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Pleasant! Is that all you can say? Why, there’s not an unmarried woman in all the South who wouldn’t find him stimulating, lively, amusing. Many married women, too, truth be told.” He worked his eyebrows knowingly at her reflection, his attempt at drollery so ludicrously foreign to his humorless nature it was hard for her not to laugh.
    â€œThen why isn’t he married?” she asked.
    â€œToo particular, I guess, but rumor has it he lost the girl he loved to typhoid fever when he was younger. I must say, Spook, you didn’t much try to impress him.”
    Jessica met his eyes in the mirror. Spook . He had not called her that since she was a little girl. The name had come from a game they’d played when she would pop out from a hiding place to surprise him. Boo! she’d cry, and he’d laugh and swing her around and call her his spook. Her throat tightened with an almost forgotten ache her father could waken in her.
    â€œI was supposed to try to impress him, Papa?”
    A pink flush cropped up around Carson’s ears. “Well, yes, Spook. I admit to trying to play matchmaker. Jeremy is the most eligible bachelor in South Carolina other than Silas Toliver, and he’s asked for. Besides, Silas has no money. Jeremy does. He would look after you properly.”
    â€œSilas has no money?” Jessica glanced in surprise at her father in the mirror. “How can that be? Queenscrown is a prosperous plantation.”
    â€œBenjamin Toliver left Queenscrown to his older son, Morris. Silas is no more than the hired help. That’s why he’s going to Texas.”
    Alarmed for Lettie, Jessica asked, “How can he afford to do so?”
    â€œHe has some money of his own that he’s sunk into the venture, and the rest he’s borrowing from me.”
    Jessica shuddered for Lettie. Not only would she be facing untold hardships in making the journey and starting a new life in Texas, but all would be done on borrowed money. It would probably take years to pay back her father before the plantation was up and running and Silas saw a penny of his own. Perhaps love would be enough to sustain them and see Silas through to the dream he and Jeremy had apparently long harbored.
    Jessica turned on her dressing-table stool to look at him. “Why are you in a hurry to marry me off, Papa?”
    â€œWell, you…you’re not getting any younger, you know. Your mother was married at your age, and frankly, I can’t think of another man more worthy of you than Jeremy.” Carson pinched at the air with two plump, strong fingers. “You’ve got to pluck him out of the pot before someone else does.”
    â€œThat depends on whether Jeremy is willing to be plucked.”
    â€œHe looked willing enough to me, but you rebuffed him.”
    â€œHe’s nearly thirty, eleven years older than I am.”
    â€œWhat difference does that make? I am eight years older than your mother, as is Silas older than Lettie, and look how happy she is with him.”
    Jessica allowed that, yes, Lettie’s happiness was evident to everyone at the party. She wondered if there was a man alive who could put the stars in her eyes that Silas had placed in Lettie’s. She did like Jeremy. She had found him stimulating and lively and amusing, but he could never be interested in someone like her. Her father had witnessed merely a gentleman’s courtliness toward the daughter of his host, and her indifference had been caused by resentment at being exhibited like a filly at a horse auction.
    â€œHe’s going to Texas, you know,” she said.
    Carson’s glance fell to his house slippers. “Yes, I know.”
    Jessica rotated back to the mirror. In this house, more was related—and understood—in the silences of her family’s conversations with one another than in spoken words. The moment’s lull clearly admitted her father’s sad but true willingness