Somerset (30 page)

T
he night of April 12, 1861, just before dawn, Silas cried out in his sleep from a nightmare in which he heard his mother's prediction again.
“No!”
he howled, startling Jessica awake beside him. She glanced at the large-faced clock on the mantel made visible by the moonlight streaming through the open window. It was 4:30.

“Silas, wake up! You're having a bad dream!” she said, shaking his bare shoulder. She jerked her hand away. “My goodness, it's cold in here, and you're perspiring.”

Silas opened his eyes, the clutch of his nightmare releasing him in the semidarkness chilled by the last breath of a long winter. “I was having that dream again,” he said.

“What dream?”

Silas pushed himself up against the headboard and ran his hand through his damp hair. He reached for a glass of water on his bedside table and took a long swallow to relieve his drought-dry mouth. He had never told Jessica of the curse his mother had predicted would fall on Somerset or of his terror that it meant to manifest itself by taking the life of his last surviving child. On and off the past anxious year, his mother had come to him in a dream with her dire threat, and he'd jerk awake with his heartbeat pounding in his ears and his skin clammy from a fear so deep he would rise from his bed for the rest of the night so as not to return to the dream again.

But never before had his imagined horror come to reality in his nightmares. Tonight in his dream he saw his mother pointing to something hidden by tall stands of cotton in the fields of Somerset.
See!
she cried.
I told you your land was cursed!
and the sprawled figure between the burgeoning rows toward which she aimed her finger was the body of Thomas.

Before reason—and his usual caution—could prevent him, he blurted, “Jessica, do you believe in curses?”

There was no immediate response, and Silas turned his blurred gaze to her, alarmed by his outburst and her thoughtful silence. Was she remembering her words at the time they discovered Joshua's still body? Had he disturbed old coals that had lain quietly burning beneath layers of ashes all these years?

“I believe that…what we call a curse is really a withholding of natural blessings,” Jessica said. “Like rain that should fall at the proper season, but it does not.”

Like women made to be wonderful mothers who cannot conceive or hold their babies in their wombs, Silas thought. “You do not think a curse is punishment administered by God for past sins?” he asked.

He hoped for a breezy dismissal of the subject as nonsense. He did not know if his wife believed in a divine being. Jessica attended church to go along with his belief in Sunday tradition and to expose Thomas to the teachings of the Christian faith their son was at liberty to accept or reject, but she seemed to have no interest in established religion. Silas had never heard her call upon the name of God, even in times of great despair, or seen her read from the Bible. To his knowledge, the King James Version upon which she'd laid her hand at the exchange of their wedding vows had never been moved from whatever shelf it had been assigned.

“I've never thought about it,” Jessica said. She cuddled closer to him and laid her head on his bare chest. “Tell me about this persistent dream of yours, beloved. I'm assuming it has something to do with a curse.”

Beloved…an endearment soft with solace and the willingness to listen and understand. Silas was surprised by a sensation of tears. Jessica called their son “sweetheart” occasionally, but Silas could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she'd addressed him by a similar term of affection. She was not the type of woman, like Camellia and Bess, and, Lord have mercy, Stephanie Davis, to drop intimate expressions of address willy-nilly, and so they carried more value. Comforted, he kissed the top of her head. Did he dare tell her of his mother's prediction that had haunted him since he'd dropped the first seeds into the soil of Somerset? Should he tell her of the drastic solution he was contemplating to eliminate the greatest fear of his life—of
their
lives?

It was not a course to decide alone.

“My mother prophesied a curse would fall upon Somerset for the sacrifice I made to fulfill my ambition of having a plantation of my own,” Silas began. “I paid no attention to it. It was the prediction of an angry and disappointed woman for my not marrying the girl she wanted as a daughter-in-law, I thought. But then our first child miscarried, the child conceived in such passion and joy, and there was another miscarriage after the birth of Thomas, and after that…you…seemed unable to conceive. And then when we lost Joshua….”

Jessica stirred abruptly in his arms, and he held her tighter to prevent her from moving away in hurt and pain. He continued. “And you said to me, “‘Silas, we are cursed.' Do you remember?”

A nod of her head on his chest indicated acknowledgment. “I remember.”

“The possibility possessed me like a demon that perhaps we
were
cursed. I and my innocent wife were being punished for the deal I made with the devil back in South Carolina, the injury I caused to Lettie, the selfish and willful trades I made for the sake of the land.”

