Somerset

  Avoiding Jessica’s gaze, Jeremy swiped at a curl of ash that had fallen from his cigarillo onto his knee. If asked, his flower-like wife would say that her world was perfect. She was married to a rich, handsome husband and was the mother of three equally handsome, intelligent, responsible sons. Her men treated her like a queen. She lived in a magnificent home with servants to attend her every wish and wanted for nothing. But had she ever had the thrill of setting her husband’s heart on fire? Jeremy thought not. Only the small, neat woman standing in the light of the louvered morning sunshine would have had the power to do that—still to this day. Jeremy shook his head. It had never been beauty that had attracted him to her—Jessica was a plain-faced woman—though time in its capriciously merciful way had added a certain loveliness to her unconventional allure. The freckles had faded and her skin had acquired the luminescence of fine china, a porcelain setting for dark eyes as lively at forty-six as they had been at eighteen. She’d maintained a figure that did not require a corset to achieve a slim waist, and the first silver had toned her bright, frizzy hair, worn in a voluptuous bun on her neck, to the tawny hue of red oak leaves in the fall. Her temple still bore a faint scar from her fall off the wagon train over a quarter of a century ago.

  “You’re shaking your head, Jeremy,” Jessica said. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that once again you’re going to talk me into deceiving Silas.”

  Voluminous skirts swaying, she swirled to his chair. “Not deceive him, Jeremy—protect him.”

  “Then go sit yourself down and explain to me the difference.”

  Jessica took her seat again. It was absolutely ridiculous, she thought, but Silas’s revelation following his predawn nightmare had planted a seed in her mind, usually unreceptive to idiocy. It must not be allowed to germinate. She’d tried to talk it out in her diary with little success, but discussing it with Jeremy might grind the preposterous little kernel to dust. She looked across the room at him, so assured of himself in the world and his place in it. “Jeremy, do you believe in curses?” she asked.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  They had agreed from the first telegraphed report of the firing on Fort Sumter that they would sign up together—Thomas, Jeremy Jr., Stephen, and Armand—and that they would join the military unit designated to defend the borders of their home state from invasion and the coast from siege. The northern and eastern rims of Texas were especially vulnerable to enemy incursions from the free territories of Oklahoma and New Mexico, as well as from Louisiana, should that state fall into Union hands. There were reliable reports that the Federals had plans to force Texas to supply beef to the Union army and that they possessed detailed routes of ingress. There was also the fear that homesteads would be open to devastating destruction and savagery by the Comanche once the U.S. Cavalry and Texas Rangers, guardians of the frontier, pulled out of the state to join the armies of their respective persuasions. The United States Navy was making its way down the Atlantic blockading southern ports to prevent the exportation of cotton and passage of trade goods, supplies, and arms to the Confederacy. It was only a matter of time before the Union fleet arrived in the Gulf of Mexico and sailed down to the ports of Texas with a like mission in mind. Maintaining a clear waterway to transport Texas’s cash crop to Europe and Mexico in exchange for desperately needed munitions was absolutely essential. To meet these concerns, Edward Clark, the state’s acting governor, sent a battle-seasoned captain in the Texas Rangers to East Texas to form a home guard unit and named Howbutker as its mustering site.

  Captain Jethro Burleson had joined the legendary Texas Rangers at twenty years of age and had spent the last twenty-two protecting the Texas frontier against outlaws, Mexican bandits, and marauding Indians. General Zachary Taylor, under whom he served in the Mexican-American War, called him Wind Rider because he could ride the fleetest mount with the expert horsemanship of a Comanche warrior.

  Jessica hated him on sight because he had distinguished himself in the Cherokee War in East Texas in 1839 in which Chief Bowles, the tribe’s wise and venerable eighty-three-year-old leader, had been killed. Jessica had championed Chief Bowles’s decades-long fight to secure land rights for his people in Texas.

  But if anybody could bring her son safely home from the conflict, she thought, gazing at the grizzled veteran holding forth as a guest at her dinner table, it was Captain Jethro Burleson.

