Chapter Fourteen
Missouri, September 1854
Carrie sits at the main table in the ladies’ lounge of the Magnolia Queen, poring over her map of the Kansas Territory. Thanks to Mordecai de Gelder’s insatiable appetite for orchids, she has five thousand dollars, and thanks to Professor Asa Gray of Harvard, she has a job. Once again the name Vinton has worked miracles. Professor Gray has overlooked the fact that she is a woman and has commissioned her to collect specimens of the plants of the Kansas Territory, which she is to dry and mount in the proper fashion and send to him as often as possible. He is also paying her to paint botanical portraits of each plant.
“Canan Vinton’s daughter!” he said when she introduced herself. “You are a godsend! I am in the throes of assembling material for another volume of Genera of the Plants of the United States, and my collector in the Kansas Territory recently fell victim to smallpox. I trust you will not succumb to the same disease, Miss Vinton.”
“If I were going to die of smallpox, I would already be dead,” she told him, but she did not mention the plague in Rio or William, because there were questions Professor Gray was sure to ask that she did not wish to answer. Nor did she tell him she was married, pregnant, and leaving her husband to search for her lover.
Smoothing out the map, she weighs down each corner with the stones she collected the last time the steamer ran aground on a sand-bar. Around her, sleeping women and children occupy the floor jammed so closely together that it’s almost impossible to walk across the room without stepping on someone. Old women are snoring, babies are crying, and more than one New England matron is having dreams that have set her moaning and thrashing about. Add to this the thumping of the steam engine that powers the paddlewheel and the racket a party of drunken land speculators is making as they stand at the stern firing off their pistols for sport, and it’s a wonder anyone can sleep at all; or perhaps not such a wonder, because by this point in the journey almost everyone aboard the Magnolia Queen is exhausted enough to sleep through anything short of a boiler explosion.
When it sought incorporation from the Massachusetts Legislature, the Emigrant Aid Company stated that the Kansas Territory was “accessible in five days continuous travel from Boston,” but you could not prove it by the women and children in the ladies’ lounge, most of whom have been traveling so long that clean sheets and hot food are already distant memories.
Carrie stares at the map and thinks about the real route to Kansas, the one ordinary people take that wanders west, north, south, west, and north for days by train and boat. When the Magnolia Queen finally reaches the Kansas Landing near Westport, most of the free-soilers on board are going to be loading their possessions into wagons and heading across forty miles of open prairie to the new abolitionist settlement of Lawrence. Should she go with them or stay on board and go up to Fort Leavenworth to see if William is there?
Lawrence is probably her best choice. It’s the kind of place William would be attracted to. The first settlers pitched their tents beside the Kaw River only six weeks ago. They’ve already built a boardinghouse where emigrants can stay until they get settled. The next wave of settlers is not simply bringing ploughs, seed, and spades with them. They intend to build an entire New England village from scratch, so they’re bringing gristmills, steam-powered sawmills, forges, chisels for shaping prairie limestone into building blocks, bells for their churches, Bibles, printing presses, even patent apple peelers, although it will be years before the orchards will bear enough apples for pies. And they’re bringing guns, a great many guns, because the pro-slavers would like nothing better than to see Lawrence burned to the ground and every man, woman, and child driven out of the Kansas Territory or massacred.
She returns to the map, puts her finger over the blank spot where Lawrence is, and again considers her options. Is William there? She has asked everyone if they have seen him: land speculators, soldiers being posted to Fort Leavenworth, the clerks who sell train tickets, a mountain man in buckskins who has waist-length hair and a beard like a rat’s nest, a Canadian trader, a Mexican cattle baron in silver-tooled chaps and a sombrero who told her he had ridden all the way from Matamoros to St. Louis, the captain of the Magnolia Queen, the women in the ladies’ lounge, the men who are presently sleeping on the floor of the main salon.
So far her search has not yielded any clues to William’s whereabouts. Most people have told her they have never heard of him, which makes sense since the majority are traveling to Kansas for the first time and thus not likely to know much about the Territory. But sometimes the answers she has received have been suspicious.
For example, some of the ladies on the Magnolia Queen are Missourians traveling to Westport with their personal slaves. So far none of these ladies will admit to having seen or heard of a tall, lanky man with dark eyes and chestnut-colored hair named William Saylor. Are they telling the truth? When Carrie speaks to them, they look at one another in ways that suggest they harbor secrets. Do those secrets concern William or do they merely dislike her because she’s an abolitionist?
The New Englanders have been sympathetic, but here, too, something seems amiss. Only yesterday a minister’s wife from Boston left a tin of oatmeal cookies in front of her stateroom door, but the minister himself will hardly speak to her, and whenever she mentions William’s name, he changes the subject.
To avoid scandal she has told everyone William is her half-brother, so why are they being so reticent? Is it because they don’t know anything, or do they pity her? Has William done what he told his friend Charles Howard he was going to do—something illegal and dangerous that he could be hanged for? That seems ridiculous, but if he hasn’t, then why this conspiracy of silence? Maybe there is no conspiracy. Maybe she’s just imagining people know more about William than they’re willing to say.
For a moment she allows herself to picture how shocked they’ll be when they see her kissing this “brother” of hers. That’s what she will do when she finds him: kiss him senseless. And she will find him. It’s simply a matter of persistence.
Rolling up the map, she blows out the candle, and puts her head down on the table. She should go back to her stateroom and sleep in a real bed, but if she tries to get out of the ladies’ lounge, she will probably tread on someone’s hand or foot, or worse yet, face, and she is too tired to deal with the yelling and confusion.
Closing her eyes, she forces herself to imagine sheep jumping over a fence. When that fails, she dismisses the sheep and begins to silently recite the Latin names of orchids. Gradually, the courage and stubbornness that have carried her through the day dissolve, and she finds herself thinking about the unthinkable.
If I can’t find William, I will . . . what in God’s name will I do? For a long time she is neither asleep nor awake, but trapped between the two. Then she must doze off because she sees tall grasses swaying in the wind and hears a voice that she recognizes as her own.
If I can’t find William, I’ll buy land and settle in the Kansas Territory near Lawrence. I can get 160 acres for about $1.25 an acre. They say the soil is rich. I don’t know anything about farming, but I know more about plants than most people. Surely, I can raise enough food on 160 acres to feed myself and my child . . .
She dreams of driving a wooden claim stake into the ground. As she does this, her anxiety dissolves, and she feels determined and self-sufficient, as if her life will turn out well no matter what happens. Then gradually the vision of the tall grasses fades. She opens her eyes and again feels loneliness and longing.
What will I do if I can’t find William? How will I bear it? Reaching out in the darkness, she touches the rolled-up map, and begins to cry quietly so as not to awaken women who are on their way to join their husbands, and children whose fathers are waiting for them in Westport.