Jessica lay still, and Silas realized she may have taken his words wrongly. How could she not? He lifted her chin and looked into her eyes. “Not that I regret a second of the decision I made to marry you, Jessica. Tell me you are sure of that.”

She removed herself from his arms and adjusted pillows at her back to sit up beside him. “I am sure of that, Silas. Where is this discussion leading?”

“I don't think the curse is through with us yet,” he said flatly. “I believe it intends a final stoke of vengeance.” He threw back his covers and got out of bed wearing only drawers. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked, wrapping a robe around him.

“Not if it will clear your head of this foolishness,” Jessica said.

Silas lit a cheroot and drew in deeply. “Is it foolishness, Jessica?”

“Silas Toliver!”
Jessica scowled at him, her tone sharp. “I was insane with grief when Joshua died and would have said anything. At the time I
did
feel we were cursed with our inability to have and keep children, but I later realized that such were the quirks of nature. Joshua's death was an accident that could have befallen any inquisitive, adventuresome twelve-year-old boy. Let's be grateful that we've been blessed with a healthy, intelligent, industrious son—a perfect heir to your Somerset. Our only concern should be his survival.”

“Exactly!” Silas jabbed the air with the cheroot. “For our son to live—that's what we both want if we could ask for anything in the world. His life is the most important thing on earth—more important than Somerset.”

Jessica turned an ear to him as if she had not heard him clearly. “What are you getting at, Silas?”

He placed the smoking cheroot in an ashtray and came to sit beside her on the bed. Jessica drew back uncertainly, doubt of his sanity clouding her dark eyes.

“What if…because of my obsession with Somerset…the curse takes Thomas?” he said. “What if God, as final punishment for the deal I struck with your father, means to leave no heir to possess the plantation?”

Jessica smacked his arm in rebuke. “Ridiculous!” she said. “Absurd. If—if Thomas perishes, a curse will have nothing to do with it. The stupid men who make war will be responsible!”

“But to make sure, I…Jessica…I…” His voice sounded raspy as a saw cutting wood. “I'm…I'm thinking of giving up Somerset—selling it—taking it out of Toliver hands, anything to get out from under the curse and bring our boy safely home.”

Jessica, pale as the bed pillows, clutched him by both arms. “
Silas
, do you hear yourself? You are talking superstitious nonsense. There is no such thing as a curse. God couldn't give a fig whether you give up Somerset or not. Honestly, do you really believe that forfeiting the plantation will guarantee Thomas's safety?” She shook him.
“Do you?”

Her voice had risen on a note of incredulity and panic. Silas pulled out of her grasp and got up from the bed, putting a finger to his mouth. Their son's room was next to theirs. “Lower your tone,” he said. “The window's open, and I don't want Thomas to hear this.”

“I should say not,” Jessica snapped. “Now answer my question. Do you really believe such a sacrifice will bring Thomas back?”

“I don't know,” he said. “In my dream tonight, I saw Thomas lying dead between the cotton rows of Somerset. I saw his body clear as day.”

That silenced her. Jessica pressed her lips together, and he could tell she was envisioning the scene. Silas picked up the cheroot and inhaled until he could feel the smoke burn his lungs.

“It was just a dream,” Jessica said finally. “Only that, Silas, nothing more. If you sell Somerset, you will be selling Thomas's heart. Whether he survives or not, either way he cannot live without his heart.”

“He'll be alive,” Silas said.

“But will he live?” Jessica pushed away the covers, drew on night slippers, and went to slide her arms up around his neck. “Silas, if you hadn't, as you say, ‘made the deal with the devil,' look at what you would have saved yourself from. You wouldn't have married me. I'd be growing old in a convent in England, never having known what it was like to love and be loved, to have been a wife and mother. You wouldn't be the father of Thomas. You wouldn't be the master of a land that is yours by right of courage and hard work and perseverance. You would never have fulfilled the calling of your heritage, nor enjoyed the prosperity, respect, and happiness you've earned. You would have been spared all that to live the life prescribed for you at Queenscrown. Tell me truthfully, my darling. As it's all turned out—Lettie apparently happy, your mother surrounded by grandchildren, you and I meant to be—where is the curse in all that? Rather than a vengeful God, can you not believe that Providence was looking after you when you made the deal with the devil?”

Tears seared Silas's eyes. He could feel Jessica's recital of all that never would have been—the logic of it—working to release him from the demons that bound him. Could it be that he was guilty of nothing but pursuing the destiny set for him? God knew, the burden of being a Toliver was sentence enough. He laid aside the cheroot and folded his arms around his wife.

