Page 146 of The Summer Country

“And drive yourself into a case of lung fever or worse? Don’t make me come and nurse you.”

Nathaniel’s weary face lightened a little. “Is that a promise or a threat?”

“A threat,” said Emily, trying her best to achieve their old bantering tone. “I’ll persecute you with mustard plasters and torment you with castor oil. Truly, you’re no use to any of your patients if you fall ill. It was selfish of me to summon you—but I didn’t know what else to do.”

“It was very good of you to come,” said George, moving to stand next to Emily.

“You know you can always call on me,” Nathaniel said briskly. “And now, if you’ll excuse me . . .”

“Wait!” The word had come out rather too forcefully. Emily modulated her tone, forcing a smile. “Won’t you come to the infirmary with me before you go and show me what I need to do to go on?”

“I’ll just see Cook about making up that parcel,” said George, and departed with a nod for Emily and a slight twitch of the head to Nathaniel, the recognition one gave an old playmate who had been one’s slave and who now didn’t fit into the social order anywhere at all. Like a dust mote one might flick away.

Is that how Aunt Millicent and Uncle Archie would see her if they knew? As someone less than herself?

“Come along, then. I took the liberty of moving your patients,” said Nathaniel, as they moved toward the slave yard and he directed her instead along a side path. “This was the estate manager’s house, once.”

“When you lived here.” It was a spacious white-walled building, built with Georgian simplicity, Beckles in small.

“When I was a slave,” Nathaniel countered. He walked forward, his head down, concentrating on his footing. “What happened in Bridgetown . . .”

He seemed to be waiting for her to respond. Emily’s mind felt numb. Bridgetown. A lifetime ago. Yesterday. She wanted to be back there with a force that alarmed her.

“What happened in Bridgetown?” she echoed.

Nathaniel’s step faltered. He paused, one hand on the veranda rail. Quietly, he said, “The circumstances were unusual, to say the least. You needn’t think I’ll presume.”

The kiss, she realized. He had kissed her. Or she had kissed him. Or a bit of both. Her cheeks colored at the memory and she bit her lip, at a loss. “Presume? I don’t— That is—”

“I take it that it wasn’t a memorable occurrence.” Nathaniel gave her a twisted smile. He plunged ahead, into the house. “That’s one way, I suppose. Least said, soonest mended, isn’t that the phrase? I’ve put the men in the old front room. Women and children are upstairs. There’s water on the boil in the old kitchen. Come along. Katy’s daughter is this way.”

Emily stopped him at the foot of the stairs. “Nathaniel, wait. I—”

“Yes?” There was a grandfather clock at the turn of the stair, but it had long since stopped, the hands permanently set at half past three, the pendulum still.

She was bone weary, jittery with exhaustion and confusion, and, for the first time in her life, she had no idea what she wanted. To sleep, perhaps. To be back in Bridgetown, with Nathaniel’s arms around her, back when people were dying by the dozen and everything was simple and plain. To be back, before all of this, in Bristol, at her father’s hearth, where she was who she was, Mr. Dawson’s daughter, Jonathan and Winifred Fenty’s granddaughter, with none of this doubt and uncertainty.

I might have been a slave, she could say. But would his face change when he looked at her?

“I should put on an apron,” she said lamely.

Nathaniel’s face went blank. “Don’t worry. This won’t take long. I wouldn’t want to keep you from Mr. Davenant.”

Emily frowned at him. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“I had heard,” said Nathaniel, “that there was an understanding. But in Bridgetown, I had thought . . . Never mind.”

“An understanding?” She was echoing everything he said like a parrot. She felt slow and stupid, which did nothing for her temper. “You don’t think I would have kissed you if—”

He did. He did think that. She could tell, and it horrified her, that he might think that of her.

“They were unusual circumstances in Bridgetown,” said Nathaniel, as though he were trying to exonerate her, to explain away a crime that had never occurred. “It’s not every day one watches a city collapse around one.”

“Do you think my word is such a poor thing as that? If I had pledged myself to Mr. Davenant, I wouldn’t have betrayed him for all the crumbling walls of Jericho! No, not for all the plagues of the Bible. But I’m not pledged to Mr. Davenant, I never have been, and I never will be. And what’s more, I’ve told him so.”

“You have?”

Emily glared at him. On this, at least, she was on solid ground. “He proposed, I refused. It’s as simple as that.”