The Summer Country

by Lauren Willig

  “The sails were made of satin, the mast it was of gold . . .”

  There were times, in the forgiving androgyny of infancy, when Jenny had pretended that the child at her breast was her own, that the hair on her child’s head had lightened from that dark birth hair to Charles’s tow, that this was her little girl, snuggling boneless into her embrace. This was her little girl and they were sailing away together in a ship made of satin and gold, far away to a land beyond the horizon, where they would feast on comfits and almonds and never be apart.

  Jenny stood, taking care not to jostle the sleeping baby in her arms. He was quite an armful now, big and solid. The older he grew, the harder it was to pretend, except in those wee hours of the morning when it was dark in the nursery and she was muzzy with sleep.

  It was strange to think of a baby, still in skirts, as masculine, but there was something distinctly male about Neddy’s peremptory shout when he wanted food, or his broad grin as he learned to sit up by himself, to reach for a toy without toppling over, to pull himself up to standing against the side of a chair. His legs stuck out over the side of her lap, too long now to fit comfortably, and he squirmed to be set down, to be free to toddle and fall and stick unsuitable things in his mouth. It was only in sleep that he relaxed against her, burrowing close, his face falling back into the roundness of babyhood.

  Was her own little girl toddling now, on plump, unsteady feet?

  It was her baby’s birthday today. August 4. Today she was one year old, and Jenny found herself fighting hard, so very, very hard, to remember the shape of her infant features, those wrinkled cheeks and squinting eyes, the curve of her hand around Charles’s finger.

  What did she look like now? Was she starting to speak, as Neddy was, a word here and a word there?

  Neddy called her “Ma-Ma.”

  Mary Anne had brushed it off, but Jenny knew she’d minded. Not that Mary Anne would ever say, but Mary Anne had her own way of making her displeasure felt.

  “I need you,” she’d declared, just that morning. “Queenie hasn’t half your hand with hair. Isn’t he old enough to be weaned?”

  She’d announced that Jenny would be coming with them to Peverills tonight, to stand in attendance behind Mary Anne, to carry her fan and drape her shawl and be there with pins in case a flounce should tear.

  “You know that Dutchess is perfectly capable of taking care of Neddy,” she’d said, hauling Neddy, protesting, from Jenny’s arms. “From the way you take on about that child, you’d think he was your own.”

  She hadn’t forgot her own.

  Did Jenny’s little girl call Rachel Fenty “Ma-Ma”? She both hoped so and hoped not at the same time. She wanted her to be loved, yes, but she also wanted there to be space left for her, for Jenny.

  But why should there be? Her daughter had never known her. Only for those few short minutes, and those nine long months when she’d been all in all to her baby, the entirety of her world.

  There were folds on her stomach that hadn’t been there before, folds that attested that she had once been great with child. Sometimes, Jenny had to look at them to remind herself that her little girl had been there, that she existed.

  “We’ll see her again,” Charles said, but he didn’t seem to realize how quickly they grew, these little ones, how soon they became people, with thoughts and opinions and preferences. Her daughter’s affections and tastes were being shaped by someone else. By the time she came to them again—and not to them, to Charles, only to Charles—she would be a stranger already, and they strangers to her.

  But how could she explain that to Charles, who hadn’t spent every day holding a baby, nurturing a baby, watching him grow by startling leaps. He was a handsome baby, Neddy, with a shock of gold curls and Mary Anne’s stubborn chin and gray eyes. Jenny’s gray eyes.

  There were times when Jenny couldn’t help delighting in Neddy, and others when she could scarcely look at him, hating him for being here, for being acknowledged, when her own child was far away, being raised by strangers.

  Charles promised her all was well, but Charles—Charles tended to believe what he wanted to believe.

  Sometimes, Jenny fantasized about setting off down the road to St. Andrew, wandering into the hills, climbing and climbing until she found that village, the village where her daughter was being raised.

  And for what? To bring their plans crashing down around them? They had come this far. If there were any suggestion that the child from Portugal were Jenny’s, it would all be for naught.

  But it hurt, it hurt so very much, to stay away.

