American Dreams (4 page)

It was then that Payton Fletcher finally provided more information about the position—tutor to the children of a Cherokee Indian family.

Her mother's reaction was instant. "Indians? But they are attacking Georgia settlers, threatening the lives of innocent women and children—"

"I assure you, Mrs. Hall," Payton Fletcher interrupted calmly but firmly, "the newspaper headlines of recent months have been gross exaggerations. If any wrongdoing has occurred, it has been on the part of the Georgians, but that is another matter. As to Will Gordon and his family, let me put your fears to rest: they are far from savages. I have had the privilege of calling Will Gordon my friend for a number of years now, and can personally vouch for his noble character."

He explained that he had become acquainted with Will Gordon when they both had attended a private boarding school here in the East. The bonds of friendship then forged had only strengthened with the passage of time.

Payton Fletcher further stated that Will Gordon was a planter, farming one of the fertile valleys in the tribal lands near northern Georgia. A single-room log house had been constructed on the property to serve as a school for his children and those of his sister. In addition to a salary of four hundred dollars a year, meals and private sleeping quarters within the Gordon home would be provided to the tutor.

Eliza's imagination immediately took one of its usual melodramatic turns as she envisioned a room of brown-skinned children listening with rapt attention, a host of primitive minds waiting to be enlightened by her teaching. When Payton Fletcher offered the post, Eliza accepted on the spot, certain this was her call of destiny.

Now, she looked about the grounds through her bedroom window. "A prosperous farm," Payton Fletcher had said. The simple phrase hardly described the obvious wealth that surrounded her. She longed to sit down and compose a letter to her mother, describing it all while the details were still fresh in her mind. But common sense told her that was an impractical use of her time when she had other matters to attend to.

Letting the curtain fall, Eliza turned from the window and recoiled with a gasp of alarm as she realized that someone stood not four feet from her. Belatedly, she saw it was a boy of no more than eleven. He stared back at her, a sly gleam of mischief shining in his coal black eyes. Eliza pressed a hand to her chest to calm her rapidly beating heart.

"You startled me," she admitted, then suspected at once that had been his intent. "You must be Kipp," she guessed.

"And you are the new teacher from the North."

"I am." With her composure regained, she clasped her hands primly together. "You may call me Miss Hall."
 

Kipp Gordon merely smiled.

Trouble. With a teacher's sixth sense, Eliza recognized that here was a pupil destined to bedevil her at every turn. She vowed there and then to be more than a match for him.

 

 

 

3

 

 

The thickly leaved branches of the towering chestnut tree blocked the rays of the setting sun and cast a premature darkness on the small log schoolhouse. Eliza placed the copy of
Webster s Blue-Backed Speller
atop
the stack of textbooks and primers on her desk, finished at last with her preparations for the next day's lessons.

All in all, Eliza felt she had accomplished a great deal in only three short days. The school hours were firmly established. The first class began at eight o'clock in the morning with the arrival of the four Murphy children, the Gordons' cousins: Charlie, age thirteen; Tom, twelve; Mary, ten; and Joe, nine. Lessons continued until the noon meal, then resumed at four in the afternoon, after the heat of the day had passed. The school day concluded with piano lessons for the three girls, Temple, her younger sister, Xandra, and Mary.

Eliza rose from her desk and circled the room, closing the four windows as she went. At the end of that first day, she had forgotten to shut them. The next morning, she had found a large ratlike creature nosing around her desk. Quite unintentionally, she had screamed, not frightened as much as startled. Kipp Gordon had charged into the schoolhouse just as the poor opossum scrambled across the puncheon floor to the open window. The sound of Kipp's ridiculing laughter still rang in her ears, a match to the scorn that had gleamed in his dark eyes. Trouble—he was definitely that.

With the contest of wills over for the day, Eliza cast a last look around the schoolroom, then walked out the door, closing it securely behind her. The three-story brick mansion crowned the knoll, its grandeur making it the focal point of the farm. Detached from it were two kitchens and a smokehouse. Brick paths from the mansion led to a stable of blooded horses, a blacksmith's forge, farm sheds, and a cluster of cabins for the thirty-some slaves owned by the Gordons.

