Somerset

by Leila Meacham

  When negotiations were completed, Eunice summoned Jonah and shocked everyone by ordering champagne. After Carson, Jessica, and Silas had taken a glass, she lifted hers. Tears shone in her eyes, and her voice cracked. “I never thought I’d toast the engagement of my daughter to a man she does not love nor he her,” she said, “but I hope and pray that you can find in the other something to keep you together besides a financial contract, Silas, and the threat of spending your days shut away in a convent, Jessica. I’m sure if you try, despite difficulties to the contrary, you will find all sorts of reasons to care for each other, as there have been in my marriage, and I’m sure, Silas, in that of your parents.”

  Carson grunted and turned a startled stare to his wife. Difficulties? What difficulties? But he, too, lifted his glass. “Here! Here!” he said.

  Eunice drank hastily and set down her glass. “Now if you will excuse me…” She lifted her skirts and made a speedy and teary exit from the room. The only sound in the silence of her wake was the snap of flames in the fireplace. Carson, his gaze sad on the door of his wife’s departure, cleared his throat but failed to remove the grit from his voice.

  “I will pray for your happiness,” he said. “Now leave me, please.”

  Jessica surprised Silas by waving Jonah away when the butler came to see him to the door and escorted him out to the verandah herself. He couldn’t imagine what else she had to say to him not already communicated in the drawing room.

  “You believe my father had your wagons burned, don’t you?” Jessica stated after she’d closed the door firmly behind her. She barely reached his shoulder, and the cold winter light on her upturned face gave her skin, despite its freckles, the sheen of alabaster.

  “The timing of their destruction seems too much of a coincidence not to suspect foul play,” Silas said, “but the sheriff could find no evidence to support my allegations.”

  “The sheriff!” Jessica’s contemptuous tone dismissed the man. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the fool hadn’t lit the fuse himself—on my father’s orders,” she said. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Toliver.”

  “And I am sorry for yours,” Silas said.

  “Mine is nothing compared to yours.” She peered up at him, her brown eyes sorrowful. “When will you tell Lettie?”

  “I’m on my way now.”

  “I am…so devastated for her. I can’t begin to imagine how she will feel. Will you tell her I…”

  “Love her? Yes, I will, Jessica. She will know you had no part in this. I will tell her the truth, as I have told you. Though it will give her no comfort, I believe she knows me well enough to understand that if I were to stay, eventually what we have together would be lost.”

  Jessica bit her lip. “I thought…love could conquer anything.”

  She expressed the absurdity in the wistful, schoolgirl voice of someone who had no experience with the kind of love of which she spoke and probably never would. She looked even younger than her age, and Silas was moved to touch her in some comforting way, as one would a child, but he resisted.

  “There are some other, greater loves that love cannot overcome,” he said, his throat aflame. “I wish it were not so.”

  She said, surprising him once again, “I wish it were not so as well, Mr. Toliver, since the love you and Lettie share most probably will not come to either of you again. You’ve made a poor bargain, sir.”

  A groom had brought his horse around. “And you an equally poor one, I’m afraid, Miss Wyndham.” He noted she had not bothered with a shawl. “You will get cold,” he said.

  “I’m quite sure I will, Mr. Toliver, but I will get used to it. I fear I must, for I don’t expect ever to be warm again. Good day.”

  Refusing to think or feel, imagine or speculate, Silas began the longest ride of his life, a canter of insensate oblivion to the house where lived the keeper of his heart. He found her in the tiny sitting room of the manse, a personal space separate from the small parlor where her father was conducting a Bible study. An overflow of wedding paraphernalia and gifts filled every available nook, and, surprised by his visit, Lettie hurriedly fetched a sheet to draw over her veil before he could catch a glimpse of it.

  “Bad luck for the groom to see any particle of a bride’s dress before the wedding,” she said, kissing him soundly. When Silas did not respond, she drew away to look at him worriedly. “What’s wrong?”

  He willed himself to go blind and deaf to her. He must not remember how the firelight played on her hair or the whisper of her dress as she rushed to throw her arms around his neck. He felt the low-ceilinged walls of the cramped room closing in. “Could we go…outside to the swing?” he asked.

