“A threat,” said Emily, trying her best to achieve their old bantering tone. “I’ll persecute you with mustard plasters and torment you with castor oil. Truly, you’re no use to any of your patients if you fall ill. It was selfish of me to summon you—but I didn’t know what else to do.”
“It was very good of you to come,” said George, moving to stand next to Emily.
“You know you can always call on me,” Nathaniel said briskly. “And now, if you’ll excuse me . . .”
“Wait!” The word had come out rather too forcefully. Emily modulated her tone, forcing a smile. “Won’t you come to the infirmary with me before you go and show me what I need to do to go on?”
“I’ll just see Cook about making up that parcel,” said George, and departed with a nod for Emily and a slight twitch of the head to Nathaniel, the recognition one gave an old playmate who had been one’s slave and who now didn’t fit into the social order anywhere at all. Like a dust mote one might flick away.
Is that how Aunt Millicent and Uncle Archie would see her if they knew? As someone less than herself?
“Come along, then. I took the liberty of moving your patients,” said Nathaniel, as they moved toward the slave yard and he directed her instead along a side path. “This was the estate manager’s house, once.”
“When you lived here.” It was a spacious white-walled building, built with Georgian simplicity, Beckles in small.
“When I was a slave,” Nathaniel countered. He walked forward, his head down, concentrating on his footing. “What happened in Bridgetown . . .”
He seemed to be waiting for her to respond. Emily’s mind felt numb. Bridgetown. A lifetime ago. Yesterday. She wanted to be back there with a force that alarmed her.
“What happened in Bridgetown?” she echoed.
Nathaniel’s step faltered. He paused, one hand on the veranda rail. Quietly, he said, “The circumstances were unusual, to say the least. You needn’t think I’ll presume.”
The kiss, she realized. He had kissed her. Or she had kissed him. Or a bit of both. Her cheeks colored at the memory and she bit her lip, at a loss. “Presume? I don’t— That is—”
“I take it that it wasn’t a memorable occurrence.” Nathaniel gave her a twisted smile. He plunged ahead, into the house. “That’s one way, I suppose. Least said, soonest mended, isn’t that the phrase? I’ve put the men in the old front room. Women and children are upstairs. There’s water on the boil in the old kitchen. Come along. Katy’s daughter is this way.”
Emily stopped him at the foot of the stairs. “Nathaniel, wait. I—”
“Yes?” There was a grandfather clock at the turn of the stair, but it had long since stopped, the hands permanently set at half past three, the pendulum still.
She was bone weary, jittery with exhaustion and confusion, and, for the first time in her life, she had no idea what she wanted. To sleep, perhaps. To be back in Bridgetown, with Nathaniel’s arms around her, back when people were dying by the dozen and everything was simple and plain. To be back, before all of this, in Bristol, at her father’s hearth, where she was who she was, Mr. Dawson’s daughter, Jonathan and Winifred Fenty’s granddaughter, with none of this doubt and uncertainty.
I might have been a slave, she could say. But would his face change when he looked at her?
“I should put on an apron,” she said lamely.
Nathaniel’s face went blank. “Don’t worry. This won’t take long. I wouldn’t want to keep you from Mr. Davenant.”
Emily frowned at him. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“I had heard,” said Nathaniel, “that there was an understanding. But in Bridgetown, I had thought . . . Never mind.”
“An understanding?” She was echoing everything he said like a parrot. She felt slow and stupid, which did nothing for her temper. “You don’t think I would have kissed you if—”
He did. He did think that. She could tell, and it horrified her, that he might think that of her.
“They were unusual circumstances in Bridgetown,” said Nathaniel, as though he were trying to exonerate her, to explain away a crime that had never occurred. “It’s not every day one watches a city collapse around one.”
“Do you think my word is such a poor thing as that? If I had pledged myself to Mr. Davenant, I wouldn’t have betrayed him for all the crumbling walls of Jericho! No, not for all the plagues of the Bible. But I’m not pledged to Mr. Davenant, I never have been, and I never will be. And what’s more, I’ve told him so.”
“You have?”
