Somerset

by Leila Meacham

  “I do,” Thomas conceded, “and if it’s any comfort, I…have also wondered if some…hand of vengeance is not responsible for the tragedies that have occurred in the Toliver family because of the sacrifices my father and I made for the plantation, but only in moments of despair. I put no stock in such superstition, not for a minute. My brother’s fatal fall from a horse, the deaths of our son and daughter, my mother’s incapability to preserve and bear more children—no more a mystery than the DuMonts losing their daughter in a hurricane or the Warwicks a son at the hand of a Union officer in wartime. Young women die in childbirth every year. What happened to David could have happened to any boy playing by that pond.”

  A strange stillness had come over Priscilla. An odd light appeared in her eye. She drew to a straighter posture. “You mentioned that you, too, had made sacrifices for Somerset. What were they, Thomas? Was I one of them?”

  Thomas heard a faint echo of hope that he would deny her suspicion. He turned away and began to unbutton his vest. How he had hoped she would never put that question to him. Priscilla had borne his children. Whatever else she wasn’t, she’d been a loving mother.

  “Tell me, Thomas. I want to know.”

  He unbuttoned his cuffs. “Yes, Priscilla, you were the sacrifice I made for Somerset.”

  There was silence, like the kind following a loud thunderclap. Thomas kept his back to her, unwilling to see what injury he had wrought.

  Priscilla said in a surprisingly steady voice, “You wanted an heir in case you were killed in war, and no one else but I was available or suitable at the time. Was that it?”

  “That’s right. I thought we could make a go of it.”

  “And because of the sacrifice you made marrying me, two of our children are dead.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Well, I do. And so does your mother. I lied, Thomas. I read her diaries.”

  Thomas jerked around in time to see tears of deep hurt welled in her eyes and struggled to temper his reaction. He’d destroyed any doubt she may have had of his reason for marrying her. Suspecting was one thing. Knowing for certain was another. He was surprised that after all these years, she still fostered hope he’d married her for love.

  “I’m sorry, Priscilla,” he said. “I deceived you, but I hoped our children and the life I’ve provided you—the life you seem to enjoy—was compensation. I know I’ve denied you certain pleasures and joys you would have known if I’d…felt differently or if you’d married someone else, but why in God’s name did you read my mother’s private journals? Was it to gather information for that history of the Tolivers you’re writing?”

  She drew a handkerchief from the sleeve of her dressing gown, on hand for emotional moments that struck without warning. Thomas, too, made sure to have one available in his coat pocket for sudden attacks of memory and loss.

  Priscilla dabbed at her eyes, then deliberately thrust the handkerchief back up her sleeve. She was through crying for him, the gesture said to Thomas. “I suppose I could give that excuse, but I’m tired of lying,” she said. “You don’t seem to have that tendency, so I’ll try the truth for a change, see how you like it. I read Jessica’s diaries to learn if she suspected me of having sexual relations with Major Andrew Duncan.”

  Thomas stared at her, shocked speechless.

  Priscilla eyed him innocently. “Jessica did, actually. Suspect the truth, I mean. I found her reflections on the matter in black-and-white in her journal of 1866.”

  “Priscilla…did…you have relations?”

  “I most certainly did, so don’t think I’ve reached my age without entirely having experienced those pleasures and joys you denied me.”

  A memory of the dashing, red-haired army major who had bunked in the carriage house during the Union occupation over twenty-one years ago wafted through Thomas’s shock. Twenty-one years ago…

  “You never once noticed, did you?” Priscilla said, smug satisfaction glowing in her eyes. “You were so involved with your holy plantation and so indifferent to me, you never once flicked a glance in the direction of Andrew and me, but your mother did. Why do you think she held Regina at arm’s length all her life?”

  Priscilla’s face swam into focus. “You’re not telling me that Regina was—”

  “Major Andrew Duncan’s? Yes, I am.”

  Thomas staggered back as though acid had been flung into his face.

