Chapter Ninety-Five
It was early evening when Thomas arrived home. Supper had been kept warm for him, but he declined it, and after giving Jacqueline a long, thankful embrace, he went up to his mother’s suite carrying Priscilla’s memorial to the Tolivers. Closeted in his first-class compartment on the way home, visions had hurled out of the past against the twinkle of lights in distant houses seen from his train window. A scene shot before his eyes of Priscilla complaining to him of his mother caring more for their sons than for their daughter. He had dismissed her observation as foolish. His mother loved all her grandchildren equally. She’d simply had more experience raising boys and was more comfortable around them. Occupied fool that he was, Thomas had never given a thought to his mother’s slight detachment from Regina. He’d noticed only how his daughter’s little freckled face lit up and her arms reached out for her grandmother when she came into sight. Vignette after vignette of family times flashed to him that justified Priscilla’s concern, and he’d been a blind idiot not to have seen it until now. The light should have dawned when Priscilla admitted reading his mother’s diaries to learn if she’d discovered her affair with the major.
A chill gripped his spine as Thomas realized his mother had suspected from Regina’s birth that her granddaughter could be Andrew Duncan’s child. Could be, for how could she know for sure? Thomas had lived these many years with the doubt of his daughter’s paternity buried in him like a festering bullet impossible to extract. He had resigned himself to it, but he could no longer live with the gnawing, burning pain. He had to know what his mother knew. He wanted to believe Priscilla—he was desperate to believe her—but that leap was too high for his credulity unless his mother could offer some proof of her own that his daughter was or was not born of his flesh. As Priscilla had said, his mother never missed a trick.
Jessica answered his knock in her bedclothes, but she was still up, having her evening pot of hot chocolate. She looked surprised to see him.
“Yes, son? What is it?”
“Mother, I must talk to you.”
“I’ll be delighted to listen.”
Thomas had never told anyone of Priscilla’s admission of adultery or her denial of him as Regina’s father that night in his bedroom. For eight years he’d shouldered the burden of her disclosures in secret, but he could no longer bear his pain alone.
“You knew all along of her relationship with Duncan, didn’t you, Mother?” Thomas said when he bared the reason for the divorce and Priscilla’s retraction of her lie.
“And you’re wondering why I didn’t tell you,” Jessica said. “What good would have come of it, son? Besides, I only suspected their attraction. I did not know for sure.”
“But you treated Regina as if you did.”
A hint of color on his mother’s lined cheeks betrayed her shame. “Yes, I did, and I hope you will forgive what I can never pardon in myself. I was as sure then that Andrew Duncan was Regina’s father as I am now sure he wasn’t.”
“Why? What evidence of her paternity changed your mind?”
Jessica laid the Toliver history tome she’d earlier thumbed through on a side table. Thomas thought it a deliberate diversion to gather her words. His mother was not one to speak of serious subjects without first considering them.
“It doesn’t matter now how I know,” she said, flickering a sad smile. “A grandmother’s intuition, perhaps, but Priscilla has given you all the evidence you need. Your heart can rest easy.”
“You’re saying I should believe her?”
“Oh, yes, son. Priscilla told you the truth.”
“How do you know?”
“In these cases, my dear, you have to determine the truth by what you know about the person. You know Priscilla hates you as only a scorned woman can. If Andrew Duncan had been Regina’s father, why would she feel the need to pull out the thorn of your doubt? It was through no regard for your pain she attempted to release you from it, but concern for her immortal soul. Can you imagine dying with something like the lie she told you on her conscience? Do you credit Priscilla with that much courage? I’m sure she hopes you’ll reject her confession and live in misery the rest of your life, but she’s cleared her skirts with her Maker and that’s all that matters to her. Believe her, son, and treasure a father’s memories of his daughter.”
Thomas contemplated his mother. He would never have positive proof that the daughter interred next to his son had been blood of his blood, flesh of his flesh, but he was sure enough of Priscilla to believe the logic of the living legend sitting across from him. His mother had never steered him wrong. What was more, she was convinced that Regina was his child, a vote of confidence good enough for him. A feeling of deliverance swept through him like a man drawing fresh air into his nostrils after being buried alive. He stood up on the brink of tears and bent to kiss the cheek of the woman who had given him life. Of course he forgave her. She had suffered the doubt of Regina’s paternity longer than he and now must live out her life regretting the affection she’d denied the best of the Tolivers.
