Page 144 of The Summer Country

Emily heaved herself up from her chair, every muscle in her body sore. Her dress was sticky with old sweat; her eyes felt fusty. The woman in the bed was sleeping now, her breath rattling in her throat as she fought to breathe around the sickness in her lungs.

Lung fever made the elderly wander, Nathaniel had said. For a wandering person, Mrs. Davenant had come back, again and again, to the same story. There had been justifications and arguments; there had been moments when Mrs. Davenant knew her and others when she had called her Jenny and alternately berated her for lying and pleaded with her for forgiveness, with rather more berating than pleading. The shade of Charles Davenant had been with them; Mrs. Davenant had carried on one-sided conversations with him, some cajoling, some defensive. But all had, in the end, come to the same thing.

A child had been taken away, and Mrs. Davenant had lied about it and pretended that the child had died.

Not just a child. Lottie St. Aubyn.

Lottie. Lucy. Lucy. Lottie.

Emily’s stomach grumbled, and she realized it had been some time since she had last eaten. She had partaken of bread and cheese in the carriage on the way to Beckles. Had it truly been that long? Her stomach thought so.

Food. She would get some food and a nice strong cup of tea and then she would go and do something useful in the infirmary, where there were people, real people, sick people, who needed her.

But she paused, all the same, looking down at Mrs. Davenant, at that willful face, slack with sleep, and felt a combination of pity and horror, so strong that it choked her.

To carry something like that, all one’s life . . . How could one do it?

But perhaps, Emily thought numbly, having the lives of hundreds of souls in one’s hands numbed the conscience. Perhaps it was something about the institution of slavery that made the impossible possible and the horrible mundane. If one regularly traded in people, what was one more child separated from her parents?

She put her hands to her temples. Food, she reminded herself. And a clean dress. She was still wearing the same dress she’d put on yesterday morning to come from Bridgetown. It was one of Mrs. Turner’s, sadly worn and stained now. She would have to try to make it good, although she doubted Mrs. Turner would want it back now, no matter how she scrubbed at the stains.

Queenie was waiting to take her turn at Mrs. Davenant’s bedside. Mechanically, Emily apprised her of the patient’s progress. It was easier to think of Mrs. Davenant as that, as the patient.

Emily’s clothes were in the wardrobe where she’d left them. Emily selected one of her own dresses, plain gray serge, entirely inappropriate for the climate, but hers.

She looked at herself in the mirror, a different person from the girl who had last stood at this same glass, almost three months since. Thinner, her face drawn, the cheekbones more prominent, the eyes shadowed from long nights and care. The face of a woman, not a girl.

Was it her imagination, or did she look more like her mother? She’d always had her father’s coloring, his mid-brown hair, his hazel eyes, his round cheeks. But the past month had whittled away at her, leaving hollows in her cheeks that hadn’t been there before, making her eyes seem larger, her mouth wider.

Or maybe it was just the expression on her face that made her think of her mother, a watchful determination.

She had always thought her mother looked like her grandmother—or the woman she’d believed her grandmother. Or maybe she’d only thought it because she’d been told so many times, or from the simple fact of their both having dark hair, similarly dressed, and an air of command. Their voices too had been the same, even when they argued; they had the same pitch, the same turns of phrase.

It had never occurred to her to doubt that they might be mother and daughter, any more than she would have doubted her own parentage.

But now . . . Now there were patients who needed her.

Emily hastily pinned on her collar and cuffs and made her way downstairs. She would scrounge a bit of bread and then find Nathaniel in the infirmary. She hoped he’d slept, although she doubted he had. He was too proud to take a bed in the house where he had once been a slave.

If her mother truly was who Mrs. Davenant said, Emily might have been born a slave at Beckles. She might have lived here as a child in one of the huts that made up a village behind the house, as Nathaniel had.

She certainly wouldn’t be sleeping in one of the great bedrooms upstairs, waited upon and pampered.

Emily went down the stairs, meaning to go out to the infirmary, but she paused and retraced her steps across the great room, to the portrait of her hostess that hung on one side of the arch that led into the dining room.

It wasn’t Mrs. Davenant she looked at, but the woman behind her, the slave, Jenny.

It was nearly impossible to make out anything of her features. She had been painted in a white kerchief and apron. The artist had an uncertain grasp on perspective, but she seemed to be of middle height, taller than Mrs. Davenant, and gracefully built. The artist’s technique wasn’t good, but he had captured something. There was a dignity about Jenny that even the artist had grasped, just as he had grasped the pugnacious tilt to Mrs. Davenant’s chin.

Just beneath Mrs. Davenant’s chin, Emily saw something she hadn’t noticed before. The glimmer of gold. It was a locket, tied around her neck with a ribbon. A locket, edged in filigree. A locket, in fact, very like the one around Emily’s neck.

To Jenny, for her good service . . .

A coincidence. An accident. Maybe her grandfather had taken the locket. Adam had said he’d stolen something, hadn’t he? Or might have stolen something.

But if her grandfather were to steal anything, why a locket?

Why a child?