  “There now,” Priscilla said. “That knowledge should relieve you of a little grief for Regina’s passing and certainly any guilt you may feel because of your lack of attention to me.”

  “You—you’re lying, Priscilla. You’re just saying all this to get even with me, to hurt me.…”

  “Well, I warned you I possessed knowledge to do that, didn’t I?”

  “Regina was my daughter! Mine!”

  “From whom do you think she got her red hair and freckles and skin tone?”

  “My mother!”

  “Or from Major Duncan. We’ll never know for sure, now will we?” Priscilla moved closer to glare into Thomas’s face, small teeth gritted. “I loved you, Thomas. I wanted you. Not your money or family name or the compensations you threw me as a sop. Sure, I had my…repressions when we married, but with the warmth and assurance of your love I could have overcome them as I did with Andrew. He gave me back to you a changed woman that you enjoyed for a few years.” She patted his shirt front. “It will take a while to adjust to the truth, Thomas, but we’ll go on as we always have, and I better not ever hear of you dallying with Jacqueline Chastain. You owe me your fidelity.”

  Thomas brushed away her hand. “I will start proceedings tomorrow morning,” he said.

  Priscilla tilted her head inquiringly. “What proceedings?”

  “Divorce proceedings. I’m charging you with adultery.”

  Chapter Ninety

  Priscilla pleaded. “Think of Vernon,” she said. “Think of Regina, what this will do to her memory.”

  “I’m expecting you to think of them, Priscilla.”

  There was talk, of course, when word got around the county that Thomas and Priscilla Toliver were ending their twenty-six-year marriage, but an out-and-out scandal was diverted when Priscilla agreed to allow Thomas to divorce her quietly. Thomas laid out the terms. He would not state his grounds for seeking the divorce before the county judge if she would simply, without contesting his petition, leave his house and his life with no legal recourse to return. In the space of the public record requiring the reason for the dissolution of their union, he would agree to having the standard, commonplace explanation written. It would state the marriage had become “insupportable because of discord or conflict between the personalities that destroys the legitimate ends of the marital relationship and prevents any reasonable expectation of reconciliation.”

  “No reasonable expectation of reconciliation, Thomas?” Priscilla queried in a broken voice.

  “None.”

  And so it was done. Priscilla chose the city of Houston as her new place of residence for its accessibility by train that made it convenient for Vernon, her brothers, and few remaining friends to visit her. Thomas set her up in a small but elegant house in the most prestigious neighborhood in the city, opened an account in her name, and arranged to pay for a three-servant staff and horse and carriage.

  The divorce became final ninety days after the county judge signed the document releasing Thomas from the marriage, and on the ninety-first day, he called upon Jacqueline Chastain. They were married three months later. Once again, the DuMont Department Store had lost its top designer.

  Four years later, in 1892, Vernon handed the conductor his ticket and settled down in his first-class compartment. The train had begun its chug through the outskirts of Howbutker, its rails following the course of a lake. Vernon noticed through his seat window that the water-loving cypresses were dropping their leaves, the first trees in Texas to do so in the fall. On just such a morning nine Octobers ago, his little bro
ther had died. David would have been twenty-three years old had he lived. The little shooting heart pain that always came with the recollection of his brother added to Vernon’s low spirits. He was on his way to Houston for a weekend visit with his mother. He loved her and felt sorry for her, but he dreaded the hours cooped up in her little house seeing what she’d allowed herself to become.

  His mother had lost everything that had fostered her vanity. She had dressed and adorned herself as befitted the wife of Thomas Toliver and their social position in the top rung of Howbutker society—the state, in fact. Beyond her children, she had breathed to impress, be seen, and included. She now lacked those inducements to preen and look her best, and her weight gain and indifferent appearance showed it.

  There was nothing Vernon could say or do to encourage an interest in charity work, intellectual pursuits, or the making of new friends in her changed environment. His mother preferred to live hidden away from the stigmas of her divorce and the humiliating remarriage of his father to his “paramour” and to nurse in private her grief for the loss of two of her children and the station to which she’d once belonged.

