Chapter Thirty-Seven
Their luncheon together as a family perfectly complemented the night before. Joshua had approached Jessica shyly when his father brought him to her room before they went downstairs. She sat before her dressing table, and Silas led him to her chair.
“You get to be my mother, Papa said.”
Jessica took his hands into hers. Her voice pitched low and gentle, she said, “It doesn’t mean we can’t still be good friends.”
“That’s what Papa said, too, but I want you to be my mother first. I don’t mind if you tell me what to do. My friends say their mothers tell them what to do because they love them.”
“That’s very true,” Jessica said.
“But you’ll read to me like always?”
“Until I teach you to read. Then you can read to me.”
Joshua glanced up at his tall father. “Is it all right if I hug her now?”
“I don’t think she’ll break,” Silas said, with a slight wink at Jessica layered with private meaning. She ignored him and gave herself up to the embrace of the little arms around her neck. How had this miracle happened that she was now a wife to the handsome man beside her and a mother to this adorable child she had already grown to love? Wisdom cautioned her to beware of such heady happiness built on the uncertain ground of her marriage, but for the moment she would follow Silas’s advice and not question what had happened—was happening—between them. She felt wanted and needed. She would enjoy this new, delicious experience as long as it lasted.
Chatting merrily, they’d trooped down the stairs hand in hand and entered the dining room like any normal set of parents with their offspring between them and selected a table next to the family from the wagon train. They were Lorimer and Stephanie Davis and their son, Jake. Like the Tolivers, they were dressed as people of property, the woman one of the few slave-holder wives who had become somewhat friendly with Jessica. But for a faint show of curiosity at Jessica and Silas’s new marital situation (their fellow travelers were aware the couple, heretofore living separately, had shared a room), the Davises greeted them as one of them—parents with sons who had a grand time playing together.
Jessica had determined to wait until Silas was ready to depart for the wagon train to relate the news of Lettie’s marriage. She did not want a second of their time together marred before he had to return.
The moment came too fast. They had left Joshua taking a nap, Tippy also. Her one lung was feeling the oppression of the New Orleans humidity. Silas had said good-bye to his son as he’d seen him to bed. Jessica had accompanied him to the courtyard, where his horse was bridled and saddled. Like any husband and wife, they apprised each other of their plans. Silas would return day after tomorrow to attend Joshua’s birthday party. He would drive his Conestoga back in the company of another wagon loaded with children for his son’s party, and post the wagon to sell. He had already lined up a potential buyer who was willing to give him a fair price. Jessica would be busy with hotel personnel arranging the birthday luncheon, and she had accepted Henri’s offer to squire her and Tippy and Joshua around New Orleans. The Frenchman wanted to show them his father’s emporium and the St. Charles Hotel that was near completion and touted to be the largest and grandest hotel in the United States. Joshua was excited about riding the streetcar with his friend Jake.
Then Jessica said, “Silas, I have something I must tell you.”
“I hope it’s nothing to disturb my illusion that you are happy.”
“It has nothing to do with my happiness, but it may yours. Your brother and Lettie are married. My mother wrote of it in her letter.”
Jessica held her breath. The next seconds would tell if he still cared for Lettie and mourned her loss as now irrevocable. Jessica had often wondered if Silas would return for Lettie should she still be unmarried after he fulfilled the terms of the contract and divorced her.
“Is that so?” he said, and saved Jessica two days of agony during his absence wondering if Silas was awash with regret. He took her hands and kissed them. “I wish my brother and his wife well,” he said, “and hope the disparities between them can be settled as satisfyingly as ours.”
He said no more, and his face went expressionless except for the small smile he gave her as he tipped his hat and rode away. Jessica covered the back of her hand with her palm, preserving the touch of his lips on her flesh. Silas was bound to feel pain, she thought, and perhaps a sense of betrayal and sadness that things had turned out as they had. But Lettie was gone from him forever, and she was here, at least for as long as it took Silas to fulfill the terms of his contract with her father.
Silas was glad he was alone and on his horse miles from camp. He would need solitude and time and distance to adjust to his shock and the feelings that followed. So Lettie had settled for Morris. The picture of his beautiful, passionate, exuberant former fiancée married to his Bible-spouting, laconic dullard of a brother was almost too painful to imagine. His shock gave way to dismay. Talk about copulating with a mule! Good God, what had Lettie been thinking to marry Morris?
But as his horse’s hooves ate up the miles, Silas came to a new awareness. It lightened his sadness for Lettie’s fate and his guilt for his part in it. His former fiancée had known exactly what she’d been thinking to marry Morris. For the sacrifice of her beauty and body to his blockhead of a brother, she’d gained the Queenscrown she’d always loved. Silas recalled her excitement at the prospect of living a year at the plantation before leaving for Texas. Even then he’d suspected that when it came time to go, for all her adventuresome talk, she would be reluctant to leave its luxury and comfort. Lettie was never more radiant than when she graced the rooms at Queenscrown, never looked as if she felt more suited to a place. Queenscrown was her consolation prize, and Morris, of whom she was fond, not a bad substitute for the man who had jilted her.
His mother had gained the daughter-in-law she thought she’d lost. There would be grandchildren to hold and adore. With the exception of a minor adjustment, the lives and futures of the girl and family he’d left behind would continue as planned.
By the time Silas reached camp his pain had been assuaged, his guilt all but forgotten. His thoughts were on Jessica. He wished he could have ridden back to draw her into his arms and assure her his former love was only a chapter in a book he’d started but returned to the shelf unfinished. He had no interest or desire in taking it down again. His old life was gone and everyone in it. He doubted he would ever return to South Carolina and Queenscrown, even to see his mother, who would turn her full affection and attention to Morris and Lettie and her grandchildren. Her younger son and grandchild would become only a memory that claimed her thoughts now and then.
Jessica was in his future, whatever that held. The inevitable shadow of slavery hung over their happiness together. He must prevent her from corrupting his son—their son, now, and all their children to follow—to her way of thinking. Slave labor was essential to his dream of Somerset, and he would not permit his wife to interfere with raising his heirs to understand that their way of life and the perpetuation of their land-owning heritage depended on it. When Silas was putting Joshua down for his nap, the boy had asked if he’d bring Josiah, Levi, and Samuel back for his party, slaves’ sons he treated as equal to Jake Davis. When Silas had explained that would not be possible, his son had asked why.
“The party is only for you and your friends,” Silas told him. “Josiah and Levi and Samuel are Negroes.”
“But how does being Negroes keep them from being my friends?” Joshua had asked.
He was too young to understand, as Silas had been when growing up playing with slaves’ children and thinking of them as friends. Eventually, by the natural influence of the institution that had bred him, he had learned and accepted the difference in their stations. He had not had to be taught, but then there had been no Jessica Wyndham Toliver whispering her contrary views into his ear.
For now, though, he would not anticipate the problems ahead for him and Jessica in their marriage. He would be thankful the obstacle he’d expected did not exist. For the time being, the slip of a girl he’d married who had blossomed into a woman before his eyes did not hate him.