Somerset

by Leila Meacham

  “Jess! That’s the brooch you wore when I first met you!” he exclaimed.

  “You have a good memory, Jeremy.”

  “How could I forget?”

  For a few seconds, Jessica thought his eyes misted over. She averted her glance to the brooch the morning sunlight had set on green fire in her hand. “I never wore it after that night,” she mused. “I’ve been keeping it as a little nest egg. It should bring quite a sum if the sale is transacted by a man adept at negotiating deals.”

  “Why in the world would you wish to sell it, Jess?”

  “For money to publish my book, Roses. I don’t have enough of my own, and no publisher is willing to pay me for the privilege of printing a history of our families. Who would buy it? And for obvious reasons, now is not the time to ask Thomas for the money.”

  “Ah, Jess…” Jeremy took the brooch from the box and inspected it admiringly. “It’s so beautiful, so rare. It looked lovely on you the night of your eighteenth birthday party. Why don’t you keep it and let me give you the money to publish your book?”

  “No, Jeremy, dear. That would be going against Silas’s wishes and the agreement he and you and Henri made when we first settled here—the pact never a lender or borrower be to the other. It has stood the families in good stead. Besides, upon my death, I don’t want the brooch to be an issue between Jacqueline and Darla. Knowing Jacqueline, she’d let Darla have it, and I’d rather bury it first. Will you sell it for me?”

  “Of course I will. I know just the man who will buy it for the price of its value.”

  “And Jeremy?”

  “Yes, Jess?”

  “No adding extra bucks of your own to the sum. Promise?”

  “I promise, Jess.”

  He went by train to Houston the next morning. Jeremy made a point to patronize the hometown merchants whenever he could, but the nature of his business today required discretion and anonymity. He was on his way to an establishment from which he had purchased gems of rare quality to give as presents to his late wife. He did not suffer Jessica’s quandary when it came to the dispensation of Camellia’s jewelry to his two daughters-in-law and now Jeremy III’s wife, Beatrice. Camellia would have been proud to see her collection worn by the women her menfolk had married. In all ways, Jeremy considered himself a very lucky man.

  Thane and Thaddeus Oppenheimer were twin owners of a jewelry shop only the wealthy entered. Thane sold and Thaddeus bought. It was Thaddeus Jeremy told the elegantly dressed salesgirl he wished to see, and after flicking a glance at his business card and over his expensive attire, she led him directly into the man’s gemology laboratory at the rear of the shop.

  “My God, this is exquisite!” Thaddeus declared, studying the brooch through his loupe, a small, handheld magnifying device used by jewelers to assess a gemstone’s quality. “I shouldn’t tell you that. You’ll ask the earth.”

  “Which Thane will sell for that and a couple of planets more,” Jeremy rejoined.

  “He will indeed,” Thaddeus murmured. He stated a price.

  “Done,” said Jeremy.

  “This will go into the case immediately,” the jeweler said. “It could be gone by the end of the day.”

  “Most likely,” Jeremy concurred.

  Jeremy lunched at the Townsmen, his club in Houston, the money for the brooch thick in his wallet. He took his time and enjoyed a brandy and coffee afterwards in the lounge, where he chatted with other captains of industry and met a representative of the state’s new rich. He was a man from Corsicana in East Texas who, in the process of tapping a shallow artesian well on his property in 1897, hit a pocket of oil and gas. After a pleasant exchange with the newcomer, Jeremy checked his gold fob watch and decided he’d allowed enough time for the brooch to be inventoried, cleaned, polished, priced, and displayed under the bright lights in one of the gleaming cases of the Oppenheimers’ shop. He’d best hurry.

  Thane was behind the counter. Jeremy saw the brooch displayed in an individual glass case set on a pillar at the front of the store to entice customers as they walked in.

  “I’d like to purchase that emerald pin if I may, Thane,” he said.

  Thane looked puzzled. “But…you just sold it to us, Mr. Warwick.”

  “And now I want to buy it back—for the asking price, of course.”

