The Seeker

by Ann H. Gabhart

  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.

  And now she didn’t pretend that she could stop Selena’s onslaught on Grayson. Not without her father’s help, and he was so enamored with the woman it was obvious he thought she could do no wrong. Charlotte saw little choice but to bide her time and carry on as if her life wasn’t getting turned upside down. She wasn’t exactly pretending that things hadn’t changed or that her carefully arranged future wasn’t slipping out of reach, but with time, she was sure she could step out of the vortex. She could take control of her future again. Just as soon as her head stopped spinning.

  Meanwhile, it didn’t help that she often caught Adam Wade’s much-too-perceptive eyes on her as she put forth a polite front at the dinner table each evening. It didn’t help that the only news she received from Hastings Farm was of Edwin visiting the Shaker village. It didn’t help that her father began talking of six-year-old Landon, whom he hadn’t even met, as if he was the son he had always wanted. It didn’t help that Selena began to speak of the dowry Charlotte would take with her when she married in May, when it was becoming more and more apparent that there might not be a wedding in May.

  It especially didn’t help that Charlotte’s father told her Selena thought she spent an inappropriate amount of time in the kitchen with Aunt Tish and had suggested Charlotte should go visit his Virginian relations for a few months to broaden her horizons beyond Grayson. When Charlotte asked which relatives, since the redheaded grandmother had passed on years since, her father said there was a cousin but he would have to find out her name. Even so, he was sure Charlotte would be quite welcome as a houseguest.

  Charlotte felt as if she had been bowled over by a runaway horse, and every time she tried to stand up and get her bearings, the same thing happened all over again. Selena was outflanking her at every turn. And all with a too-sweet smile and the claim that she only had Charlotte’s best interests at heart.

  On the third day, she summoned Charlotte to her while she was sitting for the portrait. If it hadn’t been her father delivering the message, Charlotte would have ignored Selena’s summons. Not forever. Just until after the sitting because of how assiduously she had been avoiding the artist except at the evening meal when she could hardly be absent from her place without a good excuse. Cowardice would not be an acceptable reason or one she would like to explain to her father. Nor could she come up with a reasonable excuse to delay talking to Selena when her father found her in the garden.

  “Charley, I’ve been looking for you.” He sat down on the stone bench beside her and shifted his weight from side to side with a little groan. “These things need some padding.” He was a man who liked his comfort.

  “But the sunshine is nice.” Charlotte smiled as she dropped her book to her lap, keeping her finger on the page to mark her place. The extra weight her father had put on in the last few years had aged him. He was barely past fifty, but he winded easily and preferred his easy chair to any sort of sporting activity. At least before Selena.

  Charlotte hadn’t seen him for several months, since he had been staying in Frankfort. With the country in such a state of turmoil, she had not thought his extended absence from Grayson odd. He had to keep abreast of legislative issues and work for his constituents. But it seemed this year there had been time for more pleasurable pursuits as well.

  He glanced up at the cloudless sky as if he hadn’t noticed whether the sun was even shining until she mentioned it. “So it is,” he said.

  The bright light in the garden made
it easy to see how thin his hair was getting on the top, even though Ruben, his longtime valet, had carefully combed his remaining hair over the balding spot. Gray was creeping back from his temples and taking over his eyebrows. His moustache was almost completely gray. A light sheen of perspiration moistened his forehead even though the air was cool enough that Charlotte had considered going back inside for her shawl.

  “Are you feeling all right, Father?” Charlotte asked with a worried frown.

  “Now don’t you be worrying about me.” He patted her arm. “I’ve never been better.”

  “You look tired.”

  “Well, things were busy in Frankfort what with the current unrest in our country, and of course once I met Selena, things started hopping. Not much time for relaxation. Not that I’m complaining,” he said with a little laugh. “Most certainly not. Selena’s the best thing to happen to me in a long while. And to Grayson too, or I miss my guess.”

  Charlotte had no words to answer that, but her father didn’t need her words as he went on. “You can’t know how very glad I am that you and Selena are getting along so well. She thinks of you as a favored younger sister, you know.”

  “Does she?” Charlotte stared down at her book as she carefully marked her place with a ribbon before she closed it. “Not a daughter, then.”

  Her father laughed. “You can hardly expect that, since she’s only a few years older than you.”

  “That’s good anyway. I had a loving mother.” Charlotte looked up at him as if the next question just came out of thin air. “How old is Selena anyway?”

  He raised eyebrows that Ruben must have forgotten to comb that morning before he said, “I haven’t been a politician these many years not to know there are some questions a man dares not ask, and a woman’s age is one of those.”

  “What do you know about her?” Charlotte looked directly at her father. When the color rose in his cheeks, she wasn’t sure if it was due to anger or embarrassment.

  He frowned a little. “I know enough and I should think you know enough not to be disrespectful to your father.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound disrespectful, Father.” She stared down at her book a moment. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. A story of impropriety. “I was merely curious about her. And her son, Landon. Have you met him?”

  “No, no, but I am anxious to have him here at Grayson. Selena planned to send him to Georgia to spend some time with relations there, but I’ve talked her out of that. He needs to be here with his mother. And me. He’s only six, but Selena says he’s smart as a tack.” Her father’s good humor returned as he looked up and off across the garden. “It will be good to have a boy running about the house.”

  “Georgia? I understood Selena was from Boston.”

  “That’s where she was living when her late husband made his tragic departure from life. Some sort of wasting sickness, she says. All very sad. But her extended family owns a plantation in Georgia. Very well-to-do, I surmise. That’s why she’s so capable of looking at Grayson and seeing where we might have been neglectful over the last few years in managing our people. A soft heart is fine in church but can get you in trouble on the farm.”

