The Seekers (31 page)

“Has anyone seen him? His friends—?”

“Not since last week. Perhaps he’s left Boston.”

“You said that yesterday!
And
the day before!”

“Because it’s a possibility, sir. He could be in some village miles from here—”

“The boys aren’t doing the job. Hire men with horses. A dozen—two dozen if you need them. Have the men check every printer in the state! Printing’s the only trade Abraham knows, and he’s got to make a living somehow—I want him found!”

Morecam nodded unhappily, started out. Then he turned back to ask an obligatory question. “How is Mrs. Kent faring?”

“She’s recuperating splendidly, I’m happy to say.”

“And your daughter?”

“Amanda is starting to gain weight thanks to the wet nurse we engaged. I believe both she and her mother have come through unscathed.”

“That’s wonderful. Does—does Mr. Abraham’s son know his father has vanished?”

Gilbert nodded. “His reactions are strange. He acts neither happy nor sad. It’s as if he’s locked his feelings deep inside—”

And he’s not the only one who has done that,
Gilbert thought with a profound sense of guilt.

“Plagued odd, the whole business,” Morecam said. “I should imagine it’s disappointing, too, since you took such an interest in Mr. Abraham’s welfare. Have you had a reply from Captain Lewis?”

“It’s much too soon.”

“Yes, I suppose.” Morecam scratched his chin. “Do you have any idea why Mr. Abraham ran off?”

“None,” Gilbert lied, turning away from the reporter. Surely his face was betraying him. His soul felt heavy as stone.

“Well, I’ll see to hiring some men at once.”

“Thank you, Mr. Morecam.”

The reporter’s footsteps faded, blending into the rhythmic
crumph-crumph
of the presses down on the first floor.

Gilbert stared out the grimy window, reflecting that there was but one source of joy left in the whole world: the tiny, gnarled and wondrously red face of the gnome-child that would, with luck, grow into girlhood and womanhood someday. He looked at Amanda often when he was at home. Suckled and cooing in her blankets, she was an astonishing creature. He held her with extreme care whenever he picked her up. His feelings at such times were as close as he’d ever come to a religious experience.

He already loved the child with a devotion that managed to scatter some of its warmth on Harriet. He was solicitous about her comfort. Never angry when she asked him—scathingly—about Abraham, usually coupling her inquiry with a declaration that she hoped he stayed away forever.

Gilbert was beginning to feel Abraham might do just that. Dear God, how many scars were left from that one night in July—!

He had seen a beast let loose within himself and had still not recovered from the experience. Very likely he never would, completely. In a peculiar way, his own violent outburst had drawn him closer to his vanished half brother. They were more alike than he had ever suspected.

As a result, his new desire to find Abraham had become a fixation—even though Gilbert had no idea what he would do if his brother suddenly turned up.

Would he welcome Abraham back to the family? Harriet would resist—and the harm to Jared might make such an action doubly unacceptable. Gilbert didn’t understand exactly what Jared felt about the events of that night—he refused to discuss them—but there was no question the boy’s mental state had been affected. Perhaps permanently.

Why, then, did Gilbert pursue the search for Abraham? He had admitted the answer days ago.

Guilt.

The guilt was a constant, almost unendurable burden. And he couldn’t share it with another human being, certainly not with his wife.

Like his own suddenly discovered capability for violence, Gilbert’s guilt added a new perspective to his understanding of Abraham’s actions after his return to Boston. He was able to see his half brother’s erratic behavior in a different, more compassionate light, was able to comprehend, and not just intellectually, how Abraham must have felt when Elizabeth died—

Staring through the flyspecked windows at slate roofs and church spires, Gilbert saw Abraham’s eyes as they were a moment before he rushed into the rain that fateful evening.

Accurately or not, his memory told him Abraham’s eyes had been filled with tears.

“Find him,” Gilbert murmured to the yellow haze in the August sky.
“Find him—!”

But every man and boy hired by Gilbert Kent ultimately failed in that assignment. By late September, he reluctantly concluded that Abraham had either left Massachusetts or—the possibility could not be escaped—done away with himself.