  “It’s cold and threatening rain.”

  “By the fire, then.”

  “We’ll keep our voices down. The ladies are so engrossed in discussing the Gospel according to Matthew they won’t hear a thing we say. This is about the Conestogas, isn’t it?”

  She was aware that the loss of the Conestogas would mean an indefinite, perhaps permanent, delay of their departure to Texas. She had been grief-stricken for him but maintained her indomitable belief that something unexpectedly good would come out of the disaster.

  “Yes, Lettie. It’s about the Conestogas.”

  He explained, forcing his heart to grow cold to the vision of her joy dissolving in shock and disbelief.

  “Jessica? You’re going to marry Jessica Wyndham?”

  “Yes, Lettie.”

  He hung his head to avoid looking at her. He must not store in memory the heartbreak that filled her blue eyes or the sound of it in her startled cry of pain. He must not carry away, never to be forgotten, the silence of her shocked incredulity as he explained once again, and badly, that he could not survive as things were and always would be at Queenscrown. Day after day, month after month, year after year, he would quietly erode, Silas told her. Pieces of him would slough off until he was barely recognizable as the man she’d married. He would feel like a grounded sailing ship, left to dry-rot where he’d been stranded.

  “Then you must go,” Lettie said, rising and standing erect and remote as a marble statue. “God be with you and Jessica, Silas.”

  “Lettie, I…”

  “No more need be said. Good-bye, Silas.”

  “But I must say this…” he insisted, forcing his words through an agony so searing he felt he was burning alive. “I wish with all my being that it was possible to rip out the part of me that could allow me to do this to you, Lettie, my one, my only love. As God is my witness, I would if I could, but I cannot.”

  “I know, Silas.” She stood before the lace curtain of a window through which the last gray light of day outlined her stoic posture, and he was not to be spared the love and courage he saw on her face that would release him to marry another woman. He wanted to go to her for a final, tender embrace, but she turned her back on him, erecting an invisible wall, and he knew he would carry with him the sight of her head finally bowed and shoulders drawn for the rest of his days.

  The heavens opened on his return to Queenscrown, a pummeling, repudiating rain from which he did not take shelter, and he was soaked through when he arrived at the plantation. Lazarus rushed to take his hat and coat, clucking that he must get to his room for dry clothes, but Silas told him he wouldn’t bother. “Just bring me a towel, and please ask my mother and brother to meet me in the drawing room immediately,” he ordered his longtime servant.

  “Yes, Mister Silas. Master Joshua, too? He’s playing a board game with his uncle.”

  “No, Lazurus. My son is to be sent to his room until I go up to see him.”

  Elizabeth and Morris heard him out in drop-jawed silence, Elizabeth’s bosom heaving in apparent need of oxygen before Silas was through. Silas had instructed them to hold their diatribes until after he’d concluded what he had to tell them, but neither looked capable of uttering a word when he finished.

  Finally, Morris pronounced, “He that hastens to be rich has an evil
eye and considers not that poverty shall come upon him. You need to read your Proverbs, Silas.”

  “And you need to reread Father’s will, Morris. Do not speak to me of poverty.”

  “Son—” Elizabeth staggered up from her chair. “You can’t do this to Joshua. His little heart will never mend, and you must think of Lettie.”

  “Joshua will have a better chance of his heart mending than mine will, Mother, and I am thinking of Lettie. Is it better to hurt her now than later, when it is too late to rectify her mistake? In any case,” he said, turning from her to pour himself a shot of whiskey, “the deal is made. I am promised to Jessica Wyndham, and we’ll marry in a week.”

  Elizabeth leaned against the back of a chair for support. “I tell you this, Silas William Toliver, son of mine. If you go through with this marriage for the reasons you’ve contracted it, there will be a curse on your land in Texas. Nothing good can come from what has been built on such sacrifice and selfishness and greed.”

