Somerset (4 page)

W
illie May sat amidst the piles of unwashed dishes from the party the night before, indulging in a second cup of coffee and relishing the rare opportunity to be alone with her thoughts in the Big House. It was Sunday morning. Everyone in the house—the master and mistress, Miss Jessica, and the servants, including her daughter—and all the field-workers from the Yard were at church services held today by the creek. There was to be a baptism afterwards, celebrated in the shade of the big pecan and cypress trees by the bank, everybody eating the leftovers from Miss Jessica's eighteenth birthday party. The DeWitts had gotten off to Charleston and their departure to England on Saturday afternoon, thank God. At least Willie May hadn't had
them
to worry about in the hustle of getting fifty guests wined and dined and cleaned up after.

“Now, you all go on to bed,” Miss Eunice had ordered the house servants last night after they'd cleared the tables and put away the food. “The dishes can wait until after church services tomorrow. Willie May, you go to bed, too. You look like you're dead on your feet.”

She was good that way, Miss Eunice was, always considerate of her housekeeper's limits, though the mistress had her boundaries. Boundary lines were fine by Willie May. Life was so much easier and simpler when everybody knew their place and
accepted
it and never bothered about nobody else's. That was the subject disturbing her this morning in the peace and quiet of the Big House. Boundaries. Tippy didn't know hers, and that was the fault of Jessica Wyndham. The master's daughter was going to get her girl in trouble—
big
trouble. She could smell it coming.

A part of Willie May had knotted up tight as a ball of twine from the day her baby girl—ten years old—had wandered, with Miss Jessica, of course, into the drawing room, where the mistress was in a dispute with her decorator over color and drapery material for the Venetian windows. Willie May had been serving tea when she saw her daughter pick up two swatches of different fabric in matching colors and, calmly, without saying a word, hand them to Miss Eunice.

“Well, I declare,” her mistress had exclaimed. “I do believe this is the perfect color of green and fabric combination. We'll use the velvet for the valances and the silk for the panels.”

They had all stared at her baby girl, and right then, Willie May had felt that tightening of her innards that had hardly loosened a day since, especially when Miss Jessica piped, “I
told
you she was smart, Mama!” and beamed at Tippy.

Willie May and Miss Eunice had watched helplessly as the girls' friendship grew by the day. In the beginning, when the children were blossoming out from infants together, neither mother had paid much attention to their enjoyment of the other's company. On plantations, it was natural for white and black children to play together, especially if the offspring of house servants lived with their parents in quarters in the Big House. Willie May had been mightily relieved to have her daughter, born missing a lung, brought up under her eye rather than in the Yard, where the other slaves' children were put to work, and Miss Eunice had been happy that her little girl, with no sisters for companions, had a playmate. Their growing bond had skipped Carson Wyndham's notice altogether, even when his daughter had insisted that every treat be shared with Tippy and that she be given the same toys and dolls as she. It was Miss Jessica who had given Tippy, christened Isabel, her name.
“Tippy!”
she had squealed as the girls were learning to walk and her tiny daughter had preferred to tiptoe rather than toddle.

Willie May and Eunice had been slow to do anything about their daughters' closeness since, in some ways, it mirrored their own. Carson Wyndham had purchased Willie May, not quite twenty, as a maid for Eunice Wyndham when he brought his bride from Richmond, Virginia, to his huge estate, Willowshire. Alone for weeks while her husband was away minding the business of his many plantations, Eunice would have gone mad from loneliness had it not been for Willie May. Snatched from her parents and her village in Africa at seventeen years of age, Willie May understood about separation from home. She had been taught English and domestic service by Anglican missionaries—a lucky find for the slave traders—and she and the mistress had become each other's confidante, together making their way through new worlds with husbands they barely knew, sharing the joys and travails of pregnancies and childbirths and the management of the most prominent manor house in South Carolina. Eunice was quick to say she didn't know what she'd do without Willie May, but only because she trusted her housekeeper never to trespass on the bounds of their friendship.