“I have never loved you more than at this moment,” he said, his voice cracking on the wonder of his shackles falling free.

“Then you may prove it to me,” Jessica said, leading him back to bed.

T
homas stole quietly away from the open window of his parents' bedroom, awed and shocked. He had heard every word of his mother and father's conversation. Unable to sleep, he had gone out onto the verandah and taken a chair by his room to watch the sun rise on another uncertain day when he'd heard his father cry out. He'd jumped up to go to them, but his mother's voice had stopped him. Apparently, his father had been in the throes of a bad dream.

To make sure he was all right, Thomas had hung close to their window, open to allow in the last cold air before the spring turned warm and invited mosquitoes. His father was fifty-five and showing the distress of the past months. A year ago, the jeweler in town, the same age as his father, had died in bed next to his wife, the strain of a nightmare too much for his heart.

His poor father had reason to suffer nightmares, Thomas thought. The events of the last months had taken their toll. Silas Toliver's pleas to the Texas legislature and his friends of influence to oppose secession continued to go unheard. February first, Texas became the seventh state to join the newly formed nation calling itself the Confederate States of America, shortened to the Confederacy for brevity's sake. His father's old friend, Governor Sam Houston, had been deposed from office after he locked himself in the basement of the capitol building in Austin and refused to come out to sign the papers authorizing separation from the Union. Contrary to the opinions of the Tolivers' aghast friends, his father had tirelessly supported the governor's views of the state's inevitable fate if removed from the teat that nourished it. He'd been sickened to his soul when public opinion turned against Sam Houston and forced the hero of San Jacinto, the man to whom the state owed so much, to withdraw from government service and retire to his farm in Huntsville, Texas.

Still his father had persisted in trying to convince anyone who would listen that the South was outmanned, outgunned, and outmatched. Typical of the reception of his views, in a town meeting called to discuss the wisdom of secession and the consequences of an armed conflict, one farmer dared to demand of the prominent Silas Toliver, “Why should we listen to you? For years you said there would be no war.”

“That was before Mr. Lincoln was elected,” his father countered. “Listen to reason,” he'd begged. “Only a third of the population in Texas owns slaves. Why should a few dictate the course that will involve the rest of the state in economic ruin and the waste of life to support a cause bound to be lost?”

Boos and hisses had answered his pleas. No less polite had been the reaction from other planters when his father had encouraged them to follow his plan to save Somerset from destruction should the slaves be emancipated. To a man, they believed the South would succeed as a nation. No Northern president would have a say in the rights of the Confederacy's citizens to hold slaves. Great Britain and France would come in on the side of the Southern states in case of war, and the United States would back off. Those two great European countries were dependent on the region's cotton, and to produce cotton, slaves were a necessity. In no way would they tolerate the disruption of their vital import by Mr. Lincoln's Congress.

Thomas had seen his father pale at these optimistic assumptions. “Don't the fools know that cotton agents in London have warned that England has a stockpile of cotton in their warehouses, whereas much of Europe's wheat harvests have suffered?” he would moan. “Great Britain is far more dependent on the North's grain than they are on the South's cotton!”

His father's anti-separatist stand, coupled with his mother's long-known views on slavery, had made the Toliver family all but social pariahs. To his father's great disappointment, he was not re-elected to the city council. Parents withdrew their children from his mother's Young People's Reading Group. Only their status as first settlers and city founders and the steadfast friendships of the DuMonts and Warwicks prevented them from being cast totally out of Howbutker society. Henri DuMont and Jeremy Warwick wielded such economic power and influence in the county—indeed, in the whole state—that none dared to exclude the Tolivers from their guest lists—not that their invitations would have been accepted anyway.

The cruelest charge—and the one that disturbed Thomas the most—had been the allegation from Lorimer Davis that Silas Toliver had gone crazy from anxiety that in case of war, his son and only heir would be killed. No one need listen to him, the planter declared. Parental alarm and fear that Somerset would pass into oblivion were his sole reasons for opposing secession.

Tonight, drawing away from his parents' window, Thomas was forced to believe he'd heard evidence that Lorimer Davis's theory was correct. He felt almost nauseated from the chilling revelation that his father had considered selling Somerset to ensure his safe return in case of war. Good God, what an appalling, unthinkable idea! He knew his father loved him—too much, he'd thought at times—but sell Somerset? To appease an imagined curse? Thank God his mother had made him see the ridiculousness of it.

