Page 38 of The Summer Country

“I’ve a commission for my mistress,” she said quickly. She fumbled beneath her fichu, bringing out a folded piece of paper. “I have a pass.”

“Of course you do. I never meant to imply otherwise.” Charles tried to smile, but his lips didn’t seem to want to work properly. “I—I seem to have lost my way.”

Miss Beckles’s maid looked at him with concern. “You’ve been too much in the sun.”

“No. I . . . I’ve had a shock, that’s all. My father— My father has a daughter. In Bridgetown.” Black spots buzzed in front of his eyes, like flies. “My sister. I have a sister.”

Miss Beckles’s maid caught his arm, steadying him.

“You need something to drink.” She smelled of flowers and linen left to dry in the sun. “Can you wait here?”

There was a murmur of voices, haggling, the clink of coins, the splash of a dipper. Charles’s mouth felt fuzzy.

Jenny pressed a cup into his hand. “Drink this.”

He did. The ginger beer burned its way down his throat, making him cough and gasp, but whether it was the shock of it or the liquid, Charles felt considerably better for it. He took another sip, more slowly, letting the ginger tingle on his tongue.

Charles looked down at Miss Beckles’s maid. “Thank you. You must think me the rawest foreigner.”

She looked away, giving him a good view of the lines of her profile, like a carving on a cameo. “You shouldn’t stay outside when you aren’t used to the sun.”

Robert had said much the same thing, only he had been talking about other matters. “Was I so naive? My father always said we owed a sacred duty to the souls in our care, that only a beast would—”

He was raving as though he truly were sun mad. And maybe he was mad, pouring all this out to a stranger, a slave. But to whom else could he speak? Robert? Miss Beckles? Jonathan Fenty? His world had shrunk, all his friends gone, an ocean away.

Charles slugged back the last of the ginger beer, fighting for normalcy. “Could you show me the way to St. Michael’s?”

The last thing Jenny wanted was to shepherd Mr. Davenant to St. Michael’s.

“It’s not far,” she said, hoping he would take her meaning and excuse himself, leaving her to fade back into the market, just for a time, just for a bit more, unremarked and unremarkable.

It was so tempting to imagine she might drift into the crowd, drift and keep drifting until she was well away, with money in her hand, enough to buy her a new name, a new life.

She might set herself up as a seamstress or a milliner, away, far away from Beckles and all the misery in that cursed house. She could sew a fine seam, none better. Mary Anne would feel betrayed, she might even genuinely miss her—at least, for a time. But Mary Anne would survive. She could look out for herself. And if she couldn’t—hadn’t Jenny paid her debt? Weren’t they long since quits?

It would never serve.

She knew that. She’d known that even before Mr. Davenant had called her name, bringing her back, painfully, to herself. Barbados was a small island. Her father would find her. Even if he didn’t, Jenny knew what became of a woman alone, especially a woman of her complexion. She’d seen the houses on Canary Street, which catered to the sailors just in port, the soldiers in the garrison, the planters come to town. Mulatto girls, that was their specialty. They were supposed, her father claimed, to have licentiousness bred in their blood, mongrels, purpose-made for a man’s pleasure, borne of sin for the furtherance of sin. The closer to white, the higher the price, rented out as a temporary wife or just for the night.

She wouldn’t be whored out. Or worse, caught. There was a cage where they kept runaway slaves, not five minutes’ walk down Broad Street. The smells emanating from it were so dreadful that the merchants of Broad Street had complained. Apparently, the stench of rotting flesh was bad for business. Jenny’s stomach clenched. No. Her best chance, slim as it was, was with her mistress.

If her father didn’t have his way first.

Jenny found herself recalled to the present by Master Charles. “Is it very out of your way? I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

He had to know she had no choice in the matter. “It’s no bother, Master Charles. It’s just down Broad Street. You’ll know where you are soon enough.”

“Did you finish your business?”

“What? Yes. It was only a small errand.” She could feel the coins tied in a handkerchief burning a hole in her bodice, more money than she had ever had in her possession before. “Are you feeling better, Master Charles?”

“Yes, thank you. You would think I would be used to the heat by now.” They walked in silence for a time. They garnered the occasional knowing glance; it was a common enough sight, a man with his mistress. Master Charles didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t notice anything. They were just shy of the Cage when he burst out, “My father set them up in a house. Here in Bridgetown.”

“Is it the cost?” If Mary Anne was correct, the Davenants were in dreadful debt, a step away from losing everything.

“The cost?” Master Charles blinked at her as though she were speaking a different language. “The moral cost, perhaps. My father broke his vows. He betrayed my mother, he betrayed his conscience. . . . What price can one put on that?”

His voice cracked as he said it. Jenny looked at him curiously, torn between pity and disbelief. “Is it so different in England, then? Are all men noble and all women pure and virtuous?”