Freedom to Love

by Susanna Fraser

  “Everyone will be glad you’re home,” Elijah said. “We’ve had any number of men from the Light Division stop by the inn, and you were generally mourned.”

  Henry grinned. “I hope the same will be the case when I’m truly dead.”

  “I paid my condolences to your mother recently,” the colonel said after a slight pause. “I’m glad only half of them were needed.”

  “She mentioned you.”

  “I suppose you only learned of your brother yesterday.”

  Henry nodded tightly and blinked burning eyes. “Yes. I’m still shocked. The rest of the family has had time to grow accustomed, but I don’t know how long it will take me to stop looking around for him when someone says Lord Farlow.”

  “I noticed you didn’t announce yourself with the title.”

  Henry spread his hands. “You would’ve expected my brother Edward. I wouldn’t give you that kind of shock without preparation.”

  The colonel nodded, a twinkle in his eye acknowledging the justice of this.

  “Wait,” Cameron said. “You inherited your brother’s title?”

  “To my regret.”

  “And here I’ve been calling you sir instead of my lord.”

  “Don’t think I mind that! I’m still the same Henry Farlow I’ve always been.”

  “Not quite,” Dryhurst said. “Every day the world changes us, and you’ve been through more than your share in the past year.”

  “Yes, well.” Henry shrugged helplessly. “I must change now. My wife and I had intended to settle in Canada once we’d had a good visit with my family and got our affairs into order. Now...we both need to adjust. Speaking of which, I should be getting home to see how she and Jeannette are faring with my family. I’d be glad to have you—all of you—call upon us to meet them, here and now, if you’d like. I’ve told Thérèse and especially Jeannette a good deal about you, Cameron. I don’t wish to treat you as some kind of exhibition for your race, but I think it would do Jeannette good to meet a free black Englishman.”

  Cameron returned a thoughtful nod. “Naturally she’ll want to see that she isn’t alone. We’d be glad to come.” He turned to his wife. “That is, if you don’t mind. I can carry Mary.”

  Rose smiled, her gray eyes sparkling. She’d always been the beauty of the regiment. “We need to wake her soon in any case, or she’ll not sleep tonight.”

  And so once the little girl was awake—proving to have her mother’s light eyes, striking in a face almost as brown as her father’s—they walked out into the late afternoon sunshine. At first they kept to little Mary’s toddling pace, but she soon complained, and her father swung her up to ride on his shoulders, high above everyone they met. Henry had met very few men taller than Elijah Cameron.

  The three of them got a little ahead of Rose and Colonel Dryhurst. In a low voice, Cameron said, “You’ll need to find another man you can trust to act as your clerk now, my lord.”

  Henry bit back the urge to tell Cameron not to call him that. It was the proper form of address for him from someone of Cameron’s rank in the world, and he must begin getting used to it. “I’d had it in mind to ask if you and Rose would give up the inn and come work for us—her as our cook and you as my secretary—but I don’t suppose either of you would want that.”

  “No,” Cameron said, firm and decisive. “I daresay you’d be as good a master as a servant could have, but Rose has had enough of servitude, and now that I’m out of the regiment I’ve had enough of taking orders. I’d rather be my own master.”

  “I thought you might. But do let me know if you think of anyone you could recommend.”

  “I’ll think on it. At the inn we employ old soldiers when we can—so many of them have been turned out with no place to go and nothing to live upon—but not many have the education you’d need. You might find a half-pay officer of limited means, though.”

  “An excellent notion.”

  They reached Farlow House, and Henry led them all inside and asked Ostell to summon Thérèse and Jeannette.

  * * *

  Thérèse was sitting with Jeannette nibbling a slice of toast, this one spread with apricot preserves, when a footman knocked at the door and told her Lord Farlow wished for her and her sister to join them in the parlor to meet his colonel and one of his old soldiers, a certain Elijah Cameron. Thérèse wanted to put him off—after her interview with her mother-in-law, she was weary in both body and spirit. But Jeannette’s eyes were alight at the prospect of meeting a free black man, so for her sake Thérèse refreshed her appearance as best she could, and the two of them walked downstairs together.

  Colonel Dryhurst proved to be a slim, ascetic-looking gentleman of sixty or so who bowed courteously over her hand and asked her innocuous questions about her journey and her impressions of England so far. But as they chatted, her eyes were drawn to Elijah Cameron—and his family. For he had his wife and daughter with him. The wife was a beautiful white woman, rosy-cheeked and generously curved, wearing a dress as well-cut as anything Lady Farlow or Felicity had, though the materials were simpler. These were prosperous working people—a black man and a white woman, married and cheerfully out and about in public. Such a thing was impossible in America.

  Their two-year-old daughter was exploring the room under her mother’s watchful eye lest she touch anything she might destroy. Little Mary had thick black ringlets already long enough to flow onto her shoulders and gray eyes like her mother’s. Thérèse had seen light-eyed children of mixed blood before—Gratien’s had been a striking amber—but she’d never seen such light eyes paired with such dark skin, for the little girl was as brown as her father.

