Somerset

by Leila Meacham

  She had hit her husband on his weak flank. As the date had drawn nearer for the wagon train to pull out, coupled with the harrowing news from Texas, Carson had grown more and more morose. Eunice, recognizing he was having second thoughts about their daughter’s safety, made her move. “It’s not too late to stop her,” she said. “We can have the marriage annulled. Jessica and Silas have never…well, you know.”

  “And then what, Eunice?” Carson said, his face red with agitation. “We’re back to where we started with her. You would prefer we send our daughter to a convent?”

  “I believe Jessica has learned her lesson. You’ve scared her sufficiently for her to realize what will happen if she engages in speech or action that would put her in peril and embarrass this family again.” Eunice’s words had the convincing ring of a mother who knows her child.

  “If we back down now, Jessie will think she can get away with her outrageous sentiments and behavior next time,” Carson disagreed, but he delivered his argument in a tone of halfhearted conviction.

  Eunice moved closer to hold her husband’s eye. “If there is a next time, Carson,” she said softly, “I promise I won’t interfere with what you must do. I’ll make sure Jessie understands that.”

  Carson inhaled loudly and stepped away from the lure of his wife’s wiles. “I made a deal with Silas. I can’t back down now. There’s been scandal enough without my being perceived as a blackguard who’d set up the boy to believe he was headed to Texas on my money, destroyed his engagement to the woman he loved, then yanked the rug out from under him two days before his departure.” He shook his head firmly. “I can’t do that to Silas.”

  Eunice grasped her husband’s chin and compelled him to look at her. “Abide by your agreement with Silas. Let him go, but without Jessica. All he wants is the money. He’ll be happy to be rid of her because he’ll still have the chance of marrying Lettie. You can afford it, Carson.” Her tone turned pleading, her look amorous as she took his face in her hands. “Isn’t our daughter worth it, my love?”

  Carson folded his hands around her forearms, the nearest to an invitation to hold her since the whole blasted mess began. “She’s worth it,” he said huskily and drew her closer.

  His lips did not quite make it to hers. The door of the library burst open, and Lulu ran in, panting. “Pardon me, Master, but you better come see. It’s Miss Jessica. She’s done gone and done it again.”

  “Done what?” Eunice cried.

  “She done taken the side of a black man.”

  “What?” Carson threw off his wife’s arms. “Who? Where?”

  “A lazy piece of colored trash, that who. He be at the whupping post. The overseer, Mr. Wilson, was ’bout to lash him, and Miss Jessica, she step in, say he has to whup her first.” Lulu paused for breath. “It all goin’ on right now.”

  “Run and send somebody to tell Wilson to hold off. I’ll be right there.” Carson turned to his wife, his jaw rigid, his gaze implacable. “Proceed with our daughter’s packing, Mrs. Wyndham. She is going to Texas.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  In the hour before dawn, March first, 1836, the vehicles bound for the eastern part of Texas began to assemble in a field behind the town of Willow Grove, South Carolina. Groups of family and friends had gathered to wave the wagon train off, and some stores and shops were open for last-minute purchases or for their owners to bid farewell to longtime customers they were not likely to see again. There was a festive air about the occasion, mixed with melancholia and concern. On February twenty-third, the Mexican general Santa Anna and his troops had laid siege against a garrison of 187 Texians bivouacked in a mission called the Alamo on the San Antonio River. Their commander was one of their own, a South Carolina boy born in Saluda County named William Barrett Travis. Alongside him was his cousin, also of South Carolina, James B. Bonham. The Alamo had been under siege seven days, and the Charleston Courier held out little hope that the brave defenders—the South’s Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie among them—could hold out until reinforcements arrived.

  Among the most solemn groups waiting to say their good-byes were the Wyndham and Warwick families and beloved members of their household staffs. Missing were Elizabeth and Morris Toliver, but standing in their stead were Cassandra and Lazarus, holding a still-sleeping Joshua. In a last-minute decision, Silas had freed the elderly couple to stay behind with his mother and brother, and they watched on with eyes still swollen from tears of relief and gratitude. Willie May and Jonah stood with Carson, Eunice, and Michael, and Jeremy’s two brothers and father had brought along the Negro nanny who’d cared for all Warwick sons as infants.