  “Uh…yes. As you wish, Mr. Warwick.”

  Jeremy wrote the jeweler a check for the amount of the brooch and said, “No need to have it wrapped up, Thane. It’s going right into the safe when I get home.”

  In a voice of barely restrained astonishment since his customer had walked in, the jeweler said, “Not to be worn at the neckline of a lovely woman, Mr. Warwick?”

  “Only in memory, Thane,” Jeremy said.

  Jessica counted the bills in surprise. “You were paid this much, Jeremy? You promise you didn’t throw in your own money?”

  Jeremy held up his hands. “I promise,” he said. “You have there the exact amount the jeweler paid for the brooch. Believe me, he’ll sell it for a lot more.”

  Jessica said in a faintly musing voice, “I wonder who will buy it.”

  “Perhaps a man who loves a woman very much,” Jeremy said.

  Chapter Ninety-Eight

  On New Year’s Day, 1900, Jessica began in earnest to put together the history of the founding families of Howbutker. The organization of the book would require the first quarter of the year and the actual writing of the text the second two. Her hope was to have the manuscript to the publisher at the beginning of the final three months to allow plenty of time for Roses to be assembled and printed and ready to present to the three families at their annual gathering on Christmas Eve.

  Her budget allowed for the purchase of a Remington typewriter and the services of a typist and proofreader. After conducting not very extensive interviews with the town’s limited pool of qualified applicants, Jessica chose a young woman in need of supplementing her secretary’s salary to type her weekly output. To correct her grammatical mistakes, she hired a reporter of equal age eking out a living at the Howbutker Gazette.

  Thomas had said, “Darla made a living reading copy for a publisher before she and Vernon were married, Mother. Why don’t you use her services?”

  Jessica had given him a look that he’d misread. “Oh, right,” he said. “With the baby coming and all she has to do, Darla doesn’t have time.”

  “How perceptive you are,” Jessica said.

  Jessica, the secretary, and the reporter made a convivial group that Amy was happy to ply with pots of tea and bakery goods twice a week for a day. The rest of the time, Jessica was closeted with her notebooks and writing tablets and pencils, emerging from her room only at meal times.

  “Time seems to be of the essence to your mother,” Jacqueline observed to Thomas. “You would think she ‘hears time’s winged chariot hurrying near,’” she quoted from a poem by Andrew Marvell that she and Jessica had enjoyed reading together.

  “She is nearly eighty-three,” Thomas said. “Perhaps she does.”

  “Perish the day,” murmured Jacqueline.

  Jacqueline missed her mother-in-law’s company. They were great reading and gardening and cycling companions, and Jacqueline had begun to feel lonesome. Thomas spent every day at the plantation now that cotton was once more a necessary commodity in the world of commerce. The new century saw cottonseed production superseded only by lumber in fiscal importance in Texas, and the Toliver cottonseed mill hummed night and day to meet the demand for its output. Textile mills to rival the North’s had been constructed in the state and the Southland, and Somerset led the way in supplying the millions of bales of cotton required annually to satisfy foreign and domestic requests. The fortunes of the Tolivers were turning around.

  At the beginning of April, when Jessica had been at her writing task for three months, Jacqueline presented Thomas with a proposal that would indirectly affect the outcome of her life. Darla was one month from her expected delivery date
and had endured a hard pregnancy. She’d been confined to bed for the last thirty days, and Sassie, with the assistance of only one maid and her own four-year-old daughter, Pansy, to see after, was running her legs off to appease the demands of her fractious mistress. The rent house was too small to provide living space for more help, so Jacqueline suggested the entire family move in with them on Houston Avenue—“just until the baby is born and Darla can get back on her feet,” Jacqueline said. Thomas would see more of his grandson, and Amy would love having her daughter and granddaughter under the Toliver roof.

  Thomas was reluctant. God knew he was obtuse when it came to women, but from the start he’d pegged the reason for his daughter-in-law’s willingness to live elsewhere but in the mansion of her husband’s family. She was not a woman to share her possessions, and those she considered her husband, son, and house.

