Now Face to Face (24 page)

You and I, James, thought the Duchess, looking at the portrait of that foolish king. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it was to have thankless children. Her family did not appreciate her diligence and work. They thought her interfering and deceitful. There was not a deceitful bone in her body.

Her eyes were closing. She was dozing. Annie would walk all the way from the kitchen, hurrying so that the tea would be warm, and find her asleep. Well, she could not help it. She was old.

Like the kingdom, she had survived a dreadful year of death, anger, loss, estrangement. She needed her rest.

Witch, you sent Barbara away, said her daughter, Diana, a dream Diana, dark and vivid in her beauty. As a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion. In Diana’s nose was a jewel of gold.

It’s a paradise, answered the Duchess, a veritable paradise.

Nothing is paradise, said Diana.

Take that jewel from your nose, the Duchess snapped. There’s a pirate behind you who will kill you for it.

C
HARLES
, L
ORD
Russel, and the Duke of Wharton stood at Blackfriars Stairs, where Londoners hired small rowboats to cross the Thames, London’s watery heart and river road. The stairs were located between the landmark of St. Paul’s Cathedral, its dome towering over all the city in spreading majesty, and Fleet Ditch, a tributary of the Thames, down which now floated a continual, sluggish stream of butcher’s offal and blood from an open square at which cattle were sold and around which the butchers had settled. A woman pushed between the two, intent on taking the boat they had just summoned.

“That is our boat, madam,” began Charles, but on seeing who it was, he smiled. “Lady Alderley, it’s been far too long.”

Diana, Lady Alderley, Barbara’s mother, looked the man up and down.

“My dear Charles,” she purred, holding out her hand to him, her voice low and husky, as provocative as the look she gave him. “Where is Tony? Is he not with you?”

“No, not today. You know, of course, my friend the Duke of Wharton—”

Diana spoke over Charles’s words, ignoring the man he tried to introduce. “It’s been too long since we’ve seen each other, Charles. We must remedy that. I am going to insist that you call on me some morning this week. Have I your promise? Wonderful. I’ve had no word from Barbara. Have you? No? Well, letters from Virginia can take many months to arrive, I’ve been told. I’m going home to change and then I’m off to the theater. I must see this actor everyone is talking of, this Laurence Slane. Why don’t you join me? Bring Tony with you.”

She completely ignored Wharton.

“What is all this crowd?” she went on. “I had to push my way through them.”

Wharton moved forward and answered her. “Convicts are to be transported from Newgate.” The prison of Newgate was near Blackfriars Stairs. “And the rabble gather to see the sight. Look there, in the river. There are the boats that will take them to the ships.”

“Make way!”

There was a shift and murmur among the crowd as some hundred men, chains around ankles and wrists, shuffled down the broad, slippery steps, their guards shouting out for the crowd to move. Boats had come to cluster at the lowest steps like so many ducks come to feed. Those men in the front inched down the steps and climbed into the boats as well as they could. The boats would take them to the ships anchored on the other side of London Bridge, whose low arches kept large vessels from sailing so far east. Several carts from the prison waited, full of men who had gaol fever but were being transported anyway.

There was a sudden commotion: A man had fallen on the slime and mud of the lowest steps and pulled three others chained to him into the water of the Thames. Diana saw it and laughed, the laugh sounding like a small silver bell, her ruby-colored mouth open to show teeth with no gaps among them. That was unusual in a woman of middle age; but then, nothing about Diana was usual.

A magistrate and constable jumped into the water to pull up the men, who thrashed and struggled lest their leg chains sink them.

“I thought that one would drown. Too bad. Where do they go, Charles?” Diana’s famous eyes, an odd violet shade, were shining.

“The York River,” Wharton answered before Charles could. “I see your ignorance is as great as your bad manners, Lady Alderley. The York is a river in the colony of Virginia, madam. Shall we ask one of them to convey a loving message to Barbara before he slits her throat?”

The man who could completely abash Diana was not yet known in London and would have been offered a hundred toasts if he had been, but she was briefly silenced. After a moment she asked Charles to escort her to a rowboat; there was one waiting off to one side of the steps apart from these boats for the convicts.

“Why do you associate with Wharton?” she asked as he handed her into the boat. “He is half mad. I never liked him, never. Come with me to the theater tonight, and we’ll talk about Barbara.”

“Wharton is a friend.”

“A dangerous friend. Ask Harry. Try to join me this evening.”

“Perhaps.”

“How is Tony? One hears such rumors about him these days.”

Charles looked away to the river, the even pleasantness fading from his face. “He drinks too much, does what any man does when the woman he loves goes away.”

“Take care of him, Charles. He admires you. I thought he might board a tobacco ship and go chasing after Barbara.”

“I thought I might board a tobacco ship and go after her, myself.”

Diana patted his arm. “We’ll get her back, Charles. You’ll see. It isn’t the York River she is going to, is it? No, of course it isn’t, it is the James River. Yes, because I remember thinking at the time I learned she was gone how like my mother it was to send Barbara to a river on the other side of the sea and named after such a foolish king. My father always said King James would not have lost his kingdom if he had stayed on English soil and fought William of Orange for it.”

“I think the river is named after his grandfather James I, and not King James II,” Charles said, but the rowboat was already moving into the river; Diana, settling her long skirts, didn’t hear him, and would not have cared if she had.

