Somerset

by Leila Meacham

  “Yes, indeed,” he said.

  Inwardly, Jessica sighed. Oh, for the love of heaven!

  How she would like to throttle Thomas for denying Priscilla what every wife needs and desires—notice and appreciation from her husband. Did he not see how lovely she was? Priscilla was somewhat empty-headed, sure enough, and too impressed with family name and position, but she had a good heart and caring disposition. Could he not appreciate those qualities beyond her expression of them to his satisfaction in the bedroom? Was he so indifferent to her feelings that he was blind to the human fact that he’d left her vulnerable to the attentions of other men?

  Did he not know that, subjected to enough indifference, a woman’s heart could turn cold?

  These were times like no other; Jessica wished desperately for Silas. Thomas had moved beyond her counsel simply for the reason he didn’t feel he needed it. Silas would have talked to him man to man, husband to husband. Thomas would have taken no offense, but for his mother to wade into those risky waters.…She could hear her son now: Mother, what are you talking about?

  Two weeks later, Priscilla approached Jessica about “a delicate matter.” When she heard it, Jessica’s heart sank. Her gaze raked her daughter-in-law’s face to find some clue the girl was aware of the dangerous course she was pursuing. For the past week, Priscilla had been supervising the finishing touches on the school. The Freedmen’s Bureau had been registering students, and the first day of classes would begin next week. Priscilla had left to Jessica the tasks of preparing lesson plans, collecting books from neighbors and friends, and securing school supplies, since her daughter-in-law felt her services were needed at the construction site.

  “We need more space,” Priscilla said in explaining the reason for asking Jessica to give up the bed and sitting room she’d shared with Silas. Jessica would be given the suite she and Thomas had occupied in another wing. “We’d like to turn the sitting room into a nursery for Vernon where he’ll have more privacy.”

  “Privacy? Vernon is only five months old,” Jessica said.

  “He’ll grow.”

  Jessica was powerless to say no. The house belonged to her, and she was in a position to exercise full authority over it, but for the sake of family harmony, she wouldn’t. She was glad Thomas and Priscilla had scrapped the idea of building a manor house on Somerset. Jessica wanted Vernon to grow up in the family home, away from the plantation. Perhaps the child would escape the dominance it had over his father.

  Priscilla had strolled to the window overlooking the carriage house when making her request to Jessica, a look of anticipation on her face. Did the girl think her mother-in-law was blind?

  “When do you wish to make the move, Priscilla?” she asked.

  Priscilla turned to her with obvious relief at Jessica’s acquiescence. “As soon as I can get the servants to see to it,” she said.

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  It was early October 1866 before Jessica could resume the thirtieth year of recording the affairs affecting the Tolivers, Warwicks, and DuMonts. One morning, her heart full, she opened the stiff paper cover of her new notebook in her suite where she had begun tending to her correspondence after she turned the full management of the household over to Priscilla. With the passing of the diadem had come her surrender of the morning room to her daughter-in-law, the only caveat being the removal of her secretary upstairs to her suite. Autumn had arrived with a vengeance, and a cold rain slashed at the windows but a fire blazed in the grate. Petunia had brought her up a pot of steaming tea.

  Jessica stared at the blank, white page. Where to begin to record for posterity—and for her own memory when it began to fade—the end of an era she had known for forty-nine years? Today was her birthday. She poured a cup of tea and reflected. Was there any other place to start but the place where she was born?

  The “homeland,” as many from the Willowshire wagon train continued to refer to South Carolina, had been the most severely punished of all in General Sherman’s march through the South. Its infrastructure lay in ruins. Railroads, bridges, roads, wharfs, gins, and warehouses had been demolished. Plantations had been plundered, homes and buildings and fields burned to the ground, livestock stolen or slaughtered, and farming equipment destroyed. None of the three planter families of the Wyndhams, Warwicks, and Tolivers remaining behind had escaped the devastation. Michael now lived with his family in a two-room cabin on what was once Willowshire. One of Jeremy’s brothers had been killed futilely defending the family property, and the other had pulled up stakes and taken his family to South America to begin again. Morris died of a heart attack shortly after Sherman’s army reached Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, and his two sons did not survive the Battle of Shiloh. Lettie and her daughter had gone to live with her sister in Savannah.