  Thomas caught her eye and winked. She returned a small smile that did not lighten the visible worry on her face. At the head of the table, his father sat as somberly, flanked by the no less dour men of the DuMont and Warwick households and Jake Davis, who would not allow his family’s falling-out with the Tolivers to interfere with his friendship with his childhood friend.

  The only women present were Jessica and Priscilla, neither of whom added to the glow cast by the candle chandelier. Thomas was well aware of the grim nature of his mother’s thoughts as Captain Burleson spoke of his expectation that the war would be “much longer than those fools in the legislature realize,” and of his wife’s meditations as well. Priscilla was probably hoping the evening would never end, for that would mean she and Thomas would adjourn upstairs to the room prepared for the newly married couple before he reported to duty, and there she would be expected to perform her marital responsibility.

  Their wedding night had been a disaster. Thomas had anticipated Priscilla looking forward to the marriage act, wanting a child as quickly as he, but she had been nervous, afraid, tense in his arms, squeezing her eyes shut and gritting her teeth as if she expected a fist in her face. She had screamed out at the first hint of penetration. “I’m not ready,” she cried, pushing him off her. “Please stop!”

  He had felt like a monster. “What’s wrong? What did I do?”

  “You’re…it’s so…big, so…” Her lips had twisted in distaste, and she’d turned away from him and drawn her body into a rigid ball.

  Priscilla had, of course, never seen a man’s appendage before, but Thomas would have thought her mother would have informed her of what to expect on her wedding night. Or maybe she had, he’d thought. Ima Woodward was a Puritanical woman. She had probably put the fear of God into her daughter.

  “Well, sweetheart,” he’d said, “it’s normal for a man’s…genital organ to…enlarge when he desires a woman.”

  She’d peeped at him over her shoulder. “You desire me? It’s not just to impregnate me?”

  “Of course not,” he’d lied.

  The second night had not been much better. Priscilla had been willing, but he might as well have tried to coax a flame from wet kindling. The third night they had achieved copulation, but it had not been the loving, joyous consummation Thomas had envisioned. Lying afterwards on her side of the bed, he in a fume of disappointment on his, he’d asked, “What is wrong, Priscilla? Can you explain the reason for your reluctance? Don’t you love me?”

  “Of course I do,” she’d said, her voice plaintive, sounding like the cry of a kitten lost from its mother. “It’s just that it’s all so…frightening.”

  Frightening? He had known numerous women, and none of them had complained that he frightened them. They’d all loved the way he made love.

  He had turned to her, moved by the fragile outline of her body beneath the sheet, the lustrous tangle of her blond hair on the pillow, and caressed her face. It was oval-shaped and sweet as a rose. “It will be all right, Priscilla,” he’d said. “It will just take time and patience.”

  But in the two weeks they’d been married, he was out of both. In a few days, at the beginning of June, his company would deploy to join another group in Galveston to defend the coast, and so far, Thomas had no reason to hope he’d leave his wife pregnant.

  From her side of the table, Priscilla suddenly brightened and launched into a subject that had come to fascinate her. “Captain Burleson, be aware that you are carrying off the sons of aristocrats whose forebears acquitted themselves with famous bravery on English
battlefields,” she informed him.

  It was the wine, an anesthetic to dull her dread of the coming night, Thomas thought, only then realizing his wife was tipsy. Priscilla was a fastidiously decorous woman—girl, for she had no claim to the realm of his mother. It was not like her to burst forth with a line of conversation that held no interest to the captain and would have embarrassed his parents and guests if pursued, but Priscilla had an inordinate interest in his family’s and their best friends’ ties to a royal past.

  “How is that, Mrs. Toliver?” Captain Burleson asked, raising shaggy eyebrows in a polite show of interest.

  “It doesn’t bear telling,” Jessica said promptly and rang the small silver bell at her plate to summon Petunia. “Gentlemen, port and cigars await you in the drawing room.”

