“Same for Michael,” Morris said. “He and I were to go hunting yesterday, but he sent word around that something had come up.”
“Indeed there must be something extraordinary that’s happened,” Reverend Sedgewick added. “None of the family attended the Christmas cantata Wednesday evening. Most unusual. Mr. Wyndham always leaves a large donation in the offering plate.”
“Did Miss Conklin get off to Massachusetts all right?” Jeremy asked Lettie. “I understand that Jessica was to take her to the ship in the carriage.”
“We don’t know for sure, and we’re a bit worried,” Lettie answered. “That’s why I called on Jessica. When I went to air out the cemetery house in her absence, I found blood on the bedsheets, and some bloody swabs in the waste bin as well.”
“Most puzzling,” offered Reverend Sedgewick.
“Do you suppose she cut herself?” Silas asked.
“I wish I could speak with Jessica to find out,” Lettie said.
“Perhaps it was due to nature,” Elizabeth suggested, giving Lettie a look that made her color, and changed the subject. “I was so looking forward to seeing Willowshire dressed for the holidays,” she lamented. “That colored girl of the Wyndhams’…what’s her name?”
“Tippy,” Silas volunteered.
“Is a marvel with seasonal decorations. It’s hard to imagine such ingenuity coming from such an ill-favored strip of a colored girl.”
Morris took a bite of his buttered biscuit and asked with his mouth full, “Are you talking about that monkey-looking maid with the big feet who looks like she could swing from the chandeliers?”
“Yes, dear,” Elizabeth said. “Apparently Jessica dotes on her.”
There was a sudden interruption as Lazarus drew back the double doors to the dining room. He went to Morris’s chair and bent close to his ear. “Excuse me, Master, but there is a visitor in the drawing room.”
“This early in the morning, Lazarus? Who in heaven’s name is it?”
“Mr. Carson Wyndham, suh.”
To the startled silence of everyone at the table, Morris yanked his napkin from his collar. “I’ll go immediately.”
“But he didn’t come to see you, suh,” Lazarus explained. “He came to see Mister Silas.”
“My brother?” Morris stared down the table at Silas as if the idea were unthinkable.
“Good heavens,” Elizabeth said with a loss of breath.
Silas folded his napkin and rose. He grinned at Jeremy, winked at Lettie. “Maybe the old boy has changed his mind,” he said.
Morris raised an eyebrow. “And he came here to tell you in person in the midst of the Christmas season? Don’t count on it.”
“Find out all you can about what’s going on at Willowshire,” Elizabeth whispered loudly behind her hand.
Carson Wyndham stood staring out the Palladian windows of the drawing room with his hands clutched behind his back. Lazarus had taken his hat and the riding crop that he was never without. Silas recognized the stance of a man in deep reflection. He was forced to agree with Morris. Why would the most powerful and richest man in South Carolina deign to call at the breakfast hour to grant his request for a loan this time of year when business had come to a halt?
“Mr. Wyndham, sir?”
Carson turned, and only the force of good manners prevented Silas from uttering his surprise. He recognized a face drawn with severe worry and anxiety. His own was beginning to show signs of such agitation in his mirror each morning. Carson Wyndham’s dour expression, the snap gone from his eyes, seemed at odds with the freshly starched, perky ruffles of his fine cravat. “Thank you for seeing me with no notice, Silas,” he said.
“My pleasure, sir,” Silas said with a slight bow.
“I’m not sure you’ll think so when you hear why I’ve come.”
“Then perhaps we should sit down and I’ll ring for coffee.”
Carson waved a hand dismissively, the large ruby of a signet ring catching the light from the fireplace. “Don’t bother, but maybe you’d best take a chair. I prefer to stand.”
Perplexed, as he sat down in one of his mother’s prized Hepplewhites, Silas searched his mind for a possible reason Carson Wyndham stood in his drawing room—Morris’s drawing room—on the morning when the social event of the year was to have taken place at Willowshire that evening. He could think of none, but of one matter he was certain: The man had not come to grant him a loan.
