The Summer Country Page 16

  “I suppose it’s all a matter of familiarity breeding contempt,” said Emily, clinging to the horse’s mane in what she doubted was approved style as she tried to relieve the pressure on her maltreated nether limbs. “I’ve always lived in town. Our vegetables come to us already shaken free of dirt and our meat nicely butchered and wrapped in a brown paper package. It seems rather exciting to be so close to creation.”

  “We are that,” said Mr. Davenant ruefully. “If you wish to see pigs slaughtered, you’ve come to the right place. We grow all our own provisions. My grandmother is adamant about that. We’re as self-sufficient as Robinson Crusoe on his island. There were some rather bad famines in the past between harvests—the hungry time, they call it—so my grandmother likes to make sure we always have enough and then some.”

  “Your grandmother seems a remarkable woman,” said Emily, rather grimly.

  “She is,” said Mr. Davenant, his tone mirroring hers. His face lightening, he added, “She took to you too. Says you remind her of someone.”

  “Most likely my grandfather,” said Emily, frowning at the horse’s ears and wondering just how one stopped one of these things.

  “I don’t think so,” said Mr. Davenant thoughtfully. “She seemed to mean it kindly and—well. Did you say something?”

  “No,” said Emily through clenched teeth. “That’s just the sound of my teeth coming loose.”

  The days took on a pattern. After breakfast, she and Mr. Davenant would retire to the stable yard, and if Emily had to spend some time afterward in a darkened room with ice wrapped in linen applied to tender parts of her anatomy, only her maid Katy knew it. By the end of the week, Mr. Davenant pronounced her ready to leave the stable yard and escorted her, still holding the lead rein, as far as the end of the drive.

  Mrs. Davenant eluded her requests for instruction, telling her there would be time enough when she had seen the elements of the plantation, and Emily admitted, grudgingly, that there might be some sense in it as Mr. Davenant, on their morning rides, took her day by day to the fields, to the mill, to the boiling house, demonstrating the uses of each.

  Emily half suspected Mrs. Davenant of designing the tour to discourage her; she hadn’t realized until Mr. Davenant took her about just how much there was to learn, how many steps from the holing of the cane to its triumphal transmutation into sugar, molasses, and rum. But Mr. Davenant brushed aside her doubts, insisting that if he could manage, anyone could.

  “I have no head for business,” he confessed, “or for management. I’m like a parrot that’s been taught to squawk in tune.”

  “But with lovely plumage, at least?” teased Emily, who was beginning to enjoy shocking her host. It was so absurdly easy.

  A groom accompanied them for propriety’s sake (and, Emily privately suspected, to administer aid should she come to grief), but Adam and Laura remained behind. Laura spent long hours sipping weak tea in a quiet corner of the veranda, chasing the shade as the sun shifted. Mr. Davenant would often join her there, reading to her or speaking softly together of poetry and art, until Mrs. Davenant would invariably come to roust him out and send him about his business.

  Adam, meanwhile, was conveyed almost daily back to town by Mrs. Davenant’s own carriage, where he engaged in unspecified business dealings that Emily suspected had a great deal to do with the icehouse and less with the exchange.

  Emily’s schedule was determined for her, without discussion or opportunity for dissent. In the mornings, she rode with Mr. Davenant. In the afternoons, Emily sat by Mrs. Davenant as she entertained callers, ensconced like a queen in a cane-backed chair in the great room. Tremaines, Alleynes, Piles, Collymores, Burkes, Walkes, Thorpes, and dozens of others whose names Emily forgot but who all seemed to be related to one another, all longtime landowners, and, as Mrs. Davenant would have it, true Barbadians.

  Which, of course, had the effect of reminding Emily that she was not.

  Emily noticed that Adam was seldom invited to these gatherings. The owner of Peverills was welcome where Jonathan Fenty’s grandson was not.

  Or, rather, the owner of Peverills was tolerated, pending further inspection.

