Page 120 of The Summer Country

“Surely, she wouldn’t. . . .”

“Wouldn’t she? If it were me or she, she would abandon me in a moment. She’d say he made advances and I attacked him. They’d put me in the Cage, and then they’d kill me. Or worse.” She didn’t need to say. They could both imagine it. Whippings so severe they tore the flesh from the bone. She might be chained, left without water, raw, bleeding, a living meal for bird and beast. “Charles. I’m the only one who saw. I’m the only one who knows.”

Charles blinked, trying to shut out the image of Robert, sprawled lifeless on the floor, Robert, in his white smock and golden curls, calling his name. “Will she . . . try to silence you?”

He remembered the day Jenny had told him about her father, the mix of horror and disbelief that such things could happen in a Christian household, in the nineteenth century. But they had. And Mary Anne Beckles had been trained at her uncle’s knee.

Jenny shook her head, white-lipped. “Not if her account goes unchallenged. Not if she thinks she’s safe. She’ll keep me close, but she won’t hurt me. I don’t think.”

“Oh God,” Charles said, lifting his hands to his head.

“She doesn’t trust me anymore. Once, perhaps.” Jenny looked at him, all her feelings written on her face. “She offered me the position of housekeeper. The keys to the household and the choicest cuts of meat. I told her it was enough to me to serve her. I don’t know whether she believed me or not.”

Charles sat down heavily on a bench. “We did this to her.” It had seemed such a grand idea, in the endless summer of new love, to play at being Cupid. What harm could it bring? They were doing both a favor, that was what he had told himself. “We did this to him. We killed him. If they’d never married—”

“He might have drunk himself to death or plunged his horse over a cliff or run away to Jamaica. What does it matter? The truth can’t come out. Not if you love me.” She searched his face, and whatever it was she saw there made her drop her hands and step away. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

“No!” Charles hastened toward her, running his hands up and down her arms, drawing her close, as much for his own comfort as hers. They’d sacrificed so much; how could they lose each other? “Not that. Never that. You can always tell me anything. We have no secrets from one another. We should have no secrets from one another.”

Jenny stood like a statue in his embrace. “Why didn’t you tell me about the baby coming to Peverills?”

“I—I would have done.” It had seemed a grand idea to announce her to the world. It should, he realized, have occurred to him to tell Jenny first. “I should have done. When Carlota comes . . .”

“Carlota.” The name resounded from her tongue like the sack of a city, all destruction and ash. “You’ve made my child foreign. You’ve made my child foreign to me.”

Charles scrambled to try to understand her grief. “Jenny. Jenny.” He slid a finger under her chin, lifting her face to his, trying to make her see. “She’s not really foreign. It’s just a name, only a name. You agreed to it.”

“Because I had no choice!” Jenny wrenched away from him, her face a Medusa mask of despair. She pressed both hands to her face, holding them there for a long moment, and then said, in a voice as dry as the cane, “I’m sorry.”

“No. I’m sorry.” Charles held out his hands to her, and this time, slowly, she came to him, pressing her face into that spot in his chest that seemed to have been made just for her. Charles stroked her hair, taking comfort in the repetitive motion, in her presence. “I’m so sorry. For all of this. I’d only meant to make things better. If I’d known . . .”

If he had known, what then? Could they have done any differently?

“I am more an antique Roman than a Dane,” Charles quoted, looking out over Jenny’s head at the midnight gardens, so carefully laid out by his mother, the gardens where he and Robert had played as children, innocent and unknowing. “But I’m not. I’m neither. I’m an Englishman. I’d always thought it overblown, all that ancient Greek palaver about rushing into one’s fate by seeking to avoid it, but now—I wonder. As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods; / They kill us for their sport.”

Robert. They had killed Robert. Or had Robert killed himself? Fate or free will, divine judgment or the mere consequence of one choice leading to another and another and another, until the weight of those choices collapsed on one, bearing one down?

Charles could hear his own voice, as distant as the moon. “I’d thought we lived in an age of reason, that man might make his own destiny. Is it all a snare? Do we create our own doom, or are we mere actors in a drama of someone else’s devising?”

“Charles,” Jenny interrupted. “Charles. When is the child coming?”

History, poetry, natural philosophy, all tangled together. Anything to put off thinking about the immediacy of it all. Charles dragged his attention back to Jenny. “Soon. Six months, perhaps a year?”

Jenny pulled back, staring up at him. “Another year?”

“We have to make it look right, like she’s really coming all the way from Portugal,” Charles said earnestly. “There would be arrangements to be made, passage to book, a nursemaid to be hired. . . . It all takes time.”

“She’ll be nearly two by then.” The grief in Jenny’s voice tore at Charles’s heart.

He wanted to promise to produce the child immediately, to thrust her into Jenny’s arms, but he couldn’t, not now, not without doing violence to all their plans.

How had they come to this? So much grief, so much grief caused with the purest of intentions. He’d thought to see Robert and Mary Anne happily married; he’d wanted his and Jenny’s child safe and free, close at hand. It had all made sense at the time.

Choice piled upon choice upon choice.

But this wasn’t Athens. It was Barbados. And he was neither an antique Roman nor a Dane. Robert was dead, but they weren’t.

“Do you remember anything from that age?” said Charles, attempting to cheer her. “I don’t. In France, they send their babies out to the country and only bring them home when they’re an age to reason. We’re only in keeping with the fashion.”