The Gifted (32 page)

His eyes touched on Thelma Jackson with her strident voice that hurt his ears. Then he quickly passed his glance by Marian Williams whose eyes reminded him of an unhappy weasel and whose face and neck bloomed with red splotches whenever he spoke to her. Both had successful fathers. Rich fathers. Not fathers who forgot to mind to business and went off to war only to carry home a deadly illness. Patriotic and heroic, but heroism didn’t pay off debts.

Looks weren’t everything, he reminded himself. A good woman with intelligence and grace, that was what he needed. That was what it appeared Laura Cleveland was. All that along with a pretty face and stylish bearing. And the money. He could never forget the money. Perhaps that was his problem. The feeling he was being bought. Then again, perhaps not bought. Sold might be the better word. Sold by his mother to maintain their lifestyle. A lifestyle he no longer cared about.

Still, he could not imagine his mother anywhere but their house situated on one of the best streets in Atlanta. Even the thought of her doing her own housework or laundry was ludicrous. She needed servants. She needed new hats and social events. He could hardly expect her to become a governess or a shopkeeper. The very idea was enough to make a laugh work up inside him as he looked across the room toward her. She had never wanted for anything in her lifetime. Born to money, reared in money, and married in money. At least that had been her intent. She’d had no way of knowing her husband would have a careless view toward their fortune.

Tristan doubted if she’d ever even given any thought to the possibility the money well might run dry. Now that it had, he had a duty to his mother. Not only that, but his father’s debts had become his debts. Debts that kept increasing with each passing day like storm clouds piling in on storm clouds. He’d seen the papers from the lawyers. His mother was right. He needed to marry Laura Cleveland.

What he did not need to do was keep recalling cornflower blue eyes and blonde wisps of hair sneaking out of a bonnet. One day could not change his whole life. A day he couldn’t even remember. But he did remember the blue-eyed sister. Jessamine.

Jessamine. A flower in the south. Yellow blooms that released their fragrance in the cool of the evening. A heady fragrance that had surely led to many a man going down on his knee in a garden to promise his undying love. Perhaps he needed to be in that southern garden with Laura instead of thinking on the flower he had left at the Shaker village.

“She’s the belle of the ball.” Sheldon Brady stepped up beside him and followed Tristan’s gaze across the floor to Laura. “I think she’s already heard three proposals in the three weeks she’s been here.”

“Three?” Tristan looked toward the man to see if he was trying to fool him.

Brady smiled. “Three. Laura tells me that is nowhere near last summer’s pace, but then last summer was play for her. This summer her father is expecting her to seriously consider some of the propositions.” The man’s smile disappeared as he leveled his eyes on Tristan. “At least one of them.”

Tristan veered away from talk of proposals by asking, “Have you known the Clevelands long?”

The man’s smile returned, polite, revealing nothing. “Only a couple of years. I did a reading at Laura’s finishing school in the East. She so enjoyed my essay that she invited me to visit their home in Boston.”

“Boston? I thought they lived near Atlanta.”

“The Boston house was her mother’s childhood home. Viola much prefers the north, and remains an avid supporter of the arts in that city. And while it would be preferable to not have to depend on such, the social rounds are an important part of my work. The funding part. The ladies buy more books when they know me.”

“That’s right. You write romantic novels.”

“That’s how I manage to stay out of the poorhouse, but as Robert says, romantic drivel. Someday I will write the novel I am intended to write. Poetic and sweeping in scope.” He said the words in such a way that Tristan wasn’t sure if he was serious or simply making fun of himself. “But write I must, whether it is drivel or literature worthy of kings. The paper calls to me and demands my ink.”

“Laura seemed quite impressed at dinner on Tuesday.”

“Oh yes, Laura.” His voice softened a bit as his eyes went back to Laura. “A lovely girl with discriminating taste. At least that’s the reason she gives her father for spurning so many promising proposals. I think Robert fears she will be an old maid and Viola fears she won’t. Dear Viola has suffrage leanings.” Brady’s eyes slid over to Viola Cleveland and Tristan’s mother and then drifted back to settle on Laura. “Rumor has it you are Robert’s favored candidate at present.”

