The Summer Country

by Lauren Willig

  “I’ve sent the servants ahead to the country,” said Mr. Turner.

  “Adam,” Emily said, rising from her seat. “Adam, you should know—”

  “It’s the strangest thing, Emily,” Adam interrupted. He scrubbed a hand over his eyes and Emily realized he had lost his hat somewhere, leaving him bareheaded, his red hair disordered and darkened with sweat. “He’s dead. Montefiore’s dead.”

  “He was a good man,” said Mr. Turner soberly.

  Adam didn’t seem to hear him. “I went to his store on Swan Street and they told me he’d never come in, so I went to his home and there was a little boy crying and they were hanging black cloths over the mirrors. They told me he died just this morning. Went into convulsions. One minute he was alive, the next he was gone.”

  “Adam,” Emily said urgently. “Adam, we have to get away. There’s illness in the town.”

  Adam swayed on his feet. His forehead glistened with a sheen of sweat in the half-light of the shuttered drawing room. “’S hot today.” He tugged at the knot of his cravat. “I’m feeling the heat. Lord, how do people live in this?”

  Emily caught at her cousin’s arm. She smelled rum on him, on his clothes, on his breath. “Did you come straight here?”

  Adam’s eyes shifted away. “I might have stopped at the icehouse first. Don’t look like that. I only had one cup—spilled some of it. It was very distressing!”

  “I’m sure it was,” said Dr. Braithwaite. “Uncle—”

  “All right, all right.” Mr. Turner rose. He bowed courteously, but Emily noticed he kept his distance, making no attempt to shake hands. “Mr. Fenty, Miss Dawson, if you’ll forgive me? I’ve overstayed my time. Nathaniel—”

  Dr. Braithwaite stepped back, away from him, holding up a hand to ward off contact. “Give my most sincere expressions of affection to Aunt Ada and my cousins. Tell them to drink no water that isn’t first boiled.”

  “We’ll hardly have to worry at Belle View. But yes, I’ll tell her. She can blame you when the servants leave us.”

  “Tell them they’ll be glad for it by and by. Better to sweat and live.”

  “Emily?” Emily’s attention was abruptly wrenched back to her cousin as he tugged at her sleeve. “I might—I might have had one too many.”

  Emily regarded Adam with dawning alarm. “I thought you only had one cup.”

  “I’m not—I’m not feeling so clever.”

  Adam’s face looked more green than pink. Doubling over, he sprayed the contents of his stomach all over Mrs. Turner’s Aubusson rug.

  Emily started forward, but Dr. Braithwaite flung out an imperious arm. “Don’t. I’ll see to him.”

  “It might just be the rum.”

  Dr. Braithwaite made an attempt to hold her back. “Would you stake your life on that?”

  Emily pushed him impatiently aside. “If that’s what it is, I’ve already been exposed.” She knelt by her cousin, feeling his head with the back of her hand, supporting him with her arm. “Adam? Adam, how are you feeling?”

  Adam groaned. “I’ve been sick, haven’t I?”

  “All over the rug,” said Emily, with a cheerfulness she was far from feeling. Outside, she could hear the cry of Mr. Turner’s coachman, the crack of the whip, the clatter of hoofbeats as Mr. Turner’s carriage rattled away, fleeing the sickness. “Just like the time you gobbled all the jam tarts, you big greedyguts. We’re going to get you cleaned up and get you to bed.”

  She looked to Braithwaite, and he nodded. “You’d best keep him here. I’ve my rounds to make, but I’ll attend him when I can.”

  “The servants . . . ?”

  “All gone to Belle View except for one kitchen maid and a boy to tend my horse and gig.” Sliding an arm under Adam’s shoulders, Dr. Braithwaite said, “Come along, Mr. Fenty. Do you think you can stand?”

  “Dizzy.” With Dr. Braithwaite’s help, Adam lurched to his feet, wincing in pain. “Christ, my stomach.”

  “Let’s get you upstairs.”

  Emily looked back over her shoulder. “The rug—”

  “I’ll burn it.” At Emily’s expression, he added, “My uncle can afford another.”

  Together, they managed to get Adam out of his coat and boots and into a bed in a small bedroom at the back of the house, away from the street side.

