The Seeker

by Ann H. Gabhart

  “No. I have ever been a burden to her. Will I be a burden to you? Will you desert me here?”

  “Nay.” Charlotte leaned close to whisper for his ears only. “I never will.”

  “Whatever you speak, speak for all to hear, Sister Charlotte.” “Yea, I beg your forgiveness, Sister Altha. I was merely assuring Brother Landon he would not be a burden here.” Charlotte stood up and turned toward Sister Altha. She met her eyes. “If I must promise a price, I will.”

  “Nay,” Sister Altha said quickly with a wave of her hand. Charlotte was shocked to see a blush crawl up into her cheeks. “Our charity cannot be bought. You surely have learned that while with us, my sister. We take in many children in need.”

  “Yea,” Charlotte said. There was no need to speak of the promise she’d made and kept for Aunt Tish. It lay in the air between them. But now it seemed to be a matter Sister Altha preferred not to recall.

  “Come, we will take the little brother to the Children’s House.” Sister Altha held out her hand to him with as much of a smile as ever crossed her face before she gave the governess an unsmiling look of dismissal. “Good day, Miss Pennebaker.”

  Miss Pennebaker fiddled uneasily with the clasp on her receptacle and didn’t move toward the door. “There is the small matter of the money due me if Miss Vance would be so generous.”

  In spite of the woman’s stiff manner, Charlotte felt some sympathy for her. She had done her duty by Landon even if she didn’t show any fondness for him. “I am sorry, but I have no money to pay you,” she said with regret.

  The woman’s eyes widened in disbelief. “You own Grayson. Over a thousand acres of land and the slaves to work it. You can’t stand there and say you have no money. You’re rich, Miss Vance. Rich!”

  Charlotte stared at Miss Pennebaker, and for the first time since her father’s death realized that what the woman said was true. Charlotte was rich in land. She thought of the rolling hills she’d loved to gaze upon from Grayson’s veranda. She thought of the stands of trees and the green pastures. She thought of the men working the fields and her fond memories halted. She would not be rich in people. As soon as allowed she would sign papers of manumission for any remaining servants. And land without workers filled no coffers.

  “Here at Harmony Hill, we have all things in common,” she said after a moment. She still had her hand on Landon’s shoulder.

  “You have given them Grayson?” Miss Pennebaker sounded shocked.

  “Nay. I am yet a novitiate and not a full member of the Society. But even though as you say I may be wealthy in land, I have no cash. Whatever might have been in the house was lost in the fire and all in the bank—if there is any and I do not know for I didn’t know my father’s business—”

  Miss Pennebaker interrupted her. “Mrs. Vance did.”

  “Yea, but she is not here to reveal what she may have known,” Charlotte said with as much patience as she could muster. Her sympathy for the governess was wearing thin. “Be that as it may, any money in my father’s name is in his lawyer’s hands until the estate is settled. So I do regret that I have naught to give you. Perhaps you can make a claim with the lawyer, Mr. Granville, in the town.”

  “How much do you want?” Sister Altha asked suddenly.

  “Fifty dollars,” Miss Pennebaker answered without hesitation.

  “The Ministry will give you twenty. And at that you may be overpaid. Come with me.” Sister Altha turned on her heel to lead the way out of the room.

  In the hall she looked back at Charlotte who was following along behind Miss Pennebaker with Landon. She didn’t smile, but Charlotte understood her look. Paying the governess was Sister Altha’s way of making amends for the bargain she’d pushed on Charlotte the year before. Charlotte accepted her look with a slight bend of her head. And she knew that when the day came that she left the Shakers—and she suddenly knew without a doubt that day would come—she would deed two hundred acres of her beloved Grayson to them. Not because she owed it, but because here she had found love. From Sister Martha. From Dulcie and Gemma. And now if not love, then acceptance from Sister Altha.

  Sister Altha lifted her chin a bit in acknowledgment of Charlotte’s nod. “You may take the child to the Children’s House, Sister Charlotte. Brother Ballard will help him settle in. He has a joyful way like our Sister Gemma.”

