The Summer Country

by Lauren Willig

“It will happen, eventually. But I find I can’t risk our child on eventually.”

  “What if the deception were to be discovered?”

  “How would they prove it? It would be Robert’s word against mine. He’d sound mad for forcing the point. The truth would be nearly impossible to trace. I have friends in England who would help create a false trail for us if need be. . . .”

  Bringing more and more people into the conspiracy, more danger of discovery. Jenny put her hands protectively over her stomach. “And where will our child live when he’s meant to be traveling from Portugal? Who will nurse him?”

  Charles sat a little straighter. “Jonathan Fenty has a sister with a new baby.” His lips twisted in a half smile. “I know because I had our housekeeper give Jonathan a rattle and some old dresses for the baby. They live in St. Andrew, in an area so remote that many never even get so far as Speightstown. If a child were to be fostered there, just for a year, there would be no tattling tongues to bear word back to Beckles.”

  Jenny thought of Fenty, with his hair clubbed back in a queue, his hard face, his watchful eyes. “Do you trust him so far?”

  “Absolutely,” said Charles, without hesitation. “What reason would he have to betray us?”

  What reason did anyone have to betray anyone else? And yet people did so all the time, for money or love or sheer ill temper.

  “How do we know his sister would care for our child?”

  “Because I would pay her,” said Charles. “And we’d have Jonathan to keep an eye for us. No one could find it strange that he wanted to visit his family once a fortnight.”

  “Have you broached this with him yet?”

  “No. I wouldn’t without speaking to you first. If you mislike it . . . we’ll think of something else.”

  He’d already said he could think of no other way.

  “I mislike everything,” said Jenny, letting herself lean against him. She was so tired, so very tired, their growing child sapping her strength, weakening her resolve.

  Charles smoothed the hair back from her forehead. “We could still go away together.”

  Jenny shook her head. “It’s too late for that. I’d as lief not have our child born with fins.”

  “We’d be on a ship, not in the water,” pointed out Charles, but he didn’t argue the point.

  Jenny lowered her face so he couldn’t see her expression. It wasn’t fair to resent him for not wanting to throw everything away for her and their child. He had offered, after all. It was more than most would have done. What did she expect? She was lucky he was standing by her so far, she knew that.

  But it stung a bit, all the same.

  “I don’t trust Nanny Bell to remain silent,” she said. They both knew it was a capitulation.

  “If I can find a midwife . . .” With sudden decision, Charles rose from their seat, holding out both hands to help Jenny up. “Will you come speak to Jonathan with me? If he refuses, we’ll know we need to find another way.”

  “Now?” She wasn’t sure she liked this. But then, she didn’t like anything right now. Her emotions were all out of joint.

  “Why let ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’?” Charles abandoned Shakespeare for plain prose. “I’m afraid if we stop to reflect we’ll decide it’s mad.”

  “It is mad,” said Jenny, falling into step beside him. She couldn’t help but notice how he shortened his stride to accommodate her new bulk.

  “If the world is mad, maybe to be mad is to be sane. It’s not sophistry, or even philosophy; I mean it. I’d always thought that there was a remedy for everything in law, but when Nature’s law conflicts with positive law, I hold it no breach to maintain the right.”

  When one’s own self-interest demanded it. There might be a child at this very moment being born into bondage on Charles’s own land, a child who would call him master. How was it Nature’s law when it was his own child, but the law of the land when it was someone else’s?

  Jenny swallowed the thought. For one, she knew that Charles was well aware of it, and if he hadn’t manumitted his people yet, it was because he hadn’t the resources to do so without plunging everyone into poverty. For another, in this case, the contradiction was in her favor. Let Charles dream of universals and the rights of man. She would fight to protect her own.

  They found Charles’s bookkeeper at his desk in the little room that served as book room and office, bent over his accounts. The door was open, but Charles knocked on it all the same.

  “Jonathan? Might I trouble you awhile?”

  “It’s your house,” said the bookkeeper, thriftily tapping the excess ink off his pen before setting it down. He made to rise, but checked at the sight of Jenny, straightening slowly. “Is something amiss at Beckles?”