Neither woman could say the same for Tippy, thanks to Jessica Wyndham, and the master had begun to notice.

Just this morning, as the household was leaving for the creek, he had asked in the tone they all dreaded to hear, “Where did you get that dress, Tippy?” Everybody had stiffened, including Miss Jessica, who was finally getting it through her stubborn head that her color blindness was putting Tippy in danger.

“I made it, suh.”

The master had rubbed the material between his fingers. The dress was beautifully and fashionably constructed. “Raw silk. Where did you get it?”

“In Boston, suh. It was a remnant give me by Miss Jessie's dressmaker.”

The master had shot a glance to his daughter. “Do you have one made of the same fabric?”

Miss Jessica had had the good sense to duck her head. “Yes, Papa.”

To Tippy he said, “Go to your room immediately and take it off. No colored maid of this household will wear a dress of the same material as my daughter.”

Tippy had run from the hall, holding in a cough like the kind that had erupted from her one lung all night.

A few years ago the master wouldn't have given the dress, or its exceptional tailoring, a second thought. Tippy's sewing and weaving talents, bolstered by her color sense and eye for design, were well known and even praised in the household, but things had begun to change around Willowshire in 1831. That was the year Nat Turner, a Negro preacher, had led a two-day rebellion of slaves against their white masters in Southampton County, Virginia, where Mister Carson owned a tobacco plantation. He had gone to Virginia to witness the trial and hanging of the men involved and come home a different sort of master.

Then in 1833, to slap tar on resin, a man named William Lloyd Garrison had founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in Boston, the city where Miss Jessica was going to school, attended by the colored maid she treated like a sister. It had not occurred to the master that his daughter would be exposed to the radical teachings of the man and his followers, much less influenced by them, but he was wrong, as Willie May and Miss Eunice now realized.

Willie May got up and tied on her apron. Here at Willowshire, she and her kind had it good. Mister Carson believed in taking care of his property, and he made sure his slaves were well fed, clothed, and housed. They got weekends and Thanksgiving and Christmas off, and the field hands were allowed ten-minute rest periods in the shade and all the water they could drink. They were allowed to establish their own customs and lifestyles with no interference from the Big House so long as they stayed within appropriate bounds. The whipping post still stood in the center of the Yard, but it hadn't been used in recent memory and only then because a slave had beaten his wife half to death. The master, unlike other planters, didn't believe in breaking up colored families by selling their children. Carson Wyndham was hard but fair, and he expected his overseers and drivers to be the same. Except for the masters of Meadowlands and Queenscrown, Mr. Carson's attitude was markedly different from other planters and headmen, who could make a slave's life miserable. At Willowshire, the living was stable and fairly pleasant.

But times were changing. You could sense it at every turn. Last July, a mob had attacked the Charleston post office and burned anti-slavery literature sent by northern abolitionists to be distributed throughout the South. President Jackson had backed the protest and tried but failed to make it illegal to distribute “incendiary” material through the U.S. Post Office. Patrols had increased, bad men armed with whips and guns who rode the lanes by the light of the moon looking for runaways and uppity Negroes on whom to mete out punishment. At Willowshire, unlike before, slaves were not free to visit other slaves at other plantations without special permission from the master, and word was that Mister Carson's drivers—slaves put in charge of other slaves in the field—were less friendly to the workers. Several colored overseers had been replaced with white, and “Spit” Johnson, a grumbler whose discontent had heretofore been tolerated, had disappeared one night. Rumors flew that he had been taken away to the auction block in Charleston and sold.

Willie May feared for her daughter under this cloud of changes. Reading and writing and spouting poetry, speaking like a white woman and advising the mistresses what fabric to buy and how to wear their hair were nothing for a young colored girl with one lung to parade before her masters. After today, she wouldn't be surprised if Tippy weren't assigned chores less pleasant than keeping Miss Jessica company. She might even be removed from the room next to her mistress and assigned to a cabin in the Yard that she'd have to share with another family. Willie May prayed for her only daughter to have the good sense to mind herself, lest some night horsemen came and dragged her from her bed to make an example of what happened to Negroes who did not know their place.

