The Summer Country

by Lauren Willig

  But Beckles, Beckles had been spared. The trouble had passed Beckles by. Mary Anne tried to take comfort in that. But her eyes stung, all the same, and her hand shook too badly to hold her pen.

  “I’ll see myself in.” Mary Anne’s head came up at the sound of the voice, raw and smoke-stung though it was.

  “Charles?” She would never have known him. His clothes were little more than rags. There was a raw and ugly burn on one arm. His hair was gray with soot, adding twenty years to his age. He looked as though he’d come from the siege of Troy, and it had gone ill with him. Mary Anne stumbled from her seat and hurried to him. “Your arm! I’ve a salve for that.”

  Charles shook his head, as though his ears were still ringing. His voice was the merest rasp. “I’ve come to beg a bed and a bath. Peverills is gone.”

  Mary Anne’s chest felt very tight. “And Jenny?”

  “Gone. The east wing burned to the ground.”

  Mary Anne’s fist pressed against her lips. It wasn’t true; she wouldn’t let it be true. “Did they find—was she—are you sure?”

  “There were so many—so many trapped— Their bodies— Oh God.” Charles’s voice broke. “Lottie was sleeping in there.”

  “Oh, Charles.” Mary Anne put a hand on his arm, not sure what to say. Last night, she’d thought Charles dead. Fenty—he was probably already gone to Antigua. What good would it do to get him back now? “Oh, Charles. I’m so very sorry.”

  “Why didn’t I go to her? I ought to have thought—I didn’t think. I never thought they would fire the house. I thought I could talk to them—reason with them—” His eyes were very blue in his soot-grimed face. “Someone told me—someone told me that they were meant to be burning Beckles and sparing Peverills. But the message got garbled.”

  “Oh,” said Mary Anne, feeling an overwhelming surge of gratitude for the incompetence of the insurgents. If Edward had been caught, asleep . . . It wasn’t to be thought of. “Oh, Charles. You know you can stay with us at Beckles as long as you like.”

  Charles buried his face in his hands. “I killed her, Mary Anne. My baby. My Lottie.”

  Mary Anne put a hand on his arm, feeling deeply ineffectual. Now was the time to tell him that she knew, that she’d guessed. Now was the time to tell him that Lottie was alive and safe, with that thief and bully Jonathan Fenty.

  But instead, she said, “Charles. Charles. There’s nothing to be done now.” He looked up at her blindly, not seeing her, and Mary Anne said, with more confidence, “You’ll start again. Don’t they say something or other rises up out of the ashes? Maybe it’s a blessing?”

  “A blessing?”

  The thought of Jenny smote her, but she pushed on. If Jenny and Charles hadn’t lied—well, none of this need have happened. Lottie would have been safe at Beckles, learning the art of cleaning silks and doing hair. And really, it was for the best for Charles. If he knew Lottie was alive, he would go after her, and how would he forget Jenny then? He hadn’t really known Jenny, not like Mary Anne had.

  It was absurd for him to wear the willow over her, but that’s what he would do unless he was pushed to abandon his grief and make something of himself. That’s the sort of man he was. If she had to take it on her own conscience to see him free of the past, that was what she would do.

  Besides, she didn’t trust Fenty not to make good his word. Not that she really thought he could bring a case against her for murder, not now, but it wasn’t something she particularly wanted to test.

  “You’re young yet,” said Mary Anne bracingly. “You can rebuild Peverills. You’ll marry, have other children.”

  Charles flung away from her, looking at her with undisguised loathing. “Peverills can rot. It’s brought me nothing but misery.”

  It brought him thousands of dollars a year, but Mary Anne didn’t think Charles would necessarily appreciate that observation, not in the mood he was in.

  “A little time away might do you good,” she said, doing her best to sound supportive and understanding, even if she did think a stronger man would stand and face his losses and not go running away to be coddled and consoled with port and beef dinners. “You’ll want a good manager for Peverills while you’re gone, and you’ll need to leave instructions about rebuilding. . . .”

