Page 145 of The Summer Country

At that rate, how did she even know the woman in the picture was the mysterious Jenny? George had said it might not be anyone at all, might just be the idea of a servant. It was madness to stare at her, searching for some similarity of feature. It was mad, all of it.

Emily held tightly to her locket, striving for reason. She had been prepared to believe that her mother was the child of an unknown Irishman. Why should this be any more incomprehensible than that?

Because her grandmother had been married before, Emily told herself. Because it was perfectly plausible that there might have been a child of that first marriage. This story Mrs. Davenant had told her was a regular mare’s nest of lies and subterfuge, as improbable as a princess letting down her hair for a prince to climb up or a maiden dancing all night on a shoe made of glass.

Sometimes the strangest stories were the truest. It was the plausible one had to mistrust, not the improbable.

Emily stared into the face of the woman in the picture, a sick feeling in her stomach, a corrosion that came from within. It wasn’t about logic or reason or likelihood. The truth was that she didn’t want to believe that might have been her grandmother in the picture, in kerchief and apron. It was one thing to go to a lecture and account herself enlightened, or to host a sewing circle for our brethren in chains, but quite another to imagine oneself in shackles, her will subject to others, bought and sold because of the color of her skin.

Emily looked down at her hands. Her skin looked just the same as it always had. A little redder, perhaps, from all the boiling, with a few shiny spots where she had burned herself and the burn had begun to scar.

But that wouldn’t have mattered, not before the emancipation bill. She knew that. It didn’t matter if she was as black as coal or as fair as Laura; if her mother had been a slave, she would be too, a lesser being, to be looked down upon and ordered about.

She might have been mocked for her poverty by the girls at Miss Blackwell’s, but she had never been looked down upon, not really. She had always been the vicar’s daughter, supreme in her domain, Jonathan Fenty’s granddaughter, with the aura of a great fortune about her, even if her dress was twice turned.

“Emily!” George hurried across the room, arms out as though he intended to embrace her. Emily took an automatic step back and he checked, reaching for her hands instead, giving them a quick squeeze of welcome. “We were terribly concerned about you, especially after we had the news about Mr. Fenty. I’m so very sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you,” said Emily. Adam’s death felt very far away, something that had happened in another life. Emily was horrified at herself, at her own callousness. Quickly, she said, “I had hoped to spare you at Beckles the infection.”

“But the infection came to us all the same.” George looked at her anxiously. “My grandmother— Is it the Asiatic cholera?”

“No,” said Emily. She could give him that much comfort, at least. It felt so strange to be back at Beckles, back with George, as though no time had passed at all, as though last night, as though all the weeks in Bridgetown, had been nothing but a fever dream. Here, nothing had changed; the room smelled of lemon and wax, not the putrid stench of death.

An illusion, Emily reminded herself, pinching her palms. Death was here. It waited in the pest house, shoved out of sight. It was as though everything around her were a stage set, the painted scenery they had made for their theatricals at Miss Blackwell’s, paper thin, with emptiness behind.

George didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. “Thank goodness,” he said fervently. He looked up at the portrait, seeing only his grandmother, not the dark figure behind her. “I don’t know what I’ll do once she’s gone. It’s impossible to imagine Beckles without her.”

Emily looked at him, at the closely shaven chin and aristocratic nose. He looked very little like his grandmother, which meant he probably took after the Davenant side. It struck her that they were cousins. His grandfather and hers would have been brothers. If it was true, that was.

He was, she realized, looking at her. “Do I have something on my chin?”

“No,” said Emily. And then, “You do love her, don’t you?”

“She raised me,” George said simply. “She was more a father to me than my father ever was.”

Emily turned away, not wanting him to see her face. “We’re doing our best, you know. She has the lung fever. It’s . . . not good. But she has a strong constitution.”

“The strongest,” said George, smiling painfully. He grasped her hand, clutching it so hard the bones rubbed together. “Thank you.”

“Miss Dawson? Mr. Davenant.” Nathaniel stood in the doorway, his hat in his hand.

“Nathaniel—Dr. Braithwaite.” Emily retrieved her hand with rather more force than necessary. It seemed, suddenly, imperative to be away from George and the portrait behind her. Her worlds had bumped into one another; she wasn’t sure what to do with Nathaniel in the great room at Beckles, any more than she would know what to do with George in the drawing room at Mr. Turner’s. Her head ached from lack of sleep. “It was so very kind of you to come all this way. I didn’t know what to do with the doctor gone.”

“Burn his books and bury his remedies? I saw that butchery he called an infirmary.” He waited for a response from Emily, and, when none came, Nathaniel said, in a more dignified tone, “I’ll look in on Mrs. Davenant, and then I need to be getting back to Bridgetown.”

“You’re going?” A moment ago, she had only wanted him gone; now she hated the thought of his leaving.

“Unless you need me to stay.” He looked steadily at her, his expression so unguarded that it hurt Emily to look at it.

She dropped her gaze first. “You should have something to eat before you go,” she murmured, telling herself it was for Nathaniel’s own good, that she shouldn’t keep him, that he looked exhausted.

“I can have Cook wrap something up for you,” George chimed in cheerfully.

“Yes, that would be best, wouldn’t it?” Nathaniel set his hat on his head, looking, suddenly, very remote. “I’m needed in Bridgetown. And you have enough to occupy you here.”

“You need a nap,” said Emily, stricken with guilt. In contrast to George, he clearly hadn’t shaved, or bathed, or slept. His chin was lightly stubbled and his cravat wilted. He had come running all this way for her, and now she’d snubbed him without meaning to. “You look dreadful.”

“Thank you,” said Nathaniel. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, only succeeding in making them redder. “Don’t trouble yourself. I can sleep in the barouche.”