Somerset (20 page)

T
heir luncheon together as a family perfectly complemented the night before. Joshua had approached Jessica shyly when his father brought him to her room before they went downstairs. She sat before her dressing table, and Silas led him to her chair.

“You get to be my mother, Papa said.”

Jessica took his hands into hers. Her voice pitched low and gentle, she said, “It doesn't mean we can't still be good friends.”

“That's what Papa said, too, but I want you to be my mother first. I don't mind if you tell me what to do. My friends say their mothers tell them what to do because they love them.”

“That's very true,” Jessica said.

“But you'll read to me like always?”

“Until I teach you to read. Then you can read to me.”

Joshua glanced up at his tall father. “Is it all right if I hug her now?”

“I don't think she'll break,” Silas said, with a slight wink at Jessica layered with private meaning. She ignored him and gave herself up to the embrace of the little arms around her neck. How had this miracle happened that she was now a wife to the handsome man beside her and a mother to this adorable child she had already grown to love? Wisdom cautioned her to beware of such heady happiness built on the uncertain ground of her marriage, but for the moment she would follow Silas's advice and not question what had happened—was happening—between them. She felt wanted and needed. She would enjoy this new, delicious experience as long as it lasted.

Chatting merrily, they'd trooped down the stairs hand in hand and entered the dining room like any normal set of parents with their offspring between them and selected a table next to the family from the wagon train. They were Lorimer and Stephanie Davis and their son, Jake. Like the Tolivers, they were dressed as people of property, the woman one of the few slave-holder wives who had become somewhat friendly with Jessica. But for a faint show of curiosity at Jessica and Silas's new marital situation (their fellow travelers were aware the couple, heretofore living separately, had shared a room), the Davises greeted them as one of them—parents with sons who had a grand time playing together.

Jessica had determined to wait until Silas was ready to depart for the wagon train to relate the news of Lettie's marriage. She did not want a second of their time together marred before he had to return.

The moment came too fast. They had left Joshua taking a nap, Tippy also. Her one lung was feeling the oppression of the New Orleans humidity. Silas had said good-bye to his son as he'd seen him to bed. Jessica had accompanied him to the courtyard, where his horse was bridled and saddled. Like any husband and wife, they apprised each other of their plans. Silas would return day after tomorrow to attend Joshua's birthday party. He would drive his Conestoga back in the company of another wagon loaded with children for his son's party, and post the wagon to sell. He had already lined up a potential buyer who was willing to give him a fair price. Jessica would be busy with hotel personnel arranging the birthday luncheon, and she had accepted Henri's offer to squire her and Tippy and Joshua around New Orleans. The Frenchman wanted to show them his father's emporium and the St. Charles Hotel that was near completion and touted to be the largest and grandest hotel in the United States. Joshua was excited about riding the streetcar with his friend Jake.

Then Jessica said, “Silas, I have something I must tell you.”

“I hope it's nothing to disturb my illusion that you are happy.”

“It has nothing to do with my happiness, but it may yours. Your brother and Lettie are married. My mother wrote of it in her letter.”

Jessica held her breath. The next seconds would tell if he still cared for Lettie and mourned her loss as now irrevocable. Jessica had often wondered if Silas would return for Lettie should she still be unmarried after he fulfilled the terms of the contract and divorced her.

“Is that so?” he said, and saved Jessica two days of agony during his absence wondering if Silas was awash with regret. He took her hands and kissed them. “I wish my brother and his wife well,” he said, “and hope the disparities between them can be settled as satisfyingly as ours.”

He said no more, and his face went expressionless except for the small smile he gave her as he tipped his hat and rode away. Jessica covered the back of her hand with her palm, preserving the touch of his lips on her flesh. Silas was bound to feel pain, she thought, and perhaps a sense of betrayal and sadness that things had turned out as they had. But Lettie was gone from him forever, and she was here, at least for as long as it took Silas to fulfill the terms of his contract with her father.

Silas was glad he was alone and on his horse miles from camp. He would need solitude and time and distance to adjust to his shock and the feelings that followed. So Lettie had settled for Morris. The picture of his beautiful, passionate, exuberant former fiancée married to his Bible-spouting, laconic dullard of a brother was almost too painful to imagine. His shock gave way to dismay. Talk about copulating with a mule! Good God, what had Lettie been thinking to marry Morris?