Thomas sat down in his room, stunned from the proof he'd heard tonight that certain rumors drifting to him over the years had a basis of truth. Threads of gossip, innuendos, whispers, vaguely familiar names, together with his own impressions and knowledge of family history, began to weave into a sort of decipherable tapestry. He had never questioned the love between his mother and father, but there had been intimations that their marriage had been arranged. His powerful grandfather, Carson Wyndham, had been involved, and money had traded hands between him and Silas Toliver back in South Carolina. The transaction had required that his father abandon the woman he was to wed in exchange for the money to buy his plantation in Texas.

Only wisps of such hearsay had ever reached Thomas's ears, and he'd never been curious enough to wonder or ask about their foundation. But evidently there
had
been another woman in his father's life: this Lettie he'd mentioned tonight. Wasn't she the wife of his brother, Morris? Was she the sacrifice his father had spoken of? Apparently the deal he'd made with the devil had been with the wealthy man who became his father-in-law. Was it true that Carson Wyndham had paid Silas Toliver to marry his daughter? Why? To prevent her from entering a convent? And had his father in fact used the money to bankroll Somerset?

Thomas remembered his “Willowshire” grandparents well—especially his imposing grandfather—even from their one short visit long ago. The only reunion with his mother's parents had been strained. Thomas recalled a contract-burning ceremony that had set his father's teeth on edge, and his parents had not been sad to see them go. He knew very little of the “Queenscrown” side of the family. There was a grandmother named Elizabeth who wrote occasionally, but she had never come to see them or they her. He knew there was an uncle called Morris, and once he'd heard the name
Lettie
mentioned whom Thomas assumed to be his wife, but his parents did not discuss them in his presence.

Thomas now had a fair understanding of why his grandmother had prophesied that a curse would fall on her son's land, but how could his father give a rational, intelligent thought to it? Did he really think Joshua's death or his mother's failure to carry children were punishments from God for whatever deal he had struck over twenty-five years ago? Or that his son's death would be God's final stroke of vengeance? Sheer nonsense! If there was a war, Thomas would go. In what capacity he would serve was another matter. In February, the lieutenant governor of Texas had authorized a committee for public safety to recruit volunteers, but he and Jeremy Jr. and Armand, Stephen, and Philippe (Robert suffered from bronchitis severe enough to preclude war service) had already decided to wait and join the regiment formed that would best defend Texas.

And, yes, he could be killed, and there would be no heir to take over Somerset, but he'd already decided on a solution to defray that possibility. He'd planned to talk to his parents tomorrow about proposing to Priscilla Woodward. He and Priscilla had known each other since her father had hung up his shingle as one of the town's two physicians ten years ago, and he'd courted her for one.

Thomas had been waiting to feel for her what she clearly and unabashedly felt for him, but while he liked her and enjoyed her company, something that he could not put his finger on was missing. She was the prettiest girl in town, with bouncy golden curls and sparkling blue eyes, and she exuded a buoyancy good for his more serious nature. She was a little too impressed with his house on Houston Avenue and his link to English royalty, but he could understand it. Priscilla had grown up in a modest house still home to her two older brothers, who worked as lumberjacks for the Warwick Lumber Company. Meals in the Woodward house consisted of meat and potatoes, eaten at the kitchen table with her brothers still in their work clothes, shirt sleeves rolled up. Mrs. Woodward's finest possession was an English bone china tea set. Priscilla wasn't ashamed of her upbringing—Thomas couldn't have gone with that—but she appreciated the refinements of his home and lifestyle and that was all right with him.

The idea of marrying her had gradually formed when the same realization hit him that had deeply troubled his father. If he should die, what would become of Somerset when his father passed on? The idea of the plantation passing out of Toliver hands was abominable to him. It must not happen, and Priscilla Woodward was the resolution. He would marry her, and they would begin a family right away. He was almost twenty-four. It was time he tied the knot, became a father. He felt much better now about the fact that he did not feel as deeply for his future wife as he would have liked. He had deduced from his parents' conversation tonight that his father had not loved his mother either when they first married, and yet, here the old boy was at his age proving to her he did.

Somewhat at ease, Thomas crawled back into bed for another hour's sleep before the sun fully rose. When he awoke, the news had been telegraphed to the community that Confederate forces had—at the exact hour Silas had cried out in his sleep—fired upon the federal troops stationed at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The War Between the States had begun.