  A cub reporter from the Charleston Courier, pen and notepad in hand, moved amidst the din and activity and, by the light of the moon and stars and campfires, attempted to put on paper his thoughts and impressions of the scene he described as “a sight to behold and a memory to hold.” His first pages recorded the awesome cost of pulling up stakes for the uncertain promise and dubious success of driving the same stakes into soil in hostile territory thousands of miles away.

  “Six to eight hundred dollars to assemble a basic outfit of wagon and oxen, goods and equipment—a fortune,” he informed the reader. He went on to apprise his reading audience that the Willow Grove wagon train would consist of approximately two hundred people, counting the slaves, and an undetermined number of conveyances because the tally changed weekly. They were of all sorts, sizes, and value, ranging from expensive Conestogas and prairie schooners (a lesser version of the desert camel) to market wagons, buggies, carriages, traps, carts, and pack mules. Many would walk, sleeping under wagons or under the stars, and take their food from the land. It was estimated the train could make ten to fifteen miles a day.

  Managing this conglomerate group, the reporter wrote, were the wagon masters he described as sitting their horses like princes commanding minions whose trust in them was as clear as the day breaking over the remarkable sight. “Silas Toliver and Jeremy Warwick wield the whip of leadership like men born to authority with the knowledge and skill, if not the experience, to enforce it,” his notes read. “Upon their shoulders rests the responsibility to get the travelers where they are going as safely as possible.” He quoted Jeremy as declaring, “We have studied every map and chart of the terrain, perused every article and guidebook, read every letter shared with us from correspondents in Texas, and interviewed dozens of people who have been there. We are as informed as we can be to guide the train successfully to our destination. The rest is up to God.”

  Silas declined to be interviewed, but the reporter followed on his heels and furiously jotted down the wagon master’s orders, calmly but firmly delivered. The leader would give his group two hours to settle down their families and animals, attend to last-minute details, say their good-byes, and take their designated place in line. Those who were late in doing so would be left behind. He would tolerate no dawdlers or laggards. A personal item of interest crept into the reporter’s notes when the wagon leader went to collect his son to place in the care of the driver of his Conestoga, one of Queenscrown’s most trusted slaves. The reporter quoted Joshua as saying, “Please, Papa. Can’t I ride with Jessica and Tippy?”

  Silas Toliver obliged the tearful plea and, carrying his son, strode to Jessica Wyndham’s—Mrs. Silas Toliver’s!—matching Conestoga, where she sat, dressed like a peacock among sparrows, on the wagon seat with her strange-looking pixie of a maid and a young colored boy named Jasper. The wagon master repeated his son’s request to his wife, who said happily, “Of course,” and, almost too slight for the boy’s weight, took him into her arms. “Don’t worry, Silas, we’ll look after him,” she said, and smiled into Joshua Toliver’s droopy eyes. “It’s nap time for you, young man,” she said further, and without another word to her husband, spirited the boy away under the spanking white canvas.

  The reporter noted that Silas Toliver’s stern features relaxed a little as he walked away, and the writer for the Courier admi
tted to himself he would have given a month’s salary to know the thoughts of a man who had yet to consummate his marriage to his wife, so gossip had it, but tittle-tattle had no place in serious journalistic reporting. Instead, the young man fixed his courage on getting Carson Wyndham to answer from a father’s perspective the question of how he felt about his daughter going to Texas.

  “How do you think I feel?” the formidable cotton baron and business tycoon snapped, and, with a glare, stalked off with his wife and son before the reporter could position his pen to record his reply.

  At the fixed moment for departure, a bugle sounded. The wagon masters were already in position at the head of the two motley lines of conveyances, farm animals, slaves, and those who would walk in the dust of churning wheels. As the last notes struck the cold morning air, both Silas Toliver and Jeremy Warwick raised a leather-jacketed arm and signaled forward. The wagon train was off.

