The Summer Country Page 35

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Christ Church, Barbados

  August 1814

  “Dead?”

  “An hour since. Dr. MacAndrews is there now. He gave her something to help her sleep.” Jenny shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. “I had to tell you now, before you heard the news from someone else.”

  “Dead,” Charles repeated.

  He couldn’t quite get his mind around it, that his brother, whom he had seen alive only hours before, earthy, fleshy, reeling with drink, brimming with life, was still and cold. He thought of the little brother he had known, stumbling behind him in skirts, the sun shining off his golden hair. His mother’s arms, cradling a baby. This is your brother, Robert.

  “I ought to have kept him here. I ought to have made him sleep it off.” He’d known he ought, but he had been thoroughly fed up with Robert and his grievances. He’d wanted rid of him. But not permanently. Not like this. “Did he fall from his horse? Did he do himself an injury?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  Something of Jenny’s strange stillness penetrated Charles’s grief. Not simple respect for a death, but something more, something that stank of secrets. “What happened?”

  “He was waiting for her when we came back. He was in his cups. He tried to force her.” There was something terrible about the flat, uninflected narrative. Jenny looked him in the eye, her face set, and Charles had the awful feeling that she was seeing him, not as himself, but as a stranger, an enemy. “He had her against the wall.”

  Maybe he was dreaming. Maybe this was all a nightmare. He’d dreamed the whole awful evening, the fight, its sequel. “What did she do?”

  “She hit him. With the writing desk. She didn’t mean to kill him. Just to stop him. But he fell—so hard.”

  “Oh God.” Charles stared at her in horror.

  Jenny’s calm slipped for a moment. “There was so much blood.”

  “Head wounds do bleed, you know,” said Charles, gaining hope. “They always look worse than they are. He might be alive yet.”

  Jenny shook her head. “Dr. MacAndrews has been.”

  “The man wouldn’t know a corpse from a fowl cock!”

  “Charles.” Jenny put a hand on his arm. “He held a mirror to his mouth. There was no breath.”

  Cases of men who seemed dead and then revived, men in their coffins, terrifying their family by knocking to be let out . . . All these bubbled up in Charles’s throat, a hundred arguments against death. But Jenny was watching him, watching him with pity and no little impatience.

  “She can’t know you know. Do you hear me?” He was aware she was speaking, but only just. Grief and disbelief blinded him, choked him. “I only told you because—because you deserved to know. Dr. MacAndrews says it’s an apoplexy. Master Robert hit his head as he fell. There’s no one who knows otherwise. Only me. And you.”

  “But— That shouldn’t be for us to determine,” said Charles dazedly, thinking of the little boy he remembered, the little boy lost beneath the angry young man.

  There were so many Roberts who would never be, now. Robert in comfortable middle age, Robert the patriarch.

  Grasping for something, anything, Charles fell back on his legal training. “It was self-defense. That’s manslaughter. But there’s only her word.” Not Jenny’s. A slave couldn’t testify in a trial. And Mary Anne was a woman, a wife, which complicated matters. “There’s no legal concept of rape in marriage. In the eyes of the court, there was nothing for her to defend against. Which makes it murder. But I can’t imagine any jury wouldn’t take into account—”

  “Are you mad?” Jenny grabbed Charles’s arm, hard. “She’ll deny it. And then she’ll say that I was the one who did it, that she was protecting me.”

  “Surely, she wouldn’t. . . .”

  “Wouldn’t she? If it were me or she, she would abandon me in a moment. She’d say he made advances and I attacked him. They’d put me in the Cage, and then they’d kill me. Or worse.” She didn’t need to say. They could both imagine it. Whippings so severe they tore the flesh from the bone. She might be chained, left without water, raw, bleeding, a living meal for bird and beast. “Charles. I’m the only one who saw. I’m the only one who knows.”

  Charles blinked, trying to shut out the image of Robert, sprawled lifeless on the floor, Robert, in his white smock and golden curls, calling his name. “Will she . . . try to silence you?”