  Jessica made a note to herself: Begin where it all began.

  The fortunes of the Texas Warwicks and DuMonts would make for happier recording. Jeremy and Henri had fared well economically, Henri reasonably; Jeremy especially. Everything Jeremy touched seemed to turn to gold, his insisted form of payment. In April, the U.S. Telegraph Company, in which he held many shares, was absorbed by Western Union, making it the largest telegram company in the country and Jeremy a very wealthy man. He would bat away expressions of admiration for his successful enterprises with the back of his hand. His heart lay in the lumber industry and his optimism had never waned. “The real wealth in Texas, my friends, is in timber,” he would say. “You just wait and see.”

  His surviving sons had married and presented their parents with numerous grandchildren. The oldest, a boy a year older than Vernon, was named Jeremy III. Camellia laughingly referred to the bearers of her husband’s name by “Jeremy the father, Jeremy the son, and Jeremy the holy terror.”

  The blockade had interfered with the importation of Henri’s European inventory, but his connections with the French, who were a presence in Mexico and had been sympathetic to the Confederate cause, partially took up the slack. Through diplomatic immunity, French couriers could bring goods across the Texas border, and stock that could not be transported was smuggled. Henri, following Jeremy’s advice, had also deposited prewar profits in a northern bank. He shared his friend’s enthusiasm for the growth that was bound to come to Texas because of the exodus of people from the South seeking new beginnings in a state not ravaged by war. With that conviction in mind, he had purchased lots in Howbutker to lease as residential and commercial property.

  Of the two DuMont sons, Armand alone had married and sired a robust son his parents chose to name Abel. He was the same age as Jeremy III, and expectations were that Vernon and the boys would grow up to enjoy friendships as close as the ones shared by their grandfathers and fathers.

  The page still blank, Jessica reflected on what—and how much—she should include of her own family’s affairs the past seventeen months. Regardless of jealousies and personal resentments against the Tolivers, community sentiment held they must be given their just due, and the family name had emerged from the war more influential than ever. The outcome of events had exonerated Silas’s views. There were many who wished they’d listened to his wise words of counsel and followed his example. Thomas, criticized for not shouldering his gun to fight in the Southland, was recognized as having been among the bravest in defending his native state, and Jessica had been assigned a legendary status in the annals of Howbutker history for…well, being Jessica.

  Somerset had been among the few plantations in East Texas to rise from the ashes with a sound foothold on survival. Silas had managed to transport a large shipment of cotton to England before the Union blockade, and thousands of dollars in payment waited to be collected after the war. Combined with the money Thomas had been astonished to learn his mother had stashed away in a Boston bank, her son had the income to replace aged equipment and draft animals, make repairs, and pay his former slaves so well that few had left his workforce. This year the harvest had been good and cotton trade with
northern and European markets had commenced with renewed vigor.

  Vernon was nearly a year and a half old and the joy of their lives. For all of them, he bridged the abyss of Silas’s loss. There were times, watching her grandson, when Jessica thought she would explode from the yearning that Silas could have known him. She had worried that as the child grew he would be affected by the tension between his parents, but by the time he was old enough to become aware of it, their marriage had been coated with a patina of courtesy and mutual acceptance of the other that passed for the appearance of love. For a while, Priscilla had seemed like a new woman, freer, livelier, happier. Jessica had no proof that Major Duncan was the man responsible for the change, but it began the week of the opening of the new school. Priscilla bloomed. Jessica was sure the blooming had nothing to do with teaching numbers, the alphabet, and script to a group of wriggling, tittering, unwashed black children confined in a hot and humid schoolroom. She recognized the nature of Priscilla’s giddy laughter, sparkling eyes, and bouncy step from nights she’d enjoyed with Silas.

  Jessica kept a tight lid on her speculations. She could only hope for her daughter-in-law’s discretion and Thomas’s blind unawareness of the reason for the new Priscilla. Gradually the girl shed her timidity, indecisiveness, and apprehension that had increased after she married Thomas—because she’d married Thomas, in Jessica’s opinion. But her son did notice.