  Landon hung back and grabbed hold of Charlotte’s apron when Brother Ballard reached for his hand. “Why can’t I stay with you? You said you are my sister.”

  “Yea. And I am.” She gave Brother Ballard a beseeching look as she pulled Landon a little apart to speak with him. With a kind smile, Brother Ballard stepped back to give her the moment she needed. She turned her full attention on Landon as she tried to explain. “But the Shakers have many rules, and while we are here we must abide by them. It was difficult for me too at first, but bending my will to their ways has taught me much about the strength of my spirit and helped me develop patience. It will do the same for you in the time you’re here before your mother comes for you.”

  “She won’t come. Not unless she has need of a son again as she did with my second papa. She knew he wanted a son.”

  “You’re right. He did. As much as I tried, I could not fill that spot in his heart that desired a son,” Charlotte admitted as sadness welled up in her.

  “He loved you,” Landon said simply. “He was always telling me about my sister, Charley, and how good it would be when you came home.”

  “But then I didn’t.” The sadness grew and sat like a heavy stone inside her chest.

  “You came home when he needed you. To say goodbye.” The little boy had his fierce look on again. “I didn’t say goodbye to my first papa. He loved me like our papa loved you. He told me he was going to heaven, but I didn’t know he meant that night. I wish I had hugged him longer. I wish I had said goodbye. ”

  A tear slid out of the corner of his eye and trailed down his cheek. It loosed something inside Charlotte and released the tears that she had been carrying around in a tight knot inside her. She knelt down and pulled the little boy close to let their tears mix. After a while, when she could find her voice, she said, “He knew. Just like you said my father knew.” Charlotte rubbed the tears off his cheeks with her apron and then dried her own. “The Lord told him.”

  He watched her and then glanced back at Brother Ballard, waiting patiently a little ways behind them. “Did the Lord tell you to come here?”

  “I don’t think so, but sometimes our feet walk strange paths to get where we need to be.”

  “And where is that?” He frowned as he waited for her answer.

  “I don’t know, Landon, but wherever it is, I promise to let you walk the path with me if you want. But for a while we need to stay here and do as they ask us. Do you think you can put your seafaring spirit aside for a few weeks and listen to Brother Ballard? It is not a bad thing to learn to work.”

  “As long as you stay my sister.”

  “Forever I will be your sister.” She did not allow herself to think of Adam and what her promise might mean if he did come back for her. He had told her he could not be tied down. But the promise had been made. Whatever the cost, she would keep it.

  In October the news came to Harmony Hill that General Bragg’s army was marching up from the south to join with the Confederate troops already deeply entrenched in the central and southern parts of the state in order to push the Union army out of Kentucky. With Kentucky in Southern hands, there would be a clear road to the north and new supplies of horses and food for the Rebel army.

  Only a day after the news of troop movements reached them, General Kirby-Smith’s army rode into Harmony Hill in search of food. The soldiers they’d fed prior to this had been hungry, but they had been respectful as the Shakers brought out meals for them. These soldiers were too tired, too hungry, too thirsty to worry about proper behavior. Brother Quinton said they rushed the pumps like herds of buffalo at a salt lick and cared not who they might tra
mple in the stampede. Then with their thirst slaked, they flocked around the kitchen doors and windows like hungry wolves ready to devour every morsel thrown out to them. Some even leveled their guns at their fellow soldiers when it was concluded the cakes or pies were not divided equally.

  The sisters and brethren worked from before daylight until midnight preparing hundreds of meals, and still it was not enough.

  33

  Adam got off the train in Louisville and headed toward where a man at the station said General Buell’s army was mustering in new troops. He could have hired a buggy. Sam wouldn’t complain about the expense since he’d sent Adam to Kentucky. Several hansom cabs waited at the station with horses hitched and ready, but Adam wanted a horse, not a cab. Usually at least one buggy horse demonstrated some spirit, and Adam could make a deal with the driver, but today he didn’t see a decent-looking animal in the whole row of conveyances for hire.

  When he asked one of the drivers about it, the heavily bearded man looked at Adam as though he might have just fallen out of the sky. His answer was a terse two words. “The war.”

