The Seeker (7 page)

He’d like to try to capture the spark in those green eyes. He’d never known a girl quite like her, although he did have to admit a quick kiss in the garden was hardly enough to claim knowing her. But sometimes he could watch a person and guess much about them. His artist eye, his grandmother told him. She’d had an artistic bent. As a young lady she had tried her hand at painting delicate wildflowers, which she told Adam was one of the few acceptable subjects a young lady might try to capture with brushstrokes.

Later she taught art to inept young ladies to supplement the income of Adam’s grandfather, headmaster of a school that touted itself as preparing the best young gentlemen for Harvard and Yale. A respectable profession and one that supplied their needs, but few extras. Especially after Adam’s father left to seek their fortune in California and was never heard from again. Adam’s mother had no choice but to take her three sons and daughter and move back in with her parents.

While she had been greatly relieved to be back in the urbane society of Boston instead of stuck in the uncivilized area of Louisville where Adam’s father had run a store, there was always a shortage of funds to keep up proper appearances. Satisfying her need for the luxuries of life was probably the primary reason his father had been lured away from his family by the siren of gold panned from creeks. If she could have been satisfied with a storekeeper’s clerk as a husband, then all of their lives might have been different. But she had been raised on the cusp of society in the East and wanted her children to climb up to a higher rung on the social ladder.

Phoebe, Adam’s elder by three years, had grabbed the higher rung with great enthusiasm and married well some years back before producing an appropriate number of offspring for her contented husband. Adam, on the other hand, cared nothing for social standing. That had been knocked out of him in his grandfather’s private school where all the true gentlemen’s sons had peered down their noses at the lowly headmaster’s grandson. It didn’t matter to them that his mind had been quicker than many of theirs, or perhaps that was the reason for their disdain. A disdain that he learned to return in spades.

His grandfather had often caned him for posting irreverent sketches of this or that student. Or perhaps not for the irreverence but just for the sketching. His grandfather wanted to beat the artistic dreamer out of him, but some things can’t be altered in a man’s spirit. Art was one of those things for Adam. That and his streak of independence that made him say no when his grandfather tried to force him into Yale to spend four more years being the charity case of the school. He didn’t need Yale. He only needed his pens and his brushes.

When he had told his grandfather he would not enroll in college, that instead he would concentrate on improving his art, his grandfather had almost spit out the word. “Art.” His voice was full of contempt, and his hands curled as if he were wishing for the headmaster’s cane to attempt one more time to bring Adam into line. “You’re as much a fool as your father before you. Chasing off after some dream that will never come to fruition.”

Adam braced his shoulders as though expecting a blow from the old man, but he didn’t back down. “I am an artist.” Those were words he’d practiced for just that moment, and he spoke them with conviction.

His grandfather had once been tall, like Adam, but years of studying and bending over students to instruct them had rounded his shoulders until he had to peer up at Adam through gray eyebrows that grew in wayward paths. But his light blue eyes were as sharp and as accusing as ever. “Artists starve in garrets.”

Adam had lived in the man’s house since he was twelve years old, but little affection had grown between them. He had realized early on that his grandfather saw Adam’s father whenever he looked at him and that he could never be good enough, smart enough, or pliable enough to override the anger his grandfather still carried for the man who had ruined his daughter’s life. So Adam never tried. He didn’t try that day either as he answered his grandfather’s near curse. “Then I will starve.”

He had not exchanged a word with his grandfather since. His grandmother had written him encouraging letters that caught up with him occasionally as he traveled to the West searching for his father. He still carried regret that he had not returned to Boston when his grandmother fell ill. He hadn’t thought she would die so quickly.

By the time he received word of her death, she’d been underground for days. He saw little need to rush to Boston then. His mother had Phoebe and the boys, his two younger brothers, to hold her hand and pull her through. As for his grandfather, the man needed nothing from Adam. He would simply shut himself away in his library and hardly notice the good woman’s passing.

The truth was, Adam didn’t have the money for the trip to Boston and to New York both. And it was to New York he had finally been summoned. To interview with
Harper’s Weekly
. He didn’t believe in angels, but sometimes he wondered if his grandmother had whispered his name in Sam Johnson’s ear as she passed through the air on her way to heaven. He had not looked back since except to send his mother money to help pay the younger boys’ tuition.

Jake was in his first year at Harvard. A hothead who didn’t have art to turn to. Instead he had fought his way through their grandfather’s school with his fists and had earned a measure of respect from the gentlemen’s sons that allowed him a more accepted place in their society. That had carried through for Harry, who at sixteen was almost ready to matriculate at the college of his choice. He had a love of books and the feeling that teaching was a calling. His calling. Phoebe wrote that Grandfather Tyler was a changed man when he was around Harry.

Perhaps the old man was changed with Harry, but there was no change that could bridge the rift between him and Adam. Adam had proved him wrong, and that was something he could never accept.

Adam shook away the thoughts of his grandfather as the landscape alongside the road changed. Stones stacked on stones with no masonry to hold them in place kept the cows in the lush green fields. Even the cattle seemed different, fatter with little sign of having just come through a hard winter. The sturdily built barns had wide doors that slid back on long iron rods attached to the barn instead of swinging open. But perhaps the most telling difference was that, among the many workers in the fields, he spotted only two black faces under the straw Shaker hats.

Adam didn’t stop. Up ahead, the buildings of the Shaker village rose up into the sky. The main houses were every bit as large as the manor houses he’d just come from but built without the first curling bit of ornamental trim work that adorned the local gentry’s mansions. Yet somehow the straight, simple lines of the Shaker structures lent them a kind of natural elegance Adam’s artist eye admired.

