The Gifted (28 page)

“How very sad.” Mrs. Floyd sniffed and touched a handkerchief to her eyes.

“Not really, madam. It was my daughter’s choice.”

“But didn’t you want to see her, to know she was well?” Mrs. Cleveland was still leaning toward him. “A child is the dearest blessing a person can receive. It seems wrong to reject it out of hand.”

Brady looked back at her as though her words were stones she had thrown at him. “I don’t think I did that. I saw that she was cared for. I loved her. I do love her.”

Mrs. Cleveland sat back in her chair and touched her napkin to her lips. “Then you should find her.”

“Perhaps I should,” the writer said. “Perhaps I should.”

“And how serendipitous.” Laura was smiling but not with the same abandon as earlier. “You have a blue-eyed daughter named Jessamine whom you suddenly have an urge to find and Tristan is rescued by such a girl only miles from where we’re sitting.”

“Perhaps not merely serendipitous, my dear,” Mrs. Cleveland said. “Perhaps providential.”

Providential. The word echoed in Tristan’s head. He remembered his thoughts as he was following his mother down to the dining room. That if the Lord meant for him and Jessamine to be a match, he would bring them back together. And now it could very well be he was sitting at the same table as her father.

“Probably no connection at all,” Laura’s father boomed. He shot a look toward his wife. “Viola is just being a meddling fool. Pay her no mind, Sheldon.”

“No, no, Viola is speaking from the heart. She knows about loving a daughter.” Brady smiled at Mrs. Cleveland, who went back to folding her napkin after her husband’s blast. Then he looked back at Cleveland and laughed a little. “But you’re no doubt right, Robert, about there being no connection between our new friend’s unanticipated encounter with a Jessamine and my own Jessamine. Even so, there are times when serendipity—not to mention providence—can be the friend of a man who earns his coin penning stories.” He turned his eyes back to the ladies across the table from him. “It would make a heartrending story, don’t you ladies think? Long lost daughter or, perhaps more accurately put, long lost father is found.”

“A waste of time. Chasing the past. It won’t do anything but bite you if you catch it.” Cleveland looked up and around before he tapped on his cup with his spoon. “Where are those waiters? Hargrove needs to get a better bunch of servants.”

Tristan’s mother began to chatter innocuously about the delicious ribbon cake for dessert. Nobody mentioned the Shakers or Jessamine again, but thoughts of her so lingered in Tristan’s mind that he couldn’t concentrate on what was being said around the table. He wasn’t the only one. The writer seemed preoccupied as well. Between them, Laura also had little to say. Mr. Floyd took advantage of their silence to begin the litany of his aches and pains. Sister Lettie had told Tristan the Shakers forbade talk during their meals. Perhaps they were on to something.

18

When the rising bell sounded, Jessamine sat up and put her feet on the floor as she had every morning for years. The planks felt cool on her bare feet, and from outside the open window she heard the cheery trill of a mockingbird even though dawn was barely breaking. For a minute with that sound of joy in her ears and the lingering wispy remnants of a blissful dream tickling her mind, she forgot her day would not be as it might have been before Sunday.

That unpleasant truth slammed into her waking brain when her eyes caught on Sister Edna rising from the bed next to hers. Her watcher. Already the woman’s eyes were pinned on Jessamine. Waiting to catch her in some wrong. Waiting to squeeze the very joy out of the day. Jessamine dropped to her knees beside her bed as did all the sisters in the room. A Believer knelt to pray upon rising every morning. A silent appeal for an industrious day and right attitudes before they went out to their duties.

Jessamine let the familiar words whisper through her mind.
Dear Father in heaven. Help me to work with willing hands at the tasks thou hast set for me this day. Let my heart rejoice in serving you.
She kept her head bent and her eyes closed as she waited for more prayer words to surface in her mind. Words of love for her sisters and praise for the blessing gifts of the day. But she did not feel loved. She did not feel blessed. She felt burdened. And sorrowful. The same kind of sorrow she’d felt when her granny passed on.

