Chapter Seventy
“Mother, she’s the spitting image of you,” Thomas said, turning the swaddled bundle in his arms to Jessica for her first peek at her granddaughter.
“Oh, dear,” Jessica said, peering into the well of pink blanket at the little red face of Regina Elizabeth Toliver.
“Now, now,” Thomas chided, his rebuke infused with the proud laughter of a father enchanted by his newborn infant. “I know you’ve never been happy with your fair skin and freckles and red hair, but Papa loved them, and so do I, and I will love them on this little angel.” He touched his lips to the diminutive forehead.
“Maybe she’ll be spared my freckles,” Jessica said, doubting the hope and herself as the origin of the child’s misfortune.
Thomas smiled down at his two-year-old son, who stood gripping his leg, the boy’s upturned face filled with curiosity at the object in his father’s arms that had so enraptured him. They were alone in the library. The Woodwards were upstairs with their daughter, and soon Priscilla’s mother would swoop in to return the child to her daughter’s breast.
“All right,” Thomas said, “it’s your turn, Vernon. Come, let’s sit down, and I will introduce you to your little sister.”
Jessica watched her tall son take a chair to facilitate her grandson’s view of the first female born to a Toliver in twenty years. Thomas’s joy in the child’s gender was a surprise to her. He had hoped for a boy as a playmate for Vernon. Thomas made no bones about wanting Vernon to have many brothers. He had minded being an only child after Joshua’s death and had demanded, “When am I going to have another brother like my friends?” before he was old enough to know not to ask such questions.
“Twenty years!” Priscilla had echoed when Thomas had informed her of the little-known fact of Toliver history after the doctor’s announcement she’d given birth to a daughter. “That’s an entire generation!”
“You have done what no other woman in the family has been able to accomplish in all that time,” Thomas said, fondly blotting his wife’s wet hairline with a towel.
“You’re not disappointed?” she asked. Priscilla lay exhausted in the birth bed after three hours of intense labor she’d borne with amazing fortitude and patience. Dr. Woodward’s competitor had been called in to assist with the delivery and declared to Priscilla’s father hovering anxiously in the hall that he had never seen a birthing mother so cooperative with Mother Nature.
“She really wants this baby,” he’d said.
Thomas said tenderly, “No, I’m not disappointed. I’m sorry I gave you the need to ask.”
“You wanted a son so badly.”
“I wanted another child. Given the sons born into the families around here, I didn’t dare dream of becoming the father of a daughter.”
“You don’t mind that she…doesn’t look like either of us?” Priscilla asked.
“Not at all. She represents my mother’s side of the family.”
“I’m so relieved you feel that way,” Priscilla said.
Jessica had listened to the conversation from a corner of the room (having yielded the attendant position at the side of her old bed to Priscilla’s mother), and asked herself what difference did the child’s paternity matter? What did family blood have to do with loving a child?
Everything, if Thomas ever suspects his daughter is not a limb off the Toliver tree, she had thought. So far he had perceived nothing. The attraction between Priscilla and Major Duncan appeared to have escaped his notice entirely. Not even the downturn of his wife’s happy mood after the major’s departure roused his suspicions. He blamed the destruction of the school. “She was so keen on her work there,” he’d said.
“I’m sure that’s the explanation,” Jessica had remarked but was not surprised when Priscilla, using the excuse of her pregnancy, had rejected a request by the Freedmen’s Bureau to resume her teaching duties in an abandoned warehouse until another facility could be built.
Paternity, blood, inherited links would matter to Thomas. Jessica felt the needles of a cold apprehension as she listened to him explain to Vernon his duties as a brother to his little sister. What if Thomas, for no particular reason, should have cause to wonder if the little redheaded girl he called his daughter was really his flesh and blood? What if, on some ordinary day as he observed Regina Elizabeth at play, bearer of his Queenscrown grandmother’s name, he should unexpectedly recall Major Andrew Duncan and remember how his wife had come alive during his assignment in Howbutker? What if one thought led to another and on to another, and then suddenly, as surely as he was certain the sun would rise tomorrow, Thomas knew. That sort of instant awareness happened.
It had happened to her. Jessica remembered vividly the moment the realization struck her that Jeremy Warwick loved her beyond the breadth of friendship, though his attention would never stray outside its fraternal bounds. The families were playing croquet on the Warwicks’ lawn, Jeremy paired with Jessica, Henri with Camellia, while Bess served the lemonade. Jeremy’s ball sailed through the last wicket and hit the stake. He’d smiled at her. “We won,” he said, and in that second, like a shaft of sunlight revealing a secret passage in a familiar room, Jessica knew.