  He remembered the day Jenny had told him about her father, the mix of horror and disbelief that such things could happen in a Christian household, in the nineteenth century. But they had. And Mary Anne Beckles had been trained at her uncle’s knee.

  Jenny shook her head, white-lipped. “Not if her account goes unchallenged. Not if she thinks she’s safe. She’ll keep me close, but she won’t hurt me. I don’t think.”

  “Oh God,” Charles said, lifting his hands to his head.

  “She doesn’t trust me anymore. Once, perhaps.” Jenny looked at him, all her feelings written on her face. “She offered me the position of housekeeper. The keys to the household and the choicest cuts of meat. I told her it was enough to me to serve her. I don’t know whether she believed me or not.”

  Charles sat down heavily on a bench. “We did this to her.” It had seemed such a grand idea, in the endless summer of new love, to play at being Cupid. What harm could it bring? They were doing both a favor, that was what he had told himself. “We did this to him. We killed him. If they’d never married—”

  “He might have drunk himself to death or plunged his horse over a cliff or run away to Jamaica. What does it matter? The truth can’t come out. Not if you love me.” She searched his face, and whatever it was she saw there made her drop her hands and step away. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “No!” Charles hastened toward her, running his hands up and down her arms, drawing her close, as much for his own comfort as hers. They’d sacrificed so much; how could they lose each other? “Not that. Never that. You can always tell me anything. We have no secrets from one another. We should have no secrets from one another.”

  Jenny stood like a statue in his embrace. “Why didn’t you tell me about the baby coming to Peverills?”

  “I—I would have done.” It had seemed a grand idea to announce her to the world. It should, he realized, have occurred to him to tell Jenny first. “I should have done. When Carlota comes . . .”

  “Carlota.” The name resounded from her tongue like the sack of a city, all destruction and ash. “You’ve made my child foreign. You’ve made my child foreign to me.”

  Charles scrambled to try to understand her grief. “Jenny. Jenny.” He slid a finger under her chin, lifting her face to his, trying to make her see. “She’s not really foreign. It’s just a name, only a name. You agreed to it.”

  “Because I had no choice!” Jenny wrenched away from him, her face a Medusa mask of despair. She pressed both hands to her face, holding them there for a long moment, and then said, in a voice as dry as the cane, “I’m sorry.”

  “No. I’m sorry.” Charles held out his hands to her, and this time, slowly, she came to him, pressing her face into that spot in his chest that seemed to have been made just for her. Charles stroked her hair, taking comfort in the repetitive motion, in her presence. “I’m so sorry. For all of this. I’d only meant to make things better. If I’d known . . .”

  If he had known, what then? Could they have done any differently?

  “I am more an antique Roman than a Dane,” Charles quoted, looking out over Jenny’s head at the midnight gardens, so carefully laid out by his mother, the gardens where he and Robert had played as children, innocent and unknowing. “But I’m not. I’m neither. I’m an Englishman. I’d always thought it overblown, all that ancient Greek palaver about rushing into one’s fate by seeking to avoid it, but now—I wonder. As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods; / They kill us for their sport.”

  Robert. They had killed Robert. Or had
Robert killed himself? Fate or free will, divine judgment or the mere consequence of one choice leading to another and another and another, until the weight of those choices collapsed on one, bearing one down?

  Charles could hear his own voice, as distant as the moon. “I’d thought we lived in an age of reason, that man might make his own destiny. Is it all a snare? Do we create our own doom, or are we mere actors in a drama of someone else’s devising?”

  “Charles,” Jenny interrupted. “Charles. When is the child coming?”

  History, poetry, natural philosophy, all tangled together. Anything to put off thinking about the immediacy of it all. Charles dragged his attention back to Jenny. “Soon. Six months, perhaps a year?”

  Jenny pulled back, staring up at him. “Another year?”

  “We have to make it look right, like she’s really coming all the way from Portugal,” Charles said earnestly. “There would be arrangements to be made, passage to book, a nursemaid to be hired. . . . It all takes time.”

  “She’ll be nearly two by then.” The grief in Jenny’s voice tore at Charles’s heart.

  He wanted to promise to produce the child immediately, to thrust her into Jenny’s arms, but he couldn’t, not now, not without doing violence to all their plans.

