The Seekers Page 6

  “Damned odd!”

  Abraham set his unfinished glass aside. “Sir, I’d like to ask that we postpone the rest of this discussion.”

  “Until when?”

  “Until I’ve had a chance to think things out.”

  Abraham was uncomfortable in the evasion. But he couldn’t bear to continue the talk—the argument—now.

  His father was growing too angry. It showed in the seethe of his next sentence.

  “I do hope you haven’t entirely closed your mind against me.”

  “No”—Abraham faced away quickly to conceal the he—“no, of course I haven’t. Good night, Papa.”

  Philip rose and walked into the shadows near the front windows. He remained gloomily silent as his son left the room.

  iii

  “Good night, Mr. Abraham,” said the nasal-voiced octogenarian who served as footman in the Kent house. Climbing the stairs to his old room in the third story—a room only occupied for a short time before he left for Pittsburgh and Wayne’s service—Abraham called a reply over his shoulder. The reply was more grumble than anything else.

  Yes, he had lied to his father. No point in denying that. On the long, arduous journey home, he had thought a good deal about the future. He wasn’t content to fit pliably into the mold prepared for him by Philip Kent.

  In many ways service in the northwest had been an unsettling experience. It had shown him the world was not confined to paper and presses—all he had known as a child. His most vivid early memory of his father was sensory: the smell of ink in the first loft Philip had occupied; a loft above the chandler’s store operated by the patriarch of the powerful Rothman family, now respected Boston bankers.

  Some of what Abraham had told his father was true. He didn’t yet know what he wanted to do with his life. Not in detail, that is. His central goal was much as he’d stated it: to strike out on his own. That was clearly imitative admiration of Philip—though he realized his father would always refuse to see it as such. God, how the man had changed in just three years—!

  During Abraham’s first twenty-four hours in the house, he’d literally gaped at the lavish new furnishings—the obvious signs of Philip’s continuing ability to pyramid his profits from his initial business venture: an investment in shares in privateering vessels during the Rebellion. The venture had cost Abraham the mother he didn’t remember. She had been abducted by one of the privateer captains, and had perished at sea trying to escape from her kidnapper.

  Abraham really hadn’t appreciated how rich Philip had become until he’d been away from Boston a while, living in altogether different and less luxurious surroundings. Following his return, however, he very quickly found the wealthy household stultifying; too formalized and proper. That spurred him to make up his mind to go his own way.

  Because he didn’t want to hurt his father, he had tried to hide that truth just now. But he couldn’t hide it from himself. So there remained two obstacles for him to overcome.

  The immediate one of convincing Philip that he deserved the right to shape his own destiny.

  And the more difficult because less clear-cut one of determining what that destiny ought to be.

  With a shake of his head, Abraham realized he’d paused on the second-floor landing. As he started up toward the third, he heard his stepmother’s voice murmuring in Gilbert’s room. He called the obligatory good night. Then, aware of Peggy hurrying to the door to speak to him, he rushed on up the steps into the relative gloom of the cramped upper story.

  Peggy didn’t call out to summon him. She was a wise woman, and he admired her wisdom. She would sense from his quick passage upstairs that the interview with Philip hadn’t gone well, and he wanted to retire undisturbed.

  Servants had lit a small fire in the grate in his room. He could smell the wood smoke as he touched the latch, thrust the door inward—

  “My God—!”

  “Sssh!” Elizabeth Fletcher put a warning hand to her lips. “Don’t be a ninny and make noise or you’ll spoil everything.”

  Shaking a little, Abraham stepped into the room, closed the door.

  “What the devil are you doing here, Elizabeth? Dressed like that—it—it isn’t proper.”

  “Oh, don’t start talking like the others!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “I’ve already had another tedious lecture from Mama this evening.”

