Chapter Eighteen
Jeremy Warwick slowed his white stallion to a canter as he turned into the tree-lined, moss-draped approach to the Parthenon-looking mansion of his family home. Built of white plastered brick, the manor house of Meadowlands was a palatial, squarish structure of two and a half stories surrounded by broad double galleries supported by monumental columns rising to the roofline. Like a brilliant gemstone, even in the falling dusk, it sparkled in a setting of lush gardens and lawns sloping away to picked-over cotton fields whose expanse reached beyond the range of the human eye. Born to Meadowlands’ opulent entitlements and therefore naturally taking them for granted, Jeremy had never paid much attention to the magnificence and scope of his ancestral home and family’s property until today. Queenscrown was no less grand. He cantered along, viewing the Warwick mansion and endless stretches of land from a new perspective. What would a man do—what would he risk, sacrifice, forfeit—for the ownership of all of this, he wondered.
All of this was what Silas desired, felt born to, believed he needed for survival as a man. Jeremy was of no such mind. If Morris died tomorrow and left Queenscrown to his brother, Silas would be a happy, fulfilled man. If Jeremy’s father and siblings followed suit—God forbid—and he, Jeremy, were to inherit Meadowlands, he would be miserable. His reasons for going to Texas were different from Silas’s. He yearned to be the master of his own source of livelihood, but in a fresh, new, vigorous environment. All Jeremy knew was farming, but he welcomed the possibility and challenge of turning his hand to some other profitable venture in the land of opportunity Texas was purported to be. He had come to find South Carolina’s planter system—its customs, traditions, mores, prejudices—stifling and restrictive, as worn out as the land would one day be. Jessica Wyndham must find it so as well.
But he could understand Silas’s obsessive need to possess all of this. He was a man of the soil—predominantly cotton-producing soil—and he was a Toliver, born to own, command, lead—not follow. Silas carried his forebears’ blood, and he could no more change or compromise his conviction of his role in life than he could alter the color of his eyes.
Jeremy felt enormous pity for him. No sailor on the planet would trade fifty-foot waves for the dilemma Silas faced. He stood between a lion and a tiger. Either could eat him alive. If he chose to remain at Queenscrown with the woman he loved, he would surely emotionally expire. If he went to Texas, all the land and cotton in the world might not allay his misery at being married to the woman he did not.
Would Silas sacrifice those he loved to preserve his own life? He would leave Lettie devastated, humiliated, inconsolable. Joshua would be crushed. The little boy already thought of Lettie as his mother, and Elizabeth loved her like a daughter. If Silas jilted her to marry Jessica, he would leave South Carolina a disgraced man. He could never come home again.
And what of Jessica Wyndham? After the beautiful Lettie Sedgewick, what chance did the girl have of winning Silas’s heart—that is, if she were of a mind to? From what he’d seen of the feisty Jessica—and now knowing her views on slavery—it might be hate at first kiss between her and Silas.
Jeremy shook his head in sympathy for his friend and impelled his stallion to a faster clip. Too bad he was not in the running. Not since he was twenty-one and met the girl he loved and later lost to typhoid fever had a woman so intrigued him as Jessica Wyndham. Had her father asked him to take his daughter off his hands, he might not have had to think about it long.
Jessica met her aunt coming up the stairs. “Aunt Elfie!” she cried as they threw themselves into each other’s arms.
“Oh, my dear child, this is all my fault,” her aunt exclaimed. “If I’d just monitored your activities closer while you were in Boston…”
Jessica pulled away to look at her. “This is not your fault, Aunt Elfie. I left here with my convictions already conceived. They were simply birthed in boarding school. Do you…have any idea what my fate will be?”
“No, dear niece. Your father does not confide in me, but your mother is very worried.”
Lulu had stopped at the bottom of the staircase. “The master is waiting, Miss Jessica,” she said with a sharp look of rebuke.
“Certainly not for you,” Jessica snapped. “Go on about your business.”
“But I’m to take you to him.”
“I know the way to my father’s study. Get on with you.” Jessica waited until the maid had disappeared and asked, “Aunt Elfie, have you seen Tippy? What have they done with her?”
“She’s all right, child—for the time being. She’s quartering with her mother and has been dispensed to the sewing room. I believe she’s working on your bridesmaid’s dress. Please, please, Jessica, mind your p’s and q’s with your father when you see him.”
“I’ll try, Aunt Elfie,” Jessica said, kissing her aunt’s cheek. Then she hurried down the stairs, skirt and hair flying behind her.
Since she did not know how to arrange her hair, Jessica had worn it loose for the four days of her confinement. Its naturally frizzy curls fell in long, ungovernable ringlets when not brushed into submission by Tippy’s hand. Today, the thick russet mass had been secured away from her forehead by a barrette. She’d dressed hastily and found, too late to change, a noticeable stain on the front of her dress, and she’d been unable to fasten herself into a corset. Her waist was as thin as a blade anyway since she’d eaten little during her incarceration, but her father could surprise her by noting such things. Would her appearance anger or endear her to him?