  The war. The war was the reason for everything. Men, who a year before were friends and even brothers, now lined up on opposite sides of the battlefields and fired their muskets at one another. Men not much more than boys died before they even got a good sip of life. Horses were confiscated. Houses burned and gardens left in ruins.

  He stopped walking and looked at the sky to get his directions. Then he turned to stare to the southeast. Charlotte was there. Not that far on the train. In her Shaker dress. Or perhaps she had left Harmony Hill to go back to rebuild Grayson. He didn’t know. If she had written again, no letter had caught up with him.

  After Jake’s funeral, he’d gone from Boston to Washington, D.C., to hear the President’s speech declaring that unless the rebelling states returned to the Union by January first, he would issue a proclamation freeing their slaves. Then Adam had ridden to where the Potomac Army was once more resting and waiting. It seemed even after the victory at Antietam, the Northern generals had seemed content to sit on their hands and once more do absolutely nothing to achieve an end to the conflict. Rumors were swirling that Mr. Lincoln was ready to replace General McClellan.

  When Adam found the encampment of Jake’s Massachusetts Company, many unfamiliar faces occupied the spots around the campfires with new recruits filling the ranks decimated by the last battle at Bull Run. An old sergeant by the name of Hoffman stood up from the camp stool in front of his tent when he saw Adam and came over to offer his sympathies.

  “It was a bad one down there and a worse one after we got back. Lost five to typhoid, three to dysentery, and Jake to the lung rot. And that was just out of our company.” The sergeant shook his head. “I never thought Jake would go down that way. Strong as an ox when he joined up. A good boy. Brave to a fault.”

  “Yes.” A knot formed in Adam’s throat and kept him from saying more.

  Sergeant Hoffman turned his eyes away from Adam back toward the men spread out around them to give him time to bring his emotions under control. After a minute or two, the sergeant said, “Plenty more gonna be following him over to the other side. May the good Lord have mercy on us all.”

  Now as Adam stood staring in the direction of Harmony Hill, he wondered if Charlotte or her Sister Martha was praying for his mother the way he’d asked in his last letter. He had almost written the words to ask them to pray for him too, but he had no right to ask for such prayers. Not after years of pushing the Lord aside as though he were no more important than an old pair of shoes Adam had outgrown.

  Yet as he’d sat by Jake through his brother’s last hard hours, the need to pray burned within him as he leaned his head over on Jake’s bed and wanted to put his own breath inside his brother’s lungs to ease his labored breathing. In his anguish he knew no formal words of prayer other than those he’d been taught as a child. Our Father who art in heaven . . . Now I lay me down to sleep . . . Thank you for the blessing of our food.

  Please don’t let my brother die. That should have been easy to pray. The chaplain who came to pray over Jake the morning before he died said things about how the Lord heard and answered even unuttered prayers, but that the answer was not always healing. He said a child of God had to accept the Lord’s will.

  Adam had wanted to ask him if he thought the war was the Lord’s will, but he had bit his lip and stayed silent. It didn’t seem wise to challenge a man of God at the same time he was seeking prayers for his brother. Then before night fell, Jake let out one last shuddering breath and did not pull in another. The chaplain’s prayers had not protected Jake. But even worse, Adam had not protected his little brother. Adam had stayed on the sidelines and watched while his little brother ran into battle. Always the watcher and not the doer, and now he’d watched his brother die.

  The war. The reason for much death. Adam shook away thoughts of Jake. He had to think about drawing the scenes of war. That was his job. He couldn’t think about how close he was to Harmony Hill and Charlotte. Not yet. There would come another day in a garden, but first the war.

  And it looked as if Sam was right to send him to Kentucky. The man had a nose for where the next battle was going to be. Louisville was overrun with Union troops as General Buell’s forces had just made a fast march from Tennessee to Louisville to stop the advance of the Confederate General Bragg and his troops who were trying to drive the Union out of Kentucky. Lexington had fallen to the Confederates and news was coming in that Bragg had left his main army in Bardstown to go to Frankfort for the purpose of installing a Confederate governor.

