The Summer Country

by Lauren Willig

  “Only shank’s mare,” said Emily.

  Mrs. Davenant was not amused. “What, do you expect to be carried about on a palanquin?” she demanded, rooting about in a cabinet filled with leather-bound books. “If you don’t ride, you’ll have to learn. George can be of assistance in that, at least. He may have his head in the clouds, but he has an excellent seat.”

  Emily wasn’t entirely sure she liked the way Mrs. Davenant was taking charge of her future. “I’m sure he has.”

  “You’re too old to learn to ride well, but you can hack, at least.” Mrs. Davenant thumped a book down on the desk, letting it fall open. “Ah, here we are. I thought you might like to see these.”

  Increase of horses, 1813. January 5. On the plantation: Charity, a bay; Hope, a chestnut.

  Decrease of horses, 1813. June 3. Honor, a gray, sold.

  The paper was yellowed, the ink faded, but the writing gave Emily a prickly feeling, like the faint sound of a familiar voice in a distant room. She had to stop from turning her head to see if her grandfather was there, behind her, standing by her shoulder to examine his work.

  “This is my grandfather’s hand.”

  “He kept the accounts for Peverills.” Mrs. Davenant closed the book before Emily could take more than a quick glance at the neat columns of figures. “The world has changed considerably since Peverills was last a working concern, but this should give you some notion of the requirements of a plantation of this size.”

  The current accounts for Beckles might be of somewhat more use, Emily suspected, but she doubted that Mrs. Davenant would allow her to thumb through those.

  And this had been her grandfather’s. His life, his work. All those years of which he never spoke.

  Emily touched the faded paper cover of the ledger. “Might I borrow this?”

  Mrs. Davenant scooped it up again. “You may peruse it at your leisure—here at Beckles. You’ll stay here,” she said, as though it were already decided. “Your cousins too, if you wish.”

  “But—” A few hours ago, she hadn’t known the Davenants existed; now she was being invited to join their household. Had she imagined the hostility when Mrs. Davenant had heard her grandfather’s name? Or was that just her way? Either way, Emily wasn’t sure she wanted to subject herself to Mrs. Davenant’s rule. “We have obligations in Bridgetown.”

  “A nasty, festering place. No, you’ll do better here.” Mrs. Davenant raised her lorgnette, examining Emily as though she were a set of accounts that didn’t quite add up. “We have, I think, a great deal to learn from one another. . . .”

  Chapter Eight

  Bridgetown, Barbados

  April 1812

  “Get your corn here! Corn!”

  “Eggs! Fresh eggs!”

  A chicken pecked at Charles’s boot. “Pardon me,” he said, and realized he was apologizing to poultry.

  Broad Street was thronged with hawkers crying their wares. Charles had already refused guava, pickles, and aguacate pears, rum from a dipper, and lengths of fine lawn.

  Charles’s cravat clung limply to his neck. The jacket and waistcoat that had been quite comfortable in London were roasting him in his own sweat. He threaded his way through, past carts and donkeys, storefronts spilling out wares from foreign shores, wondering what on earth he was doing here and whether it might be wiser to turn back. But he had come this far. He had met with the plantation attorney that morning, and then, instead of sensibly returning to the horse he had stabled at an inn not far from St. Michael’s, he had turned in the other direction entirely, down Broad Street toward the house where Robert claimed their father’s mistress lived.

  If his father had had a mistress. If there were such a house. Or even such a street.

  They had never visited Bridgetown when he was a boy. Charles’s tutors had lived at Peverills; his mother had shopped for ribbons in Oistins. Bridgetown was unfamiliar territory, merely a place to embark and disembark, a carriage ride through busy streets. The idea that their father might have a house here, another family here . . . It beggared belief.

  His father had made periodic visits to Bridgetown, it was true. He had come to town to consult with the estate attorney, to meet with sugar factors, for meetings of the Barbados Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, of which his father had been an enthusiastic and vocal member.

  But he had never been gone long. Only a night here and a night there.