As he rode into the village, a bell sounded, and men and women in uniform dress began filing out of the various buildings to make their way to the large stone building in the center of the village. None of the people seemed to be engaged in conversation as they walked, and few even cast a curious glance toward him riding past them. He was part of the world and so of little interest.

Adam glanced up at the sun straight over his head. The bell had evidently summoned them to their midday meal. He slid off his horse and held the reins while he pulled out his sketchpad. He didn’t see Edwin Gilbey. Or any person who stood out. They were all as alike as ants trailing into an anthill as they filed past him. The women wore white caps and large white collars lapping over their bosoms to tuck down in their aprons, covering their plain dresses. The men wore straw hats with wide brims and suspenders to hold up their butternut brown or gray pants.

As he began to sketch them flowing into the white stone building in front of him, one young girl peeked over at him curiously before an older sister shot her a stern look. The girl quickly lowered her eyes to the path once more.

“I mean no harm,” he said with a winning smile as the older sister looked at him with suspicion.

She made no response except to narrow her eyes on him with evident distrust before she shooed the young women with her past him like a farm woman trying to pen up a gaggle of geese.

Before his eye could forget the two women’s faces, he turned a page and drew the young Shaker girl with the bloom of youth in her cheeks and the older woman drained of cheer. He was still filling in the details on the three sketches when the Shakers began coming back out of the building to return to their duties.

With a look up at the sun, Adam reluctantly put away his sketchpad and mounted his horse.

It was two hours past noon before he got back to Grayson. Selena Vance was not pleased.

7

In the days that followed, Charlotte felt as if she had been tossed into a spinning vortex with no way to break free. She had no control in her own house. Her father’s new wife wasted little time in assuming her role as mistress of Grayson. All sweetness and light disappeared with Selena’s party dress on that first day as she settled at Charlotte’s mother’s writing desk in the morning room and began handing out orders.

The house would be scrubbed from top to bottom. Wardrobes were to be emptied out to make room for her things that would be arriving in trunks in the coming days. The Grayson china with its delicate rose pattern would be packed away and replaced with a pattern of her choice as soon as she had the opportunity to travel to Boston to purchase it. Work on redoing rooms for her son, Landon, who would be arriving with his governess at the end of the month, would begin in earnest at once.

Charlotte felt as if she should run up the stairs and bar the door to her room to at least keep the woman’s changes from it. Her father may have felt the same, because each day as soon as breakfast was over, he retreated to his library. The library with its great cherry desk was his sanctuary and the place where he plotted his political campaigns and curried favors from influential visitors and backers. His political strategy room.

He cared little for the books filling the shelves from floor to ceiling on one side of the room. That had been her Grandfather Grayson’s passion when the library had been his retreat before her father. Grandfather Grayson claimed to have read every book on the shelves, some over and over until those books fell open to his favorite passages when Charlotte pulled them from the shelves to read. As she curled in the chair in front of the library’s fireplace, Charlotte often imagined the old gentleman reading over her shoulder.

After her mother died, Charlotte had free access to the books as there was no one to tell her which books were proper fare for a young lady and which were not. Her father certainly didn’t know. He had little time for literature or even history. He claimed to be too busy making history to worry about dwelling on the mistakes of the past.

Charlotte had no argument with that. She also shared her father’s passion for politics, and some of her best times with her father were spent in the library listening to the political news from Frankfort. She saw no need to give up these talks just because he had brought a wife home. If Selena’s strained look was any indication whenever Charlotte’s father began talking of the necessity of preserving the Union at all costs, the woman had little interest in politics.

But Charlotte was eager to know her father’s thoughts on whether the Southern states could be wooed back into the Union. President Lincoln hadn’t been able to do so in his first month in office, but diplomacy took time. Or so her father always told her. Coaxing an opponent back to your side could be more difficult than doing so by force, but the extra effort was well spent.

However, from what Charlotte read in the newspapers, the South didn’t seem to look with favor on any sort of compromise. Even before President Lincoln took office, the Secessionist states had already established their own government—the Confederate States of America. Charlotte had read about their meeting in Alabama, but surely saner heads would prevail as they had in crises of the past. Those in positions of power would want to find a way to heal the breach without picking up arms.

Charlotte was anxious to hear her father say as much. Plus she was eager to know his plans for the next campaign. That was more than a year away, but a man who wanted to be reelected couldn’t wait too long to get his name on the right people’s lips. While it was unseemly for a candidate to go out begging for votes for himself, it was vital to have a great many supporters who would. Even more, she wanted to laugh with him about the ridiculous bills some of his fellow senators at times tried to push through the Kentucky legislature.

She wanted to feel his hand patting her head and hear him saying, “Charley, you should have been a boy. You could have been the next governor. Right after me. We could have kept it in the family for years.” Even though he always said it as if he’d made a big joke, she knew that thinking about running for the governor’s office wasn’t a joke to him.

But Selena managed to steal those times with her father from Charlotte too, for now when she carried coffee to him after breakfast, he wanted to talk of nothing but Selena. Selena this. Selena that.

It didn’t seem to matter what the woman did. On the very first day, she ordered Gibson, their butler, to carry Charlotte’s mother’s portrait to the attic, and her father didn’t protest. On the second day, she demanded access to the account books not just for the household but for the whole farm, and he handed them over with a smile. Charlotte began to fear that if Selena asked him to burn down the house and build it back to her specifications, he might strike the match on his boot. As long as she kept calling him “my love” and flashing her ingratiating smile at him.

It was almost beyond bearing. But Charlotte had never spent much time pretending. Not since she was twelve and her mother had handed over the keys to the pantry and linen cabinet. She had never pretended her mother would rise up off her couch and take control of the household again. She had never pretended that her father would notice and appreciate the way she, Charlotte, kept the household running. She had never pretended that she loved Edwin or that he loved her. Love had nothing to do with the agreement between them.