Somerset

by Leila Meacham

  Jeremy averted his gaze to the fire. “No, I suppose not. You’d let me give my life for you, as you would for me, but heaven forbid we owe each other money. This…tacit agreement between the Warwicks and Tolivers started way back in England at the end of the War of the Roses, you know, when the Lancasters and Yorks decided to share the key to the kingdom as long as it didn’t open the other’s coffers.”

  “It is our legacy, Jeremy. Neither a lender or borrower be.”

  Jeremy glanced at him worriedly. “So what are you going to do? Is there any hope at all? I assume Carson Wyndham turned you down, and that’s what his visit was all about a few weeks ago—why you looked as if you’d been given a death sentence.”

  “I may as well have been,” Silas said, getting up to stroll to one of the tall windows of the drawing room. He could not sit long these days, neither could he stand, or lie down. His nerves would not permit it. Did he dare tell Jeremy of Carson Wyndham’s offer? What would Jeremy think of his best friend for even considering it? They each had the highest respect for the other’s character and integrity. Though they sometimes differed in their view of things, no dispute had ever come between them, even when they embarked on joint ventures ripe for disagreement. As boys, together they’d built canoes, rafts, and tree houses; concocted schemes to earn spending money; planned hiking, hunting, and fishing trips. As men, they’d invested an equal share of money, care, and training in a racehorse, shared the affections of the same girls, and made a committee of two in deciding everything from how best to remove a tree from the road to building a bridge serving their neighboring plantations.

  Let Silas and Jeremy decide how to handle it, was the directive from both fathers of the men and now Morris, when a project concerning the juxtaposed estates was involved, deferring to “the boys.”

  But if Silas accepted Carson’s proposal, would Jeremy even want him to accompany him to Texas? Would he want a leader of the wagon train by his side who had betrayed the one he loved to fulfill the dream they shared? If he agreed to Carson’s terms, would Jeremy understand that, given the man Silas knew himself to be, he had done what he believed was right for all?

  “Then there’s no hope at all?” Jeremy repeated, the question soft with sadness and regret. “You’ve tried every avenue?”

  Silas stared out the window. The flames from the fireplace leaped around his reflection in the glass, aptly showing a man in hell. He turned abruptly to the drinks table. “There is one avenue open to me,” he said, lifting the top of a whiskey decanter. It was only four o’clock in the afternoon. Jeremy’s brow raised slightly.

  “And that is?” his friend asked, shaking his head no to Silas’s offer of a drink.

  Silas poured himself a glass and sat down before the fire. “You were right about Sarah Conklin,” he said. “There was more to her than appeared. Michael Wyndham discovered her to be a conductor in the Underground Railroad. She’s been sent packing and will not be returning to her teaching post in Willow Grove. I have yet to tell Lettie.”

  “Good heavens!” Jeremy exclaimed. “How did Michael find out?”

  Silas explained what he knew. He had an idea Carson had left out certain unsavory details of the story.

  “The poor girl,” Jeremy said. “I hope Michael and his men did not get rough with her.”

  “Carson didn’t say.”

  “Does Jessica know?”

  Silas lifted his glass to his lips. “She knows. She was part of the deception.”

  Jeremy sat straighter. “What?”

  Silas finished the story of Jessica’s involvement. “Her father is very angry with her,” he said in conclusion. “So angry, in fact, that he wants to get her out of his sight. That’s what he came to see me about the other day. He wants my help.”

  “You? How can you help?”

  “He wants me to marry his daughter and take her to Texas.”

  Jeremy’s paralytic look reminded Silas of the time, long ago, when they’d been fishing on opposite sides of the lake. Across the water, Jeremy had regarded him with the same stupefied stare, and Silas shortly discovered what had caught his attention on his side of the lake. A bear had arrived to fish upstream, so intense on his task that it failed to notice Silas. Jeremy’s harrowed gaze reflected his two choices. Should he climb a cypress where he’d be safe but captive or chance life and limb by making a dash for freedom? Silas had taken the risk and escaped into the trees beyond the bear’s reach. He felt himself in a similar position now. Should he stay were he was, secure but bound, or seek liberation at the risk of great loss? At the lake that day, Jeremy had not abandoned him. Would he stick by Silas now if he should decide to take Carson’s offer?

