Page 53 of The Summer Country

“Why don’t you?”

“I’m the only one my grandmother has left. I can’t leave her. She may seem strong—she is strong—but she . . . she isn’t an island unto herself, however much she may pretend to be. She needs me more than she admits. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said—”

“My grandfather was the same way. He would thunder at us and complain, but he was always happiest with his whole family about him.” Losing her mother and then her grandmother had diminished him; he had seemed, somehow, a little smaller with each death. Emily quickly mustered a smile. “It’s all the same with these domestic tyrants, isn’t it? He would scold us and tell us we were useless—and then give us sweets.”

She wondered if the plantation was only a larger and less digestible sort of sweet, the gift her grandfather would have offered her mother if she had lived.

But no. It seemed more likely that her grandfather had bought it planning to make something of it, and, finding it too large a task to manage from afar, and reluctant to admit having made a miscalculation, had simply let it sit, bequeathing it to her on the assumption she would take charge, as he had trained her to do.

“You must miss him terribly,” said Mr. Davenant.

“I do,” said Emily simply. “Very much.”

“But you do have other family in Bristol?” Mr. Davenant asked diffidently. “I don’t mean to pry. I simply wondered if you wouldn’t be homesick for your own people if you stay on in Barbados.”

Emily shook her head. “I don’t imagine so. I don’t have a home in Bristol anymore. That’s not entirely true. My aunt and uncle would be happy to offer me a home. But my own home—” She bit her lip. There was no point blundering about. She might as well get right to the heart of it. “My father remarried last year.”

Mr. Davenant leaned back on one arm, looking up at her face beneath the brim of her bonnet. “You don’t sound pleased.”

Emily shrugged. “My father is very happy.”

“Do you dislike his wife so very much?”

“Nooo. . . . Not dislike her, precisely.” One didn’t dislike Hester. One weathered her, like a gale. A gale scented with carbolic and puffed with improving aphorisms. “We don’t fit well in the same place.”

Emily didn’t need improving, thank you very much. She had been running her father’s household since she was ten, ministering to his motley flock, carrying baskets to the deserving poor, forcibly scrubbing the undeserving poor, and making sure her father’s spectacles were always in reach.

Hester had provided him with a little cord on which to hang the spectacles. She had rearranged the furniture in the drawing room, removed Emily’s mother’s pianoforte (“Sentiment is all very well, but it does look rather worn, doesn’t it?”), and taken on the preparation and delivery of charitable baskets. It was her right. Emily knew that. But it didn’t make it any easier to be displaced.

Did her father even notice? Sometimes she wondered, and there was a sting in that too.

“Did she make you scrub the scullery and sleep in the ashes?” asked Mr. Davenant sympathetically.

“I don’t mind a bit of scrubbing.” It was the lack of purpose that rankled. “No, far worse. She wanted to marry me to the curate.”

Mr. Davenant squinted up at her, shading his eyes against the sun. “And what about the curate?”

“I’m not sure he was permitted to have any say in the matter. I half expected to return home one day to find the parlor decked with orange flowers and Mr. Curtis trussed to the altar.”

“With an apple in his mouth?” Mr. Davenant pushed himself back up to a sitting position, his smile fading. “My grandmother arranged my father’s marriage. It was a disaster. They were both terribly young, and . . . Well, I shouldn’t complain, should I? I wouldn’t be here but for it. And we did round out the northwest corner of our lands.”

There was an uncharacteristic bitterness to his tone.

“I’m so sorry,” said Emily. “Have your parents been gone long?”

“As long as I can remember. My father ran off to Paris when I was still in swaddling clothes.”

“Oh. I had assumed . . . Never mind.”

“That he was dead? No. Merely absentee. My mother as well. She went on an extended visit to relations in the Carolinas and never came back.”

“Oh,” said Emily, entirely at a loss. Nothing short of death would have induced her own mother to leave her, and while Emily might have railed at death, she had never doubted her mother’s love. “Was she—have you—does she visit?”

“Sometimes. Infrequently. They said she went away for her health, but I think it was more that she couldn’t bear life at Beckles. She’s very happy in Charleston, I understand.”

Emily plucked at a thread on her skirt. “Did you ever think of going with her?”

“I’m heir to Beckles and the last of my line. I couldn’t do that to Grandmama. She’s lost so much already.” Mr. Davenant looked at the sky and jumped to his feet with an exclamation of distress. “It’s later than I’d realized. We should get back. If you don’t mind, that is.”