“Could you not have sold them the land they worked so they would stay, Daddy?” Vernon, blinking rapidly, asked in a wistful voice.
Thomas raised the boy’s chin to look at him. Vernon was nearly shoulder height to him now, but it would not be long before they stood eye to eye. “There are some things too important to put personal feelings above, son. Somerset is one of them. This land belongs to the Tolivers, and not a single acre of it is for sale at any price, for any reason. We are its sole masters. We share its control with no other man. You must remember that.”
“I will, Daddy.”
Thomas nodded. He had no doubt the boy would remember. His son was so much like him at fourteen. Vernon loved the plantation and had taken an interest in it from the time he toddled down the cotton rows hand in hand with his father. David, his eleven-year-old son—their scamp—had as well. Thomas had been blessed with two sons who had taken to learning the business of running a plantation like hounds to the hunt. David would have been here today, but he’d been permitted to play this Saturday morning in a baseball game, the new sport of the nineteenth century. Both understood what was expected of a Toliver. Thomas would have no son of his living off the bounty of his family’s labor without contributing to it. No offspring of his would enjoy the prominence of the name without deserving the right to bear it.
His daughter, too, understood her role as a member of a family that lived by the expectations of its heritage and traditions. Thomas automatically smiled, thinking of Regina. Sons were from the gods, but daughters were from the angels. This morning, she had said to him, “Daddy, Petunia and Amy are very sad.”
She had been the first of his children to call him Daddy. It had begun with da-da, and the boys had gone with their sister’s later form of address. Regina often led the way in how things were said and done in the Toliver household. Of all of the Tolivers he had known, she represented the truest definition of nobility. Kind of heart, strong in spirit, generous and gracious, she held the clearest title to the real meaning of royalty.
“I know, precious,” he’d said.
“Petunia’s brothers and their families are leaving Somerset. Can’t you do something to make them stay?”
“I cannot. Their departure is their decision.”
It was one of the rare times he had ever refused his daughter anything, and her disappointment cut him like a knife. For the fraction of a moment, he had actually considered reconsidering—anything to take that pained look from her sweet, freckled face. Instead he had drawn her to his lap. At twelve, she was enough of a little girl still to sit on his knees in the fortress of his arms. Most fathers would have offered a sop, a gift to compensate for the denied request, but that would not work with Regina. No concession could divert her from her original desire. She could not be bought.
“They leave for what they think is a better place,” he explained.
Her brow creased. “Than Somerset?”
“Yes.”
“There is no better place than Somerset,” she said.
He had hugged her. “I hope Petunia’s brothers will not find that out in Kansas.”
Whenever a blue spell overcame him, like today, Thomas thought of his family, and his mood lifted. He was a very blessed man indeed to have an efficient wife and loving mother at home, the memory of a devoted father, and three delightful children to call him Daddy. Sometimes his heart swelled with such love and pride he thought it would burst.
“Why are you smiling, Daddy?” There was a note of disapproval in Vernon’s voice. His tears had barely dried, and his father was smiling.
Thomas placed his arm around his son’s shoulders as they turned to go into the cabin. “I was thinking how fortunate I am to be the father of three fine children,” he said.
“Heirs to Somerset. Isn’t that what we are?”
“You’ve learned your lessons well, my son. Yes, heirs to Somerset. I wish my father had lived to see there is no curse on the land.”
“A curse?”
Thomas wished he had not spoken. Vernon was like a dog with a bone when he wanted to learn more about something. “A jinx,” Thomas explained. “Supposedly cast by a supernatural power to inflict harm on someone or something as punishment for their wrongdoing.”
“Your father did something wrong?”
“Not at all. He made…certain sacrifices to assure the establishment of Somerset.”
“What were they?”
“I don’t recall.”
“What kind of punishment did he believe the curse inflicted?”
