Somerset (23 page)

I
n the spring of 1846, Carson and Eunice Wyndham called on their daughter and son-in-law at Somerset. They had come specifically for the purposes of finalizing the business between
Silas
and Carson and to meet their new grandson, who immediately won Eunice's heart. “I just wish Benjamin had lived to see the boy,” she said. “He'd be pleased to see that his grandson looks a Toliver through and through. Morris's boys…well, they take after Lettie and have little interest in the plantation.”

“In that regard, they take after Morris,” Silas said dryly, feeling a moment's disloyalty at the thought of Lettie producing three healthy children—two sons and a daughter Eunice described as regrettably having Morris's “heavy bones.”

The five of them sat in chairs on the front porch of the Tolivers' log house, and a glance at his wife's stoically expressionless face at this news made Silas ashamed of his brief envy. He knew what she must be thinking. He would have reached for her hand to offer comfort, but that would only embarrass her and aggravate the pain she was trying to hide.

Ever since Somerset's first acre was cleared, even as he rebuked himself for giving a thought to it, Silas had wondered how—when—the “curse” on his land would manifest itself. Where was the curse in his cotton production, which, after a rough beginning, had increased year after year? Where did it lurk in the abundant rainfall at just the right times, in the robust health of his slaves and animals, the deliverance of his family and workers from crippling accidents and disease, and from fire that could wipe out a farmer's crops and buildings in the twinkling of an eye? How were all those blessings jinxed by his mother's prediction?

But sometimes, after he and Jessica had made love, he would lie awake long into the night assaulted by the demons that rose from their lairs to haunt the souls of the guilty, and wonder if his wife's womb held the curse. Nonsense, he would say in the morning light. Jessica was simply…barren. Nothing—certainly not a curse—was at fault. Joshua had died by the hand of a thoughtless blacksmith who'd allowed him to ride an unknown horse. If he should feel guilty about anything—and he did—Silas thought to himself as he watched Carson ceremoniously light the contract with the glowing tip of his cigar, it was that he had gone back on his intention to hand over a banknote for the sum the man had paid him to marry his daughter. How he would like to see the bully's face—and Jessica's—when Carson realized that all his son-in-law possessed, including his daughter's love, had been earned by his own hand. Silas Toliver was free and clear of any debt he owed Carson Wyndham, and Jessica at last had proof that love alone kept her husband by her side.

But it was wishful fantasizing. The lure to develop and improve his land had been too great. After building his river landing, he'd begun saving again, but a blacksmith in Illinois named John Deere invented and manufactured a type of steel plow that could cut through sticky soil without clogging, and Silas had given in to the temptation to buy several. The single horse-drawn plows had saved him time and money because the steel blades, unlike the wooden plow that farmers had used for centuries, could turn a furrow in any kind of weather or condition of the ground. Before, he'd have to wait several days for soggy soil to dry, or, if hard, employ three men and several strong animals to plow a field.

There had been other, irresistible “siren songs” to which he'd listened and yielded in the ten years of his indebtedness to Carson until his extra money was depleted. Jessica had never been aware of his intention to pay back her father. It was a secret—and a regret—that Silas would take to his grave. As he observed the contract become ashes in a crockery saucer, the shame of his failure burned like acid to hear his father-in-law, with a condescending sweep of his cigar about his six-room log house, say, “This is all well and good, Silas, but it's time my daughter lived in a proper house. As I promised, the money for it is in your bank, and I'll send a good architect to you.”

Eunice, sitting next to Jessica, patted her daughter's arm. “Wouldn't you like a big new house that becomes you, dear?” But even as she said it, a bleak movement in her eyes betrayed again the dismay her expression had clearly shown when she saw her daughter for the first time in ten years. “My goodness, but you've…weathered the years well,” she had said, to cover her embarrassment at her reaction to Jessica's thin frame in her simple, countrywoman's dress, her red hair drawn in a severe bun below her bonnet.

“Thank you, Mama,” Jessica had said when meeting her parents at the stagecoach station. She had planned to greet them in the one gown she'd allowed Tippy to sew for her that reflected the new bell-shaped skirt and low, pointed waist, but the seam line of the narrower sleeves restricted her arm movements, so she'd elected to wear the type of simple homespun dress she wore every day.

“One that becomes me?” Jessica repeated her mother's question.

“As a Wyndham, as…” Eunice glanced at Silas, and though she appeared galled to say it, added, “the wife of your prominent husband here in the new state of Texas.”

