Page 31 of The Summer Country

Mr. Davenant joined Emily before the portrait. “My grandfather. I’m told I’m very like him.”

“Are you?” Emily looked doubtfully at the picture.

The portrait failed utterly to capture anything of the subject beyond the fact that his hair was fair. Even that was debatable, given the muddy quality of the paint. He might have been in a uniform or a richly hued coat; his stock was a pale blur at his throat. Fields rolled up and down behind him, culminating in a house drawn alarmingly out of perspective. He had been painted with a horse standing behind him and a dog at his feet.

Mr. Davenant laughed. “It’s a dreadful picture, isn’t it?”

“The frame is very nice,” said Emily. She peered at the gray-and-coral blur in the upper right corner. “Is that meant to be this house?”

Mr. Davenant hesitated for a moment. “No,” he said. “It’s your house.”

“Peverills?” If one stood to one side and squinted, one could just make out the stylized outlines of the roof, so different from the long and low silhouette of the house in which they stood.

“It was painted before the fire, of course.”

“The rising, you mean?” said Emily, remembering what Dr. Braithwaite had told her. The memory of her tactlessness made her squirm.

“Yes, that,” said Mr. Davenant. “The portraits were a wedding gift from my grandmother to my grandfather. You’ll see that she’s standing in front of Beckles.”

Emily obediently moved with him to the other side of the arch. The white of the house blended into the white gauze of the woman’s Empire-waisted dress, making her look slightly hunchbacked. A woman stood behind her, her dark skin blending into the shadows, head lowered so that one couldn’t quite see her face.

“Who is that with her?”

“Just a maid,” said Mr. Davenant. “I’m not sure if she’s a real person or just an idea the painter had, like the dog with my grandfather. My grandfather never kept dogs—not in the house—but the painter liked the idea of a dog.”

Emily looked again at the woman in the background. For an imaginary person, she had a surprising amount of presence. Emily could feel the tension straight through the choppy paint, the sense of the woman watching and waiting. Waiting for what?

“My grandfather was a Peverill, you see.” Mr. Davenant was still talking. He clasped his hands behind his back. “Well, really, he was a Davenant, but his mother had been a Peverill. When he married my grandmother . . . you might say there was a bit of Montague and Capulet in it. The properties had always marched side by side, but there was bad blood between the families dating back nearly to the very settling of the island.”

“It sounds very romantic,” said Laura, with genuine interest. The lemonade had done wonders for her. She had lost the sickly look and gained some color in her cheeks.

“It was,” said Mr. Davenant gratefully. “The Peverills were Cavaliers; the Beckleses Roundheads. The Peverills supported the royal governor. The Beckleses championed Cromwell’s man. There’s a story that Sir Marmaduke Peverill personally trussed Praise God Beckles to prevent him sending word to Cromwell’s fleet. Of course, the Beckleses were mad as fire and retaliated by lording it over the Peverills while Cromwell remained in power. And so it went.”

“Until your grandparents?” Laura was clearly charmed by the story. “Did they meet much opposition?”

Mr. Davenant looked a bit sheepish. “By then the rivalry was more legend than fact. My grandmother’s guardian made some objection, I gather, but it had to do more with finance than tradition.”

“That’s a pity,” said Adam, who was roaming about the room with the air of a man who felt his time was being wasted. “I was hoping for a duel or an elopement at the least.”

“There were those, or so I’m told, but in previous generations. There’s a story—”

“Are you telling fairy stories, George?” A woman appeared at one of the arches, black taffeta rustling importantly as she stalked toward them. She was of medium height, a black lace cap on her gray-streaked brown hair. “Never mind my grandson. He spends too much time reading Sir Walter Scott and spinning pretty fancies for himself. Roundheads and Cavaliers, indeed!”

“But they were,” protested Mr. Davenant, unoffended. “You told me so yourself.”

“They were planters and Barbadians. All the rest is immaterial. We have a saying in these parts, ‘Neither Carib nor Creole, but true Barbadian.’ You, I take it, are not from these parts.”

Mr. Davenant looked apologetically at his guests. “May I have the honor of making you known to my grandmother, Mrs. Davenant? Grandmama, may I present your new neighbor? Miss Dawson has recently come into possession of Peverills.”

“Peverills?” Mrs. Davenant examined Emily with a concentrated interest reminiscent of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf. “Welcome, indeed, then. Peverills has stood empty for so long, we had begun to despair of it.”

“It seems my grandfather bought it some time ago.” Some further explanation seemed to be required, so Emily added, “He came to England as a young man, but he always accounted himself a true Barbadian.”

“He was well-respected in Bristol,” Adam countered. He had never been comfortable with their West Indian origins, had winced away from their grandfather’s stories, making himself as English as English could be. “He might have been an alderman if he had wanted to be.”

Mrs. Davenant looked distinctly unimpressed. To Emily, she said, “And who might your grandfather be?”

“His name was Jonathan Fenty.” Was. That was felt like a knife in her chest. She didn’t quite believe it yet, that he was gone. “He left the island some years ago. I don’t imagine—”