Page 74 of The Summer Country

“You’ll need furniture. And linens.”

“And everything else. In the meantime, I suppose we’ll go back to Miss Lee’s hotel.”

Dr. Braithwaite paused, looking at her as if she were a problem he needed to solve. “If I might give you a word of advice—”

“Which you intend to give me anyway?”

Dr. Braithwaite ignored the interruption. “Stay a while longer. Or if you go, remove to another plantation, not to Bridgetown.”

“Why?”

“It’s the hot season. There’s been a drought. Water supplies are low and increasingly tainted. It’s the perfect breeding ground for disease. I don’t want to cause alarm, but . . . you’re safer in the countryside.”

Emily wished she still had the cloth to occupy her hands. Instead, she closed her hand over the locket at her throat. “I’m concerned that my friend—my cousin now, I mean—may have contracted something already.”

“What are the symptoms?” Dr. Braithwaite was immediately all professional.

“Retching—to be fair, everyone was ill on the boat, but it hasn’t ended since we’ve been here. It’s been over two months now and there’s no sign of improvement. If anything, it’s worse.”

“Anything else?”

“Fatigue. Listlessness.”

“No distemper of the bowels?”

“None that I’ve observed. But I might not know—that is—”

“You’re not privy to your cousin’s chamber pot.”

“Yes.”

“No headaches? Body aches? Chills? Fever?”

“No, none of those. But she can’t eat. What she does eat, she casts up again. I thought, some variety of tropical distemper . . .”

Dr. Braithwaite’s shoulders relaxed. He leaned back against the table. “She’s newly married, isn’t she?”

Emily nodded. “Yes. But what does that have to do with it?”

“I doubt we’re dealing with the beginnings of an epidemic. Not of that sort, at least.”

“Do stop speaking in riddles,” Emily begged. “You haven’t seen her. She’s quite genuinely ill.”

“I don’t doubt that,” said Dr. Braithwaite. “Without doing injury to your delicate sensibilities, have you ever considered that Mrs. Fenty might be increasing?”

Chapter Sixteen

Christ Church, Barbados

December 1812

There was soon no doubt that Mary Anne was with child.

Pregnancy didn’t suit Mary Anne. Her head ached and her ankles swelled; her stomach rebelled, not just in the mornings, but in the afternoons and the evenings too. Jenny found herself in constant service, called upon to massage Mary Anne’s temples with lavender water, to read to her from manuals on estate management, to be Mary Anne’s eyes and ears and holder of the slop bucket.

Dr. MacAndrews prescribed champagne, on the theory that the bubbles would settle her stomach. The doctor Robert called in from Bridgetown recommended a reducing diet, which Mary Anne said was all very well, since she couldn’t manage to eat anyway, and what in the blazes were they bothering paying him for?

“Only the best for the heir to Beckles,” retorted Robert, and Jenny wasn’t sure if he meant it as a jibe or not.