  How had they come to this? So much grief, so much grief caused with the purest of intentions. He’d thought to see Robert and Mary Anne happily married; he’d wanted his and Jenny’s child safe and free, close at hand. It had all made sense at the time.

  Choice piled upon choice upon choice.

  But this wasn’t Athens. It was Barbados. And he was neither an antique Roman nor a Dane. Robert was dead, but they weren’t.

  “Do you remember anything from that age?” said Charles, attempting to cheer her. “I don’t. In France, they send their babies out to the country and only bring them home when they’re an age to reason. We’re only in keeping with the fashion.”

  Jenny looked up at him, her gray eyes nearly black in the darkness. “Don’t you want her back?”

  Did he? The truth was, Charles wasn’t quite sure how he felt about it. In theory, yes, she was his child. But he had a strange reluctance to see her. It was as if this child was his failures made flesh. He’d thought to be better than his father, but his father, at least, had contrived to free his lover and child.

  It was almost easier to pretend she was what he claimed, the child of a friend, whom he could welcome with open arms and every affection, for Hal’s sake.

  But he couldn’t say that, so, instead, he said, “Don’t worry. She’s being raised with every care. Jonathan wouldn’t stand for less. I would suspect Jonathan of extending the arrangement to keep the fees but for the fact that he spends most of it on gifts for her.”

  Jenny wasn’t amused. “He doesn’t want to give her up. Have you seen the way he looks when he speaks of her? As if she were his.”

  Charles rubbed her arm consolingly. “He’s hardly going to run off with her. Don’t worry. We’ll have our girl home soon.”

  “You’ll have our girl home,” said Jenny, so softly that Charles could scarcely make out the words. But he did, and he knew she was right.

  “We’ll find a way,” he said again, but even to his own ears, the words sounded thin.

  “Yes,” said Jenny politely, and turned to go.

  “Wait!” Charles put out a hand to her. Speaking rapidly, he said, “There’s a seat opening on the council. I mean to have it. It will mean spending some time making up to red-faced planters and their narrow-minded wives, but . . . you were right. Writing letters to London only does so much. If I can work here, from within . . .”

  “Oh, Charles.” Jenny put a hand to his cheek. Charles wasn’t sure why, but it felt like good-bye.

  Taking her hand, he turned it and pressed a kiss against the palm, trying to put all the strength of his love into that kiss. “Please, don’t give up. I haven’t. We’ve come this far.”

  Standing on her tiptoes, Jenny pressed a kiss to the corner of his lips. “I need to get back.”

  Charles watched her go, seeing his mother, Robert, everyone he had failed. But there was only Jenny, stepping lightly across the freshly hoed fields, disappearing into the gloaming. Jenny, who was his future, he promised himself, not his past.

  It would all come right. He would make it right.

  Once he had his seat on the council, once their child was come to Peverills . . .

  “Soon,” he promised Jenny, his whisper traveling on the wind like the sound of the cane. “Soon.”

  Christ Church, Barbados

  July 1815

  It was nearly a year before Charles Davenant’s Portuguese ward came to Peverills.

  Ructions in Europe had caused difficulties in getting a ship from Lisbon. The girl’s nursemaid had taken fright at thought of the journey and abandoned her post at the harbor, causing a delay as a new nursemaid was found. The stories were vague, but no one really demanded much in the way of details. No one cared. All thoughts were concentrated on Napoléon’s escape from Elba, his triumphal march on Paris, the new war in Europe.

  Carlota St. Aubyn slipped into Barbados society hard on the heels of the news of the Duke of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo.

  She benefited from the general elation and a vague sense of warmth that extended to all things related to the duke, Portugal included. Gossip, predisposed, in this case, to be positively inclined to anyone connected with the late victories, elevated her parentage, endowing her mother with the fictional rank of first contessa and then marquesa, creating a dramatic and doomed love story between the persecuted noblewoman (resisting the lustful advances of the French conquerors) and the noble English officer who had rescued and married her, only to succumb, tragically, to a Frenchman’s sword.

