The Gifted (13 page)

It was a promise Jessamine had clung to. One that she had believed. But one that death had ripped from her heart. Now Jessamine didn’t even know the name of her father or mother. She knew her own name—Jessamine Brady. But her granny’s last name wasn’t Brady. It was Kendall. The name was written on the inside of the front cover of her grandmother’s Bible. Ida Kendall. But there were no other names. No mention of marriage or children. Only that name written in the front. The old preacher had known Jessamine’s name, but he claimed to know nothing more when Jessamine questioned him.

“She was your grandmother. That I know. Great-grandmother I’m thinking,” the old man said as he waited with her for the men he’d brought with him to finish digging her grandmother’s grave out behind the cabin. “And your name is Brady. Jessamine Brady, but I never heard her say the first word about your parents. I’m sorry, child, but your grandmother didn’t talk about what she didn’t want to talk about. She was a fine woman, but she never entrusted her story to me. Nor yours.”

“She said my mother died when I was a baby,” Jessamine told the preacher. “But I have a father. I’ll stay here and wait for him to come.” She sat up straight in her grandmother’s favorite chair and crossed her arms over her chest.

She was ten. It seemed possible to her. She could fish in the stream. She could dig up and plant the garden. She could find fallen branches in the woods for the stove. But the old preacher told her she couldn’t stay at the cabin. That she’d have to go to the Shaker village.

Now she knew he was right. She had been too young to stay in the woods alone. But at the same time she sometimes wondered if the prince who had loved her mother had come back to her grandmother’s cabin and found her gone. The one who had passed the storytelling blood down to her.

But made-up stories had no purpose in a Shaker village. Such books were forbidden as a frivolous waste of time. One could read the Bible and books that told Mother Ann’s story. The Millennial laws were read at least once a year and bits of stories from newspapers were read aloud during some meetings in the family houses. How Jessamine longed to have the newspapers in her hands, to let her eyes explore every story on the pages and not only the stories deemed suitable for her ears by the Ministry. She wished for a pen to write her words in the white borders of the pages.

A couple of years ago, after Jessamine confessed her desire to write down the words of a story, Sister Sophrena instructed her to write songs instead. Songs were a way of letting the words out of her heart that would bless her brethren and sisters. Jessamine took the paper and pen Sister Sophrena gave her with every intention to do as she was told. She planned to sit quietly and allow Mother Ann to gift her with a worship song, but when no song words rose in her mind, the blank page became too big a temptation. Words spilled from her pen, writing about a boy finding a bird with a broken wing. He gathered seeds and berries to feed the plain brown bird and carried it in his pocket to protect the injured bird from the hawks and foxes. At last the bird could fly again and the boy opened his hands to let the bird go.

Jessamine had paused in her writing to ponder whether to end her story there or to turn the bird into a magical creature ready to grant the boy his fondest wishes. All might have been well if Sister Edna had not come into the retiring room and caught Jessamine.

When the woman demanded to see what she was doing, Jessamine had handed over the paper with great reluctance. Sister Edna could not have possibly read more than three lines when she squawked like a goose having its feathers plucked for a pillow. Without reading another word, the woman ripped the paper to shreds, taking no care to keep the pieces from falling all over the floor.

After she dropped the last of the paper bits, she brushed the palms of her hands together as though pleased to be finished with the task. “Thinking on pretend stories is a sinful wasting of one’s time. You need to concentrate on noble things of the spirit. Think on Mother Ann and her precepts.”

“But we pretend in worship. We fill invisible baskets with pomegranates. We pretend to catch balls of love thrown down from heaven by Mother Ann. We even listen with raptness when one of the brethren claims to be an Indian chief and starts speaking in a language none of us knows.”

Her words brought forth another squawk from Sister Edna. “You surely can’t mean to compare your scribbled words with those true and perfect gifts of the spirit sent to us from Mother Ann.” The woman’s eyebrows almost met over her eyes as she glowered at Jessamine. “Be careful, Sister Jessamine, that you do not step into a bog of sin that will swallow you up. The gifts of worship are real and true and to be embraced with joy. The spirit will not be mocked.”

“But—”

“Not one more word,” Sister Edna said as she turned to leave the room. Her whirling skirt sent the bits of paper flying under the beds and all about the room. The woman paused at the doorway to look back at Jessamine. “Pick up every piece and throw each sinful word into the stove where the fire will devour them. Then it would be well for you to be prayerful that your sinful thoughts will not hold your feet too closely to fires of retribution for such wrong behavior.”

After she was gone, Jessamine looked down at the scraps of paper scattered across the floor like flakes of snow and mourned her lost story. Slowly she picked up every piece, but she didn’t throw them in the fire as ordered. She was alone in the room. There was no one to see her tie her handkerchief around the bits of paper and secrete the story in her apron pocket.

For days she’d carried the story around, carefully concealing it each time she changed clothes. The story built in her mind until it was almost as if the bird she imagined had come to life and was actually confined within her handkerchief. Then one day while in the woods with a group of sisters in search of ginseng roots, she lagged behind the others until she could only faintly hear their voices. Stepping behind a large oak tree, she pulled the knotted cloth from her apron pocket and gingerly opened it. The bits of paper were crumpled and mashed with hardly any piece large enough to hold a recognizable word, but in her hand they were a bird. She opened her fingers and surrendered the papers to the breeze. They fluttered in the air a moment and then drifted down to the ground. She thought of the rains melting the paper holding her words into the earth and smiled.

