The Summer Country

by Lauren Willig

  Laura nodded. “Some people might snub you, of course, if they knew, but I can’t see that bothering you.”

  “No,” said Emily. “They’re the same sort who used to snub me for being poor and wearing the wrong sorts of clothes.”

  “And you had no patience for them then,” said Laura. “So I don’t see why you would mind them now.”

  “No.” It seemed strange that it was Laura, Laura, whom she had always believed so conventional, so timid, who would cut through all her concerns and put it so simply. But then, maybe there was something to be said for novel reading. “I do worry a bit about Aunt Millicent and Uncle Archibald, that they might think I don’t belong to them anymore—but I don’t imagine they’d truly disown me. We’re too much in the habit of each other. And I’m not sure I mean to go back to Bristol, not to stay.”

  “Do you mean to stay in Barbados, then?” Laura busied herself with the tea things. “I know there was talk of your marrying Mr. Davenant. . . .”

  “Not you too!” Emily grimaced to show Laura she didn’t mean it. “That’s Mrs. Davenant’s scheme. Mr. Davenant and I would be as ill-suited as—” She broke off as she realized the colossal indelicacy of what she had been about to say.

  “As Adam and I? It’s all right. I don’t mind. Oh, how clumsy of me.” Laura waved away Emily’s help and retrieved the spoon she had dropped, the effort making her cheeks rather pink. “I never did think you and Mr. Davenant would suit. Is it Peverills, then?”

  “No.” Peverills wasn’t what was keeping her here. “It’s Dr. Braithwaite.”

  “Mr. Turner’s nephew?” For a moment, Laura looked nonplussed. Then she regarded Emily thoughtfully. “I ought to have known when you wouldn’t speak of your time in Bridgetown.”

  “It was a cholera epidemic. I was hardly going to write to you about boils and bedpans,” said Emily defensively. “Dr. Braithwaite is the nephew of Grandfather’s oldest business partner—and a doctor. In any other circumstances, he would be accounted a very good match for a vicar’s daughter.”

  But for the color of his skin. But then, what was skin but a covering for bone? It would be nice if the rest of the world felt that way.

  Laura took Emily’s hands in hers, the gold of her wedding ring very bright against her fair skin. “You are not any vicar’s daughter. You’re Emily Dawson. You have always gone your own way, and you would be wrong to go any other. Besides,” Laura added, her lips loosening into a smile, “I always did think you would fall in love with a physician.”

  “Not the curate?” said Emily, sniffing a bit and trying to hide it.

  “Never the curate,” said Laura firmly. Releasing Emily’s hands, she said lightly, “Did I tell you I’ve decided on a name for the baby?”

  “Have you?” Emily rubbed at a speck of something in her eye. It was dreadful the way sugar dust got everywhere.

  “If it’s a boy,” said Laura, “I shall call him Emil, and you shall stand godmother.”

  “Emil?” Emily thought the name dreadful, but, for once, she couldn’t find it in her to interfere. If Laura wanted to name her child Esmerelda Hepzibah Tiddly-Wink or Praise-God Barebones, she would stand there at the font and see it done.

  Emily was deeply chagrined at how she had misjudged her oldest friend, how she had misjudged everyone, really. She had dismissed Adam as the carefree scapegrace he had always seemed, when, in truth, he had been riven with the anxious need to make something of himself.

  She had prided herself on knowing Laura better than anyone, and yet. She had taken Laura’s quietness for weakness, just as she had accepted Mrs. Davenant’s assertiveness for strength.

  But was it strength, really? It struck her now it wasn’t so much strength as selfishness, a blind clinging to what she believed to be hers, and Emily had the uncomfortable feeling that she had been guilty of the same.

  She had resented Adam taking Laura from her and Laura taking Adam, not because she had loved Adam, not in that way, but because they had both been hers and she had wanted to come first. She had blamed her father for abandoning the memory of her mother, had looked down on him for marrying again, and dismissed it as the need of a weak character for a stronger. But maybe it wasn’t her father who had been weak at all. Maybe it was she. It was easier to blame others than look hard at oneself and see all the spongy bits in one’s soul.

