The Seekers by John Jakes

This is my house, and it’s my decision.”
    “Yes, you make all the decisions, don’t you?”
    “See here—!”
    “You also make it quite apparent that I’m an outsider.”
    “Oh, Elizabeth, that’s altogether unfair and unwarranted,” Peggy said in a saddened tone.
    “Is it? I don’t believe so!”
    The candles in the chandelier put glistening highlights in Elizabeth’s pale blue eyes. Yet Abraham had the uncanny feeling that her tears were artifice. If so, they still worked.
    Philip looked taken aback. “My dear child, your mother’s quite right. You’re as much a part of this family circle as any other person at the table. But the fact remains—you’re much too forward and free-thinking.”
    “I suppose next you’ll be calling me a mad, bloodthirsty Jacobin!” Elizabeth wailed, starting to rush out. As she left, she contrived to brush against Abraham. His arm tingled at the touch of her muslin-covered breast.
    They all listened to Elizabeth clattering away upstairs to her room just down the hall from Abraham’s on the third floor. A door slammed distantly. Philip sighed. Then: “Peggy, will you please go to her? She continues to harbor the misguided notion that because I’m not her father, I care the less for her.”
    Peggy said softly, “We both know that’s not true.”
    “At the same time, I demand decent behavior. Elizabeth quite often seems totally incapable of it.”
    “She just doesn’t want to grow up and be ladylike,” Gilbert said with a tentative smile.
    No one responded. His large eyes lost their glow. His face fell.
    Abraham knew full well that the problem was much deeper than Gilbert’s oversimplification suggested. Elizabeth bore her father’s last name, Fletcher. That she was illegitimate was no secret within the Kent family. The circumstances of her conception, however, were largely unclear to Abraham.
    He did know that his stepmother had met Philip only after she had placed her infant daughter in a foster home here in Boston. Evidently Peggy hadn’t wanted to expose the child—and herself—to scandal in her native Virginia. Beyond that, Abraham had pieced together certain other information from chance remarks at the family table or hearthside:
    Peggy’s first husband had been a Virginia planter named McLean. He was butchered in a short but apparently harrowing slave rebellion that swept Peggy’s home district along the Rappahannock River in 1775. Elizabeth, born in 1778, had therefore been fathered by this Fletcher fellow after Peggy became a widow.
    Sometimes Abraham wondered whether that slave uprising might be the cause of the silent grief that seemed to grip his stepmother occasionally. Walking abroad in Boston, he had seen Peggy turn pale at the sight of a free black man.
    Philip had once confided to Abraham that Peggy had indeed suffered physical harm in the rebellion. To what extent, he didn’t say. Abraham had speculated on the possibility of rape. That would account for Peggy’s pallor and the sudden nervous starts which automatically—and unfairly—lumped all Negroes into a single category: persons to be feared.
    If Peggy Ashford McLean Kent’s past did include ravishment, how it had affected her intimate relationship with Abraham’s father remained a mystery. He knew they shared one large bed. And his stepmother hadn’t been so devastated that sexual congress was impossible for her. Gilbert was proof of that. Beyond the obvious, however, Abraham didn’t deem it his business—or, to use Philip’s word, decent—to speculate.
    He did know that no children had come of Peggy’s union with the murdered McLean. Growing up, he’d asked his father questions about the whole puzzling business. Philip refused to reply to most of them, stating that he did so out of respect for his wife’s wishes. The past was buried and would remain so.
    No one was forbidden from talking about Elizabeth’s real father—though no one dwelled on him especially either. Over