Page 69 of The Summer Country

“If you say so,” said Jenny skeptically.

“We’ll make it so.” Nothing could fright him out of his good humor now, not with Jenny home again. “You’ll see. Jack shall have Jill and naught shall go ill.”

“Until you fall down and break your crown.”

“But will you come tumbling after?” Charles kissed her. “There’ll be no breaks and tumbles. Once Robert’s baby comes, they’ll be too pleased with themselves to waste any time on the likes of us. They’ll scarce remember we exist.”

Chapter Fifteen

Christ Church, Barbados

May 1854

“I had no idea you had an uncle Charles,” said Emily. “No one ever mentioned him.”

George discovered a deep interest in the backs of his gloves. “Well, they wouldn’t. He’s been gone for some time now. And my grandmother rather minded his selling Peverills.”

It wasn’t just that, thought Emily, looking at George’s averted face. Mrs. Davenant had gone to some trouble to create the impression that Peverills had been unfairly wrenched from her hands in some hole-and-corner fashion. When, in fact, it had never been hers to begin with. All of it, the paired portraits on the wall, the grand pronouncements, were, if not a lie, then at least a substantial misrepresentation.

“If your grandmother was never mistress of Peverills,” said Emily, “then how did she come to have the account books?”

“I wasn’t born yet,” George prevaricated, “but as I understand it . . . the books were left in the bookkeeper’s house, and my grandmother thought it best—that is, she took it upon herself to . . . um, to watch over them for Uncle Charles. While he was away.”

In other words, she had stolen them. “I see,” said Emily.

“It was all in the family,” Mr. Davenant hastened to explain. “Uncle Charles seemed disinclined to marry, so it was expected the estate would come to my father eventually. No one ever expected that he might sell it.”

“But why would he go away just like that?” Emily looked out over the blackened gables of Peverills. True, the house was ruined, but there was still the rest of the plantation. If her grandfather had bought the plantation twenty-odd years ago, that still left twenty years that the land had been left untenanted, abandoned. “Even if one hadn’t the money to rebuild, he might have gone on farming the land and lived in the bookkeeper’s house. Or leased the land to someone else. Why leave it all sitting empty like that?”

George glanced at her sideways. “The story I was told was that it was because of the little girl. His ward.”

“His who?”

“I forget you don’t know. It’s all common knowledge here. Well, legend, really. I’m not sure how much is true and how much pure embellishment, but . . . I’m not telling it very well, am I?”

It seemed churlish to agree, so Emily tilted her head at an expectant angle and waited.

“My grandmother doesn’t talk about any of this,” George said seriously. “I had it from the servants, and the stories do tend to vary rather wildly. But if you boil it all down, it comes to this. My uncle had a ward, a little Portuguese girl. This was during the wars with Napoléon, you know.”

Emily nodded. “They went on for some time.”

“We’re rather proud of our part in it all here,” said George. “In any event, the girl was the child of a schoolmate who died on the peninsula. My uncle was very sincerely attached to her, I gather.”

Emily remembered the doll lying in the grass, the paint blistered and faded. “What happened to her?”

“She died in the fire.”

Emily had expected as much, but to hear it made it more stark, more real. “How dreadful. That poor little girl.”

“Uncle Charles was devastated. He’d promised his friend he’d see her safe, and . . .” As one, they both looked out at the fire-blasted stone and fallen rubble. George’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down beneath his loosely tied stock. “Can you imagine that? To have made it through a war safely and then to die like this?”

Emily shook her head mutely, trying not to imagine that little girl as she must have been, nearly half a century ago.

“I know such things happen all the time,” said George, “that there are fires and children die in them, but this was on our own doorstep, as it were.”

Emily looked up at him, her eyes meeting his. “Just because it happens all the time doesn’t make it any easier.”

“They say she haunts the place, that if you come here after dark, you can hear a child crying, calling out for help that never comes.”