Emily glared at him. On this, at least, she was on solid ground. “He proposed, I refused. It’s as simple as that.”
“Is it?” Nathaniel made a jerky gesture with his hands, never taking his eyes off her. “You might be mistress of all this.”
“I don’t want to be mistress of all this! Which you would know if you had bothered to ask—or if you knew me at all, which you ought by now.” Emily felt her temper rising, her jangled nerves finally snapping. “And if you thought I was to marry Mr. Davenant, what in heaven’s name were you doing kissing me?”
“I wasn’t thinking,” said Nathaniel honestly. “That is— Oh, bother.”
He had kissed her because he wasn’t thinking. Emily was rather sure she had just been insulted. She clung to anger, the one emotion that made sense at the moment. “You weren’t thinking? That’s all you can think to say to me? That you weren’t thinking?”
“What was I meant to say? That I love you?” Nathaniel snapped, and then froze, staring at her with an expression of raw panic. “Don’t tell me you would have welcomed such a declaration.”
Would she? Emily felt frozen, panicked. She hadn’t thought about the kiss. She had been busy; there had been cholera, lung fever. . . . She admired Dr. Braithwaite; if she was being honest, she desired him. She had seen enough in her father’s parish, had heard enough, to know there was more to married life than thinking of England, but she had never felt it, that burning in the blood, until yesterday, until their kiss.
But would she have welcomed a declaration?
“That wasn’t your decision to make for me,” Emily said fiercely. “You don’t know whether I would have welcomed it or not, because you never made it.”
Nathaniel stared at her. “And if I were to tell you I loved you?”
The words were soft, but they seemed to echo around her. Emily’s ears were ringing and there were little black spots in front of her eyes that might have been dust motes or might not.
Emily grabbed the banister, feeling the reassuring solidity of mahogany beneath her palm. If I were to tell you, he had said. Not I love you but if.
She took a deep breath and said stringently, “Then I would tell you that I can’t reason in hypotheticals. If you loved me—if you loved me—you would have the courage to say it, not dance around it like a Frenchman at a ball.”
Nathaniel looked at her bemusedly. “A Frenchman at a ball?”
That was what he chose to notice? Emily flapped her hand distractedly. “You know what I mean, all mincing and capering and, oh, I don’t know! People are dying, Mrs. Davenant is dying, and you’re talking in riddles. If you decide you have something to say to me, you know where to find me.”
“People are dying,” said Nathaniel, his voice low. Emily wasn’t sure whether he was reasoning with himself or her. “Your cousin is dead, Mrs. Davenant is ill. Your emotions are disordered. . . .”
He made her deepest feelings sound like a drunken doxy on a spree at the public house. “Don’t you dare presume to lecture me on the state of my emotions. You have no idea what they are. You don’t even know your own.” It was a case of pot and kettle, but Emily was too angry to acknowledge that. “If you loved me—if you loved me—you wouldn’t let conventions stand in your way.”
“Emily . . .”
She couldn’t bear it a moment more. “Don’t Emily me. That’s Miss Dawson to you, Dr. Braithwaite. I wouldn’t want to presume.” Turnin
g in a fury of starched petticoats so he wouldn’t see her tears, Emily said thickly, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have patients to see to. You can . . . go to Bridgetown.”
She stomped up the stairs, leaving Nathaniel standing behind her, trying very hard to contain her mouth, which had an unfortunate tendency to quiver. She dashed the back of her hand against her eyes, feeling like an idiot.
She paused outside the makeshift ward, waiting for the clatter of footsteps behind her. But there were none. Instead, she heard a faint click as the door of the house was closed, very, very softly.
Chapter Thirty
Christ Church, Barbados
August 1854
Emily felt as though the inside had been scooped out of her like a melon.
She folded against the wall, her forehead scraping against the whitewash, her chest convulsing in silent sobs, the tears sliding down her cheeks no matter how much she screwed up her eyes to try to stop them.
All of that, every bit of that miserable, painful scene, had been her own fault. She could blame Nathaniel all she liked, with his hypotheticals and his if I loved you, but the truth of the matter was that she had sent him away, because she couldn’t bear to admit to herself that she didn’t know her own mind.
