Page 149 of The Summer Country

Laura nodded. “Your grandfather loved your mother and your mother loved you. It’s your mother’s real parents I keep thinking about, how they must have suffered, particularly her mother. To carry someone inside you, so close to you, and then have her taken away . . . A great wrong was done, but it wasn’t to you.”

And all because of the woman gasping for life in the great bed upstairs.

Emily knew her grandfather—the man who had acted as her grandfather—had some part in the tragedy too. But Jonathan Fenty had done what he had done out of love, to save her mother growing up a slave. If there had been some selfishness in that love, there had been sacrifice too. Emily wasn’t at all sure what the penalties were for stealing a slave, but she suspected they weren’t light. If nothing else, her grandfather’s reputation would have been ruined. He, ambitious as he was, would never have been able to do business in Barbados again.

She came again and again to the painting of Jenny, standing behind Mrs. Davenant, Jenny, who had died trying to save the child she had never been allowed to acknowledge.

“I understand now why my grandfather wanted me to have Peverills. It was his way of making things right, giving me what he thought was my birthright.”

“Isn’t it?” said Laura practically.

“Not legally,” said Emily. She thought about George Davenant, about the other Davenants in Bridgetown he had called not really Davenants at all. “Morally, perhaps? Charles Davenant wanted his daughter to have Peverills, that much is clear. Or he would never have gone to such lengths to make her—well, not legitimate, but as close as he could.”

Laura tested her tea. “Do you think your mother knew?”

“I doubt it.” Emily thought of her mother, her anti-slavery groups, her pamphlets, her meetings, her triumph when emancipation had finally been secured. “I rather think she would have shouted it from the rooftops had she known and gone on lecture tours on the strength of it. But it does still seem odd that she should have taken up the cause she did.”

“The Lord works in His own ways,” said Laura. “Will you? Tell people, I mean.”

“I don’t mean to go on lecture tours”—unless someone asked her, of course—“but I shouldn’t want to keep it a secret. That wouldn’t be right.” Emily looked at Laura, trying to put her tangled thoughts into words. She didn’t want to minimize the efforts of the grandparents who had raised first her mother and then her. She was beginning to realize, more and more, just how much they had done for her, how much they had cared. But it felt grievously wrong not to acknowledge the grandparents who had never had a chance to see their child grow or hold their only grandchild. She knew so little of them. Would they have liked her? It seemed a silly thing to think about, but she did, all the same. “I don’t want to repudiate either set of my grandparents.”

Laura nodded. “Some people might snub you, of course, if they knew, but I can’t see that bothering you.”

“No,” said Emily. “They’re the same sort who used to snub me for being poor and wearing the wrong sorts of clothes.”

“And you had no patience for them then,” said Laura. “So I don’t see why you would mind them now.”

“No.” It seemed strange that it was Laura, Laura, whom she had always believed so conventional, so timid, who would cut through all her concerns and put it so simply. But then, maybe there was something to be said for novel reading. “I do worry a bit about Aunt Millicent and Uncle Archibald, that they might think I don’t belong to them anymore—but I don’t imagine they’d truly disown me. We’re too much in the habit of each other. And I’m not sure I mean to go back to Bristol, not to stay.”

“Do you mean to stay in Barbados, then?” Laura busied herself with the tea things. “I know there was talk of your marrying Mr. Davenant. . . .”

“Not you too!” Emily grimaced to show Laura she didn’t mean it. “That’s Mrs. Davenant’s scheme. Mr. Davenant and I would be as ill-suited as—” She broke off as she realized the colossal indelicacy of what she had been about to say.

“As Adam and I? It’s all right. I don’t mind. Oh, how clumsy of me.” Laura waved away Emily’s help and retrieved the spoon she had dropped, the effort making her cheeks rather pink. “I never did think you and Mr. Davenant would suit. Is it Peverills, then?”

“No.” Peverills wasn’t what was keeping her here. “It’s Dr. Braithwaite.”

“Mr. Turner’s nephew?” For a moment, Laura looked nonplussed. Then she regarded Emily thoughtfully. “I ought to have known when you wouldn’t speak of your time in Bridgetown.”

“It was a cholera epidemic. I was hardly going to write to you about boils and bedpans,” said Emily defensively. “Dr. Braithwaite is the nephew of Grandfather’s oldest business partner—and a doctor. In any other circumstances, he would be accounted a very good match for a vicar’s daughter.”

But for the color of his skin. But then, what was skin but a covering for bone? It would be nice if the rest of the world felt that way.

Laura took Emily’s hands in hers, the gold of her wedding ring very bright against her fair skin. “You are not any vicar’s daughter. You’re Emily Dawson. You have always gone your own way, and you would be wrong to go any other. Besides,” Laura added, her lips loosening into a smile, “I always did think you would fall in love with a physician.”

“Not the curate?” said Emily, sniffing a bit and trying to hide it.

“Never the curate,” said Laura firmly. Releasing Emily’s hands, she said lightly, “Did I tell you I’ve decided on a name for the baby?”

“Have you?” Emily rubbed at a speck of something in her eye. It was dreadful the way sugar dust got everywhere.

“If it’s a boy,” said Laura, “I shall call him Emil, and you shall stand godmother.”

“Emil?” Emily thought the name dreadful, but, for once, she couldn’t find it in her to interfere. If Laura wanted to name her child Esmerelda Hepzibah Tiddly-Wink or Praise-God Barebones, she would stand there at the font and see it done.

Emily was deeply chagrined at how she had misjudged her oldest friend, how she had misjudged everyone, really. She had dismissed Adam as the carefree scapegrace he had always seemed, when, in truth, he had been riven with the anxious need to make something of himself.

She had prided herself on knowing Laura better than anyone, and yet. She had taken Laura’s quietness for weakness, just as she had accepted Mrs. Davenant’s assertiveness for strength.