Page 130 of The Summer Country

It was no use telling him that every word he told her about Lottie was a dagger in her heart, because then he might stop, and she didn’t want him to stop. She wanted to know. But it hurt. It hurt so badly to know she was there, so close, growing bigger every day, every day another day that she didn’t know her mother.

She held to what Nanny Grigg had told her, this promise of intervention from abroad, from the king and queen, who valued them as their masters didn’t. Wasn’t it what Charles had been saying for years, and she hadn’t believed him?

Jenny sat up, yanking her dress back up around her shoulders. “Has there been any word from the assembly about the registry bill?”

Charles blinked up at her. “About the . . . Why do you ask?”

Jenny busied herself braiding her hair back into order. “Someone told me that there’d been papers sent from England, that we’re to have our freedom by the New Year.”

Charles levered himself into a sitting position, looking at her with some concern. His shirt was open, his cravat discarded nearby. “Who said that?”

“Oh, just talk.” Jenny turned her back to him. “Could you pin up my hair for me?”

Charles obediently began coiling the braid around. “The way Alleyne was going on about it in the council, you’d think he was about to be stripped of all his property tomorrow,” he said indistinctly around the pins in his mouth. “I thought the man was going to have an apoplexy on the spot. And he’s not the only one. They’ve resolved against the bill and mean to tell Parliament so.”

Jenny jerked her head around, wincing as her hair pulled. “But—if the king in England says—”

Charles patiently put her hair back up, sticking the last pin in place. “The king in England might say—or, in this case, Mr. Wilberforce in Parliament—but the planters of Barbados do not.” Rooting about on the ground, he found her kerchief and handed it to her. “It will come back again, I’ve no doubt. It’s not nearly so radical as they claim. It’s their own fevered imaginations that make it so.”

Jenny looked at him, the kerchief in her hand. “What will happen?”

Charles shook his head. “A great deal of jabbering and angry editorials in the Barbados Mercury. All sound and fury signifying nothing.”

“Nothing,” repeated Jenny.

All of that and then nothing. Jenny felt a stab of fear; she had held to the idea that there was a greater power, a power that could step in and free them, but if the law of England couldn’t prevail, what could? She felt as though she were back under the regime of her father, where rules changed at his whim, and nothing and no one was safe.

Instead of going back to Beckles, Jenny walked north instead, to Simmons. Mary Anne was dining at Rosehall and had taken Queenie with her. She had a few hours, at least.

She found Nanny Grigg in the slave yard, sitting with Jackey, the head driver, and King Wiltshire, a carpenter from Bayleys, who was, she thought, married to one of Jackey’s sisters, who had been sold away to Bayleys. Jackey’s children were playing a game with buttons while Jackey and King Wiltshire looked on and offered advice.

Nanny raised a hand in greeting. “Jenny! You’re here late.”

“I’ve just come from Peverills.” She looked at the children playing at their game, with their much-mended smocks, their feet bare. Their father was an important man on the plantation, so if they were lucky they might be apprenticed to a trade by and by instead of set to hoeing cane, but they would live on Simmons and die on Simmons unless they were sold away. The wrongness of it smote her like a fist. “They’ve refused the registry bill. The assembly. Mr. Davenant just told me.”

“They can’t do that.” King Wiltshire came to his feet, stepping heavily on one of the counters.

“You’ve broken it!” protested Jackey’s oldest.

“Hush,” said Nanny. “He’ll find you another. Run along. There’s grown-up business at hand. Go to your mother in the kitchen. She’ll give you a piece of cane to suck.”

The children looked to their father. “Go on,” Jackey echoed.

King Wiltshire kicked the cracked bits of ivory away. “I heard that there’s a black queen in England and she means us to have our freedom, and it’s Mr. Wilberforce who’s to give it to us.”

“I heard that too,” said Nanny. “It was in a paper Will Nightingale showed me. He had it from Washington Franklin over at Contented Retreat, and if he wouldn’t know, no one would. He’s a freeman—his father freed him as he lay dying, and his brother too. They go where they please and read what they will.”

“Nice for those who can get it,” said Jenny. She didn’t know where her father was now. Jamaica, most likely. But he’d certainly never thought about freeing her. “I don’t know about the queen or Mr. Wilberforce, but I do know what I heard from Mr. Davenant, and that’s that the council and assembly mean to deny the bill.”

“They’re keeping our freedom from us.” She’d never seen Nanny look so, her pleasant-featured face stiff with anger. “They’ve stolen it. They’ve stolen our freedom.”

“The queen won’t stand for it,” said King Wiltshire reassuringly, putting a hand on Nanny Grigg’s arm.

She shook him off. “And what’s the queen to do in England when we’re here? I was a fool to think they’d let us go. We’ll never have our freedom unless we fight for it.”

“But how?” said Jackey. “They’ll have the militia on us.”

“I don’t mean tonight, you great goathead. We’d need to work, to plan. . . . They did it in Saint Domingo, didn’t they?” Nanny started pacing back and forth, her hands moving with her thoughts. “People don’t know. Once they know, once they know what’s being kept from us, they’ll rise up and demand it. Why do you think they keep so many of us from reading and writing? To keep us ignorant. To keep us low. But we’re not.”