  The cub reporter, along with those remaining behind, watched the cavalcade pull away to the cacophony of creaking wheels, suspended pots and pans banging from the sides of wagons, babies crying, dogs barking, and livestock mooing, bawling, clucking, and bleating—“the sound of the westward movement,” he would ascribe to the spectacle in his article. The young man wished them well. In a week he would report on the fall of the Alamo in Texas and then later the revenge of the Texians at San Jacinto where, under the leadership of Sam Houston, they would defeat Santa Anna and his army and pronounce the territory independent from Mexico. The Willow Grove wagon train was headed toward the newly declared Republic of Texas.

  Part Two

  1836–1859

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  From the first night the wagon train formed a circle for shelter and a corral for the animals, Jessica learned that nothing was expected of her. The other women were hardly out of their wagons before they set about preparations to get their families fed and bedded down for the night. Jessica watched the organized industry in awed dismay, feeling helpless and totally useless as mothers sent their smaller children off to gather firewood and fetch water, the older ones to dig a fire pit while the men unhitched, hobbled, and fed the animals. Dutch ovens and roasting spits, frying pans and eating utensils appeared, and in no time at all, pots were simmering and coffee brewing. A slave couple named Jeremiah and Maddie whom Silas had brought along in lieu of Lazarus and Cassandra were assigned to take care of camp duties for the Toliver family.

  Watching the activities wrapped in her fashionable blue cloak of merino wool, Jessica said to Silas, who had drawn to her side for the first time that day, “I feel rather…pointless.”

  “No need to. You were such a help with Joshua today. You kept him occupied.”

  “Keeping him engaged is a pleasure. What are my duties?”

  “None, except to stay well.”

  “Ah, yes, we can’t have me dying on you before you build your plantation.”

  Silas looked ready to explain that she’d once again misinterpreted his meaning but thought better of the effort and said, “Tell Tippy that in the future she’s to set up your washstand in the light of the campfire. The shadows are private but dangerous—a good place for a silent abduction with no one the wiser until you’ve been discovered missing.”

  “Me? Why—why would anybody want to abduct me?”

  “Perhaps your imagination can assist you in taking my word for it, Miss Wyndham.”

  Jeremy had drawn up to their campfire. “Ransom, Jess,” he explained quietly, addressing her by the shortened, friendly version of her name he’d elected to call her, “or a Creek warrior desiring a white squaw.”

  “Or worse,” Silas added, an eyebrow arched meaningfully.

  “You—you’re trying to frighten me.”

  “No, Miss Wyndham,” Silas said. “We’re trying to protect you. Stay in the light of the fire.”

  Jessica did not dare dispute the order and washed in the Conestoga, keeping ears and eyes open for strange sounds and shadows outside the wagon. With Tippy sleeping on a pallet beside her, she hardly closed her eyes for two weeks because of watching for a skulking figure or the feathered headdress of an Indian warrior outlined against the canvas.

  From the outset, Jessica realized the privileged daughter of Carson Wyndham was not to be invited into the close-knit community of the wagon train. Besides her dubious standing as Silas Toliver’s wife, she treated her black driver and maid as equals, confirming gossip of her anti-slavery leanings that had leaked to the cavalcade before it pulled out. Members of slave-owning families, especially the men, gave her wary looks and, Jessica was certain, discouraged their wives from mingling with her, “quite as if they expect me to unlock their slaves’ shackles and set them free,” she told Tippy. The others did not seek to befriend her simply because of the great distance between her status and theirs, and Jessica was at a loss how to bridge the barrier of their social differences.

  She would have liked to discuss the matter with Silas, for she was willing to enter into the activities of the community, do her share, but she rarely saw him except in the evenings when they gathered for supper around their campfire, and then not for long. His council and attention were in constant demand. When he could take time to enjoy a meal, Joshua was the main focus of conversation between them. Jessica had reluctantly granted Tippy’s request that she and Jasper eat later with Jeremiah and Maddie—“It looks better that way, Miss Jessie”—but often Jeremy and Tomahawk joined their group, and her hope to have Silas’s attention was disappointed. Jessica came to resent the intrusion on her only opportunity to speak to her husband.

