me and if the Ministry allows this purchase as I feel certain they will, we will arrange the funds while our sister fetches the necklace of which she speaks.” Sister Altha was all business now.

Brother Willard, who was almost as old as Sister Martha, drove Charlotte and the old sister to Grayson that afternoon. At Charlotte’s request, he pulled the Shakers’ wagon in among some trees a little way from the house where they would be hidden from easy view. Charlotte had no wish to see Selena or for Selena to see her.

Of course Selena might not even be at Grayson. She might have gone to a summer home somewhere in the north. Or to Frankfort to be with Charlotte’s father. That would give her the chance to attend all the fancy events that were held in the capital. Charlotte wondered if Selena was planning entertainments at Grayson. Perhaps not, since so many in the county were pro-Secessionist while Charlotte’s father would be maintaining his unyielding support of the Union even as he roundly condemned the President’s talk of abolishing slavery.

If she was at Grayson, Charlotte hoped Selena would be taking her afternoon rest on the front veranda, as was the usual custom for ladies in the summer months. Charlotte could almost see the tray of sweet iced tea and shortbread cookies covered by a white linen cloth on the glass table beside the wicker chair. There might even be a young slave girl stirring the air and keeping the flies away with a palm leaf fan if visitors had come to call.

The thought of whiling away a summer afternoon so lazily seemed almost foreign to Charlotte now as she made the short walk to the graveyard. The July sun was hot. So the moment she was out of sight of Sister Martha, Charlotte stripped off the Shaker cap to let the slight breeze ruffle her hair. It was good to feel Grayson land under her feet and have Grayson air filling her lungs. Every inch of her skin tingled with joy as she lightly ran her hands over the bark of the trees and wished her shoes gone so the grass could tickle her toes. She was home.

But not to stay, she reminded herself sternly. Perhaps never again to stay. That was no reason she couldn’t rejoice in this moment as she paused at the edge of the stand of trees and looked toward Grayson’s manor house. The rear of the house was plain in comparison to the front. No dormer windows. No veranda spreading out with shady welcome. The porch on the back was a working porch where servants shelled beans and shucked corn. She looked for Aunt Tish, but could see no one moving about.

That was good. Charlotte slipped across the open field to the graveyard where once again she felt concealed by the trees shading the graves. She’d promised Sister Martha she wouldn’t linger, but once at her mother’s grave, she touched the headstone warm from the day’s sun and remembered the last time she’d touched the stone. Adam Wade had backed her into it, expecting her to kiss him. She hadn’t. She’d wanted to, but she hadn’t.

Would she ever again have the chance to feel his lips on hers? He was following the army into battle. Not to fight, but to draw illustrations of the conflict. That didn’t mean he might not be in harm’s way. And she, what of her? She had promised her hands to the Shakers. It was better to push all thought of Adam Wade far from her mind. She had told Sister Altha she would pick up the cross of sacrifice and carry it without complaint. She was no longer the Charlotte who was born to the manor house and a lady’s life of ease. She was Sister Charlotte with a duty to do. Retrieve the necklace for the Shakers to sell to help gather the money needed for Aunt Tish’s freedom.

She knelt down to feel for the edge of the circle of grass she had lifted up to bury the necklace. “I know you won’t mind, Mother,” she said aloud as she pushed the trowel she’d brought with her into the ground.

“Are you Mayda?” a timid voice asked behind her.

Startled, Charlotte whirled around. The trowel banged against the tombstone and bounced out of her hand. A boy was watching her with large, frightened eyes.

“Mayda?” she asked when she found her voice.

“Come out of the grave to haunt my mother.” The child pointed a finger at the tombstone. He was very slender and too pale either from the fright of staring at a haunt or perhaps a recent illness that had kept him in out of the sun for too many days. “Little Jim says I’d better watch out for Grayson ghosts trying to chase me and Mother away.” He paused a minute as if getting up his nerve to say his next words. “Ghosts like you.”

“Do I look like a ghost?” Charlotte asked with a little smile.

“Not the way I imagined, but Miss Pennebaker says I don’t always imagine things right. Like being a whaleboat captain. She tells me that really wouldn’t be so much fun, that I’d have to start out swabbing decks and eating fishhead stew.” He came a couple of steps closer. “Have you ever eaten fishhead stew?”

“I don’t think I have, but then ghosts don’t have much need to eat.”

“You’re not a ghost,” the little boy said.

“Oh? Then who am I?” Charlotte laughed before she turned away from him to pick up the trowel and shove it into the ground to find the box she’d planted there only a few months before.

“My sister.”

Charlotte froze as chills ran up her back. Perhaps instead of her being the ghost, this child was. Her little brother grown 276 older in some sort of spirit world and haunting the graveyard where his little body was buried. Charlotte shook her head at the foolishness of her thoughts. The child behind her wasn’t a ghost any more than she was. She dug deeper in the hole until she felt the hard edges of the box. She lifted it out of the dirt before she turned back to the boy. “Why do you think I’m your sister?”

“You have red hair. Ghosts don’t have red hair, but my sister does.”

He had to be Selena’s child, even if he had little resemblance to her. “All right. You’ve caught me. I’m not a ghost. But who told you I’m your sister?”

“Mother.” The boy had lost his nervous fright at the thought of ghosts and now merely looked curious. “Is it a long walk from Virginia?”

“Virginia?”

