Somerset

by Leila Meacham

  “You would think South Carolina still a colony of the British Empire, considering how slavishly devoted some of us are to all things English,” Lettie had said to Jessica with a twinkle in her eye when they finally had a chance to chat privately.

  “Except for slavery,” Jessica said. “The British have had the humanitarian decency to abolish the slave trade.”

  Jessica could have bitten her tongue. She’d leaped without looking, but Lettie Sedgewick’s tolerant nature and Jessica’s experience with the minister’s daughter invited controversial confidences. When tutoring Jessica, Lettie had not minded, and had even encouraged, Tippy to sit in on their sessions, albeit secretly. It was against the law to teach slaves to read and write, and the tutor could have endangered her father’s position as minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Willow Grove if she were found out.

  Humor flitted across her friend’s countenance. “Quite so,” Lettie said. “I see you haven’t changed much, my dear pupil, but may I caution you to think first where you are before speaking.”

  “I must learn to do so.”

  “I heard from Silas about the little incident on the disembarkation dock in Charleston yesterday. Jeremy Warwick was in the area to pick up something for Meadowlands. He told Silas that he did not show himself for fear of causing further embarrassment to you and your mother and brother.”

  “No doubt Mr. Warwick thought the worst of me.”

  “Not at all. He told Silas he thought you awfully brave.”

  Or awfully stupid, Jessica thought, looking at her father’s sober face in the mirror. Had Michael told him of the incident in Charleston yesterday, and he was here now to chastise her?

  “Jessie,” Carson said, “I want you to look especially nice tonight.”

  “We’ll certainly try, won’t we, Tippy?” Jessica said, relieved. “Is there any particular reason other than it’s my birthday?”

  “No…no reason. I just want to feel especially proud of my little girl who’s home at last after two years, so please appear your best.” He bent and kissed her cheek. “See you at the party. And Tippy?”

  Tippy stood at attention. “Yessuh?”

  “See that it happens.”

  “Yessuh, Mister Carson.”

  He strode from the room, and the women exchanged long, interrogating looks. “What was that all about?” Jessica asked.

  “Jeremy Warwick,” Tippy answered promptly.

  “Jeremy Warwick?”

  “I heard all about it in the kitchen. Your papa wants you to make an impression on him with the hope you two will get together. You’re to be seated next to him at the supper table.”

  “Jeremy is Silas’s age—too old for me—and I understand they’re going to Texas together. Why would my father want me to marry him?”

  “I don’t know. The Warwicks are rich. Maybe to ward off the bucks who aren’t?” Tippy batted her lashless eyes meaningfully. “Jeremy Warwick is a good man, so they said in the kitchen. A good master. I can’t understand why he’s still unmarried. Maybe your daddy wants you to set your cap for him before someone else snatches him up.”

  “No, Tippy, that’s not the reason,” Jessica said in sudden understanding. Hurt plunged through her. Her father had learned about the brouhaha on the dock. Michael would have informed him, and her mother, too fearful to keep secrets from her husband, must have told him about her views on slavery. “My father wants to be rid of me before I cause trouble.”

  But only if taken out of South Carolina by a good and rich man. Her father loved her that much, she thought. Jessica felt anger slowly overtake her hurt. Well, she had news for him. She would never marry a slave owner.

  Chapter Five

  She was to be presented in a receiving line in the ballroom rather than strike a grand entrance from the top of the staircase. Staircases were for great beauties. The arrangement suited Jessica just fine. Her right glove was smudged by the time she had finished shaking the hands of the fifty guests attending her birthday party, and she could not feel the stem of her champagne glass for moments after she was free to seek out Lettie standing with Silas Toliver and Jeremy Warwick before her five-tiered, flower-​​bedecked birthday cake.

  “It’s lovely,” Lettie exclaimed in wonder at the cake when Jessica joined them. “Do I recognize Tippy’s hand in the design?”

  “Of course. She made the flowers from beaten egg whites dipped into sugar and hardened.”

  “Well, it’s exquisite, as are you, birthday girl. What a lovely gown! From Paris?”

