by Karleen Koen
“I am Lady Devane,” she said, her husky voice, her mother’s voice, a stark contrast to her angelic face under the big hat.
“I am Margaret Cox, your neighbor,” said the round woman, her eyes—bright, dark buttons—lost in her plump face. “These are my grandsons, Bowler, James, and Brazure. This is Colonel Edward Perry, another neighbor of yours and mine, and this is his daughter, Beth. Colonel Perry found this cow, Lady Devane, and thought it might belong to you. Now, we have brought you some supper, and a little something extra to settle you in and welcome you. James, Brazure, take it out of the cart before the dogs eat it.”
“I am delighted—we are delighted—to make your acquaintance, Lady Devane,” said Edward Perry, his voice calm, peaceful, like the sound of reeds in a river. The bow he made was quaint and old-fashioned, and the eyes in his seamed face were lively and kind. Barbara liked him at once. He was dressed all in black, plainly, like the Quakers of London.
Barbara watched as the young men shyly brought forward three hams, two unplucked geese, sacks of something, and a basket of candles.
“Cornmeal in those sacks. One of my sons-in-law owns a grist mill,” said Mrs. Cox. “Those candles have been made with bay myrtle. They smell sweet when you burn them.”
“All for me?” Barbara smiled, her grandfather’s smile, charming, dazzling. That smile’s a gift, said her grandmother, none of your doing at all, numbing those who see it, so mind how you use it, Bab. I am minding, Grandmama.
“Come into the house. I can’t take supper alone. I won’t take supper alone. You must all join me.”
She remembered this, country kindness, neighbor looking after neighbor. It was a good thing, a far better end than Colonel Bolling would have made to her first full day at First Curle. Kindness begat kindness. She could feel her heart open again. How kind they were to make her first evening alone here less lonely.
“Please,” she said, meaning every word she spoke, “it would make me so happy.”
“Well, then,” said Mrs. Cox, “it will have to be done, won’t it?”
“Tell me,” said Barbara to them all as they entered the house, “how difficult is it to grow tobacco?”
COLONEL EDWARD Perry took a heavy silver goblet from the silver tray Hyacinthe held before him. He surveyed the parlor, which was still in disarray but already changed by the fine table and chairs, by a painting brought from England and set upon the plain mantel. Plump, naked nymphs with deliciously rounded flesh lolled in some dark garden. The lushness of the pose, the skill and craft of the brushstrokes, fed his soul.
I was unaware my soul needed feeding, he thought, but it clearly does. His lively, kind eyes went to Barbara, who was speaking to her page boy in rapid French, then moved to serving dishes of silver—plates, goblets, trays, unpacked but not yet put away, upon the table. Though he possessed some rich things himself, he had not been able to keep himself from touching these plates, this tray, could not help but run his fingers along the design, feeling the heaviness of the metal, marveling at the craft of the silversmith who had made the intricate design of grapes and leaves over which his fingers played.
Lady Devane was singing to them, now, some French nonsense song, her maidservant harmonizing with her, and he, like the others in the chamber, was struck silent at the beauty and liveliness here in Jordan’s plain parlor.
Jordan’s parlor no more, thought Colonel Perry; her presence already vibrates through it. She has the shining patina of that silver I cannot keep my eyes from—and, I wager, the solid inside, the strength that bends but won’t break easily. She must have graced the court. Why did she leave it to come among us?
When he’d gone to England as a younger man, he’d heard an Italian opera for the first time, and had found himself weeping, because the beauty of the music, the voices, was so unexpected, so fiercely fine and perfect. There was something of that emotion in him now, here in this simple parlor transformed by paintings and French chairs, by silver goblets and the sure and certain grace of the young woman singing to them. What is there here that I am so touched, so moved within? he thought, as another song began.
“Tell me of this,” he said to Barbara later, when the singing was finished and she sat near him, fanning herself with an exquisite fan. He pointed to it, and she handed it over.
