Chapter Ninety-One
He had meant to stay in Houston only for the weekend and depart Sunday to be home in time to ride out to Somerset for a look at how the first picking had gone, but Vernon remained in the city four days. When he returned to his home on Houston Avenue, Jacqueline met him with a small cry of relief. “Vernon, we’ve been so worried. We thought something had befallen you.”
“I should have sent a telegram. I’m sorry. Jacqueline…may I speak with you?”
Vernon drew her aside into the library for a private word. He had been met with a ring of black, anxious faces—Amy’s, Barnabas’s, Sassie’s, and those of several other servants. His grandmother was upstairs and his father at the plantation. When he and his stepmother were alone, Vernon said, “Jacqueline, I…believe I’ve fallen in love.”
“Ah,” she said. “So that was the cause for the delay. Who is she? How did you meet?”
Jacqueline was one of the easiest people in the world to talk to. At first Vernon had bowed his neck not exactly against her, but certainly not for her. But within weeks of her coming to live in his childhood home, he understood what had drawn his father to her. Vernon had expected her to take over the house with wide-sweeping, arbitrary changes, impose her will, tastes, and authority, but she had not. She had simply blended in, won the hearts of the servants immediately, the approval of his grandmother, and, gradually, her stepson’s admiration. She brought a calm and soothing presence into the home, and, despite the grief lines permanently engraved in his father’s fifty-five-year-old face, Vernon had never seen him so happy—if he’d ever seen him happy at all.
“On the train to Houston,” he answered his stepmother’s question. “Jacqueline, do you believe in love at first sight?”
Jacqueline pursed her lips. “At your age, I believe in physical attraction at first sight.”
“Why at my age? Why not yours when you and my father met?” Vernon had learned from his mother that she’d made “the mistake of her life” when she sent his father to Jacqueline Chastain’s shop to pick up a headband for his sister’s sixteenth birthday party. “Something flared between him and that woman that she made sure stayed lit,” his mother had accused.
Jacqueline answered, “Because at your father’s and my age, we recognized something beyond the physical that we both longed for and could give to the other.”
“How do you know when it’s more than the physical?”
“That knowledge comes only with knowledge of the other person.”
Vernon threaded his hands agitatedly through his hair. “I don’t know that I can wait to get to know Darla Henley. I’m so…so besotted by her now. Jacqueline, I could hardly leave her to get on the train. I wanted to put her in my satchel and bring her home with me. I never thought I could feel this way about any woman, but I cannot think, I cannot breathe when I think of her.”
His mother had warned that Darla could be a gold digger, but she wasn’t, Vernon was certain. He decided to play down the impression of wealth he’d given her by the first-class compartment on the train, the French champagne, his fine clothes, and see what she made of it. He called upon her the second night he was in Houston and rather than taking her to the elegant restaurant atop the Townsmen, the elite gentleman’s club to which he and his father belonged, he squired her to a more modest eating establishment. He wore an informal set of clothes he kept at his mother’s for lounging about the house and transported her to and from her father’s narrow, three-story “railroad house” in a hired cab. If Darla was surprised or disappointed in her expectations of the man who appeared at her door from the more affluent one with whom she’d shared a compartment on the train, she did not give a hint. She seemed only delighted that he’d honored his request to see her again. He’d skillfully avoided talking about himself on the train, and she’d been too polite to ask what he did for a living. Later in conversation he’d volunteered that he worked a cotton farm with his father in East Texas.
“Very difficult work,” Darla had said. “My aunt would attest to it.”
After relating these details to his stepmother, Vernon said, “Do you think she’ll be offended when she finds out I’m a man of wealth?”
“You mean do you think she’ll believe you dressed down and conveyed her about to places you thought suitable for a woman of her station?”
“You’re so quick, Jacqueline,” Vernon said. “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”
“Be honest with Darla, Vernon. Explain that it wasn’t her station you were thinking of, but your own and the reason for your concern. Give her the choice to be displeased with you or understanding of your need to know the basis of her interest.”
“Still,” Vernon said, feeling contrite, “it was a rotten thing to do.”
“Yes, it was,” Jacqueline agreed. “There are other ways besides watering down one’s credentials to determine a person’s genuine feelings.”
“I will keep that in mind, Jacqueline. Thank you,” he said and hugged her.