  Silas threw the whiskey down his throat. The figure of his mother blurred. He would leave without her blessing, completing his alienation from his family. But in her stead, he saw a land blazing with cotton overlooked by a resplendent manor house of which he was the master. His son would take his place beside him and someday beget his own heirs to rule over the dominion of Somerset.

  “I already am cursed, Mother,” he said. “I carry the Toliver blood.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  That Sunday, the usually organized and focused Reverend Sedgewick appeared distracted and rambled in his sermon, and there was the notable absence of his lovely daughter in the choir loft. All was explained when in the week following, those invited to the marriage ceremony of Lettie Sedgewick and Silas Toliver received the return of their gifts and a brief note stating the wedding had been called off. The citizens of Willow Grove, members of the First Presbyterian Church, and the residents of Plantation Alley shared a mutual gasp of shock and wondered if the cancellation had anything to do with the burning of the groom’s Conestogas the week before. No one associated the mysterious closure of the Wyndham house over the holidays with this latest development until the news was leaked that Silas Toliver was now set to marry Jessica Wyndham.

  The leak had come from Meadowlands when Silas had met with Jeremy to tell him of his decision. The plantation had its own version of Willowshire’s Lulu, and the servant was outside the open door of the Warwick library at the moment Silas asked Jeremy to stand with him when he married Jessica Wyndham in five days’ time.

  “Morris refuses, and Mother says she won’t attend the ceremony,” the servant overheard Silas say, and got an earful of the why and wherefore he had to marry Jessica Wyndham and jilt his betrothed. The maid carried the scandalous news to the servants’ quarters and added her own opinion that eventually reflected the consensus of the whole town. Lettie Sedgewick was the daughter of a poor minister while the daughter of the master of Willowshire, though plain as cheesecloth, was rich. Silas Toliver was broke. It didn’t take the sharpest intellect to figure out why he was marrying Jessica Wyndham.

  Shock waves immediately rocked the underpinnings of the village and plantation community, and Silas found himself an object of scorn and aspersion for which not even his worst anticipation of the scandal had prepared him. Elizabeth and Morris would not speak to him. The townspeople shunned him. Tradesmen were surly when he went to buy supplies and make arrangements for the wagon train. His worst moments came when he told his son he would not be marrying Lettie.

  His child’s mouth trembled, followed by tears that filled his large hazel eyes. “Lettie won’t be my mama? Why, Papa? Doesn’t she like me anymore?”

  “She not only likes you, Joshua. She loves you. This is not about anything you’ve done, son. This is about…what I have done.”

  “Have you been bad?”

  “In her eyes, yes.”

  “Can you undo the bad thing?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Joshua had cried himself to sleep every night and would not eat or respond to any diversion, but, the worst cut of all, he turned from Silas’s arms to his uncle’s.

  “Have you any idea the grief you’ve caused that child?” his mother reproached him.

  “Yes, Mother, but I rely on time to heal it. I fear time will not be so kind to me.”

  “Nor should it.”

  Only his friendship with Jeremy, who kept a closed mouth on the situation, and their earnest preparations for the journey to Texas kept Silas from going mad over the suffering he’d caused his son and Lettie. Within days after he’d left his former fiancée with bowed head, she had taken a boat down the coast to Savannah to stay with relatives. According to Reverend Sedgewick’s denouncement of him that Elizabeth was pleased to report, she would not return until “Silas Toliver was gone and good riddance to him.” Doggedly, Silas thought of himself as a man rowing his boat through darkness, no beam of light anywhere, but he knew the shore was somewhere in the distance. He must keep rowing and trust his judgment of the direction he had chosen. Eventually land—and liberation—would appear.

  The five days flashed by with the speed of lightning and dragged with the slowness of a ball and chain. Silas had not seen Jessica since striking the deal with her father five days before, nor had he spoken with a member of her family. He had dealt with Carson Wyndham’s banker in settling the financial details of his marriage contract. Little money was to come to him outright, Silas learned to his dismay. He was to be paid for the destroyed Conestogas and the money used to finance his trip to Texas and provide start-up capital for his plantation. Beyond that, funds would be allocated at stages of Somerset’s development and for specific purposes. Silas was to keep careful records and receipts as proofs of purchase and evidence of his endeavors. Carson Wyndham would regularly—and unannounced—dispatch an emissary to collect them and check on his daughter’s welfare. If all were in order, Silas could expect another deposit into his bank account.