  They stood looking at each other across the foot of the bed. Dr. Braithwaite said, “It’s no use to try to persuade you to go, I imagine.”

  Emily shook her head. “What would be the point now?”

  “You’re not concerned about your reputation?”

  “If I were to put my reputation before my responsibilities, then I would be a poor character, indeed,” said Emily warmly. “I don’t care what busybodies think, but I do care for my own good opinion.”

  Dr. Braithwaite raised his brows. “There’s no possible answer to that. I’ll leave laudanum for you. It will help him rest—and it does seem to do some good. I’m not sure why, but it does.” He looked at Emily’s vomit-splashed skirt and jabbed a finger at it. “Burn that too. Or at least boil it.”

  “And wear what?” Emily looked down at her own maltreated frock. “I wasn’t intending to make an extended visit.”

  “I have to get back,” said Dr. Braithwaite, beating a hasty retreat. “Help yourself to anything you need from my aunt’s wardrobe.”

  Emily remembered Mrs. Turner’s gown, a miracle of French fashion. Aside from being entirely impractical for tending sickbed, it most likely cost enough to rebuild the roof of Peverills.

  “I’m not emptying slop buckets in your aunt’s Paris dresses!” Emily called after him, horrified.

  Dr. Braithwaite paused on the landing. “Why not?”

  “If you don’t know why not . . . Oh, never mind. I’ll find something.” Emily went off to raid the wardrobes of the upper servants, supplying herself with two plain calico dresses and a variety of brightly colored head scarves to tie up her hair.

  The housekeeper was stouter than she; the dresses hung loosely, but that was all to the best in the growing heat, which haunted the corners of the house, rising with the day. It was decidedly hotter in town than it had been at Beckles. Emily found herself grateful for the scarves that kept her hair off her face and neck, and began to wonder if she ought to have lodged Adam in a downstairs room as he lay in his shirt on tangled sheets.

  Emily scoured the pantry, searching for suitable foods for an invalid. She ruthlessly raided the chicken coop, sacrificing a fowl for the pot, wringing its neck, scalding and plucking it with her own hands while Adam dozed, fitfully. She would have to find some way, later on, to thank Mr. Turner for his unwitting hospitality. In the meantime, the only object could be to get Adam on his feet again.

  “You can cook?” Dr. Braithwaite came in as Emily was hovering over the soup, trying to fish out a recalcitrant sprig of greens.

  “Not like your aunt’s cook,” said Emily, poking at the chicken with a wooden spoon. “But I can do you a good, strong broth, or a milk pudding.”

  “Your talents never cease to amaze me.”

  “Don’t say that until you’ve tasted it.” The steam from the pot warmed Emily’s cheeks. She thrust her spoon at Dr. Braithwaite. “Does this need more salt?”

  She fed Adam broth, alternately bullying and cajoling him into taking a spoon here and a spoon there, letting him rest against the pillow between sips, mopping his brow with a damp cloth.

  Adam moved restlessly against the pillow. “Do you ever think we ought to have married?”

  “You’re talking nonsense. Hush.”

  “That was what Grandfather wanted, you know.”

  “Grandfather wanted what Grandfather wanted.” Emily touched a gentle finger to Adam’s sunken cheek. “You’ll get better and go back to Laura and your baby and be very glad we didn’t marry, I’m sure of it. Now have another spoon of soup.”

  Sometimes he thought they were in the nursery again, that Emily’s mother had just died. “Don’t
worry, Cousin Em’ly, we’ll have a jolly time, I promise. Nurse is an old fussbudget, but she’s all right if you know how to get around her.”

  And Emily would thank him and pretend to be that long-ago girl, until he drifted again into sleep.

  There were mumblings about debts and moneylenders, women and French letters, horses that ran too fast and horses that didn’t run fast enough; there were times when he carried on conversations with cronies that weren’t there and others when he argued with imaginary adversaries.

  But it was the adversary inside him whom Emily was determined to fight.