His firm conviction was immediately shattered when Carson, standing before him, imperious legs spread, hands clasped behind his back, glowered down at him and said, “What would you say if I told you I’d absolve your loan, pay all your expenses to Texas, give you enough money to start your plantation and build a manor home, and throw in fifty slaves in the bargain?”
Silas gazed at Carson as if the man had suddenly popped the buttons of his finely tailored waistcoat. When he recovered from his shock, he said, “I’d say I was dreaming or that you were in the throes of a nightmare.”
“You’re not dreaming, and I’m as awake as an owl at midnight.”
“Forgive me, sir,” Silas said, “but I’m at a loss here.”
“What would you do to get what I just offered?”
Bewildered, but beginning to see a small ray of hope in his confusion, Silas said, “Almost anything short of committing murder or robbing a bank.”
“That’s what I thought.” Carson pursed his mouth and mulled over something in silence a moment as if deciding whether to continue. Finally, he seemed to make up his mind and drew a noisy breath through his nostrils. “Well, here it is, Silas. All that I offered is yours if you’ll do one thing for me.”
Silas’s heartbeat held. The enticements the man tendered danced like sugar plums in his head. To start off to Texas with enough money to make every one of his and Lettie’s dreams come true…he would almost make a deal with the devil, but nothing came without conditions—not with Carson Wyndham. “What is it that you want me to do?” he asked.
“Marry my daughter,” his visitor answered.
Chapter Sixteen
Silas gaped at Carson, dumbfounded. “You’re asking me to do what?”
“That’s right. You heard me,” Carson said. “I want you to marry Jessica and take her with you to Texas.”
“But I’m engaged!”
“I know. You must figure out how to circumvent that commitment.”
“Circumvent it?”
“Silas…” Wyndham drew up his barrel chest, the starched cravat lifting with it. “I’m offering you the chance of a lifetime—an opportunity that will never come to you again. Take it, and you’re free to live the life you’ve always dreamed. Reject it, and you’re doomed to live a life you hate, become the man you hate. You’d be doing Miss Sedgewick a favor by setting her free to marry someone whose obsession does not come before his love for her.”
Appalled, Silas declared, “You presume, sir, and you are forgetting Miss Sedgewick’s love for me.”
“A heartache that the years will dull because of the hate she will feel when you choose my offer over her. How important is love over a decision that will determine the rest of your life and the life of your heirs? Think about it.”
“I couldn’t possibly do what you’re asking, and I am sure your daughter shares my aversion to your proposal.”
“Jessica has absolutely no say in the matter. She forfeited that right when she betrayed me and her family.”
A glimmer of light was beginning to shine on the mystery of the cancellation of festivities at Willowshire. Jessica—that little firebrand—must be at its root. Silas regarded his visitor with distaste. “What did she do, if I may ask?”
Carson related the details of Jessica’s crime.
“Good God!” Silas said.
“Exactly,” Carson said, closing his eyes wearily for a brief second. “My daughter is not winsome, Silas, I grant you that, and you’d have a tiger by the tail if you marry her, but some men would find her particular temperam
ent…alluring.”
“Jeremy apparently does,” Silas said, his tone wry. “Why don’t you propose he marry her?”
“That had crossed my mind, but…”
Silas’s mouth twisted. “He cannot be bought, is that it?”
“He is not a man in your circumstances.”
Silas did not know which inference was the greater insult—or the truth. “What will happen to Jessica if you don’t…marry her off?” he asked curiously.
Carson glanced away, his mouth hard. “I will get her out of South Carolina, one way or the other, before her abolitionist fidelities become well known. I will not have a traitor in my house. Believe me, the other way will be less to her liking than the one I’ve proposed to you.” He looked at Silas, his eyes that of a father whose child is pronounced dead. “Please, Silas. Marry my daughter. You will do right by her, I know it. You might even grow to love her, and she you.”
“I doubt it,” Silas said. “I love Lettie. She has my heart.”
