The Summer Country Read online

  “No, no. You misunderstand me.” The colonel stood too. He was a tall man, and spare. His hollow cheeks gave him an ascetic air. A misleading one. His glass had been refilled as frequently as Charles’s, although he showed no effects other than a slight skew to his severe gray periwig, a coarsening of the skin around his nose. “Being new to the island, Mr. Davenant, you should know—my niece is not like other women.”

  “I am sure she is all that is accomplished and charming,” Charles said politely. He tried to focus on the colonel, but there appeared to be two of him.

  He was rescued by an unexpected source, a woman who came soft-footed onto the veranda from the great room. “Master John?”

  The colonel went still for a moment, then turned. “Jenny. Can’t you see I’m with a guest?”

  The woman didn’t flinch or falter. She wore, Charles saw, an apron over her gown, but it was of fine lawn, trimmed with lace. The candle she held obscured her face, leaving Charles with only a flickering impression of dark hair beneath a white cap. “Beg pardon, Master John. But Hamlet is in a bad way. He’s asking for you.”

  “The cares of a plantation, Mr. Davenant. You’ll know them soon enough. Hamlet is our head driver. There was a . . . mishap . . . in the mill this afternoon.” To Jenny he said, “Tell Hamlet I’ll be there presently.”

  Jenny didn’t budge. Only the flame of her candle wavered. “I’m afraid it might not wait, Master John.”

  Her meaning was clear. The colonel bit down hard on whatever it was he was thinking of saying. “Right, then. Mr. Davenant, if you’ll pardon me for just this little while—”

  “No need,” said Charles quickly. He was very aware of the woman’s—Jenny’s—eyes on him from behind the candle. “I should be getting back to Peverills.”

  “Nonsense. At this hour? You’ll stay the night, of course. There’s no bother about bedchambers. As you can see, we have plenty of room.” The colonel’s avuncular smile reduced Charles to a stripling. “I’d be remiss if I let you make your way home alone on dark and unfamiliar roads. You won’t have me explain to your brother how I let you break your neck.”

  Robert would probably thank him for it.

  The thought sprang to his mind unbidden, and Charles was only grateful he had the wits left not to voice it.

  The colonel took advantage of his silence to say, “Have another glass of port—or would you prefer punch? I won’t be long. We can find you other entertainment if you like. The girls at Beckles are counted exceptionally pretty. Just look at our Jenny here.”

  The colonel’s tone was so calm, so matter-of-fact, that it took Charles a moment to catch his meaning. He sounded as though he were offering the loan of a chess set, not the use of a human being.

  “I—” Charles felt himself floundering, unsure what to do. Flight seemed the most sensible option. Quickly, he said, “If I must abuse your generosity, may I take advantage of the use of your coach and coachman? You’re right, of course. It would be folly to risk my neck on strange roads.”

  Although he would if he had to. Every instinct screamed to get away while he could. Was he being tested? Was that it? Surely the colonel wouldn’t really prostitute his niece’s maid like that.

  He’d heard the stories, of course. He’d spent his life contesting them, at Eton, at Oxford, at Lincoln’s Inn. No, he’d said, again and again. The West Indies didn’t decay men’s morals. No, Creoles weren’t creatures of uncontrollable lusts. The stories that were told—well, maybe it happened on some islands, on the French islands, the Spanish islands, but not on Barbados, not in Charles’s family. Just because they owned slaves didn’t make them monsters of depravity and decadence.

  “If you’re certain . . . ?” The colonel made a vague gesture toward Jenny, who stood without moving, like Lot’s wife turned to a pillar of salt. The torchlight flickered off her modest dress, hinting at the curves beneath, here then gone, all the more erotic for being hidden.

  Charles could feel his cheeks slowly heat, as they hadn’t since he was thirteen, being shown naughty etchings by candlelight with four others in Heatherington-Smythe’s rooms at Eton. He shook his head in wordless negation.

  The colonel shrugged, as one man to the vagaries of another. “Well, then. The carriage it is. Paris! Paris! Have Miss Mary Anne’s carriage brought round.”

  “Master John.” Jenny’s voice was colorless, insistent. “Hamlet won’t wait.”