  “I’m shocked,” his friend said simply.

  “So I see. Care for that whiskey now?”

  As Silas poured his drink, Jeremy asked, “What did you tell him?”

  Silas noted gratefully that his friend did not say, as anyone else would: You told him no, of course.

  “I told him I’d think about it,” Silas said. “I’m telling you now, Jeremy, for whatever you might think of me after today, that I am thinking about it. Carson Wyndham offered me that avenue you asked about.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jeremy Warwick slowed his white stallion to a canter as he turned into the tree-lined, moss-draped approach to the Parthenon-looking mansion of his family home. Built of white plastered brick, the manor house of Meadowlands was a palatial, squarish structure of two and a half stories surrounded by broad double galleries supported by monumental columns rising to the roofline. Like a brilliant gemstone, even in the falling dusk, it sparkled in a setting of lush gardens and lawns sloping away to picked-over cotton fields whose expanse reached beyond the range of the human eye. Born to Meadowlands’ opulent entitlements and therefore naturally taking them for granted, Jeremy had never paid much attention to the magnificence and scope of his ancestral home and family’s property until today. Queenscrown was no less grand. He cantered along, viewing the Warwick mansion and endless stretches of land from a new perspective. What would a man do—what would he risk, sacrifice, forfeit—for the ownership of all of this, he wondered.

  All of this was what Silas desired, felt born to, believed he needed for survival as a man. Jeremy was of no such mind. If Morris died tomorrow and left Queenscrown to his brother, Silas would be a happy, fulfilled man. If Jeremy’s father and siblings followed suit—God forbid—and he, Jeremy, were to inherit Meadowlands, he would be miserable. His reasons for going to Texas were different from Silas’s. He yearned to be the master of his own source of livelihood, but in a fresh, new, vigorous environment. All Jeremy knew was farming, but he welcomed the possibility and challenge of turning his hand to some other profitable venture in the land of opportunity Texas was purported to be. He had come to find South Carolina’s planter system—its customs, traditions, mores, prejudices—stifling and restrictive, as worn out as the land would one day be. Jessica Wyndham must find it so as well.

  But he could understand Silas’s obsessive need to possess all of this. He was a man of the soil—predominantly cotton-producing soil—and he was a Toliver, born to own, command, lead—not follow. Silas carried his forebears’ blood, and he could no more change or compromise his conviction of his role in life than he could alter the color of his eyes.

  Jeremy felt enormous pity for him. No sailor on the planet would trade fifty-foot waves for the dilemma Silas faced. He stood between a lion and a tiger. Either could eat him alive. If he chose to remain at Queenscrown with the woman he loved, he would surely emotionally expire. If he went to Texas, all the land and cotton in the world might not allay his misery at being married to the woman he did not.

  Would Silas sacrifice those he loved to preserve his own life? He would leave Lettie devastated, humiliated, inconsolable. Joshua would be crushed. The little boy already thought of Lettie as his mother, and Elizabeth loved her like a daughter. If Silas jilted her to marry Jessica, he would l
eave South Carolina a disgraced man. He could never come home again.

  And what of Jessica Wyndham? After the beautiful Lettie Sedgewick, what chance did the girl have of winning Silas’s heart—that is, if she were of a mind to? From what he’d seen of the feisty Jessica—and now knowing her views on slavery—it might be hate at first kiss between her and Silas.

  Jeremy shook his head in sympathy for his friend and impelled his stallion to a faster clip. Too bad he was not in the running. Not since he was twenty-one and met the girl he loved and later lost to typhoid fever had a woman so intrigued him as Jessica Wyndham. Had her father asked him to take his daughter off his hands, he might not have had to think about it long.

  Jessica met her aunt coming up the stairs. “Aunt Elfie!” she cried as they threw themselves into each other’s arms.

  “Oh, my dear child, this is all my fault,” her aunt exclaimed. “If I’d just monitored your activities closer while you were in Boston…”

  Jessica pulled away to look at her. “This is not your fault, Aunt Elfie. I left here with my convictions already conceived. They were simply birthed in boarding school. Do you…have any idea what my fate will be?”

  “No, dear niece. Your father does not confide in me, but your mother is very worried.”

