The Summer Country

by Lauren Willig

  Hal and Septimus and Arthur, his closest companions, his true brothers. He’d always assumed that no matter how far they all roamed, they would still be ready at a moment to come together again, connected by shared memories and ancient affection, present even in absence.

  But Septimus was in Northumberland, trying to sort the finances of an estate he’d never expected to inherit and didn’t know how to run. Arthur had taken orders and was serving his flock somewhere in Cornwall, already engaged to the daughter of the local squire, growing fat on pasties and clotted cream. If they thought of Charles at all, it was in the same way, a part of their pasts, tinged with the exotic, sugar and rum and coconut trees.

  And Hal, the best of them all, was dead, fighting the French in Portugal and Spain.

  The waste of it all ate at him. How many like Hal were gone? How many lives lost? What had his last moments been like, in that strange and foreign country? He’d formed a connection with a Portuguese woman, Septimus wrote. His family hadn’t approved. Septimus had sent money to the woman, by a trusted intermediary. Money, Charles didn’t need to be told, that Septimus could ill afford to spare.

  He would have to write and offer to make Septimus whole. He would write . . . and say what? That his heart was breaking? That he was about to have a child he couldn’t acknowledge, whose body could be broken or bartered by his own brother?

  Maybe Hal was the lucky one, after all. At least he had died with honor, fighting to keep England free.

  Free. The word was a mockery.

  “Yes?” He’d asked not to be disturbed but the door had burst open, revealing Robert, disheveled and reeking of rum punch. “Robert?”

  “I’ve had a son.” Robert swayed on his feet, catching at the cane back of a chair. “Hadn’t you better congratulate me?”

  “Congratulations,” said Charles sincerely, or as sincerely as he could. He was still half at Eton, a boy again, chasing with Hal along pathways that existed only in his memory. “Isn’t it early?”

  “Yes. But you’d never know it. The boy’s big. Strong.” Robert stumbled forward, resting both hands on the desk, crumpling Septimus’s letter. “His eyes are blue.”

  It took Charles a moment to realize what he was getting at. “All babies’ eyes are blue! And even if they stay blue, Father’s eyes were blue. What color are Mary Anne’s eyes?”

  Robert looked uncomfortable. Or perhaps it was simply that he was bilious. “They’re not blue,” he said belligerently.

  They were gray, the same gray as Jenny’s, but Charles couldn’t say that. “They’re not black, either.”

  “And how would you know that?” Robert was spoiling for a fight.

  Charles couldn’t take it anymore. He rose to his feet, kicking back his chair. “Because she’s my neighbor. Because I have eyes.” Relenting a bit, he asked, “How is she?”

  “Not good,” said Robert. “Nanny Bell’s with her. That maid of hers chased Dr. MacAndrews off, wouldn’t let him bleed her. Said there was enough blood already.”

  “Shouldn’t you be with her?” Septimus’s letter. Mary Anne. Death compassed Charles about. He could hear it like a roaring in his ears, like waves coming to claim everyone around him. “She needs you. Your son needs you.”

  Robert glowered at him. “If he’s my son.”

  “I don’t believe your wife played you false,” Charles said shortly. “I can tell you for certain that she didn’t play you false with me. You have a choice, as I see it. You can let jealousy poison everything you touch, or you can welcome your son into the world and cherish him.”

  Robert blinked at the onslaught of words. “And if he’s not my son?”

  “He is,” said Charles. “But if he weren’t . . . who’s to say what makes a man himself? You’re Father’s son, but you’re not the least bit like him. In looks, yes. But not in spirit.”

  “Mother had the raising of me.” Robert’s eyes narrowed and Charles could tell that what little ground he had gained was about to be lost. “Father was too busy writing letters and tupping Mother’s maid.”

  Charles cut him off before he could revisit old slights. “There you have it. Whatever this boy’s blood—and I tell you now, it is yours—you can decide whether or not you want the raising of him, whether you want him to share your thoughts, your feelings. You can leave him entirely to your wife. Or you can go home and bend the knee and give thanks that you have a healthy baby in the cradle.”