  “Yes and no.” Charles regarded Jenny, half pride, half bemusement, looking for a moment like any father-to-be. “Jenny and I are expecting a child.”

  “Felicitations.” Whatever he truly thought, Fenty didn’t betray his emotions by so much as the flicker of an eyelash. “Does Mrs. Davenant know?”

  “No. We’d like to keep it that way, if we can.” Blindly, Charles took Jenny’s nearest hand in his, holding it so tightly that she could feel the bones crunch together. “Both of us are determined that our child not be born a slave.”

  Jenny could see Fenty take in their linked hands. “I’ll do my possible, such as it is. I assume you don’t mean me to beat Mr. Robert into submission?”

  “Tempting as that is . . . we were thinking more of theft than battery. If that would cause you troubles with your conscience, we can stop the conversation here and you can pretend none of this was ever said.”

  “Oh, my conscience isn’t so delicate as that. There’s no love lost between me and Beckles. They wouldn’t hesitate to do me a mischief, so why shouldn’t I return the favor?”

  Jenny could feel Charles’s surprise, but he did his best not to show it. “Why, indeed?” he said gamely. “You should be paid for your trouble, of course. In coin, as well as the moral satisfaction.”

  “What precisely did you have in mind? Do you mean to make Miss Beck—Mrs. Davenant’s maid disappear?”

  “No,” said Jenny emphatically, before Charles could say anything at all. “Miss Mary Anne would raise the parish looking for me. But she won’t care about one child born dead.”

  “Ah,” said Fenty, as though a complicated sum had just come right. He gave a small nod. “Babies die all the time. Die and are buried and never seen again?”

  “We’d thought your sister might be willing to foster an orphan child, a baby sent from Bridgetown. She’d be generously paid, of course.” Charles looked meaningfully at Fenty. “It’s only for a year or so, until my old friend Hal’s child arrives from Portugal to be raised at Peverills.”

  Fenty snorted. “When you contrive, you don’t go by halves! All right, then, let me see if I have this aright. In a year—or so—the baby goes back to its family in Bridgetown, and I’ll be sent to fetch a foreign wean from a ship in Carlisle Bay?” He grinned, a pirate’s grin, all teeth and trouble. “I’ll do it, devil take me if I won’t.”

  “It is theft,” Charles cautioned. “The child is the property of the Beckles estate.”

  “It’s not theft if they can’t prove it happened,” said Fenty, with a glint in his eye. “That may not be in your books, but that’s the law as I’ve seen it.”

  “Won’t you need to ascertain your sister’s willingness?”

  “My sister knows what side her bread is buttered. It’s easier to nurse a babe than squeeze starch out of arrowroot. As long as she’s paid for her trouble, she’ll nurse the babe as tenderly as her own.”

  “Well, then,” said Charles, looking helplessly at Jenny, as though trying to figure out what to do next. “All that’s left to do is discuss terms.”

  “Not quite all,” Jenny interjected. Where did they think this child was planning to appear from? “There’s one difficulty.”

  “Only o
ne?” said Fenty, and Jenny found herself smiling back despite herself. Fenty had a strange charm, but it was charm all the same.

  “The midwife,” said Jenny. “I don’t trust Nanny Bell not to betray us.”

  Fenty looked to Charles, who shook his head. “I can’t vouch for our people at Peverills. They’re accustomed to answering to Robert, even if he is master of Beckles now.”

  “Well, that’s soon enough mended. My sisters have more than enough experience between them.” His accent grew thicker, Jenny noticed, when he spoke of his family. “Who do you think delivered their trildren? Becky’s brought a dozen trildren into the world. Some of them have even lived past infancy.”

  Charles looked a little uneasy at his gallows humor. “If she would . . .”

  “But wait,” said Jenny. “How is she to be brought to me? Or am I to be brought to her? Won’t someone question her presence at Beckles?”