That only heightened Gilbert’s sadness on the mellow afternoon when a special messenger brought a letter posted three weeks before, at the city by the falls of the Ohio.

From Louisville, where he had stopped with a river pilot, ten recruits and a Newfoundland dog christened Scannon, Captain Meriwether Lewis wrote to say that he and Captain William Clark would welcome former Cornet of Dragoons Abraham Kent into the Corps of Discovery that would start up the Missouri River the following spring. The letter was still in Gilbert’s pocket as he walked slowly up the incline of Beacon Street in the late afternoon.

He had left Kent and Son early, unable to concentrate on his work. He’d roamed streets he couldn’t remember, attempting to do the impossible—forget.

From the Common rang the cries of a band of small boys rolling hoops. Leaves streamed down from the trees under whose boughs his father had strolled while courting his first wife. The recurring cough brought Gilbert to a halt suddenly, a lace kerchief at his lips.

In a moment the spasm passed. He put the kerchief away and walked on.

The light had leached from the sky, leaving little more than a ribbon of bright amber beneath clouds lowering in the west. Gilbert drew Captain Lewis’ letter from his coat. How pointless to carry it about, he thought. Harriet, occupied with baby Amanda, wouldn’t be interested. A corner of the letter’ snapped in the autumn breeze as he remarked mentally that Abraham had certainly been right in one judgment.

Harriet’s concern for Jared had only been pretense, a gambit to employ against Abraham in order to hurt him. Since Abraham’s disappearance, She had barely spoken to the boy. Only from Gilbert did he ever hear a cordial word.

But it was to Jared’s father that Gilbert’s thoughts returned as he slowly ripped the letter into long strips, then tore each strip into smaller squares, finally letting the whole catch the wind and rise upward, blown and scattered in the fading amber light. The figures of the boys with their hoops were growing indistinct. Shadows covered the Common.

Objectively, with no sense of superiority, he said to himself:
I have never been strong and never shall be. But poor Abraham
—
in many ways he was weaker than I. Well, all vessels have different flaws
—
as I have discovered.

But I am the only one left to help Jared survive.

That responsibility bore heavily on him as he resumed his slow progress up Beacon.

How different things might have been if Abraham hadn’t caught some whore’s pox. Perhaps the journey with Captains Lewis and Clark would have restored his faith in himself and his abilities
—

Ah, but speculating on that was profitless. The chance was gone, just as the pieces of letter were gone in the clouds of dead leaves and debris whirled away by the twilight wind.

A servant girl from a house near Gilbert’s went by. She carried a hamper of vegetables and a firkin of country butter. In response to her deferential greeting, Gilbert forced himself to touch the rolled brim of his beaver hat. A tall, emaciated figure in the dusk—an eighty-year-old clerk in a boy’s body, wasn’t that how Abraham had phrased it?—he gazed toward the lamplit windows of his own elegant home.

I must see that Jared does not merely survive, but grows into a sound, whole man
—
free of Abraham’s legacy of failure and self-hate
—

He had no illusions that it would be easy. Jared did carry the Fletcher blood. He lived in a household dominated by a woman who deemed him worthless, despised his very existence and seized every opportunity to show her feelings. As to the damage to Jared’s young mind that dreadful night, who could say whether it would prove—as Gilbert often feared—irreparable?

Still, calmed by the beauty of the radiant light in the western sky, he knew he would try his best. One kind of blood—family blood; the blood of caring and compassion—must wash out the lingering traces of other, uglier blood that had marked the walls of the Kent house.

Was it possible? Though he vowed to try, it didn’t seem so—

Then he thought of his father.

Gilbert stopped again, transfixed by the last golden sunshine under the darkening clouds above the Charles River. His eyes reflected the light like coins. From boyhood he recalled fragments of long conversations with Philip.

What was America if not the eternal promise of beginning again? Philip Kent had sensed that promise long before he first stepped onshore.