He was standing by the mantel of the great stone fireplace, smoking a long-stemmed pipe and consulting the flames as if they held the answer to what to do with his daughter. Her mother sat in an armchair by the fire, looking lost and abandoned, and Jessica’s heart twisted in remorse for the pain she continued to cause her. Her mother started to get up to go to her, but her father laid a gentle hand on her shoulder and she subsided into the silken layers of her gown.
Carson moved to his desk and set the meerschaum bowl in its holder. Jessica took that as not a good sign. Her father was a mellower man when he smoked his pipe. “Jessica,” he said, “you have shamed our family, not only us of its intimate circle, but you’ve disgraced us to others in the community, people who put store in your parents and brother and abide by our example. You obviously do not agree with the example we Wyndhams set, so I will give you two choices where you may indulge your abolitionist convictions and actions to the fullest—depending, of course, on whether they’re tolerated.”
Eunice spoke up, her voice thin with grief. “Oh, Carson, must you? Can’t we give her another chance?”
“Now, Mother, we agreed,” Carson remonstrated her gently, his own voice losing some of its force. “Our daughter cannot stay among us. She’s a betrayer and a traitor not only to her family but to her heritage—those who have gone before us and to all southerners who share and support our way of life. That is,” he said, still speaking to his wife but fastening his gaze on his daughter, “unless she apologizes to her family and admits her mistake to those she’s deeply offended. I’m sure they will understand she was temporarily misguided by her affection for Miss Conklin.”
“You mean apologize to Michael and the Night Riders?” Jessica asked, her frozen fear immediately dissolving in the heat of her indignation.
“Precisely.”
“Never,” Jessica said.
Her mother pressed her fingers to her forehead. “Oh, Jessie, darling…”
Jessica returned her father’s hardening stare. “What are the choices of my punishment, Papa? To be burned at the stake or flayed alive?”
Carson turned his back on her, his way of saying he had had enough. Jessica read the message from the squaring of his shoulders, the deliberate withdrawal of his chair from its kneehole, the drop of his attention to papers on his desk, dismissing her. It was possible he would never look at her again, not directly. She was damned to him. He did not address her as he said, “You may recall the punishment your mother’s older sister earned for disgracing the family in Boston.”
Terror, cold as a steel blade, drove into her heart. The story had become legend in her mother’s family. The oldest daughter, for conducting an illicit relationship with a boy of whom her father did not approve, had been banished to a Carmelite convent in Great Britain, one of the strictest orders of nuns in the Catholic Church. Jessica had heard her mother and Aunt Elfie lament the harsh conditions under which their sister lived. The “inmates,” as they called the nuns, were permitted to speak for only two hours each day and were allowed no contact with the outside world. They lived in stark cells and took vows of poverty and toil, prayed constantly, lived on only vegetables, and fasted from Holy Cross Day in September until Easter of the following year. Once she was removed from their home, the two sisters never saw their sibling again.
“You wouldn’t,” Jessica said, glancing at her mother for verification of the threat. Eunice blinked away tears and nodded slightly.
“I would,” Carson said. “As soon as I can make arrangements.” He took up a pen to scribble his name to a document. “There is an order of Carmelites located in Darlington, a market town in the northeast of England. Perhaps you will encounter your aunt there. She should be around…sixty years old now, by my estimate.” He turned the document over and affixed his signature to the next item requiring his attention. “Or…” he added casually, “you may marry Silas Toliver and go live with him in Texas. Take your pick.”
Jessica swayed from a sudden light-headedness. Was her father crazy? Silas Toliver was engaged to Lettie. They were to be married in less than six weeks. Did he not remember his daughter was to be her maid of honor? Tippy was working on her bridesmaid’s dress. She glanced again at her mother, who had closed her eyes and was biting her lip as if in silent and urgent prayer, and then at the indifferent face of her father, poring over his papers.
“Silas Toliver is engaged,” Jessica said, “or have you forgotten? How can you offer him as a choice for me—that is, if he would have me?”
“He’ll break the engagement for the price I’ve offered him,” Carson said, “and believe me, he will have you. He has ten more days to agree to it. I have no doubt of his answer.”
“Good Lord, Papa! What have you done?”
Her mother rose in a rustle of silk. “Silas is a good man, Jessie,” she said, her tone pleading. “He’ll take care of you. Your father will see that you want for nothing. If you go to that awful place in England, we’ll never see you again.”
“But Silas is engaged!”
“An easily fixed situation,” Carson said.
The horror of her father’s manipulation—what he had bullied into place—had begun to dawn. “What about Lettie? If Silas doesn’t marry her, she’ll be destroyed!”
“A fatality of your stupidity and Silas’s desperation. She’ll get over it.”
“I won’t choose either one,” Jessica said. “I’ll run away first—go live with Aunt Elfie in Boston.”
“No, you won’t, my dear daughter, for if you do, I will sell Tippy and her mother—separately. You must believe me, I will. I cannot have you in Boston where you will continue to work against the interests of your family and the South.”
Eunice gave a little moan and put her hands over her ears—in shame, Jessica perceived.
“Papa, I thought you loved me,” she said quietly.
He looked at her, perhaps for the last time fully. “I do, my dear, more than you will ever know or could possibly comprehend from my actions, and that’s the tragedy of it. Now go to your room and think about your choices. Your mother will send Tippy to you to do something about your dreadful appearance. We must look our best for our last family Christmas together.”