  However, Thomas was concerned for the baby’s well-being in its mother’s womb. All that bad temper and fretfulness he heard about from Amy, passed on by Sassie, couldn’t be good for the child’s health and development. Vernon must have another heir. Thomas loved his grandson, Miles, but the boy was so obviously a Henley, of the same weave as his mother. Young as the child was, neither father nor grandfather could see Miles growing into the kind of man essential to the helm of Somerset.

  So Thomas agreed, and within weeks the Vernon Toliver family was ensconced in a wing of the mansion on Houston Avenue. Though she remained uncomfortable, Darla’s temper settled. She even relaxed enough from the pressure of her domestic responsibilities to look forward to the arrival of her newborn. Up until then, there had been some concern over the lack of maternal enthusiasm for the human being growing in Darla’s womb causing her to suffer every undesirable symptom of pregnancy and the disruption of her well-run household. Miles had been such an easy child to carry.

  In early May, after eight hours of unrelenting labor, Darla was relieved of her burden. Too drained and exhausted to assume an appropriate expression of joy, her disappointment in the gender of the child was visible to all members and servants of the Toliver family when Mary Regina Toliver was put into her arms. The baby’s father and grandfather and great-grandmother stood by the bedside, marveling at the infant. A cap of black hair, the trace of a chin dimple, the elegant shape of the head, hands, and feet marked her for a bona fide Toliver.

  Jacqueline stood at the foot of the bed and saw the same rapture upon her husband’s face that was present when he’d looked at his daughter Regina at her sixteenth birthday party so many years ago. Thomas would not be able to part with this child of his lineage, even for the distance of her parents’ home across town. The Vernon Tolivers were under their roof for good. As they were moving in, Jacqueline had seen Darla assessing her temporary surroundings in the light of the new developments in their lives. The Vernon Tolivers’ improved economic situation and their growing family dictated they move to a house in keeping with their status and needs. What more appropriate place than the mansion of her husband’s birth to which he had claim? Jacqueline read the handwriting on the wall. The new grandchild would be the deal maker. Jacqueline would no longer be in charge of her home.

  Her apprehensions came to be. Darla, quietly and subtly, without drawing attention from her husband and father-in-law, set about making it clear to Jacqueline that as a stepmother, she was a usurper whose place had been won through the failure of another woman—the true wife and mother of the home, now dead. It was only proper that she, the wife of the heir to Somerset and bearer of his descendants, should take her rightful position as mistress of the house.

  Jacqueline was sixty years old. She had neither the desire nor the stamina to pit herself against a woman of Darla’s indefatigable determination to dominate home and family. She could have gone to Jessica, who would have explained “rightful position” to Darla, but she would cause no domestic rift. The children were under their mother’s strict control, and access to them was limited, so Jacqueline formed other interests, one of which was travel. Freed of domestic responsibilities and with her husband busy all day at the plantation or with civic duties, Jacqueline was at liberty to take overnight trips by train to museums and art galleries and sites of interest in San Antonio and Houston and Austin. Members of her reading group often went along and sometimes Beatrice and Pixie, whose young company she relished.

  In early September of 1900, Jacqueline asked Thomas to take a train trip with her to Galveston to see the city’s acre-sized flower garden that had won national acclaim. The excursion was really an excuse to get a few days’ separation from the woman she’d been foolish enough to invite into her home. Darla had become dreadfully bossy of late to the servants, especially Sassie, and it was difficult to watch Darla’s overt favoritism of Miles when she allowed Mary to cry her heart out in her crib and forbade anyone to pick her up. They could stay at the lavish hotel on the Galveston shoreline built for the visitors flocking from all over the country to see the spectacular flower display, Jacqueline told Thomas.

  Sadly, Thomas said he must decline. It was harvest time at Somerset, and he couldn’t go off and leave Vernon to handle things alone. Perhaps his mother would go with her.

  Jessica was finishing Roses, Jacqueline reminded him.

