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The cruelty of it took her breath away. She’d known her mistress long enough to know that nothing was by chance and no slight went unpunished; she was being sentenced for bearing a child without her mistress’s approval, for daring to risk her life in childbirth.

“Master Ned has a nurse,” she said carefully.

Mary Anne dropped back against the pillows. “I don’t like that nurse Robert found. She’s slovenly.” Drowsily, she added, “They say babies take their character from their milk. I’d rather have Neddy be like you. At least it’s all in the family.”

It was the first time Mary Anne had acknowledged her relationship and Jenny knew it was only because of the opium, loosening her tongue, making her say what she would otherwise hide.

By rote, she went to the side of the bed, smoothing the pillows for her mistress, pulling the coverlet up around her shoulders, trying not to let her anger show in her motions. “I’ll do my best by Master Ned.”

“Jenny.” Mary Anne reached up, covering one of Jenny’s hands with her own. In the dark, her eyes looked black, the pupils fully dilated. “I am sorry. About your baby.”

Jenny let her hand lie still beneath Mary Anne’s. Tears pricked at the backs of her eyes. “Thank you,” she managed.

Mary Anne let go, lifting her hand to smother a yawn. “Such a pity. . . . He might have been a companion for Ned.”

Jenny stared at her cousin with disbelief, disbelief and something that felt very much like hatred.

“She.” Jenny yanked the mosquito netting back into place, her knuckles white around the floss, fighting the urge to bring the whole edifice crashing down on Mary Anne’s head. “She was a girl. A little girl . . .”

Chapter Twenty-One

St. Andrew, Barbados

May 1854

“What was the child’s name?” Emily asked urgently.

George cocked his head, listening. “She says they just called her Baby.”

“Her? The child was a girl?”

Old Betty chuckled and said something that made George’s cheeks turn red. After a moment, he relayed, “She says all babies look alike in skirts. But she changed that child’s swaddling more than once, and she can vouch it had the, er, correct parts.”

Emily might have been amused if her attention hadn’t been elsewhere, on the baby she hadn’t known existed. “What happened to her? To the child? Did she go to the Carolinas with my aunties?”

“No.” George cleared his throat. “She says that Fenty—er, your grandfather—took the baby away well before that. How long? A year or so, she thinks. Before the troubles.”

“That would be sixteen? The troubles, I mean?” A child born at least two years before the troubles, before her grandparents’ marriage. A child her grandfather took away with him.

No. It couldn’t be. She was refining too much on the disordered memories of a poor old woman, who might very well be telling her a tall tale.

But why this tale? If she were going to spin stories, why this particular story?

Emily put her hand to the locket at her throat. Inside, on one side was a lock of her grandfather’s red-gray hair and her mother’s dark brown plaited together under glass, on the other a miniature of her mother as a small child, a replica of a miniature her grandfather had kept on a little stand in his study.

A little girl with dark brown curls and blue eyes, and a warm skin that her grandfather sometimes put to her mother’s Welsh heritage, and other times, with a chuckle, to a gypsy somewhere in the family tree.

Or to an unknown woman who bore her grandfather a bastard child.

It made far more sense for her mother to be a child of her grandmother’s first marriage. And yet . . .

She didn’t want to ask in front of George. Not when it was probably all nonsense.

“Do you think we might offer her some of our picnic?” Emily asked George in an undertone. “I’d like to give her something, but I don’t want to offend her with money. . . .”

“I don’t think she’ll be offended,” said George.

“Please?” asked Emily prettily, doing her best to pretend to be Laura. “How often do you think she gets to taste meat?”