Page 150 of The Summer Country

But was it strength, really? It struck her now it wasn’t so much strength as selfishness, a blind clinging to what she believed to be hers, and Emily had the uncomfortable feeling that she had been guilty of the same.

She had resented Adam taking Laura from her and Laura taking Adam, not because she had loved Adam, not in that way, but because they had both been hers and she had wanted to come first. She had blamed her father for abandoning the memory of her mother, had looked down on him for marrying again, and dismissed it as the need of a weak character for a stronger. But maybe it wasn’t her father who had been weak at all. Maybe it was she. It was easier to blame others than look hard at oneself and see all the spongy bits in one’s soul.

She had prided herself so on her common sense, when it wasn’t common sense at all, but complacency, a willful refusal to look at anything she didn’t want to see.

She was looking now, and the horrible truth was that she didn’t much like what she saw.

She went over every excruciating exchange she had ever had with Nathaniel, every thoughtless, prideful, insensitive thing she had said. She cringed at the memory of it. The Bristol and Clifton Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, indeed. Somehow, knowing that her own grandmother had been a slave, that, but for a bit of sleight of hand, her mother would have been a slave, made sitting at a few meetings and listening to Mr. Frederick Douglass speak seem very thin, indeed.

As the cholera in Bridgetown waned and then disappeared entirely, Nathaniel had resumed his weekly clinic at Peverills. Or so Emily was told. Half a dozen times she reached for her riding habit, and half a dozen times she thought better of it.

She had been smug, prideful, obtuse. She had blamed him for not blazoning his feelings on his sleeve, when she had scarcely been willing to face her own. She was the worst sort of hypocrite and it was no wonder he hadn’t written or called.

“You could write to him,” suggested Laura.

“But what if he doesn’t want to receive a letter from me?”

“Then he can return it unread.” When Emily only looked at her, Laura sighed and went back to counting linen.

Slowly, slowly, against all expectations, Mrs. Davenant had begun to mend. On a sunny day in October, six weeks after Mrs. Davenant had descended into insensibility, Queenie came to tell Emily that Mrs. Davenant was sitting up in bed, demanding tea and Emily.

“She knew me,” said Queenie significantly, as she led Emily into the room, which had the indefinable smell of the sickroom. “It’s the first time she woke up and knew me.”

“Of course I knew you. Why wouldn’t I know you? Leave us,” Mrs. Davenant told Queenie, who raised her brows but went. Mrs. Davenant beckoned Emily peremptorily to her bedside, saying without preamble, “I said a great many things when I was sick, didn’t I?”

“Yes.” Emily stood by the bed, not wanting to sit down.

“I told you about the child.”

The child, as though her mother had been a pawn rather than a person. It was an absurd thought. Her mother had been very much a person, one of the strongest people Emily knew. “My mother, you mean? Yes.”

Mrs. Davenant smiled grimly. “You think I was wrong, don’t you? Do you think you’d be sitting here in silk and lace if I hadn’t done what I’d done?”

Emily wasn’t wearing silk and lace; she was wearing poplin and cotton. And that certainly wasn’t the way Mrs. Davenant had told the story when she was half-mad with fever.

“It’s hard to tell what might have been,” said Emily. “But it seems very cruel to let a father think his child burned to death.”

“Crueler to tell him otherwise.” Mrs. Davenant tried to raise herself on her elbows. “You weren’t there. You don’t know. At the time, I thought it was for the best.”

“For the best to let him think she was dead?”

“I set Charles free! He could marry, have children.” Mrs. Davenant subsided against the pillows. “He didn’t, though. Instead, he left. He gave each of his slaves a gift of money, and then he went to London and he freed them all. It was something that was done then, to save the manumission fees, selling a slave to a friend in England and having the slave freed there. Just seldom on so grand a scale.” She looked sideways at Emily. “Natty Cooper—oh, if you must, Dr. Braithwaite, as he’s calling himself now—ridiculous cheek!—his uncle had him freed that way. Your grandfather did the honors in England, I believe.”

“It seems hard that he died never knowing his daughter had lived,” said Emily.

Mrs. Davenant grimaced at her. “Charles? Charles isn’t dead. He’s alive and living in Paris. He’s married now. A Frenchwoman. They have a whole passel of brats, with impossible French names. I know because Edward wrote me. It was Charles my Edward ran to.” She was quiet a moment, the only sound her fingers pleating the fabric of the sheets. “It seemed a bit like justice. I took his child and he took mine. An eye for an eye and a child for a child.”

It didn’t sound at all like justice to Emily; it sounded more like a justification. Edward had chosen his own path; Emily’s mother had had no choice. Not to mention the small matter of Charles Davenant never knowing what had happened to his daughter.

“You still have George,” Emily pointed out.

“Yes, I still have George.” Lifting her head, she fixed Emily with a red-rimmed gray eye. “There’s nothing to stop you marrying George.”

There were, Emily thought, many things to stop her marrying George.

Through the window, Emily could see Laura and George, her black head bent near his golden one, consulting on some matter of household management. Or possibly on Sir Walter Scott. It might be either.

They were, Emily thought wistfully, very well matched. They would have to wait out the mandated period of mourning of course, but once that was done . . . Disloyal though it might be, she rather hoped Laura and George didn’t let Adam get in the way.