Chapter Sixteen
Silas gaped at Carson, dumbfounded. “You’re asking me to do what?”
“That’s right. You heard me,” Carson said. “I want you to marry Jessica and take her with you to Texas.”
“But I’m engaged!”
“I know. You must figure out how to circumvent that commitment.”
“Circumvent it?”
“Silas…” Wyndham drew up his barrel chest, the starched cravat lifting with it. “I’m offering you the chance of a lifetime—an opportunity that will never come to you again. Take it, and you’re free to live the life you’ve always dreamed. Reject it, and you’re doomed to live a life you hate, become the man you hate. You’d be doing Miss Sedgewick a favor by setting her free to marry someone whose obsession does not come before his love for her.”
Appalled, Silas declared, “You presume, sir, and you are forgetting Miss Sedgewick’s love for me.”
“A heartache that the years will dull because of the hate she will feel when you choose my offer over her. How important is love over a decision that will determine the rest of your life and the life of your heirs? Think about it.”
“I couldn’t possibly do what you’re asking, and I am sure your daughter shares my aversion to your proposal.”
“Jessica has absolutely no say in the matter. She forfeited that right when she betrayed me and her family.”
A glimmer of light was beginning to shine on the mystery of the cancellation of festivities at Willowshire. Jessica—that little firebrand—must be at its root. Silas regarded his visitor with distaste. “What did she do, if I may ask?”
Carson related the details of Jessica’s crime.
“Good God!” Silas said.
“Exactly,” Carson said, closing his eyes wearily for a brief second. “My daughter is not winsome, Silas, I grant you that, and you’d have a tiger by the tail if you marry her, but some men would find her particular temperament…alluring.”
“Jeremy apparently does,” Silas said, his tone wry. “Why don’t you propose he marry her?”
“That had crossed my mind, but…”
Silas’s mouth twisted. “He cannot be bought, is that it?”
“He is not a man in your circumstances.”
Silas did not know which inference was the greater insult—or the truth. “What will happen to Jessica if you don’t…marry her off?” he asked curiously.
Carson glanced away, his mouth hard. “I will get her out of South Carolina, one way or the other, before her abolitionist fidelities become well known. I will not have a traitor in my house. Believe me, the other way will be less to her liking than the one I’ve proposed to you.” He looked at Silas, his eyes that of a father whose child is pronounced dead. “Please, Silas. Marry my daughter. You will do right by her, I know it. You might even grow to love her, and she you.”
“I doubt it,” Silas said. “I love Lettie. She has my heart.”
“And you will have my money. Think about it, and get back with me in a fortnight. Otherwise, the deal is off. I will have put into effect another way to deal with my wayward daughter.”
Jeremy had come out into the hall when Carson, followed by a grim-faced Silas, stepped from the drawing room. Lazarus hurried to hand their visitor his riding crop and hat. Positioning the brim tightly, Carson said, “Good morning, Jeremy,” but not before Silas had read in his expression the wistful wish that it could have been Jeremy to whom he’d made the proposal. Jeremy was indeed a fine specimen of a man, more easygoing and jocular than the man he’d come to purchase. Silas recognized that his own sense of humor had been pinched by recent events and…his obsession, so Carson had called his weakness.
“Happy Christmas to you and your families, gentlemen,” Carson said, with a last glance at Silas before Lazarus saw him to the door.
Jeremy had not missed its meaningful glint. “What was that all about?” he asked after Carson had gone.
Silas raked a hand through his hair. From the dining room came Lettie’s clear soprano voice, the sound that was like music to his ears. “Jeremy,” he said, “there are times I wish I’d never been born.”