  “Yes, yes.” The colonel grasped Charles’s hand, giving it a hard squeeze. “You see how it is, Mr. Davenant. I trust we shall see you at Beckles again soon.”

  “And you at Peverills.” Charles would have said anything to be done with it. “Good night, Colonel.”

  Another hearty slap on the back and the colonel was gone, leaving Charles feeling like a moth who had flown into a lamp and found it too hot for his liking. His glass, he realized, was still in his hand. And it had somehow become empty. He set it down unsteadily on a table, listening for the sound of hoofbeats, wanting nothing more than his own bed. His bed in London, by choice.

  He found himself missing it with a painful longing. His chambers had been cramped and narrow and always too cold, but they had been his, his alone. There had been a simplicity to them, no mosquito netting to tangle him about, no servants coming in and out without his bidding. He wanted to close his eyes and wake to the sound of the bustle from Kingsway, flower girls and costermongers and angry carters all disputing the right of way in strident London tones.

  “Master Davenant?” The woman’s voice took him by surprise. Charles had assumed she’d followed her master. The night had a strange, kaleidoscope feel to it, people sliding in and out of view.

  “Yes?” He felt like a nervous virgin, drawing back as she approached. “It’s—Jenny, is it?”

  She didn’t respond. He might be all embarrassment, but she was as calm as any judge confronted with a bumbling barrister. “My mistress has asked me to tell you that she will be riding tomorrow, a little before noon, by the path that runs along the boundary between Beckles and Peverills. She would be pleased to help you reacquaint yourself with the district.”

  Charles cleared his throat. “That’s very kind of her, I’m sure, but—”

  “I was not asked to bring a reply.” That was all she said, but Charles felt thoroughly put in his place.

  Below, the sound of carriage wheels clattering, the jingle of tack, heralded the approach of the promised carriage. It was an old-fashioned closed carriage, lacquered black, with lanterns on either side. To his relief, Charles saw someone had thought to bring his horse around and tether him to the back of the carriage. Not his horse, but one from the Peverills stable. He couldn’t help but think of it all, still, as being his father’s, on loan only.

  Miss Beckles’s maid dropped a small curtsy. “Safe journey, sir.”

  And she was gone, before he had time to tell her that he had no intention of riding with her mistress.

  “Well? What did he say?” Mary Anne turned from the window in a flurry of satin and crepe.

  “Very little,” said Jenny carefully. Her mistress was already quivering like a beast in a cage; there was no need to set her snapping.

  Mary Anne traced a restless circle around the room, her flounces floating around her, her very hair crackling with tension. “You couldn’t press him?”

  “He seemed inclined to refuse. I preferred not to give him the opportunity.” Below, Jenny could hear the sounds of the carriage rattling down the drive, down the long alley of tamarind trees, away from Beckles. Lucky man. “This way, he’ll have the night to think better of his choice.”

  “Ye-es.” Mary Anne stopped in front of her dressing table, dropping down heavily into her chair. “I can send him a note in the morning.”

  Jenny picked up the silk slippers her mistress had kicked off, setting them aside, out of the way. “You don’t want to press so hard. You’ll scare him off.”

  “If I don’t, my uncle will first.” Mary Anne began pulli
ng at the pins in her hair, removing them with unnecessary force. “What did you think?”

  Coming up behind her, Jenny firmly moved her mistress’s hands away. “I think if you yank like that, Mistress Mary, you’ll have a sore scalp.”

  Mary Anne scowled at Jenny in the oval mirror, her reflection uncertain in the candlelight. “You know what I meant. What did you think of him?”

  Jenny could see Mr. Davenant as only a pale face in the darkness, features almost extinguished by the glare of the candle, fair hair cut short and unpowdered, as the younger men wore it. “He seemed pleasant enough.”

  “They all seem pleasant enough at first.” Mary Anne gave her head an impatient shake as Jenny took the last of the pins out. Her hair, a thick chestnut, tumbled past her shoulders. “I don’t need pleasant. I need desperate.”

  “Captain Harvey was desperate,” pointed out Jenny, lifting the silver-backed brush.