  “I’m not rebuilding,” said Charles shortly. “I mean it, Mary Anne. I’m done.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to say something about Jenny, about knowing. But Edward came running in, the end of a hobby horse bumping against the floor behind him. He’d recently graduated from dresses to a skeleton suit, in blue serge with a white collar, his golden curls shining around his face.

  “Mama, where Jenny?” he demanded imperiously. “Want Jenny.”

  A choking sound emerged from Charles’s throat.

  Edward looked from one grown-up to the other, confused. He tightened his stranglehold on the hobby horse’s neck and sidled over to her, tugging at her skirt.

  “Mama. Mama, why Uncle Charles cry?”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Christ Church, Barbados

  August 1854

  Dried tears made tracks down Mrs. Davenant’s cheeks as she slept.

  Emily heaved herself up from her chair, every muscle in her body sore. Her dress was sticky with old sweat; her eyes felt fusty. The woman in the bed was sleeping now, her breath rattling in her throat as she fought to breathe around the sickness in her lungs.

  Lung fever made the elderly wander, Nathaniel had said. For a wandering person, Mrs. Davenant had come back, again and again, to the same story. There had been justifications and arguments; there had been moments when Mrs. Davenant knew her and others when she had called her Jenny and alternately berated her for lying and pleaded with her for forgiveness, with rather more berating than pleading. The shade of Charles Davenant had been with them; Mrs. Davenant had carried on one-sided conversations with him, some cajoling, some defensive. But all had, in the end, come to the same thing.

  A child had been taken away, and Mrs. Davenant had lied about it and pretended that the child had died.

  Not just a child. Lottie St. Aubyn.

  Lottie. Lucy. Lucy. Lottie.

  Emily’s stomach grumbled, and she realized it had been some time since she had last eaten. She had partaken of bread and cheese in the carriage on the way to Beckles. Had it truly been that long? Her stomach thought so.

  Food. She would get some food and a nice strong cup of tea and then she would go and do something useful in the infirmary, where there were people, real people, sick people, who needed her.

  But she paused, all the same, looking down at Mrs. Davenant, at that willful face, slack with sleep, and felt a combination of pity and horror, so strong that it choked her.

  To carry something like that, all one’s life . . . How could one do it?

  But perhaps, Emily thought numbly, having the lives of hundreds of souls in one’s hands numbed the conscience. Perhaps it was something about the institution of slavery that made the impossible possible and the horrible mundane. If one regularly traded in people, what was one more child separated from her parents?

  She put her hands to her temples. Food, she reminded herself. And a clean dress. She was still wearing the same dress she’d put on yesterday morning to come from Bridgetown. It was one of Mrs. Turner’s, sadly worn and stained now. She would have to try to make it good, although she doubted Mrs. Turner would want it back now, no matter how she scrubbed at the stains.

  Queenie was waiting to take her turn at Mrs. Davenant’s bedside. Mechanically, Emily apprised her of the patient’s progress. It was easier to think of Mrs. Davenant as that, as the patient.

  Emily’s clothes were in the wardrobe where she’d left them. Emily selected one of her own dresses, plain gray serge, entirely inappropriate for the climate, but hers.

  She looked at herself in the mirror, a different person from the girl who had last stood at this same glass, almost three months since. Thinner, her face draw
n, the cheekbones more prominent, the eyes shadowed from long nights and care. The face of a woman, not a girl.

  Was it her imagination, or did she look more like her mother? She’d always had her father’s coloring, his mid-brown hair, his hazel eyes, his round cheeks. But the past month had whittled away at her, leaving hollows in her cheeks that hadn’t been there before, making her eyes seem larger, her mouth wider.

  Or maybe it was just the expression on her face that made her think of her mother, a watchful determination.

  She had always thought her mother looked like her grandmother—or the woman she’d believed her grandmother. Or maybe she’d only thought it because she’d been told so many times, or from the simple fact of their both having dark hair, similarly dressed, and an air of command. Their voices too had been the same, even when they argued; they had the same pitch, the same turns of phrase.