But as his horse's hooves ate up the miles, Silas came to a new awareness. It lightened his sadness for Lettie's fate and his guilt for his part in it. His former fiancée had known exactly what she'd been thinking to marry Morris. For the sacrifice of her beauty and body to his blockhead of a brother, she'd gained the Queenscrown she'd always loved. Silas recalled her excitement at the prospect of living a year at the plantation before leaving for Texas. Even then he'd suspected that when it came time to go, for all her adventuresome talk, she would be reluctant to leave its luxury and comfort. Lettie was never more radiant than when she graced the rooms at Queenscrown, never looked as if she felt more suited to a place. Queenscrown was her consolation prize, and Morris, of whom she was fond, not a bad substitute for the man who had jilted her.

His mother had gained the daughter-in-law she thought she'd lost. There would be grandchildren to hold and adore. With the exception of a minor adjustment, the lives and futures of the girl and family he'd left behind would continue as planned.

By the time Silas reached camp his pain had been assuaged, his guilt all but forgotten. His thoughts were on Jessica. He wished he could have ridden back to draw her into his arms and assure her his former love was only a chapter in a book he'd started but returned to the shelf unfinished. He had no interest or desire in taking it down again. His old life was gone and everyone in it. He doubted he would ever return to South Carolina and Queens­crown, even to see his mother, who would turn her full affection and attention to Morris and Lettie and her grandchildren. Her younger son and grandchild would become only a memory that claimed her thoughts now and then.

Jessica was in his future, whatever that held. The inevitable shadow of slavery hung over their happiness together. He must prevent her from corrupting his son—
their
son, now, and all their children to follow—to her way of thinking. Slave labor was essential to his dream of Somerset, and he would not permit his wife to interfere with raising his heirs to understand that their way of life and the perpetuation of their land-owning heritage depended on it. When Silas was putting Joshua down for his nap, the boy had asked if he'd bring Josiah, Levi, and Samuel back for his party, slaves' sons he treated as equal to Jake Davis. When Silas had explained that would not be possible, his son had asked why.

“The party is only for you and your friends,” Silas told him. “Josiah and Levi and Samuel are Negroes.”

“But how does being Negroes keep them from being my friends?” Joshua had asked.

He was too young to understand, as Silas had been when growing up playing with slaves' children and thinking of them as friends. Eventually, by the natural influence of the institution that had bred him, he had learned and accepted the difference in their stations. He had not had to be taught, but then there had been no Jessica Wyndham Toliver whispering her contrary views into his ear.

For now, though, he would not anticipate the problems ahead for him and Jessica in their marriage. He would be thankful the obstacle he'd expected did not exist. For the time being, the slip of a girl he'd married who had blossomed into a woman before his eyes did not hate him.

T
he next morning Tippy took a message for Jessica from a hotel maid who appeared at her door. “A gentleman is downstairs requesting to see Mrs. Toliver,” the maid told her.

“Did he say who he was?”

“An agent of her father.” She handed Tippy a calling card.

“Just a moment, and I'll inform my mistress,” Tippy said.

Jessica read the card, and her mouth turned down. “A Mr. Herman Glover,” she recited to Tippy, “a man who works in my father's bank.” Jessica remembered him as a thin-faced man with bony hands who looked as if he had never been exposed to a ray of sunlight. He was the employee that Jessica had warned Sarah of being planted to gain evidence against a bank teller suspected of actively opposing slavery.

“Should I tell the maid to have him wait?” Tippy asked.

“No, I'll see him,” Jessica said, hurriedly rising from her vanity table. Tippy had given her hair a thorough washing. It was amassed in a towel wrapped around her head, but she'd finished dressing and was sitting before the mirror for Tippy to work her wonders with her damp tresses. “I'll see him as I am and send him on his way. We have too much to do today to waste time on him.”

Jessica did not bother to hide her repugnance as she swept into the reception room of the hotel. “You wished to see me?” she demanded of her pale visitor.

