Page 52 of The Summer Country

A groom accompanied them for propriety’s sake (and, Emily privately suspected, to administer aid should she come to grief), but Adam and Laura remained behind. Laura spent long hours sipping weak tea in a quiet corner of the veranda, chasing the shade as the sun shifted. Mr. Davenant would often join her there, reading to her or speaking softly together of poetry and art, until Mrs. Davenant would invariably come to roust him out and send him about his business.

Adam, meanwhile, was conveyed almost daily back to town by Mrs. Davenant’s own carriage, where he engaged in unspecified business dealings that Emily suspected had a great deal to do with the icehouse and less with the exchange.

Emily’s schedule was determined for her, without discussion or opportunity for dissent. In the mornings, she rode with Mr. Davenant. In the afternoons, Emily sat by Mrs. Davenant as she entertained callers, ensconced like a queen in a cane-backed chair in the great room. Tremaines, Alleynes, Piles, Collymores, Burkes, Walkes, Thorpes, and dozens of others whose names Emily forgot but who all seemed to be related to one another, all longtime landowners, and, as Mrs. Davenant would have it, true Barbadians.

Which, of course, had the effect of reminding Emily that she was not.

Emily noticed that Adam was seldom invited to these gatherings. The owner of Peverills was welcome where Jonathan Fenty’s grandson was not.

Or, rather, the owner of Peverills was tolerated, pending further inspection.

Day bled into day and week into week. March gave way to April. Easter Sunday saw Emily sitting in the Beckles pew, crammed between Adam and Mr. Davenant. And still there was no discussion of departure. When Emily protested that they were overstaying their welcome, she was fed bromides about Creole hospitality. No one seemed inclined to hurry; Peverills might sit fallow a hundred years at this rate, while she rode a little farther each day and took tea with yet another cousin of a cousin of a cousin. She chafed at it, but found it strangely difficult to break free.

It was the first of May, over two months into their stay, before Mr. Davenant pronounced Emily capable of riding across the field as far as a tumbledown structure referred to as the Old Mill.

“Laura would adore this,” said Emily, looking ruefully at the ivy-twined stones, the gaping arch where a door might once have stood.

Laura was rather a good rider—her father had had aspirations toward retiring to a country estate and setting up as squire one day—but Laura had been so subdued, so oppressed by the heat, that Emily doubted she would ride that far.

When they returned to the house, she would have to check on Laura and make sure she wasn’t sickening for something.

“Bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” said Mr. Davenant, swinging down and helping her dismount, a process that Emily accomplished about as gracefully as a bear dancing a quadrille.

“Don’t you mean bare, ruined millstones?”

“That’s not nearly as euphonious,” protested Mr. Davenant.

“Can we go inside?”

“There’s nothing to see,” said Mr. Davenant quickly. “It was emptied long ago. It hasn’t been in use since the very end of the seventeenth century, if that.”

“It doesn’t look empty,” said Emily, peering into the darkness. “Someone left a blanket in there.”

“It has a reputation for being, well, um, something of a trysting place.” Mr. Davenant was red clear up to the tips of his ears. Hastily turning her in the other direction, he said, “You can see your land from here. This mill is on the dividing line between the properties. It served both long, long ago.”

He pointed in a direction Emily thought might be north. Or possibly east. “Before the Peverills and Beckleses fell out?”

Mr. Davenant grinned. “I’m not sure there was ever a time when the families weren’t on the outs, but they put their differences aside long enough to make some money out of it. We might make much of our gentlemanly birth, but the men who came to Barbados were adventurers at heart, Peverills and Beckleses both.”

“Does that make you an adventurer too, then?” asked Emily doubtfully.

“My grandmother would say the old blood wears thin.” Mr. Davenant dropped down on the rug the groom had set out and began rooting in the picnic basket. “Would you prefer cold chicken or ham?”

“Chicken, please.” Over the scrub and the strange, skinny trees with their shock of broad leaves at the top, Emily could see the ruined towers of Peverills. “You must think me the worst sort of interloper.”

“Shall we say the best sort of interloper?” Mr. Davenant hesitated a moment, busying himself with pouring lemonade, before asking, “Have you decided what you mean to do with Peverills?”

“Will I sell it, you mean?”

“Well—yes.” Mr. Davenant handed her a glass of lemonade, miraculously cool. The bottle had been nestled in shaved ice, a luxury that Mr. Davenant appeared to take for granted. “Forgive my clumsiness. It’s not my place to know.”

“If it’s anyone’s place, it’s yours,” said Emily frankly. “I don’t know yet. I should like to make a go of it, if I could.”

Mr. Davenant toyed with his lemonade. “I should warn you—my grandmother will be after you to sell. I’m surprised she hasn’t already. She’s never been reconciled to Peverills having been sold. It’s been her dream to see the two properties reunited.”

“Do you feel the same way, Mr. Davenant?”

“Me?” Mr. Davenant choked on his drink. “Not in the slightest. Reckoning my life in barrels of sugar, constantly worrying about the weather and the harvest and this blight and that bug. I’d just as happily chuck it all aside.”