  He could feel his anger rising like flame, pure and hot, that Robert should have a child and deny him when all he wanted was the right to call his child his own.

  What had Hal fought and died for if not this? The fundamental principles of England, a man’s right to his own hearth and home.

  “Go home,” he said. “Go home.”

  Robert looked as though he might argue.

  Charles lifted Septimus’s letter, holding it up in front of Robert’s face. “I’ve just had word that my closest friend is dead. He was fighting Bonaparte in the peninsula. He can’t hold his child.”

  There was no child, as far as Charles knew; at least, Septimus hadn’t mentioned one. But he was angry, at Robert, at the world, and it seemed a shame to let facts get in the way of rhetoric. And why not? Hal might well have had a child by this unknown Portuguese woman.

  “I’m sorry,” mumbled Robert.

  “So am I,” said Charles, and turned his back on his brother, his muscles tense and shaking with anger and something else.

  The dawning of an idea.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Christ Church, Barbados

  May 1854

  Emily didn’t know what to think.

  But there it was, in front of her, in black and white, her grandfather’s hand, recording barrels of sugar and tuns of rum and a silver-backed mirror for Lottie in spring of 1816, long after her grandparents were meant to be married and gone to Antigua.

  The very last entry read: One silver tea service, to Jonathan Fenty, for good service, on the occasion of his marriage.

  One silver tea service. She could picture the silver pot, the matching creamer and sugar, all engraved with her grandfather’s initials. It was the tea service her grandmother had always used, gone now to Aunt Millicent, who had never liked it, because the lines of it were too plain, too simple, too much of the style of the early part of the century.

  Emily leafed slowly back through the entries, as though she might find a clue among the barrels and tuns. If her grandfather had first married in 1816, then what did that make her mother?

  A mistake—not in these dates—but in her mother’s birthday? But no. Uncle Archibald had been born in 1817; her mother was the older by two and a half years. These were the commonplaces of life, the things she knew without knowing how she knew them.

  Which meant that her mother had been born at least two years prior to her grandparents’ marriage.

  “Shall I dress you for dinner?” Katy appeared, holding freshly pressed linens and an evening frock boasting tiers of apple-green muslin.

  Emily hastily slammed the ledger shut, as though caught out in something illicit. “Yes, thank you. Your little girl . . . she’s well?”

  “Just a touch of ague.” Katy busied herself with Emily’s buttons, letting the dress drop so Emily could step out of it.

  “If you need— If she needs you, I can dress myself,” Emily offered.

  “She’s all right,” said Katy, tying the tapes of an impossibly wide petticoat around Emily’s waist. “Her father’s with her.”

  Father. Fathers and daughters. Emily submitted to Katy’s ministrations while her mind returned again to her mother, her grandfather’s pet. That was what Aunt Millicent claimed when Uncle Archibald wasn’t listening. Uncle Archie had been baffled by his older sister, by her causes, by her passions, but he had loved her with a little brother’s unquestioning love. It was Aunt Millicent who complained on his behalf.

  But if they had only married in 1816 . . . Her grandmother had been marr
ied before. Emily knew that. He had died—what had Mrs. Davenant said? Three years before her grandparents’ marriage.

  If her grandmother had borne a posthumous child—Emily didn’t like to think it, but the timing was right, or close enough.

  Uncle Archibald looked like Grandfather, with his red hair and bright blue eyes. Emily’s mother had taken, she had always thought, after her Welsh mother, with darker skin and hair. Her eyes were blue, but a paler blue, the misty blue of the sky after rain. Emily remembered so little, but that she remembered, her mother’s eyes, which looked faraway even when she was close.

  “There,” said Katy, and Emily realized that she was waiting for Emily to say something, that her hair had been dressed and her earrings tied on and her locket nestled in the hollow of her throat while she brooded and brooded.

  For a rarity, Laura was at supper, ethereal in blond lace. Emily looked at her uncertainly, feeling the rift between them, unsure, for the first time, of her best friend’s feelings. Ordinarily, she would have gone to Laura with her concerns about her grandparents, as she and Laura had spoken, long ago, about the loss of their mothers, Emily’s to disease, Laura’s to continental spas, but there was a gulf between them marked by everything that had been left unsaid since their arrival in Barbados.

