Page 8 of The Summer Country

Miss Beckles’s maid dropped a small curtsy. “Safe journey, sir.”

And she was gone, before he had time to tell her that he had no intention of riding with her mistress.

“Well? What did he say?” Mary Anne turned from the window in a flurry of satin and crepe.

“Very little,” said Jenny carefully. Her mistress was already quivering like a beast in a cage; there was no need to set her snapping.

Mary Anne traced a restless circle around the room, her flounces floating around her, her very hair crackling with tension. “You couldn’t press him?”

“He seemed inclined to refuse. I preferred not to give him the opportunity.” Below, Jenny could hear the sounds of the carriage rattling down the drive, down the long alley of tamarind trees, away from Beckles. Lucky man. “This way, he’ll have the night to think better of his choice.”

“Ye-es.” Mary Anne stopped in front of her dressing table, dropping down heavily into her chair. “I can send him a note in the morning.”

Jenny picked up the silk slippers her mistress had kicked off, setting them aside, out of the way. “You don’t want to press so hard. You’ll scare him off.”

“If I don’t, my uncle will first.” Mary Anne began pulling at the pins in her hair, removing them with unnecessary force. “What did you think?”

Coming up behind her, Jenny firmly moved her mistress’s hands away. “I think if you yank like that, Mistress Mary, you’ll have a sore scalp.”

Mary Anne scowled at Jenny in the oval mirror, her reflection uncertain in the candlelight. “You know what I meant. What did you think of him?”

Jenny could see Mr. Davenant as only a pale face in the darkness, features almost extinguished by the glare of the candle, fair hair cut short and unpowdered, as the younger men wore it. “He seemed pleasant enough.”

“They all seem pleasant enough at first.” Mary Anne gave her head an impatient shake as Jenny took the last of the pins out. Her hair, a thick chestnut, tumbled past her shoulders. “I don’t need pleasant. I need desperate.”

“Captain Harvey was desperate,” pointed out Jenny, lifting the silver-backed brush.

Mary Anne made a face at her in the mirror. “Captain Harvey was too desperate. He would have run through my money within the month.”

“Or,” said Jenny, applying the brush to her mistress’s hair, “he might have killed himself with drink. And you would be a widow and free.”

Mary Anne gave a snort of laughter. “I couldn’t count on his being so considerate. Just look at Uncle John.”

Jenny’s hand stilled. “Must I?”

The girls at Beckles are counted exceptionally pretty. Just look at our Jenny here.

Jenny’s whole body burned with the humiliation of it. He’d been trying to put her in her place, she knew.

It wouldn’t be the first time.

Don’t you remember to whom you owe everything, girl?

But the colonel didn’t own her. Not anymore. He’d given her as a gift to his niece when Jenny was little more than a baby herself, five to Mary Anne’s two. He’d taken her from her mother and her people and brought her here, where she would have no one, no one but him. His tool. His puppet. But it hadn’t worked the way he had planned.

Mary Anne’s eyes met Jenny’s in the mirror, her face bleached of color, her rounded features unusually stark. “I don’t know how much longer I can stand it. There are times when I hope, when I pray, that he’ll have one glass too many, that he’ll take the wrong path on a dark night—that he’ll offend the wrong man.”

Jenny could only shake her head. The colonel was too canny for that. They both knew it. He treated the women of the field gang as his own harem, choosing his lovers as the whim took him. There were no jealous husbands to challenge him to a duel; for any man of the quarters to strike back would mean death.

As for the colonel, he played his hand cleverly, rewarding the women he favored with lighter work, their men with additional rations. It made Jenny sick to her stomach to think of it, but it worked, didn’t it? He had half the plantation in his thrall, one way or another. As for the other planters, they thought him a reliable man, a good fellow. Just look how he had sacrificed his own interests to those of his widowed sister, who, being sickly herself, had produced no better heir for Beckles than a sallow and undergrown girl.

The colonel had done his work well.

They hadn’t seen it happening, either of them. At first it had been visible only in the new reserve the neighbors had shown with Mary Anne. The curious, sidelong looks. The exaggerated concern her uncle had begun to display for her well-being. No one would say anything to Mary Anne, not directly. And no one would say anything to Jenny either. She wasn’t part of the gossip in the washhouse. People watched their tongues around her. Mary Anne and Jenny had noticed only that childhood playmates had grown distant and potential suitors—the real suitors, the eligible suitors—had stayed away, leaving only the most desperate of fortune hunters to call.

It wasn’t that Mary Anne was plain. She might not be the sort who made men stop and stare, but she was well enough, and a plantation as rich as Beckles was well known to transform plain girls into beauties.

But not when the mistress was rumored to be mad.