Page 119 of The Summer Country

She stood there with the candle, feeling painfully helpless as Dr. Braithwaite lifted Adam’s wrist to feel his pulse, then very gently reached out to pull his lids down over his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

Emily shook her head, unable to make sense of it. “He was getting better! He was.”

Nathaniel took the candle from her hand, setting it down on the table. “Miss Dawson—Emily. Come away. There’s nothing more you can do for him.”

“There must be. There must be something.”

Nathaniel took her gently by the shoulders, turning her away. “Emily. He’s dead.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Christ Church, Barbados

August 1814

“Dead?”

“An hour since. Dr. MacAndrews is there now. He gave her something to help her sleep.” Jenny shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. “I had to tell you now, before you heard the news from someone else.”

“Dead,” Charles repeated.

He couldn’t quite get his mind around it, that his brother, whom he had seen alive only hours before, earthy, fleshy, reeling with drink, brimming with life, was still and cold. He thought of the little brother he had known, stumbling behind him in skirts, the sun shining off his golden hair. His mother’s arms, cradling a baby. This is your brother, Robert.

“I ought to have kept him here. I ought to have made him sleep it off.” He’d known he ought, but he had been thoroughly fed up with Robert and his grievances. He’d wanted rid of him. But not permanently. Not like this. “Did he fall from his horse? Did he do himself an injury?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Something of Jenny’s strange stillness penetrated Charles’s grief. Not simple respect for a death, but something more, something that stank of secrets. “What happened?”

“He was waiting for her when we came back. He was in his cups. He tried to force her.” There was something terrible about the flat, uninflected narrative. Jenny looked him in the eye, her face set, and Charles had the awful feeling that she was seeing him, not as himself, but as a stranger, an enemy. “He had her against the wall.”

Maybe he was dreaming. Maybe this was all a nightmare. He’d dreamed the whole awful evening, the fight, its sequel. “What did she do?”

“She hit him. With the writing desk. She didn’t mean to kill him. Just to stop him. But he fell—so hard.”

“Oh God.” Charles stared at her in horror.

Jenny’s calm slipped for a moment. “There was so much blood.”

“Head wounds do bleed, you know,” said Charles, gaining hope. “They always look worse than they are. He might be alive yet.”

Jenny shook her head. “Dr. MacAndrews has been.”

“The man wouldn’t know a corpse from a fowl cock!”

“Charles.” Jenny put a hand on his arm. “He held a mirror to his mouth. There was no breath.”

Cases of men who seemed dead and then revived, men in their coffins, terrifying their family by knocking to be let out . . . All these bubbled up in Charles’s throat, a hundred arguments against death. But Jenny was watching him, watching him with pity and no little impatience.

“She can’t know you know. Do you hear me?” He was aware she was speaking, but only just. Grief and disbelief blinded him, choked him. “I only told you because—because you deserved to know. Dr. MacAndrews says it’s an apoplexy. Master Robert hit his head as he fell. There’s no one who knows otherwise. Only me. And you.”

“But— That shouldn’t be for us to determine,” said Charles dazedly, thinking of the little boy he remembered, the little boy lost beneath the angry young man.

There were so many Roberts who would never be, now. Robert in comfortable middle age, Robert the patriarch.

Grasping for something, anything, Charles fell back on his legal training. “It was self-defense. That’s manslaughter. But there’s only her word.” Not Jenny’s. A slave couldn’t testify in a trial. And Mary Anne was a woman, a wife, which complicated matters. “There’s no legal concept of rape in marriage. In the eyes of the court, there was nothing for her to defend against. Which makes it murder. But I can’t imagine any jury wouldn’t take into account—”

“Are you mad?” Jenny grabbed Charles’s arm, hard. “She’ll deny it. And then she’ll say that I was the one who did it, that she was protecting me.”