Page 30 of The Summer Country

“What did Doll tell you?” He couldn’t, he supposed, be surprised that Doll might take the chance to feather her own nest. With their mother so ill, a change of regime was sure to come sooner or later. And Robert, eager to protect their mother’s feelings—he would have been an easy mark.

“You don’t get it, do you?” Robert’s hands clenched in fists at his sides. “It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been an honest bastard. But Mama—it would have killed her if she’d known. I had to do what I could. I had to.”

“Robert, I’m sure you thought you acted for the best. But whatever it was Doll told you—”

“He installed her in a house in Bridgetown. Nan. The minute Mama died.” Robert shook off Charles’s hand, catching at the veranda rail to steady himself. “They’ve a bastard there. A girl.”

“I—” Charles’s tongue tangled in his lips. “We have a sister?”

“No. Father has a by-blow. It’s common enough. Why d’you think Father freed Nan and her child before Mother was cold in her grave? The brat was his. The fee damn near beggared us.”

Charles felt on firmer ground. “He freed Nan and her child because he promised Mother he would. For her good service.” The manumission fee had been steep, but it had been the right thing to do, a first step in the project of freeing all their people.

“Is that what he told you?” Robert gave a shout of laughter. “Trust Father to turn vice to virtue. He could roll in a pigsty and come out smelling of roses. At least in his own account.”

“Robert.” Charles’s heart ached for his brother, left alone, coping with an ailing mother, a preoccupied father—oh yes, Charles had admired and loved their father, but Father was always busy, always away, wrapped up in his societies for improvement of this and that, his correspondence, his charities—left to stew in his own fears and suspicions. “I don’t care about the tea and candles. It’s past time Doll retired. We’ll give her a nice little house of her own and forget about all of this. I’ll tell Fenty it was all a misunderstanding.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“I believe you believe it,” said Charles tactfully. And little wonder. If the colonel was any example of what went on, it wasn’t surprising that Robert should leap to the worst sort of conclusions. Perhaps he would benefit from some time away, some time in England. “I believe you meant it for the best. I’m sorry, Robert. I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I’m sorry you were left to care for Mother alone.”

“Christ.” Robert slammed a palm against the rail. “Do you really think I’m that green? I’ll give you their direction. Take one look at the brat and then tell me who was mistaken.”

“All right,” said Charles. In the ballroom, people were beginning to turn and stare. He put a hand on his brother’s shoulder, steering him back toward the ballroom. “Shall we have some lemonade?”

“I’m not foxed.”

“Of course you’re not,” said Charles. Robert’s cheeks were flushed and his eyes glassy. “But it is very warm.”

Robert shook out from under his arm.

“Only for those unaccustomed to the heat. You’ll see, Charles. Go to Bridgetown and bloody well see for yourself.”

Chapter Seven

Christ Church, Barbados

February 1854

Emily had never seen a room quite so large as the front room at Beckles.

It stretched the length of the house in either direction, furniture perched at intervals along the walls, enough to stock a shop, and still the room seemed half-empty. A broad arch opened onto a second great room, this one fitted with a large mahogany table. Servants bustled about, laying out porcelain and silver. The spare elegance made her grandfather’s drawing room seem stuffy and overwrought.

Emily wasn’t used to feeling small, but she felt small, small and distinctly shabby, here in the center of this vast, elegant room.

“Goodness,” she said. “Have you considered letting it out for assemblies?”

Mr. Davenant handed his hat and gloves to a waiting servant. “You’re being kind. Beckles is modest compared to Peverills.”

“As it was, you mean.” The only household of which she’d had the managing had consisted of one cook/housekeeper and one scullery maid. Emily was accustomed to rolling up her sleeves and polishing whatever might need polish. At that, it might be for the best that Peverills was no longer standing; Emily would have been lost in it.

How many servants did it take to keep a house of this size running? Emily had already counted a dozen, at least.

“We make do,” said Mr. Davenant. “Beckles isn’t what it once was, or so my grandmother tells me. But we muddle along.”

They muddled very nicely. There wasn’t a speck of dust on the French porcelain arranged on top of the mahogany wainscoting or on the ornate gilded frames of the portraits that hung on either side of the arch.

“Is this your father?” Emily asked, indicating a man with fair hair who posed before an idealized landscape of cane fields, his arm resting on an improbably placed pillar.