Page 99 of The Summer Country

“I don’t trust Nanny Bell to remain silent,” she said. They both knew it was a capitulation.

“If I can find a midwife . . .” With sudden decision, Charles rose from their seat, holding out both hands to help Jenny up. “Will you come speak to Jonathan with me? If he refuses, we’ll know we need to find another way.”

“Now?” She wasn’t sure she liked this. But then, she didn’t like anything right now. Her emotions were all out of joint.

“Why let ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’?” Charles abandoned Shakespeare for plain prose. “I’m afraid if we stop to reflect we’ll decide it’s mad.”

“It is mad,” said Jenny, falling into step beside him. She couldn’t help but notice how he shortened his stride to accommodate her new bulk.

“If the world is mad, maybe to be mad is to be sane. It’s not sophistry, or even philosophy; I mean it. I’d always thought that there was a remedy for everything in law, but when Nature’s law conflicts with positive law, I hold it no breach to maintain the right.”

When one’s own self-interest demanded it. There might be a child at this very moment being born into bondage on Charles’s own land, a child who would call him master. How was it Nature’s law when it was his own child, but the law of the land when it was someone else’s?

Jenny swallowed the thought. For one, she knew that Charles was well aware of it, and if he hadn’t manumitted his people yet, it was because he hadn’t the resources to do so without plunging everyone into poverty. For another, in this case, the contradiction was in her favor. Let Charles dream of universals and the rights of man. She would fight to protect her own.

They found Charles’s bookkeeper at his desk in the little room that served as book room and office, bent over his accounts. The door was open, but Charles knocked on it all the same.

“Jonathan? Might I trouble you awhile?”

“It’s your house,” said the bookkeeper, thriftily tapping the excess ink off his pen before setting it down. He made to rise, but checked at the sight of Jenny, straightening slowly. “Is something amiss at Beckles?”

“Yes and no.” Charles regarded Jenny, half pride, half bemusement, looking for a moment like any father-to-be. “Jenny and I are expecting a child.”

“Felicitations.” Whatever he truly thought, Fenty didn’t betray his emotions by so much as the flicker of an eyelash. “Does Mrs. Davenant know?”

“No. We’d like to keep it that way, if we can.” Blindly, Charles took Jenny’s nearest hand in his, holding it so tightly that she could feel the bones crunch together. “Both of us are determined that our child not be born a slave.”

Jenny could see Fenty take in their linked hands. “I’ll do my possible, such as it is. I assume you don’t mean me to beat Mr. Robert into submission?”

“Tempting as that is . . . we were thinking more of theft than battery. If that would cause you troubles with your conscience, we can stop the conversation here and you can pretend none of this was ever said.”

“Oh, my conscience isn’t so delicate as that. There’s no love lost between me and Beckles. They wouldn’t hesitate to do me a mischief, so why shouldn’t I return the favor?”

Jenny could feel Charles’s surprise, but he did his best not to show it. “Why, indeed?” he said gamely. “You should be paid for your trouble, of course. In coin, as well as the moral satisfaction.”

“What precisely did you have in mind? Do you mean to make Miss Beck—Mrs. Davenant’s maid disappear?”

“No,” said Jenny emphatically, before Charles could say anything at all. “Miss Mary Anne would raise the parish looking for me. But she won’t care about one child born dead.”

“Ah,” said Fenty, as though a complicated sum had just come right. He gave a small nod. “Babies die all the time. Die and are buried and never seen again?”

“We’d thought your sister might be willing to foster an orphan child, a baby sent from Bridgetown. She’d be generously paid, of course.” Charles looked meaningfully at Fenty. “It’s only for a year or so, until my old friend Hal’s child arrives from Portugal to be raised at Peverills.”

Fenty snorted. “When you contrive, you don’t go by halves! All right, then, let me see if I have this aright. In a year—or so—the baby goes back to its family in Bridgetown, and I’ll be sent to fetch a foreign wean from a ship in Carlisle Bay?” He grinned, a pirate’s grin, all teeth and trouble. “I’ll do it, devil take me if I won’t.”

“It is theft,” Charles cautioned. “The child is the property of the Beckles estate.”

“It’s not theft if they can’t prove it happened,” said Fenty, with a glint in his eye. “That may not be in your books, but that’s the law as I’ve seen it.”

“Won’t you need to ascertain your sister’s willingness?”

“My sister knows what side her bread is buttered. It’s easier to nurse a babe than squeeze starch out of arrowroot. As long as she’s paid for her trouble, she’ll nurse the babe as tenderly as her own.”

“Well, then,” said Charles, looking helplessly at Jenny, as though trying to figure out what to do next. “All that’s left to do is discuss terms.”

“Not quite all,” Jenny interjected. Where did they think this child was planning to appear from? “There’s one difficulty.”

“Only one?” said Fenty, and Jenny found herself smiling back despite herself. Fenty had a strange charm, but it was charm all the same.