  Perhaps Darla could break away for a few days, Thomas suggested.

  Absolutely not, his wife said quickly. She wouldn’t dream of taking Darla away from the children. She would go by herself unless she could interest members of her reading group to share the experience.

  In the end, Jacqueline traveled to Galveston alone. It was not the first time she’d traveled without benefit of a companion, much to Thomas’s concern. Before leaving, she visited Jessica in her room, and her heart softened at the lined face that looked up from the final pages of a draft covering sixty-five years of the sojourn of the Tolivers, DuMonts, and Warwicks in East Texas.

  “You suppose anybody will want to read it?” Jessica asked.

  “Those that matter,” Jacqueline replied.

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Jessica peered at her over the thin gold rims of her spectacles, dark eyes knowing and wise. “Long enough to cure what ails you?”

  Jacqueline smiled crookedly. Nothing got by Jessica. “I can’t be gone that long. I’ll telegraph when I’m coming home.”

  “We’ll miss you,” Jessica said.

  Thomas drove her to the train station and saw her seated in her first-class compartment. His concern for her safety was relieved by the conductor’s promise to keep an eye on her and the promise of a friend in Galveston to meet the train and escort her to the hotel.

  The telegram was never sent. On September 8, as the unwarned 37,000 residents of Galveston went about their business under blue skies despite high tides flooding some of the inland streets that morning, a hurricane was gathering force in the Gulf of Mexico. The assault that would become the most devastating natural disaster ever to strike the United States made landfall midafternoon while Jacqueline was enjoying tea served in the Palm Room of the Galveston coast hotel where she was registered. The hotel was the first obstacle in the path of the storm.

  Chapter Ninety-Nine

  It had taken Jessica two weeks after the disaster at Galveston to pull herself together to confront Darla. Finished with dressing, she sent Amy to summon her grandson’s wife to meet her in the morning room.

  “The morning room, Miss Jessica? Not up here in your study?”

  “The morning room, Amy.”

  Darla swept into the room she’d wasted no time seizing as her command station and looked stunned to see her husband’s grandmother sitting in the desk chair she’d assumed as exclusively hers.

  “You wish to see me, Jessica?”

  “I do. Have a seat, Darla.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t. I have so much to do—”

  “Sit down, Darla!”

  Darla sat. Jessica swiveled her chair to address her. “Just so you
know, I blame you for my daughter-in-law’s death. But for you, she would not have felt compelled to remove herself from your domineering, insufferable presence.”

  Darla’s mouth dropped open in protest. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You don’t have my pardon. Ever! I am taking back my house. Get your things out of this room this morning. Otherwise, I will have them removed and not in the orderly fashion you would prefer. And in the future, the servants will report to me. Is that clear?”

  Darla rose dismissively and drew to an indignant height. “Vernon will have a say about this.”

  “Vernon has no say about anything concerning this house. This house belongs to me, and I will make the decisions concerning it. If you don’t like that arrangement, you and your family are at liberty to move.”

  Aghast, Darla said, “You wouldn’t dare do that to your grandson and his children.”

  Jessica quite deliberately got to her feet and went to stand before Darla. She gazed into the amber eyes, feeling hers like agates in cold water. “You wouldn’t dare force me to do it, but be assured that if you are of the courage to do so, Darla, I will carry out my promise. And do not for a moment think you can hold the threat of withdrawing Vernon and the grandchildren from Thomas or me over my head. Vernon would never allow it. You would see a side of your husband you do not wish to know, and he would see a side of you that you’ve taken great pains to conceal. Have I expressed myself clearly?”

  Darla drew back from the piercing gaze, hand clutching her throat. “I believe so.”

  “Very good,” Jessica said.

  “Here you go, Mrs. Toliver,” a representative of the Hawks Publishing Company of Houston said to Jessica as he handed her a volume bound in wine-colored leather with a title embossed in gold leaf. “First copy of Roses hot off the press. Mighty handsome, if I may say so.”