  She had prided herself so on her common sense, when it wasn’t common sense at all, but complacency, a willful refusal to look at anything she didn’t want to see.

  She was looking now, and the horrible truth was that she didn’t much like what she saw.

  She went over every excruciating exchange she had ever had with Nathaniel, every thoughtless, prideful, insensitive thing she had said. She cringed at the memory of it. The Bristol and Clifton Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, indeed. Somehow, knowing that her own grandmother had been a slave, that, but for a bit of sleight of hand, her mother would have been a slave, made sitting at a few meetings and listening to Mr. Frederick Douglass speak seem very thin, indeed.

  As the cholera in Bridgetown waned and then disappeared entirely, Nathaniel had resumed his weekly clinic at Peverills. Or so Emily was told. Half a dozen times she reached for her riding habit, and half a dozen times she thought better of it.

  She had been smug, prideful, obtuse. She had blamed him for not blazoning his feelings on his sleeve, when she had scarcely been willing to face her own. She was the worst sort of hypocrite and it was no wonder he hadn’t written or called.

  “You could write to him,” suggested Laura.

  “But what if he doesn’t want to receive a letter from me?”

  “Then he can return it unread.” When Emily only looked at her, Laura sighed and went back to counting linen.

  Slowly, slowly, against all expectations, Mrs. Davenant had begun to mend. On a sunny day in October, six weeks after Mrs. Davenant had descended into insensibility, Queenie came to tell Emily that Mrs. Davenant was sitting up in bed, demanding tea and Emily.

  “She knew me,” said Queenie significantly, as she led Emily into the room, which had the indefinable smell of the sickroom. “It’s the first time she woke up and knew me.”

  “Of course I knew you. Why wouldn’t I know you? Leave us,” Mrs. Davenant told Queenie, who raised her brows but went. Mrs. Davenant beckoned Emily peremptorily to her bedside, saying without preamble, “I said a great many things when I was sick, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.” Emily stood by the bed, not wanting to sit down.

  “I told you about the child.”

  The child, as though her mother had been a pawn rather than a person. It was an absurd thought. Her mother had been very much a person, one of the strongest people Emily knew. “My mother, you mean? Yes.”

  Mrs. Davenant smiled grimly. “You think I was wrong, don’t you? Do you think you’d be sitting here in silk and lace if I hadn’t done what I’d done?”

  Emily wasn’t wearing silk and lace; she was wearing poplin and cotton. And that certainly wasn’t the way Mrs. Davenant had told the story when she was half-mad with fever.

  “It’s hard to tell what might have been,” said Emily. “But it seems very cruel to let a father think his child burned to death.”

  “Crueler to tell him otherwise.” Mrs. Davenant tried to raise herself on her elbows. “You weren’t there. You don’t know. At the time, I thought it was for the best.”

  “For the best to let him think she was dead?”

  “I set Charles free! He could marry, have children.” Mrs. Davenant subsided against the pillows. “He didn’t, though. Instead, he left. He gave each of his slaves a gift of money, and then he went to London and he freed them all. It was something that was done then, to save the manumission fees, selling a slave to a friend in England and having the slave freed there. Just seldom on so grand a scale.” She looked sideways at Emily. “Natty Cooper—oh, if you must, Dr. Braithwaite, as he’s calling himself now—ridiculous cheek!—his uncle had him
freed that way. Your grandfather did the honors in England, I believe.”

  “It seems hard that he died never knowing his daughter had lived,” said Emily.

  Mrs. Davenant grimaced at her. “Charles? Charles isn’t dead. He’s alive and living in Paris. He’s married now. A Frenchwoman. They have a whole passel of brats, with impossible French names. I know because Edward wrote me. It was Charles my Edward ran to.” She was quiet a moment, the only sound her fingers pleating the fabric of the sheets. “It seemed a bit like justice. I took his child and he took mine. An eye for an eye and a child for a child.”