But no one had died now. She was surrounded by her sisters. Surrounded by their love for her. And yet the sorrow mashed down heavy on her soul as though someone had dropped a heavy sack of troubles across her shoulders.

She kept her eyes tight shut while the sisters around her began rising to their feet. Prayer time was over. She knew that without peeking through her eyelids and yet she stayed on her knees hoping for a prayer to come to mind. A prayer that would help her endure Sister Edna by her side every moment of the day to come. She could almost feel the sister moving toward her to give Jessamine’s shoulder a shake and demand she conclude her morning prayer. She would remind Jessamine of Mother Ann’s admonition that time was wasting and they had none to waste.

Her words would be true. Wasting time was not the Shaker way. Duties called. But prayers weren’t wasted times. She thought of the song “Come down, Shaker life, come life eternal.” She wanted the prayers to come down, give her peace eternal, show her the way. She didn’t want to simply come up with the words she’d been told the Eternal Father wanted to hear. She wanted the words to be true prayer words from her heart. Besides, she had no way to imagine any words of her own on this morning. Her imagination felt flat as a flapjack stepped on by one of the brothers. One of the fleshier brothers.

“Sister Jessamine, it is time to be about our day.”

Sister Edna’s words wormed into Jessamine’s ears even though she pretended she did not hear as she continued in a pose of prayer.

Sister Edna spoke louder, more stridently. “Sister Jessamine!”

As if the sharply spoken words released something inside Jessamine, a prayer slid through her mind with the ease of a snake slithering off a hot rock to hide beneath that same rock until danger passed him by.
Watch over the man from the woods. Tristan. Tristan Cooper. Let me see him again. If it be thy will. And oh please, let it be thy will.

“Whatever are you praying for so many minutes, Sister Jessamine?” Sister Edna was standing directly beside her, tapping her toe impatiently. She was already dressed with a crisp, white apron tied around her waist, ready to begin the day’s duties and very cross that Jessamine still wore her white cotton sleeping shift.

“I was praying for the day, Sister Edna,” Jessamine answered softly as she scrambled to her feet. “As I do every morn.”

“Seemed to be taking you somewhat longer on this morning.”

“I was praying the Lord might make the day joyful.”

“Work well done and done promptly, that is the reason for joyfulness.” Sister Edna’s eyes were narrow slits peering out of her frowning face. “That is what pleasures our Mother Ann.”

“Yea, Sister Edna. I will hasten to dress so that we may begin our cleaning.”

Jessamine looked around the room as she got to her feet. There were five beds on each side of the room. Sister Edna had moved her things to the bed against the inside wall next to Jessamine’s. She wanted to be sure Jessamine made no midnight escapes. Such a thought had never occurred to Jessamine in the years she’d been among the Shakers. At times she had used the excuse of a trip to the privy to go out into the night and take joy in the sky full of stars. On other nights in the midst of summer, she often slipped outside to escape the gathered heat in the sleeping rooms, but she had never thought to sneak out of the retiring room simply to escape her sisters.

At least not until now. The night before as she lay straight and still on her narrow bed waiting for sleep to come, the velvety night had called to her with its promise of moonlight and stars. Her feet had itched to run out into the night and let the sound of the whippoorwills and tree frogs fill her ears with nature’s music. She wanted to find a place in a garden and see the lightning bugs rise from the grass to disappear in the gloaming of the gathering night. Things she had done while living with Granny. Things she had nearly forgotten. Things that for some reason now pulled at her.

Perhaps it was Sister Edna forever frowning by her side that was making Jessamine feel the backward pull toward the freedom of her early years when her granny let her rise or sleep when she chose. She taught Jessamine when she was ready to learn and told her stories when she was ready to dream. But Jessamine was no longer a child. No longer a free spirit of the woods. She was a Shaker sister with responsibilities and penance to pay and the willingness to pay it in order to return to peaceful communion with her sisters.