He examined the scene painted on its furled-out sections: a rose garden, and yew trees beyond.
“It is Tamworth Hall, where I grew up. This is the rose garden my grandfather planted.”
“The famous Duke of Tamworth?”
“Yes. He planted it in the last years he lived, when he was frail and unwell. My brother gave this fan to me as a gift for my sixteenth birthday.”
What sadness in that lovely face, thought Perry. “Your brother?” he prodded gently.
“Harry. He’s dead now. All my brothers and sisters are dead.” She changed the subject abruptly. “What is the best tobacco seed?”
“Digges seed, from the Digges plantation on the York River, but the man to ask is Major John Custis in Williamsburg, not I. You’re thinking of planting a crop of tobacco?”
“This is a tobacco plantation.”
“Let me tell you that my tobacco merchant in London writes me a melancholy story, Lady Devane, of the ruinous effect of the South Sea Bubble—”
I cannot escape you, Bubble, thought Barbara. She clenched her hands around her drawn-in fan.
“—and its consequences to trade. I think tobacco will sell low again. We endured ten years of sales worth little or nothing the last time prices fell. I think we may be coming to such a time again. A wise man or woman would pull in his—or her—horns and live small.”
“Would she?” Barbara smiled at him. He was kind to warn her. “Thank you for your advice.”
“Not my advice, simply my opinion. Tobacco grows best on virgin land. We grow perhaps three years of crops upon a field before moving on to clear others, leaving old fields to rest. That is why only a portion of this plantation is planted. Jordan was looking to his tomorrow, to the tobacco he would need to raise four and five years from now. Tell me the news of England. Are the South Sea directors fined yet?”
“Parliament was determining the final amounts of the fines when I left England.”
“I read a great hatred of Robert Walpole in my letters. Do you think he will last as a minister to the King?”
“He was my late husband’s dear friend, and my husband always said that Robert is a rock around which the water must flow.”
“Even with his defense of the King’s ministers over this South Sea debacle? The writers of my letters say the people despise him, that King George must eventually dismiss him.”
Barbara shrugged.
“Will the Pretender invade?” he asked.
This was the second time within days that this question had been voiced. Surely this was just old men playing soldier, yet Colonel Perry’s words disturbed her now, as the Governor’s had not. The clans had risen in Scotland at the end of 1714. James had landed and been declared king. Would he attempt invasion again?
“He had not done so when I left.”
“I see from your face you think he will not. Yet my letters from England are filled with nothing but talk of how unhappy all are with King George and his ministers. It would be the perfect time.”
“Do not say so.”
“You are for King George?”
“I am for no one I love being hurt by war.”
“Very wise.”
Later, Barbara stood out in the yard, seeing them off. It was quite a sight: restless horses, barking dogs, lanterns being lighted, Mrs. Cox being helped into the cart. She said to Barbara, “You won’t find a better neighbor or finer friend than Edward Perry, Lady Devane.”
A moment later, Colonel Perry looked down at Barbara from his horse.
“You won’t find a better neighbor or finer friend than Margaret Cox,” he said. “I will call upon you tomorrow to see how you do.”
The c
art was moving off in the dark, its entourage with it.
“If you don’t have enough meat in your smokehouse,” called Mrs. Cox, “you let us know. My boys can kill anything moving.”
Walking into the house, Barbara said to Thérèse, “Who is it Colonel Ferry reminds me of? I cannot put my finger upon it.”
Thérèse looked at her in surprise and didn’t answer.
“You know. Tell me.”
“Lord Devane.”
Roger? Roger had been the handsomest man who ever lived, time doing nothing more than frost and refine that which was already beautiful. Everybody had said that he was ageless.
“The color of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, his gestures, his manners,” said Thérèse. “If Lord Devane were seventy-and-something—I think so, madame.”
The eyes, thought Barbara. His eyes are like Roger’s, that same color of faded sapphire. Her heart ached its familiar ache. There would never be someone like Roger again. How could there be?
