The Seeker

by Ann H. Gabhart

  Gemma looked puzzled. “I’m not sure of your meaning.”

  “Sister Altha seemed so . . .” Charlotte hesitated as she searched for an acceptable word. “So solemn. I cannot imagine her laughing.”

  “She has many duties and little time for frivolity,” Gemma said. “Plus it is only fitting to maintain an even and solemn countenance so one does not disturb the peaceful air around one with an overabundance of chatter or laughter. Both sins I find need to confess much too often.”

  She pulled open one of the drawers in the chest and lifted out a dress and underclothing. “And now is a time for solemn attention to the task at hand so we won’t miss the midday meal.” She handed Charlotte the clothes. “If you need assistance with your collar and cap, I can supply that after I fetch you some shoes.”

  “Why can’t I wear these?” Charlotte lifted her skirt to show her feet clad in the sturdy side-laced shoes she wore when riding.

  “You will feel better wearing the same as all the sisters.”

  “Can I keep these here in my room?”

  “Nay, such would only be undesirable clutter. Those of the Ministry will store them for you if you feel an attachment to them. It is the Shaker way.” She spoke kindly, but there was no room for argument as she pointed Charlotte toward a small dressing room that opened off the sleeping room. “I will gather up your worldly clothing after you change.”

  Charlotte stripped off her gray riding habit and laid it aside with some regret. She was tempted to leave on her own underclothing, but she had agreed to abide by their rules. She untied the ribbons around her waist and let her pantalettes fall to the floor in a soft cloud of silk before quickly pulling on the plain white cotton drawers with no bit of lace anywhere on them. She had not worn a corset over her camisole, and she was relieved to see there was none in the clothing Gemma had handed her. At least she’d be able to breathe while pretending to be a Shaker. She shed her camisole with its lace and ribbons and pulled the shiftlike undershirt over her head.

  The fabric of the dress was sturdy but soft and faded to a light blue from many washings. It was too large for her, but once she lapped the white collar across her front and tied on the apron, it didn’t much matter that several inches of the waistline were folded under. A mirror not much bigger than her hand hung on the wall. She peered into it as she stuffed her hair up into the cap.

  When she was finished, she stared at her reflection a moment longer as though staring at someone she didn’t know. Had she lost her identity so easily? Just by shedding a few clothes the way a butterfly broke out of a cocoon? But this was not a transformation to beauty. Rather in the opposite direction. From the active pursuit of beauty in every facet to plainness. There would be no party dresses she could not unbutton here. No jeweled combs in her hair. No glittering necklaces or rings. No one would care if freckles appeared on her nose or if her hair curled or hung straight. No one would see more than a glimpse of hair under the cap.

  She suddenly smiled as she spoke to the reflection in the mirror. “Good morning, Sister Charlotte. I do hope I can learn to get along with you for a few weeks.”

  Then she laughed softly as she thought that Adam Wade would have little desire to steal a kiss from the new Charlotte. But it wasn’t the artist she needed to think about. It was Edwin. Perhaps this plain sister would not be so intimidating to him. Perhaps he would look at her and regret the thought of giving up their plans. It was beyond her understanding how he could even consider surrendering the Hastings land to the Shakers. Land passed down from his grandparents. Whatever that Elder Logan had told Edwin, it certainly wasn’t true that Faustine Hastings would have approved of that. She was no doubt turning over in her grave.

  As surely Charlotte’s own mother was. Charlotte took one last peek in the mirror and twisted her mouth to the side to hold back another smile at the glimpse of Charlotte Mayda Vance as a plain and simple Shaker sister. Not the heiress to Grayson. Not the senator’s daughter. A Shaker sister.

  The thought wasn’t nearly as distressing as she might have supposed it would be. Of course it was only temporary. She ran her hands down the long white apron so like Aunt Tish’s, tucked a stray hair up into her cap, and pushed open the door just as Gemma came back in the sleeping room carrying Charlotte’s new shoes. They bore little resemblance to any dancing shoes she’d ever seen, but everyone knew the Shakers danced in worship. A dance she was prepared to learn.