“S
ilas, dear, what's the matter?” Lettie said to her betrothed's back. He stood at a window of the church manse that offered a view of a small garden ablaze with golden chrysanthemums. He was to take home a large arrangement of them for his mother's Thanksgiving table tomorrow. “Are you bored with all this wedding nonsense?”

Silas turned from the window, the vision of Lettie at a table overflowing with wedding frippery—lace and ribbons and a swath of something filmy—lovelier than any garden.

“No, my love, though I admit they're more to a woman's enthusiasm than a man's.”

“As long as you're not having second thoughts about marrying me.”

“Never.” Silas came to sit beside her at the table, and she set aside a writing tablet on which she had been checking off an endless list having to do with their wedding date, the first Saturday in February. He could not comprehend why women felt compelled to begin nuptial preparations months in advance (his mother was in a flurry of activity), but he'd been assured that, with the demands of the holidays in between, early organization was critical. He had argued to set an earlier date to settle into marriage before their departure the first of March, but his fiancée's brother was a student at West Point, and he could not get leave to attend the festivities until the first week of February.

“What's troubling you, then?” Lettie ran her fingers lightly over his furrowed forehead. “When your brow gets bunched up, I can tell you're disturbed.”

Silas took her hand and pressed her fingers to his lips. The smallest touch of her skin to his could arouse him. God forgive him, he could not remember his first wife's flesh that had borne his son. Were it not for Joshua, he would not have remembered her face. Ursuline, she'd been called, and the rather prudish name had fit her moralistic views, especially those related to sex. That memory of her remained. His wife had been the daughter of a planter and a member of the landed gentry, but in truth, his father-in-law had been a hell-raising brigand. Silas had expected some of the old man's fire to burn in his daughter's veins, but he had been sadly disappointed. Lettie, daughter of a preacher, hadn't a priggish bone in her body and was as eager as he to share a marriage bed. Silas called the difference in their attitudes, so incongruous to their upbringing, quirks of nature.

He was of a mind to tell Lettie the truth, but she was, after all, of Presbyterian stock, Scottish to the bone, and abhorred debt. She was aware that he would have to borrow the money for their expenses to Texas from Carson Wyndham, but, like Silas, she was convinced that with hard work, they could clear the books with him within a few years.

“We won't be sitting on our verandahs like the members of the planter class here,” she'd said. “We'll work right alongside the field hands to get the job done. Time to play lord and lady of the manor when our debt is paid.”

“My father would turn in his grave to know we were working alongside blacks,” Silas had said, laughing, loving her for her courage and willingness to set sail into the unknown—or, rather, into the known dangers and personal deprivations—with no armor of protection but her love for and faith in him.

“Let him. We're going to Texas. Anything goes there.”

His fiancée's disposition made him love her more every day, and Silas could not understand why he felt it necessary to protect her from disquieting news such as the latest unrest in Texas and this new development that threatened his dream. Lettie rose to every unexpected roadblock. Where he saw obstacles, she saw challenges. What he considered maddening detours—irritating rearrangements of his plans and desires—Lettie serenely accepted as “mercies in disguise” arranged by some grand design to save people from taking a wrong path. She lived by and taught her students the motto she'd coined to tackle onerous but necessary tasks: “Dread and do, or don't and regret.”

Despite her porcelain appearance, she seemed the perfect wife to take with him to a frightening and uncertain country, but as problems continued to pile up, Silas could not brush aside his fear that even Lettie would find them insurmountable when time came to leave her home and father, lifelong friends and her beloved Charleston, so close to the town where she'd grown up. What if she refused to go? Silas couldn't bear to go off and leave her until he forged out a life for them in the new territory, and he couldn't endure remaining at Queenscrown.

Jeremy had stronger faith in her fortitude than he. “Lettie is not going to change her mind, Silas,” he had told him more than once, “but it's only fair to give her the reasons to do so, or you'll regret it later on.”