  Emily smiled, tentatively. Laura smiled back, but as quickly ducked her head and let Adam hand her into her chair.

  The fare was largely European; Mrs. Davenant, she was learning, brought out the more exotic varieties of local cuisine to terrorize European visitors and, occasionally, the hapless Dr. MacAndrews.

  Once the soup had been ladled from the great tureen, Emily asked Mrs. Davenant, “I’ve been meaning to ask: Were you at my grandparents’ wedding?”

  She tried very hard to make the inquiry sound casual, moving about the bits of turtle in her soup without actually making any effort to eat them.

  Mrs. Davenant took a long, slow sip of her wine, which had been watered until it was barely pink. “No. They were married from Antigua, as I recall. Your grandmother owned a property there.”

  “And then they sold it and went on an extended wedding journey through the southern bits of America.” Emily grasped at straws. “Did he come back in between?”

  “Not that I know,” said Mrs. Davenant. She held her glass in the air but didn’t drink, the light winking off the intricate patterns in the cut glass. “The last time I saw your grandfather was on Easter Day in 1816. I remember it, because that was the day the troubles started. We were at table at Peverills when the news came. The men ran to join the militia. In the confusion . . . I believe your grandfather left to join your grandmother in Antigua later that week. I couldn’t say.”

  “Might they have been married already?” Emily asked hopefully.

  “No.” Mrs. Davenant seemed to come back from far away. “If they were, I wasn’t informed.”

  “Yes, of course.” Emily looked across the table at Adam, a red-haired, fair-skinned Fenty, his face blotchy with heat. “My grandmother was married before. Did she have any children in her first marriage?”

  Mrs. Davenant paused before answering. “Perhaps. She might have done. I didn’t know them well.”

  George choked on his claret. “I thought Mrs. Boland stood godmother to my father.”

  “And look how that turned out,” snapped his grandmother. As if it ended the matter, she said decidedly, “The Bolands weren’t a Barbados family.”

  George raised his brows at Emily behind his napkin, inviting Emily to share his amusement. Emily wasn’t feeling terribly amused. “I know my grandmother was older than our grandfather, by some years.”

  Adam gestured to one of the servants to refill his glass. “If she’d had another child, wouldn’t we have known? It’s hardly the sort of thing one would keep secret. Unless you think our aunt or uncle met some deep and dismal fate.”

  “You’re right.” Emily forced a smile. “It’s just that my grandparents rarely spoke of their courtship. There’s so little I know of their lives before Bristol.”

  Adam looked at her incredulously. “That’s hardly true. What about all the stories about laboring in the hot sun?”

  “I thought you claimed those were more morality tales than true histories.”

  George smiled at Laura. “If you want family histories, I can tell you about my mother’s great-great-grandfather, the privateer.”

  “Oh, not that nonsense,” muttered Mrs. Davenant, but she resumed eating again, albeit slowly, her eyes on Emily all the while, watching, measuring.

  “A privateer?” asked Laura, blissfully unaware of undercurrents.

  “Yes, pillaging the Spanish for the sake of the Virgin Queen,” said George with a smile. “It began in Dorset. . . .”

  The servants removed the soup course, moving silently among the guests with platters of meat and poultry, sweetbreads, and stewed mushrooms. Emily let George’s words drift around her, pretending to eat, making the correct responses at the correct times, caught in her own thoughts. There was something Mrs. Davenant knew, something she was hiding.

  Perhaps. She might have done.

  Not a no. Emily found herself watching her own hands as though expecting them to have changed, to belong to someone else. It was almost a surprise to find them exactly the same, with a sunburst of freckles on her right wrist, almost exactly in the shape of a star, and the scar on her right index finger from a forgotten accident as a child.

  She had always been Jonathan Fenty’s granddaughter. That was as much a part of who she was as the curl of her hair and the shape of her chin. She knew nothing of her grandmother’s first husband, the mysterious Mr. Boland, only that he was Irish, and older, and rich.