  It had never occurred to her to doubt that they might be mother and daughter, any more than she would have doubted her own parentage.

  But now . . . Now there were patients who needed her.

  Emily hastily pinned on her collar and cuffs and made her way downstairs. She would scrounge a bit of bread and then find Nathaniel in the infirmary. She hoped he’d slept, although she doubted he had. He was too proud to take a bed in the house where he had once been a slave.

  If her mother truly was who Mrs. Davenant said, Emily might have been born a slave at Beckles. She might have lived here as a child in one of the huts that made up a village behind the house, as Nathaniel had.

  She certainly wouldn’t be sleeping in one of the great bedrooms upstairs, waited upon and pampered.

  Emily went down the stairs, meaning to go out to the infirmary, but she paused and retraced her steps across the great room, to the portrait of her hostess that hung on one side of the arch that led into the dining room.

  It wasn’t Mrs. Davenant she looked at, but the woman behind her, the slave, Jenny.

  It was nearly impossible to make out anything of her features. She had been painted in a white kerchief and apron. The artist had an uncertain grasp on perspective, but she seemed to be of middle height, taller than Mrs. Davenant, and gracefully built. The artist’s technique wasn’t good, but he had captured something. There was a dignity about Jenny that even the artist had grasped, just as he had grasped the pugnacious tilt to Mrs. Davenant’s chin.

  Just beneath Mrs. Davenant’s chin, Emily saw something she hadn’t noticed before. The glimmer of gold. It was a locket, tied around her neck with a ribbon. A locket, edged in filigree. A locket, in fact, very like the one around Emily’s neck.

  To Jenny, for her good service . . .

  A coincidence. An accident. Maybe her grandfather had taken the locket. Adam had said he’d stolen something, hadn’t he? Or might have stolen something.

  But if her grandfather were to steal anything, why a locket?

  Why a child?

  At that rate, how did she even know the woman in the picture was the mysterious Jenny? George had said it might not be anyone at all, might just be the idea of a servant. It was madness to stare at her, searching for some similarity of feature. It was mad, all of it.

  Emily held tightly to her locket, striving for reason. She had been prepared to believe that her mother was the child of an unknown Irishman. Why should this be any more incomprehensible than that?

  Because her grandmother had been married before, Emily told herself. Because it was perfectly plausible that there might have been a child of that first marriage. This story Mrs. Davenant had told her was a regular mare’s nest of lies and subterfuge, as improbable as a princess letting down her hair for a prince to climb up or a maiden dancing all night on a shoe made of glass.

  Sometimes the strangest stories were the truest. It was the plausible one had to mistrust, not the improbable.

  Emily stared into the face of the woman in the picture, a sick feeling in her stomach, a corrosion that came from within. It wasn’t about logic or reason or likelihood. The truth was that she didn’t want to believe that might have been her grandmother in the picture, in kerchief and apron. It was one thing to go to a lecture and account herself enlightened, or to host a sewing circle for our brethren in chains, but quite another to imagine oneself in shackles, her will subject to others, bought and sold because of the color of her skin.

  Emily looked down at her hands. Her skin looked just the same as it always had. A little redder, perhaps, from all the boiling, with a few shiny spots where she had burned herself and the burn had begun to scar.

  But that wouldn’t have mattered, not before the emancipation bill. She knew that. It didn’t matter if she was as black as coal or as fair as Laura; if her mother had been a slave, she would be too, a lesser being, to be looked down upon and ordered about.

  She might have been mocked for her poverty by the girls at Miss Blackwell’s, but she had never been looked down upon, not really. She had always been the vicar’s daughter, supreme in her domain, Jonathan Fenty’s granddaughter, with the aura of a great fortune about her, even if her dress was twice turned.