Silas had decided to risk the regrets and kept some daunting news to himself—like today's, for example. A new cloud hung over their heads, and he could see no sun peeking through. Eight of the ten families who'd signed agreements to lease his Conestogas had backed out. He'd thought his speculation in the wagons was a sterling investment. He'd bought them to rent to families who could not afford their own transportation to Texas, certainly not the space and comfort the Conestoga offered that regular farm wagons did not. Silas had believed the lure of striking and graceful vehicles to lease would increase the number in the wagon train (the more, the safer), and the rent money would offset part of his investment cost and pay his expenses on the trip. He would still own the wagons, which he would sell upon arrival in Texas, and a clause in the contract agreement stated the renter was to pay him a percentage of his crops for the first two years. He had not counted on the deterrents of war in Texas or the faintheartedness of men seeking a better life but lacking the will to pursue it. He'd have been better off keeping his money in his pocket.

Jeremy suffered no such financial anxieties, but Silas would not borrow from his best friend. The Warwicks and Tolivers were to begin their enterprises in Texas with no indebtedness to each other but dependency upon their mutual friendship. Snow would fly in hell before Silas gave his brother, Morris, the satisfaction of lending him money—and at exorbitant interest, no doubt. Unless he could find replacements for the number who had reneged on renting his Conestogas, he would be forced to borrow more money from Carson Wyndham, and Lettie would strongly disapprove of that. She would loathe being in further debt to a man she intensely disliked.

Soon enough to tell her, Silas decided, when he had time to hear from the advertisements he'd placed in the state newspapers and the
Nashville Republican
publicizing his Conestogas to lease, though he had little hope they'd be answered. There was great turmoil in Texas, the reason the eight families had pulled out.

“Share with me,” Lettie urged, smoothing his brow.

Silas chose to relate the lesser of the two disheartening events troubling him. “The scout is back that Jeremy dispatched in late September to reconnoiter the area where we're headed,” he said. “It seems that skirmish in October between the Texians and the Mexican Army kindled a fire that can't be put out.”

“It happened on Jessica's birthday—October Second,” Lettie said with a trace of wonder that people could be shooting each other while others were enjoying a party.

Silas smiled indulgently and tapped her nose. “Goodness, girl, the occasions by which you remember dates,” he said. “But yes, on Jessica's eighteenth birthday, the scout rode right into the fire and took up arms himself.”

The papers had carried the story of the October 2 fracas between the Anglo settlers and one hundred dragoons of the Mexican Army in a town in Texas called Gonzales. The skirmish had been incited when the area's military commander of the Mexican forces demanded that a cannon be returned that the citizens of Gonzales had borrowed to protect them from Indian attacks. The colonists had refused and mounted an armed resistance under a hastily sewn flag made out of a wedding dress on which had been written:
COME AND TAKE IT
!

The Mexicans had tried but were defeated, and the cannon remained in the possession of the colonists.

Lettie's reaction to the story had been typical. She'd laughed. “I believe I like these Texians,” she'd said. “They show fortitude and bravery against odds.”

Silas draped the swath of gauze Lettie called tulle around her neck and drew her face close to his. He'd found that amorous moments worked best for softening bad news. “Remember how we thought the incident would blow over?” he said, gazing into luminous blue eyes that, come their wedding night, he would watch close in sleep and awaken the next morning beside him. “Well, it hasn't. The newspapers are calling the battle at Gonzales the ‘Lexington of Texas.'”

Lettie's eyes fell seductively to his lips, quickening his desire. “And that means?”

“The Texas revolution has begun.”

Dismay flooded her enamored gaze, and she pulled against the filmy restriction. “Oh dear. Will that mean we have to delay our departure until things are more settled there?”

“We can't delay. We must head out by March to make our destination before winter. We need to arrive in time to get shelters built and the land cleared for the next spring's planting.”