Silas puffed on his cigarillo, uncomfortable with the conversation in the presence of Thomas. It was another source of shame that his son would never learn that Somerset and the manor house were financed by anyone else but his father. Thomas was only nine years old, but inquisitive and already able to discern innuendo, moods, veiled conversations.

“What's a contract?” he'd asked when Carson had referred to it and drawn the document from his coat pocket.

“A signed agreement,” Carson had answered. “This one is between your father and me.”

“What did you agree to?”

“I'll let your father tell you if he's so inclined,” Carson said with a smirk at Silas.

“That is business between your grandfather and me only, Thomas,” Silas had said. “Go help Jasper with the new foal.”

“Jasper!” Carson exclaimed. “Are you talking about that skinny little colored boy I let you have, Jessica?”

“Yes, Papa,” Jessica answered between tight lips. She had listened to the exchange between Silas and her father in visible contempt—for both of them, Silas had no doubt. “I don't know what we'd do without him. Jasper is around twenty-eight now, married, and has several fine children. One, a daughter, is especially dear to me. Her name is Petunia.”

Carson's faint quirk of an eyebrow at his wife clearly stated their daughter, at twenty-eight, hadn't changed much. With a motion of his cigar, he dismissed the subject of a slave and his offspring. “Let Thomas stay,” he overrode Silas's order. “His grandmother and I will have little enough time with him as it is.”

“Yes, Papa, let me stay,” Thomas begged.

“To the barn, son. I'll come get you in a little while to be with your grandparents.”

Glaring at Carson to let him know he'd be damned before he allowed him to embarrass him before his son, Silas was startled to hear Jessica say unexpectedly, “I'd like the house built in town on the street with the DuMonts and Warwicks.”

Silas removed his cigarillo in surprise. “Not here on Somerset?”

“No, in Howbutker, on Houston Avenue, down the street from our friends.”

“Well, since I'm buying, I say my daughter can build her house anywhere she damn well pleases,” Carson said. He stuck his cigar into his mouth and tilted back his porch chair with thumbs hooked into his vest pockets to see what his son-in-law thought of that.

Ignoring Carson, Silas studied his wife. She had lost some of her fire since Joshua's death. She and Joshua had been unusually close, mutually caring of the downtrodden, animals, and nature, interested in books and learning. Thomas was more attuned to the songs and voices of the land, never happier than when accompanying his father into the fields
—Like riding through clouds, Papa!
—and almost from infancy had shown an interest in harvests and ginning.
Why does the soil have to be warm before you plant? How are the seeds separated from the fiber, Papa?

Unlike Joshua, there was no mistaking that Thomas realized his place as the son of the master of Somerset. He played with the children of the slaves—Jessica saw to that—but he did not call them his friends as Joshua had. His friends were among the sons of the Warwicks and DuMonts and Davises. Slowly, as Thomas evolved from the toddler stage, Silas saw him become what his sweet-natured brother could never have been: a descendant of his Toliver lineage to the bone.

Not long after Joshua's death, Silas had come upon Jessica storing away the boy's treasured stick horse and buckskin jacket. “Shouldn't we give those to Thomas in memory of his brother?” he had suggested.

“No, Thomas would only use them until they were as worn as his memory of Joshua, then discard them,” she said, startling S
ilas
with her bitterness. “I prefer to keep them in memory of…my memory of Joshua.”

As he deliberated on his wife, the thought occurred to Silas that she desired to live away from the plantation because she did not wish to see the hold the planter system had begun to have on their son. Perhaps she did not wish to remain in the house of Joshua's home and where her miscarriages had occurred. Or…Silas noted Jessica's gaze on the ashes of the contract. After today, could it be that his wife no longer wished to live surrounded by the reminder of the trade that had brought her to live here?

“What about you, Thomas?” Jessica asked. “Wouldn't you like to live in Howbutker close to Jeremy Jr. and Stephen and Armand and Philippe?”

“I like it here,” Thomas said.

“Of course you do,” Jessica murmured.

That night before he climbed into bed next to his wife, Silas tucked a red rose into a water glass and left it by the stove. The next morning Jessica twirled it at him as he entered the kitchen. “What is this for?”

“To say I'm sorry.”

He expected her to say
For what?
But she did not. She knew.

“We'll build the house in Howbutker,” Silas said.

T
he Carson Wyndhams—at Eunice's insistence—had brought Willie May with them for a reunion with her daughter, so it was with great pleasure that Jessica conducted another ceremony at the Toliver homestead after her parents' departure back to South Carolina.