Thomas hesitated. Yellow fever was rampant in Louisiana and sure to hop over the border into East Texas, but all the windows in the family home on Houston Avenue had recently been covered with the new metal mesh coverings called screens to deter the influx of disease-carrying mosquitoes. There was always a danger of cholera returning and other afflictions and accidents that could claim the lives of his children in the blink of an eye, but not by the hand of an imprecation uttered by his father’s angry mother almost half a century ago. Yet, superstitiously, Thomas felt a reluctance to voice aloud his father’s fear that her malediction related to the procreation and preservation of Toliver heirs. Silas Toliver had worried for nothing. Yes, he had lost his first son, but Joshua, God love his sweet soul, was no real heir to Somerset. Silas Toliver’s true heir was alive and well, and his grandsons would carry the name of Toliver and the plantation into the next generation.
“It’s a waste of time to talk about nonsense,” Thomas said to his son. “There is no such thing as a curse.”
Part Four
1880–1900
Chapter Seventy-Five
Jeremy glanced around the parlor-cum-ballroom at the group gathered to welcome home Philippe DuMont. The forty-two-year-old bachelor son of Henri and Bess DuMont had returned home for a brief period before reporting to his new job at the Pinkerton Detective Agency in New York after an eleven-year stint with the Texas Rangers, the state’s mounted fighting force organized during the Texas Revolution to guard its frontier. There were twenty-two of assorted ages assembled, all from the DuMont, Toliver, and Warwick families. The number and size of the grandchildren had grown too large to be seated at Bess’s dining room table, so for the homecoming meal earlier, to many cheeky comments, the youngsters had once again been assigned to the “children’s table.” The third generation of Toliver offspring consisted of Vernon, aged fifteen; Regina, thirteen; and David, twelve. Those of the DuMont clan were Armand’s sons, Abel, sixteen; and Jean, thirteen. The Warwicks’ number was composed of Jeremy Jr.’s namesake, Jeremy III, sixteen; and Brandon, thirteen, and Stephen’s boys, Richard, sixteen; and Joel, fifteen.
Bess had desired a larger party for her son’s homecoming, but Philippe had roundly rejected the idea, disarming his vehement refusal with a chuck of his mother’s chin that, as always, so she’d told Camellia with a laugh, had charmed away her disappointment.
They were all very fond of Philippe, but he’d never quite been one of them. Tall, rangy, rugged, totally lacking the elegance of his father’s and brother’s frames, Philippe had turned out to be if not the black sheep of the families, then the surprise mongrel in a litter of purebreds. From the growth of his first peach fuzz, they’d all observed in Henri’s second son a militant nature enigmatically softened by a tenderness toward the fragile and helpless. They’d been amused by his obsessive protection of his little sister, Nanette, and his assignment of himself as discreet guardian of Jeremy’s asthmatic son, Robert. Fool with Robert and the hapless malefactor had the fists of tall, strong, fearless Philippe to contend with. Jeremy had loved him for that. The death of Nanette had shadowed the last of Philippe’s boyhood years, and the senseless killing of Robert had added to a growing rage against any who would harm the weak. With his brother, Armand, Philippe had returned home after the war to help his father run the DuMont Department Store, the expectation being that the two would assume Henri’s position when he retired.
/> In less than a month, Philippe had left to join the Texas Rangers. He was not cut out to work behind a dry goods counter, he said, or to live in a fine home with servants to polish his boots and turn his bed. He was born to wear buckskin, eat his meals by a campfire, and live under the stars. Besides, Texas needed men like him to defend its frontier against the Comanche and Kiowa and Apache still attacking defenseless wagon trains and homesteads, scalping the men, raping the women, and carrying off children into captivity.
Much to the heartbreak of Bess and the chagrin of Henri, Philippe did not return home in 1870 when the Rangers were replaced by a union peace-keeping force called the Texas State Police. His organization disbanded, Philippe headed north to the Panhandle and sold his services as a gun arm for ranchers trying to defend their land from takeover by the cattle barons.
The election of Governor Richard Coke in 1873 saw the end of the abusive Texas State Police and the reinstatement of the Texas Rangers. Philippe immediately rejoined and added to the myths bred from the capture and killing of notorious criminals and the defeat and removal of the Indians from the plains of Texas.