  Day bled into day and week into week. March gave way to April. Easter Sunday saw Emily sitting in the Beckles pew, crammed between Adam and Mr. Davenant. And still there was no discussion of departure. When Emily protested that they were overstaying their welcome, she was fed bromides about Creole hospitality. No one seemed inclined to hurry; Peverills might sit fallow a hundred years at this rate, while she rode a little farther each day and took tea with yet another cousin of a cousin of a cousin. She chafed at it, but found it strangely difficult to break free.

  It was the first of May, over two months into their stay, before Mr. Davenant pronounced Emily capable of riding across the field as far as a tumbledown structure referred to as the Old Mill.

  “Laura would adore this,” said Emily, looking ruefully at the ivy-twined stones, the gaping arch where a door might once have stood.

  Laura was rather a good rider—her father had had aspirations toward retiring to a country estate and setting up as squire one day—but Laura had been so subdued, so oppressed by the heat, that Emily doubted she would ride that far.

  When they returned to the house, she would have to check on Laura and make sure she wasn’t sickening for something.

  “Bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” said Mr. Davenant, swinging down and helping her dismount, a process that Emily accomplished about as gracefully as a bear dancing a quadrille.

  “Don’t you mean bare, ruined millstones?”

  “That’s not nearly as euphonious,” protested Mr. Davenant.

  “Can we go inside?”

  “There’s nothing to see,” said Mr. Davenant quickly. “It was emptied long ago. It hasn’t been in use since the very end of the seventeenth century, if that.”

  “It doesn’t look empty,” said Emily, peering into the darkness. “Someone left a blanket in there.”

  “It has a reputation for being, well, um, something of a trysting place.” Mr. Davenant was red clear up to the tips of his ears. Hastily turning her in the other direction, he said, “You can see your land from here. This mill is on the dividing line between the properties. It served both long, long ago.”

  He pointed in a direction Emily thought might be north. Or possibly east. “Before the Peverills and Beckleses fell out?”

  Mr. Davenant grinned. “I’m not sure there was ever a time when the families weren’t on the outs, but they put their differences aside long enough to make some money out of it. We might make much of our gentlemanly birth, but the men who came to Barbados were adventurers at heart, Peverills and Beckleses both.”

  “Does that make you an adventurer too, then?” asked Emily doubtfully.

  “My grandmother would say the old blood wears thin.” Mr. Davenant dropped down on the rug the groom had set out and began rooting in the picnic basket. “Would you prefer cold chicken or ham?”

  “Chicken, please.” Over the scrub and the strange, skinny trees with their shock of broad leaves at the top, Emily could see the ruined towers of Peverills. “You must think me the worst sort of interloper.”

  “Shall we say the best sort of interloper?” Mr. Davenant hesitated a moment, busying himself with pouring lemonade, before asking, “Have you decided what you mean to do with Peverills?”

  “Will I sell it, you mean?”

  “Well—yes.” Mr. Davenant handed her a glass of lemonade, miraculously cool. The bottle had been nestled in shaved ice, a luxury that Mr. Davenant appeared to take for granted. “Forgive my clumsiness. It’s not my place to know.”

  “If it’s anyone’s place, it’s yours,” said Emily frankly. “I don’t know yet. I should like to make a go of it, if I could.”

  Mr. Davenant toyed with his lemonade. “I should warn you—my grandmother will be after you to sell. I’m surprised she hasn’t already. She’s never been reconciled
to Peverills having been sold. It’s been her dream to see the two properties reunited.”

  “Do you feel the same way, Mr. Davenant?”

  “Me?” Mr. Davenant choked on his drink. “Not in the slightest. Reckoning my life in barrels of sugar, constantly worrying about the weather and the harvest and this blight and that bug. I’d just as happily chuck it all aside.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “I’m the only one my grandmother has left. I can’t leave her. She may seem strong—she is strong—but she . . . she isn’t an island unto herself, however much she may pretend to be. She needs me more than she admits. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said—”

  “My grandfather was the same way. He would thunder at us and complain, but he was always happiest with his whole family about him.” Losing her mother and then her grandmother had diminished him; he had seemed, somehow, a little smaller with each death. Emily quickly mustered a smile. “It’s all the same with these domestic tyrants, isn’t it? He would scold us and tell us we were useless—and then give us sweets.”