“Rumors fly here at the Springs.” Tristan kept his voice light.

“They do, but often a spark of truth sets off the rumor. Old rich is fashionable in the south and Robert does want his little girl to have every advantage.”

“Most fathers would surely feel the same.” Too late Tristan remembered Sheldon Brady had claimed a daughter. The one he left as a baby with his grandmother. The lines on the man’s face deepened and Tristan tried to soften his words. “I mean I assume they would. I am not a father.”

“But I am and you are right. I did want her to have every advantage. I had so many plans for her. A good school. Journeys to the ocean and hikes into the mountains. Dances such as this when she came of age.” He kept his eyes on the dancers spinning past them as he went on. “I suppose I built up a father and daughter fairy tale in my mind to assuage my guilt for leaving her behind. I should have gone back for her whether she answered my letter or not.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t I? An excellent question. But I can only come up with excuses, not a valid answer. The years have held many ups and downs for me. More downs than ups and sometimes I barely eked out enough with my writing to supply my own needs, small as they were. It’s only lately that I have found a measure of success that now allows me sojourns in places like this.” He waved his hand out toward the dance floor before he looked straight at Tristan. “You are young. You have yet to experience many of the trials of life.”

“I fought in Mexico. I thought I might die in Mexico.”

“Forgive me, I didn’t mean to suggest that fighting in the war and the grief of your father’s death were not trials. They surely were,” the man said quietly. “But there are trials over which we have little control and times when we simply end up clinging to the boat sides, praying for the best as we traverse the rough waters of life. Then there are those other types of trials where our hand is on the tiller. We are guiding our course with our decisions. We make choices. Those are the trials that can continually haunt us, for we have to wonder if we traversed the right stretch of the river of our lives or if our hand was clumsy on the tiller.”

“Do you think the Shaker girl who rescued me in the woods could be your daughter?”

“I don’t know. I have done little but wonder about that the past two days as I made a pretense of writing.”

“Would your grandmother have joined with them? With the Shakers.”

The writer smiled. “That I know without the first doubt did not happen. Ida Kendall was not one to give up her freedom. She would have never left the woods. She had lived there so long she was as one with the trees.”

“Perhaps she got sick.”

“I think that may be what happened. I don’t know why I didn’t worry about that when I left my child with her, but Granny seemed ageless to me. My thinking was faulty, for her age was advanced.” He paused a moment before he went on. “I did go back to the cabin once, the year Jessamine would have been fifteen. The cabin roof had fallen in and a family of raccoons had taken up residence. In behind the house, I found several graves with no markings other than fieldstones, so I had no way of knowing who lay in those graves. People I had never met or perhaps my grandmother or my daughter or both. The area had seen a cholera outbreak not so many years before I returned.”

“So you thought her dead. Your daughter, I mean.” Tristan watched the man. They both had forgotten the swirl of dancers in front of them and even Laura surrounded by her flock of admirers as she sipped her drink and took a break from the dance floor.

“I didn’t know what to think. I inquired in the nearest town, but no one knew anything about Ida Kendall or Jessamine Brady. That did not surprise me. My grandmother was a recluse who cared not if any living, breathing people inhabited her world. She is the one who passed down to me the desire to create fictional worlds. She lived in her story lands there in the woods. My mother had a little of the fey in her as well, but she gave it up when she married my father. It was ever a grief to her to be compelled to live so completely in a world where make-believe was not allowed. My father was very stern and thought the use of one’s imagination was not only foolishness but verging on a sinful waste of one’s energy and time.”

“That obviously didn’t stop you.”

Brady laughed. “A child with an imagination can figure out ways to hide his dreaming. I could no more give up stories than cease breathing.”

The music stopped and the dancers all changed partners. Laura moved out on the floor with a man named Calvin Green. He looked as if he’d won the prize as the band struck up a new song and he slid his arm around her waist. She, on the other hand, appeared to be as bored with his attentions as she had looked that afternoon with Tristan’s once the ducks had finished off the bread.

