Free The Seekers by John Jakes

won’t.”
    “Promise?”
    He heard a grotesque echo of Gilbert’s voice when she spoke, another echo in his own reply.
    “Yes, Elizabeth. I promise.”
    She uttered a small, satisfied laugh and leaned back against his arm.
    She stayed with him an hour or more, until the house was utterly still, and then stole away. In the weeks that followed, as the new year of 1796 opened, she visited him by night whenever she could. No one in the house seemed to suspect, because the lovers carefully avoided one another except at those times when normal household activities such as meals brought them together.
    But not many days had passed in January before Abraham realized that his problems had taken on a new dimension.
    He was no longer merely defying his father.
    He was falling in love with Elizabeth Fletcher.

Chapter IV
The Storm Breaks
i
    D URING LATE JANUARY AND into February, Abraham’s relationship with his father remained in a state of truce. He agreed to work regular hours at Kent and Son—the firm was expanding so fast that sufficient help couldn’t be found—but at the same time, he made clear to Philip that his decision shouldn’t be construed as a permanent one.
    To reinforce the point, Abraham insisted on menial work and menial wages. He didn’t want other employees thinking he was taking advantage of his status as the owner’s son.
    Despite all the conditions Abraham set, Philip seemed happy with the arrangement. His face showed his pleasure whenever he walked into the press room and saw Abraham black-handed and smeary-cheeked from manipulating the leather balls that inked the type forms, or lugging huge stacks of newly cut paper.
    Although new inventions were being introduced at an astonishing rate—duly reported in the columns of the Bay State Federalist —the equipment of Kent and Son remained similar to that on which Philip had first learned his trade in a shop in London in the 1770s. Kent’s now owned four large flatbeds, each driven by human muscle applied to a screw lever. The presses were located on the first floor of the three-story structure near Long Wharf. Their weight had already caused a noticeable sag in the floor.
    On the second story Philip maintained his own bindery, plus warehousing space. Kent and Son had just printed an inexpensive edition of Mr. Noah Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller. This instructional book for school children was already more than a decade old. But it showed every sign of remaining the standard text for generations to come, and the warehouse was piled high with copies of the Kent version.
    The building’s third floor held Philip’s cramped, rather dingy private office, a smaller press for his weekly newspaper, and another, even dingier cubby occupied by the paper’s editor, Mr. Supply Pleasant.
    Mr. Pleasant had advanced to journalism from a career as a public letter writer hired for a few pence by the illiterate, or by those who wanted their correspondence inscribed in a fine, graceful hand. Abraham quickly developed a liking for the graying, potbellied editor. Whenever he had a free moment, he climbed the stairs to talk with Pleasant and scan the stories being set in type by Pleasant’s one assistant.
    Pleasant, in turn, soon sensed Abraham’s dissatisfaction with his work downstairs. He raised the subject one blustery day in February.
    “Your father’s delighted that you’re working for Kent’s, Abraham.”
    “It’s only temporary, I assure you.”
    “The book trade isn’t to your liking?”
    “No, that’s not quite it. What I don’t like is being expected to spend my life in the book trade.”
    Supply Pleasant leaned back in his chair, scratched his nose with a quill that left an ink stain between his eyes. He peered over the top of his steel spectacles. “Then what career do you have in mind? Medicine? The law?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “A year’s study at Harvard might help you decide.”
    “I doubt it.”
    “Well, many a young man takes a