The Summer Country Page 38

  “I’ll accept your thanks if you’ll take mine,” she said, before she could think better of it. “In truth, I think I would have gone mad if I hadn’t had something to do after—well, after.”

  “Your cousin?” Nathaniel toyed with his sherry, pushing the delicate cut-crystal glass this way and that on the top of the cabinet. “I’d wondered, a long time ago, if you had feelings for your cousin.”

  “Of course I did. He was my cousin. Oh, you mean like that. No.” There had been a time she’d been comforted by the notion that Adam was there to marry if she ever really wanted to marry someone, but that had been the extent of it. For the most part. “He would have complained that I bullied him.”

  “You mean the way you bully me?”

  “I don’t—” Emily broke off as she realized he was teasing her. “You don’t let me bully you.”

  His eyes were a deep, deep brown. She had never noticed that before. She had never noticed the small scar just above his right eye, or the softness of the skin beneath his mustache. But she noticed it all now.

  “That’s because I have the good sense to acknowledge when you’re right,” said Nathaniel.

  “And when I’m wrong?” Her voice sounded very strange to her ears, as if coming from far away, from someone else’s throat.

  Nathaniel’s eyes crinkled at the corners and Emily wondered that she had never noticed that before or the particular shape of his hair against his brow. “You haven’t led me astray yet,” he said. And then, “Emily . . .”

  The sun was setting, the light fading. No one had thought to light the lamps. The room was dim and cool, the house quiet, the city outside the windows quiet. After so much pain and strife, there was, here, peace, and Emily found herself answering without words. Her arms knew what they wanted to do without conscious thought from her brain. They wrapped around his neck as if that was where they’d always meant to be.

  At some point or other in his life, Nathaniel must have kissed someone. Quite a few someones. He certainly seemed to know what he was about. That was the last thought Emily had before she gave up on thinking entirely as a waste of valuable energy that could be better spent kissing him back.

  All the tension, all the fear of the past two months, all the relief that it was finally over, it all found an outlet in this, transmuted into a mad sort of passion. Her hands were in his hair, his fingers on her face, her hair, her back. She’d never understood girls who ruined themselves before, but she did now, as she wiggled closer, impatient with the layers of cotton and poplin and lace, horsehair and whalebone and wool.

  “Ahem?” Cousin Bella gave a discreet rap at the door and Emily jumped back, putting a hand to her hair, which was rather less neatly arranged than it had been a moment before.

  Nathaniel backed up, bumping inelegantly into the curio cabinet. “Yes?” he said shortly.

  Emily bit her lip to still a slightly hysterical giggle. She put her hand to cover her lips, which felt swollen and strange.

  “There’s a letter come from Beckles,” said Cousin Bella peaceably. “For Miss Emily.”

  The mention of Beckles was enough to dispel any lingering giddiness. “Thank you, Cousin Bella.”

  Cousin Bella handed the letter to Emily and sat down on the settee, looking as though she intended to stay there for quite some time. Emily glanced at Nathaniel. She wasn’t entirely sure which of them was being chaperoned.

  Until five minutes ago, she wouldn’t have thought they had any need to be chaperoned.

  But now . . .

  “Aren’t you going to read it?” asked Nathaniel, his voice as clipped as it had been six months ago.

  Emily looked uncertainly at him. “Yes.”

  It wasn’t from Laura. She knew her hand, her penmanship the envy of the other girls at Miss Blackwell’s.

  “From George Davenant, I take it?” said Nathaniel. “I know the seal. I’ll leave you to read your correspondence in private.”

  “No. There’s no need.” She’d fallen once into a pond in winter. She felt the same way now, shivering with the suddenness of the chill. “There’s nothing in it that can’t be shared.”

  She saw the hostility on Nathaniel’s face change to concern. “What is it?”

  Emily passed him the note with a hand that shook, ever so slightly. “The cholera is in Christ Church. It’s come to Beckles.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Christ Church, Barbados

  November 1815

  When Charles brought his ward to Beckles to visit with Neddy, Jenny wasn’t included in the party.