She never confessed her disobedience of Sister Edna’s order to burn the papers. It didn’t seem necessary even though Sister Sophrena claimed confession of even the smallest sin freed one’s spirit and drew one closer to the perfection of the Lord. But Jessamine felt no guilt. The story of the bird by itself wasn’t important, but the way stories boiled up inside her was. The prince who loved her mother had passed that gift down to her.

Besides, in spite of what Sister Edna told her, Jessamine couldn’t see how made-up stories were that much different from the spirit drawings and songs given to others among the Believers. Such were much celebrated during the Era of Manifestations. Jessamine had witnessed the elder sisters surrounding a young sister’s bed as they waited in the glow of lamplight ready to write down the words the child uttered while asleep and then singing those words at next meeting.

To Jessamine, a story seemed to be just as much a gift of the spirit rather than a sin she might need to confess. Her granny had never thought it wrong and she had been every bit as much of a believing woman as Sister Sophrena, praying with Jessamine every night and telling her wonderful stories from the Bible.

But while Jessamine didn’t think of her stories as sins, that didn’t mean she didn’t recognize other times when she did willfully sin. She could tell herself she was doing no wrong to take a bit of a detour toward the Gathering Family House at the end of the day to see if she could spot the stranger in Brother Benjamin’s garden. She could even think of stepping off the path into the garden to pull out a weed from among the doctor’s medicinal plants. How could there be sin in ridding the garden of a weed? But she could almost hear Sister Sophrena telling her to be more attentive to the weeds wanting to sprout in her heart.

Whether letting her feet carry her past the doctor’s garden and not keeping her eyes on the path in front of her was sinful or not, she knew without a doubt that wishing for some glimpse of the stranger was a breach of her promise to Sister Sophrena. And she knew just as surely that the man stepping out of the shadows and taking hold of her arm was exactly what she had hoped would happen.

9

The girl pulled in a quick breath and her eyes flew open wide when Tristan stepped in front of her. He hurried out words of apology. “Forgive me. It wasn’t my intent to startle you, Jessamine.”

She didn’t speak. Instead she seemed poised to turn and run away, so he put his hand lightly on her arm to keep her beside him for a moment. That was all he wanted. A moment. He smiled at her as he went on. “That is your name, isn’t it?”

“I can’t talk to you,” the girl said.

“I promise to do you no harm.” She was every bit as beautiful as he remembered, with eyes even bluer than his memory of them. But perhaps her worry was darkening them. “Are you afraid of me?”

“It’s against the rules.”

“You talked to me in the woods,” he said.

“That was different. You were in need then. And we were away from . . .” She hesitated.

“Away from the rules?”

“Nay, the rules should always be with us, but in the trees, there was no one to see.”

He took his eyes off her face to glance around. Where moments ago the paths had been busy, now they were empty. Summoned by the bell, the Shakers had all gone into the houses. “There’s no one about now.”

“Someone is always watching.”

“You mean your God?” He looked back at her. Her chin was lifted, but she wasn’t casting her eyes about. Instead she was standing very still like a deer in the forest that had hopes, however vain, that it had not been seen by the hunter it feared was in the woods.

“Nay. The Lord is ever with us,” she said quietly. “There is no way to escape his eyes. Nor that of the watchers.” At last she took a quick look over her shoulder.

“Are you afraid of them?”

Her eyes flew back to his. “My brothers and sisters? Oh, nay. They love me. Even when I do wrong.” She turned her eyes to the ground as color rose in her cheeks.

He thought he detected a tremble in her arm. He tightened his hand on her as a strange feeling pushed through him. He wanted to protect her and bring a smile to her lips instead of a tremble. “Then I must be what you fear, but I assure you that you have no reason to be afraid. You can trust my promise to do you no harm.”

“Nor do I fear you,” she said softly before she looked up. “My granny used to tell me that our greatest fears always come from within. And that the only way to conquer such feelings is to look honestly and without pretense at them.”

Her face changed, lost any hint of fearfulness, and instead took on a look of determination that impossibly deepened the blue of her eyes even more. If a man wasn’t careful to keep his wits about him, he could be swallowed whole by those eyes. She pulled her arm free from his hand only to take hold of his sleeve to tug him off the path and into the deepening shadows next to the stone house.

He gave her no resistance. He was quite willing to stand there through the dark of the night if she wanted him to. He told himself he owed her at least that much after she’d obviously risked her reputation by bringing him here to her village for help, but he was glad of the daylight. He didn’t think he’d ever seen a lovelier girl even with her bonnet covering all but a few strands of blonde hair and with no ruffles or flounces on her dress to enhance her looks. As different from Laura as day from night.

Once in the shadows, she dropped her hand away from his sleeve but kept looking straight at him. A smile trickled out on her face. “I’m glad you are recovering from your injuries. Have you remembered your name?”

“Yes,” he said, then hesitated. While it hadn’t bothered him all that much to lie to the Shaker doctor, he found it hard to do the same to this girl. But he had no other choice. The lie already told could not easily be taken back now. “Philip.”

“Philip.”

She tried out his name and he could not keep from wishing it was his real name falling from her lips instead of the lie. But he continued with the farce. “Philip Rose.”

“It’s good the memory of who you are has returned, Philip. It is a sorrowful thing to not know who you are.”

Her smile faded away, but she was just as beautiful, smiling or not. Tristan decided it was more than the shape of her features and the blue eyes, lovely as they were. It was the light from within those eyes and the innocence radiating from her face. He wanted to ask how old she was, but bit back the question. It wasn’t proper to ask a lady her age once she was no longer a child, and even though this girl might have the innocence of a child, she was every bit a woman.

“Now if I could just figure out some other things.” Tristan touched the bandage on his head. “I don’t remember anything about being in the woods before you and your sensible sister found me. Is she all right now?”