  But that was before. Before Charles’s mother had fallen ill, back when his parents still walked together in the garden of an afternoon, when his mother played the harp in the evenings and his father swore no angel could ever make a song so sweet. Nan had been there too, coming to collect Charles and Robert and shoo them back upstairs to the nursery, to scrub their faces and sing them songs.

  They were all, Charles realized, frozen in his memory as they had been nearly two decades ago, before he had been sent away to school and never came home. Had his father not died, he would be in England still. There had always been an excuse to stay away. His father certainly hadn’t chivvied him to come home; his mother’s health had worsened so gradually, her illness had worn on so long, that there had never seemed any urgency. Or so his father said. Charles had assumed his father had acted selflessly, wanting to spare Charles, his time in England given as a gift.

  But now he wondered.

  A fool’s errand, Charles told himself. That was what it was. Robert was getting his own back in the only way he knew how, taking his revenge on their father, for overlooking him, and on Charles, for having the gall to be born first.

  The house to which Robert had sent him was past the customs house, past the milk market, down Church Street and to the left. Like its neighbors, it was two stories high and built of brick. A gallery, painted green, jutted out from the second story, casting the door into shadow. The street drowsed in the midday heat, shutters closed. The thrum of Broad Street faded away. Behind doors and shutters, Charles could hear the muted sounds of voices calling, pots clattering, a pianoforte being played haltingly.

  Charles should have liked to peer in a window, but the shutters blocked his view as surely as they did the sun.

  Feeling like an idiot, he lowered the knocker.

  The woman who opened the door stared at him as though she’d seen a ghost. “Master Charles?”

  “Nan.” Her hair was tied up in a kerchief, patterned in red and pink stripes. Her face was older, lines around the eyes and corners of her lips that hadn’t been there in those long-gone days. It was strange, so very strange, to look down at her when once he had looked up. “My brother gave me your direction.”

  Nan stepped back, making a jerky gesture. “Would you like . . . Might I offer you a dish of tea?”

  The hall behind her was modest but well-appointed. A pier glass reflected Charles’s own strained face. And beneath it, a clock he recognized. It was of no great value. His mother had never cared for it. It was brass, and plain, but his father had had it with him on the ship from England and had prized it, as a relic of his wanderings.

  Stealing, Fenty said.

  Mistress, Robert claimed.

  There were perfectly reasonable explanations. A gift, for long service. Something serviceable rather than valuable. “There’s no need. I merely came to see that you were provided for.”

  Nan looked as though she were about to put a hand on his arm and then thought better of it, letting her hand fall to her side. “That’s very kind of you, Master Charles. You always were kind. Even as a child.”

  The music had stopped. The ticking of the clock seemed very loud between them. Charles could hear it marking out the seconds in time with his heartbeats in the drowsy heat of the day. This was the woman who had soothed his childish nightmares and bound his scrapes; he had loved her second to his mother, and sometimes not even second.

  But she wasn’t that girl anymore. This woman was a matron, a prosperous matron, in striped muslin and a lace-edged fichu, and he was a
man grown, not a little boy with a wilted bouquet in his hands.

  “Well, then.” There were so many questions he could ask, but he found, now that he was here, he wasn’t entirely certain he wanted to know the answers.

  “Mama?” A girl ventured into the hall, dressed in a white muslin frock tied with a blue sash.

  “Is this your daughter?”

  Nan hesitated slightly before answering. “Yes, Master Charles. Harriet, make your curtsy to Master Charles.”

  The girl obliged, looking curiously at him as she rose. Her dark hair had been plaited on either side of her face, tied top and bottom with bows that brought out the blue of her eyes. His eyes. His father’s eyes.

  It wasn’t just the eyes. It was in the shape of her chin, the tilt of her head.

  “How old is she?” Charles felt as though his tongue were glued to the top of his mouth.

  Nan paused for a moment, then said carefully, “Just turned six.”

  Six. Six? His mother had predeceased his father by only four years. Yes, she had been sick for a time before that, a long time. But even so. There had been vows pledged, vows his father had claimed to hold sacred.