  By the time Adam got to the Union’s camp, the soldiers were packing up to move out of Louisville. Reinforced with the twenty-five thousand fresh troops that had been waiting in Louisville, Buell’s army of almost sixty thousand marched toward Bardstown to crush the Rebel advance. The Union could ill afford to lose Kentucky.

  As they moved swiftly southeast across the state, Adam noted with each mile he was getting closer to Harmony Hill. When the Confederates fell back from Bardstown, it began to look like the armies might meet in Harrodsburg, practically in the Shakers’ backyard. That would be sure to disturb the peace they constantly sought.

  Adam couldn’t keep from wondering if Charlotte was seeking that spiritual peace now. Would she welcome him when his feet finally found his way back to her? This near, he would not leave the area without seeing her. It mattered not that every garden he passed was parched from lack of rain and picked clean of even the smallest corn nubbin by the throngs of soldiers passing through. It mattered not that the gardens at Grayson were shriveled and blackened by the fire. The garden he sought to walk with Charlotte was a garden of the heart. But if she had turned to the Shaker way as her last letter seemed to indicate, her feet would not want to walk in such a garden.

  He pushed it from his mind. First the war. First he would draw more illustrations of soldiers and death for Sam to print in his newspaper. Adam had stayed purposely aloof from the soldiers marching in the ranks. He did not want to know their names. He did not want to hear their talk about the sons and daughters waiting for them to save the Union and march home heroes. It was better to just see eyes and noses and mouths with nothing behind them. Not as good for his art, but easier on his heart.

  The sun beat down on their heads and dust rose in clouds around them as they marched in the unusual October heat. The countryside hadn’t seen rain for weeks, and the creeks where the men might have slaked their thirst were bone dry. The few ponds they came across that still held water were little more than pig wallows, but the men drank anyway, sometimes chasing out the hogs in order to fill their cups or canteens. The sight turned Adam’s stomach, and he took tiny sips from his own canteen to make his water last as long as possible.

  They didn’t make it to Harrodsburg. Instead the Confederates had halted their march by a river that yet held water near a little town called Perryville. With the soldiers and horses so in need
of water to drink, the river was more than enough reason for the lines of battle to be formed.

  At daylight, Adam found a spot on a knoll with a good view of the rolling countryside. To one side a big field of drying cornstalks stood in rows waiting to be shocked. Stone fences snaked across the fields giving the possibility of cover to the soldiers. But that would be little help against the artillery the gunners were moving into place.

  Adam had seen it all before. The men lining up, advancing into the musket fire. The smoke rising and settling around the artillery guns. The storm of shell, grape, canister, and minié balls. The terrible sounds of the shells screaming overhead. He could have drawn it from memory before the first shell was fired. Even so, it was his job to see it all again and he wondered uneasily if he’d chosen the best viewpoint to watch and record. He wished Bud Keeling was there, because somehow the reporter always knew where and when the action would happen first.

  Bud had stayed in the East. Where he said Adam should stay. “I’m not saying Kentucky’s not important to the Union,” Bud had said when Adam told him he was going west. “But nothing that happens there is gonna compare to what might happen here. Here’s where General Lee is. That’s who we gotta beat. And if the President ever finds a general who might make that happen, it’ll be here in the East. Here’s where the big battles are gonna happen. Not out there in Kentucky.”

  But Adam had come to Kentucky anyway, and now he sat with his sketchpad waiting for another battle. The day had dawned clear, with the rising sun revealing the fall colors in the trees along the little river. On the far side of the river, the Rebels were forming lines, pulling artillery into place, but neither side seemed to be in a hurry to get the battle underway.

  The morning hours crept by with only a spatter of gunfire now and again to indicate a few skirmishes. The previous day the information had come down to the reporters that the attack was to commence at dawn before the day’s heat drained the men of fighting energy, but then General Buell had been thrown by his horse and injured his back. So instead of riding out to direct the troops, he’d set up headquarters in a house a few miles away from where Adam now sat atop his knoll. Couriers were carrying his orders to the field, so that could be why the troops were slow to move into place.