Page 36 of The Summer Country

But now he wondered.

A fool’s errand, Charles told himself. That was what it was. Robert was getting his own back in the only way he knew how, taking his revenge on their father, for overlooking him, and on Charles, for having the gall to be born first.

The house to which Robert had sent him was past the customs house, past the milk market, down Church Street and to the left. Like its neighbors, it was two stories high and built of brick. A gallery, painted green, jutted out from the second story, casting the door into shadow. The street drowsed in the midday heat, shutters closed. The thrum of Broad Street faded away. Behind doors and shutters, Charles could hear the muted sounds of voices calling, pots clattering, a pianoforte being played haltingly.

Charles should have liked to peer in a window, but the shutters blocked his view as surely as they did the sun.

Feeling like an idiot, he lowered the knocker.

The woman who opened the door stared at him as though she’d seen a ghost. “Master Charles?”

“Nan.” Her hair was tied up in a kerchief, patterned in red and pink stripes. Her face was older, lines around the eyes and corners of her lips that hadn’t been there in those long-gone days. It was strange, so very strange, to look down at her when once he had looked up. “My brother gave me your direction.”

Nan stepped back, making a jerky gesture. “Would you like . . . Might I offer you a dish of tea?”

The hall behind her was modest but well-appointed. A pier glass reflected Charles’s own strained face. And beneath it, a clock he recognized. It was of no great value. His mother had never cared for it. It was brass, and plain, but his father had had it with him on the ship from England and had prized it, as a relic of his wanderings.

Stealing, Fenty said.

Mistress, Robert claimed.

There were perfectly reasonable explanations. A gift, for long service. Something serviceable rather than valuable. “There’s no need. I merely came to see that you were provided for.”

Nan looked as though she were about to put a hand on his arm and then thought better of it, letting her hand fall to her side. “That’s very kind of you, Master Charles. You always were kind. Even as a child.”

The music had stopped. The ticking of the clock seemed very loud between them. Charles could hear it marking out the seconds in time with his heartbeats in the drowsy heat of the day. This was the woman who had soothed his childish nightmares and bound his scrapes; he had loved her second to his mother, and sometimes not even second.

But she wasn’t that girl anymore. This woman was a matron, a prosperous matron, in striped muslin and a lace-edged fichu, and he was a man grown, not a little boy with a wilted bouquet in his hands.

“Well, then.” There were so many questions he could ask, but he found, now that he was here, he wasn’t entirely certain he wanted to know the answers.

“Mama?” A girl ventured into the hall, dressed in a white muslin frock tied with a blue sash.

“Is this your daughter?”

Nan hesitated slightly before answering. “Yes, Master Charles. Harriet, make your curtsy to Master Charles.”

The girl obliged, looking curiously at him as she rose. Her dark hair had been plaited on either side of her face, tied top and bottom with bows that brought out the blue of her eyes. His eyes. His father’s eyes.

It wasn’t just the eyes. It was in the shape of her chin, the tilt of her head.

“How old is she?” Charles felt as though his tongue were glued to the top of his mouth.

Nan paused for a moment, then said carefully, “Just turned six.”

Six. Six? His mother had predeceased his father by only four years. Yes, she had been sick for a time before that, a long time. But even so. There had been vows pledged, vows his father had claimed to hold sacred.

“Six and two months,” said Harriet and, at a look from her mother, dropped another curtsy. “If you please, sir.”

If oo plise.

Charles mustered a sickly smile. “Six! You are a great girl, aren’t you?”

Gret gel. He was morbidly aware of the shape of his own vowels, so similar to hers, the linguistic quirk that gave them away. Not in all words, but some. His father’s gift to them both.

Charles had no doubt that had she need to make reference to the color of his hair, it would be yaller, and the circle on her wrist a goold brasslet. His father, in all his years on the island, had never acquired the local accent. It was his mother who spoke with the lilt of the island; his father had retained the Whig drawl of his London years. And had, it seemed, imparted it to his children. To all his children.

If this was all his children.