  “To bring Becky to you is no great obstacle. I’m assuming you wouldn’t mind if I were to offer my widowed sister the hospitality of this house for, oh, a fortnight or thereabouts?” Without waiting for Charles to answer, he went on, briskly taking charge. “You can’t have the child here. There are too many people about. And it’s too far for you to come in your condition. You’ll have to send a message for Becky to come to you. A prearranged phrase, something that will seem innocent to anyone else.”

  “Have you silk floss to spare?” Jenny suggested ironically.

  “That will do well enough. Have it sent to me by my groom London. He’s a likely lad. He won’t ask questions.” Fenty moved quickly on. “You can’t have the child at Beckles. If they see the baby, they’ll want a body. Develop a habit of taking walks or visiting elsewhere. Do you have friends on other plantations?”

  Jenny was about to say no when she remembered Nanny Grigg. “Yes, at Harrow. I’ve been invited to stop there of a Sunday evening.”

  Fenty grinned. “Better and better. And you’ll give my respects to Mrs. Boland while you’re there?”

  “It’s true,” said Charles thoughtfully. “Even if Robert were to notice, he’d never stop you going to Harrow. He needs Mrs. Boland.”

  Mrs. Boland had been widowed in the spring. While she stayed close to home in her hired house, mourning her husband, Robert had grown increasingly anxious over whether the widow would honor the promises made by her husband.

  “Go two or three times, perhaps,” suggested Charles. “Enough to establish a pattern. That way, if you’re not at hand, everyone will assume you’ve gone to Harrow.”

  “If the baby has the consideration to come on a Sunday,” pointed out Jenny with some asperity. “And where am I to go in truth?”

  For once it was Charles who took the lead and not Fenty. “The Old Mill,” he said decidedly. “It’s close enough for you to walk and far enough that we won’t be overheard.”

  The baby, in the way of babies, didn’t oblige by coming on a Sunday.

  The first pain struck on a Tuesday afternoon in early August, while Jenny was reading to her mistress from an old book of poetry.

  It didn’t matter much what she read; Mary Anne wasn’t listening, not really. There were times she was almost herself again, frustrated at her own weakness, and other times when she turned her face to the wall and demanded her medicine, refusing to look at or hold her child, her longed-for heir.

  So Jenny picked the books herself. Her father, whatever his other sins, had been an educated man. The library at Beckles was well stocked with volumes with his signature on the flyleaf. She had chosen poetry because it made her feel closer to Charles, Charles who so earnestly believed that the world could be made beautiful.

  She found it an unexpected consolation as she sat in the unnatural twilight of the shuttered room, her body heavy and slow, letting the words wash over her. This was her gift to her child too, that he should be learned like his father. She wanted to wince away from the reality of what they planned to do, but that wasn’t in her nature: so she forced herself to face it head-on. That if they were lucky, if they were clever, she would give her child up so that he could have this: calf-bound volumes and tutors in Greek and Latin, all that careless erudition that Charles took so for granted but was so much a part of him, and a hallmark of his world, where even the most indifferently educated could quote Latin tags in his cups.

  “Sweetest love, I do not go, / For weariness of thee,” she read softly, and knew she was speaking to her child, not to Mary Anne, inert in her bed. “Nor in the hope the world can show / A fitter love for me.”

  She felt it then, a cramping pain. But she’d had pains before, in her hips, her belly, her back, so she stayed where she was and kept on reading.

  “Let not thy divining heart / Forethink me any ill. . . .”

  It came again, harder now. Jenny sat very still, half-afraid to move. All these months, fretting, planning. Now that the moment was here, she found herself frozen like an animal caught out in the open.

  Breathe. Breathe. She finished the poem. “They who one another keep alive ne’er parted be.”

  Silently, she closed the book and set it down on the bedside table. Mary Anne’s eyes were closed, her breathing shallow but regular.

  Another pain took her, stronger now, as though her child were growing impatient with her.

  “All right, baby,” Jenny murmured, and shook off the thought that this might be her last chance to talk to her child.

  She knew what she needed to do; the men might assume the baby would come obligingly on a Sunday, but she’d prepared her own contingency.