The couple glided toward Tristan on the dance floor, but when Green noticed him there, he frowned as if fearing Tristan might steal her attention from him even while she was allowing him the dance. Tristan pushed a smile out on his face when Laura looked his way, but she stared back at him with the same cool smile she was giving Green. Then her smile warmed as she noticed the writer beside him.

When Tristan looked at Brady, he shrugged his shoulders a bit. “She likes my foolish stories of love. Many young women do.”

“And do you take advantage of their admiration?”

“Only in sales of my stories, my dear man,” Brady said with a slight laugh. “As much as I hate to admit it, I’m old enough to be the father of most of my young fans.” He looked out to where the dancers were making a kaleidoscope of color as they whirled to the music.

Tristan didn’t say anything as he looked back out at Green, now peering down at Laura and speaking intently. Perhaps making his proposal. If so, she gave no appearance of welcoming such.

Beside him, Brady went on. “Isn’t it odd how people come to different conclusions? Here the young people whirl to the music to find romance while the Shakers dance to their own music in order to keep out romance. In the village I visited in the northeast, they whirled with fervor to stay spiritually pure and deny any sort of lustful thoughts. Is that how you found it?”

“I saw them dancing. They did whirl and stomp with enthusiasm, and the sexes stayed apart.”

“It takes much enthusiasm to banish man’s natural inclinations toward romance. Toward love.” The man sounded almost pensive as he continued to watch the dancers. After a few seconds he said, “And did the sister you met named Jessamine, the one I wonder might be my daughter, did she dance?”

“She did.”

The man turned his gaze toward Tristan. “With fervor?”

Tristan smiled as he remembered the young woman. “I think perhaps Sister Jessamine does everything with fervor and enthusiasm.”

“And belief in their ways?”

“That I have no way to answer.”

“Tell me again what she looked like. This Jessamine. Now, without Laura listening to water down your description.” He watched Tristan intently as he waited for his answer.

“She was beautiful even in her plain dress and with the bonnet. Her eyes were striking, so blue one wondered if they could be true.”

“Yes,” Brady murmured as if seeing those eyes. “What else?”

“The blonde hair looked promising, but it was mostly hidden. But it wasn’t really the way her features and eyes looked so much as the light that radiated from her face. Like the world was waiting for her and she was eager to run to meet it.”

“But the world is blocked from the Shaker villages,” Brady said.

“So they told me. In fact the girl got into trouble for talking to me in one of the gardens.”

“Trouble?” Brady raised his eyebrows at Tristan. “How so?”

“I was told she would be watched to be sure she would not be tempted by things of the world as she was tempted when she spoke to me.” Tristan regretted yet again the ringing of the bell that had sent her flying away from him.

“I have heard they take their rules very seriously.” A frown darkened Brady’s face.

“The devout among them seemed very kind.” Tristan tried to reassure him. “If the sister they called Jessamine is your daughter, she won’t be ill treated.”

“But in my eyes, it is ill treatment to withhold freedom of choice in love. In life.”

“What are you going to do then? Will you go offer her that freedom?” Tristan asked. “If she turns out to be your daughter.”

“How can I do less?” Brady said. “Whatever the price to my own freedom.”

“Freedom can be difficult to hold onto,” Tristan said as the music of the dance ended.

“So it can,” Brady agreed. “And it looks as if our friend Laura is desirous of gaining her freedom from Mr. Green. Shall you go rescue her or shall I?”

“I think my name is on her dance card next, although dancing with this bent wing is awkward.” Tristan raised his broken arm up a little.

“Would you like me to take your place?” The man sounded more than eager to do so.

Tristan looked at him, a little surprised, and Brady added, “Laura is a lovely dancer, but it’s no doubt best for you to fulfill your spot on her dance card. Robert and your determined mother must be appeased, don’t you think?”

As Tristan made his way across the room to claim his dance, he wondered if he was the only man in the ballroom not enchanted by Laura’s charms. It appeared as though even the writer was ready to be her champion.

With a glower toward Tristan, Green surrendered his spot next to Laura, but before he turned away he sent a smiling appeal toward Laura. “I do hope you will seriously consider my words, dear Laura.”