Jessica had been confined to her room for four days. Apparently, even her mother had been forbidden to see her. She had seen no one but Lulu, the maid who brought her meals and carried tales. Jessica had given her no tales to carry. She did not inquire about her aunt, whom she’d seen only during the tense, silent carriage ride back to Willowshire from the pier in Charleston. She did not ask about Tippy or Willie May or question Lulu for a temperature reading of her father’s and mother’s moods. The maid would put her own sly interpretation on her words and state of mind in relaying them to her parents, and in her lonely exile with only her thoughts for company, Jessica did not think she could endure the torture of knowing what form of retribution her father had taken against Tippy and Willie May. She knew only that the house was eerily quiet these days before Christmas, when ordinarily it would have been boisterous and lively with the arrivals of callers, preparations for parties, the hurrying and scurrying of household help, conversation and laughter and music.
But of course Jessica worried. Had her father sent Tippy to the fields? Had he punished Willie May as well? Would her mother ever speak to her again? What kind of punishment would her father concoct for his daughter, because punishment was bound to come. For what? For showing decency to another human being? The outline of Michael’s vicious grip on her lower arm when he’d marched her through the house to her father’s study had only now faded, but Jessica could mentally still see her bewildered aunt looking on in concern and her mother with her hand pressed to her mouth and her anguished gaze asking: What in the world have you done now, child?
While Jessica had stood with head held high, her chin jutted, Michael had related the tale of how he and the Riders had caught “a no-good, slave-loving abolitionist” red-handed at his subversive business and asked his father to guess who the bastard was signaling.
Her father had listened to the whole harangue without the bat of an eye, but his jaw hardened to stone and his dark brown gaze on Jessica turned nearly black. Finally, he’d asked, “Did Miss Conklin get on her ship?”
“Yes, Papa,” Michael said. “I saw to that. I told her worse would happen if we ever saw her face around here again.”
“And the runaway? Where is he?”
“In the barn until you tell us what to do with him. He’s just a boy, ignorant as they come. He says he doesn’t know who owns him or the name of his plantation. I figure that he never got out of the fields of wherever he’s from. His name is Jasper. We got that out of him when he saw what we did to Sarah Conklin. He told us he hid in the wagon when Scooter drove into town to pick up a wheel.”
“Then no one from Willowshire helped him?”
“He said not. I’m inclined to believe him.”
“How did he know to go to Miss Conklin?”
“He said somebody came into the fields—the agent, probably—where he was working and spread the word that the woman who lived in the house by the cemetery in Willow Grove helped runaways. He was making for that destination.”
“Is the agent anybody we know?”
“Not really. He’s a northerner who hired on as a clerk at the feed store in Willow Grove last year. We turned him over to the sheriff.”
“And this…feed-store clerk and Miss Conklin conspired to spirit the boy away?”
“Yes sir.”
“And you were their accomplice?” Carson turned his questioning to Jessica and got up from his desk to stand eyeball-to-eyeball with her.
“I was,” Jessica said, returning his stare proudly but inwardly terrified. She saw not a spark of love in the cold, dark wells of her father’s gaze.
“I am not going to ask you what you have to say for yourself. I don’t want to hear it. I want you out of my sight. Go to your room and stay there until I send for you. If you so much as poke your head out, I will deal with you severely, is that understood, Jessica Ann?”
He never called her Jessica Ann. A shocking awareness, cold as frozen steel, made its way down to the pit of Jessica’s stomach. She remembered Sarah’s moan when she’d boasted that her father’s bark was worse than his bite when it came to his daughter. Sarah had reacted not from the pain of her lashes, but from her friend’s ignorance of Carson Wyndham. Jessica’s horrified thoughts flew to Tippy. Her father would punish her maid for her transgression. He did not care if his daughter forgave him or if her love turned to hate.
She clasped her hands beseechingly. “Papa, I beg you. Please, please do not punish Tippy for what I did.”
“Michael, take your sister to her room.”
“Please, Papa…”
“Go!”
An audience of her mother, aunt, Willie May, and some of the other servants had watched, round-eyed and frightened, as Michael had herded her up the staircase like a soldier directing her to the guillotine. Before leaving, her brother’s last words to her, perhaps forever, were, “To think I adored you once.”
A hard knock on Jessica’s bedroom door, the one she’d been dreading and waiting for, jerked her back to the present. She opened it to find Lulu smirking at her. “The master wishes to see you, Miss Jessica,” she said.