Vernon was back on Darla’s doorstep the next Saturday, having dispatched a letter notifying her of his return. He’d decided to wait a little longer before making a clean breast of his status for fear of how the chips would fall. Status. How he loathed the word. It reminded him of his mother. To avoid having to share his limited time with his mother, guiltily, he booked a room in a hotel within short walking distance to the Henley residence. In the early afternoon, he tugged the rope of its front doorbell.
“Am I too early?” he asked, when she opened the door and immediately set his pulse to racing.
“Not quite early enough,” she said, smiling. “I’ve been looking for you since morning.”
She had packed a picnic lunch and knew of a delightful little park not far away. The fall weather was perfect for walking. They didn’t need to spend money on a cab, she said. They found a grassy spot in the shade of a tree and spread a blanket. After the sandwiches and cake, Vernon lay with his head in her lap while she read to him. “I’m a poetry reader myself. Do you mind?” she said, waving a slim collection of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poems before him.
“I’m a poetry listener myself,” Vernon lied. “Read to me.”
She stroked his hair, massaged his temples, smoothed his brow while she read the passages aloud, the sound of her sultry voice floating over him like music from some heavenly body beyond time and space. He melted into the bliss of her thighs beneath his head, only the fabric of her skirt and petticoat separating him from her warm flesh. He had never known a more perfect afternoon.
“Do you attend church on Sunday?” he asked, hoping she did not and he could spend the brief hours of the next morning with her before he had to catch his train to Howbutker.
“Sometimes,” she answered. “My father is not a churchgoer.”
They stood before her front door. The porch lantern was burning. They had been to supper at a café in the neighborhood. “Will you…attend tomorrow?” he asked.
“No, I was hoping you’d agree to have breakfast with Papa and me.”
“I’d like that very much,” Vernon said, relieved, and reached above her head to turn the lantern down low, casting them into semidarkness undiluted by light from the harvest moon. “I would also like to kiss you,” he said.
She answered with a demure bat of her tawny lashes. “Well…if you insist.”
“I most assuredly do insist.”
He lowered his head, drowning in the amber eyes before they closed and she submitted to his lips with a passion that would have made him think her easy if he didn’t believe she felt as he did—that they were made for each other. Vernon remembered his father saying, “My son, there is no desert drier than a loveless marriage. Marry for love, or not at all.”
“Even for Somerset?” he’d asked.
“Even for Somerset.”
Vernon also recalled gazing over Somerset’s fields after a particularly parched season. The rain had come in the night, succoring the dry earth, filling the troughs between the cotton rows with life-sustaining water that would reach their roots, and he’d tasted the sweet quench of their thirst. Vernon felt that sensation now.
But he would follow Jacqueline’s advice. Knowledge of a woman came only with knowing her. He would not make the mistake of his father. Their lips separating, her body still molded to his, Vernon looked into the amber eyes and said the words he hoped to say to her every night the rest of his life, “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
The next morning as Darla waved Vernon off in a hired cab, her father stole up behind her. “When are you going to let him know you know who he is?” he asked.
“When he tells me,” Darla said. “That will be soon enough.”
She thought he had looked familiar on the train. That thatch of coal-black hair, startling green eyes, the cleft chin, his sheer handsomeness were too memorable not to rouse the feeling she’d seen his picture in an article that had come across her copy-editor’s desk. Her publishing firm also lent its services to newspaper offices. She had deliberately excluded that information when explaining her duties to Vernon. After their meeting, she’d asked about Vernon Toliver from her boss, who knew the family name well. The Tolivers were “old Texas,” he told her—moneyed and prominent in their corner of the state—and directed Darla to back issues of newspapers containing coverage of the family from the days of the Republic to the present time. By the end of the week and her second outing with Vernon Toliver, she was well versed in the history of the cotton-growing Tolivers from Howbutker, Texas.
Darla was not at all hurt that Vernon had kept his prominence and wealth a secret from her. She considered the omission smart. He didn’t know her from Adam’s ox, but he needn’t worry. She was not after his money. She merely wished to become his wife and care for him the rest of his life. He needed her, and she would fill him to the brim. She would have many children—boys, she hoped. She didn’t believe she was cut out to be the mother of girls. They were too devious, and she knew she would not be happy sharing her husband’s love with another woman, even a daughter. When Vernon became assured of her love, he would reveal himself to her. Until then, Darla would allow time and nature and her own instincts to guide their course.