  “From Boston.” Jessica felt her face grow warm under the gazes of the men. She looked the best she possibly could, but by no means would they agree she was exquisite. Lettie saw beauty in everything and everybody and could well afford to do so. Exquisite described her, as was plain to see in Silas’s eyes. They made a dazzling couple—he, tall, dark, and handsome, a Lord Byron with his unruly raven-black hair and green eyes and attractive chin dimple, and she, petite and blond, porcelain-skinned and dainty, perfectly fitting the subject of the poet’s poem “She Walks in Beauty.”

  “And your blush is becoming, too,” Jeremy Warwick said with a little bow and the trace of a devilish grin. Was he making fun of her? Jessica ignored the compliment and said to Lettie, “I can’t tell you how delighted I am to be chosen your bridesmaid.”

  “I can’t tell you how delighted I am that you accepted. Shall we go shopping for your dress fabric next week in Charleston?”

  “I’d love to, but I’m hopeless when it comes to such things. Tippy has the best eye for material and color. She has marvelous taste. She’s responsible for the design and fabric of my gown. I always take her along to help me select my wardrobe. May she come, too?”

  “Tippy?” Silas interposed. “That’s twice I’ve heard her name. I don’t believe I’ve met her.”

  “Uh…Tippy is Jessica’s maid,” Lettie explained, her look slightly uncomfortable.

  “A Negro maid has better taste than her mistress?” Silas said, addressing Jessica incredulously.

  Jessica’s chin went up. “Mine does.”

  She felt her elbow taken in a firm, masculine grip. Was its pressure a warning? “I believe that’s the supper bell,” Jeremy said, placing Jessica’s arm through his. “I’m to have the pleasure of your company on my left at table, Miss Jessica. How did I get to be so lucky to sit next to the birthday girl?”

  “It was by my father’s design, Mr. Warwick,” Jessica said, suddenly feeling suffocated. She cast decorum to the wind, or rather to the oppressive waft of perfumes permeating the room. “If at all possible, I’m to entrance and beguile you with the hope you will not find me unweddable.”

  Her audience stared at her with mouths agape. Jeremy’s chuckle broke the stunned silence. “By Jove,” he said, “I believe I’m already entranced.”

  Jessica was combing out her curls from their party do when her father’s short, staccato knock came at the door. Jessica saved herself the bother of responding, for it opened immediately, and he entered wearing a smoking jacket and smelling like cigar.

  “Well, my girl, did you enjoy your party?”

  “Yes, Papa, very much.” It had been a stultifying evening, the conversation boring and predictable except for hearing Silas and Jeremy discuss their plans under way to lead a wagon train to Texas in the spring. It was to be half a mile long, and they hoped to make at least two miles an hour, enabling the emigrants to make ten miles a day, depending on the weather and sundry other obstacles. The journey sounded dangerous, fraught with the unknown, and she wondered how Lettie would fare from the rigors they would surely face. The only other interesting subject discussed had been the safe arrival that afternoon of Sarah Conklin from Massachusetts, who would be taking Lettie’s teaching position at the local school. The Sedgewicks had picked her up at the dock in Charleston and taken her to her new home in Willow Grove.

  “Is she pretty?” Michael had wanted to know.

  “Very,” the Re
verend Sedgewick had pronounced, coloring slightly.

  Jessica had offered no information of her acquaintance with the new schoolmarm, though she suspected that Lettie had been surprised her friend had used her influence to secure the job for an outsider and a northerner to boot.

  Her father sat on the settee, the height of the seat too low to stretch out his legs comfortably, but its position providing a vantage point by which he could observe his daughter’s face in the mirror. “I hope you’re not simply telling me what I want to hear and that you did enjoy yourself,” he said. “It was hard to tell. What did you think of Jeremy Warwick?”

  Jessica teased a strand of waxed hair from its curl with the hairbrush. “I found him pleasant.”

  “Pleasant! Is that all you can say? Why, there’s not an unmarried woman in all the South who wouldn’t find him stimulating, lively, amusing. Many married women, too, truth be told.” He worked his eyebrows knowingly at her reflection, his attempt at drollery so ludicrously foreign to his humorless nature it was hard for her not to laugh.

  “Then why isn’t he married?” she asked.