Beyond the house grounds, milk cows grazed in a pasture next to the vegetable garden. Half-wild hogs foraged in the nearby woods. Stretched along the fertile valley were fields of corn, cotton, tobacco, wheat, oats, and indigo, in addition to fruit orchards. In the absence of Will Gordon, his brother-in-law, George Murphy, supervised the work of the Negroes in the fields.

However, the domestic side of the plantation's operation was solely the responsibility of Victoria Gordon. And that, Eliza had learned, included more than just the household. It ranged from the vegetable garden and the milk cows to the care and maintenance of the Negroes—a formidable task when one considered that more than thirty needed to be fed and clothed, their sick and injured tended. On her first morning, Eliza had witnessed the weekly doling-out of supplies by Victoria Gordon as a line of black women carrying wooden trays waited to receive their rations from the barrels of meal, tubs of pickled pork and corned beef, and rows of smoked hams and pork shoulders hanging from beams in the basement's locked storeroom.

Victoria Gordon rarely sat down except at mealtime. A thousand and one tasks demanded either her supervision or her participation, and Eliza began to appreciate the cause of the woman's harried and worn look.

Conscious of the lengthening shadows around her, Eliza hurried along the brick path to the house. Ahead, the glass panes of the mansion's windows reflected the golden pink glow of the setting sun as the hush of evening settled over the plantation.

A pressing silence greeted her when she entered the great hall. Feeling its crush, Eliza paused by the staircase that marched majestically to the second floor. Tonight she wasn't anxious to climb the long flights of steps to her room. In truth, she felt lonely and a bit homesick. She missed her mother's company and the stimulating conversations they had always had in the evenings.

From overhead came the tread of soft footsteps approaching the staircase. Eliza looked up as the big-bosomed mammy called Black Cassie came into view.

"Good evening, Cassie." Eliza unconsciously shied from attaching the appellation of "Black" to the slave woman's name. It reminded Eliza of a milk cow called Brown Bessie her family had owned when she was a young girl. For all the darkness of their skins, Eliza could not regard these unfortunate Africans as animals.

Cassie came down the steps. "Was you be wantin' somethin', Miz 'Liza?"

"Nothing, thank you, Cassie."

The woman nodded and moved away. Eliza started to climb the stairs, then stopped when her glance strayed into the family parlor, with its rosewood piano. Not once since she had arrived had she played it for her own enjoyment, even though Victoria Gordon had given her permission to do so.

With a certain brusqueness of decision, Eliza entered the room and went straight to the piano. She sat down and adjusted the layers of her skirt and petticoats, then raised the hinged cover over the keys and located the pedals with her feet.

The instant her fingers touched the ivory keys, her manner changed. She played her favorite nocturne from memory, her fingers moving lightly over the keys, her body swaying gently with the soft, soothing song of evening.

As the last note faded, she began another melody, not allowing the mansion's silence to take hold. She went from one song to another with barely a pause in between, calling on her memory for selections by Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, occasionally faltering when the notes of a particular measure escaped her.

When evening's shadows began to darken the parlor, Eliza paused long enough to light two candles and place them atop the rosewood piano to illuminate the ivory and black keys. Then she resumed her playing.

She finished what she considered to be a particularly inspired— although far from technically perfect—interpretation of a fugue by Bach, and held the last note, letting it fade on its own. In satisfaction, she drew her hands away from the keys and clasped them together in her lap, awash with the song's passion.

"Please play another," a man's voice requested. "Your music is very enjoyable."

Startled, Eliza looked up. A dark figure stood in the parlor doorway, one shoulder leaning against the walnut frame. The light from the two candles failed to reach that far, throwing him into silhouette. She could make out no detail about him, but the overall impression was one of height and power.

When he straightened to stand erect, he seemed to loom closer. For an instant, Eliza mistook him for The Blade. When she realized it wasn't him, she stood and picked up the brass candle holder, lifting it high above her head.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?" she demanded, sharp and wary.