  “Teaching becomes you,” he said to his wife, and Jessica observed his heightened interest in her. He began coming home earlier, and at first Jessica feared he suspected something, but he had only wanted to be home with his wife and son. Jessica came to excuse herself after supper on some pretext to allow him and Priscilla and the baby time alone in the parlor to enjoy a private evening together.

  Their love life appeared to improve. One morning, Jessica came down to find herself the only one at breakfast.

  “Where are my son and daughter-in-law?” she asked Petunia.

  “They’re not out of bed yet,” Petunia answered with a sheepish smile. “I’ve taken care of the baby.”

  Two months after the school opened, three events occurred almost simultaneously that were to make Jessica forever wonder if they were related. The school burned to the ground, an act of arson surprising to no one since there were factions in the community outraged at its temerity to exist, but it ended Priscilla’s teaching career. Shortly after, Major Duncan asked for and received a transfer, and Priscilla announced she was pregnant.

  Chapter Seventy

  “Mother, she’s the spitting image of you,” Thomas said, turning the swaddled bundle in his arms to Jessica for her first peek at her granddaughter.

  “Oh, dear,” Jessica said, peering into the well of pink blanket at the little red face of Regina Elizabeth Toliver.

  “Now, now,” Thomas chided, his rebuke infused with the proud laughter of a father enchanted by his newborn infant. “I know you’ve never been happy with your fair skin and freckles and red hair, but Papa loved them, and so do I, and I will love them on this little angel.” He touched his lips to the diminutive forehead.

  “Maybe she’ll be spared my freckles,” Jessica said, doubting the hope and herself as the origin of the child’s misfortune.

  Thomas smiled down at his two-year-old son, who stood gripping his leg, the boy’s upturned face filled with curiosity at the object in his father’s arms that had so enraptured him. They were alone in the library. The Woodwards were upstairs with their daughter, and soon Priscilla’s mother would swoop in to return the child to her daughter’s breast.

  “All right,” Thomas said, “it’s your turn, Vernon. Come, let’s sit down, and I will introduce you to your little sister.”

  Jessica watched her tall son take a chair to facilitate her grandson’s view of the first female born to a Toliver in twenty years. Thomas’s joy in the child’s gender was a surprise to her. He had hoped for a boy as a playmate for Vernon. Thomas made no bones about wanting Vernon to have many brothers. He had minded being an only child after Joshua’s death and had demanded, “When am I going to have another brother like my friends?” before he was old enough to know not to ask such questions.

  “Twenty years!” Priscilla had echoed when Thomas had informed her of the little-known fact of Toliver history after the doctor’s announcement she’d given birth to a daughter. “That’s an entire generation!”

  “You have done what no other woman in the family has been able to accomplish in all that time,” Thomas said, fondly blotting his wife’s wet hairline with a towel.

  “You’re not disappointed?” she asked. Priscilla lay exhausted in the birth bed after three hours of intense labor she’d borne with amazing fortitude and patience. Dr. Woodward’s competitor had been called in to assist with the delivery and declared to Priscilla’s father hovering anxiously in the hall that he had never seen a birthing mother so cooperative with Mother Nature.

  “She really wants this baby,” he’d said.

  Thomas said tenderly, “No, I’m not disappointed. I’m sorry I gave you the need to ask.”

  “You wanted a son so badly.”

  “I wanted another child. Given the sons born into the families around here, I didn’t dare dream of becoming the father of a daughter.”

  “You don’t mind that she…doesn’t look like either of us?” Priscilla asked.

  “Not at all. She represents my mother’s side of the family.”

  “I’m so relieved you feel that way,” Priscilla said.

  Jessica had listened to the conversation from a corner of the room (having yielded the attendant position at the side of her old bed to Priscilla’s mother), and asked herself what difference did the child’s paternity matter? What did family blood have to do with loving a child?