And Jeremy knew that Silas had known. That awareness was the reason Jeremy had asked her not to divulge to Silas as he was dying the secret of the money stored in Boston and how it got there. Just trust me, Jess. In some ways I know your husband better than you. He would mind that you took me into your confidence over him and that I acted upon it without his knowledge.
But Silas had trusted their fidelity to him not to mind their special friendship, and so it would continue. She’d been shaken by the insight, but Jeremy would never learn of her perception that day. “Yes, we did,” she’d said, picking up the ball and waving it triumphantly at the others.
But, oh Lord, what a tragedy if Thomas discovered that Regina Elizabeth had been fathered by another man, and a union officer to boot. There would be no picking up the pieces and putting them back together again—not for the marriage or for Thomas’s relationship with his daughter.
“Poppies,” Vernon piped. “Her hair the color of poppies.”
“Then we will call her that, son. We’ll call her Poppy.”
They made a beautiful picture, her glowing son and curious grandson huddled over the infant in Thomas’s arms, a perfect subject for a portrait painter. Jessica wondered why she, as a member of the first generation, could not force herself to complete the scene.
“Come join us, Mother, before our little princess is taken from us.”
Thomas’s invitation was interrupted by the opening of the library doors, and Petunia appeared. “Miss Priscilla sent me to collect the baby, Mister Thomas. It’s her feeding time.”
Indeed, the child had begun to cry hungrily, tiny limbs flailing in the blanket. Reluctantly, Thomas handed the small bundle over to the maid. “Bring her back to me, Petunia,” he said. “I want her to know her father.”
Petunia shot a glance at Jessica, and Jessica slid hers away, her stomach curling. “As you say, Mister Thomas,” Petunia said.
Civil turmoil marked the rest of the spring and summer as Jessica approached her fiftieth birthday. Major Duncan’s successor had been replaced by an iron-fisted general in charge of all the union forces in Texas. Dissatisfied with the region’s attempts to circumvent the directives Congress imposed on its political, social, and economic structure, the general took up residence in Howbutker and immediately inflamed the citizenry by removing its elected county officials and judges and replacing them with his appointees. Only those who took the government-mandated “Oath Test” stating they had never volunteered to bear arms against the United States or “given aid, countenance, counsel, or encouragement to persons engaged in armed hostility” could serve in public office. Thomas was removed immediately as head of the city council and Armand DuMont as mayor.
Those positions, along with others vacated by the commander’s sweep, were filled with northern carpetbaggers, termed so because most arrived carrying all they possessed in fabric bags. These persons swooped in to buy destitute farms and plantations and cattle ranches at a fraction of the cost they would have had to pay for the same property and labor in northern states. The county warily and resentfully waited to see what control they would exert over the residents in their new positions of power.
An epidemic of yellow fever added to East Texas’s miseries the year of 1867 and a new foliage-eating pest called the army worm came to harass cotton farmers. Suffocating in the heat with windows closed to keep out mosquitoes, Jessica thought of Secretary of State William Seward’s purchase of Alaska from Russia that added 586,412 cold square miles to United States territory and wondered if it were possible to grow cotton there. The children were fretful, Thomas worried and irritable, Jessica weary from her depressing work in a charity hospital set up for Civil War veterans. Priscilla, on the other hand, appeared to have risen above it all, content on the cloud of her improved relations with her husband that gave her sway to exert more authority over the household.
“Whatever are you doing, Jessica?”
Jessica turned at the peremptory voice. Priscilla stood in the doorway of the pantry where Jessica had been counting the dwindling supply of staples still scarce after the war.
“Why…” Jessica said, annoyed that she had to explain herself, “I believe you can see for yourself that I’m checking the larder for the food goods we have left.”
“Isn’t that my job?”
“It is if you would do it.”
“I’ve been busy with the children.”
“Which is why I’m doing it.”
Such exchanges were not uncommon between them. Gone was the infatuated, intimidated girl who had come to them wide-eyed at the elegance and refinement of her in-laws—and before the arrival of Major Andrew Duncan and the freeing of certain inhibitions, from which Thomas had benefited.
But October brought cooler weather and the announcement that Priscilla was again pregnant. A surprise visitor awaited Jessica the afternoon of her birthday. She was summoned to the parlor to find a spindle-limbed black woman of her age wearing one of the new princess gowns that eschewed crinolines and cages and gave her bantam, ungainly figure somewhat of a shape. The woman responded to Jessica’s open-mouthed astonishment with a wide grin. “You didn’t think I’d miss your fiftieth birthday, did you?” Tippy said.