This last was the cause of the hitch of Jessica’s eyebrow as Philippe recounted the Rangers’ part in the surrender of Comanche chief Quanah Parker that marked the end of the Texas Indian Wars. Jeremy had observed that Jessica’s brows spoke a language of their own. Their twitch, contraction, range of upward movement provided insight into her thoughts. This evening, the infinitesimal arch of one of them indicated disgust at the U.S. Army’s destruction of the Comanche villages and the shooting of 3,000 of the Indians’ horses, their most prized possessions. No matter the brutality against the settlers and buffalo hunters that Philippe thought justified the slaughter, by the perk of Jessica’s eyebrow Jeremy knew her heart was still on the side of the Indians and for all people displaced by the white man’s greed and would be to her final day.
To her final day. Jeremy hoped that was a long time in coming. He was losing Camellia. The pulmonary disease that would have eventually claimed the life of his second son was taking his little flower’s.
“Quanah Parker…” Bess murmured. “Isn’t he the son of Cynthia Ann Parker captured by the Comanche when she was a little girl?”
“Yes,” Henri said. “She was kidnapped in 1836 at nine years of age and recaptured in 1860—”
“By the Rangers under Captain Sul Ross,” Philippe cut in on a note of pride.
Jeremy, Jessica, and Henri looked at one another, their gazes reflecting the memory of a time only they had shared. “Mon dieu,” Henri said softly, “has it been forty-four years since the John Parker massacre and that little girl went missing?”
“And we were headed right into the teeth of it,” Jeremy said.
“Oh, tell us about it, Grandpa,” Brandon, the younger son of Jeremy Jr., begged.
“Some other time,” Jeremy said. “You’ve had enough of a history lesson for one night, and I have to go check on your grandmother.” He got up from his chair to the sound of a creak in a leg joint. Jessica had risen also, her quiet demeanor suggesting that her mind was still occupied with Philippe’s description of the last battle in the campaign against the Indians six years ago. Jeremy wished Philippe had not been so graphic. The children would relive his account of the massacre in their nightmares.
“Shall I see you home, Jess? It’s such a dark night,” Jeremy said in the lofty hall of the DuMont château as servants helped them into their warm outerwear. It was February of 1880.
“That would be lovely, Jeremy. I’ll let Thomas know. He and Priscilla will want to stay a while longer to visit with Philippe.”
They said little on the stroll down the avenue to the Toliver mansion, each weighed by the years of memories Philippe’s mention of Quanah Parker had evoked, the sadness of Camellia’s illness. Finally, Jeremy said, “I feel every one of my seventy-four years, Jess.”
Jessica linked her arm through his. “They don’t get any lighter, do they?”
“Or easier, for all our comforts. The only defense against the effects of time is to stay busy.”
“And you are certainly that,” Jessica said. It had taken forty years, but with the coming of the railroads, Jeremy was beginning to see his faith in timber as a major industry in Texas justified and the Warwick Lumber Company its standard-bearer. By 1878, when more track had been laid in Texas than in the whole country combined, the company’s vast acreage of prime virgin pine and mighty stands of hardwoods had stood ready for harvesting and shipment by rail to markets throughout the state. To meet the demands of the railroads for cross ties, boxcars, and depots and the surge of orders from commercial builders and real estate developers in the new towns being founded and counties organized, the company had begun building additional sawmills and facilities for their workers, all overseen by Jeremy and his two sons, Jeremy Jr. and Stephen.
“I sometimes think about slowing down, spending more time with Camellia,” Jeremy had said to Jessica a year ago during one of their gazebo visits. “She wants me to take her to Europe, you know. I could step aside, leave the lumber business to the boys to run, and concentrate on my other companies, but we’re on the eve of a great dawn, and I want to feel its sun on my face when it breaks.”
Jessica wondered if Jeremy remembered those words and regretted putting his business interests before the desires of his wife now that time was running out for her to feel the sun on her face.
Jeremy must have read her thoughts. “She’s been a wonderful wife, Jess.”