“I hereby set you free, Tippy, my dearest friend,” she said, handing Tippy a document verifying her release from bondage. “Since I have fulfilled the conditions of my father's contract, he can no longer hold the threat of the sale of your mother over my head.”

Tippy folded the paper and slipped it into the bodice of her dress. Her gown was not made of the costly materials of her clients nor as fashionably designed. Even though Tippy had become a partner—albeit a silent and secret one—in the newly renamed DuMont Emporium, it would never do to appear as well dressed as the white ladies who patronized its showroom. She was paid a salary and shared in the store's profits. She lived in a small house owned by Henri located down the street from his store. He and Bess and their three children cherished her.

“I thank you, Jessica, my dearest friend,” Tippy said, her dazzling wide-toothed smile tinged with the knowledge shared by the Toliver family that the document tucked next to her bosom did not mean she was free. It would not protect her from the auction block if she were caught outside the lights of the community that held her in a favored position. The color of her skin, regardless of her remarkable talents, amassed as they were in a Negro, still dictated that she must fade into a room's shadows when in the presence of whites.

“You will, of course, assist my wife in choosing fabrics and colors for our new abode,” Silas said in the formal tone he used when addressing her.

Tippy responded with a small curtsy. “I be happy to, Mister
Silas
,” she said.

Construction of the house on Houston Avenue began in the summer. Jessica selected a site that would give a view of the entire street, now filling with impressive houses belonging to prosperous merchants and planters whose wives were tired of the arduous duties of overseeing a home and slave compound built in the middle of farm fields. The Warwicks had constructed an edifice on the order of a medieval castle up the street called Warwick Hall, down from the DuMonts' gray-stone, French-inspired château that featured Henri's love for his native country's precisely laid-out gardens. One plot over, the Lorimer Davises had erected a square, colonnaded townhouse in the stately Federal style, and next to them, a mansion of Italianate design was going up, owned by another planter of the Willowshire wagon train. The Silas Tolivers stuck with the Greek Revivalist style traditional to Plantation Alley.

It took almost a year to complete the white, three-storied manor house of pillared splendor that reigned over the avenue from an elevation slightly higher than its neighbors. The elegant entrance hall with its gilded floor-to-ceiling mirror and portrait of the Duke of Somerset, the spacious rooms and high ceilings, graceful curving staircase, marble fireplaces and crystal chandeliers, elaborate friezes, deep moldings, and sash windows drew awed praise from all who entered. Silas and Jessica responded with stiff smiles to the often-voiced opinion that fortune had certainly smiled on the Silas Tolivers.

In the spring a year after the mansion's completion, Jessica watched Jeremy converse with the black men who had delivered a pallet of dressed timber to be used to build a gazebo and rose arbor she had planned for the east side of her new home. “I want to sit in the gazebo in the early morning sun and watch my roses wake up,” she had said to Jeremy.

The Negroes were former slaves Jeremy had set free not long after his arrival in Texas. He had given all his slaves their freedom, but though released from bondage, only a few had left. It was not safe for freedmen to walk abroad, and those who remained worked as employees of the Warwick Lumber Company. They were paid a wage and given housing in a trim, company-built compound known as the Hollows.

Jeremy's liberation of his slaves had not set well with the other slave owners, and they'd threatened to boycott the Warwick Lumber Company, but it soon became apparent that Jeremy had enough business outside the county to fill his company's orders without the need for theirs. Besides, they liked Jeremy and his gracious wife, and the inconvenience of buying and hauling dressed timber from miles away became too burdensome.

Jessica had pointed out the successful transition from slave to employee to Silas, who'd responded in a raised voice, “Are you suggesting that I
pay
a Negro in whom I've invested thousands of dollars for his
work
?”

“Let him earn back the money you've paid for him, then hire him as an employee,” she'd suggested.

“I couldn't afford such wages.”

“Then allow him a share of the crops he tills. It will come to that, Silas,” Jessica had declared, standing her ground. “If there is a war, the South will lose. The North will free the slaves, and the only way you'll be able to farm your cotton is to permit our Negroes a fair portion of the profits.”

“There will be no war,” Silas stated, refusing to listen to another word from Jessica on the subject of the North's growing dissatisfaction with the South on the issue of slavery. Their slaves were happy, he said. They sang in the fields. None in Texas could claim to be better clothed, fed, sheltered, and doctored. Each family had a garden, fruit and nut trees, their own milk cow, and Saturdays and Sundays off for rest. He did not separate families. He reminded Jessica that at the disapproval of the other planters for setting an unwarranted precedent, he had granted her every request for the comfort and safety of his slaves and now wanted to hear no more about it.