“Digges seed,” she said, aloud.
“What?” said Thérèse.
“Nothing, just something I was thinking.” She’d grow tobacco to get over Roger.
Were they safe at home? They must be. They were her talismans, her dears. Were they in danger?
Of course not. Spotswood’s talk, Colonel Perry’s: just old men playing soldier. Yet in her mind was a memory of Italy, of the Jacobite court there with its backbiting and ennui, the fatal flaws of a court in exile. Yet within that milieu had been bold and committed men who could take back a throne. She’d flirted with one of them in a garden, and thought, If there were ten thousand like you, King George would sail back to Hanover tomorrow.
Chapter Three
IN LONDON, BACKSTAGE IN A CROWDED THEATER, LAURENCE Slane, an actor all the rage in the city, moved the oil over his face that would take the paint and rouge from it. Behind him, down the corridor, he could still hear the applause from the audience, still hear the name Laurence Slane being called.
“They are throwing fans and orange peels,” said Colley Cibber, who owned this theater and wrote the plays for the troupe. “Go back onstage and let them have another look at you.” Cibber was excited. It had been a while since anything had livened up audiences the way this Laurence Slane did.
Slane moved past stacks of painted scenes—of castles, drawing rooms, forests—past the ropes that brought the curtain down, past his fellow actors and actresses, and stepped out onto the stage, ignoring the ladies’ fans that littered it.
Directly to his right and his left were the best seats in the house, in boxes rising one above the other, those inside all but onstage themselves. Sometimes, depending on how well tickets sold, the audience sat in chairs directly upon the stage. In these boxes this evening, standing, applauding him, were a group of the King’s ministers and their wives, also some members of the famous Tamworth family, including the present young Duke and one of his aunts.
Candles in lanterns were flickering at the stage’s end; just beyond,
Slane could see the pit—the cheapest tickets, because the audience stood—and past it were the benches and then behind them the galleries, holding yet more people, footmen and servants in the upper ones. The clapping had increased at the sight of him, and he stood a moment, allowing it, the smell of orange peel sharp in his nostrils.
From the pit, someone held up a rough bouquet of white roses. The signal at last. Slane felt his heart swell open with an emotion like blood lust, like the moment when a man takes his first step toward a seen enemy in battle.
The signal meant the Bishop of Rochester would see him.
He leaned over to take the roses and held them aloft a moment, over his head like a trophy—indeed they were a trophy—before walking off to the sound of his name called over and over again, to the clatter of more ladies’ fans hitting the stage, the stamping of feet upon the floor.
“I am going to extend the play,” Cibber said, blinking like the rabbit of a man he was. “Four—no, five more days.”
Most plays enjoyed only a brief life before the audience tired of them and began to throw things at the actors and actresses. “You are performing bears, like the ones baited by dogs across the river,” Cibber told the actors. “Keep them entertained, or they will turn on you.”
Standing before a bit of chipped mirror, holding the roses crooked in his elbow, Slane removed the rest of the paint on his face. Though the face that stared back at him was calm, the mind behind it was leaping.
He had received the signal. The Bishop of Rochester would see him.
Weeks of the most careful maneuver and intrigue lay behind these white roses. Rochester, a bishop of the Church of England, was a leader in the Tory party, a faction of the English Parliament that King George chose to ignore—to his peril. Slane was a gosling, part of an elite corps of spies for King James III. He’d been here in London since June, to make an identity for himself, and to see Rochester, who trusted no one—and with good reason.
They had been planning an invasion since word of the magnitude of the South Sea Bubble reached them. Jamie, the Pretender, King James III, son of James II, nephew of Charles II, brother to the traitor queens, Mary and Anne, had been crowned in 1715 in Scotland as King of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. But Scotland was as far as Jamie had advanced toward his crown. His generals had lost the battles to the generals of George of Hanover, already here.
