The Seeker by Ann H. Gabhart

handed it to her.
    She read his writing. “This is legally binding?”
    “It is. You are now a slaveholder.”
    “Yes,” Charlotte agreed as she stared at the paper. “Thank you, Father.” She reached over to kiss his cheek before she carefully folded the paper and slipped it down into her pocket.
    After that, she could hardly refuse to obey his request to heed Selena’s summons to the parlor. She had Mellie’s promised freedom in her pocket.

8
    Adam Wade mixed the paint on his palette as quickly as possible. Time was wasting while he stood in the senator’s parlor painting the senator’s wife as scores of better subjects were going undrawn. He would have even preferred sketching the lines of the senator’s florid face. Sam would probably welcome that, along with a few of the senator’s words stating his seemingly sincere belief that his state could remain a neutral buffer zone if the confrontation between the states escalated. And the senator would be happy to have the notoriety of being in Harper’s Weekly . The man had ambitions. Beyond senator in the Kentucky Senate.
    Governor, the new Mrs. Vance claimed, which perhaps explained why she was the new Mrs. Vance. Adam doubted love had much to do with it, even if she did liberally sprinkle her conversations with the senator with words of devotion. Plus the senator was old money or at least had inherited such from his first wife. The wife whose portrait had been removed, leaving behind a darker square of forest green striped wallpaper over the mantelpiece behind Adam. Across the parlor the new wife sat by the window in a shaft of afternoon light.
    Adam hadn’t warmed to her. Something he generally did when he was painting someone. Perhaps his reluctance to do the portrait was the cause, or perhaps it had more to do with the way the woman ordered him about like one of her husband’s servants as he stood behind the easel and wielded his brush. Twice he’d had to wipe away his brushstrokes depicting her eyes because of the hard glint he kept letting the paint on the canvas reveal. He wished he was back at the Shaker village painting the old sister whose suspicious glower had wiped away every trace of feminine beauty from her face. At least there he could be honest with his brush.
    Selena Vance hadn’t seen her painted eyes. He knew better than to let a subject see a portrait in progress. Especially someone like the woman in front of him. She seemed—if that could be possible—even wearier of the whole process than he was. She came to each sitting wearing a cream-colored dress with an edging of delicate lace around the plunging neckline. Her skin was very white, almost too white, but it contrasted nicely with the pink of her cheeks, which she kept pinching to give them color whenever she thought he wasn’t watching.
    He could have told her he could paint in the color without her resorting to the painful pinches, but he didn’t. Her dark hair was piled high on her head in an elaborate style that had to take an hour to pin and arrange. So he supposed it was no wonder the woman was tired of sitting still even before she came to the parlor to perch on the Victorian chair and, with a bare word of greeting, demanded he begin.
    Paint her pretty and get it over with, he told himself every ten minutes. It didn’t matter that the more he looked at her, the less attractive she seemed to him in spite of her perfectly aligned features. He had an imagination. While he had never used that imagination to intentionally change the looks of one of his subjects, that didn’t mean he couldn’t this time. For his mental sanity he needed to think of Selena Vance as beautiful and portray that on the canvas. He needed to be free to get back to drawing subjects that mattered. The nation was boiling and he was stuck inside a parlor painting lace on the bodice of a dress.
    The finer points of the lace might be missing in the portrait, for he planned to be gone from the senator’s