  Everything, if Thomas ever suspects his daughter is not a limb off the Toliver tree, she had thought. So far he had perceived nothing. The attraction between Priscilla and Major Duncan appeared to have escaped his notice entirely. Not even the downturn of his wife’s happy mood after the major’s departure roused his suspicions. He blamed the destruction of the school. “She was so keen on her work there,” he’d said.

  “I’m sure that’s the explanation,” Jessica had remarked but was not surprised when Priscilla, using the excuse of her pregnancy, had rejected a request by the Freedmen’s Bureau to resume her teaching duties in an abandoned warehouse until another facility could be built.

  Paternity, blood, inherited links would matter to Thomas. Jessica felt the needles of a cold apprehension as she listened to him explain to Vernon his duties as a brother to his little sister. What if Thomas, for no particular reason, should have cause to wonder if the little redheaded girl he called his daughter was really his flesh and blood? What if, on some ordinary day as he observed Regina Elizabeth at play, bearer of his Queenscrown grandmother’s name, he should unexpectedly recall Major Andrew Duncan and remember how his wife had come alive during his assignment in Howbutker? What if one thought led to another and on to another, and then suddenly, as surely as he was certain the sun would rise tomorrow, Thomas knew. That sort of instant awareness happened.

  It had happened to her. Jessica remembered vividly the moment the realization struck her that Jeremy Warwick loved her beyond the breadth of friendship, though his attention would never stray outside its fraternal bounds. The families were playing croquet on the Warwicks’ lawn, Jeremy paired with Jessica, Henri with Camellia, while Bess served the lemonade. Jeremy’s ball sailed through the last wicket and hit the stake. He’d smiled at her. “We won,” he said, and in that second, like a shaft of sunlight revealing a secret passage in a familiar room, Jessica knew.

  And Jeremy knew that Silas had known. That awareness was the reason Jeremy had asked her not to divulge to Silas as he was dying the secret of the money stored in Boston and how it got there. Just trust me, Jess. In some ways I know your husband better than you. He would mind that you took me into your confidence over him and that
I acted upon it without his knowledge.

  But Silas had trusted their fidelity to him not to mind their special friendship, and so it would continue. She’d been shaken by the insight, but Jeremy would never learn of her perception that day. “Yes, we did,” she’d said, picking up the ball and waving it triumphantly at the others.

  But, oh Lord, what a tragedy if Thomas discovered that Regina Elizabeth had been fathered by another man, and a Union officer to boot. There would be no picking up the pieces and putting them back together again—not for the marriage or for Thomas’s relationship with his daughter.

  “Poppies,” Vernon piped. “Her hair the color of poppies.”

  “Then we will call her that, son. We’ll call her Poppy.”

  They made a beautiful picture, her glowing son and curious grandson huddled over the infant in Thomas’s arms, a perfect subject for a portrait painter. Jessica wondered why she, as a member of the first generation, could not force herself to complete the scene.

  “Come join us, Mother, before our little princess is taken from us.”

  Thomas’s invitation was interrupted by the opening of the library doors, and Petunia appeared. “Miss Priscilla sent me to collect the baby, Mister Thomas. It’s her feeding time.”

  Indeed, the child had begun to cry hungrily, tiny limbs flailing in the blanket. Reluctantly, Thomas handed the small bundle over to the maid. “Bring her back to me, Petunia,” he said. “I want her to know her father.”

  Petunia shot a glance at Jessica, and Jessica slid hers away, her stomach curling. “As you say, Mister Thomas,” Petunia said.

  Civil turmoil marked the rest of the spring and summer as Jessica approached her fiftieth birthday. Major Duncan’s successor had been replaced by an iron-fisted general in charge of all the Union forces in Texas. Dissatisfied with the region’s attempts to circumvent the directives Congress imposed on its political, social, and economic structure, the general took up residence in Howbutker and immediately inflamed the citizenry by removing its elected county officials and judges and replacing them with his appointees. Only those who took the government-mandated “Oath Test” stating they had never volunteered to bear arms against the United States or “given aid, countenance, counsel, or encouragement to persons engaged in armed hostility” could serve in public office. Thomas was removed immediately as head of the city council and Armand DuMont as mayor.