Somerset By Leila Meacham
Part One
Chapter One
Queenscrown plantation, near Charleston, South Carolina
Elizabeth Toliver observed her younger son, Silas, from under the wide, floppy brim of her gardening bonnet. He stood by the verandah railing, staring down the oak-lined road leading to the family’s plantation home, his posture expectant, his gaze intense. It was the beginning of October 1835. Elizabeth watched him from one of the rose gardens flanking the house, clippers in hand to cut a basket of the red Lancasters she’d babied and worried about in January. Amazing what water, mulch, and manure could do for spindly stalks—and for most growing things—left too long without care, she thought. Nature was full of such examples of regrowth and new strength when their requirements were met, if only man would take notice and apply to the human race.
If only her husband had noticed and applied to the needs of his second son.
“Who are you waiting for, Silas?” she called.
Silas turned his head in her direction. It was a very handsome head favored with the striking Toliver features that proved him a descendant of the long line of English aristocrats whose portraits greeted guests in the great hall of Queenscrown. Silas’s green eyes narrowed, as fiery as emeralds under brows a fair match to his rambunctious black hair, but it was the dimple set square in the middle of the family chin that left no doubt of his lineage.
“For Jeremy,” he answered, his tone curt, and returned to his surveillance.
Elizabeth’s shoulders sagged. Silas blamed her for the stipulations in his father’s will. “You could have gotten him to change his mind, Mother,” he’d accused her, “and now you must suffer the consequences.” He would never be convinced of her ignorance of the possibility that his father would write his will as he had, even though her son knew—must surely know—she’d never sacrifice his happiness to ensure hers. She now heard the “consequences” of her failure arriving on pounding horses’ hooves: Jeremy Warwick astride his white stallion, come to lure her son and four-year-old grandson and future daughter-in-law to a faraway, dangerous territory called Texas.
Jeremy thundered to a stop, and even before he greeted Silas and dismounted, he called to her, “Mornin’, Miz ’Lizabeth. How do your roses grow?”
It was his usual form of greeting, no matter the setting, and was meant to inquire after her general well-being. The reference to roses had further meaning in that both the Warwicks and the Tolivers were descended from royal houses in England identified by the elegant, prickly-stemmed flower that served as their emblems. The Warwicks of South Carolina hailed from the House of York, represented by the white rose; the Tolivers, the House of Lancaster, symbolized by the red. Though neighbors and close friends, neither grew in their gardens the other’s badge of allegiance to their aristocratic roots.
This morning How do your roses grow? was not intended to ask the condition of her beloved plants she’d nurtured back to health after months away tending her husband during his illness in a Charleston hospital, but the nature of her spirits now that he had been in his grave these four weeks. “Hard to tell,” she called back. “Their endurance will depend upon the coming weather.”
They had exchanged these entendres since the boys were children and Elizabeth had discovered Jeremy Warwick’s quick, ironic, but never mocking, wit. She adored him. Tall and strapping in contrast to her slim, sinewy son of equal height, Jeremy was the youngest of three brothers whose father owned the adjacent cotton plantation called Meadowlands. United by their family pecking order and the commonalities of age, heritage, and interests, he and Silas made ideal friends, a relationship Elizabeth had been grateful for, since Silas and his brother had warred from the time her younger son could talk.
Jeremy’s bright pleasure at seeing her dimmed in his gaze, indicating that he understood her meaning. “I’m afraid the weather can’t always be what we wish,” he said, with an apologetic inclination of his head that confirmed to Elizabeth why he had come.
“Did the letter arrive that we were expecting?” Silas asked.
“Finally. It’s in the pouch, and one from Lucas Tanner. He and his group made it to the black waxy.”
Elizabeth was of no mind to go inside. If they wished to speak privately, they could adjourn somewhere out of earshot, but she hoped they did not. Sometimes, the only way she knew what was going on in her family was to eavesdrop shamelessly or enlist one of the servants to do it. She heard Silas call into the house for Lazarus to bring coffee. Good. They meant to collude on the porch in the fineness of the fall morning.
“Will I be happy with the letter’s contents?” Silas asked.
“Most of them,” his friend replied.
Elizabeth knew what they were about. They were now beginning in earnest to fulfill the dream they had shared and talked about for years. As youngest sons, both had grown up aware they were not likely to be the sole heirs of their families’ cotton plantations upon the deaths of their fathers. In Jeremy’s case, that reality would have presented no problem. He got along well with his two brothers, and his father doted on him and would have seen he received his fair share of the estate. Jeremy simply wanted to possess his own plantation and run it as he saw fit. Silas’s fraternal and paternal situation was entirely different. From his birth, Benjamin Toliver had favored Morris, his firstborn, as heir of Queenscrown. “It’s the way of it,” he would say to Elizabeth, never having entirely shaken off the principle of the law of primogeniture, a throwback to his English heritage that decreed the eldest son should inherit the family property. In South Carolina, the law had been abolished in 1779.
But other prejudices factored in. Benjamin and Morris saw eye to eye on everything, and it wasn’t a matter of son wishing to please father. Morris genuinely shared his father’s views on every subject from religion to politics, whereas Silas’s took a different, sometimes incendiary, turn. Dislike grew between father and son and brother and brother, and it did not help that Elizabeth, to breach the widening gap between them, treated Silas with special affection. Benjamin had known that Silas and his brother, as equal partners, would have been at each other’s throats by sundown of his death. To avoid the situation, he’d bequeathed the plantation, all the money, and family property—land, house and furnishings, stock, equipment, and slaves—to Morris, leaving Silas penniless but for a yearly “salary” along with a percentage of the plantation’s profits so long as he served as land manager under his brother.
No wonder Silas, now twenty-nine, feeling betrayed and embittered, wished to abandon the land of his birth and head with Jeremy Warwick for the “black waxy” soil in the eastern part of Texas, superb for growing cotton, so the reports came back. How sad that he should leave with his heart harboring unjust ill will toward his father, for Elizabeth knew something that Silas did not. Benjamin Toliver had set aside his love for his wife out of love for his younger son. Her husband had left her in the care of a lumbering bachelor son who most likely would never marry, and she would grow old without the joy of grandchildren to cherish and spoil. She would probably live to regret it, but she’d let Silas—callous to her love for her adorable grandson and the girl who would soon become his second wife—go to Texas without ever knowing his father had fashioned his will to set him free.