  It didn’t sound at all like justice to Emily; it sounded more like a justification. Edward had chosen his own path; Emily’s mother had had no choice. Not to mention the small matter of Charles Davenant never knowing what had happened to his daughter.

  “You still have George,” Emily pointed out.

  “Yes, I still have George.” Lifting her head, she fixed Emily with a red-rimmed gray eye. “There’s nothing to stop you marrying George.”

  There were, Emily thought, many things to stop her marrying George.

  Through the window, Emily could see Laura and George, her black head bent near his golden one, consulting on some matter of household management. Or possibly on Sir Walter Scott. It might be either.

  They were, Emily thought wistfully, very well matched. They would have to wait out the mandated period of mourning of course, but once that was done . . . Disloyal though it might be, she rather hoped Laura and George didn’t let Adam get in the way.

  Was it disloyal? Or was it just sense to let the living get on with living? The dead were gone, there was no helping them.

  Besides, Emily rather suspected that if there was any justice, it would be watching Laura neatly thwart Mrs. Davenant. Mrs. Davenant had no idea.

  Mrs. Davenant was waiting for an answer. Emily turned away from the window. “I’m not sure George and I would suit. In fact, I’m quite sure we wouldn’t.”

  “You needn’t worry about George. He’ll do as he’s told.” Mrs. Davenant lowered her voice. “He doesn’t ever need to know.”

  It took Emily a moment to realize what Mrs. Davenant was talking about. “About my grandmother being a slave?” she said, and Mrs. Davenant made a hideous face. “Well, she was. I wouldn’t lie to the man I meant to marry, about that or anything. That’s no way to start a marriage.”

  Mrs. Davenant gave a choking laugh. “Oh, my dear. That’s little you know about marriage. There’s none of that meeting-of-minds nonsense. It’s a contract for property, and a license for the creation of heirs. Lawful ones. Everything else is better left aside.”

  “Not for me,” said Emily, feeling her jaw set. “I would rather be honest and take the consequences. I couldn’t countenance a marriage based on untruths.”

  “You’re a fool,” said Mrs. Davenant bluntly. “There were only the four of us left who knew. Charles is gone, Fenty is dead, London Turner won’t tell. He didn’t tell you, did he? I didn’t think so.”

  “Why did you tell me, then?” Emily demanded.

  “I was out of my mind with lung fever. I would hardly have mentioned it had I been in my right mind.” Mrs. Davenant sat in silence for a moment. “When you started asking questions about your grandmother—I was just as happy for you to think your mother might be Boland’s get, even if he was an Irishman.”

  “You never meant to tell me, then?”

  “Didn’t I just say that? It seemed a way of making amends, to have Jenny’s granddaughter mistress of Beckles. It was the only thing left I could do for her.” Pulling herself together, Mrs. Davenant said in a very different tone, “And, of course, I’d like to see Beckles and Peverills united. Had Lottie lived, I would have seen her married to Edward.”

  “She did live. She was my mother.” Maybe it was the dismissive way Mrs. Davenant waved her hand, but Emily felt her temper rising. “That girl you call ‘the child’ grew into a force to be reckoned with. She ignored everyone who told her she ought to sit by the fire and work net bags and went out into the world and did everything she could to remedy what she believed to be the world’s greatest ill: slavery.”

  Emily looked pointedly at Mrs. Davenant, who turned her head away on the pillow, making a show of not listening. Well, she would listen, whether she liked it or not. Emily wasn’t going to let her shape the world to her making, not anymore, not even here at Beckles, where she was used to reigning supreme.

  “My mother,” said Emily, her voice ringing through the high-ceilinged room, “corresponded with ministers of Parliament and American presidents. She never, ever let anyone stand in the way of what she believed. She fought to marry my father when my grandfather refused her, even though he was a lowly minister from a poor family and hadn’t a penny to his name.”

  Emily broke off, her whole body shaking, feeling hot and cold by turns.

  “You say all of this as though it were a virtue,” said Mrs. Davenant acidly.

  “It is.” The anger had gone, leaving behind it a strange certainty. Emily felt like a convalescent, as though she had been sickening for months and only now was herself again. “It’s a virtue to know one’s own heart and mind. It saves a lot of bother and a great deal of unhappiness.”

