Page 109 of The Summer Country

It was her baby’s birthday today. August 4. Today she was one year old, and Jenny found herself fighting hard, so very, very hard, to remember the shape of her infant features, those wrinkled cheeks and squinting eyes, the curve of her hand around Charles’s finger.

What did she look like now? Was she starting to speak, as Neddy was, a word here and a word there?

Neddy called her “Ma-Ma.”

Mary Anne had brushed it off, but Jenny knew she’d minded. Not that Mary Anne would ever say, but Mary Anne had her own way of making her displeasure felt.

“I need you,” she’d declared, just that morning. “Queenie hasn’t half your hand with hair. Isn’t he old enough to be weaned?”

She’d announced that Jenny would be coming with them to Peverills tonight, to stand in attendance behind Mary Anne, to carry her fan and drape her shawl and be there with pins in case a flounce should tear.

“You know that Dutchess is perfectly capable of taking care of Neddy,” she’d said, hauling Neddy, protesting, from Jenny’s arms. “From the way you take on about that child, you’d think he was your own.”

She hadn’t forgot her own.

Did Jenny’s little girl call Rachel Fenty “Ma-Ma”? She both hoped so and hoped not at the same time. She wanted her to be loved, yes, but she also wanted there to be space left for her, for Jenny.

But why should there be? Her daughter had never known her. Only for those few short minutes, and those nine long months when she’d been all in all to her baby, the entirety of her world.

There were folds on her stomach that hadn’t been there before, folds that attested that she had once been great with child. Sometimes, Jenny had to look at them to remind herself that her little girl had been there, that she existed.

“We’ll see her again,” Charles said, but he didn’t seem to realize how quickly they grew, these little ones, how soon they became people, with thoughts and opinions and preferences. Her daughter’s affections and tastes were being shaped by someone else. By the time she came to them again—and not to them, to Charles, only to Charles—she would be a stranger already, and they strangers to her.

But how could she explain that to Charles, who hadn’t spent every day holding a baby, nurturing a baby, watching him grow by startling leaps. He was a handsome baby, Neddy, with a shock of gold curls and Mary Anne’s stubborn chin and gray eyes. Jenny’s gray eyes.

There were times when Jenny couldn’t help delighting in Neddy, and others when she could scarcely look at him, hating him for being here, for being acknowledged, when her own child was far away, being raised by strangers.

Charles promised her all was well, but Charles—Charles tended to believe what he wanted to believe.

Sometimes, Jenny fantasized about setting off down the road to St. Andrew, wandering into the hills, climbing and climbing until she found that village, the village where her daughter was being raised.

And for what? To bring their plans crashing down around them? They had come this far. If there were any suggestion that the child from Portugal were Jenny’s, it would all be for naught.

But it hurt, it hurt so very much, to stay away.

Carefully, Jenny laid Neddy down in his cot, watching as he thumped his legs three times in his own strange fashion before settling.

Mary Anne kept him in a room adjoining her own, more, Jenny suspected, to annoy Robert than for any other reason. Although perhaps she was being unfair. The older Neddy grew, the more interest Mary Anne took in him, watching him with a fierce, possessive love that expressed itself more in directives than in cuddles.

“This is my boy,” she said, and Jenny wasn’t sure if she was defending her rights against Jenny or her husband. Or possibly both.

Her boy was to be raised in her image, as she saw fit. Her boy would learn estate management at her knee.

Her boy was only fourteen months and still in skirts. But Jenny couldn’t tell her that. Mary Anne was even less amenable to advice than she had been in those long-ago days when they had lived in fear of the colonel. Whatever they had once shared was gone. There were days when Jenny could scarcely bear to touch her mistress, to brush her hair and pretend to smile. She went through the old motions by rote.

Shutting the door softly behind her, Jenny passed through into Mary Anne’s room, where her mistress sat at her dressing table, dressed in Nile green satin, her hair wrapped in a matching silk turban, moodily dabbing a hare’s foot into a pot of rouge.

“Where were you? Queenie had to help me dress.”

Mary Anne knew perfectly well where she’d been. “I was feeding Master Neddy. The noise disturbed him.” Mary Anne had painted two red circles on her cheeks, but beneath them her face looked pale and haggard, her lips thin. “Are you all right?”

“Perfectly. Why wouldn’t I be?” Mary Anne shoved the rouge pot away. “That husband of mine thought to take me unawares while I was dressing. Apparently, I’m denying him his rights.”

Taking the hare’s foot away from her, Jenny began quietly blending the rouge on Mary Anne’s cheeks, trying to give her more the appearance of health and less the look of a French dandy of the previous century.

Mary Anne wafted Jenny away. “He can perfectly well comfort himself with his doxy. Does he think I don’t know about her? I’ve provided him an heir, what more does he want?”

Acknowledgment. That was what Master Robert wanted. Acknowledgment that he was master here. That was the one thing, in bed or out, that Mary Anne refused to cede.