  Carefully, Jenny laid Neddy down in his cot, watching as he thumped his legs three times in his own strange fashion before settling.

  Mary Anne kept him in a room adjoining her own, more, Jenny suspected, to annoy Robert than for any other reason. Although perhaps she was being unfair. The older Neddy grew, the more interest Mary Anne took in him, watching him with a fierce, possessive love that expressed itself more in directives than in cuddles.

  “This is my boy,” she said, and Jenny wasn’t sure if she was defending her rights against Jenny or her husband. Or possibly both.

  Her boy was to be raised in her image, as she saw fit. Her boy would learn estate management at her knee.

  Her boy was only fourteen months and still in skirts. But Jenny couldn’t tell her that. Mary Anne was even less amenable to advice than she had been in those long-ago days when they had lived in fear of the colonel. Whatever they had once shared was gone. There were days when Jenny could scarcely bear to touch her mistress, to brush her hair and pretend to smile. She went through the old motions by rote.

  Shutting the door softly behind her, Jenny passed through into Mary Anne’s room, where her mistress sat at her dressing table, dressed in Nile green satin, her hair wrapped in a matching silk turban, moodily dabbing a hare’s foot into a pot of rouge.

  “Where were you? Queenie had to help me dress.”

  Mary Anne knew perfectly well where she’d been. “I was feeding Master Neddy. The noise disturbed him.” Mary Anne had painted two red circles on her cheeks, but beneath them her face looked pale and haggard, her lips thin. “Are you all right?”

  “Perfectly. Why wouldn’t I be?” Mary Anne shoved the rouge pot away. “That husband of mine thought to take me unawares while I was dressing. Apparently, I’m denying him his rights.”

  Taking the hare’s foot away from her, Jenny began quietly blending the rouge on Mary Anne’s cheeks, trying to give her more the appearance of health and less the look of a French dandy of the previous century.

  Mary Anne wafted Jenny away. “He can perfectly well comfort himself with his doxy. Does he think I don’t know about her? I’ve provided him an heir, what more does he want?”

  Acknowledgment. That was what Master Robert wanted. Acknowledgment that he was master here. That was the one thing, in bed or out, that Mary Anne refused to cede.

  “Would it, perhaps, be less trouble to be seen to accede?” Jenny suggested. She found the pot of lip rouge, massaged a bit into her mistress’s lips.

  “I’m not having another child,” Mary Anne said indistinctly. She smacked her lips together to equally distribute the rouge, looking up at Jenny in the mirror. “I won’t go through that again. I’ll die if I do, and then who will look after all this?”

  There was no answer to that. If her mistress would only tell the master her fears—it probably wouldn’t do any good, thought Jenny wryly. They’d come too far down this road for there to be either understanding or compromise. Nothing short of total conquest would suit either.

  “What I meant,” said Jenny, “was that perhaps if you were to give the impression of eagerness, he might be less insistent? Men do tend to want what they’re told they can’t have.”

  “Perhaps that was my mistake,” said Mary Anne grimly. She was silent, and Jenny could see she was chewing the problem over. “No. No. I can’t. If he gets me with child again . . . I won’t. I can’t. G
et me my diamonds, Jenny. No, not the diamonds. Mrs. Boland is always so plain. The cameo set.”

  Obediently, Jenny fetched the cameos, fastening them around Mary Anne’s throat, in her ears, around her wrists.

  “Is the dinner for Mrs. Boland?” She knew already, of course. She and Charles met when they could, complicated by Jenny’s obligations to both Neddy and her mistress. Mary Anne had clawed her way back to lucidity, but with that had come an anxious possessiveness; Mary Anne needed to know that her allies were around her at all times. It was hard, at times, especially when Jenny had been up half the night with Neddy and her wits were slow, to remember what she was meant to know, and where she was meant to have been.

  “She’s out of mourning and taking up her late husband’s business.” Mary Anne made no effort to hide her jealousy. She adjusted the cameo necklace, making faces at herself in the mirror. “Perhaps Robert will come up sweeter if our business prospers. He can buy his whore another bauble.”

