Roses (14 page)

“Well, you should be,” she retorted. “The very idea of your father taking advantage of our situation and offering Miles—gullible,
vulnerable Miles—the opportunity to grow timber. I promise you one thing, Percy Warwick, it’ll be a subzero day on the Fourth
of July in Howbutker, Texas, before a single Warwick pine ever sinks a root into Toliver soil!” She was so angry, she was
quivering.

They had arrived at a point beside the road that allowed for a U-turn. Into this space Percy spun off, raising dust and bringing
the Pierce-Arrow to a squealing halt. Startled, Mary instinctively reached for the door handle to seek escape, but Percy grabbed
her free wrist at the same time he tore off his goggles. Mary had never seen him angry, and the sight stunned her mute. She
remembered Beatrice describing to her mother the rage of which he was capable:
It’s not often his temper flares, but when it does, it’s the most frightening thing you’ll ever see. His mouth tightens like
a steel trap and his eyes lose color. And he’s so powerful! My goodness, he could break you like a toothpick. Thank God my
boy never gets angry without just cause.

Just cause….

“Don’t you dare misconstrue my father’s attempt to come to your family’s aid as a way to serve the Warwicks,” he said through
clenched teeth, his eyes like chips of ice in his flushed face. “If you don’t know better than that, you’re more pigheaded
than I thought.”

“
He
should know better than to go behind my back to make such a proposal,” Mary countered, struggling to free herself from the
pain of Percy’s grasp. “He knows what cotton meant to my father. That’s why he left Somerset to me and not Miles!”

“Maybe Dad doesn’t take your father’s obsession as yours. Maybe he thinks that since you’re a woman, you’ll want something
else besides a weevil-ridden plantation, a system of outdated servitude to devote your life to. Maybe he thinks that since
you’re going to marry me, Somerset will be under timber anyway.”

Her jaw dropped. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“Wha—Marry you?” She stared at him, dumbstruck. “Put Somerset under timber? You’re joking, right?”

“Does this seem like a joke?”

He reached for her. She was so shocked by the preposterousness of his assumptions that her mouth was still open when he locked
his over it. She struggled and pushed, sputtered and squealed, but to no avail. The woman in her, traitor to the chaste girl
who’d withstood Richard’s advances, bloomed full grown under Percy’s assault. Her body flared, her senses blazed. Caution
and decorum flew from their restraints in surrender to her need of him, and she welcomed his possession as much as the restrictions
of their clothing permitted. Eventually, time and the present returned and she lay spent and hot in his arms, aware that her
traveling suit was rumpled, her hair disheveled, her lips smarting, and somewhere her hat lay in the dust of the road.

“Lord have mercy,” she said, too enervated to move her head from the hollow of his shoulder.

“Now after that, try telling yourself we don’t belong together.”

It was not possible to dispute it. She’d felt as tightly bound as a bale of cotton when she’d seated herself in this contraption,
and now the wires were cut and she was spilling everywhere, and they both knew it. But this would never do.
They
would never do. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I can’t—I won’t marry you. I mean it, Percy.”

“Well, we’ll see how you feel when I get back from Europe, after you’ve had the responsibility of overseeing a five-thousand-acre
plantation, fighting the boll weevil, caring for a couple of hundred sharecropping families, and keeping your overseer sober.
That’s not to mention taking care of your mother and living from hand to mouth. I wish it were fair to you to marry you before
I leave, but”—he kissed her forehead, leaving the implication between them—“at least you’ll have Mother and Dad to look after
you until I get back.”

“What presumption!” Mary scoffed, finding the will to push out of his arms. “And what if I feel the same way about us when
you return?”

“You won’t.” He smiled, not with the smugness of Richard Bentwood, but with the quiet, unshakable confidence of his knowledge
of her.

Somehow she managed to flounce back to her side of the car, straightening her dress. “Put it out of your head, Percy Warwick.
It’s not going to happen.” She looked around for her hat and saw that it had landed in a field, where a cow was happily munching
it for its dinner.

“It will happen,” he said, starting the motor.