Would she have welcomed a declaration? The question haunted her. A day ago, in Mr. Turner’s drawing room, she thought she would have said yes. In fact, she was almost sure of it. But that was a different day and a different woman. That was Emily Dawson, who knew her own mind.
And heart? Did she know her own heart?
Hearts were more trouble than they were worth. She had, not so very long ago, smiled benignly upon those giddy souls who spoke of falling in love as though it were an infection, who did foolish things and claimed they couldn’t help it.
She had hurt Nathaniel. She had hurt Nathaniel and it clawed at her gut because she knew it wasn’t his fault but her own. She had called him here, heedlessly, selfishly, and then she had pushed him away because she felt like a porcelain figurine that had been smashed and put back together again with the pieces in all the wrong places, and, if she were being very honest, part of her was angry at him for not being able to see that, for professing to care for her but not being able to look at her and diagnose in a glance the trouble that ailed her, and cure it with the strength of his own surety.
If he loved her.
She wanted him to love her so madly that it wouldn’t matter. She wanted him to sweep her doubts away, to be sure enough for both of them.
Emily lifted her head from the wall, a sick taste in her mouth. She had heard that phrase before. It was Laura who had said it, that Adam was sure enough for both of them. Until he wasn’t.
How could she expect Nathaniel to know what she wanted, when she didn’t? He was never, she realized with a catch in her throat, going to make her decisions for her. That was part of his charm.
Of course, he would never make her decisions for her if she never saw him again.
Drawing in a hiccupping breath, Emily scrubbed her face roughly on her skirt. Bother Nathaniel Braithwaite, bother Mrs. Davenant, bother everybody. She had basins to empty.
Emily threw herself into her work. There was no time for brooding when there was refuse to be dealt with, some so foul that even a cologne-soaked handkerchief wasn’t enough to stop her retching quietly behind the old manager’s house. But even the satisfaction of hard labor failed to distract her.
Mrs. Davenant had sunk into insensibility, her wasted frame shaking with coughs, shivering despite the heat. Emily left Mrs. Davenant to Queenie as much as she could, spending her time in the old overseer’s house instead, where the cholera raged on.
Emily lost one patient, an elderly man Mrs. Davenant had referred to as Prince Robert. But Katy’s daughter recovered, and Emily had the satisfaction of seeing Katy’s face as she brought the little girl into their house in the yard, walking unsteadily, small body wasted from the disease, more bone than flesh, but alive, alive and sensible.
Emily watched them together and thought of her own mother, who had been passed from person to person, hidden and renamed and renamed again.
“Why Lucy?” Laura asked. “Was it a family name?”
“No,” said Emily. “My grandfather’s mother’s name was Sarah.”
In the end, she had found herself pouring out the whole story to Laura, Laura, who, despite the inconveniences of her advanced pregnancy, had quietly but firmly taken over the running of the household in Mrs. Davenant’s absence.
“My grandfather always said that it was because Lucy meant light, and my mother had been born in a country where the sun always shone.” Emily had always thought that very poetic and had been mildly disappointed as a child to learn that she had been named, prosaically, after her father’s mother, who kept chickens and occasionally took in boarders. “But now I wonder . . .”
“Yes?” Laura poured her more tea, brewed just the way Emily liked it, in a cup large enough to hold more than just a few genteel sips.
Emily took the cup gratefully, trying to organize her thoughts. “Well, Lottie and Lucy sound rather similar, don’t they? And if my mother was quite young . . .”
“She might have been young enough to accept it as her name,” Laura finished thoughtfully, setting the tea things back just so. “Yes, I see that.”
“Or it might have been how it sounded when she said it,” said Emily. “If she was old enough to talk. It would make it less strange than choosing another name entirely.”
“And so she went from Lottie to Lucy,” said Laura, rubbing the mound of her stomach, where the baby was heaving and kicking as though trying to be part of the conversation. “That poor woman.”
“My mother?” There were many things one might say of Emily’s mother, but she tended not to inspire pity.
