Chapter Five
She was to be presented in a receiving line in the ballroom rather than strike a grand entrance from the top of the staircase. Staircases were for great beauties. The arrangement suited Jessica just fine. Her right glove was smudged by the time she had finished shaking the hands of the fifty guests attending her birthday party, and she could not feel the stem of her champagne glass for moments after she was free to seek out Lettie standing with Silas Toliver and Jeremy Warwick before her five-tiered, flower-bedecked birthday cake.
“It’s lovely,” Lettie exclaimed in wonder at the cake when Jessica joined them. “Do I recognize Tippy’s hand in the design?”
“Of course. She made the flowers from beaten egg whites dipped into sugar and hardened.”
“Well, it’s exquisite, as are you, birthday girl. What a lovely gown! From Paris?”
“From Boston.” Jessica felt her face grow warm under the gazes of the men. She looked the best she possibly could, but by no means would they agree she was exquisite. Lettie saw beauty in everything and everybody and could well afford to do so. Exquisite described her, as was plain to see in Silas’s eyes. They made a dazzling couple—he, tall, dark, and handsome, a Lord Byron with his unruly raven-black hair and green eyes and attractive chin dimple, and she, petite and blond, porcelain-skinned and dainty, perfectly fitting the subject of the poet’s poem “She Walks in Beauty.”
“And your blush is becoming, too,” Jeremy Warwick said with a little bow and the trace of a devilish grin. Was he making fun of her? Jessica ignored the compliment and said to Lettie, “I can’t tell you how delighted I am to be chosen your bridesmaid.”
“I can’t tell you how delighted I am that you accepted. Shall we go shopping for your dress fabric next week in Charleston?”
“I’d love to, but I’m hopeless when it comes to such things. Tippy has the best eye for material and color. She has marvelous taste. She’s responsible for the design and fabric of my gown. I always take her along to help me select my wardrobe. May she come, too?”
“Tippy?” Silas interposed. “That’s twice I’ve heard her name. I don’t believe I’ve met her.”
“Uh…Tippy is Jessica’s maid,” Lettie explained, her look slightly uncomfortable.
“A Negro maid has better taste than her mistress?” Silas said, addressing Jessica incredulously.
Jessica’s chin went up. “Mine does.”
She felt her elbow taken in a firm, masculine grip. Was its pressure a warning? “I believe that’s the supper bell,” Jeremy said, placing Jessica’s arm through his. “I’m to have the pleasure of your company on my left at table, Miss Jessica. How did I get to be so lucky to sit next to the birthday girl?”
“It was by my father’s design, Mr. Warwick,” Jessica said, suddenly feeling suffocated. She cast decorum to the wind, or rather to the oppressive waft of perfumes permeating the room. “If at all possible, I’m to entrance and beguile you with the hope you will not find me unweddable.”
Her audience stared at her with mouths agape. Jeremy’s chuckle broke the stunned silence. “By Jove,” he said, “I believe I’m already entranced.”
Jessica was combing out her curls from their party do when her father’s short, staccato knock came at the door. Jessica saved herself the bother of responding, for it opened immediately, and he entered wearing a smoking jacket and smelling like cigar.
“Well, my girl, did you enjoy your party?”
“Yes, Papa, very much.” It had been a stultifying evening, the conversation boring and predictable except for hearing Silas and Jeremy discuss their plans under way to lead a wagon train to Texas in the spring. It was to be half a mile long, and they hoped to make at least two miles an hour, enabling the emigrants to make ten miles a day, depending on the weather and sundry other obstacles. The journey sounded dangerous, fraught with the unknown, and she wondered how Lettie would fare from the rigors they would surely face. The only other interesting subject discussed had been the safe arrival that afternoon of Sarah Conklin from Massachusetts, who would be taking Lettie’s teaching position at the local school. The Sedgewicks had picked her up at the dock in Charleston and taken her to her new home in Willow Grove.
“Is she pretty?” Michael had wanted to know.
“Very,” the Reverend Sedgewick had pronounced, coloring slightly.
Jessica had offered no information of her acquaintance with the new schoolmarm, though she suspected that Lettie had been surprised her friend had used her influence to secure the job for an outsider and a northerner to boot.
Her father sat on the settee, the height of the seat too low to stretch out his legs comfortably, but its position providing a vantage point by which he could observe his daughter’s face in the mirror. “I hope you’re not simply telling me what I want to hear and that you did enjoy yourself,” he said. “It was hard to tell. What did you think of Jeremy Warwick?”
Jessica teased a strand of waxed hair from its curl with the hairbrush. “I found him pleasant.”