  Silas had believed the cash he required at the outset would be deposited as a lump sum into his account to be drawn upon as he saw fit, rather than doled out in increments. He was enraged to discover that the original agreement he signed after careful study had loopholes that allowed Carson to maneuver him into a position where he was indeed a beggar divested of his former leverage. Silas had burned his bridges with his fiancée, his family, town, and society, and now, too late to mend fences and without financial resources, he had no recourse but to marry Carson Wynd­ham’s daughter—and abide by the man’s dictates. Every time Silas signed his name to a bill for supplies that would be forwarded to his future father-in-law for payment, he hated the man even more.

  He and Jeremy arrived at Willowshire ten minutes before the ceremony was to take place. Only the Wyndhams and the minister were gathered in the drawing room. It appeared there were to be no other witnesses to the nuptials. Silas nodded to a dour-faced Eunice, but he did not exchange handshakes or pleasantries with Carson and Michael as he and Jeremy took their place beside the minister to await the entrance of the bride.

  Carson was apparently not to escort his daughter into the room. The practice of “giving away the bride” must strike too close to reality. Lettie had made a study of the history of wedding customs and told Silas the tradition had begun in feudal England when fathers literally gave the property of their daughters to a man to be his wife. Today, the gesture was to show approval of the groom and serve “as a symbol of the father’s blessing of the marriage.” Neither was true in this case. Mentally Silas could hear Lettie explain that the tradition of the groom standing to the right of the bride went back to medieval days—“so his sword arm would be free to defend her from attackers. Isn’t that the noblest thing?”

  Silas shook his head to free it of her voice, and the reverend of the First Methodist Church gave him a strained smile, which he did not feel the least compunction to return. Rather, he eyed his “benefactor,” as gossip described Carson, with
undisguised contempt. Carson ignored his glare, while Michael seemed to find something on a far wall to hold his attention. The few visual attempts to suggest the purpose of the occasion—probably achieved by the reputed creative hand of Jessica’s maid, Silas figured—depressed and mocked him beyond despair. Intertwined with white satin ribbons, the first narcissus, tulips, hyacinths, and crocus of the season stood upright in large containers about the room, and an elaborate, three-tiered wedding cake, bearing the maid’s signature sugar roses, reigned from a tea trolley along with a bowl of punch. Silas felt a minor relief to see the piano bench empty. Apparently there was to be no music to usher in the bride. Lettie had spent weeks deliberating on the music she wished sung and played at her wedding.

  Servants opened the heavy paneled doors to the drawing room, signaling the entrance of Jessica. She floated in wearing a white dress that shimmered as she walked but no veil to hide her pale face and freckles that stood out like small, rusted nail heads. Silas temporarily lowered his lids, feeling a loss so great it left him faint. Opening his eyes, he saw that Jessica had not missed his moment of pain. There was a fraction of a second when she almost stumbled, and pink daubs of embarrassment glowed briefly on her cheeks. She raised her head an inch or so higher, focused her gaze hard on the minister, and the flush disappeared. Oh Lord, Silas sighed to himself as he, too, faced the minister when his bride-to-be drew beside him.

  Hours later, Silas remembered hardly anything about the wedding ceremony. It was as gray and lackluster as the weather outside. His and Jessica’s emotionless responses to the vows were mumbled in monotones hardly above whispers. There were no smiles and certainly no trading of long, amatory looks since the bride and groom did not glance at each other. Wedding rings were shoved on fingers with indifference. Silas had sent the bill for Jessica’s plain gold band to Carson and returned the diamond solitaire he’d chosen for Lettie to the huffy jeweler for a refund. Silas could not silence his former fiancée’s commentary on wedding tradition in his head that made a travesty of the rings he and Jessica had traded. “The wedding ring has been worn on the third finger of the left hand since Roman times. The Romans believed the vein in that finger runs directly to the heart.”