“Your father sends greetings, Miss Wyndham,” the man said with a deep bow, but not before his expression showed surprise at her turbaned head and the brown-and-blue discoloration of a gash on her forehead.

“
Mrs.
Toliver,” Jessica corrected the inaccuracy. “What do you want?”

Flustered, pencil in hand, the man threw open the flap of a small notebook. “Your father wishes me to report back on your condition and…state of mind,” he said, and commenced to write.

“What are you writing?”

“Why, that you have sustained a terrible injury to your head, Miss…er, Mrs. Toliver. Could you give me the details, please?”

“Give me that!” Jessica ordered, and snatched the book from his hand. She flounced to a writing table and sat down.
Papa,
she wrote,

“There! That should be all the report required to assure my father of my condition and state of mind,” Jessica said, thrusting the notebook back to the agent. “Anything else?”

“Well, uh, yes, Mrs. Toliver. Now if you please, I must see your slave Tippy in person.”

Ah, yes, Jessica thought, her father's additional insurance to make sure she kept her end of the bargain. She marched to the registration desk. “Will you kindly send a maid to summon my friend Tippy to the reception room?”

When Tippy had made an appearance and become another jot in Herman Glover's notebook, he said, “And now, I must speak to Mr. Toliver. Is he here?”

“No, he isn't.”

“Uh, does that mean he isn't
here
”—the agent swept his hand to indicate the hotel—“or that he's lying dead somewhere?”

Jessica's mouth twitched. The man was serious. He was too humorless to have been facetious. She lifted an amused eyebrow. “By my hand, presumably?”

“Uh, well, yes, the idea did occur to me.”

“He's very much alive and well, thank you, but at the Willow Grove encampment five miles from the city. Shall I give you directions to the site?”

“Will he be returning to the hotel anytime soon?”

“Tomorrow, for his son's birthday party at noon.”

“Then I shall wait for him here, since I do not sit a horse well, but I assure you I will not intrude upon the party. I shall visit with him later.”

At which time you'll hand over further funds if Silas's receipts are in order, Jessica thought. Her husband's second down payment for Somerset.

“Suit yourself, Mr. Glover,” she said, her happy spirits dampened.

The birthday party went as planned except for a few words of disagreement with the proprietors of the hotel. It was one thing for a guest's Negro maid to sleep in an adjoining closet to be near her mistress, but quite another to share a table with her in the dining room. The dispute was settled by Jessica arranging for a private room where Tippy could enter from the back door. Jessica had managed to shop for several gifts for Joshua, but they were no competition for the surprise of Tippy's buckskin jacket. Even
Silas
, who kept Tippy at arm's distance or gave her a wide berth—Jessica hadn't yet decided—was impressed almost speechless, as was Stephanie Davis, who looked uncomfortable at the inclusion of Tippy in the party. Henri said, “It is a work of wonder,
ma petite
. No wonder my father”—he raised his immaculate hands in the air as if to wave from it the exact word—“was
ecstatic
over your extraordinary design of Madame's dress when you and she visited his emporium.”

The chocolate two-tiered birthday cake, topped with a spun-sugar version of a low-crowned, wide-brimmed planter's hat like Silas's, elicited raves as well, especially from Silas. He lifted Joshua to better see the design and said, “Someday, son, you'll wear a hat just like that when you ride the fields of Somerset with me.”

Everyone applauded, including Tippy, who did not seem to realize she had worked with the kitchen staff to create the symbol of oppression for her people. Her glee that Joshua and Silas were rhapsodic over her efforts so consumed her that Jessica decided not to mention it.

In late afternoon after they'd seen the wagon off with Joshua's guests to return to camp, Silas left them to meet with Carson Wyndham's agent. After several hours, Jessica went in search of him in the hotel and found him in the saloon alone, staring into a glass of liquor on the bar. The agent must have left. On the bar was a leather envelope, a reminder of the deal he'd struck with her father, the trade he'd made for Somerset. Was sorrow that he'd agreed to it the cause of Silas's gloom? Jessica laid her hand on his arm. “It was a lovely party,” she said. “Joshua couldn't have been more pleased. He must be sweltering in that buckskin jacket, but he refuses to take it off.”

