The Seekers (12 page)

“I’m not surprised you had trouble raising the money,” Philip told him. “Such exploration is absolutely pointless.”

“Indeed? Spain doesn’t think it’s pointless. She’s been at it for several centuries.”

“America’s prosperity rests on the continuing development of eastern commerce.”

“Partly, only partly,” Jefferson argued. “A contemporary man must have manufactured articles—including a shirt on his back. But he also needs food in his belly. The northeast is poor farmland, and the south is going to cotton. The west, by contrast, is unbelievably fertile. We simply can’t ignore that kind of natural wealth—”

As he spoke, his gaze lingered on the hazy blue hills in the west. Then he smiled again. “But let’s not quarrel over honest differences of opinion, Mr. Kent. The fact is, many Americans feel just as you do. That’s why I wasn’t able to implement my transcontinental plan in ’93.”

Philip said, “I also recall Michaux proved to be a spy intent on causing friction between America and Spain.”

Jefferson looked rueful. “That’s correct. When the less than pure-hearted botanist was recalled by President Washington, we had something of a scene about it. Just one of many,” he added, with a trace of sadness. “Still, if I’m ever in a position to encourage a similar venture, I will. I believe our country’s true future lies not in the east but the west.”

For the first time, Elizabeth broke from the expected feminine role of polite listener. “That’s exactly what Abraham has been saying, Mr. Jefferson!”

“Then I’d encourage you to follow your instincts, young man. They’re correct.”

“I am
dis
couraging him!” Philip exclaimed, limping off to emphasize his pique. “I think the idea is utterly foolish.”

“I don’t know that either of us will have much of a hand in the decision, Mr. Kent.” Jefferson nodded to Abraham. “Youth must be given its day—and its freedom to choose. Ah, but I think we’ve quite covered the subject—let me give you a tour of the grounds. And then, if you don’t mind the dust and noise, I’ll show you a little of the house, too.”

He lifted one hand toward Philip, palm up; it was both an invitation and a gesture of conciliation. Although Philip still looked flushed and upset, he didn’t prolong the argument. He fell in step beside his wife as Jefferson led the way.

Abraham and Elizabeth dropped a few steps behind, allowing their hands to touch. She whispered softly, “Mr. Jefferson said exactly what I hoped to hear, Abraham.”

“And I.”

“Those dreadful, stuffy people in Philadelphia—so rich and smug—I don’t want to be like them. I don’t want to spend my life in drawing rooms—or on a plantation veranda, for that matter—murmuring lies with a smile on my face.”

“Speaking of lies, I had the eerie feeling Mr. Jefferson recognized you.”

“I suppose he would have known my father, and I’m told I resemble him.”

“I feel a little sorry for Papa. I expect he’s kicking himself for his decision to come here.”

“He only did it as a courtesy to Mama,” Elizabeth sniffed, scornful. “Your father was positively rude. There’s no other word for it.”

“Rude because he fears Jefferson’s right,” Abraham said. His eyes were drawn to the blurred hills of the Blue Ridge in the west. But his mind went back to Supply Pleasant’s mocking comments about the little series of exhibitions arranged for his benefit. How true the editor’s jibe had turned out to be!

Ah, but Jefferson had given Philip a comeuppance. Under the spell of the Virginian’s words, with Elizabeth at his side in the sweet-smelling lane between rows of trees, Abraham abruptly voiced a decision. “I wavered a little in Philadelphia. But now I’m convinced we should do what we talked about doing in the first place.”

“I am too, my darling.”

He turned, noting that his father and stepmother were a good distance away in the orchard’s dappled shade.

Mr. Jefferson was pointing out something up in the branches of a cherry tree. But Philip was staring back over his shoulder at the young lovers who stood close together beneath leaves that seethed softly in the warm wind.

Abraham began, “I have only one reservation—”

Her blue eyes flared. “You’re afraid to inform your father of your decision, is that what you mean?”

He was, a little. But it wasn’t what troubled him. “You haven’t been in the best of health on this trip. A life somewhere other than a comfortable city might be too difficult for you.”

“Abraham—”

“No, hear me out. If I were responsible for putting you into unhappy circumstances, I’d carry it on my conscience all my days.”

