Roses Read Free Page B

severed Rachel’s ties to her birthright
     and destroyed her lifelong dream.
    A sudden thought drove him to a bookshelf. He sought and found a volume that he took to his desk.
Could the answer be here?
He’d not read the history of the founding families of Howbutker since that October morning he’d helped William escape. Later
     in town, he’d learned that a search was on for the runaway, son of the late Miles Toliver, brother of Mary Toliver DuMont,
     who’d subsequently adopted the boy and given him everything. Bitterly recalling his own mistreatment when he’d been dragged
     back to his parents, he’d gone to the library seeking information about the rich DuMonts that would help him decide whether
     he should alert the authorities to the boy’s destination or keep his silence. There a librarian had handed him a copy of this
     book written by Jessica Toliver, Mary’s great-grandmother. Now that he was looking, a clue to Mary’s motives might pop out
     that he’d missed forty years ago. The title of the book was
Roses.
    The narrative began with the immigration of Silas William Toliver and Jeremy Matthew Warwick to Texas in the fall of 1836.
     As the youngest sons of two of South Carolina’s most prominent plantation families, they stood little chance of becoming masters
     of their fathers’ estates and thus set out together to establish plantations of their own in a loam-rich area they’d been
     told existed in the eastern part of the new republic of Texas. Both were blue-blooded descendants of English royalty, though
     they sprang from warring houses—the Lancasters and the Yorks. In the middle of the 1600s, descendants of their families, who
     had been enemies during the War of the Roses, found themselves settling cheek by jowl on plantations in the New World near
     the future site of Charleston, which they helped to establish in 1670. Out of mutual dependence, the two families had buried
     their ancestral differences, retaining only the emblems by which their allegiance to their respective houses in England were
     known—their roses. The Warwicks, descended from the House of York, grew only white roses in their gardens, while the Tolivers
     cultivated exclusively red roses, the symbol of the House of Lancaster.
    By 1830, cotton was king in the South, and the two youngest sons yearned for plantations of their own in a place where they
     might establish a town that reflected the noblest ideals of their English and southern culture. Joining their wagon train
     were families of lesser breeding and education who nonetheless shared the same dreams, and regard for hard work, God, and
     their southern heritage. Included also were the slaves—men, women, and children—upon whose backs these dreams were to be made
     possible. They started west, taking the southern route along the trails that had lured men like Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie.
     Near New Orleans, a Frenchman, tall and slim in the saddle, rode out to meet them. He introduced himself as Henri DuMont and
     asked if he could join the train. He was dressed in a suit of the finest cut and cloth and exuded charm and sophistication.
     He, too, was an aristocrat, a descendant of King Louis VI, whose family had immigrated to Louisiana to escape the horrors
     of the French Revolution. Owing to a falling-out with his father over how to run their exclusive mercantile store in New Orleans,
     it was now his intention to establish his own emporium in Texas, without paternal interference. Silas and Jeremy welcomed
     him.
    Had they continued a bit farther west toward a town now called Corsicana, so Jessica Toliver informed the reader, they would
     have reached the land they were seeking, an area rich in a soil known as “black waxy” that was to yield huge crops of corn
     and cotton to future landowners. As it was, horses and travelers were tired by the time the wagon train crossed the Sabine
     River from Louisiana into Texas, and a weary Silas William Toliver surveyed