Page 93 of The Summer Country

Once the soup had been ladled from the great tureen, Emily asked Mrs. Davenant, “I’ve been meaning to ask: Were you at my grandparents’ wedding?”

She tried very hard to make the inquiry sound casual, moving about the bits of turtle in her soup without actually making any effort to eat them.

Mrs. Davenant took a long, slow sip of her wine, which had been watered until it was barely pink. “No. They were married from Antigua, as I recall. Your grandmother owned a property there.”

“And then they sold it and went on an extended wedding journey through the southern bits of America.” Emily grasped at straws. “Did he come back in between?”

“Not that I know,” said Mrs. Davenant. She held her glass in the air but didn’t drink, the light winking off the intricate patterns in the cut glass. “The last time I saw your grandfather was on Easter Day in 1816. I remember it, because that was the day the troubles started. We were at table at Peverills when the news came. The men ran to join the militia. In the confusion . . . I believe your grandfather left to join your grandmother in Antigua later that week. I couldn’t say.”

“Might they have been married already?” Emily asked hopefully.

“No.” Mrs. Davenant seemed to come back from far away. “If they were, I wasn’t informed.”

“Yes, of course.” Emily looked across the table at Adam, a red-haired, fair-skinned Fenty, his face blotchy with heat. “My grandmother was married before. Did she have any children in her first marriage?”

Mrs. Davenant paused before answering. “Perhaps. She might have done. I didn’t know them well.”

George choked on his claret. “I thought Mrs. Boland stood godmother to my father.”

“And look how that turned out,” snapped his grandmother. As if it ended the matter, she said decidedly, “The Bolands weren’t a Barbados family.”

George raised his brows at Emily behind his napkin, inviting Emily to share his amusement. Emily wasn’t feeling terribly amused. “I know my grandmother was older than our grandfather, by some years.”

Adam gestured to one of the servants to refill his glass. “If she’d had another child, wouldn’t we have known? It’s hardly the sort of thing one would keep secret. Unless you think our aunt or uncle met some deep and dismal fate.”

“You’re right.” Emily forced a smile. “It’s just that my grandparents rarely spoke of their courtship. There’s so little I know of their lives before Bristol.”

Adam looked at her incredulously. “That’s hardly true. What about all the stories about laboring in the hot sun?”

“I thought you claimed those were more morality tales than true histories.”

George smiled at Laura. “If you want family histories, I can tell you about my mother’s great-great-grandfather, the privateer.”

“Oh, not that nonsense,” muttered Mrs. Davenant, but she resumed eating again, albeit slowly, her eyes on Emily all the while, watching, measuring.

“A privateer?” asked Laura, blissfully unaware of undercurrents.

“Yes, pillaging the Spanish for the sake of the Virgin Queen,” said George with a smile. “It began in Dorset. . . .”

The servants removed the soup course, moving silently among the guests with platters of meat and poultry, sweetbreads, and stewed mushrooms. Emily let George’s words drift around her, pretending to eat, making the correct responses at the correct times, caught in her own thoughts. There was something Mrs. Davenant knew, something she was hiding.

Perhaps. She might have done.

Not a no. Emily found herself watching her own hands as though expecting them to have changed, to belong to someone else. It was almost a surprise to find them exactly the same, with a sunburst of freckles on her right wrist, almost exactly in the shape of a star, and the scar on her right index finger from a forgotten accident as a child.

She had always been Jonathan Fenty’s granddaughter. That was as much a part of who she was as the curl of her hair and the shape of her chin. She knew nothing of her grandmother’s first husband, the mysterious Mr. Boland, only that he was Irish, and older, and rich.

No. Emily sawed at her chicken. She was getting ahead of herself. There might be another explanation.

“What?” George was talking to her.

“I said it’s dead already,” said George. “The chicken.”

“Oh. Yes.” Emily set down her knife and fork. “How far away is the part of the island where my grandfather grew up?”

“Scotland?”

“No,” said Emily, “he was born in Barbados.”