“The South Sea Bubble has burst too many dreams,” wrote Rochester to Jamie, who was in Italy. Rochester was the most cautious, most wily of the undiscovered Jacobites, nominal head of all Jacobites in England. “The Hanoverian and his ministers”—Whigs, the other party of Parliament—“are hated as never before. Come at once and claim your throne,” he wrote. So they were.
Outside, Slane saw King George’s ministers waiting for their carriages. One of the wives among them beckoned to Slane.
“Let me introduce you,” she said. “Robert Walpole, Lord Townshend, Newcastle, this is Laurence Slane.”
Slane bowed to the men, listened to the women compliment his performance, their voices high, like those of excited young girls, their eyes soft, admiring. He pretended not to hear how handsome they declared him.
“Lovely roses,” said one of them. “Are they from an admirer?”
“I’m sure you have nothing but admirers,” gushed another one.
Slane divided the roses among the women present, smiling into the eyes of each as he gave over her share. Amused, feeling predestined, he kept one apart and presented it with a bow to Robert Walpole, the minister who had managed to save King George’s ministers from dismissal for their parts in the South Sea Bubble. There was much hatred against Robert Walpole for that. It was on the streets, written in the broadsheets that dripped gossip, sung in the street-corner ballads.
It was good, this hatred, reminding people that there was another king for the asking. Thank you, round Robin, Slane thought.
Plump, heavy-lidded, a great maneuverer of men, Walpole stared at the white rose, then at Slane.
“For His Majesty, King George,” Slane said, “with all my compliments. Tell him that tonight he is in this lowly actor’s thoughts as never before.”
“Come and seize your throne,” Rochester had written Jamie and his advisers as the public cried out for the heads of King George’s ministers to be delivered upon platters. Invade, now.
Spring, Slane would tell the Bishop of Rochester when he saw him.
We invade in the spring.
Chapter Four
BARBARA KICKED AT HER HORSE’S SIDE WITH HER BOOT HEELS, urging it forward along the edge of a fence. The fences these Virginians made were called worm fences because they undulated like a worm moving upon the ground. She had drawn a picture for her grandmother in the notebook, showing how the fence timbers met and angled first one way, then, at the next meeting, another. Her grandmother would be amused to have a worm fence, would likely want one made upon Tamworth. She was several miles from
the house, at one of the fields in which slaves were harvesting tobacco. Hyacinthe sat silently behind her on the horse. This place consisted of the house in its clearing; then, scattered through cleared woods, fields. Across the river was more land, more fields, watched over by two more overseers.
Here, in this field, slaves were cutting down tobacco stalks, leaving each stalk atop the small hilled mound on which it had grown, moving on to the next stalk and the next.
“Not all the tobacco is ready at the same time, ma’am,” said Odell Smith, her reluctant guide in this. “I spend much time riding from field to field judging what should grow a few days, a week more. The weather is my enemy. The tobacco must grow as long as we can allow, but autumn rains, due in another few weeks, or an early frost might ruin what is not yet cut.”
“So that you have to rely on your instinct,” said Barbara.
“Instinct and good fortune. If we had more slaves, I could gather in more tobacco.”
A girl was gathering the scythed stalks by the armful and carrying them to the edge of the fields. Barbara moved her horse to a rough scaffolding there; from it hung drying stalks from yesterday and the day before. She stared at the leaves, only just beginning to dry. This was what Virginians depended upon. This was made into the snuff that all fashionable men inhaled in London and Paris and every city and town of Europe.
“We air the stalks a few days before taking them to the barn,” said Smith. “Then comes the drying, Lady Devane, which is most important of all.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, if the weather is damp—and it usually rains in September—we have to light fires in the barns to help dry the leaves. You’ll know the tobacco barn when you see it. It has planks missing to better air tobacco. If the leaves aren’t dried just right, they catch the mold, and ruin in the hogsheads. The merchants find rot.”