  13

  “It won’t last three months. Once a few shots are fired, those Johnny Rebs in the South will see the futility of their position and come back into the Union like whipped dogs with their tails between their legs.” Sam Johnson sounded sure of his words.

  Adam watched Sam pace in front of him as he spoke. Tall with a bony frame, the man was rarely still in spite of an old knee injury that caused him to limp badly. He claimed to be able to think better on his feet. The pain of movement was incidental. Actually sharpened a man’s thinking, Sam claimed. A mind lacking agility, that’s what should worry a man. Not a crippled knee. Sam had no problem carrying dozens of story ideas for Harper’s Weekly in his head all at once, and he often jumped between them without warning.

  Something he did now—to the chagrin of his secretary whose charge it was to record whatever was said if Sam deemed it important. The only problem for the long-suffering man with the pen and paper sitting across the room at a little desk was that Sam never indicated which words he might later deem important enough to recall. So his aide found it necessary to record everything.

  Sam stopped in front of the table where Adam’s sketches were spread out for his view. As he pushed them to and fro searching through them, Adam had to force himself not to lean forward to rescue them from the man’s impatient hands. Sam had summoned Adam to meet him in Washington, D.C., and hear his new assignments now that war clouds were looming on the horizon. That didn’t mean he’d forgotten Adam’s old assignments.

  “Where’s that Shaker staircase? I told you we needed that.”

  “You want a staircase? Now? With war breaking out?”

  “Not any old staircase. The one that people say rises straight up in the air curling around the wall like it’s attached with glue or something. They say if you stand at the bottom and stare straight up that it’s a good chance you’ll get dizzy from those stairs telescoping away from you.” Sam made a telescope shape with his hands and looked through them toward the ceiling. “Up. Up. A marvel of engineering. Shaker engineering. I’ve heard people say they were almost afraid to step on the risers since they didn’t see how the whole contraption held to the wall. Didn’t trust the glue, I guess. What about you?” Sam lowered his telescoped hands to peer through them toward Adam. “Did you climb up it?”

  “No, I didn’t even see it.”

  “Didn’t see it? That’s why you went down there.” Sam’s voice cranked up a couple of levels as he dropped his hands and frowned at Adam.

  Adam didn’t bother pointing out to Sam that he hadn’t gone to Kentucky on assignment for Harper’s Weekly, but on his own. The Shaker staircase had simply been a suggested side venture, but it never did to contradict Sam. Instead he mumbled, “Sorry, boss.”

  Sam waved away Adam’s apology as if he no longer cared about any of it and turned his attention back to the sketches. “Whew! Guess Dickens was right if all the women look like her. He visited one of their communities in the East when he came to America, you know.” He snatched up the sketch of the old sister Adam had seen on the pathways at Harmony Hill and held it out away from him for a better look. “No feminine charms, he said. Not one. And very few red-blooded men are beyond wanting to see a few feminine charms. Right, Adam?”

  “Absolutely, sir.” Adam pushed the words out quickly before Sam took off on a new tangent. The secretary scribbled frantically on his pad of paper. Adam shifted to a more comfortable position on the settee in the editor’s hotel suite. At first it had bothered him to be seated when the editor was pacing and ranting, but
he’d grown used to it. Now he just listened and tried to pick out the directions the editor most wanted to travel in his weekly newspaper.

  The editor turned to pin Adam to the brocaded back of the settee with his sharp eyes. “I haven’t been hearing about any female problems about you now, have I?” He didn’t wait for Adam to answer. He threw the sketch back down on the table and began pacing again. “You’ve got to keep your mind on business. No time for women. Leastways the kind who want to tie the knot and commence to having a pack of children. You’ll have to wait for that pleasure, my boy. Especially with those Secessionist states stirring the pot. Of course a little bit of war is sure to up circulation. If you find the pictures we need. People like pictures. Nothing but words bores them to tears.”

  “Pictures can bring them to tears too,” Adam said.