“From your school there. I would have thought it would be a very long walk. I had to ride a train with Miss Pennebaker when we came here from Boston. I wanted to come on a ship, but Mother said I couldn’t.”

“Grayson doesn’t sit on the ocean, and my school is not quite so far as Virginia,” Charlotte said. “You must be Landon.”

“You know me then,” the child said as if it was a common thing for the people he met to know him without introductions. “Your mother told me you were coming to Grayson.”

“But you were already gone when I got here. Did Mother make you leave?”

“Why do you say that?” Charlotte sat back on her heels and studied the child’s sincere face. Not only did he not look like his mother, he seemed to have little of her ways.

“I don’t know.” He looked down at his shoes as if worried he’d said something that was going to get him in trouble. “It’s just that Mother’s very good at making things happen as she wants. That’s why Miss Pennebaker says I won’t get to be a whaleboat captain. Mother would never allow it. She says I have to be a gentleman.” The little boy peeked back up at Charlotte. “Do you know what gentlemen do? Besides not going barefoot and always being polite.”

Charlotte looked at the child Selena was pushing forward to take Charlotte’s rightful place at Grayson, and in spite of that, she laughed and took pity on this pale boy who was doomed to years of attempting to please Selena. “Gentlemen might not harpoon whales, but they ride horses and practice shooting.”

“I know. That’s so they can go to the army and be captains and generals and not have to march on the ground.” Landon looked worried again. “But I don’t want to shoot people. I’d rather harpoon whales.”

“Then perhaps someday you will,” Charlotte said as she stood up and brushed the dirt off her hands on her apron. “Sometimes a gentleman or a lady does the most unexpected things. Now I must go back to my unexpected path.”

“Can I tell Mother I saw you?”

“Do you think she’ll believe you? As you said, it is a very long walk from Virginia.” Charlotte looked at him with raised eyebrows before prizing the top off the powder box. She lifted out the necklace and dropped it down into her pocket. Sister Martha would be getting worried.

“Perhaps I will keep it a secret. Brothers and sisters have secrets, don’t they?”

“They do.”

“I hope you come back,” Landon told her. He looked sad to see her go.

“I might. Someday.” Charlotte smiled at the boy. Selena must have stolen him from another mother. “Until then, I’ll share a secret with you. Gentlemen can go barefoot as long as their mothers don’t see and they don’t complain if they happen to step on a bee.”

She left him sitting on a stone unlacing his shoes. She forgot to put her cap back on. Sister Martha had to remind her to cover her hair before she climbed up in the wagon. Brother Willard kept his eyes averted until she had done so.

Sister Altha was waiting to take the necklace when they got back to Harmony Hill. She said an elder would see to the details of selling the necklace and dealing with Perkins.

Two weeks later, Sister Latisha was introduced at meeting. Aunt Tish stood at the edge of the dancers and raised her hands to the heavens as tears streamed down her face. For the first time Charlotte’s feet weren’t reluctant to join in the laboring of the Shaker songs.

25

It took weeks for Charlotte’s letter to make its way to Adam where he was camped with the Potomac Army waiting for the generals to give the order to march south. He’d put
Harper’s
address on the letter he’d sent to Harmony Hill since he had never been anywhere that Sam Johnson didn’t eventually track him down.

Adam could have stayed in a hotel and only come out to the encampments during the day the way many of the reporters and illustrators did, but he wanted more in his pictures than what he saw on the outside as the men passed the time marching drills and playing baseball or mumblety-peg. In order to capture the mixture of eagerness and fear, boredom and excitement, loneliness and comradeship in their faces, Adam had to sit down among the men and become one of them, even if his weapon of choice was a pencil and not one of the Lincoln guns.

He got on well with the men. Few questioned his courage the way Jake had. They didn’t need him fighting alongside them to win the day. They much preferred the thought of their coming moments of derring-do being captured by his pen. Most were full of bluster when it came to talk of putting down Johnny Reb. Theirs was the holy cause, the divine duty of preserving the Union.

The preachers who roamed about the camps told them so right before they offered what might be a last chance for salvation. Some of the men of God wore the uniforms of the various state regiments. Others came out of the city to preach to any who would turn his head to listen. None seemed to consider the prayers of the preachers in the Southern pulpits not so many miles away across the Virginia border calling down the Lord’s blessings on their cause of freedom from the oppressive North.

So while the army paused on the brink of warfare, Adam filled up book after book of sketches. More than Sam Johnson and all the newspapers and magazines in the country could ever use, but he kept sketching, seeking that perfect scene to show people the gritty face of war.

At night he put his sketching tools aside and gathered with the men around campfires where the talk generally turned to home. Charlotte filled Adam’s mind at those times. He started a dozen letters to her in the near darkness, but he always ended up feeding the scraps of papers to the fire.

He assured himself that it wasn’t because some of the words he wanted to write frightened him. That wasn’t it at all. He didn’t have to write those words. He could write of simple things like the sound of a soldier strumming a guitar and singing a song about a girl back home or the way the sparks from the fire rose up toward the stars. No, he burned his words because there was no need writing to her at Harmony Hill if she wasn’t there. He hadn’t seen her face or one tendril of red hair. He could be mistaken. He wavered between being sure he was mistaken because he couldn’t imagine Charlotte with the Shakers and being sure he wasn’t mistaken because his fingers had formed with such ease the lines of the Shaker sister running from the meetinghouse.