Somerset (47 page)

T
homas gave a start when he read the name of the sender on the envelope.
Priscilla Woodward Toliver
. It was addressed to him, not Vernon. Thomas had arrived home after a frustrating day and did not need another aggravation added to the strain on his temper. What did Priscilla want? More money?

He took the envelope into his study to pour a Scotch and water before opening it. Damn, if people you thought you knew couldn't still fool and disappoint you. He'd gone to his neighboring planters today to present a USDA recommended plan for reducing next year's weevil damage. To control the pest's population, the strategy called for burning and plowing under cotton stalks immediately after harvest to avoid the beetles having a chance to hibernate, but success depended on a community effort. Weevils could migrate to the next planter's fields, so for the plan to be effective and the crop protected, each farmer had to agree to burn their residue at the same time.

Thomas had been shocked at his neighbors' lack of cooperation. Jacob Ledbetter, who owned Fair Acres, a plantation between Somerset and the strip of Toliver land along the Sabine, balked, saying, “All those fires going at the same time would be a hazard to our homes and buildings and livestock if the wind blew the wrong way.”

Jacob had a point, but what other choice did they have if they were going to reap a harvest above the cost of production next year?

His other neighbor, Carl Long, a carpetbagger from Minnesota who had practically stolen his plantation from the Tolivers' longtime friend Paul Wilson after the war, had actually attempted to blackmail him. Thomas took a stinging sip of the Scotch and water to alleviate the sour taste of Carl's offer. “Tell you what, Thomas. You buy my plantation, and you can burn the place down for all I care. Otherwise, no deal. I don't have the manpower to do what you're suggesting.”

Thomas would have liked nothing better than to have bought the Longs' land and Fair Acres, too, if it were for sale, which it wasn't, but he had no money to buy extra acreage. He had stalked away from both men in a foul temper. To hell with Carl Long, but he might strain relations with Jacob Ledbetter if he went ahead and burned Somerset's fields. Since the settlement days, the Ledbetters had allowed the Tolivers egress through their land to their property on the Sabine with its gin and cottonseed mill and dock. Jacob could close that route if his neighbor chose to preserve his plantation at the destruction of his.

Were there any heads harder to drill through than farmers' noggins? Thomas remembered the prewar days of his father's appeals, arguments, threats against secession, but did any landowner listen? To their miserable regrets, they did not, and they weren't listening now. Planters' heads were as deeply buried in the sand as they were then not to recognize their livelihoods were more threatened by the assault of the boll weevil than any force of the Union army. Once again, and probably as futilely, the only recourse open to a Toliver was to beseech the Texas legislature to establish mandatory stalk-destruction dates for cotton and corn producers.

Thomas ripped open the envelope and withdrew a single page. The house was quiet. This was the afternoon Jacqueline and his mother attended their reading club and stayed for tea.
Thomas,
Priscilla wrote,
I need to see you as soon as possible. It's very important. May I expect you Sunday? Please respond by telegram. You must come, Thomas. Time is of the essence. PWT

Thomas folded the letter thoughtfully. Sunday. That was in three days' time. He had not seen Priscilla since he'd installed her in Houston eight years ago. Though invited, she had not come to her son's wedding. Thomas never asked about her, and Vernon did not volunteer information. Vernon and Darla made regular trips to visit his mother and her father. Oddly, but apparently happily, Priscilla and Barney Henley had become friends and spent evenings together playing cards. Vernon and his wife seemed to enjoy their time in Houston with the pair and made no complaint about having to make their dutiful visits.

Jacqueline would encourage him to go. She would never say it, but she'd see it as his duty to honor Priscilla's request. He shared part of the fault in the breakup of their marriage, and Priscilla had asked for nothing extra in the eight years afterwards. She had abided by the terms of the divorce and quietly and completely disappeared from his life.

Thomas felt a sense of foreboding. What could Priscilla possibly want with him? And why the sense of urgency? Thomas dreaded seeing her. He was sure time had not been gentle, and he felt responsible for its heavy hand. Still, he wouldn't have traded these past eight years he'd been free to love and be with Jacqueline for all the guiltless consciences in the world. He loved his wife more every anniversary and, at fifty-nine, regretted only the quickly diminishing number of years left to spend with her.

He rang the servants' bell. Sassie appeared, a reminder of how fast the years had flown and would continue to fly. Sassie was nineteen and engaged to be married next year. Only yesterday she'd been toddling behind her mother, Amy, who herself had been in her early twenties.

“Sassie, when my wife returns, tell her I've gone to the telegraph office,” Thomas said.