  Robert greeted his wife with exaggerated politeness, as though he hadn’t been threatening to break her door down less than half an hour before. The strong smell of smuggled French brandy made clear what had occupied him in the interim.

  Jenny sat on the box with the coachman, her mistress’s belongings clasped in her lap, her hands cold despite the heat of the day. Jonathan Fenty would be there tonight—Mrs. Boland, she knew, had requested it specially. She knew, because Charles had told her, that Fenty went to St. Andrew once a month to visit his sister and her children.

  Yes, she had accounts from Charles, but they were secondhand. She craved word of her child the way she had once thirsted after Charles’s embrace.

  Was she well, was she happy, was there someone who cradled her in the night?

  From the box, she could see Fenty, dressed in his best suit of clothes, a tall hat jammed on his old-fashioned queue, crossing through the lime hedge to the house. Jenny followed after Mary Anne and Robert toward the house, but, as the carriage began to rattle away to the coach house, she made a moue of distress.

  “I’ve forgot the pins,” she whispered to Robert’s man Derry. “I’d best fetch them.”

  She hurried down the path, making sure to collide with Mr. Fenty, dropping her mistress’s fan in the process.

  “I beg pardon,” she said anxiously, and then, in an undertone, “Is she well?”

  She shouldn’t be doing this, she knew. It wasn’t that Charles had explicitly forbade it, but they both knew it was safest if there was no connection between her and Jonathan. But today was her baby’s birthday, and, with each day, her child felt further and further away, a dream she had once had.

  “You’ve dropped something.” Fenty leaned over, his hat tipping. “She’s the cleverest puss in Christendom. And her smile! She could make a saint do her bidding. She knows it too, the minx. She’ll grin at you, so, and hold up her arms to be picked up. She’s got everyone running circles around her.”

  Jenny blinked back sudden tears, the affection and fondness in his voice making her feel even more bereft.

  “Thank you,” she said hoarsely, taking the fan from him. She wanted to ask him more, whether she ever laughed, if she called Rachel Fenty “Ma-Ma,” if she looked like Charles or Jenny or neither, did she like to sleep with the covers or did she kick them off at night. But the yard was swarming with servants and anything more would be noted. “When next you go, will you kiss her for me?”

  Fenty took a moment to straighten his hat, squinting into the sun, away from Jenny, as though he weren’t aware of her presence. “Don’t you fret yourself. You’ll be able to kiss her yourself soon enough.”

  He walked briskly away, toward the house, limping slightly in his smart new evening shoes with buckles, leaving Jenny scrambling to gather her wits about her, hurrying off to the coach house to discover the pins that were tucked safely in her pocket.

  The party was seated at table by the time Jenny returned, sweaty and breathless. Mary Anne frowned at her and Jenny held up the packet of pins, rolling her eyes in silent apology. Jenny hurried to pick up the shawl her mistress had allowed to fall to the floor, and drape it over her mistress’s arms.

  Charles was seated at the head of the table, Mrs. Boland on his right. He didn’t lift his head or look at Jenny, but she knew, without being told, that he was aware of her presence, was watching her without looking, just as she watched him.

  With a smile, he disengaged himself from whatever conversation he had been having with Mrs. Boland and looked down the table. It was a small group by local standards: Mr. and Mrs. Poole were there; a florid-faced captain from the militia and his skinny wife; someone’s maiden cousin, visiting from England.

  Charles held up his glass to a footman, who filled it with claret, deep red in the candlelight.

  “Oy,” said Robert, clicking his fingers and holding up his own glass.

  Charles cast a look at his brother but didn’t comment. Instead, he raised his glass and said, “Thank you all for joining me this evening. I’ve a bit of news to share.”

  “He’s marrying the widow,” slurred Robert.

  Fenty’s hand tightened so hard on his glass, Jenny thought the stem would break. Mrs. Boland didn’t deign to acknowledge the comment. She had a quiet dignity about her, the granite-hard dignity of a Roman matron.

  “A good friend gave his life on the peninsula, fighting Bonaparte.”

