The Summer Country

by Lauren Willig

  “Do I have a spot on my chin?” Adam demanded. “You’re staring like you’ve never seen me before.”

  Emily shook her head and said the first thing that came to mind. “Is Laura with child?”

  Adam looked at her incredulously. “That’s my Emily, delicate and tactful.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” It was a relief to focus on something so relatively simple, to allow herself the luxury of hurt feelings.

  Adam waved a hand. “Laura said she didn’t want you fussing over her.”

  “I don’t fuss,” Emily protested. She looked over her shoulder at Laura, ethereal in the light of the candles in their brackets on either side of the pianoforte. “She should be drinking beef tea to build up her blood. Can you tell her? It doesn’t need to have come from me.”

  “MacAndrews is looking after her,” said Adam carelessly, turning to rejoin the group.

  “MacAndrews? He’s about as much use as blancmange!” Flushing, Emily lowered her voice. Mercifully, Laura and George were in the midst of a mournful ballad, caught in their own music.

  In the Hazel Dell my Nelly’s sleeping,

  Nelly lov’d so long!

  And my lonely lonely watch I’m keeping,

  Nelly lost and gone!

  A little shiver ran down Emily’s spine. Sweat, she told herself. It was the hot season, and while the evenings were cooler than the day, the multiple layers of chemise, corset, and bodice felt uncomfortably hot and rather itchy.

  “He can hardly physic himself!”

  The silent stars are nightly weeping . . .

  Adam shrugged. “That’s not what Laura says. But suit yourself. You always do. Mama always said I got Grandfather’s looks but you got his character.”

  Now I’m weary, friendless, and forsaken . . .

  Did character travel in the blood, or was it something that could be imparted by gift? Her grandfather had raised her as his own, had loved her as his own, she was sure of it. But if she wasn’t his, not truly, what did that make her?

  Not like this child, Adam and Laura’s child, who would know exactly who he was and where he came from.

  Emily stepped back, feeling suddenly very flat. “I won’t meddle. With you or Laura. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  “Don’t take on, Emily. Coz—”

  Emily batted blindly at his outstretched arm. “Good night, Adam.”

  “Are you all right?” The music had ended and George had walked over to join them.

  Emily wrinkled her forehead. “Just a touch of the headache. I think I’ll have a quiet day tomorrow. I was too much in the sun today.”

  It might even be true. The ride to and from Peverills was longer than she was accustomed to. The day had taken on a kaleidoscope quality, too much happening at once: Dr. Braithwaite’s surgery, Laura in the garden, the entries in the ledgers.

  Emily spent the next few days quietly at home; she sat with Laura and Mr. Davenant in the garden, although only briefly. Her presence was too clearly a constraint. She accompanied Mrs. Davenant to church in Oistins, sitting in the box reserved for the Davenants. In short, she was exceptionally well behaved and half-mad with trying to avoid her own thoughts by the time George broached their proposed trip to Scotland. She accepted so enthusiastically that George stammered something about seeing to the picnic and disappeared, while Mrs. Davenant watched approvingly from behind her coffeepot.

  Emily still found riding an awkward exercise at best, but there was no denying the relief of passing through the gates. When George suggested they canter, she agreed, feeling as though she were breathing for the first time in days as Beckles receded behind them, even though she knew she was going to pay for it in bruises on her backside later.

  “Well done!” said George. His cheeks were flushed with the exercise, his eyes bright, and Emily realized what a constraint was on him too in his grandmother’s house. “You’ve come some way since we began.”

  “I had a good teacher,” said Emily neutrally, and shifted a little in her saddle as he looked away.

  As they rode, the landscape began to change around them, the even fields of cane giving way to an uneven terrain of hills and hidden valleys where oleander and aloes, cacti and Scottish heather grew in the lee of the rocks. Even the very color of the dirt beneath their horses’ hooves was different from the soil to which she’d become accustomed at Beckles.

  “I’m told by visitors that it’s very like Scotland,” said George, as they walked their horses carefully up a rocky incline. “I’ve only their word on it, though. I’ve never been off this little island.”

  “Until I came here, I’d never been more than a day’s journey from Bristol,” said Emily. “We can be ignorant together.”

  “The men who settled here came mostly from Scotland and Ireland,” said George. “I’ve often wondered if they came here, to this part of the island, because it reminded them of home.”

  “My grandfather’s family was Scottish, I think,” said Emily doubtfully. “He said his ancestors came over as indentured servants and were promised fifteen pounds and land if they completed their service.”

  “Many came as prisoners of war,” said George. He had that faraway look he got when he started on about Cavaliers and Roundheads. “Captured in the risings against Cromwell. They were brought here in shackles, to an inhospitable land, and forced to survive as best they could under the burning sun.”

  “It sounds like something by Daniel Defoe,” said Emily.

  “Or Sir Walter Scott?” said George, with a sheepish smile. “It might sound like a tale, but such things did happen.”