And yet things were not the same. Even before Sister Edna was tied to her in constant supervision, things had not been the same for her in the Shaker village. She knew exactly when they had changed. The stranger in the woods. It was the touch of his face, so different under her fingers, that had begun the unsettling of her life. Merely the sight of his warm brown eyes staring at her had unleashed strange new feelings inside her. Then when he traced her lips with the tip of his finger, her granny’s stories of princes and love began dancing through her thoughts in a new way as a yearning awakened inside her for things that could not be.

That was why it had been hard to come up with the proper words of prayer as she knelt by her bed. In the back of her mind she kept hearing the echo of her granny’s words. “Love will find you, my sweet Jessamine. Never fear. Someday love will find you.”

“But how will I know it’s true love, Granny?” The memory of her child’s voice sounded in her head.

“The stars in the sky will be brighter. The sunshine in the spring will be warmer. The scent of the roses will be sweeter. Your toes will want to dance and your heart will want to sing.”

“Were you ever in love?”

Even now Jessamine remembered the look on her granny’s face as she answered. “Oh yes, my sweet child. Oh yes. It is something not to be missed. No matter the cost, it is something not to be missed.”

“I haven’t missed it. I love you.” Jessamine had grabbed her granny around the middle and hugged her tightly.

Her granny had laughed and hugged Jessamine back every bit as tightly. “And I love you, my child. That too is a love I wouldn’t have wanted to miss. But the love I speak of is the love between a man and a woman. A love given by the good Lord above that is rewarded with beautiful children like you. Someday you will know that kind of love. When your prince comes.”

Jessamine wished she could ask her granny some more questions. Like did love make a person feel like ants were crawling around inside one’s skin? Did it make a girl ready to forget every rule over her life? And what did a girl do when the prince came and then left? If that happened, then Jessamine was surely only imagining the stranger from the woods to be her prince. In her granny’s stories, the prince never rode away without the princess. He fought dragons and witches and all manner of evil, but the happily-ever-after kiss always happened at the end.

There could be no happily-ever-after ending for Jessamine with the stranger from the woods. Not with the man she now knew was Tristan Cooper. He was no prince. He had ridden away without even seeking her out to say goodbye. She had merely allowed her imagination to gallop away with her without reining it in, as Sister Sophrena so often told her she must.

Perhaps that should have been her prayer while on her knees before the start of the day, for truly the words she’d let slide through her mind begging the Lord for another sight of the stranger from the woods were wrong prayer words. Even sinful words and none the Lord or Mother Ann would bend ears down to hear. Instead they had surely clapped their hands over their ears to block out her prayer. And yet, she could not deny the yearning was there.

She should confess such feelings, for they were a stumbling block in her path. She could do so to Sister Sophrena, but never to Sister Edna. Jessamine had no idea who was to hear her confessions now that Sister Edna had been instructed to keep her under constant surveillance.

Once dressed and with Sister Edna by her side, the morning chores were tiresome but familiar as Jessamine gathered dirty linens and clothing and emptied and cleaned chamber pots. Sister Edna considered watching Jessamine to be her duty and did naught else as she followed after Jessamine at the ready to point out the slightest lack in Jessamine’s work. It was a great relief to go into the morning meal where Sister Edna’s voice could not be droning in Jessamine’s ears for at least the length of time they ate their meal in silence.

Unfortunately she could not hope for the same during the day as they worked in the gardens. It would be more of the same chiding words. More fault-finding. More spirit crushing. She almost wished they were assigned to the washhouse—a duty she abhorred. There the noise of the washing machines and sloshing clothes made conversation almost impossible. But the good planting weather was holding, and since it was already past the middle of June, there was some urgency to get the seed of the late crop cucumbers and beans into the ground. All available hands would be in the fields this day while the sun shone and the rains held off. Once the seeds were planted would be the time of prayer for rain.