Chapter Sixty-One
They had agreed from the first telegraphed report of the firing on Fort Sumter that they would sign up together—Thomas, Jeremy Jr., Stephen, and Armand—and that they would join the military unit designated to defend the borders of their home state from invasion and the coast from siege. The northern and eastern rims of Texas were especially vulnerable to enemy incursions from the free territories of Oklahoma and New Mexico, as well as from Louisiana, should that state fall into union hands. There were reliable reports that the Federals had plans to force Texas to supply beef to the union army and that they possessed detailed routes of ingress. There was also the fear that homesteads would be open to devastating destruction and savagery by the Comanche once the U.S. Cavalry and Texas Rangers, guardians of the frontier, pulled out of the state to join the armies of their respective persuasions. The United States Navy was making its way down the Atlantic blockading southern ports to prevent the exportation of cotton and passage of trade goods, supplies, and arms to the Confederacy. It was only a matter of time before the union fleet arrived in the Gulf of Mexico and sailed down to the ports of Texas with a like mission in mind. Maintaining a clear waterway to transport Texas’s cash crop to Europe and Mexico in exchange for desperately needed munitions was absolutely essential. To meet these concerns, Edward Clark, the state’s acting governor, sent a battle-seasoned captain in the Texas Rangers to East Texas to form a home guard unit and named Howbutker as its mustering site.
Captain Jethro Burleson had joined the legendary Texas Rangers at twenty years of age and had spent the last twenty-two protecting the Texas frontier against outlaws, Mexican bandits, and marauding Indians. General Zachary Taylor, under whom he served in the Mexican-American War, called him Wind Rider because he could ride the fleetest mount with the expert horsemanship of a Comanche warrior.
Jessica hated him on sight because he had distinguished himself in the Cherokee War in East Texas in 1839 in which Chief Bowles, the tribe’s wise and venerable eighty-three-year-old leader, had been killed. Jessica had championed Chief Bowles’s decades-long fight to secure land rights for his people in Texas.
But if anybody could bring her son safely home from the conflict, she thought, gazing at the grizzled veteran holding forth as a guest at her dinner table, it was Captain Jethro Burleson.
Thomas caught her eye and winked. She returned a small smile that did not lighten the visible worry on her face. At the head of the table, his father sat as somberly, flanked by the no less dour men of the DuMont and Warwick households and Jake Davis, who would not allow his family’s falling-out with the Tolivers to interfere with his friendship with his childhood friend.
The only women present were Jessica and Priscilla, neither of whom added to the glow cast by the candle chandelier. Thomas was well aware of the grim nature of his mother’s thoughts as Captain Burleson spoke of his expectation that the war would be “much longer than those fools in the legislature realize,” and of his wife’s meditations as well. Priscilla was probably hoping the evening would never end, for that would mean she and Thomas would adjourn upstairs to the room prepared for the newly married couple before he reported to duty, and there she would be expected to perform her marital responsibility.
Their wedding night had been a disaster. Thomas had anticipated Priscilla looking forward to the marriage act, wanting a child as quickly as he, but she had been nervous, afraid, tense in his arms, squeezing her eyes shut and gritting her teeth as if she expected a fist in her face. She had screamed out at the first hint of penetration. “I’m not ready,” she cried, pushing him off her. “Please stop!”
He had felt like a monster. “What’s wrong? What did I do?”
“You’re…it’s so…big, so…” Her lips had twisted in distaste, and she’d turned away from him and drawn her body into a rigid ball.
Priscilla had, of course, never seen a man’s appendage before, but Thomas would have thought her mother would have informed her of what to expect on her wedding night. Or maybe she had, he’d thought. Ima Woodward was a Puritanical woman. She had probably put the fear of God into her daughter.
“Well, sweetheart,” he’d said, “it’s normal for a man’s…genital organ to…enlarge when he desires a woman.”
She’d peeped at him over her shoulder. “You desire me? It’s not just to impregnate me?”
“Of course not,” he’d lied.
