The Seeker (6 page)
But the morning sun didn’t ease Charlotte’s worries. For the first time in her memory, she felt out of place in her own house as she got out of bed and dressed for the day. Mellie had slipped in while she slept and filled her pitcher and washing bowl and laid out her clothes, but she’d probably been ordered to the new Mrs. Vance’s aid.
Charlotte ran her hands along the cherry banister as if absorbing the familiar feel of it as she went down the stairs. She loved Grayson. She knew every corner, every floorboard squeak, every angle of sunlight through the windows. It was her house, warm and loving and home. But now a stranger was going to be climbing Grayson’s stairs and inspecting all the rooms and wardrobes not as a guest but with permanence in her step.
Plus the other stranger, the artist, was somewhere under the roof. She might turn a corner, open a door, and encounter him face-to-face at any moment with the truth of her shamelessly allowing him to kiss her vibrating in the air between them. So it was a relief when she went into the kitchen and Aunt Tish told her the man had been up at first light and gone from the house as the sun was rising.
“But he’d best be back here by half past noon or it’ll be his head,” Aunt Tish added with raised eyebrows as she looked up from taking three of the leftover dried apple tarts out of the warming oven and arranging them on a plate for Charlotte. “Miss V done been askin’ where he be when I carried a tray of coffee up to her and the Massah. She done told your papa in my hearin’ that he’d best be tellin’ that man he weren’t to go off paintin’ some lowdown field hand’s face instead of her own. Like as how such might spoil the man’s brush.”
“Unless I miss my guess, Mr. Wade will be painting whatever 49 he likes,” Charlotte said as she sat down at the table. She always ate breakfast in Aunt Tish’s kitchen when her father wasn’t at Grayson, and this morning he’d hardly note her absence with Selena filling his eyes. She liked it in the kitchen with the bacon sizzling in the skillet and the pots boiling on the stove. To Charlotte, it felt like the center of Grayson, where she could see the whole of whatever might be happening.
“Here you are, Miss Lottie. I saved you the ones with the most apples.” Aunt Tish set the plate of sweet tarts in front of Charlotte and poured them both a cup of tea. She wiped her face with her apron, but Charlotte saw the smile that sneaked up from her lips to her eyes.
“Sit down and tell me what’s so funny.”
Aunt Tish lowered herself into the chair opposite Charlotte with a little groan. She’d put on a few extra pounds around her middle over the last years and had trouble with rheumatism in her back. “That Mr. Wade, he ain’t doing nothin’ with a brush.”
“How do you know that?” Charlotte peered at her over the rim of her cup.
“He done been in here drawin’ the likes of me. Can you believe that? Had this great big pad of paper and some pencil sticks. Had me sit right here while he sat there wheres you are. Stared holes plum’ through me, and when I looked down ’fore I got in a mess a trouble for starin’ bold at his white face, told me to keep lookin’ at him. You shoulda seen how he moved his hand fast as anythin’ over that paper.” A look of wonder came over Aunt Tish’s face as she drew quick lines on the tabletop with her fingertip. “Then he turned over the page and did it all ag’in.”
“Did he show you what he drew?” Charlotte was wishing more and more that the kiss in the garden had never happened. Adam Wade sounded like someone she might enjoy getting to know better, but she could hardly stay in his company now without him thinking she was chasing shamelessly after him.
“He done better than that. He give me one of ’em.” Aunt Tish reached under her apron to pull a folded sheet of paper out of a hidden pocket. “I hated to fold it up, but I couldn’t leave it layin’ out where anybody might see it.” She smoothed it out on the table between them.
Aunt Tish stared up at Charlotte from the paper as if Adam Wade had lifted the likeness of her face out of a mirror. And while the sketch was bare bones, just a few lines, there was more to it than just the image of Aunt Tish. In those few strokes he had captured a look in her eyes. One Charlotte had seen often enough herself when Aunt Tish stood out on the back steps and looked beyond at the horizon.
“And he did this in just a few minutes?”
“Ten, fifteen at the most.” Aunt Tish lightly rubbed her flat palm over the paper. “He caught me, didn’t he now?”
“He did.” She thought of him measuring her face with his thumb and fingers the night before, and she wondered what the sketch would have shown about her if he’d drawn the lines. Maybe she was just as glad he hadn’t had a pencil in his hand. “I think there are some old frames up in the attic if you want to get Mellie to climb up there and look for one.”
“I might just do that,” Aunt Tish said as she folded up the paper to slide back in her pocket with great care.
“Where is he now? Do you know?” Charlotte asked before she bit into one of the tarts.
“That weren’t none of my bus’ness.” Aunt Tish stood up to fork the bacon out of the pan.
Charlotte eyed her broad back. “But you know.”
Aunt Tish didn’t say anything for a long moment as she stirred a pot of grits and lifted the lid on the coffeepot. Charlotte didn’t ask her again. She just waited, and finally as if Aunt Tish could feel Charlotte’s eyes on her, she sighed and turned around. “I don’t know if’n that’s where he really went or why he would want to.” She hesitated again.
Charlotte lifted her shoulders in a show of unconcern. “It doesn’t really matter to me where he went. I was simply curious about what he might be sketching next.”
“Uh-huh,” Aunt Tish said with one peaked eyebrow that showed she was seeing right through what Charlotte was saying. “Looks to me like as how he done caught your eye. Guess that’s why it’s so odd him askin’ the way to Mr. Edwin’s place.” “Edwin’s?” Charlotte didn’t even attempt to hide her surprise. She shifted uneasily in her chair. He’d promised not to kiss and tell.
“I couldn’t figure him wantin’ to be drawin’ Mr. Edwin’s long skinny face, but then I couldn’t figure him wantin’ to draw my round black one neither. I overheared him talkin’ to Willis as he was leavin’. He was wantin’ a horse. Course when Willis come in later for his breakfast, he was tellin’ how the man was full of questions on how to get to the Shakers’ town too. Askin’ all manner of questions about what Willis knew about them and the way they lived and such.”
“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.”
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 interested 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.