  In earlier, less civilized times, perhaps. But this was the year 1854. Emily didn’t quite understand romanticizing a time when life had been poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

  It was the more recent past she was interested in. She saw huts scattered along the slope, perched upon outcroppings of rock, gardens scratched into the stony ground. Trees grew thick around them, breadfruit and custard apple, trees bearing oranges that were nothing like the carefully cultivated orange trees that grew in pots in Laura’s father’s conservatory.

  “There’s a pretty prospect from the next rise,” said George. “We could set out our picnic there.”

  Emily glanced back at the houses. “I was hoping we might speak to some of the people who lived here. I had thought that maybe someone would remember my grandfather.”

  “We can ask. Shall we make inquiries first and picnic later?”

  “If you’d rather eat first . . .” The problem with people like George was that one felt the need to be nice in return.

  “No, no, that’s quite all right. The cold collation will keep.”

  “All right, then. Thank you.” Emily wasn’t sure what it was about his unflagging helpfulness that she found quite so irritating. He was being all that was kind. She should be grateful. But his very diffidence made him opaque; it was impossible to tell, beneath those flawless manners, what he was really thinking.

  George swung down from his horse and held out a hand to help her down. Gesturing to the groom to take charge of their mounts, he said, “Shall we inquire here?”

  The dwelling in front of them was scarcely a house, just a box made of rubble and lime, with crudely cut squares for windows. Shutters of sorts had been fitted to them, but one had come loose, and through it Emily could see a single room, crowded with pallets, a well-worn table in the middle of the room. The hearth was in a sort of stone cairn a few feet away.

  A woman was working in the garden, yanking at weeds on her hands and knees, a baby strapped to her back, another, wearing only a cloth around his waist, playing in the dirt, minded by an older child with a soiled kerchief around her head, who couldn’t have been more than four.

  Another woman was feeding damp stalks into a mill of sorts, turning the handle round and round to squeeze out a pale juice. She didn’t bother to look up as Emily and George approached.

  “Hullo,” said George, with a winni
ng smile. “Do you know where we might find the Fenty house?”

  “Fenty?” The woman slowly straightened, scrubbing her palms against the skirt of her dress, and Emily realized she couldn’t be much older than herself, was younger perhaps, but her skin was grained with dirt and freckled from the sun, two teeth missing from her mouth. “I don’t know any Fentys.”

  Her accent was a thicker version of Emily’s grandfather’s. It was strange, so strange, to think of her urbane grandfather here, in these hills, his nails dark with dirt.

  “Is there perhaps someone who’s lived here quite some time?” Emily asked hastily. “My grandfather came from these parts and I was hoping to find someone who knew him.”

  The woman clearly found this rather eccentric behavior, but was willing to humor her. “You might talk to Old Betty.” She indicated the far end of the ridge. “She live above the mile tree.”

  “For your trouble,” said George, and produced a coin, which disappeared rapidly into the woman’s bodice. To Emily he said, “I believe that’s the mile tree she means.”

  It was a large tree, with bunches of thin green leaves like the bristles of a broom. Emily picked her way carefully down the rocky path. She felt as though she’d stepped into a different country. After the bustle of Bridgetown and Beckles, the isolation and silence were almost eerie. “What was she growing?”

  “Arrowroot and eddoes. There’s not much will grow in this soil. But the rents are low.” He paused in front of the house the other woman had indicated. There was no need to knock. A woman had opened the slatted doors. Her skin was impossibly weathered and wrinkled, her back stooped, her thin gray hair pulled into a knot.

  “Are you Betty?” Emily inquired, tactfully leaving off the “Old.” She was beginning to think that it might have been better to simply picnic and go home. “We were told you might have known my grandfather. Jonathan Fenty?”

  She opened her mouth to speak and Emily saw that she was missing most of her front teeth. Those that remained were blackened and crooked. A stream of incomprehensible syllables emerged.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t catch that,” said Emily apologetically.

  “She said that she knew your grandfather from when she was a girl,” George translated. The woman interjected. George bent his head to listen. “I beg your pardon, she knew your grandfather’s sisters. Your grandfather was grown and gone to Peverills. He didn’t come back much.”

  “You were younger than my grandfather?” That would make her around Mrs. Davenant’s age, but Emily would have thought Betty at least two decades older.

  Betty was looking at Emily as though she thought her rather slow. Emily tried to remember what she’d meant to ask. “Did you know Rachel Fenty? My grandfather’s sister? Do you know—did she take in needlework for Peverills?”

  The woman gave a rusty laugh. “My lady,” she said tolerantly, and then something else that Emily didn’t quite get, although she thought she was beginning to discern the shapes of words.

  “She says that would be a fine thing,” said George. “Rachel Fenty was the sloppiest seamstress in the parish.”

  The woman added something.

  “And besides, she was mostly busy with the children.”

  “Her children?” That was something else Emily had never considered, that there was a whole branch of the family tree elsewhere. She knew that her grandfather’s sisters had moved to the Carolinas, that he had seen them settled there with some of his wife’s money, but it had never occurred to her to wonder if they had families of their own. Her grandfather’s world had narrowed to Bristol.

  George leaned his head close to listen. “Her child and the child her brother paid her to look after.”