Laura looked up at her, a hand on her stomach. “No, her mother. What did you say her name was? Jenny.”
“She died in the fire.” Mrs. Davenant had been very clear about that.
“Yes, I know, but what about all the time before? To have a child and not be able to own it—it’s beastly. Your mother had your grandparents to love her. But that poor woman . . .” Laura shook her head, blinking back tears. “Goodness, this baby is turning me into a watering pot.”
They drank their tea in silence for a moment, each lost in her own thoughts, until Emily said, “But what do I do? Now that I know . . .”
“There isn’t really much you can do, is there?” Laura contemplated a lump of sugar, wrinkled her nose at it, and set it aside. “Perhaps had you known as a child that you weren’t who you were, it might have changed the way you saw yourself, but you didn’t. By now your character is formed. I can’t imagine anyone who knew you would say otherwise.”
“Thank you?” said Emily, not entirely sure that was a compliment.
“Of course you are who you are. That’s not what I meant at all. It’s only your grandparents who weren’t who you thought they were. And even then . . . Your grandparents were your grandparents for all practical purposes. They loved you and helped raise you.”
“But my blood isn’t theirs.” Emily kept looking at mirrors as though she might see a difference, but she remained, stubbornly, herself.
“What’s blood when it comes to it?” Laura turned her cup around in her saucer, once, then twice. “I don’t believe it’s blood that makes a family. My mother never bothered with that. I’m far more your sister than I am my mother’s daughter. That was one of the more compelling reasons for marriage, to be your cousin in truth.”
“We would have been sisters even if you hadn’t married Adam,” said Emily, and then looked up with a grimace. “Which is what you meant, isn’t it?”
Laura nodded. “Your grandfather loved your mother and your mother loved you. It’s your mother’s real parents I keep thinking about, how they must have suffered, particularly her mother. To carry someone inside you, so close to you, and then have her taken away . . . A great wrong
was done, but it wasn’t to you.”
And all because of the woman gasping for life in the great bed upstairs.
Emily knew her grandfather—the man who had acted as her grandfather—had some part in the tragedy too. But Jonathan Fenty had done what he had done out of love, to save her mother growing up a slave. If there had been some selfishness in that love, there had been sacrifice too. Emily wasn’t at all sure what the penalties were for stealing a slave, but she suspected they weren’t light. If nothing else, her grandfather’s reputation would have been ruined. He, ambitious as he was, would never have been able to do business in Barbados again.
She came again and again to the painting of Jenny, standing behind Mrs. Davenant, Jenny, who had died trying to save the child she had never been allowed to acknowledge.
“I understand now why my grandfather wanted me to have Peverills. It was his way of making things right, giving me what he thought was my birthright.”
“Isn’t it?” said Laura practically.
“Not legally,” said Emily. She thought about George Davenant, about the other Davenants in Bridgetown he had called not really Davenants at all. “Morally, perhaps? Charles Davenant wanted his daughter to have Peverills, that much is clear. Or he would never have gone to such lengths to make her—well, not legitimate, but as close as he could.”
Laura tested her tea. “Do you think your mother knew?”
“I doubt it.” Emily thought of her mother, her anti-slavery groups, her pamphlets, her meetings, her triumph when emancipation had finally been secured. “I rather think she would have shouted it from the rooftops had she known and gone on lecture tours on the strength of it. But it does still seem odd that she should have taken up the cause she did.”
“The Lord works in His own ways,” said Laura. “Will you? Tell people, I mean.”
“I don’t mean to go on lecture tours”—unless someone asked her, of course—“but I shouldn’t want to keep it a secret. That wouldn’t be right.” Emily looked at Laura, trying to put her tangled thoughts into words. She didn’t want to minimize the efforts of the grandparents who had raised first her mother and then her. She was beginning to realize, more and more, just how much they had done for her, how much they had cared. But it felt grievously wrong not to acknowledge the grandparents who had never had a chance to see their child grow or hold their only grandchild. She knew so little of them. Would they have liked her? It seemed a silly thing to think about, but she did, all the same. “I don’t want to repudiate either set of my grandparents.”
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