The Seeker

by Ann H. Gabhart

  “What’d Willis tell him?”

  “Well, you know Willis. He ain’t much for talkin’ to white folks. Says the less said, the better. He just tol’ him all he knew was they had some mighty fine workhorses.”

  Charlotte played with one of the tarts on her plate, breaking edges off it but not putting them in her mouth.

  Aunt Tish sat back down and reached across the table to touch her arm. “Somethin’ botherin’ you, Miss Lottie?”

  “Edwin says he wants to go to the Shakers.”

  “I knowed it. Mattie tol’ me so some weeks ago. Says that Shaker man is in and out of the house over there like as how it was his.”

  Mattie was Edwin’s longtime housekeeper. “What’s she think about it?”

  Aunt Tish pulled her hand back and wrapped it around her cup. “She ain’t upset.” She stared straight at Charlotte. “No way she could be. Folks join the Shakers, they has to set their people free. Them Shakers don’t abide with slaveholdin’.”

  “Or marrying either.”

  “You speakin’ the truth there.”

  The bell in the dining room tinkled and Aunt Tish pushed herself up out of her chair. “Sounds like the Massah’s wantin’ his bacon. You goin’ out there with ’em?”

  “Not today, Aunt Tish. If Papa asks, you can tell him I’ve already eaten.”

  “There’s little truth in that,” Aunt Tish said as she eyed the tarts still on Charlotte’s plate. “You gonna waste away to nothin’, chile.”

  6

  Edwin Gilbey wasn’t home. Off to the Shaker village, according to the servant who met Adam in the driveway to hold his horse. The man had the biggest smile on his face as any Negro Adam had seen since he got to Kentucky. When Adam asked if he could sketch his picture holding the horse’s head, the man’s smile got even wider. He was missing a couple of teeth.

  “Ain’t nobody ever wanted to use up no pencil markings on the likes of me.” The man ran a hand through the fuzz of gray hair on his head as the horse snuffled his shoulder. “You any good at it?”

  “No Michelangelo, but I do a fair likeness.” Adam opened his pad to the sketch of the senator’s cook and turned it around where the man could see it.

  “Well, I’ll be if Latisha Sparrow ain’t a-starin’ up at me off’n that paper plain as day. I reckon if she let you draw her, won’t be no harm in you drawin’ my old face too.” He tilted his chin up a bit the way he’d surely seen white men’s portraits posed.

  Adam turned over to a blank page and made some quick marks. “What’s your name?”

  “Redmon.”

  “Last name or first?” Adam asked.

  “Last name, first name. All the name I needs.”

  “Well, tell me, Redmon. Are you always this happy?”

  “Ain’t no good lookin’ like you got hold of a sour persimmon. No sir. Best to keep on grinnin’ cause that’s what ever’body wants to see.”

  “Your smile’s looking pretty genuine this morning, Redmon. Is it because Mr. Gilbey’s gone?”

  “You done tryin’ to get me in trouble, Mr. Sir. But no sir, I’ve known Massah Edwin since he was in knickers. Taught him to ride a horse. Now that was a task, let me tell you.” Redmon chuckled a little. “Young Massah Edwin was some timid as a boy. But he done seems to be growin’ out of it. What with wantin’ to learn them Shaker twirls and spins.”

  “I met him last night, and to tell the truth he didn’t look like the dancing type.” Adam looked up at the black man and then quickly back down as he sketched his hand on the horse’s bridle. The man’s fingers were bony but strong.

  “You got that right. But them Shaker dances is different. We’s all hopin’ he might take to them.”

  “Oh, why’s that?” Adam had the sketch done, but he added a little shading here and there just to keep the man talking. “Them Shakers set a ton of store by their folks keepin’ their rules. Not marryin’ fer one, but they got another one that matters more to us’n around here. No ownin’ nobody. We’s thinkin’ on breathing some free air.”

  “What would you do, Redmon?” Adam glanced up at him. “Join up with the Shakers too?”