The second night had not been much better. Priscilla had been willing, but he might as well have tried to coax a flame from wet kindling. The third night they had achieved copulation, but it had not been the loving, joyous consummation Thomas had envisioned. Lying afterwards on her side of the bed, he in a fume of disappointment on his, he’d asked, “What is wrong, Priscilla? Can you explain the reason for your reluctance? Don’t you love me?”
“Of course I do,” she’d said, her voice plaintive, sounding like the cry of a kitten lost from its mother. “It’s just that it’s all so…frightening.”
Frightening? He had known numerous women, and none of them had complained that he frightened them. They’d all loved the way he made love.
He had turned to her, moved by the fragile outline of her body beneath the sheet, the lustrous tangle of her blond hair on the pillow, and caressed her face. It was oval-shaped and sweet as a rose. “It will be all right, Priscilla,” he’d said. “It will just take time and patience.”
But in the two weeks they’d been married, he was out of both. In a few days, at the beginning of June, his company would deploy to join another group in Galveston to defend the coast, and so far, Thomas had no reason to hope he’d leave his wife pregnant.
From her side of the table, Priscilla suddenly brightened and launched into a subject that had come to fascinate her. “Captain Burleson, be aware that you are carrying off the sons of aristocrats whose forebears acquitted themselves with famous bravery on English battlefields,” she informed him.
It was the wine, an anesthetic to dull her dread of the coming night, Thomas thought, only then realizing his wife was tipsy. Priscilla was a fastidiously decorous woman—girl, for she had no claim to the realm of his mother. It was not like her to burst forth with a line of conversation that held no interest to the captain and would have embarrassed his parents and guests if pursued, but Priscilla had an inordinate interest in his family’s and their best friends’ ties to a royal past.
“How is that, Mrs. Toliver?” Captain Burleson asked, raising shaggy eyebrows in a polite show of interest.
“It doesn’t bear telling,” Jessica said promptly and rang the small silver bell at her plate to summon Petunia. “Gentlemen, port and cigars await you in the drawing room.”
Priscilla looked rebuffed, and Thomas felt sorry for her. He went around to draw back her chair and whispered in her ear, “Another time, sweet, when we’re all in a mood for your enthusiasm.”
“I was only trying to change the subject, and I’m so proud of your family history,” Priscilla said, pouting.
“I know, Priscilla, but nobody cares about it but us. Take the wine up with you. It might help you to relax.”
“That would be good,” she said, lifting the decanter a little desperately to pour more wine into her glass.
Thomas sighed and left her to join the men.
All through the port and cigars, the war talk, Thomas’s thoughts were on the girl he had married. He could not understand it. When a woman loved a man, wasn’t it the most natural, normal desire in the world to want to be close to him, to feel him in her body, to possess and hold him? Priscilla said she loved him. Was it that she sensed he did not return her feelings that she could not give herself totally to the marriage act? Or was it because she was simply repulsed by everything associated with sexual intercourse—the sweat and fluids and animalistic coupling, the feeling of personal violation and…pain.
Heat surged to his face as he thought with shame of her pain during penetration long before he could conclude his objective, let alone his enjoyment. What was he to do? He would not force himself on his wife. He had tried to be gentle and considerate, but his patience was running out with the time he had left at home. Had he made a terrible mistake? Had he been wrong about Priscilla’s feelings for him? Had it been mere infatuation with his looks, his family’s prominence, and the Tolivers’ connection to royalty that she’d mistaken as love for him? Had she lied to him when she said she wanted children as much as he?
Thomas looked across the room at his father, still stalwart and handsome at his age, still so attractive to his mother who had adored him long before he came to feel the same for her, if Thomas had correctly interpreted the secrets he’d heard at their bedroom window in the early dawn hours of last year. Henri and Bess, Jeremy and Camellia had enjoyed long and happy marriages as far as he could tell. How he wanted the same for him and Priscilla!
But—he had to remember—those couples had married for love.
He excused himself while the wine was still at play in his wife’s bloodstream. Perhaps the alcohol would free her inhibitions, and tonight they would achieve—he admitted it!—the only purpose for which he had married the girl upstairs who waited for him with the sheet drawn to her chin.