  She was standing barefoot before the hearth. Thus Abraham could see—most disturbingly—the details of her figure through the filmy material of her nightdress. Her young woman’s breasts were clearly defined, nipples and all. And—was her pose deliberate?—he even glimpsed the area between her legs where the clearer outlines of her thighs joined, blurring into a hint of—Quickly, he looked away.

  “Please do keep your voice lowered,” she whispered. “Before I crept down the hall, I shut my own door with a great show of going to bed.”

  She walked slowly toward the turned-down coverlets, plumping herself on them. “Anyway, why shouldn’t I be here? We’re not brother and sister.”

  “I know, but—”

  “And I’m already condemned as perfectly scandalous by the rest of them”—the pale blue eyes challenged him—“excluding you, I trust.”

  “Yes. Yes, certainly,” Abraham told her, dissembling desperately. He felt both awkward and terrified.

  She patted the bed next to her leg.

  “Then sit with me, and talk. There’s no one else I can talk to in this house, you know.”

  He continued to stand motionless. She brushed back a lock of fair hair, her expression by turns defiant and devilish.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never been alone with a woman, Abraham Kent. Not after three years in the army.”

  “Why, I—I’ve been with a woman several times.” The truth of it was, it had happened just once. In the village of Cincinnati, on his way home, he had paid a whore. At the time the whole business had been quick and embarrassing, though in retrospect it had a certain nostalgic charm.

  “So do sit down!”

  He stared at her a moment longer, seeing something strange, even wicked, shining in her blue eyes. It was a reckless unconcern for propriety that lent her lovely face an almost unholy radiance in the flicker from the grate. Was this what she’d inherited from the Fletcher fellow who had carried on so disgracefully before his death?

  The thought frightened Abraham all the more. Yet he didn’t pull away, or order her out. Instead, he eased himself gently onto the bed. Elizabeth seized his cold hands in her warm ones. He felt the first hardness of arousal.

  “Abraham,” she said, her face close enough so that he could smell the sweetness of her breath, “you understand what they’re trying to do to both of us, don’t you?”

  “They?”

  “Well, chiefly your father. I didn’t understand it myself for the longest time. Then, the older I got, the clearer it became. I’ve known the truth for—oh, almost two years.”

  “The truth about what?”

  “About what your father wants. It’s very simple. He wants everyone who lives under this roof—me, and now you—to bend to his notions of respectability. I admit he’s been kind to me over the years. Yet in a way, I hate him.”

  “Elizabeth, that’s a damned ghastly thing to say—”

  “I can’t help it—that’s how I feel. Don’t you realize he wants to trap both of us in the same trap? Neither of us must let that happen—we’re not cut out for it!”

  “What do you propose we do, may I ask?”

  “We must fight him, Abraham. Secretly. Together—”

  Suddenly she leaned against him, letting him feel her breasts through the thin gown.

  Then she took his hand and placed it over one breast and squeezed his fingers, all the while staring at him with those strange, pale eyes.

  iv

  That moment destroyed any doubts Abraham Kent might have had about Elizabeth’s purpose in coming to his room so furtively. By means of an act Philip would be sure to find
reprehensible, she would defy the authority he sought to exert over her.

  Abraham had felt some of the same pressure in the painful interview with his father. Thus he was quite willing to let the eager instincts of his young man’s body have their way, joining the girl in this private, ultimately pleasurable form of protest.

  To his surprise, he discovered she wasn’t a virgin. Her gown tossed aside, her pale thighs spread to reveal a gilded place, she kissed and teased him as expertly as that Cincinnati whore. She drew him down, then guided him with practiced hands curled around his maleness. As the rhythm of the coupling intensified, she groaned louder and louder against his ear. Wantonly, she locked her legs around the small of his back. The ferocious outpourings shook them both almost simultaneously.

  Afterward, under the coverlets, she nestled naked in the curve of his arm. When he questioned her about her experience, she only laughed brightly and said it was of no importance. She rolled against him, gripping his cheeks with both palms while those intense blue eyes probed.

  “We mustn’t let them destroy us, Abraham. We mustn’t.”