  There was a ragged chorus of “Here, here!” and a “Damn the French!” from the florid captain that earned him an elbow in the ribs from his wife, causing his cheer to end in a hiccup.

  Charles turned the glass around and around in his fingers, as if he might distract his audience with the glow, like a gypsy with a glass ball. “He leaves behind him a daughter, by a Portuguese woman. The child is now doubly an orphan, with the loss of her mother.” For a moment, his eyes met Jenny’s, behind Mary Anne’s chair, and then flinched away again. “It seems that he expressed a wish that I raise the child.”

  “Doesn’t the man have family of his own?” inquired the maiden cousin, lifting her lorgnette.

  “They were estranged,” said Charles briefly.

  “Don’t wonder,” murmured the captain, “if he was consortin’ with Portugee beauties.”

  “Were they married?” demanded Mrs. Poole avidly. She was only just a wife herself, wearing a plunging décolletage with all the recklessness of new maturity.

  “I believe so,” said Charles cautiously.

  “If a marriage to a papist can be accounted a marriage,” said the captain’s wife, in a voice that carried.

  “The child,” said Charles, raising his voice to be heard above the commentary, “will be taking ship from Lisbon as soon as the winds are favorable. I look forward to welcoming Carlota St. Aubyn to Barbados, and hope you will too.”

  Robert lifted his glass. “The more the merrier, what? Portuguese brats and Redlegs. What next? Shall we open the dining room to the slaves and have ’em to supper?”

  “Robert,” Mary Anne hissed. To Charles, she said, “How old is the child?”

  “I don’t know precisely,” said Charles apologetically. “Communications from Portugal have been, as you can imagine, hurried and fraught. She’s quite little, I gather. One or two years old? But that’s all I know.”

  “How do you know it’s not a hoax?” Robert demanded. “Zounds, anyone with a sad story could touch you for cash and you’d open the coffers for them.”

  “I trust you will believe me when I say that I have investigated the claims with the resources at my disposal and found nothing amiss.” Charles betrayed no signs of anger but Jenny had noticed that he sounded more and more like a lawyer the closer he was to losing his temper.

  “Ha! Just hand out the family silver, why don’t you?”

  “If I wanted to,” said Charles quietly, “it would be within my gift.”

  “Well, I think it’s lovely that you’re taking in a poor little orphan,” said Mary Anne brightly. “She can be a
companion for Neddy.”

  “If you think I’m letting my son—” Robert broke off, wincing, as Mary Anne’s foot connected with his shin.

  “Christian charity is always to be lauded,” said Mrs. Boland seriously. “Those of us who have much have a duty to those who have little.”

  Mrs. Poole played with her emeralds. “Yes, but so many have so little. If one started like that, where would it end, I ask you?”

  “With no one hungry?” said Mrs. Boland.

  “Mrs. Boland,” said Mr. Fenty, speaking for the first time, his voice warm with admiration, “has made a gift to the parish council to see assistance given to all worthy families in want.”

  Mrs. Boland nodded to him in acknowledgment, and a look passed between them, plainer than words. “One does what one can,” she said.

  “They bring it on themselves,” said Robert, draining his glass again, his eyes darting from one to the other. “Shiftless, that’s what they are. Begging and scraping instead of doing an honest day’s work.”

  “What work? What work is there for them?” asked Charles.

  “There’s a little man who goes from plantation to plantation peddling,” offered Mrs. Poole, her silks and jewels glimmering. “I think most of it is stolen, but one does have to admire the dedication in all that walking from place to place. He hasn’t any shoes either.”

  Charles glanced at Mrs. Boland. “That’s another piece of news. Mrs. Boland has been kind enough to join me in a pet scheme of mine. A model plantation. Our workers will be paid for their time, with the option of staying on as tenant farmers.”

  “You plan to have Redlegs plant sugar?” Robert demanded.

  “Some Redlegs, yes. But also slaves.” Charles met his brother’s eyes. “Their wages will go to purchasing their freedom. Mrs. Boland has agreed to advance the sum for the sugar. We believe there are those in England who will be glad to buy sugar grown so.”