  “Too particular, I guess, but rumor has it he lost the girl he loved to typhoid fever when he was younger. I must say, Spook, you didn’t much try to impress him.”

  Jessica met his eyes in the mirror. Spook. He had not called her that since she was a little girl. The name had come from a game they’d played when she would pop out from a hiding place to surprise him. Boo! she’d cry, and he’d laugh and swing her around and call her his spook. Her throat tightened with an almost forgotten ache her father could waken in her.

  “I was supposed to try to impress him, Papa?”

  A pink flush cropped up around Carson’s ears. “Well, yes, Spook. I admit to trying to play matchmaker. Jeremy is the most eligible bachelor in South Carolina other than Silas Toliver, and he’s asked for. Besides, Silas has no money. Jeremy does. He would look after you properly.”

  “Silas has no money?” Jessica glanced in surprise at her father in the mirror. “How can that be? Queenscrown is a prosperous plantation.”

  “Benjamin Toliver left Queenscrown to his older son, Morris. Silas is no more than the hired help. That’s why he’s going to Texas.”

  Alarmed for Lettie, Jessica asked, “How can he afford to do so?”

  “He has some money of his own that he’s sunk into the venture, and the rest he’s borrowing from me.”

  Jessica shuddered for Lettie. Not only would she be facing untold hardships in making the journey and starting a new life in Texas, but all would be done on borrowed money. It would probably take years to pay back her father before the plantation was up and running and Silas saw a penny of his own. Perhaps love would be enough to sustain them and see Silas through to the dream he and Jeremy had apparently long harbored.

  Jessica turned on her dressing-table stool to look at him. “Why are you in a hurry to marry me off, Papa?”

  “Well, you…you’re not getting any younger, you know. Your mother was married at your age, and frankly, I can’t think of another man more worthy of you than Jeremy.” Carson pinched at the air with two plump, strong fingers. “You’ve got to pluck him out of the pot before someone else does.”

  “That depends on whether Jeremy is willing to be plucked.”

  “He looked willing enough to me, but you rebuffed him.”

  “He’s nearly thirty, eleven years older than I am.”

  “What difference does that make? I am eight years older than your mother, as is Silas older than Lettie, and look how happy she is with him.”

  Jessica allowed that, yes, Lettie’s happiness was evident to everyone at the party. She wondered if there was a man alive who could put the stars in her eyes that Silas had placed in Lettie’s. She did like Jeremy. She had found him stimulating and lively and amusing, but he could never be interested in someone like her. Her father had witnessed merely a gentleman’s courtliness toward the daughter of his host, and her indifference had been caused by resentment at being exhibited like a filly at a horse auction.

  “He’s going to Texas, you know,” she said.

  Carson’s glance fell to his house slippers. “Yes, I know.”

  Jessica rotated back to the mirror. In this house, more was related—and understood—in the silences of her family’s conversations with one another than in spoken words. The moment’s lull clearly admitted her father’s sad but true willingness to see her married to someone suitable as soon as feasible and carried away as far as possible. Jessica remained silent, the rhythmic sound of the brush strokes censorious in the quiet.

  Carson raised his head and asked suddenly, looking around. “Where is Tippy? Why isn’t she here to attend you?”

  “I sent her to her room. There was no point in her waiting up to see me to bed.”

  Carson rose, frowning. “She’s supposed to be here until you retire—then she can go to her room. You spoil that girl too much, Jessie. I won’t have it.”

  “Yes, Papa,” Jessica said, continuing to brush. Tippy had pleaded to stay up to hear about the party, but an attack of pleurisy that afternoon had almost brought her to her knees. Jessica would not dare remind her father of Tippy’s lung condition, aggravated by the day’s sudden cold snap. With few exceptions, he had little tolerance for useless property. “I’ll see that she earns her keep,” Jessica said.

  “You better.” Carson paused, locking eyes with his daughter in the mirror. She saw distress in his; felt tears rise in hers. Again, silence fell, speaking louder than tongues. “Spook, my dear, why can’t you be more like…a Wyndham?” he asked. “How was it you were born so different from the rest of us?”