He wiped away a drop of moisture that had fallen on her cheek. “Thank you, Mother. Sleep well. I certainly will.”
“Must you be in such a hurry, son? Where are you off to this time of night?”
Thomas retrieved the volume. “To see Vernon. I must tell my son his mother is dying.”
Jessica listened to Thomas’s footsteps fade away and fancied they sounded lighter despite the sadness of his mission. How thankful she was to have lived long enough to relieve her son from the pain she’d been ignorant of all these years. She was grateful, too, for the inspiration that had enabled her to shift the proof of her granddaughter’s paternity onto Priscilla. Thomas believed her, and now his mother no longer had to dread the conversation she may have had with him if he’d pressed her for the truth as she believed it.
I knew long ago that Regina was your daughter, Thomas. Tippy told me that one day I’d know for sure whether she was of your flesh and blood.
How? How did you know?
Because Regina died, my son. If she’d been another man’s daughter, she would have lived.
But, of course, she’d never have that conversation with Thomas. As a mother, she would never relieve her son’s doubt by burdening him with guilt. Thanks to Priscilla, she’d convinced him through reason, the only language Thomas understood.
Priscilla had pointed him in the right direction when she told him to read the history of the Tolivers. The proof he sought was right before him in the genealogical charts, but Thomas would never see it. Her son did not believe in the curse, but Priscilla did.
Eight years ago, the night they brought Regina’s body home for burial, Vernon had come to her room bleary-eyed with grief at his sister’s death and the certainty his parents’ marriage was irrevocably over. What curse was his mother screaming about, he’d wanted to know. He’d been twenty-two at the time, stunningly handsome, but grief had reduced him to the little boy who used to crawl into his grandmother’s lap when in need of “sugar time,” as Amy called it.
Jessica had related the basis for the superstition and watched the skepticism grow in her grandson’s expression.
When she’d finished, Vernon had summarized. “Let me be sure I understand, Granmama. This…hex on Somerset started when my grandfather married you rather than the woman he’d promised to marry and as a result, his son died and you were unable to bear any more children after my father?”
Jessica had conceded that the notion did sound far-fetched when considering that other families suffered similar tragedies, but there was the matter of Thomas’s children dying in his generation.
“Caused by my father marrying my mother for the reason he did?” Vernon had stated incredulously.
“That’s what your mother believes.”
Vernon had blown out his cheeks in apparent relief. It was so easy for the young to mistake a simple explanation as the full answer to a troubling question. “Thanks for telling me, Granmama. I was afraid there was more to it. My poor mother is deranged, as she has every right to be.” He’d stood up, clearly satisfied, and given her a grin marked with sadness. “As you used to read to us from Aristotle, Granmama: ‘One swallow does not a summer make.’ So, I’m thinking the deaths in two generations, though they could be construed as consequences for wrongful marriages, do not constitute a pattern—or a curse. But just to be sure,” he said, “in the third generation, I won’t repeat the sins of the fathers. I’ll marry a woman I love.”
As Vernon left, he looked back with a smile, reminding Jessica of Silas. As Thomas aged, he had fleshed out, and she could see the influence of the Wyndham males in his heavier shoulders and thicker girth, but Vernon’s figure, like his grandfather’s, would remain true to the slim, graceful stature of his aristocratic forebear.
“And I will add this, Granmama,” Vernon said. “However wonderful the woman was back in South Carolina that my grandfather didn’t marry, he made no mistake in marrying you.”
Jessica still felt a pleasurable warmth in remembering her grandson’s compliment and recalled her relief when he’d closed the door. She’d been afraid that Vernon would ask her if she believed in the curse. Two weeks afterwards, a headstone was erected to mark the grave of Regina Elizabeth Toliver McCord, and Jessica had cut a basket of red roses to lay at its feet.