Silas seemed startled at her appearance and quickly picked up the envelope and inserted it into an inner pocket of his frock coat. “Yes, he's beside himself, and I'm grateful to you and Tippy for making him so happy. It was sensible of her to make the jacket with room for him to grow. She's quite extraordinary, your Tippy.”

“She'd like to be your Tippy, too.”

“She's colored, Jessica.”

“Can you not look beyond the color of her skin to the exceptional person she is and accept her as my friend, one to be loved and cherished?”

“No, Jessica, I can't, but I can appreciate her and respect your relationship with her. I cannot promise more than that.”

“Promise me you won't sell her.”

“I promise.”

“And you will permit our close friendship?”

He grinned. “Do I have a choice?”

“No, but I'd like to hear you say you permit it.”

“As long as she lives.”

Jessica smiled. “Very good. Now let us go see what Joshua is up to.”

They finished out the day with a light supper and, after seeing Joshua to bed and dismissing Tippy for the night, Jessica returned to her room to eagerly await Silas, who had gone to the stable to see to his horse. She was already in her night clothes when she heard a small knock on the adjoining door between the two rooms. She opened it to find Joshua, book in hand, staring up at her in wide-eyed appeal, enhanced by sweeping lashes that Tippy declared “unconstitutional” for a boy. Silas's son possessed no facial feature that could be attributed to him. His eyes were hazel rather than green, his hair an innocent mass of brown curls instead of an aggressive black thicket. His nose was more of a sparrow's than a hawk's, his mouth a tender arch rather than a curved rod.

“I couldn't sleep,” he said in his childish voice. “Will you please read to me, Mother?”

Jessica's heart melted. How could she refuse him? “Of course I will, Joshua.”

“Thank you,” he said, and without another word, as if it were a familiar spot reserved just for him, he clambered into her bed clutching his storybook.

When Silas showed himself a while later in his dressing robe, he stared in astonishment at his son and wife snuggled side by side against the pillows. Jessica glanced up from her reading with a droll look, and Joshua, patting the space beside him, said, “Come be with us, Papa. We're at the good part.”

“Well, then, I mustn't miss it,” Silas said, and climbed in beside him.

Later, after Joshua was asleep in his own bed and Silas and Jessica had made love, Silas lay awake. The agent was not the only visitor he had met in the late afternoon after the party. Jean DuMont, Henri's father, had come to call. In speaking with him, Silas could understand better than most his new friend's desire to part ways with a man as dictatorial and supercilious as the owner of the DuMont Emporium. Jessica had described the place as magnificent—“surpassing the most elegant retail store Charleston has to offer.” Henri had told Silas that his father treated him like a lackey, never allowing him to make the most
petit
decision. Silas had been surprised to find the man waiting for him in the saloon and had thought at first he'd come with the hope that he'd dissuade his son from joining him in his migration to Texas. But Jean DuMont's mission had been entirely different.

“You have in your entourage a strange-looking Negro named Tippy, your wife's maid,” the man began. “I wish to buy her.”

He had named a price that had caused Silas's heart to leap. The money would give him a huge leg up on his savings plan and shave several years off his schedule to pay back Carson Wyndham.

“I am aghast, sir,” Silas had said.

“Then we have a deal, I presume?” Jean DuMont had said, arching an aristocratic eyebrow.

The man was already reaching inside his coat pocket for his bank book when Silas said, “No, sir, we do not have a deal. Tippy is not for sale.”

“I will double my price.”

Silas had hesitated. By marriage, Tippy was his to sell, regardless of the deal Jessica had struck with her father, but the transaction was out of the question despite its temptation. He did not like Henri's father. Even if it were not for the certainty his wife would despise him for selling her maid, Silas would not trade Tippy's indenture to this man to offer Jessica her freedom. He said unequivocally, “Like I said, sir, my wife's maid is not for sale.”

Jessica lay in a sound sleep, her face turned toward him. Silas resisted the urge to stroke her cheek, move his hand to her breast. In slumber, she looked child-like and vulnerable, hardly the woman he believed capable of harnessing the wind. It wasn't only for Jessica's love for Tippy that he had turned down Jean DuMont's offer, but the years he and Jessica would have together before he could pay back her father. Perhaps by then she would have no desire to leave.