  “I don’t know, Papa,” she said, attacked by a sudden apprehension that left her cold, “but I fear my dissimilarity of birth will cost me dearly.”

  Chapter Six

  Willie May sat amidst the piles of unwashed dishes from the party the night before, indulging in a second cup of coffee and relishing the rare opportunity to be alone with her thoughts in the Big House. It was Sunday morning. Everyone in the house—the master and mistress, Miss Jessica, and the servants, including her daughter—and all the field-workers from the Yard were at church services held today by the creek. There was to be a baptism afterwards, celebrated in the shade of the big pecan and cypress trees by the bank, everybody eating the leftovers from Miss Jessica’s eighteenth birthday party. The DeWitts had gotten off to Charleston and their departure to England on Saturday afternoon, thank God. At least Willie May hadn’t had them to worry about in the hustle of getting fifty guests wined and dined and cleaned up after.

  “Now, you all go on to bed,” Miss Eunice had ordered the house servants last night after they’d cleared the tables and put away the food. “The dishes can wait until after church services tomorrow. Willie May, you go to bed, too. You look like you’re dead on your feet.”

  She was good that way, Miss Eunice was, always considerate of her housekeeper’s limits, though the mistress had her boundaries. Boundary lines were fine by Willie May. Life was so much easier and simpler when everybody knew their place and accepted it and never bothered about nobody else’s. That was the subject disturbing her this morning in the peace and quiet of the Big House. Boundaries. Tippy didn’t know hers, and that was the fault of Jessica Wyndham. The master’s daughter was going to get her girl in trouble—big trouble. She could smell it coming.

  A part of Willie May had knotted up tight as a ball of twine from the day her baby girl—ten years old—had wandered, with Miss Jessica, of course, into the drawing room, where the mistress was in a dispute with her decorator over color and drapery material for the Venetian windows. Willie May had been serving tea when she saw her daughter pick up two swatches of different fabric in matching colors and, calmly, without saying a word, hand them to Miss Eunice.

  “Well, I declare,” her mistress had exclaimed. “I do believe this is the perfect color of green and fabric combination. We’ll use the velvet
for the valances and the silk for the panels.”

  They had all stared at her baby girl, and right then, Willie May had felt that tightening of her innards that had hardly loosened a day since, especially when Miss Jessica piped, “I told you she was smart, Mama!” and beamed at Tippy.

  Willie May and Miss Eunice had watched helplessly as the girls’ friendship grew by the day. In the beginning, when the children were blossoming out from infants together, neither mother had paid much attention to their enjoyment of the other’s company. On plantations, it was natural for white and black children to play together, especially if the offspring of house servants lived with their parents in quarters in the Big House. Willie May had been mightily relieved to have her daughter, born missing a lung, brought up under her eye rather than in the Yard, where the other slaves’ children were put to work, and Miss Eunice had been happy that her little girl, with no sisters for companions, had a playmate. Their growing bond had skipped Carson Wyndham’s notice altogether, even when his daughter had insisted that every treat be shared with Tippy and that she be given the same toys and dolls as she. It was Miss Jessica who had given Tippy, christened Isabel, her name. “Tippy!” she had squealed as the girls were learning to walk and her tiny daughter had preferred to tiptoe rather than toddle.

  Willie May and Eunice had been slow to do anything about their daughters’ closeness since, in some ways, it mirrored their own. Carson Wyndham had purchased Willie May, not quite twenty, as a maid for Eunice Wyndham when he brought his bride from Richmond, Virginia, to his huge estate, Willowshire. Alone for weeks while her husband was away minding the business of his many plantations, Eunice would have gone mad from loneliness had it not been for Willie May. Snatched from her parents and her village in Africa at seventeen years of age, Willie May understood about separation from home. She had been taught English and domestic service by Anglican missionaries—a lucky find for the slave traders—and she and the mistress had become each other’s confidante, together making their way through new worlds with husbands they barely knew, sharing the joys and travails of pregnancies and childbirths and the management of the most prominent manor house in South Carolina. Eunice was quick to say she didn’t know what she’d do without Willie May, but only because she trusted her housekeeper never to trespass on the bounds of their friendship.