“I am strong and completely healthy!” Elizabeth said, with such fervency that Abraham was alarmed. She protested too much. It was another indication of her almost fanatic desire to escape the confinement of the Kent house.

She seized his hand. “I’ll go with you anywhere you want to go. And I’ll thrive, I promise you. I’ll thrive!”

What she said failed to put all his fears to rest. But her expression was so intense, he didn’t dare voice further doubt.

So, with part of the burden temporarily lifted by her declaration, he closed his fingers around hers. Together they hurried to catch up to the older people.

That night, in the sitting room of the suite they had taken at the best lodging house in Charlottesville, Abraham and Elizabeth announced their determination to stick by their original plan.

Again Philip burst into a rage; again he hammered them with the same arguments. Hadn’t they seen the desirability of being welcome among the rich and powerful—?

Losing his temper, Abraham admitted that such a life had its charms—for those who valued them. “Perhaps there’s a reason you value them more than I, Papa.”

“Explain that remark!”

“There’s still a touch of the aristocrat in your blood. Your father
was
an English lord, after all—”

Livid, Philip whirled on Peggy. “This is your fault!”

“Just a moment, sir!” she exclaimed.

“Don’t deny it! You permitted him to be exposed to Jefferson’s democratic rot!”

“You agreed to come, Philip! No one coerced you!”

“Don’t blow Mr. Jefferson’s part in this all out of proportion,” Abraham put in. “He did no more than articulate what I’ve been thinking for a long time.”

“He did more than that,” Elizabeth said. “He told the truth!” To Philip: “Which you, in your narrowness, can’t stand to hear!”

Philip glared.
“You damned, ungrateful—”

“Stop it, sir!”
Peggy cried, jumping up. She was angrier than Abraham had ever seen her.

Philip limped to Gilbert, who sat on a cane-backed chair, huge-eyed and frightened. He slipped his arm around the boy’s shoulders. “At least I’ve one son who won’t turn his back on me.”

“Oh, God, sir—that’s
vicious!
” Elizabeth practically screamed. “The closer you come to being defeated, the more your cruel, vindictive nature reveals itself!”

Philip’s hand whipped upward, as if he meant to strike her. She ran to Abraham. Slowly, and with obvious effort, Philip lowered his hand to his side.

“Cruel?” Philip repeated in a strangled voice. “Vindictive? I thank you for your compassionate judgment. For your gratitude”—his glance at his older son was scathing—“I thank you both. Gilbert, come with me.”

“Where, Papa?”

“Downstairs. I’ll buy you a sweet from the landlord before you’re tucked in.”

Stunned and hurt, Abraham watched his father limp out with the boy. Peggy began to cry softly.

Elizabeth moved closer to Abraham, pressing her breast against him. She slipped her arms around his waist, squeezed hard, making a strange little sound in her throat. A suppressed laugh? he thought, horrified. No, surely not—

She buried her head against his chest. He couldn’t see her eyes, ugly with triumph.

Philip didn’t speak to either of them for the first forty-eight hours of the dismal journey home.

I
N HIS YOUTH, PHILIP KENT’S
connection with a religious faith had been all but nonexistent. Because of her brief career as an actress in Paris, his mother was automatically excommunicated from the Catholic church.

Philip’s first wife, Anne, the daughter of a Boston lawyer, was a Congregationalism. But she and her husband had seldom attended services. His second wife had been raised in Virginia’s aristocratic Episcopal church, but had adopted her first husband’s faith—the dour Presbyterianism of the Scots—following her marriage.

Thus it was another sign of Philip’s rising status and growing conservatism that by the time Abraham and Elizabeth were married in midsummer of 1796, Philip had reverted to British-rooted Anglicanism. The Kents owned a high-sided box pew directly across the aisle from the one belonging to the family of Mr. Revere’s eldest son in the small but lovely Christ Church in the city’s North End.

Here, on a mellow Saturday in late July, the rector united Abraham Kent and Elizabeth Fletcher, watched by an impressive gathering of notables.

Elderly Mr. Revere sat in his son’s pew. Philip’s friend General Knox, the obese ex-Secretary of War, had traveled down from Maine, John Adams and his wife Abigail, just returned from Philadelphia, were present. So was the head of the Rothman house, dark-eyed and handsome Royal, and his attractive Jewish wife.

