Chapter Eighty-Nine
“You’ve been seeing her, haven’t you?” said a voice from the shadows of an alcove opposite Thomas’s room.
Thomas spun around. The alcove was a deep utility space with shelves for setting tea and coffee trays. As children, David and Regina had played hide-and-seek there, the first place they’d look for the other. “You’ve taken to spying on me, Priscilla?” Thomas asked, inserting his key into the lock.
Priscilla emerged from the shadows into the hall lit by a wall sconce. It was nearly midnight. Thomas found something sinister about the rustle and glow of her shiny dressing gown in the light cast by the single candle. She’d lost weight in the two months after their daughter’s death, and her face had a haunted quality about it. Thomas sympathized with her pain, but only as a parent sharing the grief for the death of a mutual child. He could not bring himself to comfort her as a husband. Priscilla’s mourning was compounded by her regret that she’d let the cat out of the bag about reading his mother’s diaries. Thomas no longer wondered where she’d learned the hair-singeing things about his family he had never known. He no longer cared that she could hurt him beyond belief and his endurance. He was already there.
“I’m not spying,” Priscilla said. “I feel I must hang around my husband’s door on the off chance of speaking with him. I would have waited inside your room, but you feel the necessity to lock it.”
“I’ve sufficient reason, wouldn’t you say?” Thomas said. “We’ll talk in the morning. It’s late and I’m tired. Go to bed.”
A flush darkened Priscilla’s cheeks, but she set her jaw. “We’ll talk now. I want to know if it’s the truth.”
“If what’s the truth?”
“That you’ve been seeing Jacqueline Chastain.”
“If by seeing, you mean if I happen to catch a glimpse of her in town?”
“I heard you gave her a ride in the carriage last Sunday.”
“I offered her a ride as she was on her way to her church and I mine. It was too hot to walk.”
“How very convenient that you happened along on the very Sunday I was too depressed to go to church.”
“Think what you will, Priscilla.” Thomas opened his door. He’d had enough of this conversation.
“Don’t you care what people are saying?” she demanded.
Thomas stepped into his room and pulled her in after him. He did not wish his wife’s strident voice carrying to his mother’s suite at the other end of the hall. He shut the door. “What are they saying, Priscilla, or is this simply another one of your unfounded speculations?”
“Where have you been tonight?”
“Playing cards with Jeremy Jr. and Armand and Philippe. Philippe is home on furlough.”
“You weren’t with her?”
“I’ve never been with her.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Well, that’s your prerogative.”
“Where do you go when you’re not home or at the plantation or about your council duties?”
“Well, let’s see what’s left. I suppose I would be at one of my lifelong friends’ homes.”
“You seem to be spending a lot of time with them.”
“So it would seem.”
“Why do you spend so much time at the plantation? I thought Vernon was running things now.”
“He is, but he needs me.”
“You’ve turned him against me.”
“You have turned him against you, Priscilla. He was outside the door at the McCords and heard every word of your tirade.”
As usual, Priscilla’s belligerent stance crumbled. She wrapped her arms around her thinner girth as if to hold herself together. “Thomas—I…I…was, as you said, distraught. Why wouldn’t I be? My daughter had just died. I couldn’t have known what I was saying. I shouldn’t be held responsible.”
“Did you read my mother’s diaries?”
“No!” Priscilla said, her vehement denial flushing her face. “Everything I said was based on rumors. The families are fodder for gossip. You ought to know that.”
“I do,” Thomas conceded, “and if it’s any comfort, I…have also wondered if some…hand of vengeance is not responsible for the tragedies that have occurred in the Toliver family because of the sacrifices my father and I made for the plantation, but only in moments of despair. I put no stock in such superstition, not for a minute. My brother’s fatal fall from a horse, the deaths of our son and daughter, my mother’s incapability to preserve and bear more children—no more a mystery than the DuMonts losing their daughter in a hurricane or the Warwicks a son at the hand of a union officer in wartime. Young women die in childbirth every year. What happened to David could have happened to any boy playing by that pond.”
A strange stillness had come over Priscilla. An odd light appeared in her eye. She drew to a straighter posture. “You mentioned that you, too, had made sacrifices for Somerset. What were they, Thomas? Was I one of them?”