  For a moment, it was as though she could see her mother there, in the room, behind Mrs. Davenant’s dress, her dark hair dressed in the simple knot she had favored, an expensive Kashmir shawl tossed carelessly around her shoulders, her only ornament the simple gold band on her left hand. Her mother had never let herself be distracted by inconsequentials. When she loved, she loved without reservation, without a care for what the world might say.

  As her mother’s true parents had done before her, regardless of the costs.

  “What day is it? It’s Thursday, isn’t it?” Emily didn’t wait for Mrs. Davenant to answer; she was already hurrying to the door.

  “How would I know? One day is much the same as another when you’re confined to bed.” Pillows and sheets shifted as Mrs. Davenant lifted herself on her elbows. “I didn’t tell you that you could go! Where do you think you’re going?”

  Emily paused in the doorway, looking back over her shoulder at the other woman’s outraged face. “To Peverills, of course.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Christ Church, Barbados

  October 1854

  There was the usual huddle of people outside the bookkeeper’s house at Peverills, from which Emily concluded that the doctor must be in.

  She had ridden out without a groom, without her habit, without a hat. The habit she didn’t regret, not really. The hat she did. There were rainbows at the corners of her eyes and her hair felt as though it had been baked into bronze.

  Well, Emily thought giddily, tethering her horse to the old lime hedge, that would give her some excuse for her appearance. She could see the doctor for sunstroke.

  But that would be a coward’s trick, and she had been coward enough already.

  Despite her protests that she could wait her turn, it seemed everyone suddenly discovered that their ailments could wait. Twisted wrists weren’t that bad after all and the cut wasn’t bleeding so very much. Emily dispensed a bit of commonsense advice, said she wouldn’t be a moment and not to go away, steeled herself, and marched inside.

  Nathaniel was in his consulting room, which looked much as it had when she had visited with George. The kettle still whistled on the fire; needles and knives, shining with cleanliness, had been set out on a cloth. Nathaniel was setting a dislocated shoulder. Emily watched with professional appreciation as he heaved the arm back and snapped it into place, then bound the arm close to the chest. She had seen the operation performed far less gracefully, and she found herself very aware of the movement of the muscles beneath the fine cloth of his coat.

  Goodness, that sun had been hot out there. She could feel her cheeks burning. Or maybe that was the fire in the little room, burning and burning away, boiling away disease, making every
thing clean and new.

  The man on the table saw Emily and started to try to clamber down, earning a strong rebuke from the doctor. “Keep it bound like this for the next week. I don’t want you lifting anything heavy for the next month. Yes, I know the head driver won’t like it. Ask him if he would prefer to lose your services permanently. You won’t be much use with no right arm, would you?”

  It gradually dawned on Nathaniel that the patient was staring. Slowly, he turned, and the expression of annoyance on his face froze into . . . nothing.

  She wasn’t quite sure what she had expected, but it wasn’t nothing.

  “Miss Dawson,” he said, and Emily felt her chest twist, painfully. She had been Emily six weeks ago. She had done this. She had demanded he call her Miss Dawson, had wrenched the right to her name from him in a rage.

  “Dr. Braithwaite.” He had slept since she had last seen him and had a change of linen. Several, she assumed, given that it had been over a month. His cheeks were smoothly shaved, his mustache recently trimmed, and his cravat was bleached and starched to a nicety. He looked impossibly handsome and very urbane. Urbane and entirely remote. They were, Emily realized, doing a very good job of pretending to be statues, only her statue was wearing an elderly morning gown that hadn’t benefited from its contact with a horse, and she had, she was quite sure, the beginnings of an impressive sunburn on the end of her nose.

  She really ought to have stopped for her hat.

  “You can go out now,” Dr. Braithwaite told his patient, without looking away from Emily. Recalling himself, he added briskly, “Mind you. No heavy lifting, or don’t blame me if you lose the use of that arm. Tell the next patient . . . Tell the next patient I won’t be a moment.”