  Mary Anne made a face at her in the mirror. “Captain Harvey was too desperate. He would have run through my money within the month.”

  “Or,” said Jenny, applying the brush to her mistress’s hair, “he might have killed himself with drink. And you would be a widow and free.”

  Mary Anne gave a snort of laughter. “I couldn’t count on his being so considerate. Just look at Uncle John.”

  Jenny’s hand stilled. “Must I?”

  The girls at Beckles are counted exceptionally pretty. Just look at our Jenny here.

  Jenny’s whole body burned with the humiliation of it. He’d been trying to put her in her place, she knew.

  It wouldn’t be the first time.

  Don’t you remember to whom you owe everything, girl?

  But the colonel didn’t own her. Not anymore. He’d given her as a gift to his niece when Jenny was little more than a baby herself, five to Mary Anne’s two. He’d taken her from her mother and her people and brought her here, where she would have no one, no one but him. His tool. His puppet. But it hadn’t worked the way he had planned.

  Mary Anne’s eyes met Jenny’s in the mirror, her face bleached of color, her rounded features unusually stark. “I don’t know how much longer I can stand it. There are times when I hope, when I pray, that he’ll have one glass too many, that he’ll take the wrong path on a dark night—that he’ll offend the wrong man.”

  Jenny could only shake her head. The colonel was too canny for that. They both knew it. He treated the women of the field gang as his own harem, choosing his lovers as the whim took him. There were no jealous husbands to challenge him to a duel; for any man of the quarters to strike back would mean death.

  As for the colonel, he played his hand cleverly, rewarding the women he favored with lighter work, their men with additional rations. It made Jenny sick to her stomach to think of it, but it worked, didn’t it? He had half the plantation in his thrall, one way or another. As for the other planters, they thought him a reliable man, a good fellow. Just look how he had sacrificed his own interests to those of his widowed sister, who, being sickly herself, had produced no better heir for Beckles than a sallow and undergrown girl.

  The colonel had done his work well.

  They hadn’t seen it happening, either of them. At first it had been visible only in the new reserve the neighbors had shown with Mary Anne. The curious, sidelong looks. The exaggerated concern her uncle had begun to display for her well-being. No one would say anything to Mary Anne, not directly. And no one would say anything to Jenny either. She wasn’t part of the gossip in the washhouse. People watched their tongues around her. Mary Anne and Jenny had noticed only that childhood playmates had grown distant and potential suitors—the real suitors, the eligible suitors—had stayed away, leaving only the most desperate of fortune hunters to call.

  It wasn’t that Mary Anne was plain. She might not be the sort who made men stop and stare, but she was well enough, and a plantation as rich as Beckles was well known to transform plain girls into beauties.

  But not when the mistress was rumored to be mad.

  “We’d best hope for a bout of cholera,” said Jenny, only half joking. “It will take too long for the pox to do him in.”

  “Uncle John has the luck of the devil. He’ll never fall ill. The only way I’ll ever be free of him is to marry.” Mary Anne leaned her head back, her eyes half closing under the soothing pressure of the brush. “They say Peverills is in a bad way. He’ll need money.”

  Jenny didn’t need to ask who “he” was. There was only one “he” at the moment. Charles Davenant, newly come from England. From the moment she’d heard Davenant was returning, Mary Anne had begun weaving her schemes, with a cunning borne of desperation. And, perhaps, a bit of pique.

  There had been a time when Robert Davenant had come calling, a time before the colonel had cultivated the younger Mr. Davenant, encouraged him to join the militia, made him his drinking companion. Whether Robert Davenant had been paying court to her mistress or to her fortune, Jenny didn’t know. But she did know that the cessation of his attentions had hurt Mary Anne more than she would ever say. To marry the older brother, to show the younger just what he had missed, would be a fine revenge. If Charles Davenant rose to the lure.

  “He might borrow the money.” Jenny kept up her gentle brushing. It was her role to play devil’s advocate. So long as she knew when to stop. Mary Anne liked to be challenged only so far.

  “Why borrow it when you can marry it? Our estates run side by side. He’d be a fool to look elsewhere.”

  “Men aren’t best known for sense.”