“And you will have my money. Think about it, and get back with me in a fortnight. Otherwise, the deal is off. I will have put into effect another way to deal with my wayward daughter.”
Jeremy had come out into the hall when Carson, followed by a grim-faced Silas, stepped from the drawing room. Lazarus hurried to hand their visitor his riding crop and hat. Positioning the brim tightly, Carson said, “Good morning, Jeremy,” but not before Silas had read in his expression the wistful wish that it could have been Jeremy to whom he’d made the proposal. Jeremy was indeed a fine specimen of a man, more easygoing and jocular than the man he’d come to purchase. Silas recognized that his own sense of humor had been pinched by recent events and…his obsession, so Carson had called his weakness.
“Happy Christmas to you and your families, gentlemen,” Carson said, with a last glance at Silas before Lazarus saw him to the door.
Jeremy had not missed its meaningful glint. “What was that all about?” he asked after Carson had gone.
Silas raked a hand through his hair. From the dining room came Lettie’s clear soprano voice, the sound that was like music to his ears. “Jeremy,” he said, “there are times I wish I’d never been born.”
Jessica had been confined to her room for four days. Apparently, even her mother had been forbidden to see her. She had seen no one but Lulu, the maid who brought her meals and carried tales. Jessica had given her no tales to carry. She did not inquire about her aunt, whom she’d seen only during the tense, silent carriage ride back to Willowshire from the pier in Charleston. She did not ask about Tippy or Willie May or question Lulu for a temperature reading of her father’s and mother’s moods. The maid would put her own sly interpretation on her words and state of mind in relaying them to her parents, and in her lonely exile with only her thoughts for company, Jessica did not think she could endure the torture of knowing what form of retribution her father had taken against Tippy and Willie May. She knew only that the house was eerily quiet these days before Christmas, when ordinarily it would have been boisterous and lively with the arrivals of callers, preparations for parties, the hurrying and scurrying of household help, conversation and laughter and music.
But of course Jessica worried. Had her father sent Tippy to the fields? Had he punished Willie May as well? Would her mother ever speak to her again? What kind of punishment would her father concoct for his daughter, because punishment was bound to come. For what? For showing decency to another human being? The outline of Michael’s vicious grip on her lower arm when he’d marched her through the house to her father’s study had only now faded, but Jessica could mentally still see her bewildered aunt looking on in concern and her mother with her hand pressed to her mouth and her anguished gaze asking: What in the world have you done now, child?
While Jessica had stood with head held high, her chin jutted, Michael had related the tale of how he and the Riders had caught “a no-good, slave-loving abolitionist” red-handed at his subversive business and asked his father to guess who the bastard was signaling.
Her father had listened to the whole harangue without the bat of an eye, but his jaw hardened to stone and his dark brown gaze on Jessica turned nearly black. Finally, he’d asked, “Did Miss Conklin get on her ship?”
“Yes, Papa,” Michael said. “I saw to that. I told her worse would happen if we ever saw her face around here again.”
“And the runaway? Where is he?”
“In the barn until you tell us what to do with him. He’s just a boy, ignorant as they come. He says he doesn’t know who owns him or the name of his plantation. I figure that he never got out of the fields of wherever he’s from. His name is Jasper. We got that out of him when he saw what we did to Sarah Conklin. He told us he hid in the wagon when Scooter drove into town to pick up a wheel.”
“Then no one from Willowshire helped him?”
“He said not. I’m inclined to believe him.”
“How did he know to go to Miss Conklin?”
“He said somebody came into the fields—the agent, probably—where he was working and spread the word that the woman who lived in the house by the cemetery in Willow Grove helped runaways. He was making for that destination.”
“Is the agent anybody we know?”
“Not really. He’s a northerner who hired on as a clerk at the feed store in Willow Grove last year. We turned him over to the sheriff.”
“And this…feed-store clerk and Miss Conklin conspired to spirit the boy away?”
“Yes sir.”
“And you were their accomplice?” Carson turned his questioning to Jessica and got up from his desk to stand eyeball-to-eyeball with her.
