Page 1 of The Summer Country

Chapter One

Bridgetown, Barbados

February 1854

“Emily!” Adam shouted.

Her cousin was standing by a barouche, a barouche so shiny and new that the black lacquer dazzled the eyes.

To be fair, Emily’s eyes were dazzled already, sun-blind, rainbows dancing everywhere; she felt dizzy with wonder and delight.

When they anchored in Carlisle Bay just after noon, the island had seemed a fairyland drawn in pastels, houses bleached by the sunlight rising in tiers on the hills that circled the town, broad-leaved trees swaying on delicate trunks, the fronds casting their shadows over the blue waters, an illustration from a picture book, beautiful and remote.

But now they were here, unmistakably here, the brilliant sunshine like nothing Emily had ever seen, the heat baking through the heavy fabric of her dress and making the hair at the nape of her neck curl. The houses weren’t pastels at all, but vibrant orange and yellow, blue and green and pink. The illusion of space had been just that, an illusion; people pressed close about, dressed in brightly colored kerchiefs, carrying baskets, chickens and donkeys getting underfoot, everyone talking, laughing, arguing, crying their wares.

Emily wanted to see it all, to peer into the baskets of fruit for which she had no name, to figure out whether the patterns on the handkerchiefs being shoved beneath her nose and waved about were seeds or beads or something else entirely.

But her cousin was waiting, his fair-skinned face flushed with heat and agitation. They were to dine at the house of her grandfather’s oldest business associate, and Adam had worked himself into a pelter about it, chivvying them from ship to hotel and into evening dress, in a horror that they might be late.

“Emily!” Adam called again, jiggling from one foot to the other. His wife, Laura, was already in the barouche. “Are you coming?”

Emily made a face at him through the throng. Never mind that a new world pressed around them, strange and wonderful. A business contract was waiting. “I’m trying!”

The liveried coachman shouted, and the hawkers fell away, parting like the Red Sea. Emily gathered her skirts and made her way through the gap before it could close, glancing back over her shoulder as the crowd formed again, the hawkers descending on one of their fellow passengers from the Renown, who looked like she was destined to buy some fancywork whether she intended to or not.

“Do take your time, Emily.” Adam shoved her up into the carriage with more vigor than finesse. “Is there anyone you’d like to stop and talk to before we go? A cold collation, perhaps?”

“Adam . . .” Laura moved aside to make room for Emily on the forward-facing seat. “Come, sit by me.”

Emily squeezed her own modest skirts into the space beside Laura’s flounces, as Adam tripped on the hem of her skirt and dropped, red-faced, into the seat opposite.

“It wouldn’t do to be late. Not after Mr. Turner sent his own coach.” Lowering his voice, Adam leaned forward. “They say he’s the richest man in Barbados—the richest man in the West Indies. His fortune makes Grandfather seem like a pauper.”

“Grandfather wouldn’t like to hear you say that,” pointed out Emily as the coach paused to let two women cross the road, large jugs balanced on their heads.

“No, he wouldn’t, would he?” said Adam, and there was a catch in his voice that was audible even over the cries of the street vendors. “I keep thinking he’s still there. That we’ll go back and he’ll be there in the house at Queen Street, barking orders to his clerks.”

Emily felt an ache in her chest. She could picture it too, too well. Her autocratic, rough-mannered tyrant of a grandfather, who had loved her more than anyone in the world. He had been a self-made man, Jonathan Fenty, who had raised himself from poverty to riches through pure strength of will.

Well, will and an advantageous marriage. But mostly will.

No one, including their grandfather, had ever thought he might succumb to anything so mundane as death.

But he had, and there was a stylized angel in the churchyard to prove it, the carving raw and new, the chisel marks fresh on the stone, as the rain wept down, seeping into the newly turned earth. He was gone and they were here, in the land of their grandfather’s birth, where the sun shone in February and strange birds sang. The heat and colors pressed around her, the women with their bright kerchiefs and the baskets balanced on top of their heads, the lilting voices and bright colors, a world away from the winter city they had left.

“Grandfather would be glad to see you carrying on,” said Emily quietly. “It was what he wanted.”

It shouldn’t have stung to know that Fenty and Company would be Adam’s. It was what she had always known. He was a boy, and a Fenty. Never mind that her grandfather had always said she was the most like him. That didn’t extend to commerce. But he had left her a legacy of her own, one she had never expected.

“If he did, why didn’t he bother to train me?” asked Adam.

“Perhaps because you didn’t want to be trained? You were too busy stealing jam tarts.”

“It was just the once,” Adam protested. “You’ll have Laura thinking she’s married a ne’er-do-well. Laura?”

Laura shook her head as if to wake herself from a dream. She had always, thought Emily, had a talent for absenting herself. It had made the other girls at Miss Blackwell’s Academy for Young Leaders declare her haughty and cold, although Emily knew it was quite otherwise: a combination of crippling shyness and an ability to escape into her own mind whenever something worried her.

“Is it the heat?” Adam asked, all concern.