  Looking at her, Thérèse couldn’t help but wonder about her own unborn child. She’d once seen an old book of casta paintings showing the offspring of various pairings—white with black, white with Indian, Indian with mulatto, and every other combination that could arise in the Spanish and French colonies where the races had been mixing for a century and more. One illustration had shown a torna atrás, a throwback—the child of light-skinned parents born unexpectedly dark and African. She doubted she could have a child as dark as Mary Cameron, but what if everyone looking at him could see Africa in his features?

  Despite her worries, she was happy to see Jeannette in conversation with Cameron. Whatever he said must be reassuring, for she was laughing with genuine animation, the faint hint of wariness she showed around the Farlow women entirely gone. Would it be better for Jeannette to live among London’s free blacks? There might be an apothecary or surgeon who’d be willing to take on a female apprentice...but, no. Not yet. She didn’t want to send her only blood relative away.

  After a few minutes more of polite conversation with Colonel Dryhurst, she took the chance to step away when he and Henry got into a discussion of mutual military acquaintances and what the colonel had heard of the Battle of Waterloo, although the 43rd had been too late returning from America to take part in it.

  She walked to the window and stood in the sunlight, watching the scene. Mrs. Cameron and her daughter had fetched up in front of Cameron and Jeannette. The little girl seemed fascinated, babbling away and reaching for Jeannette’s hair.

  Cameron looked up and met her eyes. Thérèse wanted to look away, but why should she? If she was Henry’s wife, she was mistress here, and she ought not to shy away from his guests. So she made herself smile, though the expression felt awkward and tremulous on her face.

  He smiled back, thoughtfully, then stood and approached her. She’d rarely seen such a tall man—he easily overtopped Henry by half a foot—but he carried himself with a confidence that carefully avoided aggressiveness. She’d noticed the same posture and carriage among physically imposing free men of color in New Orleans. What would it be like, she wondered, to live in a world where a man like Elijah Cameron could carry himself with the sa
me swagger that Henry did when he was in his element?

  He stopped at her side—at a careful, nonthreatening distance she suspected he’d precisely calculated long ago—and greeted her with a courteous nod. “My lady.”

  “Mr. Cameron. My husband has told me much about you.”

  “He made a fine officer, and I’m sure he’ll make a fine baron.”

  “He will. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

  “Give him time.”

  She nodded. They stood in silence for a moment, watching the others. “You have a beautiful daughter,” Thérèse said. “Such striking coloring.”

  “Naturally I think she’s the most beautiful child in the world, and many have remarked upon her eyes.” He narrowed his own eyes slightly, looking down at her. “She is lighter-skinned than I am, I will note.”

  Thérèse looked more closely at the child and saw that it was so, if barely. “I can see that.”

  Cameron let out a careful breath. “I think you are highly unlikely to have a child with darker skin than your own. Especially not with him.”

  “What?” Thérèse started, and realized she’d been standing in the characteristic pose of a pregnant woman, her hand resting on her still-flat belly. She supposed that much had been obvious to any husband who’d fathered a child. But how had he—she’d never had trouble passing with a stranger before. “How did you know?” she said slowly.

  He held up a placating hand. “An educated guess. If I’d been wrong, I suppose you would’ve slapped me. It was as much about your story—Henry told us how you met, though he means to keep it a secret from most of the world—as your appearance. Also, you kept looking at Mary, and holding your hand like so.” He mimicked her stance. “But don’t worry. I cannot imagine any white person would see it, not here in England where there aren’t so many of us. And your children will be lighter still. You’re what—an eighth?”

  “Yes, and an eighth Indian,” she confessed. They were speaking in low voices, and the others were all engrossed in their own conversations, though Henry met her eyes, then smiled and looked away at her reassuring nod.

  “So your children will be seven-eighths white. Mine is a little more than half—I have one white grandfather. And Lord Farlow is fairer-complexioned than Rose, or would be if he hadn’t spent the past five years in the sun. I don’t think you need to worry in the least.”

  She sighed. “I wish he’d never inherited that title,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. “We’d planned a different sort of life, one where I could’ve been honest about who I am. But now—do you ever wonder what kind of a future your children, or a girl like Jeannette, can have here?”

  His eyes widened, and he shook his head. Thérèse realized she’d said too much, presuming to question a father on his decision to have a child. “I beg your pardon,” she said. “That was dreadfully rude of me.”

  “I understand, my lady.” The my lady was a barrier, but after a moment he smiled again, releasing tension from his posture. “Of course I wonder. I imagine all parents do, in between worrying every time they have a cough or a fever that they might not have a future. But what future could they have but England? Even if I hadn’t married Rose, if I’d married another free black, it isn’t as though I’d belong in Africa. All these schemes to send us back to Africa are nonsense, as far as I’m concerned. My grandparents may have been African—and Scottish—but I’m an Englishman. I was born here. This is the language I speak, and this is the country I know. We live in Rose’s native village, so Mary is cousin to half the children there. If life isn’t perfect, what of it? I don’t mean to give up hope for the future, and give up bringing up children to live in that future just because Mary will face challenges her cousins will never know. If we give up on hope, we might as well give up on life itself.”