When Wharton and Charles were in a boat themselves, the waterman rowing them toward Westminster, that portion of the city in which stood the royal palace of St. James and the stone townhouses and squares of King George’s noblemen, Charles said, “You were quite cruel to Lady Alderley, Wart. It’s said she’s taken Barbara’s leaving far harder than one might imagine.”

“False tears. She has no true regard for anyone but herself.”

“Why do you dislike her so?”

Gambler, whoremonger, Jacobite, she had called Wharton at the time of her son Harry’s death—as if he had made Harry game too much or run up debt; as if her late husband, whom she had divorced once his ambitions became inconvenient, had not been a Jacobite, a gambler, and a famed whoremonger, himself. “She called me a Jacobite.”

Charles laughed. Wharton stood up in the boat. He was awkwardly lean, with scrawny elbows sticking out; his arms ended in hands with oddly long fingers, his thin legs in long narrow feet. He had a narrow face and brooding eyes. Unlike Charles, he had nothing handsome about him—except his eyes. His keen mind shows through them, Barbara said to people who would listen.

His movement made the boat tilt to one side, but the waterman was skilled, used to rowdy passengers, to young noblemen with too much drink in them.

“God bless the Church; God bless the King, the Church’s defender!” Wharton shouted for all the world to hear. “God bless, there is no harm in blessing, the Pretender. But who is that Pretender and who that King, God bless us all, is quite another thing.”

“Amen,” said the waterman, and Wharton tossed him a coin, which the waterman caught without missing an oar’s stroke.

“There, haven’t I told you?” Wharton said to Charles. “Touch a Londoner, touch a Jacobite.”

Chapter Twelve

B
ARBARA WAS TRAVELING BACK FROM
W
ILLIAMSBURG IN
Colonel Perry’s coach, and they were nearly to his plantation. Her neighbors the Randolphs traveled with them, in their own coach.

“The Randolphs’ carriage has stopped,” said Perry. “Surely they have not lost a wheel. I will go and see.”

I want to walk awhile, thought Barbara, and she stepped down from the carriage and stood in the road. As far as she could see, there was no problem with the carriage in front of theirs. Margaret Cox’s grandson Bowler was there, on horseback, talking with Colonel Perry and Captain Randolph. She waved at Bowler and walked toward the men. As she came up, they stopped talking.

“Have you come to escort us home?” she asked Bowler, teasing him because he was so easy to tease. He simply stared at her.

“Lady Devane,” said Perry, reaching out and taking her arm. “There has been a mishap at First Curle.”

“Mishap?”

“Hyacinthe has disappeared.”

“Get off your horse,” she said to Bowler.

“Lady Devane,” said Perry, “you cannot—”

“Get off your horse, Bowler Cox. At once!”

She pulled at his stirrup with both hands, and Bowler dismounted. Captain Randolph began to remonstrate with her, but Barbara put one foot in the stirrup and heaved herself up, allowing all the men a startled look at dark stocking and white thigh before she tucked down her rebellious hoop, kicked at the horse’s sides hard with her heels, and galloped off down the road.

Beth Perry and Thérèse had gotten out of the coach, and Beth ran to the men, saying, “Father, we must do something—”

“We can go through the east field, find her somewhere near your plantation,” said Bowler to Colonel Perry, still a little dazed at the way Barbara had comandeered his horse, at the way he had allowed it.

“The river would have taken her to First Curle faster. Why did you not tell her? Why did you allow her to ride away like that!” Captain Randolph’s wife, leaning out of the carriage, was furious with everyone.

“I tried to stop her,” said Captain Randolph.

“Nonsense! You were all of you useless! Breaking the news to her like that—”

“We will go on,” said Perry, taking over. “You ride through the east field and see if you can catch her on the road, Will. If you catch her in time, bring her to my plantation, and we will take her up the river from there.”

“Did the boy run away?” asked Mrs. Randolph.

“He is gone, that is all anyone knows,” said Bowler. “Everyone who didn’t go to Williamsburg is looking. They’re talking of dragging the creek near the house—” It took him a moment to go on past the horrified sounds from the women. “Odell Smith thinks he may have drowned.”

“Merciful Lord Jesus,” said Mrs. Randolph.

“Beth,” said Perry. He nodded toward the second carriage, toward Thérèse, who had not followed Beth all the way, but stopped at the horses of the second carriage. She stood there, small, fragile, dark-haired against the bulk of the carriage horses.

B
ARBARA LEANED
down low on the horse’s neck, urging him on, whispering encouragement, her mind racing, asking the same questions over and over: How long had he been gone? Had he wandered away and become lost in the woods? He might have fallen and hurt himself and be unable to walk, might be waiting for them to find him. Had they mapped out the plantation, pulled the slaves from the fields, sent them in gangs to search through woods and pastures? Were they using Harry and Charlotte? The three of them had slept together since the dogs were puppies and Hyacinthe a small boy—since Paris, when Roger had given them all to her. For fashion, but also, as she later understood, to keep her company, so that she would not complain when he was gone from her too often.

She’d always thought that if there had been a child—even a lover’s—she would not have done all the foolish, wasteful, hurtful things she had done after Roger’s betrayal. But there had been no child. There would never be a child, and so Hyacinthe was her child.

She bent her head to dodge a tree branch and kicked at the horse’s sides. Faster, horse, faster, she thought. She would ride until the horse dropped under her; then she would walk until she could find another.