  Vernon blew out a sigh. Now was not the time to be away from the plantation. It was harvest time, and a bold new pest had entered the state from Mexico through the Texas valley town of Brownsville. It was called the boll weevil, a nasty little beetle about one-fourth inch long with wings and a prominent snout. Cotton and corn farmers had encountered insect threats to production before, but against this one there appeared to be no defense. Vernon would miss the meeting of planters and farmers held tonight to discuss a plan of attack with a representative of the United States Department of Agriculture, but he could not leave his mother alone on the eve of his brother’s death. His father had the comfort of his stepmother, Jacqueline Chastain.

  Vernon had been despondent at the breakup of his parents’ marriage, even though he accepted it as inevitable after going to his grandmother and begging her to clarify what he’d overheard from the room where his sister lay dead. He had been shocked that his mother had read his grandmother’s diaries (like his father, he did not believe her denial), but now that certain secrets had been exposed, Vernon insisted Jessica tell him what the Toliver curse was all about. His father had been too devastated to approach.

  And his grandmother had obliged him, chronicling the casualties leading to the day of that terrible argument that had held him transfixed in the hall of the McCords’ ranch house. The notion of Somerset being under some jinx originating from his great-grandmother in South Carolina before Texas was even a republic was balderdash, of course. He chalked it up as just one more grievance his mother could hurl against his father. Vernon had already been made aware of the reason he’d married her and been pretty certain his mother knew as well. He understood his father’s motive and his mother’s resentment. What he hadn’t known and had been captivated by was the turbulent start of his grandparents’ apparently happy history together.

  Vernon had been relieved that David and Regina were not around to suffer the pain of the divorce and would be spared seeing their mother the way she was now. The whole sad business had left him determined never to marry unless it was to a woman he loved and who loved him, but that provoked another worry: What if he should never find that woman? What then? He was twenty-seven and no one was in sight who even came close to meeting his requirements. He was the sole surviving heir to Somerset. What would happen to the plantation if no Toliver came after him to inherit?

  It was not a worry he wished to add to his despondency at the moment, and he removed a report from his briefcase to study the skimpy information cotton scientists had gathered on the boll weevil. The weevil, Thomas learned, could fly only short distances, but weather disturbances like hurricanes, prevalent in the Gulf of Mexico in September, could carry it far beyond its existing range. He was deep into reading when a discreet rap on his compartment door interrupted his concentration. “Come in,” he called, still engrossed.

  Bertram, the Negro porter with whom Vernon had become friendly on his trips to Houston, stuck his head in. “Excuse me, Mr. Toliver, but I wonder if you’d mind sharing your first-class compartment with a woman who’ll be getting off in Houston. She’s back in third with a rowdy bunch of hooligans bent on impressing her, despite her disinclination for it. She’s quiet, sir. I’m sure she won’t disturb you from your work.”

  “Oh, sure,” Thomas said, waving a hand without looking up from his papers. “Send her in.”

  Escorted by the porter, she arrived minutes later. Vernon glanced up, meaning to nod politely in welcome then return to his report. Instead, his eyes widened and his jaw slowly dropped.

  “Thank you so much, sir,” his visitor said, seeming not to notice his rapt gaze. Her hat was askew, and she appeared slightly out of breath. She set down her portmanteau and umbrella and took a seat opposite and down from him, by the door, as if she did not wish to intrude upon his space. Without another glance at him, she adjusted her hat, a straw affair too prim for the alluring abundance of glossy auburn hair massed in a bun that looked as if it might shake loose at the next jolt of the train. Fashion had veered from the overabundant extravagances of frills and flounces his mother still favored, and the woman’s simpler traveling suit with its form-fitting bodice, hour-glass waist, and slim-lined skirt was most becoming to her well-endowed figure. Vernon thought he had never seen a more desirable woman.