  To occupy her time, she would keep a journal—a type of logbook—of their migration, Jessica decided. One day she might write a book of her experiences for posterity.

  “What will you name it?” Tippy asked.

  “I don’t know yet. I expect inspiration will come.”

  Writing the journal was the ideal solution to fill the empty hours of bouncing along on the seat of the Conestoga behind Silas’s wagon while Tippy was busy under the canvas sewing a buckskin jacket like Silas’s to present Joshua on his fifth birthday in May. Tippy had made the request for the skin from Jeremy, who had procured it from only the wind knew where, and the secrecy with which the four of them—Jeremy, Jasper, Jessica, and Tippy—kept the garment concealed from the little boy and his father lent a little air of mystery and excitement to the long days.

  Silas did not drive his Conestoga, since he was at the head of the wagon train with Jeremy. He had put a longtime slave of Queenscrown in charge of it, and when the wagon’s back flap was open, Jessica could see the woody branches of roses the driver was to mind carefully. Jeremy had also brought along burlap-wrapped root balls of roses from his garden. Tippy had told him and Silas to have them mounded with used coffee grounds to keep them strong. Since wagon space was so valuable, Jessica had been surprised that the men had allotted some of theirs to roses.

  “What is their importance?” she had asked Jeremy.

  “They are symbols of our family lines that began in England,” he told her, and explained their significance. “Silas brought his Lancasters along in honor of his heritage.”

  “And you? Why did you bring along your White Rose of York?”

  “In memory of my mother.”

  Against her husband’s better judgment, thin, spindly Jasper drove Jessica’s spirited four-horse team, a present from her father. Silas would have preferred the gift had been oxen. They were slower, but more manageable and made better farm animals.

  “The first bobble, Jasper, and you’re out of that seat and on foot, understand? I’ll have somebody else take over the reins.”

  “Yes suh, Mister Silas.”

  “Did you hear that?” Tippy said to Jessica. “Your husband is concerned for his wife’s safety.”

  “My husband is concerned for the safety of his bankroll.”

  There was much to record, and Jessica was discovering she had a flair for narrative beyond
reporting mundane particulars like road conditions, weather, and features of the terrain, usually the sole details found in travel journals and logs. She included such information only if it affected life on the trail, which it often did, sprinkling her accounts with personal reflections and impressions of people and places and items of interest so that within days she realized her journal was taking on the tone of a diary.

  MARCH 20, 1836

  I sometimes recall myself in my other life and can hardly remember who that girl was. I remember she rose from a down-filled bed no earlier than nine o’clock, washed her face in a room warmed by a good fire prepared by a servant, combed her hair, and joined her family for breakfast served from a heaping sideboard. There were always ham and gravy, bacon and eggs, grits, and biscuits kept hot under their sterling lids and served on fine china, and jellies and jams and sugar cane syrup and coffee and cream. Afterwards, that girl took herself off to be bathed and dressed and coiffed at the hands of her maid and best friend, her only dilemma that of choosing what to do with her day.

  The girl I am now rises from a hard pallet while still dark on days so cold she can hardly keep her teeth together. She sleeps in the clothes she wore the day before, and bathing is out of the question because the water is icy. There are mornings the attempt to comb her hair is not worth the time or energy since it will be hidden under a bonnet needed for warmth and not removed until time for bed. Breakfast is hot mush sweetened with sugar cane syrup, of which our supply will soon be depleted, and eaten out of borrowed tin bowls that replaced the china we had to leave by the side of the road.

  Still, I do not miss that other girl too much, despite the rigors of the trail. I never had reason to be vain anyway, so to do without a fresh change of clothes each day or my hair dressed mean little to me, though I do long for a hot bath with scented soap—any bath! A creek would do, but I’ve been told—ordered by my husband—never to venture beyond the compound at night, the only time for privacy. It is too cold now even to consider sneaking out of my wagon for a dip in whatever watering place we camp by, but spring is coming. There are days you can almost feel the old earth turn over to warm its back in the sun, and clouds write poetry against the blue sky.