  Priscilla looked rebuffed, and Thomas felt sorry for her. He went around to draw back her chair and whispered in her ear, “Another time, sweet, when we’re all in a mood for your enthusiasm.”

  “I was only trying to change the subject, and I’m so proud of your family history,” Priscilla said, pouting.

  “I know, Priscilla, but nobody cares about it but us. Take the wine up with you. It might help you to relax.”

  “That would be good,” she said, lifting the decanter a little desperately to pour more wine into her glass.

  Thomas sighed and left her to join the men.

  All through the port and cigars, the war talk, Thomas’s thoughts were on the girl he had married. He could not understand it. When a woman loved a man, wasn’t it the most natural, normal desire in the world to want to be close to him, to feel him in her body, to possess and hold him? Priscilla said she loved him. Was it that she sensed he did not return her feelings that she could not give herself totally to the marriage act? Or was it because she was simply repulsed by everything associated with sexual intercourse—the sweat and fluids and animalistic coupling, the feeling of personal violation and…pain.

  Heat surged to his face as he thought with shame of her pain during penetration long before he could conclude his objective, let alone his enjoyment. What was he to do? He would not force himself on his wife. He had tried to be gentle and considerate, but his patience was running out with the time he had left at home. Had he made a terrible mistake? Had he been wrong about Priscilla’s feelings for him? Had it been mere infatuation with his looks, his family’s prominence, and the Tolivers’ connection to royalty that she’d mistaken as love for him? Had she lied to him when she said she wanted children as much as he?

  Thomas looked across the room at his father, still stalwart and handsome at his age, still so attractive to his mother who had adored him long before he came to feel the same for her, if Thomas had correctly interpreted the secrets he’d heard at their bedroom window in the early dawn hours of last year. Henri and Bess, Jeremy and Camellia had enjoyed long and happy marriages as far as he could tell. How he wanted the same for him and Priscilla!

  But—he had to remember—those couples had married for love.

  He excused himself while the wine was still at play in his wife’s bloodstream. Perhaps the alcohol would free her inhibitions, and tonight they would achieve—he admitted it!—the only purpose for which he had married the girl upstairs who waited for him with the sheet drawn to her chin.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  SEPTEMBER 5, 1863

  I see that my last entries were written in July of 1861. Has it been over two years since I have recorded my thoughts and feelings and the events of these heart-sickening, blood curdling times that have fallen on America. As a mother of a son, I cannot think of the land of my birth as two nations. The tragedies of war combine us as one.

  The glaring blank space between years is no reflection of the lack of occurrences around here, simply the lack of heart and scarcity of paper and ink on which to record them for posterity. I laugh, though only in derision, when I remember Lorimer Davis’s boast that the Confederates would have the Yankees on the run by May Day of 1862, a little over a year after war was declared. Well, May first came, but there was no cause for ribbons and flowers and ring-around-the-flagpole. No one was in the mood for a festival.

  My God, I should say not. By April of that year, the Confederates had suffered untold casualties at Shiloh in Tennessee, and New Orleans had fallen to the North. In July, the Union fleet occupied Galveston, and in September, General Lee’s army lost a major battle to overwhelming federal forces at Antietam in Maryland. The wounded are trickling home, some minus limbs, hearing, sight. The butcher’s son had his nose shot off. Oh, the stories these young men tell returning from the battlefields, they who had departed to a send-off of bands playing and flags waving, their stomachs full of barbeque and fried chicken from picnics and parties, their makeshift uniforms un-bloodied—those who will speak of the killing grounds, that is. Most do not talk at all. Their silence is like a tomb that enshrouds them.

