Page 92 of The Summer Country

“Go home,” he said. “Go home.”

Robert looked as though he might argue.

Charles lifted Septimus’s letter, holding it up in front of Robert’s face. “I’ve just had word that my closest friend is dead. He was fighting Bonaparte in the peninsula. He can’t hold his child.”

There was no child, as far as Charles knew; at least, Septimus hadn’t mentioned one. But he was angry, at Robert, at the world, and it seemed a shame to let facts get in the way of rhetoric. And why not? Hal might well have had a child by this unknown Portuguese woman.

“I’m sorry,” mumbled Robert.

“So am I,” said Charles, and turned his back on his brother, his muscles tense and shaking with anger and something else.

The dawning of an idea.

Chapter Nineteen

Christ Church, Barbados

May 1854

Emily didn’t know what to think.

But there it was, in front of her, in black and white, her grandfather’s hand, recording barrels of sugar and tuns of rum and a silver-backed mirror for Lottie in spring of 1816, long after her grandparents were meant to be married and gone to Antigua.

The very last entry read: One silver tea service, to Jonathan Fenty, for good service, on the occasion of his marriage.

One silver tea service. She could picture the silver pot, the matching creamer and sugar, all engraved with her grandfather’s initials. It was the tea service her grandmother had always used, gone now to Aunt Millicent, who had never liked it, because the lines of it were too plain, too simple, too much of the style of the early part of the century.

Emily leafed slowly back through the entries, as though she might find a clue among the barrels and tuns. If her grandfather had first married in 1816, then what did that make her mother?

A mistake—not in these dates—but in her mother’s birthday? But no. Uncle Archibald had been born in 1817; her mother was the older by two and a half years. These were the commonplaces of life, the things she knew without knowing how she knew them.

Which meant that her mother had been born at least two years prior to her grandparents’ marriage.

“Shall I dress you for dinner?” Katy appeared, holding freshly pressed linens and an evening frock boasting tiers of apple-green muslin.

Emily hastily slammed the ledger shut, as though caught out in something illicit. “Yes, thank you. Your little girl . . . she’s well?”

“Just a touch of ague.” Katy busied herself with Emily’s buttons, letting the dress drop so Emily could step out of it.

“If you need— If she needs you, I can dress myself,” Emily offered.

“She’s all right,” said Katy, tying the tapes of an impossibly wide petticoat around Emily’s waist. “Her father’s with her.”

Father. Fathers and daughters. Emily submitted to Katy’s ministrations while her mind returned again to her mother, her grandfather’s pet. That was what Aunt Millicent claimed when Uncle Archibald wasn’t listening. Uncle Archie had been baffled by his older sister, by her causes, by her passions, but he had loved her with a little brother’s unquestioning love. It was Aunt Millicent who complained on his behalf.

But if they had only married in 1816 . . . Her grandmother had been married before. Emily knew that. He had died—what had Mrs. Davenant said? Three years before her grandparents’ marriage.

If her grandmother had borne a posthumous child—Emily didn’t like to think it, but the timing was right, or close enough.

Uncle Archibald looked like Grandfather, with his red hair and bright blue eyes. Emily’s mother had taken, she had always thought, after her Welsh mother, with darker skin and hair. Her eyes were blue, but a paler blue, the misty blue of the sky after rain. Emily remembered so little, but that she remembered, her mother’s eyes, which looked faraway even when she was close.

“There,” said Katy, and Emily realized that she was waiting for Emily to say something, that her hair had been dressed and her earrings tied on and her locket nestled in the hollow of her throat while she brooded and brooded.

For a rarity, Laura was at supper, ethereal in blond lace. Emily looked at her uncertainly, feeling the rift between them, unsure, for the first time, of her best friend’s feelings. Ordinarily, she would have gone to Laura with her concerns about her grandparents, as she and Laura had spoken, long ago, about the loss of their mothers, Emily’s to disease, Laura’s to continental spas, but there was a gulf between them marked by everything that had been left unsaid since their arrival in Barbados.

Emily smiled, tentatively. Laura smiled back, but as quickly ducked her head and let Adam hand her into her chair.

The fare was largely European; Mrs. Davenant, she was learning, brought out the more exotic varieties of local cuisine to terrorize European visitors and, occasionally, the hapless Dr. MacAndrews.