  “But those are the tears we want, my boy. Pictures that yank on their heartstrings and open up their purse strings. Open purse strings. That’s what we’re after.” He paused a moment and shot Adam a look. “That and that staircase. Didn’t you say you were within a stone’s throw of the place? There’s that atrociously ugly woman to prove it.” He threw out his arm to wave at Adam’s sketches. “And who’s the girl?”

  He pulled the drawing of Charlotte on her veranda out of the pile, pausing his pacing for a moment to give it consideration. “Why didn’t you draw her face? Nobody cares about a woman’s backside when it’s hidden under all those hoop-de-doops. Looks like an upside-down mushroom.” He peered closer at the sketch. “Can’t even be sure there is a backside under there but the shoulders and neck are quite enticing.” The older man turned back to Adam with a grin that hinted of lechery. “What about it, boy? Can you vouch for her backside?”

  “Now, Sam, she was a lady.”

  “When did that ever stop you? I hear you’ve left a string of broken hearts from here to California and back.”

  “I just draw their pictures, Sam. That’s all.”

  The old man laughed and shook the sketch at him. “Then draw their front sides.”

  “But I wanted you to see the posture of her pensive longing for peace. Can’t you sense her worry about whether the war is going to tear apart her world?”

  “You’re making that up on the spot,” Sam said with another laugh. “That’s why I like you, Adam. You’re quick on your feet. You’re going to have to be to stay out of the fray and bring home the scenes we need. Lincoln’s plan to blockade the Southern ports has got them stirred up if their newspapers are any indication. The gentry down there are equipping regiments. Out of their own pockets. Got to have some deep pockets for that, but what is it they say? Cotton is king. Pockets might empty out if they can’t get around Lincoln’s ships. Rich men’s soldiers won’t get that cotton to the English factories. Their army will turn out to have a thousand arms flailing against the wind with no head. Probably end up shooting each other instead of us Yankees.”

  “That sounds good for us.”

  “For me. But you’ll have to duck bullets to draw it happening. And no yearning backside pictures.” He flipped his fingers against the picture of Charlotte Vance before he dropped it back on the table. It slid off on the floor, but he didn’t lean down to pick it up. “We want to see the gritty truth. If men are fighting, men are going to be dying. Our readers will want to see it all.”

  “I think I’d rather do the yearning for peace ones.” Adam leaned forward and rescued the picture before Sam could step on it.

  “Dead men don’t move. They’ll lay right there and let you draw them however you want.” Sam had the grace to let a flash of sorrow cross his face as he slowed his pacing and sighed deeply. “I’m not saying I’m glad for this, but it’s going to happen. We’re going to have to march an army down there into Virginia, take Richmond back, and let those Rebels know they can’t just up and leave the Union whenever they take a notion. The President never once said he was going to take their slaves away even if that’s what he should have said. No place for slavery in this modern-day world. Those old boys down south are jumping to conclusions without the first thought of wanting peace. So it’s history in the making, my boy, and our job is to capture that history and send it out to the people.”

  “Yes sir.” Adam wasn’t exactly sure what he was agreeing to, but those were the words Sam expected to hear. And he did want to be there to record history in the making while drawing down pay for it. He stood up to leave. He had learned to sense when Sam was through even if he didn’t always know what Sam was through telling him.

  “Best get to it, Adam,” Sam said. When Adam reached down to straighten his sketches and put them back in the portfolio holder, Sam waved him away from the table. “James will pack those up. Some of them might do.”

  “Good to hear,” Adam said. He was still holding Charlotte’s veranda picture. He didn’t seem to want to drop it down on top the others and surrender it to Sam’s careless hand.

  He had other sketches of her back in his hotel room. He must have drawn her from memory at least a dozen times since he’d left Kentucky to come to the capital. Every time he drew a crowd scene, he put her face there. But this was the very first time he’d captured her likeness. He could almost feel the soft curve of her shoulder under his hand when he looked at it. He turned toward the hotel room door carrying the sketch with him.

  Sam stopped him. “Where do you think you’re going with the yearning backside picture?”