“Pleasant! Is that all you can say? Why, there’s not an unmarried woman in all the South who wouldn’t find him stimulating, lively, amusing. Many married women, too, truth be told.” He worked his eyebrows knowingly at her reflection, his attempt at drollery so ludicrously foreign to his humorless nature it was hard for her not to laugh.
“Then why isn’t he married?” she asked.
“Too particular, I guess, but rumor has it he lost the girl he loved to typhoid fever when he was younger. I must say, Spook, you didn’t much try to impress him.”
Jessica met his eyes in the mirror. Spook. He had not called her that since she was a little girl. The name had come from a game they’d played when she would pop out from a hiding place to surprise him. Boo! she’d cry, and he’d laugh and swing her around and call her his spook. Her throat tightened with an almost forgotten ache her father could waken in her.
“I was supposed to try to impress him, Papa?”
A pink flush cropped up around Carson’s ears. “Well, yes, Spook. I admit to trying to play matchmaker. Jeremy is the most eligible bachelor in South Carolina other than Silas Toliver, and he’s asked for. Besides, Silas has no money. Jeremy does. He would look after you properly.”
“Silas has no money?” Jessica glanced in surprise at her father in the mirror. “How can that be? Queenscrown is a prosperous plantation.”
“Benjamin Toliver left Queenscrown to his older son, Morris. Silas is no more than the hired help. That’s why he’s going to Texas.”
Alarmed for Lettie, Jessica asked, “How can he afford to do so?”
“He has some money of his own that he’s sunk into the venture, and the rest he’s borrowing from me.”
Jessica shuddered for Lettie. Not only would she be facing untold hardships in making the journey and starting a new life in Texas, but all would be done on borrowed money. It would probably take years to pay back her father before the plantation was up and running and Silas saw a penny of his own. Perhaps love would be enough to sustain them and see Silas through to the dream he and Jeremy had apparently long harbored.
Jessica turned on her dressing-table stool to look at him. “Why are you in a hurry to marry me off, Papa?”
“Well, you…you’re not getting any younger, you know. Your mother was married at your age, and frankly, I can’t think of another man more worthy of you than Jeremy.” Carson pinched at the air with two plump, strong fingers. “You’ve got to pluck him out of the pot before someone else does.”
“That depends on whether Jeremy is willing to be plucked.”
“He looked willing enough to me, but you rebuffed him.”
“He’s nearly thirty, eleven years older than I am.”
“What difference does that make? I am eight years older than your mother, as is Silas older than Lettie, and look how happy she is with him.”
Jessica allowed that, yes, Lettie’s happiness was evident to everyone at the party. She wondered if there was a man alive who could put the stars in her eyes that Silas had placed in Lettie’s. She did like Jeremy. She had found him stimulating and lively and amusing, but he could never be interested in someone like her. Her father had witnessed merely a gentleman’s courtliness toward the daughter of his host, and her indifference had been caused by resentment at being exhibited like a filly at a horse auction.
“He’s going to Texas, you know,” she said.
Carson’s glance fell to his house slippers. “Yes, I know.”
Jessica rotated back to the mirror. In this house, more was related—and understood—in the silences of her family’s conversations with one another than in spoken words. The moment’s lull clearly admitted her father’s sad but true willingness to see her married to someone suitable as soon as feasible and carried away as far as possible. Jessica remained silent, the rhythmic sound of the brush strokes censorious in the quiet.
Carson raised his head and asked suddenly, looking around. “Where is Tippy? Why isn’t she here to attend you?”
“I sent her to her room. There was no point in her waiting up to see me to bed.”
Carson rose, frowning. “She’s supposed to be here until you retire—then she can go to her room. You spoil that girl too much, Jessie. I won’t have it.”
“Yes, Papa,” Jessica said, continuing to brush. Tippy had pleaded to stay up to hear about the party, but an attack of pleurisy that afternoon had almost brought her to her knees. Jessica would not dare remind her father of Tippy’s lung condition, aggravated by the day’s sudden cold snap. With few exceptions, he had little tolerance for useless property. “I’ll see that she earns her keep,” Jessica said.
“You better.” Carson paused, locking eyes with his daughter in the mirror. She saw distress in his; felt tears rise in hers. Again, silence fell, speaking louder than tongues. “Spook, my dear, why can’t you be more like…a Wyndham?” he asked. “How was it you were born so different from the rest of us?”
“I don’t know, Papa,” she said, attacked by a sudden apprehension that left her cold, “but I fear my dissimilarity of birth will cost me dearly.”