  When his bowels emptied, soaking him and the sheets in foul-smelling liquid, Emily stripped the bed and sponged Adam clean, clothing him in a shirt and unmentionables filched from Mr. Turner’s own wardrobe, boiling the sheets in a giant kettle in the yard, before hanging them out to dry in the brilliance of the noonday sun. Her arms ached with the effort and her hair was lank with sweat, but she felt a sense of triumph at the achievement, that she had done it herself, the kitchen girl having wisely made herself scarce. Gone to visit an aunt, she told Emily, and never returned, leaving Emily in sole command of the house.

  There were more sheets to boil, more noxious liquids; there were days when Adam scarcely moved at all and others when he moved restlessly and convulsively on the sun-scented sheets and Emily had to struggle to dose him with laudanum. The Board of Health offered lime to afflicted households, to scour away the sickness. Emily scrubbed the yard and the house, the astringent smell burning her nostrils, her hands red and chapped, then went back inside to slip chips of ice between Adam’s cracked lips, to bathe his brow with water and oil of lavender, and coax him to swallow a bit of laudanum.

  Dr. Braithwaite was right; the laudanum did seem to give him some ease, not only helping him sleep but slowing the pace of the disease.

  “Hadn’t you better find me a proper doctor?” rasped Adam, in one of his lucid moments.

  “Don’t be an ass,” said Emily sharply, lifting the tray she had brought. “Dr. Braithwaite is a proper doctor. Be polite or I’ll send you back to Dr. MacAndrews.”

  By the sixth day, Emily had begun to hope that Adam might make a recovery. His color seemed clearer; he had obediently sucked the ice chips she had given him.

  “He’s getting better,” she said to Dr. Braithwaite. “I’m sure he is.”

  Dr. Braithwaite took the glass of sherry she handed him. They’d fallen into the habit of having a glass of sherry in the drawing room of an evening, a moment of peace between the difficulties of the day and the looming demands of the night. “It’s a good sign when they’re sick,” he said seriously. “It’s the cases where there’s no, er, effluvia, where there’s the least chance of recovery.”

  “He seemed more lucid today. And he took some water. Boiled,” she added. Her companion was adamant that they follow Dr. Snow’s directive that all water be filtered and boiled before use.

  Dr. Braithwaite slumped down on the settee. “We’d another forty deaths today. And those are only the ones that were reported.”

  “Is it getting worse?”

  “Much.” He closed his eyes, resting his glass of sherry on his stomach. “They’re to close St. Leonard’s Church. The smell from the graveyard has become too overwhelming for services to be held. Anyone who lives downwind is seeking accommodation elsewhere. The governor is looking to buy land for a new graveyard. Something that can accommodate death in the thousands.”

  “I’ll keep boiling water,” said Emily. “If it doesn’t do any good, at least it can’t do harm.”

  Dr. Braithwaite opened his eyes and regarded her ruefully. “It’s damnable of me, but I’m selfishly glad you’re here. I should wish you back at Beckles, for your own good.”

  “If I were at Beckles,” said Emily matter-of-factly, “then the cholera would be too. So there’s no point in wishing me away.”

  Dr. Braithwaite peered owlishly over the top of his glass. “Are you telling me you’re cursed?”

  It took her a moment to realize he was joking. “Ha,” she said. “No. It’s just that if Adam weren’t here, he would be there, and he’d already been exposed. We can’t tell when he contracted it.”

  “No, we can’t.” Dr. Braithwaite turned his glass of sherry around and around, letting the liquid catch the lamplight. “What will happen to Fenty and Company if your cousin doesn’t pull through?”

  “He will,” said Emily stoutly. “I’m sure of it. But should anything happen to him . . . My uncle was never much interested. If Adam weren’t about to carry on the legacy, I expect Uncle Archibald might sell the company, and invest in a country estate, and pretend to be a gentleman.”

  “Pretend?”

  “We’re not, really, you know. We’re only a generation removed from those people in the hills in St. Andrew, with dirt grimed beneath their fingernails. We haven’t a genteel bone in our bodies.” It belatedly occurred to her that she wasn’t entirely sure what sort of bones she had in her body, other than the fact that they all ached right now. Her quest to find her true parentage seemed very far away right now and rather silly. The threat of death did tend to concentrate the mind on the essentials.

  “When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?” recited Dr. Braithwaite. He sounded drunk, although Emily suspected it was fatigue rather than the sherry, which he had touched not at all. “Don’t look to me. I’m just a jobbing surgeon.”