Priscilla had dressed in her finest but terribly outdated dress. Thomas paid no attention to female fashions, but even he knew that the hard bustle of women's skirts had been replaced with pleats, thanks to the sensible likes of Tippy. Priscilla greeted him with a cool smile and cooler hand. She did not look well and had lost the weight Vernon had mentioned to Amy she'd gained.

“A cup, Thomas?” Priscilla invited, sitting down in her dim parlor at a table laid for afternoon tea and motioned that he do the same.

“No, thank you.”

“Then Scotch and water, perhaps?” Priscilla pointed casually to a sideboard as in the old days when he would come in for the day and help himself to the decanter before supper.

The familiarity of her manner touched a chord. “I believe I will,” he said.

Settled in the small room, he with his crystal glass and she with her china cup, Thomas asked, “Why did you wish to see me, Priscilla? I'm taking the late train back to Howbutker.”

Her lip quirked. “I didn't expect you to stay, Thomas, only to come.”

“Well, I'm here. What do you want?”

She reached behind her to a bookcase and removed a leather volume almost too heavy for her hand. “Here,” she said, handing it to him. “A present for Vernon—my going-away present.”

Thomas took it and stared at the gold-embossed lettering.
Tolivers: A Family History from 1836
. He shot her a startled gaze. “You actually completed it?”

“It helped to pass the time. I hope Vernon will keep it for posterity. I want him to know about his family roots. The title is not exactly accurate. The historical facts go back to the beginning of the Tolivers and Wyndhams in England.”

“How—how did you compile the material? Where did you find it?”

“You mean other than from your mother's diaries?”

Thomas could feel heat shoot to his face. She had been nothing but gracious. “That's not what I was asking, Priscilla,” he said.

“I know,” she conceded, her tone less arch. “Mainly I used the
New England Historical and Genealogical Register
. It's an organization that employs genealogists who contact sources here and abroad for records and documents from such places as parish registers, archives, headstones. The photographs were collected from newspapers and from the DuMonts' and Warwicks' albums they were kind enough to part with and, of course, from your mother.”

“She'll be very impressed,” Thomas said, hearing a huskiness in his voice. The book was a masterful compilation of family genealogy, maps, pictures, anecdotes, history, and data beautifully bound. It must have taken several years to compile and assemble. He smoothed a hand admiringly over the cover. “The cost of this must have taken a pretty penny out of your pocket.”

She flicked a hand to indicate the room, grown shabby through the years. “The money was no matter. As you can see, I don't spend much, either for living or personal expenses. You'll observe that there is space in the genealogical chart for additions. It won't be long before you'll be adding another name to the Toliver tree.”

“Yes,” Thomas said, clearing his throat. “Darla should be delivering next month.”

“And Jeremy III and Abel are to be proud papas as well, are they not?”

“They, too. If the children are sons, the dads are hoping the boys will forge the special bond they knew growing up.”

A wistful shadow crossed Priscilla's face. Thomas could tell she was remembering the days when she'd been a witness to the special friendship their son had shared with his two best friends. “They enjoy an enviable companionship, Vernon and Jeremy III, and Abel,” she agreed. “I hope along with you that the next generation of boys will be so blessed.”

“Is the book why you asked me to come, Priscilla? If so, I thank you. It will be a treasured volume, but I really must be going.”

He pushed back his chair, but she raised a restraining hand. “There is something else, Thomas. My main purpose in asking you here is to tell you something you need to know.”

He had suspected there would be another shoe to fall. “And what is that?”

“It's about Regina, your daughter.”

T
he muscle of his heart contracted. “Regina?”

“Your daughter, Thomas,” Priscilla repeated.

Thomas stood up, so abruptly he struck the handle of the tea strainer, splattering brown stains and tea leaves on the white damask cloth. “I do not wish to discuss Regina with you, Priscilla. I have to go. I'll see myself out.”

“Before you hear me confess that I lied to you about her paternity?”

Thomas had picked up the book and almost reached the door. He froze in step, then slowly turned around. “You lied?”

“I wouldn't have, if I'd known you'd divorce me. That you would do such a thing—even consider such a maneuver—never occurred to me. People in your circle do not divorce.”

Thomas stood motionless. “It was not a maneuver, Priscilla. It was a straightforward rule of action to your admission of adultery.”

Priscilla got up from the table, a little shakily, Thomas noted. The flesh had darkened beneath her still bright blue eyes. Was she ill, he wondered, or simply showing the physical effects of her reclusive life, evident in the drawn shades, the musty odor, and the forlorn impression that sunlight and people rarely entered her house?