  Limp from their union and captivated by her presence, he found it easy to say, “We won’t.”

  “Promise?”

  He heard a grotesque echo of Gilbert’s voice when she spoke, another echo in his own reply.

  “Yes, Elizabeth. I promise.”

  She uttered a small, satisfied laugh and leaned back against his arm.

  She stayed with him an hour or more, until the house was utterly still, and then stole away. In the weeks that followed, as the new year of 1796 opened, she visited him by night whenever she could. No one in the house seemed to suspect, because the lovers carefully avoided one another except at those times when normal household activities such as meals brought them together.

  But not many days had passed in January before Abraham realized that his problems had taken on a new dimension.

  He was no longer merely defying his father.

  He was falling in love with Elizabeth Fletcher.

  Chapter IV

  The Storm Breaks

  i

  DURING LATE JANUARY AND into February, Abraham’s relationship with his father remained in a state of truce. He agreed to work regular hours at Kent and Son—the firm was expanding so fast that sufficient help couldn’t be found—but at the same time, he made clear to Philip that his decision shouldn’t be construed as a permanent one.

  To reinforce the point, Abraham insisted on menial work and menial wages. He didn’t want other employees thinking he was taking advantage of his status as the owner’s son.

  Despite all the conditions Abraham set, Philip seemed happy with the arrangement. His face showed his pleasure whenever he walked into the press room and saw Abraham black-handed and smeary-cheeked from manipulating the leather balls that inked the type forms, or lugging huge stacks of newly cut paper.

  Although new inventions were being introduced at an astonishing rate—duly reported in the columns of the Bay State Federalist—the equipment of Kent and Son remained similar to that on which Philip had first learned his trade in a shop in London in the 1770s. Kent’s now owned four large flatbeds, each driven by human muscle applied to a screw lever. The presses were located on the first floor of the three-story structure near Long Wharf. Their weight had already caused a noticeable sag in the floor.

  On the second story Philip maintained his own bindery, plus warehousing space. Kent and Son had just printed an inexpensive edition of Mr. Noah Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller. This instructional book for school children was already more than a decade old. But it showed every sign of remaining the standard text for generations to come, and the warehouse was piled high with copies of the Kent version.

  The building’s third floor held Philip’s cramped, rather dingy private office, a smaller press for his weekly newspaper, and another, even dingier cubby occupied by the paper’s editor, Mr. Supply Pleasant.

  Mr. Pleasant had advanced to journalism from a career as a public letter writer hired for a few pence by the illiterate, or by those who wanted their correspondence inscribed in a fine, graceful hand. Abraham quickly developed a liking for the graying, potbellied editor. Whenever he had a free moment, he climbed the stairs to talk with Pleasant and scan the stories being set in type by Pleasant’s one assistant.

  Pleasant, in turn, soon sensed Abraham’s dissatisfaction with his work downstairs. He raised the subject one blustery day in February.

  “Your father’s delighted that you’re working for Kent’s, Abraham.”

  “It’s only temporary, I assure you.”

  “The book trade isn’t to your liking?”

  “No, that’s not quite it. What I don’t like is being expected to spend my life in the book trade.”

  Supply Pleasant leaned back in his chair, scratched his nose with a quill that left an ink stain between his eyes. He peered over the top of his steel spectacles. “Then what career do you have in mind? Medicine? The law?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A year’s study at Harvard might help you decide.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Well, many a young man takes a while to find his way. But surely you have some idea—”

  “Frankly, Mr. Pleasant, about all I’ve been able to determine so far is what I don’t want. I know I’m not a bookman or a scholar. I’m damned if I’d make a good soldier, either—”

  Admitting all that was hard. In fact, he was vaguely ashamed that his accomplishments in Boston thus far consisted of doing his job without too many mistakes, and conducting half a dozen furtive meetings with Elizabeth. That last, and the attendant deception of his father and stepmother each secret hour required, were hardly things to be proud of; yet he was so completely and dizzily in love with the fair-haired girl, all else seemed unimportant.