His lips were making a slow descent from her forehead to her lips, and he heard her little sigh of pleasure. “Don't worry, my love,” she said dreamily. “The United States was founded on revolution. Can we expect anything less of Texas?”

“You are the most wonderful girl,” he said, but before he could kiss her, the manse's maid appeared in the doorway. “The new teacher is here to see you, Miss Lettie. Should I show her in?”

“Yes, by all means.”

Lettie rose to greet her visitor with a regretful look at Silas and playfully swiped the length of tulle over his head. Silas felt briefly irritated at the interruption but was glad to be relieved of further discussion of the troubles in Texas. “I can't tell you how happy I am to be leaving my students in the hands of Sarah,” Lettie said. “I was doubtful at first, what with Sarah coming to us from the North, but God answered my prayers indeed to send us someone so competent and dedicated to teaching.”

“According to Jeremy, it was Jessica's doing more than God's,” Silas corrected her without Lettie's enthusiasm. He had to wonder along with Jeremy why a single woman of Sarah Conklin's age and beauty had accepted a teaching post so far from her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“Behind her charming appreciation of us, I sense a woman at odds with her surroundings,” Jeremy had commented. “I can't put my finger on it, but there's something slightly off-key about the lovely Sarah Conklin.”

Silas paid attention to his friend's observations. Without passing judgment, Jeremy could assess people better than anyone he'd ever known, but he knew with whom to be on guard.

“Maybe it's the Massachusetts accent that sounds out of tune among us southerners,” Silas had suggested.

“Maybe.”

“Lettie says Sarah's escaping a broken heart.”

“This far south? And why weren't local applicants considered to take Lettie's place? I know several who are qualified.”

Silas had guffawed. “I'll bet you do, and they all wear skirts. Lettie says none of those who applied had the excellent references and teaching experience Sarah does.”

“Those qualifications had little to do with her getting the job,” Jeremy had said. “Sarah Conklin got the position because of Jessica Wyndham. They knew each other from school in Boston. Sarah's the sister of one of her classmates. Papa Wyndham pulled strings to get her hired at Jessica's request.”

“Well, as the school's main benefactor, I suppose Carson feels he can take that right, but, in any event, the children of Willow Grove are getting a first-rate teacher.”

Originally, Silas had considered that Jeremy's reservation toward a woman who was very much his type—independent and self-contained—was the result of his romantic relationship with one of the “local applicants” who had coveted the position and he was piqued that she didn't get it. There was also the surprise that the comely new schoolmistress had not shown a flicker of interest in Silas's handsome and eligible bachelor friend on the social occasions she had been in his company. Yet, for Jeremy to give her rebuff any more than a second's amused thought was unlike him as well. There was something about Sarah Conklin that persistently did not ring true to him.

Lettie greeted her replacement with outstretched hands when she was shown into the room. “Good morning, Sarah. Father has Jimsonweed all harnessed up for you. You'll find our horse very manageable.” She turned to explain to Silas. “Sarah has come to borrow Jimsonweed and our wagon for a ride into Charleston this morning. She's to pick up a shipment of books for the children at the post office. Sarah, are you sure you don't want me to come with you?”

“Oh, no, no!” Sarah held up both hands to emphasize her objection. “I couldn't possibly drag you away from all you have to do here.” She gestured toward the overflowing table and then acknowledged Silas as if noticing his presence for the first time. “Good morning, Mr. Toliver.”

Silas returned a brief nod. “Good morning, Miss Conklin.” There was no mistaking the glacial cast that fell over her features at sight of him before the frost was thawed by an immediate smile he thought forced. Did she dislike men in general after her broken love affair, or was it something about him and Jeremy and Michael, brother of Jessica and son of her powerful benefactor, that doused the warmth in her?

The question was no concern of his, Silas decided. Lettie liked her, and that was all that mattered. He left the women to discuss Sarah's request before his fiancée suggested he drive her into Charleston to collect her books. Silas could think of no one he'd rather less spend time with than the frosty Sarah Conklin, and he had an appointment to meet Carson Wyndham, hat in hand, at noon.