  “You’re very wise,” Thérèse said. It still seemed harder here than in New Orleans, where free people of color had been numerous enough to form a society unto themselves, but that didn’t make it impossible. And here, Jeannette and everyone like her was free.

  Cameron shrugged and smiled. “Not especially. I’m a few years older than you, that’s all. Before you know it, you’ll be a mother, and spouting all the wisdom of the world to young Jeannette there, or to Lord Farlow’s little sister.”

  She hoped so. It would be a pleasant future, one where she felt so at home in England with Henry that she couldn’t imagine another life. But that life would be founded on a lie.

  * * *

  Thérèse’s first dinner with her new family proved strained. Edward was exactly polite to her and Jeannette, but never a bit more, and he seemed to have contracted a case of the sullens. How different would he have been if they’d had the homecoming Henry had anticipated, with his eldest brother there to welcome them? Really, it was hard for her, Thérèse, to be more than merely polite to Edward herself. She couldn’t ask him about his parish and how he liked his duties, because what if he hated them and had been glad at the thought of inheriting the title and leaving them behind? It would certainly be awkward to go home and resume his old role—she could hardly blame him if he chose to stay in London and let the curate they’d told her was currently performing the duties of the parish continue indefinitely.

  At least Jeannette and Felicity were still getting along. They sat across from each other at the tail end of the table. Felicity talked of Farlow Hall and a horse she meant to offer Jeannette—”very spirited, but a little too small for me now”—while Jeannette countered with adventures they’d had on their journey. Felicity was especially thrilled by Henry’s accidental alligator hunt, and he promised to show her the teeth he still had in a little pouch among baggage.

  Lady Farlow was full of advice for Henry and Thérèse. Henry must keep Charles’s estate manager and banker, who had each served the Farlows well for many years, and she knew just the man, a French émigré, whom he should hire for his secretary. She assumed he would wish to give his proxy rather than attend the Lords, and she could recommend two peers who could be counted on to represent the family’s interests. Henry did not argue with her, though Thérèse saw his lips tighten at the French émigré, and his grip on his fork grow white-knuckled when Lady Farlow stated that of course he would stay away from Parliament.

  Thérèse tried to be equally agreeable when her mother-in-law turned her attention her way, though she privately resolved to use her own judgment—and Jeannette’s—about whether she ought to return to London in time for the birth of her child in order to be attended by the best accoucheur, or to use a wet nurse instead of her own milk. She could see Jeannette was bursting with opinions, and it was work enough to hide her amusement.

  As they were nibbling on fruits, nuts and cheeses at the end of the meal—Thérèse skipped the cheese, which had a strong smell she knew she would’ve enjoyed had she not been pregnant—Lady Farlow recommended a school just outside London she thought would be most suitable for Jeannette.

  “I told you we were hiring a governess.” Henry set his fork down and lifted his chin.

  “What’s the school like?” Jeannette asked.

  “A good enough school of its kind, but I would never send a lady of our family there.” And Henry looked daggers at his mother, who raised her eyebrows and said no more.

  A chill remained over the company for the rest of the evening, and Thérèse pleaded exhaustion to escape as soon as she could. Henry came to bed about an hour later.

  “I expected to find you asleep,” he said as he began to undress.

  “I had a nap this afternoon. I’m tired, but not that tired.”

  “I’m sorry about Mama,” he said. “I thought I’d made her understand that Jeannette is family, but she’s—” He broke off and shook his head. “I don’t think this is about Jeannette’s color so much as her birth.”

  “What’s the difference
?” Thérèse sat up in bed and crossed her arms.

  “She’s never approved of bastards—I beg your pardon—being raised alongside legitimate children.”

  “I’m a bastard,” Thérèse pointed out.

  “But you’re legitimately my baroness—or you will be once we’re properly married.”

  “So my marriage cancels out my birth?” That made little sense to her.

  “Well, yes. In this case.”

  “So you’re saying that if Jeannette was Felicity’s age and we married her off to some suitable gentleman, your mother would be happy to receive her, but she can’t stay with us to get the education that might enable her to marry some such person?”

  “I never claimed it made sense.” He pulled his nightshirt over his head and sat on the bed beside her.

  “Well, if your mother is going to make life difficult for Jeannette, maybe it would be better to send her to school.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “No. I want her with me when the baby is born, at least.”

  “So do I. And if I sent her to school, that wouldn’t be the one I chose. It’s designed for training girls to be upper servants. Sort of a charity school, for orphans and the like. Jeannette doesn’t wish to be a housekeeper or lady’s maid, and I don’t mean for her to be educated as such.”

  “But what else can she be here?”

  “What she likes. Oh, I doubt she’ll marry into the aristocracy. That much I will admit. But there’s no reason she shouldn’t marry a clergyman or a genteel sort of farmer—or an apothecary or doctor who’d let her practice at his side—or simply have her own inn or shop and be quite independent, like Rose and Elijah. And she will always be received here and at Farlow Hall, because she is a member of our family. I must own I’m surprised at Mama.”

  “Why?” Thérèse asked.

  “Because she’s as much an abolitionist as any of us.”

  “Is she?” As briefly and calmly as she could, Thérèse described the conversation over tea, and how relieved Lady Farlow had been to think her only Indian and not black.