  Charlotte sat frozen on the bench, almost afraid to breathe, but she had to ask the question pushing at her lips. “What does she suggest? For our people?”

  “We have to cull them out the same as we would our horses. She’s already talked to Perkins about it and he’s giving her names.”

  “You’re going to sell them?” Charlotte’s voice sounded wrong in her ears. “To the South?”

  “That’s where the best market is. Selena says the plantations down there are always anxious to get Kentucky-bred Negroes. And with Mr. Lincoln’s abolitionist leanings, who knows what might happen. A person has to protect his investments.”

  “President Lincoln hasn’t put forth a plan to free the slaves, has he?”

  “Not as yet, but there are many who think it could be in the offing if a compromise isn’t reached with the Secessionist states. I don’t know what those governors and representatives down there can be thinking.” He rubbed his hands up and down his thighs as his voice got a little louder. “Just because the President spoke against allowing slavery in new territories in the West doesn’t mean he planned to ban it in states where it already existed. He won’t do that. Not if he wants to keep Kentucky in the Union.”

  “Would you vote for secession?”

  “No, no. I can’t imagine any situation where Kentucky wouldn’t stay with the Union.” He pulled his eyebrows together in a frown just thinking about it. “But at the same time I can’t see surrendering my property to the federal government without proper recompense. It’s better to leave things status quo. And not keep stirring things up like those copperheads up north with their abolition talk.”

  “I wish we could just set all our people free.”

  “My dear girl, you don’t know what you’re saying.” Her words obviously shocked her father. “No, no, my dear, that would be the ruin of us all. Perhaps them even more than us. What would become of them without us to feed and clothe them?” He shook his head at her as his look turned from indignant to indulgent. “Being so young, you can hardly be expected to understand all the ramifications of freeing the slaves, and it is something you shouldn’t concern your pretty head about. What you need to remember is that our people are well cared for.”

  Charlotte wanted to argue with him, but she knew it would be useless. Better to pick her fight. “Is Mellie mine? Mother always told me so. That Aunt Tish was hers and Mellie was mine.”

  “She did say that.”

  Charlotte opened the book in her lap and tore out the blank page at the back of the book. “Would you write that down for me? That Mellie belongs to me. And Aunt Tish too. It can be an early wedding present.”

  “Not Aunt Tish,” he said. “We have to have a cook here at Grayson.”

  “Then Mellie,” Charlotte insisted.

  He looked at the paper she handed him. “I don’t have pen and ink.”

  Charlotte reached under the bench where she’d laid her writing tools when she started reading. “I was making a list earlier. Of things I need to do before the wedding.” It wasn’t exactly true, but close enough. It was actually a note to Edwin to try to ensure there was a wedding. She dipped the pen nib in the ink and handed it to her father.

  He held the pen in the air above the paper as he hesitated. “I don’t know about this, Charlotte.”

  “You were going to let Mellie go with me when I married, weren’t you?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so, but that was before Selena. I really should speak to her about this. Besides, isn’t there some doubt of the wedding going on as planned in May?”

  “Even if I don’t wed in May, I will wed eventually. And Mellie was promised to me by Mother.” Charlotte spoke the words with quiet firmness.

  “Yes, your mother was always sentimental about the servants. Something Selena says we can’t be. She says it could be we should have found a new place for Mellie years ago when it was apparent you were getting too attached to her.” He frowned as he stared down at the paper while the ink dried on the pen’s nib.

  Charlotte’s heart went cold inside her. How could her father even listen to such a suggestion? That woman had spun a spell over him. Charlotte moistened her lips and managed to keep her voice soft and insistent without letting the panic she was beginning to feel leak through. She had to protect Mellie. She had given Aunt Tish her word. “Mother didn’t think I was too attached. She said it was good to have servants we could depend on. You do remember that she promised Mellie to me, don’t you? A promise she had no doubt you’d keep.”

  He stared across the walkway at the dogwood tree whose buds were already showing white. “I did so love your mother. I planted that tree for her with my own hands on our first anniversary to prove how much. She sat on this very bench and laughed when I showed her the dirt under my fingernail
s. She had just felt the stirrings of the first child she tried to carry for me.” He smiled at the memory, but then the smile slipped off his face. “She lost that baby two weeks later. You and our poor little baby boy were the only two she carried past the first five months. And then the baby boy never drew breath.”

  “I remember,” Charlotte said.

  “Yes, I suppose you do. What were you four, five?”

  “Almost six,” Charlotte said. “He was born in May before my birthday in June.”

  “So many years ago and yet even now I can close my eyes and see that round little face, so perfectly formed. So silent and still. Mayda held him to her breast and whispered the name she’d planned for him as if at the sound of her voice he might yet gasp and begin to breathe. Charles Grayson after me and her father. I didn’t want to use the names. I wanted to save them for the baby son we might yet have, but she would not hear of naming him anything else.” Her father let out a breath heavy with the sadness of his memories. “I had to peel her hands from his tiny body to let Aunt Tish prepare him for burial. Mayda was never the same after that.”

  “But she kept loving us.” Charlotte needed to hear him affirm that.

  “Yes. As much as she was capable. She put too much on you when you were little more than a child, and I suppose I did as well. We should have let you go away to school.”

  “I never wanted to leave Grayson. Grandfather taught me to read and write before he died,” Charlotte said. “And I went to Miss Lucinda’s school in town. I’m not uneducated.”

  “Not in history and letters, but there is an art to being a lady and rules that must be observed by young women in your position.”