Mary could not look at him as they pulled back onto the road. There was now a new enemy in her midst, far more insidious than
the boll weevil, more deadly than hail or flood or drought, more frightening than a cartel of Boston bankers lying in wait
to foreclose on Somerset. Now she knew what was behind her strange antagonism toward him these last few years. He had the
power to make her love him. He could weaken her will to his. Marriage to him would mean combining their interests, expanding
the Warwick timberlands at the expense of Somerset. She would become absorbed into the Warwick identity, lose the special
distinction associated with a Toliver. Their children would be raised as Warwicks, and the Toliver line would perish. Miles
was no Toliver. He was his mother’s son, a Henley, a weak-willed visionary.
She
was the only true remaining Toliver. From her would come the sons to sustain the line, but only if she married a man who
shared her commitment. Percy Warwick was not such a man.

“It would behoove us both,” she said, staring straight ahead, “never to put ourselves in this position again.”

“I promise nothing, Gypsy,” he said.

At her door, she extended her hand formally. “Thank you for meeting my train, Percy. It’s not necessary for you to come in.”

Percy ignored her hand and slid his arm around her waist. “Now, don’t worry about what we discussed,” he said. “The subject
can wait until I return.”

She lifted her face to stare straight into his eyes. “I want with all my heart for you to return, Percy, but not to me.”

“It must be to you,” he said. “There can be no one else. Now, go easy on Miles. He’s been like a hound beset with wolves this
year. If there’s one thing he’s learned, it’s that he’s no farmer. He’s made a mess of things, as I’m sure you’ll point out,
but the man has done the best he could.”

Mary nodded to indicate she understood. “That’s my girl,” he said, and drew her to him to kiss her lips lightly. She tensed
against the rise of passion, a self-betrayal his amused gaze indicated he’d felt. “I’ll see you later,” he said, leaving her
to descend the steps. Behind her, she heard the door open and Sassie’s exclamation of welcome, but it was a long few seconds
before she could take her gaze from his confident stride to the Pierce-Arrow.

H
OWBUTKER
, O
CTOBER
1919

T
he train was late. For the tenth time in as many minutes, Mary glanced at the lapel watch pinned to her outdated dark green
serge suit before once more staring down the empty track.

“The train was probably late in leaving Atlanta,” Jeremy Warwick offered, to ease the mounting tension in their little group
gathered on the platform. There were four of them—Jeremy and Beatrice Warwick, Abel DuMont, and Mary—waiting among a larger
crowd that had come to the station to welcome “the boys” home from the war. The high school band was there, lined up and ready
to strike into “Stars and Stripes Forever” the moment a uniformed figure stepped down from the train. A banner reading W
ELCOME
H
OME
, H
OWBUTKER’S
O
WN
was draped over the entrance to the station, and one like it stretched across a section of Courthouse Circle for the parade
scheduled later that day.

The war had been over for nearly a year, but not for Miles and Ollie and Percy or for thousands of other members of the American
Expeditionary Forces (AEF) delayed in France—either by the scarcity of ships to bring them home or by occupation duty in Germany.

Only Percy would be coming home unscathed. Miles had been severely gassed toward the end of the war, and rather than leave
him behind, Captains Warwick and DuMont volunteered to remain after the armistice to help demilitarize a hostile Rhineland.
Shortly after Christmas, as a member of the occupying garrisons, Ollie had been injured by a grenade that had all but severed
his leg from his hip.

It had been a long twenty-six months for the returning soldiers’ families. The war years themselves had been worrying enough,
with newspaper accounts of soldiers enduring unspeakable anguish and hardships of combat, and then of influenza raging throughout
the AEF, striking as many as ten thousand a week. But then reports at the war’s end had caused even more agony with tales
of wounded men still in critical condition being moved from base hospitals to forwarding camps, where they were left to convalesce
without medical supplies and attention.

At news of this, the families’ hopes sank to their lowest depths of the war. It had been bad enough imagining the boys engaged
in trench warfare, shivering in tents on quagmire floors without sufficient fuel or blankets during the coldest winters Europe
had ever known, but to think of Miles and Ollie wounded and forgotten, cut off from home, and Percy facing the same possible
fate every day was an even worse nightmare.

There had been virtually no mail received on either side of the Atlantic. The few letters that had trickled in from overseas
complained of the abysmal mail service, and the families—who shared every letter among them—could hear their sons’ plaintive
cries of loneliness between the raillery of their lines.