Jeremy sent the men on their way, brushed the lumber dust off his hands, and joined Jessica on the Corinthian-columned porch that faced the wide boulevard of Houston Avenue, recently paved with bricks from the area's red clay. It was April 1848.

“Well, Miss Jess, how do your roses grow?” he asked, removing his hat as he sat down and stretched out his long legs.

“I can tell you better after I've transplanted them from Somerset,” she said, letting the ironic meaning of her entendre dance between them.

Jeremy laughed. “Ah. Husband and son.”

“I'm not worried about the Lancasters and Yorks.”

Jessica loved these opportunities to share a chat with Jeremy, another compensation for living in town and on this street. Besides Tippy, Jeremy was her best friend. Jessica could tell him anything, more so than Bess and Camellia, more so than Silas. Strangely, their spouses did not see in their special relationship a warrant for jealousy, which made their friendship even more comfortable. Now that the Tolivers had come to live on Houston Avenue, Jessica and Jeremy could pull up a chair together more often.

“Don't you think it's time to put a shovel to the plants?” Jeremy said. “Until you do, the place won't feel like home.”

“Well, like Silas and Thomas, the roses are happier there.”

“They'll be happy here, too, Jess. It's a magnificent house.”

“But you said it. The place is a house, not yet a home. I may be happy here, such as I'm capable, but I fear Thomas will not. He loves living closer to his friends, but he misses Somerset, and now that our old log cabin has been turned over to Silas's overseer, Thomas has no place to lay his head but in his bed on Houston Avenue.”

“Wasn't that the plan?”

Jessica cracked a small smile. With uncanny perception, Jeremy could always see right through to the core of other people's designs. “I want my son to have a few hours' separation from the plantation and…from his father,” she added frankly.

Jeremy raised a brow. “You might as well try to split a hair.”

“Well, I'm going to try,” she said. “I've kept my promise to S
ilas
that I wouldn't voice my contrary views to our son but that I could not speak for my example. So far my
example
has fallen on blind eyes, but Silas agrees with me that at eleven the boy needs more schooling than either of us can give him. I want Thomas to have
choices
about what he wishes to do with his life. How will he know of them if he doesn't have the opportunity of an education? He might wish to study medicine or law, become a journalist or teacher.”

“All well and good, Jess, but how will you accomplish that here in Howbutker?”

“Silas has agreed to hire a tutor.”

“Ah,” Jeremy said, cocking an eyebrow. “With the hope a tutor may achieve what you've promised not to do?”

Jessica smiled. Again, Jeremy had read between the lines, which is what Jessica had done when she received a letter from Guy Handley in answer to her reply to his notice in the Positions Wanted section of the
Houston
Telegraph and Texas Register
. In the advertisement he'd described himself as “a teacher of the humanities with special emphasis on classical literature.” Jessica had been caught by the word
humanities
. In his letter, Guy Handley had explained that he was from Virginia and a graduate of William and Mary College. He was the private tutor of the children of a prominent landowner in Houston until his employer was killed in the Mexican-American War. The man's widow was moving back to her people in Louisiana, but he wished to remain in Texas. He would be happy to come to Howbutker for an interview if she would please advise him of a time and date.

“He's coming by coach tomorrow,” Jessica said to Jeremy, “and I hope so much Thomas takes to him and to his studies. He was none too pleased to hear he'll be in school half a day.”

“And so should all our children be,” Jeremy said, rising and replacing his hat. “The public school won't open until next year, and we're not likely to lure the talents of a Sarah Conklin.”

Jessica glanced up at him, startled, and a chill wafted across her skin at the little knowing glimmer she caught in Jeremy's eyes. Was his remark about Sarah another of his double entendres meant to imply he'd perceived the real reason she hoped to hire Guy Handley? It was as if Jeremy had read the tutor's letter and seen the tiny circle that served as a dot drawn over the
i
in “Cordially yours” at the letter's closing. Ordinarily, the substitution for the proper mark would have meant nothing to Jessica, but in Sarah Conklin's letters she had noticed a similar circle affixed over the
i
's in both their names. Only those aware that codes were a form of secret communication in the Underground Railroad would pay attention to the coincidence. Was Guy Handley, the tutor she hoped to employ to teach her son, an abolitionist?