“I wanted to hurt you—and deeply,” Priscilla said, using the table for support as she stepped around it. “I knew the only way I could strike at that cold heart of yours was through Regina.”

Thomas's jaw tightened. “I don't know what your game is, Priscilla, but I'm not playing. Frankly, I don't give an ant's piss whether you slept with Duncan. Regina's paternity doesn't matter. She was my daughter in every sense of the word, if not my flesh and blood.”

“Now who's lying?” Priscilla said. A mixture of triumph and appeal shone in her eyes. “You know damn well you wrestle in your sleep at night—cry—from the devastating possibility that the daughter you loved, worshiped, adored had been fathered by another man. By day your memory of her is tainted with the thought that the blood of a Union soldier, the enemy you fought against, a Yankee, ran in her veins—that the daughter to whom you attributed the finest of your families' traits was no more a
Toliver
…a Wyndham…than I am.”

Thomas swallowed hard, unable to veil the pain she must surely read gripping his throat. Yes, for years after Regina's death, even now, the image of his daughter could not come to him in memory without the grief of her death compounded by the wretchedness of wondering if the child of his heart belonged to another father.

“If it pleases you, Priscilla, then of course it matters,” Thomas said, “and you may take satisfaction in the assurance that yes, indeed, you hurt me where I could feel no greater pain.” He opened the door.

“That's why I asked you here, Thomas—to tell you the truth. You've got to believe it,” Priscilla called in a strained voice as he stepped into the foyer.

Thomas took his hat from the hall tree. “Why should I?” he said.

“Because I'm dying and I want to make things right.”

He paused and turned to study her. “Are you lying to me, Priscilla?”

“Well, I suppose you'll know shortly, won't you?” she said with a derisory toss of her head. “Thomas, I'm too weak to argue with you. You can believe me or not. I slept with Andrew Duncan three times, and they were not when I could have gotten pregnant, so Regina could be no one's daughter but yours.”

Thomas stepped back into the parlor for a closer look at his former wife to determine if she was lying or telling the truth. With Priscilla, it was hard to know, but he did not doubt she was sick. He noticed the more pronounced pallor of her skin, the deeper sockets of her eyes and hollow cheeks. He felt a wave of pity for her, but he could not let sympathy override his knowledge of the deceit of which she was capable.

“How do I know you're not merely telling me what I want to hear? That this…
confession
isn't a way to make amends for a despicable claim you now wish you hadn't uttered?”

Priscilla closed her eyes tiredly. “Think what you like. I've said my piece. You can believe it or not. What the hell do I care if you live out your life always wondering. You have
Jacqueline
”—Priscilla spit out the name—“to comfort you.” Carefully, slowly, Priscilla walked over to draw the bellpull, then fell into a chair, swallowed by a puff of silk and crinolines. “Now you must leave so I can take my pain medicine. My girl is good to see I take just the right amount.”

The book under his arm, his hat in hand, Thomas felt himself at a loss what to think. Did he believe her or not? He wished she'd made a stronger case to relieve his doubt. Was she really
dying
…​his son's mother? He said, “Priscilla, I…are you telling me the truth…about everything?”

“I have said what I had you come to hear, Thomas. I don't owe you anything more than that. What you do with it is your lookout. Now get out.”

“I am sorry your life is ending this way.…”

Priscilla waved aside his expression of sympathy. “My only regret is that I didn't marry someone who would have appreciated me like Major Andrew Duncan did.”

Thomas said, “I regret that for you, too, Priscilla.”

“But I was a good mother, and I delivered three beautiful children.”

“Yes, you were, and yes, you did, Priscilla. No one can fault you for that.”

“Send Vernon to me. Tell him to come as soon as possible and without his wife. She'll make him the happiest husband alive, but everybody else in his life better watch his back.”

“That's what my mother says.”

Priscilla grinned sickly. “Good ol' Jessica. She's not one to miss a trick.”

The maid entered, carrying a tray of medicines, and went straight to her mistress sitting listlessly in a chair by the window. She set the tray on a table and drew the draperies even closer against the afternoon sunlight, adding to the parlor's gloom. Priscilla had closed her eyes and seemed to have forgotten Thomas's presence. While the maid unscrewed the cap to a bottle, he went to her chair and pressed her hand. She did not respond. He turned to leave and she said without opening her eyes, “There is one way you can be sure Regina was yours, Thomas.”

He halted in his tracks. “How?” he said.

“Read the history,” Priscilla said and opened her mouth wider to receive the spoonful of liquid sleep.