  “If you’re angling for compliments, I’m not going to provide them,” said Emily. She decided she liked looking at her sherry more than drinking it. She admired the amber hue, and then set the glass down on the table. “When we first arrived, the night your uncle made you agree to take us to Peverills—”

  Dr. Braithwaite groaned. “You’re not going to throw that up at me, are you?”

  “Oh, I don’t blame you for not wanting to go. Especially since you’d been trespassing.” She looked pointedly at her companion, who assumed an air of exaggerated innocence. “No, what I wondered about was what your uncle said that night, about the obligation you owed my family.”

  “Oh, that,” said Dr. Braithwaite. He let his head fall back against the wooden frame of the sofa, which couldn’t have been comfortable, as it had been carved into a stylized and rather pointy design.

  “Yes, that,” Emily said.

  “Your grandfather gave my uncle the money to buy his freedom.” There was a pause. Dr. Braithwaite slowly wiggled himself back up into a sitting position. “If you must know, he also arranged for my freedom. Of course, if my uncle had waited a year, he could have saved himself the money and your grandfather the trouble. But they didn’t know, then, that emancipation was so close. And there were the apprenticeships, so there was that.”

  “Wait,” said Emily. “I don’t understand. Couldn’t your uncle just buy your freedom?”

  “That assumes my mistress would have been willing to sell.” He grimaced, as though the words had a sour taste, and took a swig of sherry to wash them away. He coughed a little, as the alcohol hit his throat, and then said, his voice hoarse, “As you may have noticed, Mrs. Davenant doesn’t like to let any of her people go.”

  Emily thought about George, about the spyglasses, about the son run off to Paris. “No,” she said.

  Dr. Braithwaite leaned forward over his sherry glass, cupping it in both hands. “Your grandfather had a hold over Mrs. Davenant.” He held up his hand before Emily could speak. “I don’t know what it was. I only know that whatever it was, it was enough. Of course, the next question is what hold my uncle had over your grandfather. But that, you’ll have to ask him.”

  “I think I might know,” said Emily slowly, thinking of the little Portuguese girl who wasn’t. She was so tired that even the one or two sips of sherry had made her feel worn through, as limp as an old dishrag. Rising, she stretched her arms as far as her dress would allow them to go, stifling a yawn. “I’d best go up to Adam. He’s been very quiet.”

  Dr. Bra
ithwaite caught her hand. The motion was so natural, so completely unconsidered, that it took both of them by surprise.

  He dropped it as though he’d been burnt, saying rapidly, “Are you getting enough rest? You won’t do him any good if you work yourself into a decline.”

  “I haven’t time to go into a decline.” Emily stared down at her own hand, as though expecting to see the imprint of his fingers branded into her wrist. She gave her head a little shake. “Truly. I’m in the pink of health.”

  “I can see that.” Dr. Braithwaite leaned back against the couch, self-consciously holding his sherry. “The kerchief suits you.”

  Emily wrinkled her nose at him, trying very hard to conjure the easy, comfortable tone of a few moments before. “I’ll look one out for you,” she promised. “After I’ve looked in on Adam.”

  Adam was sleeping soundly, very soundly. Emily didn’t like to wake him. The room was dim, lit only by Emily’s candle. She shaded it to keep it from falling too harshly on Adam’s eyes, but something about the slackness of his wrist arrested her attention and she moved closer, holding the candle aloft so she could see his face.

  “Nathaniel.” She didn’t even realize she’d called him by his first name as his uncle did. “Nathaniel.”

  “What is it?” She could hear him taking the steps by twos. He was in the room in two bounds, coming up hard behind her.

  “It’s Adam. He’s not— I don’t think he’s breathing.”

  She stood there with the candle, feeling painfully helpless as Dr. Braithwaite lifted Adam’s wrist to feel his pulse, then very gently reached out to pull his lids down over his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

  Emily shook her head, unable to make sense of it. “He was getting better! He was.”

  Nathaniel took the candle from her hand, setting it down on the table. “Miss Dawson—Emily. Come away. There’s nothing more you can do for him.”

  “There must be. There must be something.”

  Nathaniel took her gently by the shoulders, turning her away. “Emily. He’s dead.”