Chapter Eighty-Eight
He arrived minutes behind the doctor. The McCord men—Tyler, his twin brothers, and their father—were standing in a group on the wraparound porch of the main house, heads down and shoulders slumped. As Thomas leaped to the ground, his frantic stare lit upon Curtis McCord first. The rancher’s hand was clamped around his lower jaw, the pose of a man in great despair, and a jab of terror struck Thomas in his gut. Seeing him, Curtis cut through his brood and hurried down the steps.
“Thank God you’re here, man. You’re in time—”
“For what?”
“You better hurry,” Curtis said. “I’m sorry to have to say it, but you better hurry.”
Thomas pushed by him. He had a glimpse of Tyler’s tear-washed face as he ran up the steps and into the house, the guilt heavy in his son-in-law’s red-rimmed gaze that dropped the instant he made eye contact with his wife’s father.
A servant, recognizing him, merely pointed up the stairs to a room at the far end of the hall. Even before Thomas reached it, his stomach heaved at the warm, astringent stench of blood and body fluids, an odor he had not smelled since his days in the midst of the wounded and dying on the battlefields of Texas in the Civil War. He charged toward the open door and was met by the tall, taciturn Mexican woman that ran the house with an implacable hand. She moved to stand in front of him. “You cannot go in, Se?or. Doctor here now. No men allowed.”
“The hell you say. I’m her father.” Thomas shoved the housekeeper out of the way and tore into the room. A cry ripped from his throat. On the bed, his daughter lay under a sheet whose bottom half was soaked in blood. Her eerily pale face, framed by a mass of sweat-darkened hair and her freckles standing out like a sprinkling of cinnamon on a white empty plate, appeared to float from the pillow. She moved her head at hearing him, but her eyes stayed closed.
“Daddy…” Regina acknowledged his presence with a weak lift of her hand, and Thomas rushed to clasp it, the figures of Anne McCord and the doctor and midwife blurs on the other side of the bed.
“I’m here, Poppy. I’m here,” Thomas said. He knelt by the bed, his throat clutching. “What can Daddy do for his little girl?”
“Keep…holding…my hand,” Regina murmured, her eyes still closed, her slight breathing labored. The doctor moved to lift and peer beneath the sheet.
“Forever if you wish, sweetheart,” Thomas said, stroking her cold, clammy forehead. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“The baby…was…born dead,” Regina whispered. “A boy…”
“Sssh, rest now, sweetheart. It will be all right.”
“Mother?”
“On the way. Granmama and Vernon, too.”
He heard Priscilla’s hysterical voice from the floor below, followed by a rush of anxious footsteps up the stairs. When Thomas glanced toward the door, he saw the doctor shake his head at the midwife and felt the earth drop from beneath his knees. Seconds later, Priscilla burst into the room, his mother behind her, but they had come too late. Thomas turned back to his daughter and observed her chest fall in its final breath.
Beginning to keen, Priscilla shoved Thomas out of the way, toppling him, and gathered her daughter to her bosom to rock her as she had when Regina was a child. Thomas hauled himself to his feet and fell into a nearby chair, covering his face with his hands as tears began to stream. He heard Anne and the doctor say something to his mother before they and the midwife slipped from the room, and then Jessica came to stand beside him and place a hand on his shoulder. He felt its gentle weight like a crushing stone. Its significance reached beyond commiseration, beyond mere understanding of his grief. He lifted his tear-streaked face. “Are we Tolivers cursed, Mother?”
She closed her eyes against his interrogation. Her face sagged, and Thomas was suddenly reminded of how old she was—seventy in October, the month another of his children had died.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I do!” Priscilla suddenly shrieked. She whirled to them, still clutching her daughter, loathing in her streaming eyes, the contortion of her mouth. “You Tolivers are cursed, cursed, cursed!” she screamed. “And my baby boy and now my daughter are dead because of it. God, I wish I’d never married into this family! I wish I’d never laid eyes on any of you, God damn you!”