  She would hear about it from Dutchess, trying not to look like she was asking, trying not to crane for a glimpse of her daughter as she climbed into the Peverills carriage, lace on her petticoats and red leather shoes.

  “You’d never guess she was younger than Neddy,” Charles said proudly, in one of their rare meetings at the Old Mill. The rainy season ought to have been almost past, but the humidity in the air made Jenny’s dress cling damply to her skin and the hair prickle at the nape of her neck. Another storm was coming, or thinking of it. In the mood she was in, Jenny was ready for it to unfurl with wind and rain, blowing away everything in its path. “She’s so much quicker than he. He follows wherever she goes.”

  “Oh?” said Jenny flatly.

  Charles didn’t seem to notice. “I’ve hired a Frenchwoman to come twice a week and speak French with Lottie. She can say bonjour and comment ça va.”

  “Magnifique,” said Jenny, who had learned French with Mary Anne, or what passed for French in her governess’s estimation.

  “Are you all right?” said Charles, lifting himself on an elbow, and Jenny didn’t know whether to hit him for his obtuseness or weep onto his chest, or possibly both.

  “It’s the weather,” she said.

  It was no use telling him that every word he told her about Lottie was a dagger in her heart, because then he might stop, and she didn’t want him to stop. She wanted to know. But it hurt. It hurt so badly to know she was there, so close, growing bigger every day, every day another day that she didn’t know her mother.

  She held to what Nanny Grigg had told her, this promise of intervention from abroad, from the king and queen, who valued them as their masters didn’t. Wasn’t it what Charles had been saying for years, and she hadn’t believed him?

  Jenny sat up, yanking her dress back up around her shoulders. “Has there been any word from the assembly about the registry bill?”

  Charles blinked up at her. “About the . . . Why do you ask?”

  Jenny busied herself braiding her hair back into order. “Someone told me that there’d been papers sent from England, that we’re to have our freedom by the New Year.”

  Charles levered himself into a sitting position, looking at her with some concern. His shirt was open, his cravat discarded nearby. “Who said that?”

  “Oh, just talk.” Jenny turned her back to him. “Could you pin up my hair for me?”

  Charles obediently began coiling the braid around. “The way Alleyne was going on about it in the council, you’d think he was about to be stripped of all his property tomorrow,” he said indistinctly around the pins in his mouth. “I thought the man was going to have an apoplexy on the spot. And he’s not the only one. They’ve resolved against the bill and mean to tell Parliament so.”

  Jenny jerked her head around, wincing as her hair pulled. “But—if the king in England says—”

  Charles patiently put her hair back up, sticking the last pin in place. “The king in England might say—or, in this case, Mr. Wilberforce in Parliament—but the planters of Barbados do not.” Rooting about on the ground, he found her kerchief and handed it to her. “It will come back again, I’ve no doubt. It’s not nearly so radical as they claim. It’s their own fevered imaginations that make it so.”

  Jenny looked at him, the kerchief in her hand. “What will happen?”

  Charles shook his head. “A great deal of jabbering and angry edito
rials in the Barbados Mercury. All sound and fury signifying nothing.”

  “Nothing,” repeated Jenny.

  All of that and then nothing. Jenny felt a stab of fear; she had held to the idea that there was a greater power, a power that could step in and free them, but if the law of England couldn’t prevail, what could? She felt as though she were back under the regime of her father, where rules changed at his whim, and nothing and no one was safe.

  Instead of going back to Beckles, Jenny walked north instead, to Simmons. Mary Anne was dining at Rosehall and had taken Queenie with her. She had a few hours, at least.

  She found Nanny Grigg in the slave yard, sitting with Jackey, the head driver, and King Wiltshire, a carpenter from Bayleys, who was, she thought, married to one of Jackey’s sisters, who had been sold away to Bayleys. Jackey’s children were playing a game with buttons while Jackey and King Wiltshire looked on and offered advice.

  Nanny raised a hand in greeting. “Jenny! You’re here late.”

  “I’ve just come from Peverills.” She looked at the children playing at their game, with their much-mended smocks, their feet bare. Their father was an important man on the plantation, so if they were lucky they might be apprenticed to a trade by and by instead of set to hoeing cane, but they would live on Simmons and die on Simmons unless they were sold away. The wrongness of it smote her like a fist. “They’ve refused the registry bill. The assembly. Mr. Davenant just told me.”