  Adam turned back toward him. “You said you didn’t like it.”

  “Artist ears! Always perked up for criticism in everything a man says.” Sam shook his head. “What I like don’t matter a penny’s worth. It’s what our readers like.”

  When Sam reached for the picture, Adam surrendered it reluctantly.

  “Who is she?” Sam asked.

  “A Kentucky senator’s daughter. There’s no need to print her name.”

  “Protecting her, are you?” Sam looked up from the picture at him. “From what? Most young ladies would be thrilled to see their picture in Harper’s.”

  “Without a name she can represent a hundred Southern belles.”

  Sam looked back down at the sketch. “True enough.” Then he was eyeing Adam with a knowing smile. “I think this Southern belle’s charms caught your eye, young Adam.”

  Adam smiled back to try to negate the bit of color climbing into his cheeks. “She was very pretty. Red hair and green eyes. Not your usual fainting belle.”

  “I knew a redhead once. Quite a woman. Would have married her except she found a man with more money.”

  “A mistake I’m sure she rues to this day,” Adam said.

  “He invested in railroads, so I doubt it. She was dripping in diamonds last time I saw her, but the red had turned gray. Old gets us all.”

  “If a bullet doesn’t get us first,” Adam said, turning toward the door again.

  “You stay out of the crossfire, boy. We need pictures, not dead illustrators.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  He was almost out the door when Sam called after him. “No bullets are flying yet, so go on back down there and get that staircase. You keep dragging your feet, somebody’s going to beat us to it. I’ll print it right beside the old Shaker cow you drew. Make a good contrast. Heaven knows why, but readers want to know about those crazy Shakers. But do it fast. Armies are gathering and you don’t want to miss the war.”

  That’s how everybody in the capital was talking. As if the war might only last a few days, weeks at the most. While men were lining up to volunteer to preserve the Union, nobody thought it was going to take much effort. A show of cannons. A few rounds of ammunition. Adam had sketched some of the new recruits gathering in the Army of the Potomac. Young. Fresh. With no idea of what they were heading toward.

  Adam didn’t know either. He’d never been in a war. But he’d read history. His grandfather had insisted that the only way to be ready for the future was to know the past. Plus Adam had talked to Mexican War veterans. Some
of them were lining up to volunteer again alongside the fresh-faced kids. The old warriors had a different look. While they weren’t shying away from the conflict, they were going into it with a stoic knowledge that fighting and dying went hand in hand in a war. And this time the face of the enemy wouldn’t be foreign. This time they would be fighting their brothers and cousins and some of the men who had lined up beside them to fight the Mexicans.

  That was the story he needed to be finding. Not some winding staircase at a Shaker village in Kentucky. His interest in the Shakers had been shoved aside. They’d be there living their strange beliefs after the conflict ended. Now he needed to be where the armies were massing. Where men were choosing North or South.

  Then again it might be good to be back in Kentucky. If ever a state was divided, Kentucky was. Their governor leaned toward Secessionist, but most of the other political leaders waved the Union flag even while they had nothing good to say about President Lincoln. They wanted to ignore the war. Keep trading with the North and living like the South with slaves working their land. Governor Magoffin saw no problem with sitting on the fence. Something it seemed both sides were willing to go along with as long as they could set up their recruiting camps just across the borders to the north and south. The last news report Adam had read said plenty of Kentucky men were walking out of the state in both directions to sign up to fight.

  So maybe Kentucky wouldn’t be a bad place to be. There would be scenes aplenty to keep him busy while the armies were gathering. And he could do that ethereal staircase Sam was so determined to show his readers. It was good to keep Sam happy. Or as happy as was possible.

  Adam smiled a little. A side trip to Grayson might not be out of the question on his way to the Shaker village. Another stolen kiss before he went off to war. He couldn’t remember a girl so haunting his thoughts, but the senator’s daughter was different. He might consider propping his feet up in front of a fire that she was tending. He hoped that pantywaist from next door had gone to the Shakers so Charlotte would forget the asinine idea of marrying him.