  The hat in place, his compartment companion folded her hands in her lap and took a deep breath of apparent relief that emphasized the fullness of her bosom. She caught him staring, and her full lips arched into a small smile. “I promise not to be a distraction,” she said in a warm, throaty voice that conjured dazzling possibilities beneath the bed sheets.

  Vernon untangled his legs, sat up straighter, and cleared his throat. “I invite you to be as much of a distraction as you like.”

  An auburn brow registered her surprise. He guessed her to be in her early twenties. “Then…do you suppose you might summon the porter for a glass of water?” she asked, pressing a hand to her ivory throat. “I feel so very parched.”

  “Water for a parched throat? May I suggest something perhaps more quenching?”

  “Like what?” she said, amber eyes curious.

  “Champagne,” Vernon said, reaching for the porter’s cord.

  “At eleven o’clock in the morning?”

  “The hour is pressing toward noon.”

  “Oh, well, I—” Her hand fluttered to the high collar of her blouse. “If you insist…”

  “I most assuredly do insist,” Vernon said with a smile.

  Her name was Darla Henley. She was returning to Houston from a visit with her aunt, a widow, who still managed to operate a farm that had been in her family for two generations. Her father was a postmaster in Houston. Her mother was deceased. She worked in a publishing firm after having earned a secretarial diploma.

  “And what do you do in the publishing firm?”

  “I read and correct copy—material submitted by writers.”

  On their second glass of champagne, he asked, “Why aren’t you married—a woman like you?”

  She sipped her champagne. She had moved at his invitation to the window seat opposite him. “I was promised, but I broke it off.”

  “Why?” Vernon asked, soberer than he’d ever been in his life.

  Darla Henley clearly was not. Tipsily, she explained, “I discovered in time that we were not suited.”

  “Really? How did you know?”

  “I was quite sure he was not the sort of man to order champagne to quench a lady’s dry throat at eleven o’clock in the morning.”

  Vernon laughed, suddenly feeling he hadn’t a care in the world, a state of being he’d not experienced in a long time. Did her comment mean she was looking to snare a man of wealth or a man of panache? He hoped to find out. Reaching inside his coat, he withdrew a slender leather case from which he extracted a card. He handed it to her. “
I wonder if you’d permit me to call upon you while I’m in Houston, Miss Henley?”

  “Why, Mr. Toliver, I’d be delighted,” she said.

  Chapter Ninety-One

  He had meant to stay in Houston only for the weekend and depart Sunday to be home in time to ride out to Somerset for a look at how the first picking had gone, but Vernon remained in the city four days. When he returned to his home on Houston Avenue, Jacqueline met him with a small cry of relief. “Vernon, we’ve been so worried. We thought something had befallen you.”

  “I should have sent a telegram. I’m sorry. Jacqueline…may I speak with you?”

  Vernon drew her aside into the library for a private word. He had been met with a ring of black, anxious faces—Amy’s, Bar­nabas’s, Sassie’s, and those of several other servants. His grandmother was upstairs and his father at the plantation. When he and his stepmother were alone, Vernon said, “Jacqueline, I…​believe I’ve fallen in love.”

  “Ah,” she said. “So that was the cause for the delay. Who is she? How did you meet?”

  Jacqueline was one of the easiest people in the world to talk to. At first Vernon had bowed his neck not exactly against her, but certainly not for her. But within weeks of her coming to live in his childhood home, he understood what had drawn his father to her. Vernon had expected her to take over the house with wide-sweeping, arbitrary changes, impose her will, tastes, and authority, but she had not. She had simply blended in, won the hearts of the servants immediately, the approval of his grandmother, and, gradually, her stepson’s admiration. She brought a calm and soothing presence into the home, and, despite the grief lines permanently engraved in his father’s fifty-five-year-old face, Vernon had never seen him so happy—if he’d ever seen him happy at all.

  “On the train to Houston,” he answered his stepmother’s question. “Jacqueline, do you believe in love at first sight?”

  Jacqueline pursed her lips. “At your age, I believe in physical attraction at first sight.”