Beatrice Warwick, unable to deny her, had allowed Lucy, too, to pore over her son’s letters, reading after reading. By now,
Mary’s former roommate was installed at Mary Hardin-Baylor and had made frequent weekend visits to Houston Avenue, where she
had managed to insinuate herself into the Warwicks’ reluctant good graces, which included a guest room. Lucy preferred their
forced hospitality to the lack of any at all in the Tolivers’ cheerless mansion up the street.

Naturally she would be here today, Mary thought with familiar irritation as she glanced in Lucy’s direction. Slimmer and fashionably
turned out in a becoming mauve dress whose hugging lines and shorter length showed off her new figure, Lucy had strolled away
to check her reflection once again in the station house windows. Lord, how that girl could wriggle in where she was determined
to be. Mary had learned through the Warwicks’ cook that Beatrice—a formidable woman hard to outmaneuver—was at a loss as to
how to deal with the nuisance Lucy had become.

Earlier that day when Percy’s parents had called for her in their shiny new Packard—Lucy preening in the backseat—her onetime
roommate had looked delighted to see her appear in her old green serge. “You look marvelous!” she’d cried as Mary lifted her
outdated long skirt to get in. “I’ve loved you in that for years!”

“So has Percy,” Beatrice drawled from the front seat. “How thoughtful of you to wear something he will remember, Mary Lamb.
So much has changed around here since the boys have been away.”

Lucy lapsed into silence, and a glance at her pouting lips told Mary she realized she’d been put firmly in her place. Mary
felt a warm glow of appreciation toward Beatrice Warwick. She knew she stood high in her respect and affections, higher than
in her own mother’s. She would brook no one patronizing one of their own, especially an outsider whose designs on her son
were as clear as well water.

Mary looked affectionately at her sitting stoutly beside her husband—suited, gloved, and hatted in expensive black. She had
donned what everyone called her “widow’s weeds” the day the boys left for war and had dressed in black ever since. It wasn’t
that she had no faith in the boys’ deliverance from the jaws of death, she said. It was her way of protesting war in general,
the stupidity of nations to engage in barbarity to settle their differences. She wore mourning, she said, for all the sons
who would not make it home.

On the platform, Mary turned her glance from Lucy to Abel DuMont. From his expression, she could tell that already Ollie’s
father, a widower since Ollie was ten, was visualizing the tragedy of his son descending the train on crutches. Surgeons were
already scheduled in Dallas to restore the leg as much as possible. Moved by sympathy for him, she slipped her hand under
his arm, gloved to hide the giveaway signs of her labor. His deepened crow’s-feet crinkled in lieu of a smile, and he patted
her hand in understanding. Mary hoped that he’d forgiven her for not wearing the beautiful day dress with a matching cape
she’d left hanging in her closet. She had modeled it in a fashion show for the DuMont Department Store. As a reward for participating,
all the young women who had paraded down the ramp, town girls like herself, were given the dresses they had modeled. Mary
was certain the fashion show had been arranged for her benefit, as yet another way that Abel might introduce a new dress into
her wardrobe for the homecoming events. She’d appreciated the gesture, but the Tolivers were not ready for charity yet.

From far away came the sound of the long awaited train whistle. “I hear it!” someone shouted, and the crowd stirred anew,
moving into the small, elite group that had stepped closer to the edge of the platform.

Mary felt as if her heart were ready to burst through her chest wall as the whistle blew again and a thin spiral of smoke
rose in the distance. How would he be changed… Percy Warwick, the town’s golden boy? Surely war must have altered him. Would
he return with the same easy manner, the quick laugh, the confidence with which he’d always met life? Would he still want
to marry her?

Even now her blood warmed at the memory of their last moments together on this very spot over two years ago. In front of everyone,
he had drawn her into his arms… a small enclave of intimacy in the midst of the crowd. She hadn’t seen much of him between
the time he’d brought her home from the train and the day he left for officers’ training camp, or in the week’s interim between
his return home and his departure for overseas. Even if she hadn’t spent every day at the plantation and evenings unraveling
Miles’s ledgers, she doubted he’d have tried to see her. He was playing a waiting game, she was sure of it—waiting for her
to tire of running Somerset, hoping she’d be run to earth with the struggle of it by the time he came home.