Page 21 of The Summer Country

“And let it sit empty?”

“Maybe. He was never exactly forthcoming about his life in Barbados, was he?”

“He was about some things,” Emily said, in their grandfather’s defense.

“Yes, the morality tales. Hoeing the ground in the hot sun, trying to grow enough Indian corn to keep body and soul together, a fourteen-mile walk in blazing heat to and from the market in Speightstown. . . . We all heard those stories. But the rest of it? Who knows. Maybe he . . .”

“What?” The tips of Adam’s ears had turned red, a sure sign of guilt.

“Not fit for your ears, coz.”

“You needn’t go all prunes and prisms on me, Adam. I’m not”—she’d almost said “Laura”—“one of your sisters. There’s no need to spare my sensibilities.”

The gap between her father’s parish in St. Jude’s and her cousin’s grand house on Great George Street existed in more than just geography. There were times, at Miss Blackwell’s, when Emily felt a world away from her classmates, divided by what she had seen and heard. Adam’s sisters, she knew, understood it only as a matter of physical want; they made baskets and gathered up old clothes for Emily to deliver to “her” poor. Laura worried about their spirits; she put in impracticalities for them: sachets of fine linen and lavender, slim books of poetry, the items that she would want in times of duress.

But Adam, Emily thought, should know better. Or did he? He might have the run of the city, but he had never once visited her father’s parish, never seen the children playing shoeless in the gutter, the women who knocked at the kitchen door late in the night, shawls covering their bruised eyes.

Adam cast a glance over his shoulder, made sure no one was listening. “All right, then. The governor had a notion that Grandfather did something dodgy, and that was why he ran when he did—and why he had enough money to set himself up after.”

That, Emily was sure, was a distinctly abridged version. “Do you mean . . . he stole something?”

“Stole, reclaimed . . .” Adam made a helpless gesture. “A long time ago, Grandfather told me land was stolen from our family. He said the Fentys were lured to Barbados on the promise of land for work, that they had the work but never got the land.”

“This land?”

Adam shrugged. “You know as much of it as I.”

“So maybe that’s what this was all about. He wanted the land. It would suit him, to even the score.” Her grandfather was a firm believer in an eye for an eye. He wouldn’t take only the eye, but the spectacles as well, as interest. But something didn’t quite make sense. “Why leave it to me, then? I’m not a Fenty.”

“Once you’re sending plagues . . . Don’t look at me like that! I didn’t mean it. He always said you were the most like him of the lot of us. Maybe that’s why.” Before Emily could feel too pleased by that, Adam added, “And he did always feel that you’d got the short end of the stick, losing your mother and all. Remember when he used to bring out the bag of sweets?”

“One for you and two for me.” The memory made Emily smile, despite herself. Her grandfather, with that crumpled paper bag he kept in his desk drawer. He’d lectured them all about frugality, but then he showered them with sweets. “I never liked peppermints.”

“But you never told him, did you?”

“No. I gave them to you, instead.” At Adam’s suggestion, as she recalled. Emily narrowed her eyes at her cousin. “So, really, you had no cause to complain. You were hardly cheated.”

His expression troubled, Adam reached out and squeezed her hand. “I didn’t begrudge you the sweets, Emmy. And I don’t begrudge you this. I just . . . I don’t want to see you—”

“Toiling in the fields?”

Adam didn’t return her amusement. “Caught up in some scheme of Grandfather’s. You know how he was. He liked his surprises and his japes.” Glancing over his shoulder at Dr. Braithwaite, he said darkly, “Look at him, sending us off to his old friend Turner without ever letting on that the man’s a nigger. I’d wager he had a good laugh when he put that in the will.”

Looking back, Emily saw Dr. Braithwaite watching them. She twitched her hand away from her cousin’s. “That’s not fair,” she said flatly. “I don’t believe Grandfather ever thought of that. He admired Mr. Turner for his business sense.”

Adam shrugged. “Have it as you will. But you can’t deny the old man liked to make everyone dance to his tune. He yanked us about like puppets.”

He was, Emily suspected, thinking of their grandfather’s opposition to his marriage with Laura, which had been fierce and vocal. “Only for the best,” she protested. “He always meant it for the best, whatever it was.”

Adam made a noise of frustration. “I just don’t want to see you hurt. I know you loved him—I loved him too!—but he was no saint. My father always said there was more to Grandfather’s past than we knew.”

“Whatever it was,” said Emily firmly, stepping away, “it was forty years ago. How can it touch me now?”

Adam looked as though he might say something else, then shrugged. “You’ve always taken your own counsel.”

She’d offended him. Emily tried to make it right, just as she had, long ago, when they had played blindman’s bluff and he’d had to be soothed when she won. “I appreciate your advice, Adam, truly, I do.”

Adam knew her as well as she knew him. “You just won’t take it.”