Page 114 of The Summer Country

Mr. Turner received Emily in the same room to which she had first been escorted four long months ago. It felt more like four years. The fossils were still in their places in the curio cabinets, the works of philosophy and theology on the shelves, but there was already the slightly sleepy air of a house abandoned, the dust motes dancing lazily in the sunshine, the furniture waiting only for the guest to depart so the holland covers could be set over them.

Tea and cakes had been set out, but it was a bachelor effort, not the bounty Mrs. Turner might have commanded. It didn’t matter; Emily wasn’t terribly hungry. She was feeling rather foolish about the whole affair, but having come so far, she knew there was no turning back.

“I hope you didn’t delay for my sake,” said Emily.

“Not at all,” said Mr. Turner, in a way that implied just the opposite. “I sent to Beckles this morning to cancel our appointment, but my message must have missed you. Have you come to discuss the sale of Peverills? If so, I would advise that you wait. This isn’t a good time to sell.”

“No. No, it’s not that.” Emily worried at the clasp of her net bag, the one Laura had worked for her a hundred years ago, back at Miss Blackwell’s, adorned with fat cabbage roses and extravagant green vines. “You mentioned, some time ago, that you had once been my grandfather’s groom?”

Mr. Turner leaned back against the settee, propping one ankle against the opposite knee. Emily had an impression of leashed power, a tiger being kind to a kitten. “Yes?”

“I made a visit to St. Andrew, to my grandfather’s people. There was an old woman there, Old Betty.” Mr. Turner’s attention never wavered, but she could tell he was waiting for her to get to the point. Emily took a deep breath. “She told me my grandfather kept a child there, an ‘outside’ child, she called it.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Turner.

“Is there—do you—that is, could you tell me anything about that child?” Emily linked her fingers together, leaning forward. “I need to know, was it my grandfather’s child?”

Mr. Turner looked at her, taking her measure, her old dress and sensible hat. She hadn’t wanted to wear Mrs. Davenant’s borrowed finery to go to town. It was one thing to play make-believe at Beckles, but she had felt, somehow, that to take that person, that Emily, to Bridgetown would be to cross a line she couldn’t cross back.

“I suppose there’s no harm in telling you now,” said Mr. Turner at last.

Emily waited, painfully aware of every noise around them, every hoofbeat in the street, every tick of the clock. “You knew her, then?”

“The child? Yes. I didn’t bring her to Scotland, but I went with your grandfather when he visited. The fiction, then, was that she was your grand-aunt’s child. Rachel Fenty,” he amended. “Everyone there knew otherwise, of course, but it was what your grandfather told strangers.”

“What was she like? The little girl.”

“A baby,” said Turner. His lips spread in a smile at Emily’s obvious disappointment. “I was a boy of eight. I had no interest in babies. One looked much like another. Your grandfather doted on her, though. We never went up that cliff without treasures in the saddlebags. Embroidered linens and wooden toys. There wasn’t another child in St. Andrew so pampered. His sisters didn’t mind it, though,” he added pragmatically. “Their children got the leavings. And the money for keeping her.”

Emily’s hand closed around the locket at her throat. She’d pinned it to her collar like a broach, a talisman. “So it was true, then. The child was my grandfather’s.”

“What? No.” Mr. Turner shook himself out of the past.

“I don’t understand,” said Emily, feeling very stupid and very slow. “I’d thought they said—”

“That’s what the people there believed, of course, and it didn’t do to disabuse them. But the child—no.” Mr. Turner regarded her expressionlessly, and she had the sense he was doing sums in his head, weighing his options. “The child that your grandfather brought to Scotland wasn’t his. She was the child of Charles Davenant and a slave, Mary Anne Davenant’s maid Jenny.”

“Oh,” said Emily, feeling her brain go blank with surprise. She’d been prepared to show the miniature of her mother, to grapple with the reality of her parentage, but it wasn’t her parentage at all. Her grandfather had been doing a kindness for someone else. She had stumbled into someone else’s tragedy.

“You see their problem,” said Mr. Turner conversationally, politely giving her time to recover her wits. “The girl belonged to Mrs. Davenant. So would the child. So they hid it.”

“The woman in St. Andrew—she said my grandfather took the child away again?”

“Yes. I was with him for that,” Mr. Turner said reminiscently. It was, Emily thought, more than a space in time for him. He had been a different person then, a boy, a slave, a world away from the man of property he had become. “We brought the child to Peverills. The story put out was that she’d come from Portugal.”

“The Portuguese ward.” Emily didn’t realize she’d spoken the words aloud until she saw Mr. Turner looking at her. “So she wasn’t Portuguese at all?”

“No more than you or I,” said Mr. Turner gravely. “Your grandfather never spoke to you of it?”

Emily shook her head. “I only learned of it from Mr. Davenant.”

Can you imagine that? To have made it through a war safely and then to die like this? George had said. There had been no war, but it was almost worse, what the child had survived; to be wrested from slavery only to perish in a rising meant to free those like her.

“That poor child,” said Emily with feeling.

Mr. Turner considered a cake and set it down again, uneaten. “There is a bit more to the story.”

“Mr. Davenant abandoned Peverills, I know. I can’t wonder at it. The poor man.” To engage in so much subterfuge to extricate his child from the toils of slavery, only to see her die in a fire. No wonder Mr. Davenant had fled from Peverills and never returned, never rebuilt. Emily thought of the shadowy figure behind Mrs. Davenant in the portrait at Beckles. “Whatever became of the mother? Jenny?”