  No. Emily sawed at her chicken. She was getting ahead of herself. There might be another explanation.

  “What?” George was talking to her.

  “I said it’s dead already,” said George. “The chicken.”

  “Oh. Yes.” Emily set down her knife and fork. “How far away is the part of the island where my grandfather grew up?”

  “Scotland?”

  “No,” said Emily, “he was born in Barbados.”

  Mrs. Davenant gave a dry laugh. “Scotland is in Barbados. It’s a portion of the parish of St. Andrew.”

  “It’s not terribly far.” Ever chivalrous, George jumped in to save Emily’s pride. “It’s considered a great place for a picnic. It’s very picturesque. We could ride there next week if you like.”

  “If we took the carriage, Laura and Adam could come,” suggested Emily. “What do you think, Laura? You could bring your sketchbook.”

  “The terrain is rugged and wild,” Mrs. Davenant said. “You’ll do better to go on horseback.”

  “You can sketch it for me,” said Laura, adding, as a precaution, “In words.”

  “I can draw a straight line,” protested Emily, feeling an inexplicable surge of relief, as though she’d been forgiven for a trespass she hadn’t realized she’d committed.

  “Yes,” agreed Laura, looking more herself than Emily had seen her in weeks. “It’s only all the other ones that are the problem.”

  “I was the despair of our drawing master,” Emily confessed to George.

  “But the French mistress adored you,” said Laura. “And that poor woman who tried to teach us geography.”

  She smiled across the table at Emily, and Emily smiled back, feeling as though the last few months had disappeared and they were themselves again.

  “I’ll bring you back flowers to press,” she promised. “And you can come next time.”

  Emily approached Adam after dinner, when the men had returned to the great room after the ritual passing of the port. They seldom lingered over their tipple; Adam found George tedious and George preferred the company of the ladies. “Will you come to Scotland?”

  “Are you afraid young Davenant intends to make his intentions plain?” Emily frowned at him; George was just on the other side of the room, turning the pag
es while Laura played the pianoforte. Adam held up his hands. “Don’t look to me. I have a meeting in town.”

  “Surely, you can do without your visit to the icehouse for one day!”

  “I’m not going to the icehouse! I have a meeting with a man named Montefiore. He’s a merchant.” Adam’s mouth twisted. “I know what you think of me, coz, but believe me, this is business, not pleasure.”

  “What sort of business?” Emily asked suspiciously.

  “Fenty and Company business.” Lowering his voice, Adam said, “London Turner hasn’t renewed his contract. I’m sure—well, he says it’s just waiting for his clerks to produce the documents, but don’t you think if he wanted the documents ready they’d have been ready by now? I don’t know if he’s just enjoying making me cool my heels or if he has other irons in the fire.”

  Emily glanced over her shoulder. George and Laura were lost in their music. But Mrs. Davenant was watching them. “I suspect the former.”

  “But what if it’s not? What if he’s seen his chance to strike a better bargain elsewhere? I’ve been searching out other business. This man Montefiore isn’t as big a fish as Turner, but he’s a man of some property, with warehouses in town. If Turner leaves us empty-handed, it would be something to take home to Papa.” Adam tugged at his cravat pin, looking like the boy he had once been. “I can’t go back and tell them I’ve made a hash of everything.”

  Emily put a hand on his arm. “You haven’t made a hash of everything.”

  “Haven’t I? I insulted Turner’s nephew. He hasn’t forgiven that. If someone had only told me . . . But never mind. I’m determined to make it right.”

  “Would you like me to speak to Dr. Braithwaite?” She certainly knew where to find him on Thursdays.

  “No! That is, I mean, it wouldn’t do any good. I don’t believe Turner lets his nephew have anything to do with his business. Truly, Emily. Don’t meddle. This is my own mess. I need to fix it myself.”

  “All right, then.” It had been a long time since they had spoken so frankly with each other, as they used to. It was on the tip of Emily’s tongue to tell him about the ledger and their grandparents’ marriage—but what would Adam think? Would he look at her differently if she wasn’t their grandfather’s grandchild?