  Supply Pleasant chewed the stem of his quill a while, then picked up a stack of neatly inked foolscap sheets. “Strikes me you’re like a beggar at a banquet, Abraham.”

  “How so, Mr. Pleasant?”

  “You’re confronted with so many rare dishes, you don’t know which to pick first. The country’s a veritable cornucopia of opportunity—a veritable cornucopia!” Pleasant had a passion for flowery phrases, in conversation as well as in the paper. He wrote every word of the five columns on each of the four sixteen-by-twenty-inch pages of the Federalist.

  He handed the foolscap sheets to the younger man. “Sit ten minutes with this. You’ll see what I mean.”

  “What is it?”

  “A feature I’ve been preparing for some time. A review, if you will, of the remarkable accomplishments of our young country. Of course,” Pleasant added after another bite of the quill, “my employer exercises his right to edit my copy. There are subjects which can’t be mentioned. The very sensible metric measurement system, for example. It’s certain to become a world standard—certain! But it’s deemed an invention of the devil by good Federalists like your father. While other nations go ahead and adopt it, I predict we shall not—simply because the French Jacobins thought it up. Also—”

  He pointed at the sheets with his quill.

  “Mr. Jefferson’s new plow. Experts claim it will revolutionize farming. Not only does it break the soil, it lifts and turns it aside more efficiently by means of the mold-board Jefferson added. I’ve put in some copy on the plow, but I’m sure Mr. Kent will scratch it out.”

  “Don’t you resent that sort of interference, Mr. Pleasant?”

  “Naturally I resent it.”

  “Then why don’t you protest? Or quit? The first amendment to our Constitution in ’ninety-one guaranteed a man’s freedom to speak—or publish—what he wishes.”

  “That’s exactly how it is—Mr. Kent publishes what he wishes,” Pleasant said with a resigned smile. “I don’t quit because I like newspapering. And I’m not shrewd enough on matters of financing to operate my own gazette. You’re too young to realize that much of life is compromise, Abra
ham. My idealism doesn’t extend to my belly, which is empty several times a day, regular as a clock. Besides, your father and I have reached a state of accommodation. He only interferes on subjects related to politics.”

  “But slanted news is dishonest!”

  “No doubt you’re right. However, don’t forget it was propaganda, not straight news, that rescued us from the morass of the unworkable Articles of Confederation and gave us our Constitution. If Messrs. Jay and Hamilton and Madison hadn’t published their eighty-odd Federalist essays in the New York papers a few years ago, we might still be a gaggle of fractious states instead of a reasonably stable federal union. Like all things, journalism has both its lofty and ignoble sides.”

  Abraham wasn’t persuaded. But he was interested in the article Supply Pleasant had handed him, intrigued by its title and subheadings:

  THE YOUNG COLOSSUS!

  A Succinct Review of the Conditions

  Generating Unparalleled Prosperity

  Under Our Federal Government!

  Amazing Advancements

  In The Mechanical Sciences!

  Expansionist Fever Points To

  Vast Population Increase!

  “To return to my original point,” Pleasant said, “there is enough happening in the United States to provide a young fellow with twenty lifetimes of satisfying labor. Give that a scan and you’ll see I’m right. Now I must get to work and finish this review of The Mysterious Monk. I saw it last night at Powell’s theater. A most diverting Gothic melodrama—”

  Abraham hardly heard. Carrying the sheets in his blackened fingers, he retired to the back stairs of the building, found a little light under a grimy window, plucked an apple from his leather apron and began to read.

  For a while he couldn’t get past the opening sentence. He kept seeing Elizabeth’s lovely and defiant blue eyes.

  ii

  Finally Abraham managed to read the article to the end. Mr. Pleasant’s piece was indeed a paean to the prosperity and intellectual achievement that seemed to be sweeping the nation.