  “Aye, my lady.” The woman put her hand on Emily’s arm, speaking simply and clearly so that Emily could understand. “’Ee gi’ ’ee outside trild to ’ee sister.”

  Emily looked up at George. “Outside child?”

  George tugged at his white stock. “His, er, natural offspring.”

  The woman nodded, unimpressed. “’Ee bastard.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Christ Church, Barbados

  June 1813

  “I’ve been thinking about our child,” said Charles.

  Jenny rubbed her aching back, trying not to think unkind thoughts. He might have been thinking about their child, but she’d been doing the work of carrying it.

  The only mercy was that she was spared from doing her usual work. Mary Anne lay in a twilight state from the laudanum Dr. MacAndrews had prescribed, drifting in and out of consciousness. Robert, frightened into contrition, sat by his wife’s side, reading to her from manuals on estate management. Queenie and a series of undermaids bathed their mistress and changed her linens, leaving Jenny, for the first time in months, with time on her hands and no one to watch where she went.

  “Have you now?” she said neutrally.

  Charles was too lost in his own thoughts to notice. “What if . . .” he began. “What if the baby were to be born dead?”

  Jenny could feel herself stiffen, turning to salt like the woman in the tale. “Is that what you want?”

  “No! Quite the contrary!” Charles looked so genuinely horrified that Jenny let herself relax, but just a little. Instead of leaning into him, she stayed upright on the stone they were sharing in the Old Mill, moving just a little away from him. He looked at her earnestly. “What I meant was, what if the baby were to appear to be born dead?”

  How had they come to this? From promises of manumission to mad schemes. Jenny put her hand on her stomach, on the mound that was their baby, and felt the child squirm within her.

  “Are you planning to whisk it away in a warming pan?” Jenny asked wearily.

  Charles had the grace to look sheepish. “Something like that. Not the warming pan, perhaps, but what if your baby—our baby—were to disappear?”

  “And be raised by someone else?” As if feeling her distress, the child undulated, making ripples against her dress. “Where—where would you send him?”

  Jenny tried to control her emotions, to think of the baby and not of herself. What was better, to keep her child with her in captivity or see him free and a stranger? Her child might grow up in England, that land where even the air conferred freedom. He might grow up ignorant of her past, thinking himself the equal of any man.

  He might grow up among strangers, never knowing his mother.

  At least she’d had her mother, even for a short time. She could remember what it was to be loved.

  Yes, Charles loved her, she knew that. It seemed strange to say that, to believe in his love, when a year ago she would have sneered to think that such a thing existed. But it was a different sort of love, a balancing of personalities, not the simple, fierce love of a mother for a child. She’d known that love; was it so wrong she wanted her child to know it too?

  Or was it for herself she wanted it?

  Perhaps it was crueler so. Perhaps her child would be happier for the not knowing her, not having to bear the pain of losing later.

  Charles took her hands, all contrition. “I’m making a muddle of this, aren’t I? I don’t mean our child to be sent to strangers, not permanently, at any rate. I had a letter last week, from an old schoolfellow. One of my friends, one of the best men I knew, died on the peninsula.”

  Sometimes, she felt she and Charles had lived like this forever, known each other forever, but at times like this, she was reminded how much of his life she didn’t know. Charles might give the impression of being an open book, but there were whole chapters he kept closed. “Are you all right?”

  “I don’t quite believe he’s dead. Perhaps if I were in England, perhaps if the war were over, it might seem possible, but as it is, I keep thinking he must still be somewhere in Portugal, and the whole thing a mistake.” Charles recalled himself with a visible effort. “But that isn’t the point. What if Hal were to have left a child?”

  “Did he?”

  “Not
that I know of, but what if he had? What if that child—that Portuguese child—were to be sent to be raised at Peverills?” Charles’s blue eyes were intent on hers. “No one would question such an arrangement. I was Hal’s closest and oldest friend. It isn’t beyond reason that he would entrust his natural child to me. If he should be dark skinned . . . well, everyone knows the Portuguese are dark. The child could be raised at Peverills, with every honor and advantage.”

  “And where would I be in this?”

  She saw Charles’s eyes flicker away and knew she’d hit the problem. “With us, as soon as we can win your freedom.”

  “But not as his mother. His mother would be an unknown Portuguese woman.”

  “I wouldn’t be able to claim him as his father either. Only as his guardian.”

  Jenny wanted to shake him and shout that it wasn’t the same. But she suspected he knew that already. “What of the midwife who delivers the child? Even if we pay her off, there’s no guaranteeing she’ll hold her tongue. Where’s the child to live until your friend’s child arrives from Portugal?”

  “I hadn’t thought of the former, I confess. But I do have some thoughts on the latter. I know it’s not perfect. But it would be a way to keep our child with us, free.” Sensing her resistance, he said, “It’s a damnable coil. If I could think of a better way, I would. We could smuggle the child abroad—”

  “No!” To transport a child so young would be a death sentence.

  Charles held up a hand. “Or all go away together. Or we could let fate take its course and you can have your baby at Beckles, with Nanny Bell, and we can pray that Parliament will do what they ought and free you both.”

  Jenny’s throat felt very dry. “I have more faith in warming pans than prayers.”