Thomas heard a faint echo of hope that he would deny her suspicion. He turned away and began to unbutton his vest. How he had hoped she would never put that question to him. Priscilla had borne his children. Whatever else she wasn’t, she’d been a loving mother.
“Tell me, Thomas. I want to know.”
He unbuttoned his cuffs. “Yes, Priscilla, you were the sacrifice I made for Somerset.”
There was silence, like the kind following a loud thunderclap. Thomas kept his back to her, unwilling to see what injury he had wrought.
Priscilla said in a surprisingly steady voice, “You wanted an heir in case you were killed in war, and no one else but I was available or suitable at the time. Was that it?”
“That’s right. I thought we could make a go of it.”
“And because of the sacrifice you made marrying me, two of our children are dead.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Well, I do. And so does your mother. I lied, Thomas. I read her diaries.”
Thomas jerked around in time to see tears of deep hurt welled in her eyes and struggled to temper his reaction. He’d destroyed any doubt she may have had of his reason for marrying her. Suspecting was one thing. Knowing for certain was another. He was surprised that after all these years, she still fostered hope he’d married her for love.
“I’m sorry, Priscilla,” he said. “I deceived you, but I hoped our children and the life I’ve provided you—the life you seem to enjoy—was compensation. I know I’ve denied you certain pleasures and joys you would have known if I’d…felt differently or if you’d married someone else, but why in God’s name did you read my mother’s private journals? Was it to gather information for that history of the Tolivers you’re writing?”
She drew a handkerchief from the sleeve of her dressing gown, on hand for emotional moments that struck without warning. Thomas, too, made sure to have one available in his coat pocket for sudden attacks of memory and loss.
Priscilla dabbed at her eyes, then deliberately thrust the handkerchief back up her sleeve. She was through crying for him, the gesture said to Thomas. “I suppose I could give that excuse, but I’m tired of lying,” she said. “You don’t seem to have that tendency, so I’ll try the truth for a change, see how you like it. I read Jessica’s diaries to learn if she suspected me of having sexual relations with Major Andrew Duncan.”
Thomas stared at her, shocked speechless.
Priscilla eyed him innocently. “Jessica did, actually. Suspect the truth, I mean. I found her reflections on the matter in black-and-white in her journal of 1866.”
“Priscilla…did…you have relations?”
“I most certainly did, so don’t think I’ve reached my age without entirely having experienced those pleasures and joys you denied me.”
A memory of the dashing, red-haired army major who had bunked in the carriage house during the union occupation over twenty-one years ago wafted through Thomas’s shock. Twenty-one years ago…
“You never once noticed, did you?” Priscilla said, smug satisfaction glowing in her eyes. “You were so involved with your holy plantation and so indifferent to me, you never once flicked a glance in the direction of Andrew and me, but your mother did. Why do you think she held Regina at arm’s length all her life?”
Priscilla’s face swam into focus. “You’re not telling me that Regina was—”
“Major Andrew Duncan’s? Yes, I am.”
Thomas staggered back as though acid had been flung into his face.
“There now,” Priscilla said. “That knowledge should relieve you of a little grief for Regina’s passing and certainly any guilt you may feel because of your lack of attention to me.”
“You—you’re lying, Priscilla. You’re just saying all this to get even with me, to hurt me.…”
“Well, I warned you I possessed knowledge to do that, didn’t I?”
“Regina was my daughter! Mine!”
“From whom do you think she got her red hair and freckles and skin tone?”
“My mother!”
“Or from Major Duncan. We’ll never know for sure, now will we?” Priscilla moved closer to glare into Thomas’s face, small teeth gritted. “I loved you, Thomas. I wanted you. Not your money or family name or the compensations you threw me as a sop. Sure, I had my…repressions when we married, but with the warmth and assurance of your love I could have overcome them as I did with Andrew. He gave me back to you a changed woman that you enjoyed for a few years.” She patted his shirt front. “It will take a while to adjust to the truth, Thomas, but we’ll go on as we always have, and I better not ever hear of you dallying with Jacqueline Chastain. You owe me your fidelity.”
Thomas brushed away her hand. “I will start proceedings tomorrow morning,” he said.
Priscilla tilted her head inquiringly. “What proceedings?”
“Divorce proceedings. I’m charging you with adultery.”