  “Six and two months,” said Harriet and, at a look from her mother, dropped another curtsy. “If you please, sir.”

  If oo plise.

  Charles mustered a sickly smile. “Six! You are a great girl, aren’t you?”

  Gret gel. He was morbidly aware of the shape of his own vowels, so similar to hers, the linguistic quirk that gave them away. Not in all words, but some. His father’s gift to them both.

  Charles had no doubt that had she need to make reference to the color of his hair, it would be yaller, and the circle on her wrist a goold brasslet. His father, in all his years on the island, had never acquired the local accent. It was his mother who spoke with the lilt of the island; his father had retained the Whig drawl of his London years. And had, it seemed, imparted it to his children. To all his children.

  If this was all his children.

  The possibility hit Charles like a blow. If there was one, might there be others? Others scattered in little brick houses about Bridgetown? Working in his own fields? An infinity of betrayals made flesh, all speaking with the exaggerated accent popularized by a duchess an ocean away thirty years or more before.

  How had they kept the truth from his mother? What stories had they told? It would have been easy enough, with his mother confined to her bed. The child could be explained as a result of a liaison with the old bookkeeper, with a neighboring overseer, a passing guest. Infants didn’t look much like anyone in particular, not yet. “Master Charles? Are you certain you wouldn’t like a dish of tea? Or a posset? You’re looking peaky.” Nan put a hand to his elbow, looking at him with such concern that for a moment Charles was six again and had tripped on the garden path.

  “No,” Charles said, stepping back so abruptly he nearly lost his footing. “I—I have an engagement. I mustn’t stop.”

  “The master—he would have been proud to see you take his place. Whenever you sent a letter, he would keep it by him and read it again and again. He would read them aloud to me. . . .” Nan trailed off at the look on his face. Backing away, she put an arm protectively around her daughter. “It was kind of you to visit, Master Charles.”

  “Not at all. You were always good to me when I was a boy.”

  Had they been together even then? Nan couldn’t have been more than sixteen at the time, his father thirty or more. No. He couldn’t believe it. But then, he hadn’t believed the rest of it either, and here the truth was in front of him, in blue bows and white muslin.

  “I am glad to see you so well. And you,” he said to the girl, and fled.

  He could hear the girl’s voice, raised in a question, and Nan shushing her, chivvying her back toward the pianoforte, as the door shut behind him.

  His sister. He had a sister.

  No, Robert had said. Our father has a by-blow.

  Some men had untold numbers of half brothers and sisters, working their fields, pouring their drink, emptying their chamber pots. Charles thought of Mary Anne Beckles’s maid, standing on the balcony holding her mistress’s wrap, her cousin, her owner.

  But not at Peverills. Not his father. He had decried the practice, had written about it, lectured about it.

  Words, words, words, and no truth to them, all those letters, all those fine, fine letters.

  How naive his father must have thought him when he wrote back! All grand ideals and philosophical abstracts. And all the while . . . The thought that he had shared Charles’s letters, Charles’s private letters, with his mistress made Charles so angry that the world around him seemed to blur and fade. He had stripped his soul naked in those letters.

  When had it started? Was it after their mother had grown ill, when she had begun to take to her bed for long stretches in the morning, and then the afternoon, and then not leave her bed at all? His father’s letters had been punctuated with his mother’s movements, or lack thereof. A good day, when she had moved from bed to chaise longue. A bad day, when she could only lie against her pillows, with Robert to read to her.

  And while Robert read . . .

  Had he forced her? Had she seduced him? Each image was more monstrous than the last. Monstrous and impossible.

  “You looking for a place to stay?” A woman in a low-cut dress positioned herself in front of him, leaning forward to make clear that she wore no fichu to veil her charms. “There’s rooms at Nancy Clarke’s.”

  A boy hurried over, elbowing the woman out of the way. “You’ll find better at Betsy Austin’s. Three dollars a night!”

