Page 148 of The Summer Country

If he loved her.

She wanted him to love her so madly that it wouldn’t matter. She wanted him to sweep her doubts away, to be sure enough for both of them.

Emily lifted her head from the wall, a sick taste in her mouth. She had heard that phrase before. It was Laura who had said it, that Adam was sure enough for both of them. Until he wasn’t.

How could she expect Nathaniel to know what she wanted, when she didn’t? He was never, she realized with a catch in her throat, going to make her decisions for her. That was part of his charm.

Of course, he would never make her decisions for her if she never saw him again.

Drawing in a hiccupping breath, Emily scrubbed her face roughly on her skirt. Bother Nathaniel Braithwaite, bother Mrs. Davenant, bother everybody. She had basins to empty.

Emily threw herself into her work. There was no time for brooding when there was refuse to be dealt with, some so foul that even a cologne-soaked handkerchief wasn’t enough to stop her retching quietly behind the old manager’s house. But even the satisfaction of hard labor failed to distract her.

Mrs. Davenant had sunk into insensibility, her wasted frame shaking with coughs, shivering despite the heat. Emily left Mrs. Davenant to Queenie as much as she could, spending her time in the old overseer’s house instead, where the cholera raged on.

Emily lost one patient, an elderly man Mrs. Davenant had referred to as Prince Robert. But Katy’s daughter recovered, and Emily had the satisfaction of seeing Katy’s face as she brought the little girl into their house in the yard, walking unsteadily, small body wasted from the disease, more bone than flesh, but alive, alive and sensible.

Emily watched them together and thought of her own mother, who had been passed from person to person, hidden and renamed and renamed again.

“Why Lucy?” Laura asked. “Was it a family name?”

“No,” said Emily. “My grandfather’s mother’s name was Sarah.”

In the end, she had found herself pouring out the whole story to Laura, Laura, who, despite the inconveniences of her advanced pregnancy, had quietly but firmly taken over the running of the household in Mrs. Davenant’s absence.

“My grandfather always said that it was because Lucy meant light, and my mother had been born in a country where the sun always shone.” Emily had always thought that very poetic and had been mildly disappointed as a child to learn that she had been named, prosaically, after her father’s mother, who kept chickens and occasionally took in boarders. “But now I wonder . . .”

“Yes?” Laura poured her more tea, brewed just the way Emily liked it, in a cup large enough to hold more than just a few genteel sips.

Emily took the cup gratefully, trying to organize her thoughts. “Well, Lottie and Lucy sound rather similar, don’t they? And if my mother was quite young . . .”

“She might have been young enough to accept it as her name,” Laura finished thoughtfully, setting the tea things back just so. “Yes, I see that.”

“Or it might have been how it sounded when she said it,” said Emily. “If she was old enough to talk. It would make it less strange than choosing another name entirely.”

“And so she went from Lottie to Lucy,” said Laura, rubbing the mound of her stomach, where the baby was heaving and kicking as though trying to be part of the conversation. “That poor woman.”

“My mother?” There were many things one might say of Emily’s mother, but she tended not to inspire pity.

Laura looked up at her, a hand on her stomach. “No, her mother. What did you say her name was? Jenny.”

“She died in the fire.” Mrs. Davenant had been very clear about that.

“Yes, I know, but what about all the time before? To have a child and not be able to own it—it’s beastly. Your mother had your grandparents to love her. But that poor woman . . .” Laura shook her head, blinking back tears. “Goodness, this baby is turning me into a watering pot.”

They drank their tea in silence for a moment, each lost in her own thoughts, until Emily said, “But what do I do? Now that I know . . .”

“There isn’t really much you can do, is there?” Laura contemplated a lump of sugar, wrinkled her nose at it, and set it aside. “Perhaps had you known as a child that you weren’t who you were, it might have changed the way you saw yourself, but you didn’t. By now your character is formed. I can’t imagine anyone who knew you would say otherwise.”

“Thank you?” said Emily, not entirely sure that was a compliment.

“Of course you are who you are. That’s not what I meant at all. It’s only your grandparents who weren’t who you thought they were. And even then . . . Your grandparents were your grandparents for all practical purposes. They loved you and helped raise you.”

“But my blood isn’t theirs.” Emily kept looking at mirrors as though she might see a difference, but she remained, stubbornly, herself.

“What’s blood when it comes to it?” Laura turned her cup around in her saucer, once, then twice. “I don’t believe it’s blood that makes a family. My mother never bothered with that. I’m far more your sister than I am my mother’s daughter. That was one of the more compelling reasons for marriage, to be your cousin in truth.”

“We would have been sisters even if you hadn’t married Adam,” said Emily, and then looked up with a grimace. “Which is what you meant, isn’t it?”