Vernon would be arriving soon. He must not hear his mother carry on so. Thomas forced sound from his throat. “Priscilla…please. You’re distraught. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“The hell I don’t!” Carefully, Priscilla laid her daughter down and levered herself up to face them. Her hat was askew, the front of her beribboned bodice soiled with the sweat of her daughter’s ordeal. Her eyes gleamed maniacally. Her lips twisted obscenely as she continued in a screech mindless of the rain of consequences to fall.
“Jessica’s father paid Silas Toliver to jilt the woman he loved to marry your mother, Thomas. Did you know that? The price was the money to buy Somerset—that holy altar before which you Tolivers worship.”
Priscilla had flounced to Thomas’s chair to speak directly into his face. “Your grandmother predicted a curse would fall on the land because of what he did, and your father came to believe her when he lost his son and the other children he would have had if he’d not betrayed the woman he was supposed to marry. Until the day he died, your father believed his children—the heirs to Somerset—were born to die because of the jinx he’d incurred when he made his deal with the devil.”
Riveted to his chair, Thomas asked aghast, “How do you know all this?”
“She read my diaries,” Jessica answered calmly.
Priscilla blinked and regarded Jessica as if only then realizing she was in the room. Thomas saw rage give way to befuddlement in his wife’s sudden notice of his mother.
“You read my mother’s diaries?” he croaked.
Priscilla backed away unsteadily, squeezing her eyes shut and pressing her fingers to her temples as if unsure of where she was. “No! I’ve heard rumors, that’s all.”
“I’m afraid not,” Jessica said. She stepped to the bed and trailed the back of her hand down her granddaughter’s cheek. Bending, she kissed the ash-pale brow. “Sleep well, dearly beloved child.” Straightening, she regarded Thomas and Priscilla with a face as stolid as a marble bust. “Be careful of what you say. Vernon is in the hall.”
“Keep him out there for a little while, Mother, and shut the door,” Thomas said as she turned to leave.
Priscilla had cowered away from him. When the door closed, he asked, “Is it true, Priscilla? Did you read my mother’s diaries?”
“No! And why should that be important anyway? Our daughter is dead.” Priscilla clamped her hands to her face and began to wail again. Heavily, Thomas pushed up from the chair. He wished he had the stomach to fold the mother of his daughter in his arms, but he did not. His feelings for his wife were as dead as the body under the blood-soaked sheet.
“We must speak with Tyler to ask permission to take our daughter home,” he said.
Four days later, on the afternoon of the burial when the mourners of Regina Elizabeth Toliver McCord had seen her interred in the family cemetery with her stillborn son, the members of the Toliver family gathered listlessly in the parlor of the mansion. They sat sprawled in the stiff, horsehair chairs and couches, too emotionally drained to move or speak. Priscilla and Jessica had not removed their hats or Thomas and Vernon their stiff cravats. Amy entered silently bearing a tray of tea and specially baked scones and left the room.
Thomas and Priscilla had not spoken a word beyond necessity since the evening the little procession returned to Houston Avenue pulling the wagon that carried their daughter’s body home to be bathed and dressed for viewing. Stiff-lipped and dry-eyed, they had met the flood of visitors to the mansion from opposite sides of the room. The evening of their return, Thomas had slept in one of the guest rooms. The next day, he instructed members of the household staff to remove his things from the room he shared with Priscilla to his new quarters.
“Somebody needs to say something,” Vernon said.
Jessica poured the tea. “One lump or two?” she said, sugar tongs raised.
“Neither,” Vernon said, standing. “I need to get out to the plantation.”
“I am going to have a rest,” Jessica said. “Perhaps you should, too, Priscilla.”
“Yes,” she agreed listlessly.
“Thomas?” His mother cast an eye in his direction.
Thomas drew up his legs to stand. “I will not be home for supper,” he said.
Priscilla threw him a wild-eyed look. “Where will you be?”
“Out,” he answered.