  The clock on the mantel said it was gone five. Jenny closed the door of Mary Anne’s room behind her and hailed Queenie, who was coming up to sit with Mary Anne. “She’s sleeping. But she’s asked me to mend her Pomona gown and I can’t find the green floss. Will you send to the seamstress?”

  “Now?” asked Queenie.

  Jenny glanced over her shoulder at the closed door, biting her lip in exaggerated concern. “You know how she is these days. If she says she wants the gown, I’d best have the gown for her. Even if she’s most like to have forgot she wanted it by suppertime. But then again, she might not.”

  “Green?” said Queenie.

  “Pomona green. You know how particular she gets. If the seam shows, I’ll never hear the end of it. Didn’t we use the last of the Pomona green floss sewing the trim on her pelisse?”

  “Oh no,” said Queenie with feeling. She was so young and eager that Jenny almost felt bad about gulling her.

  “Never you mind,” said Jenny quickly. “You sit with her. I’ll go to Harrow. Mrs. Boland has a dress of the same color. I’ll wager Nanny Grigg will have the right shade in her sewing box.”

  “But it’s so far and so late—it will be past dark by the time you get back!”

  “When has that ever bothered anyone?” Jenny tried to sound jaunty, but it was ruined by her wince as another pain struck. At the alarm on Queenie’s face, she said, white-lipped, “Don’t you worry. This baby’s not coming yet. All the same, though, maybe send to Peverills and see if they’ve the thread there? There might be some left from the old mistress. Paris!” She snagged one of the boys who ran errands and delivered messages. “Go to Peverills and ask Mr. Fenty’s groom London to see if they’ve any Pomona green silk floss. Tell him the mistress wants it without delay.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Paris and London had been born in the same year, victims of her father’s fancy to name all the children after cities.

  What would Charles name their child? Jenny wondered, and then dragged her mind back to the present, to Queenie holding tight to her arm.

  “Maybe you should go to Nanny Bell instead of Harrow?”

  “Don’t be foolish; it’s not that far away. And if I’m taken there, well, Nanny Grigg’s as skilled as Nanny Bell. Only don’t let her hear you say that.” Jenny forced a smile. “Don’t you worry about me, Queenie. Just go sit by our mistress and make sure she’s not alone when she wakes.”
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br />   The sun was already setting when she set off down the road in the direction of Harrow, just far enough to confound anyone watching. She didn’t, at least, have to worry about the spyglasses; her mistress was too fuddled to use them, and Master Robert was away at what he said was a militia meeting but Jenny knew to be a tryst with his mistress in Bridgetown.

  The cane had been felled months ago; the first gang had finished turning the ground and had just begun holing the cane, breaking the fields into large squares, with two young plants in each. Jenny missed the protection of the mature cane, those long fronds shielding her.

  The pains were stronger now. She found herself sinking to her knees in the newly turned earth, breathing in the scent of dirt and manure as she struggled not to cry out. She forced herself up to her feet, taking advantage of the space between pains to get as far as she could as fast as she could, her shoes sinking into the soft earth, stumbling and catching herself again, pausing again, nails biting into her fists, her body feeling as though it were breaking apart.

  Dimly, she was aware that there was dirt on her face and knees. In between pains, she felt herself again, ashamed of how she gave in to the agony, let it turn her into an animal, stripping her of reason and dignity. She’d heard Mary Anne shouting and crying, had seen her frenzied writhing. How had she not realized it would come to her too?

  Because she’d thought herself stronger. But she wasn’t strong, not now, and the pains were coming closer now, closer and harder.

  It felt like years before she made it to the mill, a lantern shining through the ruined door. She’d wanted to greet them with dignity, but the pain hit again, rendering her insensible, and she was only aware of arms grasping her forearms, holding her up, arms around her. She shook them off; she hurt, she hurt, to be touched only made it worse. But then the pain was past and it was Charles there, Charles frantic with worry, chafing her hands, her wrists, hugging her as close as he dared, helping her over the threshold, to where a makeshift bed had been prepared with blankets upon blankets. Water boiled over a campfire, and beside it stood a strange woman with Jonathan Fenty’s red-gold hair tucked up underneath a kerchief and some of his brisk and businesslike manner.