The man stepped into the room, and into the light. He was dressed in trousers and the black frock coat of a planter. The wavering light from the candle flame reflected over the angled hollows and planes of his face and picked up the cinnamon lights in his brown hair.

"This is my house," he replied quite simply.

"Your house?" The answer was not what Eliza had expected. It had never occurred to her he might be Will Gordon.

"And you must be the new tutor, Miss Eliza Hall."

"Yes." She lowered the candle, painfully conscious of her less-than-professional appearance and determined not to show it. "I was not told you had returned."

"I arrived home only moments ago."

As if to confirm this assertion, Temple rushed into the room, a cotton robe tied over her nightdress, her long hair unbound and tumbling in a thick black curtain about her shoulders and back. She stopped when she saw her father, her face alight with a child's pleasure.

"Father. You are here." Her voice was rich with delight.

"I am." The look he gave Temple was that of a doting father.

She moved to his side and turned her gaze on Eliza, amused to see the dozens of curls springing free of the teacher's prim bun, making her appear a bit of a madcap. This was the real Eliza Hall, full of spirit and verve despite the stiff and colorless image she tried to project.

"When you heard the piano music, did you think it was me?" Temple cast a teasing glance at her father.

"I knew it could not be you. The tune was not one I had heard before," he said with an answering smile.

Temple laughed. "Soon you will not be able to say that. Miss Hall is giving me lessons on the piano so that I may play it as grandly as she does."

"Let us hope." He raised an eyebrow in mock skepticism.

The tutor spoke up quickly. "Your daughter is an apt pupil."

Will Gordon recognized the combative stance of this tall, plain woman and resisted the urge to smile. Instead, he responded with a formal nod. "I am pleased to hear that, Miss Hall. Tell me, how was Payton Fletcher when you saw him last?"

"He seemed in good health," the tutor replied stiffly.

"Are his eyes still sharp and is his smile still wide?"

"Indeed." Eliza smiled at the accurate description of the Springfield lawyer. "He asked me to give you his warmest regards."

"It has been years since I last saw him. I must write him on the morrow." He looked down at Temple and forced a smile. "Now that Payton Fletcher has become a gentleman of the green bag, I may have more need of his counsel than I once thought."

There was a twinkle in his eyes when he used the backwoods term for a lawyer, but it couldn't cover the lines of strain and fatigue Temple saw in his face.

"You are tired from your long ride." She touched his arm in quick concern. "Have you eaten?"

"Your mother is preparing some food for me."

"I will see if it is ready." Temple knew as well as her father that his meal would be completely forgotten if her mother heard one of the children call out. It was something Temple could not understand, but it was nonetheless often the case.

As soon as Temple started for the door, the new tutor spoke up. "With your permission, Mr. Gordon, I will withdraw to my room and leave you alone to rest from your journey."

Without waiting for his reply, she followed Temple into the hall. Alone now in the family parlor, Will felt the silence of the room close around him. All feeling of ease was gone. Restless, he crossed to the parlor window and stared beyond the panes into the black of the night. In Cherokee lore, black was the color of the west, where legend claimed the land swallowed the sun. Will turned from the sight and moved to the piano. There he paused and struck one of the keys, listening to its clarion ring.

In his mind's eye, he again saw the new tutor, Eliza Hall, at the piano the way she had first appeared to him when he stood in the doorway, her fingers moving with fluid deftness over the keys, her body swaying with the rhythm, her expression rapt and glowing, her hair a halo of butternut curls about her face. For a brief moment he had been transported back to a less troubled time— to that fortnight he had spent in the Massachusetts home of Pay-ton Fletcher and his family. Payton's mother had played the piano nearly every evening, accompanying Payton, who loved to sing.

That had been long ago. So very long ago.

Will sighed and glanced about the empty room, then moved toward the door. Tonight he didn't want to be alone with his thoughts. From the hall came the sound of a cough being smothered. Victoria, he thought, experiencing a stab of concern. When he reached the receiving hall, he saw her there, a wraith of the woman he had married eighteen years ago.