“I was,” Jessica said, returning his stare proudly but inwardly terrified. She saw not a spark of love in the cold, dark wells of her father’s gaze.
“I am not going to ask you what you have to say for yourself. I don’t want to hear it. I want you out of my sight. Go to your room and stay there until I send for you. If you so much as poke your head out, I will deal with you severely, is that understood, Jessica Ann?”
He never called her Jessica Ann. A shocking awareness, cold as frozen steel, made its way down to the pit of Jessica’s stomach. She remembered Sarah’s moan when she’d boasted that her father’s bark was worse than his bite when it came to his daughter. Sarah had reacted not from the pain of her lashes, but from her friend’s ignorance of Carson Wyndham. Jessica’s horrified thoughts flew to Tippy. Her father would punish her maid for her transgression. He did not care if his daughter forgave him or if her love turned to hate.
She clasped her hands beseechingly. “Papa, I beg you. Please, please do not punish Tippy for what I did.”
“Michael, take your sister to her room.”
“Please, Papa…”
“Go!”
An audience of her mother, aunt, Willie May, and some of the other servants had watched, round-eyed and frightened, as Michael had herded her up the staircase like a soldier directing her to the guillotine. Before leaving, her brother’s last words to her, perhaps forever, were, “To think I adored you once.”
A hard knock on Jessica’s bedroom door, the one she’d been dreading and waiting for, jerked her back to the present. She opened it to find Lulu smirking at her. “The master wishes to see you, Miss Jessica,” she said.
Chapter Seventeen
Silas could not sleep or eat. He went for hard rides at dawn, long walks at midnight. In the still, frosty hours, while Plantation Alley slept, he pondered, worried, prayed about what he should do. He was four days into the two-week period he’d been granted to make a decision, and he was as far away from reaching it as he was the moment when Carson Wyndham had proposed the solution to both their problems.
His mother fretted over him. “Cassandra made your favorite pie, Silas. Why aren’t you eating it?”
His fiancée had grown pale from worry. “I know when something is deeply disturbing you, my love. What is it? Please tell me.”
Jeremy, who knew him better than a brother, said, “Something’s taking a bite out of your soul, my friend. I’m listening, if you want to talk about it.”
And his brother—obtuse, leaden, impercipient—observed, “Silas, whatever is amiss with you started the minute Carson Wyndham walked out of the drawing room. What did he do—offer his daughter’s hand in marriage?”
Morris had laughed at his joke, but Silas, unsmiling, had turned away lest his brother read the truth in his eyes.
The Conestogas were still for sale on the field next to the barn, their number now increased by two. His prospective renters had also withdrawn from the wagon train, a development that had caused Jeremy to send a note saying he believed he’d determined the source of the problem gnawing at him and would like to meet with him to discuss it. His friend was waiting in the drawing room at Queenscrown when Silas, finished with his managerial duties, joined him before the fire. It was two days before Christmas, and the house was redolent with the savory aromas of cooking and the smell of evergreens. At this point, hoping for a miracle, Silas had not told Jeremy he might have to pull out from the wagon train himself.
“I believe I understand what’s been troubling you, Silas,” Jeremy said. “It’s money, isn’t it? You’re out of funds for the trip.”
Frustrated, Silas ran a hand through the thicket of his black hair. “I’m afraid so, Jeremy,” he admitted. “I haven’t told you because I believed I could secure a loan, and with the money from the rent and sale of the Conestogas, I’d have enough to get us to Texas and provide a start, but neither has come through. I can’t take Lettie to Texas with empty pockets.”
Looking distressed, Jeremy leaned forward. “I don’t even want to think of going to Texas without you, Silas. This is a dream we’ve been hatching for years. Our plans are under way. Put your pride aside and let my family loan you the money.”
“No, Jeremy.” Silas shook his head emphatically. “Thank you for your offer, but I absolutely refuse it. Being in debt to one’s best friend is no way to start out an enterprise together. You know that as well as I do. If our situations were reversed, would you allow me to help you?”
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