True, in his later years, he had rejected Jefferson’s visions of an expanding nation. But to Gilbert that rejection was superficial, overridden by a deep and abiding kinship with Philip’s most basic convictions. He and his father might differ on geography but they’d never had any fundamental differences about the promise of the land. They believed passionately in the enduring hope of change, renewal, rebirth that America’s free air made possible—

His upturned face caught the last glimmers of the sunset. He felt a moment of almost supernatural closeness to his father. It was as if Philip stood near him in the shadows of evening, a presence at the edge of his vision, a powerful force that diminished his pain and strengthened his courage—

Unwilling to break the moment, Gilbert remained motionless, causing whispered comments from pedestrians hurrying by. Finally he roused himself, shivering in the sudden bite of the sunless wind. The aroma of wood smoke from chimneys enticed him homeward—with a quicker step now.

He would exchange trivial pleasantries with Harriet at dinner, rock and coo at baby Amanda for a few minutes afterward, and then he would speak with Jared. He would begin the long, hazardous and difficult job of raising Abraham Kent’s son to manhood.

On his front stoop, Gilbert Kent paused one final time to stare into the western heavens, all clouds of ebony. His shoulders lifted, as if in anticipation of a struggle.

He turned and entered his house.

I
N THE GLOOM OF
the vast building, the boy’s breath plumed as he pointed to the plank-covered pits. “Ten blocks of your best pond ice, Mr. Dawlish. Delivered to the house by six o’clock tonight. Six o’clock sharp. The poultry’s due to arrive from the country by half past.”

He extended a handful of coins. The ice house owner didn’t take them. “Anyone notice you two coming in here?”

The boy bristled. “Is that important? Money’s money.”

“Sometimes. Kent money ain’t the most popular in Boston these days.”

The slim but sturdy-looking boy stuffed the coins in his pocket and seized the hand of the little girl beside him.

Though only eight years old, in her cape and bonnet of purple velvet she resembled a miniature woman—as was intended. She had her mother’s pale skin, brilliant dark eyes and hair. But her mouth was more generous, her expression more cheerful—never marred by the sourness the boy associated with Uncle Gilbert’s wife, the girl’s mother.

“Come, Amanda,” the boy said. “Someone else will sell us ice.”

Dawlish snatched the boy’s forearm. “I’ll deliver the order! Just do me a favor. Leave by the rear door.”

Disgust showed on Jared Kent’s rather sharp-featured face. He slapped the coins into Dawlish’s hand and ushered Amanda toward the indicated door, walking with long, swift strides. Like his cousin, he was superbly and expensively dressed: nankeen trousers, a fine linen shirt with a frothy neckerchief, a vest cut straight across the bottom. Jared’s uncle didn’t insist he wear a striped vest, the symbol of Democratic-Republican sympathies. Gilbert Kent frequently appeared in such a vest, though—scandalizing most of his Boston peers.

From beneath Jared’s vest hung a fob, without which no gentleman, whatever his age, was well dressed. Jared lacked a watch to attach to the hidden end of the fob, but that didn’t matter—only the fob’s display counted.

He’d received the fob from his uncle the preceding Christmas. The obverse of the medal at the bottom of the broad green ribbon had been struck in the pattern of the tea-bottle symbol. There was also a Latin inscription:

Cape locum et fac vestigium.

The reverse bore the words Kent and Son, and the year. Jared liked wearing the fob as much as he hated wearing his tight-fitting jacket with its ridiculous short tails, a perfect duplicate of the adult male style.

As the cousins stepped into the surprisingly warm sunshine of a Saturday in early December 1811, the varnish on the leather brim of Jared’s cap glittered with highlights. He pointed suddenly.

“ ’Ware the cat.”

Amanda hiked up her skirts and hopped over the dead animal rotting in the alley’s drainage channel.

“Jared.”

“Mm?”

“Why didn’t that man want Papa’s money?”

Head tilted back, the boy was eyeing the slope of the roof at the rear of the ice house. Then he turned his attention to a pile of empty crates at the end of the building. His tawny hair, worn three inches long in the current youthful fashion, shone in the sun. His sky blue eyes darted from the crates back to the roof. Finally he answered the question.

“Because Uncle Gilbert is about the only rich man in Boston who believes we should go to war, I guess.”

Amanda covered her mouth. “Mama would take the birch rod to you if she heard what you just said.”

“You’re being silly. Tradespeople say ‘I guess’ all the time.”

“But it’s vulgar!”