Jessica heard a sob deep in his throat. “Yes, she has, Jeremy.” Their breaths wreathed out before them, frosty puffs of vapor swallowed by the dark night. The temperature warranted her wearing the warm seal cape her family had given her for Christmas and Jeremy his camel hair coat with its rich lapels of sheared lamb. The crystal air carried the promise of snow by morning.
“Better than I’ve been a husband.”
“Camellia wouldn’t agree.”
“No, she wouldn’t, but I know.”
Jessica placed a hand on his lapel. They had reached the front steps of her verandah. “Then let her die without knowing, Jeremy.”
A sliver of moonlight caught the flash of surprise in his eyes. “You know?” he said.
“I know.”
“But that doesn’t mean we can’t always be the best of friends.”
“We’ll always be the best of friends, Jeremy.”
He bent his head and kissed the cold contour of her cheek. “Good night, Jess.”
“Good night, Jeremy.”
Chapter Seventy-Six
It had been a morning of visits with her grandchildren. Vernon first, who tapped on her door as Jessica was dressing. “Granmama, will you help me decide what David and I can get Poppy for her birthday?” and later, at breakfast, when everyone else had eaten and gone, David, her favorite, had stayed behind. Jessica was the only one in the household with whom her younger grandson could discuss his passion of baseball. It seemed that John “Monte” Ward had become the first pitcher to hit two home runs in a game when his New York Gothams defeated the Boston Beaneaters 10 to 9 in May.
“Wouldn’t that have been something to see, Granmama?” he’d asked.
“It sure would have,” she’d agreed.
“Maybe you and I can go see a game together one of these days.”
“I’ll count on it,” Jessica said.
Now Regina had come to call. From the gazebo, Jessica watched her granddaughter let herself out the screened back door of the house. “I thought I’d find you out here,” she called to her grandmother.
Nothing much to think about, Jessica thought, but fondly as she watched Regina pick up her skirts and daintily make her way down the back steps to the brick walk leading to the gazebo. Weather permitting, Jessica always sat in the swing this time of day to have her midmorning tea. Regina had a little of her mother’s vacuity in her, but it added an endearing quality to her sweetness of nature denied Priscilla.
It was impossible not to adore her.
“I brought an extra cup,” Regina said. “You don’t mind sharing your pot with me, do you?”
“I’m delighted with the company as always,” Jessica said, making room on the swing. “What do you have there? Is that the package of long-awaited patterns from Tippy?”
Regina giggled. “I think it’s darling the way you call one of the most famous fashion designers in America Tippy when everybody else calls her Isabel.”
“She wasn’t always Isabel. Which pattern did you choose?”
“Well, that’s what I’d like to talk to you about.” Regina removed three envelopes from a glued paper sack, the new type of packaging material for mailing lightweight goods. “I need to enlist your help with Daddy.”
Jessica poured Regina a cup of tea. “I can’t imagine why you’d need my help with your father. You have only to ask, and he will do your bidding.”
Regina smiled. “Not about something like this,” she said. “I want Armand’s tailor to make the dress for my birthday party from this design”—she handed Jessica one of the three colorfully illustrated envelopes—“but Mother and I agree Daddy will think it’s too daring. She’d like me to choose one of the more modest ones, but I want you to convince Daddy that this is the one for me.”
Jessica drew her spectacles from her dress pocket to study the illustration on the envelope containing tissue pattern pieces cut approximately to Priscilla’s dress measurements. The evening gown was billed as an “Isabel” design, created for the E. Butterick Company in New York. Tippy had been working for the company since 1876 when Ebenezer Butterick offered her the position as head designer of his pattern empire. Since his revolutionary introduction of graded patterns for home use in 1867, it had grown to include one hundred branch offices and one thousand agencies throughout the United States and Canada, Paris, London, Vienna, and Berlin. The gown featured a low neckline and a waist the circumference of a wasp’s middle. Jessica could understand why Thomas would object. At almost sixteen, Regina’s figure was voluptuous—“another attraction we all agree to blame on you, Mother,” her son accused with a father’s sigh and roll of his eyes.
Somerset Page 40
