Page 37 of The Summer Country

The possibility hit Charles like a blow. If there was one, might there be others? Others scattered in little brick houses about Bridgetown? Working in his own fields? An infinity of betrayals made flesh, all speaking with the exaggerated accent popularized by a duchess an ocean away thirty years or more before.

How had they kept the truth from his mother? What stories had they told? It would have been easy enough, with his mother confined to her bed. The child could be explained as a result of a liaison with the old bookkeeper, with a neighboring overseer, a passing guest. Infants didn’t look much like anyone in particular, not yet. “Master Charles? Are you certain you wouldn’t like a dish of tea? Or a posset? You’re looking peaky.” Nan put a hand to his elbow, looking at him with such concern that for a moment Charles was six again and had tripped on the garden path.

“No,” Charles said, stepping back so abruptly he nearly lost his footing. “I—I have an engagement. I mustn’t stop.”

“The master—he would have been proud to see you take his place. Whenever you sent a letter, he would keep it by him and read it again and again. He would read them aloud to me. . . .” Nan trailed off at the look on his face. Backing away, she put an arm protectively around her daughter. “It was kind of you to visit, Master Charles.”

“Not at all. You were always good to me when I was a boy.”

Had they been together even then? Nan couldn’t have been more than sixteen at the time, his father thirty or more. No. He couldn’t believe it. But then, he hadn’t believed the rest of it either, and here the truth was in front of him, in blue bows and white muslin.

“I am glad to see you so well. And you,” he said to the girl, and fled.

He could hear the girl’s voice, raised in a question, and Nan shushing her, chivvying her back toward the pianoforte, as the door shut behind him.

His sister. He had a sister.

No, Robert had said. Our father has a by-blow.

Some men had untold numbers of half brothers and sisters, working their fields, pouring their drink, emptying their chamber pots. Charles thought of Mary Anne Beckles’s maid, standing on the balcony holding her mistress’s wrap, her cousin, her owner.

But not at Peverills. Not his father. He had decried the practice, had written about it, lectured about it.

Words, words, words, and no truth to them, all those letters, all those fine, fine letters.

How naive his father must have thought him when he wrote back! All grand ideals and philosophical abstracts. And all the while . . . The thought that he had shared Charles’s letters, Charles’s private letters, with his mistress made Charles so angry that the world around him seemed to blur and fade. He had stripped his soul naked in those letters.

When had it started? Was it after their mother had grown ill, when she had begun to take to her bed for long stretches in the morning, and then the afternoon, and then not leave her bed at all? His father’s letters had been punctuated with his mother’s movements, or lack thereof. A good day, when she had moved from bed to chaise longue. A bad day, when she could only lie against her pillows, with Robert to read to her.

And while Robert read . . .

Had he forced her? Had she seduced him? Each image was more monstrous than the last. Monstrous and impossible.

“You looking for a place to stay?” A woman in a low-cut dress positioned herself in front of him, leaning forward to make clear that she wore no fichu to veil her charms. “There’s rooms at Nancy Clarke’s.”

A boy hurried over, elbowing the woman out of the way. “You’ll find better at Betsy Austin’s. Three dollars a night!”

Where in the deuce was he? Looking up, Charles saw a row of substantial houses. On a veranda, a pretty woman in a muslin gown and silk kerchief laughed with a soldier, toying with his tassels. From one of the windows, a woman waved to Charles.

Charles ducked, feeling his already flushed cheeks color.

“I’m not stopping. Forgive me.” Charles veered around and away, picking an alley at random, hoping it would lead him back to Broad Street.

He found himself in the middle of a great market, ringed by stalls selling fruits and vegetables, flies buzzing over pools of blood beside the butcher’s stall, women with baskets wrangling with vendors.

A constable wrestled a man into the stocks, to the great delight of the crowd, while hard by Charles’s side a fight had broken out, with cries of false weight and other accusations lost in the general fray.

Charles dodged out of the way. He was, he realized, well and truly lost. He had no idea how he’d come from Nan’s house to here, or even how long he might have been walking. He weaved through the crowd, feeling absurdly out of place, aware of the conversations stopping as he walked by, the suspicious looks, the people who ducked out of the way.

He thought he might know where he was. Robert had spoken of the market where slaves went to sell their masters’ goods, blend into the crowd, and never return—or went to sell items filched from a master’s house or garden. Did they think him a slave catcher? Charles felt decidedly conspicuous in his top boots and high-crowned hat. He tried to ask directions but couldn’t seem to catch anyone’s eye.

Until he saw the familiar line of a back at a jeweler’s stall.

“Jenny? It is Jenny, isn’t it?”

For a moment, Charles thought he had been mistaken, that it was someone else entirely. He had only ever seen Miss Beckles’s maid dressed in a lawn apron and a white cap, while this woman wore a muslin dress, her hair tied up in a kerchief like half the other women at the market.

But then she turned, and it was unmistakably she. The kerchief seemed strange on her, like a costume. Charles thought vaguely that they were both in a play for which no one had bothered to teach them the lines.