  “They can’t do that.” King Wiltshire came to his feet, stepping heavily on one of the counters.

  “You’ve broken it!” protested Jackey’s oldest.

  “Hush,” said Nanny. “He’ll find you another. Run along. There’s grown-up business at hand. Go to your mother in the kitchen. She’ll give you a piece of cane to suck.”

  The children looked to their father. “Go on,” Jackey echoed.

  King Wiltshire kicked the cracked bits of ivory away. “I heard that there’s a black queen in England and she means us to have our freedom, and it’s Mr. Wilberforce who’s to give it to us.”

  “I heard that too,” said Nanny. “It was in a paper Will Nightingale showed me. He had it from Washington Franklin over at Contented Retreat, and if he wouldn’t know, no one would. He’s a freeman—his father freed him as he lay dying, and his brother too. They go where they please and read what they will.”

  “Nice for those who can get it,” said Jenny. She didn’t know where her father was now. Jamaica, most likely. But he’d certainly never thought about freeing her. “I don’t know about the queen or Mr. Wilberforce, but I do know what I heard from Mr. Davenant, and that’s that the council and assembly mean to deny the bill.”

  “They’re keeping our freedom from us.” She’d never seen Nanny look so, her pleasant-featured face stiff with anger. “They’ve stolen it. They’ve stolen our freedom.”

  “The queen won’t stand for it,” said King Wiltshire reassuringly, putting a hand on Nanny Grigg’s arm.

  She shook him off. “And what’s the queen to do in England when we’re here? I was a fool to think they’d let us go. We’ll never have our freedom unless we fight for it.”

  “But how?” said Jackey. “They’ll have the militia on us.”

  “I don’t mean tonight, you great goathead. We’d need to work, to plan. . . . They did it in Saint Domingo, didn’t they?” Nanny started pacing back and forth, her hands moving with her thoughts. “People don’t know. Once they know, once they know what’s being kept from us, they’ll rise up and demand it. Why do you think they keep so many of us from reading and writing? To keep us ignorant. To keep us low. But we’re not.”

  “I could spread the word at Bayleys,” said King Wiltshire. “There are like-minded souls there. They’d help.”

  Nanny Grigg nodded and looked to Jackey. “Your friend Franklin. He’d help us?”

  “A few years past, an overseer—a white man—broke into his house and tried to rob him. Franklin beat him off. Franklin got six months in the gaol. You know what the overseer got?” Jackey looked around the little group, his face grim. “Whatever he wanted from Franklin’s house. He’ll help us, all right.”

  “Jenny.” Nanny Grigg turned to her, all business. “Who at Beckles would help?”

  “I don’t know.” She wasn’t sure what she thought about all this. Her old instinct, to keep her head down and avoid trouble, warred with a burning sense of injustice, a furious need to do something, anything. Seeing the way they were looking at her, she added quickly, “I’m not trying to shirk my share. The old master, Colonel Lyons, he liked to set people against each other. I wouldn’t trust anyone not to tell the mistress.”

  Nanny thought for a moment, and then said decisively, “There’s Davenant. You’ll be our eyes and ears in the council. Whatever he says, whatever papers he has from England, you bring to us. The more we know, the better. We’ll spread the word.”

  “Charles—Mr. Davenant—said they’d have it back again, the bill, I mean,” said Jenny.

  “And what will they do?” said Nanny. “The same. No disrespect to your Master Charles, but if we wait for him to argue them into sense, we’ll all be dust and our great-grandbabies yet in chains.”

  Jenny thought of Lottie, in gold bracelets and red leather shoes. Lottie, who, at the wrong word, would be clapped in irons and hauled back to Beckles, stripped of her lace and ribbons and set to work digging weeds and watering cattle.

  She could feel the features of her face set in a hard mask, echoing Nanny’s. “Whatever’s needful, I’ll do it.”

  Nanny nodded. “We’ll have the island in arms by Christmas.”