  “Emily!” George hurried across the room, arms out as though he intended to embrace her. Emily took an automatic step back and he checked, reaching for her hands instead, giving them a quick squeeze of welcome. “We were terribly concerned about you, especially after we had the news about Mr. Fenty. I’m so very sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you,” said Emily. Adam’s death felt very far away, something that had happened in another life. Emily was horrified at herself, at her own callousness. Quickly, she said, “I had hoped to spare you at Beckles the infection.”

  “But the infection came to us all the same.” George looked at her anxiously. “My grandmother— Is it the Asiatic cholera?”

  “No,” said Emily. She could give him that much comfort, at least. It felt so strange to be back at Beckles, back with George, as though no time had passed at all, as though last night, as though all the weeks in Bridgetown, had been nothing but a fever dream. Here, nothing had changed; the room smelled of lemon and wax, not the putrid stench of death.

  An illusion, Emily reminded herself, pinching her palms. Death was here. It waited in the pest house, shoved out of sight. It was as though everything around her were a stage set, the painted scenery they had made for their theatricals at Miss Blackwell’s, paper thin, with emptiness behind.

  George didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. “Thank goodness,” he said fervently. He looked up at the portrait, seeing only his grandmother, not the dark figure behind her. “I don’t know what I’ll do once she’s gone. It’s impossible to imagine Beckles without her.”

  Emily looked at him, at the closely shaven chin and aristocratic nose. He looked very little like his grandmother, which meant he probably took after the Davenant side. It struck her that they were cousins. His grandfather and hers would have been brothers. If it was true, that was.

  He was, she realized, looking at her. “Do I have something on my chin?”

  “No,” said Emily. And then, “You do love her, don’t you?”

  “She raised me,” George said simply. “She was more a father to me than my father ever was.”

  Emily turned away, not wanting him to see her face. “We’re doing our best, you know. She has the lung fever. It’s . . . not good. But she has a strong constitution.”

  “The strongest,” said George, smiling painfully. He grasped her hand, clutching it so hard the bones rubbed together. “Thank you.”

  “Miss Dawson? Mr. Davenant.” Nathaniel stood in the doorway, his hat in his hand.

  “Nathaniel—Dr. Braithwaite.” Emily retrieved her hand with rather more force than necessary. It seemed, suddenly, imperative to be away from George and the portrait behind her. Her worlds had bumped into one another; she wasn’t sure what to do with Nathaniel in the great room at Beckles, any more than she would know what to do with George in the drawing room at Mr. Turner’s. Her head ached from lack of sl
eep. “It was so very kind of you to come all this way. I didn’t know what to do with the doctor gone.”

  “Burn his books and bury his remedies? I saw that butchery he called an infirmary.” He waited for a response from Emily, and, when none came, Nathaniel said, in a more dignified tone, “I’ll look in on Mrs. Davenant, and then I need to be getting back to Bridgetown.”

  “You’re going?” A moment ago, she had only wanted him gone; now she hated the thought of his leaving.

  “Unless you need me to stay.” He looked steadily at her, his expression so unguarded that it hurt Emily to look at it.

  She dropped her gaze first. “You should have something to eat before you go,” she murmured, telling herself it was for Nathaniel’s own good, that she shouldn’t keep him, that he looked exhausted.

  “I can have Cook wrap something up for you,” George chimed in cheerfully.

  “Yes, that would be best, wouldn’t it?” Nathaniel set his hat on his head, looking, suddenly, very remote. “I’m needed in Bridgetown. And you have enough to occupy you here.”

  “You need a nap,” said Emily, stricken with guilt. In contrast to George, he clearly hadn’t shaved, or bathed, or slept. His chin was lightly stubbled and his cravat wilted. He had come running all this way for her, and now she’d snubbed him without meaning to. “You look dreadful.”

  “Thank you,” said Nathaniel. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, only succeeding in making them redder. “Don’t trouble yourself. I can sleep in the barouche.”

  “And drive yourself into a case of lung fever or worse? Don’t make me come and nurse you.”

  Nathaniel’s weary face lightened a little. “Is that a promise or a threat?”