  Lulu had stopped at the bottom of the staircase. “The master is waiting, Miss Jessica,” she said with a sharp look of rebuke.

  “Certainly not for you,” Jessica snapped. “Go on about your business.”

  “But I’m to take you to him.”

  “I know the way to my father’s study. Get on with you.” Jessica waited until the maid had disappeared and asked, “Aunt Elfie, have you seen Tippy? What have they done with her?”

  “She’s all right, child—for the time being. She’s quartering with her mother and has been dispensed to the sewing room. I believe she’s working on your bridesmaid’s dress. Please, please, Jessica, mind your p’s and q’s with your father when you see him.”

  “I’ll try, Aunt Elfie,” Jessica said, kissing her aunt’s cheek. Then she hurried down the stairs, skirt and hair flying behind her.

  Since she did not know how to arrange her hair, Jessica had worn it loose for the four days of her confinement. Its naturally frizzy curls fell in long, ungovernable ringlets when not brushed into submission by Tippy’s hand. Today, the thick russet mass had been secured away from her forehead by a barrette. She’d dressed hastily and found, too late to change, a noticeable stain on the front of her dress, and she’d been unable to fasten herself into a corset. Her waist was as thin as a blade anyway since she’d eaten little during her incarceration, but her father could surprise her by noting such things. Would her appearance anger or endear her to him?

  He was standing by the mantel of the great stone fireplace, smoking a long-stemmed pipe and consulting the flames as if they held the answer to what to do with his daughter. Her mother sat in an armchair by the fire, looking lost and abandoned, and Jessica’s heart twisted in remorse for the pain she continued to cause her. Her mother started to get up to go to her, but her father laid a gentle hand on her shoulder and she subsided into the silken layers of her gown.

  Carson moved to his desk and set the meerschaum bowl in its holder. Jessica took that as not a good sign. Her father was a mellower man when he smoked his pipe. “Jessica,” he said, “you have shamed our family, not only us of its intimate circle, but you’ve disgraced us to others in the community, people who put store in your parents and brother and abide by our example. You obviously do not agree with the example we Wyndhams set, so I will give you two choices where you may indulge your abolitionist convictions and actions to the fullest—depending, of course, on whether they’re tolerated.”

  Eunice spoke up, her voice thin with grief. “Oh, Carson, must you? Can’t we give her another chance?”

  “Now, Mother, we agreed,” Carson remonstrated her gently, his own voice losing some of its force. “Our daughter cannot stay among us. She’s a betrayer and a traitor not only to her family but to her heritage—those who have gone before us and to all southerners who share and support our way of life. That is,” he said, still speaking to his wife but fastening his gaze on his daughter, “unless she apologizes to her family and admits her mistake to those she’s deeply offended. I’m sure they will understand she was temporarily misguided by her affection for Miss Conklin.”

  “You mean apologize to Michael and the Night Riders?” Jessica asked, her frozen fear immediately dissolving in the heat of her indignation.

  “Precisely.”

  “Never,” Jessica said.

  Her mother pressed her fingers to her forehead. “Oh, Jessie, darling…”

  Jessica returned her father’s hardening stare. “What are the choices of my punishment, Papa? To be burned at the stake or flayed alive?”

  Carson turned his back on her, his way of saying he had had enough. Jessica read the message from the squaring of his shoulders, the deliberate withdrawal of his chair from its kneehole, the drop of his attention to papers on his desk, dismissing her. It was possible he would never look at her again, not directly. She was damned to him. He did not address her as he said, “You may recall the punishment your mother’s older sister earned for disgracing the family in Boston.”

  Terror, cold as a steel blade, drove into her heart. The story had become legend in her mother’s family. The oldest daughter, for conducting an illicit relationship with a boy of whom her father did not approve, had been banished to a Carmelite convent in Great Britain, one of the strictest orders of nuns in the Catholic Church. Jessica had heard her mother and Aunt Elfie lament the harsh conditions under which their sister lived. The “inmates,” as they called the nuns, were permitted to speak for only two hours each day and were allowed no contact with the outside world. They lived in stark cells and took vows of poverty and toil, prayed constantly, lived on only vegetables, and fasted from Holy Cross Day in September until Easter of the following year. Once she was removed from their home, the two sisters never saw their sibling again.