A wealthy iron-maker named George Lumden had come all the way from Connecticut, along with his red-haired, bright-cheeked wife Daisy. The bridal couple understood Philip had helped Lumden desert from his British regiment during the troubled days before Lexington and Concord. Lumden had been quartered in the house of Abraham’s mother, where Daisy was a lowly cook. Now she was rich.

Christ Church, in short, was so packed with persons of wealth and influence that ordinary well-wishers such as Mr. Supply Pleasant were hard put to find a single seat in a rear corner.

Abraham hardly noticed the dignitaries, however. His attention was divided between Elizabeth and his father.

Elizabeth’s bridal gown and veil were the most expensive obtainable. Yet beneath that veil, her cheeks lacked color, as if the wedding were more strain than pleasure.

Philip looked just as he had for weeks—glum and displeased.

Peggy had been responsible for virtually all the wedding arrangements. She sat in the family pew with perfect poise. Yet her face showed signs of fatigue and tension. Philip’s face might have been hewn from Maine granite as he performed the novel function of giving Elizabeth away to his own son and then retired to the pew, limping yet somehow haughty.

Only thirteen-year-old Gilbert seemed totally delighted. Gilbert had shot up in height without adding weight. His skin was the color of parchment. People often commented privately that Gilbert Kent resembled a worried, emaciated old man more than he did an adolescent.

But all that dimmed from Abraham’s awareness as he stood beside Elizabeth. Her eyes sought his from time to time, large and startlingly blue despite the gauzy veil covering her face. He wished he could speak to her. Comfort her. Instead, he was forced to stand rigid, then kneel, then rise again while the rector droned his way through the service.

Unhappy about his father’s attitude and concerned for his bride, Abraham got a jolt as the rector began reading scripture.

“So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.”

The words struck a responsive chord in Abraham’s memory. Wasn’t that the very passage he’d tried to recall months ago? At the time, he’d been unable to remember either the precise text or its source—Saint Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians. A slight flush tinged his cheeks as he realized how widespread the knowledge of his rift with his father must be. Otherwise, why would the rector have selected this particular passage?

Sunshine slanted through large windows into the white-walled brilliance of the sanctuary. Elizabeth’s fair hair shone beneath her veil. Her quick, sidelong glance told Abraham she too understood the significance of the text—and his discomfort.

“For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh—”

Abraham longed to turn and see how Philip was taking it. He didn’t dare.

“—let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself, and the wife see that she reverence her husband.”

The rector closed his Bible, began to pray. In a tangle of emotion—soaring love, depressing guilt—Abraham steeled himself to endure the rest of the ceremony. He wanted it over so that he could speak to his father. The need had all at once grown almost compulsive.

The rector might as well have been praying in a foreign tongue for all the attention Abraham paid. Something else was troubling him now.

Shame.

Here he was, standing in God’s house accepting a white-gowned young woman as his spouse—and he had already known her carnally. Sinfully, the rector would declare. The mere thought undercut the joy of the occasion, and increased his uneasiness.

Well,
he said to himself at last,
I suppose even among these respectable people, there are few who have totally clean hands and a spotless conscience.
His father, for example, had killed other human beings in order to survive. Didn’t the Bible promise that Christ would forgive error? Bless those who came to His altar with a humble and contrite heart?

Never what could be called a devout person, Abraham still found himself saying a short, fervent prayer. A prayer begging Heaven to grant him forgiveness and, more important, a good beginning to his life with his new wife—

The organ pealed. Lifting Elizabeth’s veil to give her a decorous kiss, Abraham saw her lids flutter, as if she were faint. When he touched his mouth to her cheek, he was shocked by the chill of her skin. And he felt her trembling.

As he stood back, she smiled, but wanly. With a stab of dread he wondered whether his prayer would go unheard because they had both sinned.

In the dusk, the house on Beacon Street blazed with lamplight, rang with the voices of the guests. The voices grew louder with every quart of rum added to the great crystal bowls of punch. In a corner of the dining room, a small string orchestra scraped away, adding to the din.