  Newspaper accounts strike like a fist to the heart. Most of the soldiers on both sides are barely out of their adolescence with no experience of warfare, weaponry, or knowledge of why they’re fighting. Engagements with the enemy are fought Napoleonic style. The young men are lined up to march in ranks toward entrenched opponents. Those in the line still standing then engage those in the trenches in hand-to-hand combat. The bloody aftermath must be the most appalling, ungodly sight on earth, next only to the filthy army camps and the shocking conditions that breed disease of every contagious variety. One reporter wrote that if a bullet did not kill you, disease would. Walter Bates, the barber, lost his son in an epidemic of typhoid fever, and Billy Costner died from bowels destroyed by dysentery. Untreated measles, chickenpox, mumps, and whooping cough are just a few of the outbreaks that can threaten the lives of soldiers confined to camps littered with refuse, food wastes, heaps of manure and offal. Consumption of contaminated food and water are other hazards against the chance of survival.

  I listen to the stories and read the newspaper articles without taking a breath, for of course I’m thinking of Thomas and the boys and the conditions under which they’re living, the dangers they face. He is in a specialized unit that makes daring strikes into Louisiana to cripple the enemy’s ability to cross the Sabine into Texas. By necessity, their camps are without shelter and most often near stagnant swamps teeming with snakes, crocodiles, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Our son has given us few details about the deadly nature of his missions on the few occasions he’s been home, but his father and I can guess from his hollow eyes and cheeks, his thinner frame, the state of his clothes. On his last visit, Thomas asked for my remaining ink and notepad, for he’d been assigned the task of writing the parents and spouses of the men in his unit who had died in a brush fire ignited during heavy fighting in a dry field.

  “You need all my paper?” I asked him.

  He replied with a grim mouth, “I need it all.”

  I find it bitterly amusing that Henri, bless his Frenchman’s heart, insisted the boys be outfitted in custom-tailored uniforms, such as their specifications were in the Confederate army at the time. Those uniforms have long seen the dust of the road.

  Henri supplied me with more ink and paper, and today I write with the blood of every one of us in the region running cold. Occupation of East Texas will come within weeks unless our troops—among them Thomas, Jeremy Jr., Armand, Jake, and Priscilla’s two brothers—can hold off the Union forces at Sabine Pass, a waterway off the Gulf Coast leading into the Sabine River. It is there the Federals hope to push into the interior of the state with the primary intent of plundering everything they can get their hands on to fuel their war machines and confiscate cotton for northern textile mills. Terrifying news has arrived that gunboats and transport ships loaded with thousands of Union soldiers have entered the pass, defended only by an undermanned fort to which the boys have been sent as reinforcements.

  If my son should perish, this will be my last entry in my diary. Someone else—a DuMont or Warwick, even Priscilla if she’s still
in the mood—will have to take up the chronicling of the founding families of Howbutker. There will be no following generation of Tolivers to read it.

  At least it looks that way now. Each morning I rise under the weight of a mother’s worry for the happiness of her only child and for Priscilla’s, too. It was obvious from their first night together that things had not gone well in the bedroom, and after mornings of the children coming down to breakfast with drawn, disappointed faces, Silas and I suspect that Priscilla is afraid of marital intimacy. Never would Silas blame Thomas. “Look at him!” his father will storm. “Can you imagine any young woman not wanting our son. My God, every female he meets practically drops her drawers for him!”

  Silas blames Priscilla’s mother—“that dried prune of a woman with as much sexuality about her as a wooden spoon!”—as responsible for putting ridiculous fears about men into her daughter’s head. But I, too, must shoulder some responsibility for Thomas’s befuddlement with Priscilla and therefore his ineptitude in understanding her. He grew up with no sisters and a mother who requires no coddling or celebrating, who does not need love expressed in words or pampering. It would never occur to him that such manifestations of devotion are what Priscilla craves.

  But if Thomas loved the girl, understanding of her needs would come naturally. He would have the desire to please her. I do not point out to Silas that by now Priscilla may have realized Thomas only married her to beget an heir and that her disinclination for sex may have something to do with the girl’s wish not to be used. As much as she loves Thomas, she has her pride after all. At the very least, if the girl does suffer from an arousal disorder, knowledge of his lack of feelings for her would certainly not help.