  That there wasn’t a word of truth in it didn’t bother anyone in the slightest. By the time Carlota had been at Peverills for a week, half the island believed it, and the other half deemed it impolitic to disagree.

  “Not that it matters,” said Mary Anne, donning a new round gown of ruby merino, trimmed with sapphire velvet and Valenciennes lace, utterly impractical for the climate, but made to model from a batch of slightly wilted fashion papers come from England on the same ship as word of the duke’s victory over Bonaparte. It was, Mary Anne had decided, close enough to a year that the lilac of half mourning could be abandoned, and she intended to do so with a will. “The child is Charles’s ward, whether she’s the daughter of a countess or a Lisbon doxy.”

  She seemed to have no suspicion that the child might be anything other than the daughter of Charles’s old school friend, and for that, Jenny was grateful.

  Not that Jenny would know if Mary Anne thought otherwise. The old days, when Mary Anne would speak whatever was on her mind, were gone.

  Sometimes, Jenny would catch Mary Anne watching her, eyes narrowed and lips pursed. There were tests, seemingly casual comments, designed to see if Jenny could be tricked into referring to the events of that awful night. Jenny, who had thought the skill gone with her father, rediscovered the art of turning to stone, presenting a blank countenance when pressed.

  But Mary Anne wasn’t satisfied.

  Jenny wasn’t sure what would satisfy her. To bring it up, openly, and swear fealty? But to voice it would be to acknowledge it, to acknowledge that Mary Anne had killed her husband and suborned the nearest physician; it would be like plunging her hand into a fire to grasp a hot coal, like a medieval saint praying for a miracle.

  Jenny didn’t believe in miracles, only in survival.

  Mary Anne adjusted her high-crowned bonnet with the white ostrich plumes. “Is Edward ready? Call Dutchess. That girl, I swear, she spends half her time making eyes at Johnny Cooper.”

  “There’s no need to bring Dutchess. I can manage Master Edward.” If she was playing with Neddy, it would give her an excuse to approach Carlota. No one ever minded the nursemaid. Not that she would say anything to Carlota. She wasn’t that fo
olish. She just wanted to see her, to compare the living child to that tiny creature in her memory, whom she’d so briefly held in her arms.

  “No,” said Mary Anne flatly, and Jenny knew she’d gone too far. “You’ll attend me.”

  “Yes, mistress,” said Jenny, and knelt to help her mistress into her gloves.

  When they arrived at Peverills, Neddy ran ahead, calling, “Unker Charles! Unker Charles!”

  Uncle Charles was a great favorite, largely because he allowed himself to be climbed upon and his hair to be pulled.

  “Welcome.” Charles didn’t look at her. One wouldn’t, at a slave. He extended an arm to Mary Anne as Neddy raced ahead, very much at home in his uncle’s house. “Come and meet my ward. She’s in the garden.”

  He took them through the house and out the back, where the ground sloped away in the gardens planned by Charles’s mother. By a trick of topography, one could see the sea in the distance, but not the cane closer by. A clever arrangement of walls and terraces created a world apart.

  Beneath the shade of a tamarind tree, a little girl in a white gown was playing. Her shoes were of red morocco, her hair a cluster of soft, dark curls around her face that she shook back as she tried to spin two cups on a string, tossing them up into the air, and then tossing them again. Scattered around her were two brightly painted tops, a cup and a ball, and a quaintly carved doll in a miniature gig.

  “Go on, then,” said Charles to Neddy. “I’ve got her a diabolo but neither of us can quite figure out how to work it. Would you like a go? I’m sure Carlota would be happy to share.”

  Nothing loath, Neddy raced out to join her. Carlota yanked the diabolo behind her back and, her little tongue between her lips, selected a top for him instead, which Neddy took gladly.

  She was so much smaller than Neddy, but she didn’t look little, somehow. With a pang, Jenny realized who the child reminded her of. Not herself, but Mary Anne. There was something in her self-possessed determination, in the set of her chin.

  But Charles was there too, in the flash of those blue eyes, the ready humor as she laughed at Neddy as he jumped for the flying bobbins.