  “He can be the biggest dolt in all Christendom so long as he gets me away from my uncle.”

  “He didn’t seem a dolt.” Jenny had been there, at supper, standing just outside the arch to the great room. Mary Anne liked to keep her close, for comfort. Davenant had been uncomfortable, yes, visibly so, but there was a measured tone to his voice, a thoughtful way about him, even deep in his cups.

  But, as Mary Anne said, all men seemed pleasant enough. At first.

  Mary Anne spoke into the silence. “I have to get to him before my uncle does.”

  Jenny set down the brush. “Push too hard and he’ll think you really are mad.”

  “There are times when I wonder if I might be.” Mary Anne sounded a decade older than her nineteen years. And well she might. The last five years, they had both lived like soldiers on campaign, constantly on guard against the next threat. The fact that it was Mary Anne’s own house, her own land, only made it worse. She might be mistress, but her uncle was her guardian, and there was little she could do in her own defense, at least, not without confirming that she was as mad as her uncle implied.

  And Jenny was only so safe as her mistress could keep her.

  “You’re not mad. Or if you’re mad, then so are we all.” Jenny divided Mary Anne’s hair into three, weaving the heavy mass into one long plait. “Mr. Davenant seems a reasonable man. He didn’t much like Master John, that much was clear.”

  That was putting it mildly. Jenny hadn’t missed the way he had recoiled when Master John had offered Jenny to him.

  A chill worked its way down Jenny’s spine. What about next time? What if the next man didn’t refuse? Her fingers turned cold at the thought; she could feel them prickling.

  It was getting worse. Little reprisals, small cruelties. But they were mounting, day by day. And Jenny had no doubt that Master John had larger plans in hand.

  “No, Mr. Davenant didn’t seem taken in by Uncle John, did he?” Lost in her own reflections, Mary Anne didn’t notice Jenny’s abstraction. “We might be able to find our way free yet.”

  You, Jenny thought. You might be able to find your way free.

  They’d been through so much together, she and Mary Anne, bound together closer than blood. She was, Jenny knew, privy to Mary Anne’s every thought, every concern. But she was still her property. And she couldn’t imagine that Mary Anne would give her up, not now, not while Mary Anne was still in this house, in her uncle’s pow
er.

  Slaves disappeared all the time, losing themselves in Oistins, in Bridgetown, hiding with family members on other estates. But Jenny had no family to run to. Her people, whoever they were, were on Jamaica, lost to her before she was old enough to remember them. Her only family, such as it was, was in this house, in front of her.

  Her cousin, who was also her mistress.

  Her father. Who had just offered her to a strange man as if she were a Bridgetown doxy, for sale for a shilling.

  But why should that surprise her? She’d always been a tool to her father, nothing more. The fact that she shared his blood was purely incidental. Except, of course, when he wanted something of her.

  Mary Anne’s braid was starting to unravel.

  “One day at a time,” said Jenny, and twisted a ribbon neatly around the tail of her mistress’s braid. She smiled calmly into those gray eyes that were so much like her own. “You’ll need your sleep if you’re to charm Mr. Davenant in the morning.”

  Chapter Three

  Christ Church, Barbados

  February 1854

  Thursday morning found Emily and her cousins on the road to Peverills.

  Emily half expected Dr. Braithwaite to discover an emergency at the hospital, possibly involving plague. But the plague, if plague there was, stayed within bounds, and aside from an admonition that they must be on their way early if they wished to avoid the heat of the day, Dr. Braithwaite voiced no further objections.

  The sun pounded down on Mr. Turner’s barouche, reflecting off the road and the bright brass trappings of the carriage. After the gray of Bristol’s cobbles, the white of the road looked as though someone had dunked it into carbolic and scrubbed. The world had been scoured clean: from the bright-painted pastel houses to the white road to the brilliant scarlet leaves on the trees. Emily had to blink and blink again, like someone who had emerged from the gloom of the sickroom. It made halos around her eyes and around the heads of Adam and Dr. Braithwaite, who sat in the rear-facing seats, their backs to the coachman. A picnic basket, stuffed to bursting by Mr. Turner’s cook, rattled in tune to the rhythm of the horses’ hooves.