  She wondered if the plantation was only a larger and less digestible sort of sweet, the gift her grandfather would have offered her mother if she had lived.

  But no. It seemed more likely that her grandfather had bought it planning to make something of it, and, finding it too large a task to manage from afar, and reluctant to admit having made a miscalculation, had simply let it sit, bequeathing it to her on the assumption she would take charge, as he had trained her to do.

  “You must miss him terribly,” said Mr. Davenant.

  “I do,” said Emily simply. “Very much.”

  “But you do have other family in Bristol?” Mr. Davenant asked diffidently. “I don’t mean to pry. I simply wondered if you wouldn’t be homesick for your own people if you stay on in Barbados.”

  Emily shook her head. “I don’t imagine so. I don’t have a home in Bristol anymore. That’s not entirely true. My aunt and uncle would be happy to offer me a home. But my own home—” She bit her lip. There was no point blundering about. She might as well get right to the heart of it. “My father remarried last year.”

  Mr. Davenant leaned back on one arm, looking up at her face beneath the brim of her bonnet. “You don’t sound pleased.”

  Emily shrugged. “My father is very happy.”

  “Do you dislike his wife so very much?”

  “Nooo. . . . Not dislike her, precisely.” One didn’t dislike Hester. One weathered her, like a gale. A gale scented with carbolic and puffed with improving aphorisms. “We don’t fit well in the same place.”

  Emily didn’t need improving, thank you very much. She had been running her father’s household since she was ten, ministering to his motley flock, carrying baskets to the deserving poor, forcibly scrubbing the undeserving poor, and making sure her father’s spectacles were always in reach.

  Hester had provided him with a little cord on which to hang the spectacles. She had rearranged the furniture in the drawing room, removed Emily’s mother’s pianoforte (“Sentiment is all very well, but it does look rather worn, doesn’t it?”), and taken on the preparation and delivery of charitable baskets. It was her right. Emily knew that. But it didn’t make it any easier to be displaced.

  Did her father even notice? Sometimes she wondered, and there was a sting in that too.

  “Did she make you scrub the scullery and sleep in the ashes?” asked Mr. Davenant sympathetically.

  “I don’t mind a bit of scrubbing.” It was the lack of purpose that rankled. “No, far worse. She wanted to marry me to the curate.”

  Mr. Davenant squinted up at her, shading his eyes against the sun. “And what about the curate?”

  “I’m not sure he was permitted to have any say in the matter. I half expected to return home one day to find the parlor decked with orange flowers and Mr. Curtis trussed to the altar.”

  “With an apple in his mouth?” Mr. Davenant pushed himself back up to a sitting position, his smile fading. “My grandmother arranged my father’s marriage. It was a disaster. They were both terribly young, and . . . Well, I shouldn’t complain, should I? I wouldn’t be here but for it. And we did round out the northwest corner of our lands.”

  There was an uncharacteristic bitterness to his tone.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Emily. “Have your parents been gone long?”

  “As long as I can remember. My father ran off to Paris when I was still in swaddling clothes.”

  “Oh. I had assumed . . . Never mind.”

  “That he was dead? No. Merely absentee. My mother as well. She went on an extended visit to relations in the Carolinas and never came back.”

  “Oh,” said Emily, entirely at a loss. Nothing short of death would have induced her own mother to leave her, and while Emily might have railed at death, she had never doubted her mother’s love. “Was she—have you—does she visit?”

  “Sometimes. Infrequently. They said she went away for her health, but I think it was more that she couldn’t bear life at Beckles. She’s very happy in Charleston, I understand.”

  Emily plucked at a thread on her skirt. “Did you ever think of going with her?”

  “I’m heir to Beckles and the last of my line. I couldn’t do that to Grandmama. She’s lost so much already.” Mr. Davenant looked at the sky and jumped to his feet with an exclamation of distress. “It’s later than I’d realized. We should get back. If you don’t mind, that is.”