  “You wouldn’t,” Jessica said, glancing at her mother for verification of the threat. Eunice blinked away tears and nodded slightly.

  “I would,” Carson said. “As soon as I can make arrangements.” He took up a pen to scribble his name to a document. “There is an order of Carmelites located in Darlington, a market town in the northeast of England. Perhaps you will encounter your aunt there. She should be around…sixty years old now, by my estimate.” He turned the document over and affixed his signature to the next item requiring his attention. “Or…” he added casually, “you may marry Silas Toliver and go live with him in Texas. Take your pick.”

  Jessica swayed from a sudden light-headedness. Was her father crazy? Silas Toliver was engaged to Lettie. They were to be married in less than six weeks. Did he not remember his daughter was to be her maid of honor? Tippy was working on her bridesmaid’s dress. She glanced again at her mother, who had closed her eyes and was biting her lip as if in silent and urgent prayer, and then at the indifferent face of her father, poring over his papers.

  “Silas Toliver is engaged,” Jessica said, “or have you forgotten? How can you offer him as a choice for me—that is, if he would have me?”

  “He’ll break the engagement for the price I’ve offered him,” Carson said, “and believe me, he will have you. He has ten more days to agree to it. I have no doubt of his answer.”

  “Good Lord, Papa! What have you done?”

  Her mother rose in a rustle of silk. “Silas is a good man, Jessie,” she said, her tone pleading. “He’ll take care of you. Your father will see that you want for nothing. If you go to that awful place in England, we’ll never see you again.”

  “But Silas is engaged!”

  “An easily fixed situation,” Carson said.

  The horror of her father’s manipulation—what he had bullied into place—had begun to dawn. “What about Lettie? If Silas doesn’t marry her, she’
ll be destroyed!”

  “A fatality of your stupidity and Silas’s desperation. She’ll get over it.”

  “I won’t choose either one,” Jessica said. “I’ll run away first—go live with Aunt Elfie in Boston.”

  “No, you won’t, my dear daughter, for if you do, I will sell Tippy and her mother—separately. You must believe me, I will. I cannot have you in Boston where you will continue to work against the interests of your family and the South.”

  Eunice gave a little moan and put her hands over her ears—in shame, Jessica perceived.

  “Papa, I thought you loved me,” she said quietly.

  He looked at her, perhaps for the last time fully. “I do, my dear, more than you will ever know or could possibly comprehend from my actions, and that’s the tragedy of it. Now go to your room and think about your choices. Your mother will send Tippy to you to do something about your dreadful appearance. We must look our best for our last family Christmas together.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  In the days allotted him before making his decision, Silas observed life at Queenscrown through the eyes of an outside observer, all scales removed from his vision. It was not a difficult challenge. His greatest strength lay in his willingness—and courage—to face the truth, seeing it not as he’d like, but as it was. He did not fall into the trap of believing that, given time and the right circumstances, one day things would be different. A man could waste his life waiting for his fortunes to turn around. In arriving at decisions, Silas weighed the circumstances as they were currently, considered their chances of change, and determined his course.

  Thus, he set his attention to observe, in unbiased focus, the people and circumstances that would mark his days for the rest of his life if he remained at Queenscrown and worked as his brother’s land manager. Lettie he saw as a wife who would accept her portion without complaint. She would probably continue her teaching duties now that Sarah Conklin would not be returning, a fact he knew and she did not. Her small income would add to his salary, allow her a new frock now and then, perhaps weekend trips to Charleston to dine and take in a play at the Grand Theater. She would never be the mistress of Queenscrown. His mother was the undisputed ruler of the domestic domain, and while they were exceptionally fond of each other, there were bound to be differences in running the household, raising Joshua, and officiating at social events. He saw an erosion of their affection as inevitable, and even a slight discord between two women in a household could make the rest of the occupants miserable. And what if Morris married? Then Lettie would take third chair behind his mother and the new mistress of Queenscrown. Morris’s children would take precedence over Joshua. Joshua and his future siblings would be seen as the children of a dependent relative. Silas could take over the land manager’s quarters, now occupied by the head overseer, but how could he, a Toliver and a descendant of the aristocratic scion of Queenscrown, tolerate living in a yeoman’s cottage?