  “I ain’t thinkin’ on that. No sense tradin’ one massah for another no matter how kindly they might be. And I wouldn’t be wantin’ to give up my Mattie. We jumped the broom long time back.” He looked off to the north. “No sir. Me and Mattie, we’d go north. They say a man like me can get a job up there holdin’ horses and such.”

  “You could get a job here too, couldn’t you? As a free man.”

  Redmon looked down at the ground. “It ain’t all that easy. They has this law about freed slaves leaving the state or so I been told. Besides, around here, some scalawag might grab my free papers away from me and make him some money sellin’ me south. That kind a thing wouldn’t be worth noticin’ here, but they tell me it’s different in the North.” The man peered up at Adam and his smile faded away. “You sound Northern. Is it true we’re gonna go to war? The North agin the South?”

  “It looks that way.”

  The black man shook his head. “We best pray the good Lord has mercy on us all.”

  “Guess I’ll have to depend on your prayers, Redmon. I’ve never been much of a praying man,” Adam admitted with a smile.

  “Ever’ man is a prayin’ man if times is bad enough, and could be times is gonna be bad enough for a bunch of folks soon if shots start firin’.”

  “You could be right.” Adam turned the pad around for Redmon to see, and the man’s smile came back.

  “I do declare, Mr. Sir, you done grabbed old Redmon’s face and put it down on that paper. And the horse ain’t bad neither. My Mattie ain’t gonna be believin’ it.”

  Adam turned the pad back around and scribbled Phoebe’s address on the bottom of the drawing. She owed him after pushing him into the unwelcome task of painting Selena Vance’s portrait. He tore off the drawing and held it out to the black man. “Here. You take this and show Mattie. Then she’ll believe you.”

  “Oh no sir, Mr. Sir. I couldn’t take that from you.” Redmon held up his free hand with his palm toward Adam and stepped back a couple of paces. The horse danced backward with him.

  “Sure you can, Redmon. I’m giving it to you. Just fold it up and put it in your pocket.” He pointed to the address he’d scribbled on the bottom of it. “And if you get your free papers and go north as far as Boston, you go to that address there and show them this picture. They’ll hire you on to handle horses just like you do here. That’s a promise.”

  Adam folded the drawing a couple of times and handed it to Redmon, who took it from him as though he thought the paper might ignite in his hand. The man stared at the folded paper a few seconds before he slipped it out of sight in his pants pocket.

  “That’s mighty generous of you, Mr. Sir.” He flipped his eyes up to Adam’s face and then back at his feet. “You makin’ a promise to old Redmon, I’ll be makin’ one back. Seein’ as how you ain’t on familiar terms with the good Lord, I’ll do some prayin’ for you. Just in case things start goin’ bad.”

  “Thank you, Redmon. A man would be foolish to turn down a believing man’s prayers.” Adam smiled and took the reins to his horse. “And you say Mr. Gilbey’s over at the Shaker village. Can you point the way?”

  The sunshine was warm on Adam’s shoulders as he rode along the road past cattle grazing on the spring grass in the rolling pastures. In the plowed fields, black men with hoes walked in an up-and-down wave across the smooth dirt, planting seeds. In the distance the redbud blooms brightened up the tree line of woods. All in all, a day to make a man glad to be out riding a horse down a sunny Kentucky road.

  A dozen times, Adam wanted to stop and get out his sketchpad. But the morning was speeding past and he’d told Selena Vance he’d be back to work on her portrait that afternoon. For the hundredth time he wished he hadn’t let Phoebe talk him into such a tiresome task. The woman was not a pleasure to paint. Full of vanities and not the least i
nterested in a portrait that revealed her nature. She wanted something pretty. Her comfortable image of herself. He could do it, but it was tedious, uninteresting brushstrokes to paint flattering poses that he had no pleasure signing his name to. He liked stripping away a person’s pretenses and drawing the stark lines of truth. But there was nothing for it but to make her as beautiful as artistically possible and move on to more interesting subjects. Like Redmon or the senator’s cook. Or perhaps the senator’s lovely redheaded daughter.

  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.