  But it wasn’t Christmas; it was nearly Easter by the time the groundwork had been laid. The papers buzzed with news of the registry bill and its rejection; planters sent petitions to Parliament and angry screeds to the Spectator in London and the Mercury in Bridgetown.

  “You see this?” Nanny said. She read aloud from the Spectator: “‘The vulgar are influenced by names and titles.’ Oh, it’s the names that are the trouble, right enough. If I were a rose, I’d smell sweeter. ‘Instead of SLAVES, let the Negroes be called ASSISTANT-PLANTERS; and we shall not then hear such violent outcries against the slave trade by pious divines, tender-hearted poetesses, and short-sighted politicians.’ Assistant planters, is it? If they want to visit Simmons, I’ll show them who’s short-sighted. Let them spend a day being an assistant planter, and see how they like it.”

  Slowly, quietly, their network spread. A slave named Bussa, at Bayleys, took charge of finding arms. Two freedmen, Cain Davis and John Richard Sarjeant, joined the cause. Davis was free, but his children were still slaves. With no master to answer to, he was able to circulate through the fields, conveying the intelligence that the queen was to free them but the assembly had denied them, and if they wanted their freedom they must fight for it.

  The leaders of the conspiracy were to meet at the River Plantation for a dance on Good Friday to finalize the details.

  “A dance at the River?” Mary Anne eyed Jenny askance in the dressing table mirror.

  “Do you need me tonight?” Jenny asked, trying to look as if it didn’t really matter. They would go ahead without her, she knew, but it would look bad. And she wanted this. She wanted a hand in it; she wanted to bring it about herself, for herself, for Lottie, for Charles.

  “Don’t I always need you?” said Mary Anne absently, rooting through her jewel box. She looked up. “Is it a man?”

  “A man?” Jenny didn’t have to feign her surprise.

  “I wasn’t born yesterday, you know,” said Mary Anne. “You’re constantly at Simmons. Yes, yes, I know you like exchanging recipes with Nanny Grigg, but if you haven’t learned to get claret stains from silk by now, you never will.”

  “There might be,” Jenny said slowly. Better for Mary Anne to think her infatuated than seditious. “He’s a driver, at Bayleys, but he often calls at Simmons.”

  Mary Anne closed her jewel box with a sn
ap and looked up at Jenny in the mirror. “If you must go courting, let me find you someone at Beckles. Johnny Cooper, perhaps. He has a good leg.”

  Jenny found herself smiling despite herself. “Queenie would have something to say about that.”

  Mary Anne didn’t return her smile. “It’s not her place to say anything,” she said smartly. “Would you like to be married? I could arrange it, if you liked. You could have a house in the yard. A baby.”

  A baby to add to the rolls at Beckles. Increase of slaves, one infant, out of Jenny. Value sixty dollars. “I haven’t forgot my last baby.”

  Mary Anne turned in her seat, and her hand rested briefly on Jenny’s. “Babies die,” she said matter-of-factly. It was, Jenny knew, her idea of comfort. “My mother lost three before she had me. It’s sad, but there it is. You can’t mourn the rest of your life. It isn’t healthy.”

  Would she be saying the same if it were Master Neddy? “No, Miss Mary,” said Jenny. “About the dance . . .”

  “Go. I can’t have you looking like death.”

  “Thank you, Miss Mary.” Jenny began to walk away, not going too fast, not wanting to look like she was hurrying.

  “Wait.” Jenny stopped at the door. Her mistress was looking at her speculatively. “If you tell me who it is, I’ll see about buying him. It’s little enough to keep you happy. If he’s a good worker.”

  “Mistress,” said Jenny, trying to muster the correct degree of wonder and gratitude. Mary Anne looked so pleased with herself, so delighted with her own generosity. Jenny would have laughed if her nerves hadn’t been so tightly wound. “Thank you.”

  “You’ve been with me a long time.” Mary Anne checked her hair in the mirror. “It’s time we saw you settled.”

  Settled and breeding. Jenny knew the way her mistress’s mind worked. More babies for Beckles, a price tag attached to each one.

  Only two days more. Two days more and she would be free.

  Or dead.