  “Not at all,” said Emily, taking his hand. The sun still shone, but the day felt darker than it had been before.

  They rode back in silence broken only by comments about the weather. There was a new constraint about his manner as Mr. Davenant helped Emily down from her mount in the stable yard. And who could blame him? Emily suspected her pity showed on her face, and she hated herself for it.

  “Miss Dawson,” he said as he handed her down.

  “Hadn’t you better call me Emily?” Emily blurted out, in an attempt to make amends. “It seems silly to stand on formality.”

  “Emily,” he said, looking down at her hand in his as though surprised to see it there. He released it and stepped back. “Then you must call me George. I’ve overstayed my time. I’d best see to my work, or my grandmother will have my head.”

  Emily watched him go with a frown, feeling that she’d thoroughly put her foot in it. She hadn’t asked him to confide in her. Well, perhaps she had, just a little. But she had never imagined that there might be such unhappiness beneath Mr. Davenant’s easy air.

  It made her feel a little sick to think of the baby he had been, being left behind. No wonder he wouldn’t leave his grandmother. She was the only one who had stood by him, even if standing by him did seem to mean nudging and guiding him.

  Emily looped up the skirt of her habit as she climbed the steps to the bedroom floor. She would go in and tell Laura about the Old Mill, she decided. It might be just the thing to get Laura moving again. Not today, of course. But tomorrow, in the cool of the morning, perhaps she might persuade Laura to ride out with her. Mr. Davenant—George—could do without her for one day; they could both use some time apart after today. She felt silly for complaining about Hester when George had real sorrows with which to contend.

  Before Emily could knock, Laura’s door opened, and Adam came out, stopping short at the sight of her. He closed the door behind him, but not before Emily heard the sound of retching.

  “You reek of the stables,” he commented.

  “And so would you if you had been riding. Is Laura ill again?”

  Emily made to go past him, but Adam stopped her. “Just a touch of heat. Don’t fuss at her, Emily. She wants to be let alone.”

  “She’s been ill since we arrived. Don’t tell me it’s just the heat.” Emily glanced back at the door. “If you won’t let me look at her, perhaps a doctor ought to be called.”

  Adam made a face at her. “MacAndrews?”

  “That’s not funny,” said Emily shar
ply. MacAndrews came to supper once a week, on Wednesdays, and it didn’t take a doctor to diagnose his shaking hands and yellowed skin. “I wouldn’t trust a cat to his care. I thought Mr. Turner might make a recommendation.”

  “His nephew, for one?” said Adam, as though it were a great joke.

  “Why not? He’s better trained than most doctors here.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Taking her by the arm, Adam turned Emily and marched her away from Laura’s door. “There’s nothing wrong with Laura that a bit of rest and some tea won’t cure.”

  “Yes, but—” Emily twisted back, but Adam held fast.

  “Hadn’t you better look to your own affairs?” he demanded. Seeing a passing servant carrying linens, he lowered his voice, tilting his head toward hers. “The old dragon had me to tea today while you were off gallivanting with young Davenant.”

  Emily suppressed the urge to point out that Mr. Davenant was at least as old as Adam and possibly a year or two more besides. “Yes? That’s hardly surprising under the circumstances.”

  Adam stopped at the landing, raising his brows at her in an infuriating way. “But don’t you want to know why?” Without waiting for Emily to answer, he said, with some relish, “She quizzed me about your mother. Where was she born, when was she born, what was she like, who did she favor. . . . It was, I would have you know, a most pointed inquisition.”

  “She knew Grandfather.” Even if she hadn’t liked him. “I’m not surprised she wants to know about his children.”

  “Not his children. Child. She couldn’t have been less interested in Father. What do you imagine that means?”

  “That she was making conversation with a guest and thought it a topic of mutual interest?”

  “And all of those morning rides with young Davenant?”

  “Do stop calling him that. I expect she thinks I’ll get discouraged if I see how much work it all is and sell Peverills to her cheap.”

  Just as those endless teas were a campaign to show her how little she belonged, how little she understood their traditions and family ties.