  Where in the deuce was he? Looking up, Charles saw a row of substantial houses. On a veranda, a pretty woman in a muslin gown and silk kerchief laughed with a soldier, toying with his tassels. From one of the windows, a woman waved to Charles.

  Charles ducked, feeling his already flushed cheeks color.

  “I’m not stopping. Forgive me.” Charles veered around and away, picking an alley at random, hoping it would lead him back to Broad Street.

  He found himself in the middle of a great market, ringed by stalls selling fruits and vegetables, flies buzzing over pools of blood beside the butcher’s stall, women with baskets wrangling with vendors.

  A constable wrestled a man into the stocks, to the great delight of the crowd, while hard by Charles’s side a fight had broken out, with cries of false weight and other accusations lost in the general fray.

  Charles dodged out of the way. He was, he realized, well and truly lost. He had no idea how he’d come from Nan’s house to here, or even how long he might have been walking. He weaved through the crowd, feeling absurdly out of place, aware of the conversations stopping as he walked by, the suspicious looks, the people who ducked out of the way.

  He thought he might know where he was. Robert had spoken of the market where slaves went to sell their masters’ goods, blend into the crowd, and never return—or went to sell items filched from a master’s house or garden. Did they think him a slave catcher? Charles felt decidedly conspicuous in his top boots and high-crowned hat. He tried to ask directions but couldn’t seem to catch anyone’s eye.

  Until he saw the familiar line of a back at a jeweler’s stall.

  “Jenny? It is Jenny, isn’t it?”

  For a moment, Charles thought he had been mistaken, that it was someone else entirely. He had only ever seen Miss Beckles’s maid dressed in a lawn apron and a white cap, while this woman wore a muslin dress, her hair tied up in a kerchief like half the other women at the market.

  But then she turned, and it was unmistakably she. The kerchief seemed strange on her, like a costume. Charles thought vaguely that they were both in a play for which no one had bothered to teach them the lines.

  “I’ve a commission for my mistress,” she said quickly. She fumbled beneath her fichu, bringing out a folded piece of paper. “I have a pass.”

  “Of course you do. I never meant to i
mply otherwise.” Charles tried to smile, but his lips didn’t seem to want to work properly. “I—I seem to have lost my way.”

  Miss Beckles’s maid looked at him with concern. “You’ve been too much in the sun.”

  “No. I . . . I’ve had a shock, that’s all. My father— My father has a daughter. In Bridgetown.” Black spots buzzed in front of his eyes, like flies. “My sister. I have a sister.”

  Miss Beckles’s maid caught his arm, steadying him.

  “You need something to drink.” She smelled of flowers and linen left to dry in the sun. “Can you wait here?”

  There was a murmur of voices, haggling, the clink of coins, the splash of a dipper. Charles’s mouth felt fuzzy.

  Jenny pressed a cup into his hand. “Drink this.”

  He did. The ginger beer burned its way down his throat, making him cough and gasp, but whether it was the shock of it or the liquid, Charles felt considerably better for it. He took another sip, more slowly, letting the ginger tingle on his tongue.

  Charles looked down at Miss Beckles’s maid. “Thank you. You must think me the rawest foreigner.”

  She looked away, giving him a good view of the lines of her profile, like a carving on a cameo. “You shouldn’t stay outside when you aren’t used to the sun.”

  Robert had said much the same thing, only he had been talking about other matters. “Was I so naive? My father always said we owed a sacred duty to the souls in our care, that only a beast would—”

  He was raving as though he truly were sun mad. And maybe he was mad, pouring all this out to a stranger, a slave. But to whom else could he speak? Robert? Miss Beckles? Jonathan Fenty? His world had shrunk, all his friends gone, an ocean away.

  Charles slugged back the last of the ginger beer, fighting for normalcy. “Could you show me the way to St. Michael’s?”

  The last thing Jenny wanted was to shepherd Mr. Davenant to St. Michael’s.

  “It’s not far,” she said, hoping he would take her meaning and excuse himself, leaving her to fade back into the market, just for a time, just for a bit more, unremarked and unremarkable.