by Karleen Koen
She rubbed her arms. All summer you’ve been playing a dangerous game, Charles had once said to her, and said again now in her mind. I could not keep myself from loving you in spite of it—which only makes me a fool. But what does this summer make you, Barbara?
Someone was coming into the cupola; Barbara stepped back into the darker shadow a chimney made. But the ivory heel of one of her shoes made a sound, as Klaus stepped through the window she had opened.
“It isn’t Christmas Day, but I’m come to claim a dance anyway,” he said. “What’s that upon your face? Are you—were you weeping?”
“No. No, I never cry.”
He reached out then and touched her cheek with a finger, and it told him she lied. He held out his hands in the gesture that began a dance. The music from below spilled through the open windows, drifted up softly to them. One dance, on a rooftop, where no one could see—what would it hurt? And so she put her hand in his.
Something shivering, vital leaped from him to her at that moment, and she thought, I shouldn’t have done this. She saw that he was as affected by it as she. But by then she was in his arms. She felt his lips touch her forehead, then her cheeks, her neck, her mouth.
You are far too gentle, Captain, she thought, and she wrapped her arms around his neck. They kissed, and she thought, I want this, I want all of it, I do. His hands were at her breasts, which were pushing out now almost completely from her gown, and there were kisses upon her neck, on the tops of her breasts, and she thought, We will couple, right here under the stars. Good. It is settled between us, at last.
“I cannot stop thinking of you,” he said. “There is a woman, a widow—Someone is coming.” And quickly he pulled her back into the deep shadow of the chimney.
Inside the cupola, another couple appeared, then kissed, as Klaus and Barbara had done; but their kisses were interspersed with vows and with pledges of love. It was like having her face dashed with cold water, to watch their passion, to hear them pledge devotion, loyalty. It was a sweet thing, bittersweet to her. The mood of moments earlier, when she would have lain with this man beside her under the stars, vanished.
The couple went below again; it seemed to her in the moonlight that Klaus’s eyes gleamed as a wolf’s might. “They have left,” he said.
“And so must you.”
“What is it? What is wrong?”
“Go away, please.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When you come back from your voyage, Captain, we’ll see then.”
“Do you promise?”
“I promise.” He didn’t want to go. Barbara saw it and leaned against the chimney, staring up at the stars, listening to the sound of him crossing the rooftop, and then to the silence.
Words tumbled through her mind, words Roger had written her, the words of John Donne:
Come live with me, and be my love, / And we will some new pleasures prove / Of golden sands, and crystal brooks,/With silken lines, and silver hooks. / There will the river whispering run, / Warm’d by thy eyes, more than the Sun. / And there the enamor’d fish will stay, / Begging themselves they may betray. /…Let others freeze with angling reeds,/ And cut their legs, with shells and weeds, / Or treacherously poor fish beset, / With strangling snare, or windowy net: /…For thee, thou needst no such deceit, / For thou thy self art thine own bait; / That fish, that is not catch’d thereby, / Alas, is wiser far than I.
Roger, she thought, I am not wise.
Bolling’s words were awful, but also honest. What would happen if she and Klaus became lovers? She had no wish to break apart his favorable alliance. The purpose of marriage was to increase property and standing; she understood it well. Her own marriage had done so, had helped to pull her family back into favor, for Roger was loved by the Hanovers. If she began with Klaus, would she be satisfied with bits of time here and there? Wouldn’t she—if she began to love him—want more?
She lifted dark, full skirts and swung herself into the cupola, going down the stairs in her ivory-heeled shoes, feeling thwarted, irritable, confused, and underneath it all, sad.
At the bottom of the stairs, staring up at her, was Colonel Perry.
It was almost as if he was waiting for her, and the angle of his face as he stared up at her, the way candlelight softened the seams, highlighted the bones, made her stop mid-step. His eyes were rare, perfect, matched stones in his face; they were the color of Roger’s eyes, and it seemed to her for one moment that Roger looked at her out of them, looked out and offered solace. Her heel caught, and she stumbled, but he was up the stairs in an instant, catching her.
“My dear, are you hurt? Can you walk?”
“Yes, I can walk.” And yes, I hurt.
“The Iroquois have arrived,” he said. “They will all dance in your honor.” He led her down to the hall, and she was aware of other things, too many bodies, too many candles burning, too much noise. It was as if the scene above with Klaus, the brief thought that she had seen Roger, had heightened all her senses. Then she saw them, the Iroquois delegates, here to negotiate a treaty with the Governor, and honoring her fête with their presence, by special arrangement of the Governor. They stood at the fireplace, above their heads the arms of Queen Anne gilded in the chimneypiece. There was a circle of space around them, as if no one dared stand too close. She stopped where she was.
They were half naked, with ornate feather headdresses upon their heads, paint upon their faces and bare chests, bear claws clacking around their necks and hanging from their ears, long cloaks of fur and feathers trailing off their shoulders. Upon their feet were soft, heelless shoes studded with shells and beads.
“They have dressed in your honor and in honor of the King, from whom I’ve told them you arrived.” The Governor was now at her side, leading her to a chair, talking all the while. “Those shells on their dress are called peak. They are used also for wampum, their currency. Those are moccasins on their feet, made of buckskin. Their women soften and dry a buck’s skin over smoke.” The Iroquois held elaborately carved sticks with a hard ball of wood at one end.
“War clubs, tomahawks,” said Spotswood.
The Iroquois had inscrutable eyes, sunken cheeks, dark skin; the paint reminded Barbara of scars upon their faces. Suddenly, she could see the slaves on First Curle dressed thus. Then their scars would blend with what they wore, be part of who they were, have meaning in a way they now did not.
“Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca: the five tribes of the Iroquois.” Spotswood was telling her how the Indians could journey for a hundred miles on foot to stalk their enemies, their only nourishment a thing called rockahominy, which was Indian corn parched and reduced to a powder. “Nation of snakes, they are called.”
“They honor the bravery of their opponent by making him die in great suffering if they should capture him,” said Perry. “The chant of a warrior’s death song is as important as his deeds. A warrior sings as he dies, tells the tale of his life, of his bravery.”
Barbara sank into a low curtsy, a curtsy suitable for kings or their emissaries; these men—their wildness, their unexpected, painted, beaded, magnificent savagery—seemed one with all she had felt inside herself, and all she had seen here in Virginia so far, the wide rivers, the primeval trees, the sight of half naked, night-colored slaves toiling in fields under wide, blue skies; it all seemed one with the anger Bolling had made her feel, the desire Klaus had aroused, the anger and grief, not conquered even now, after almost a year’s time, but instead rolling and surging in her, so that she felt wild with it, so that she imagined Edward Perry as an older Roger.
The two delegates from the Iroquois were as impressive in their finery as any foreign delegation come to King George’s court. They owned the mountains, Colonel Perry had told her: “It is well for us that at last they agree to a treaty with us, because the French are settled on the other side of the mountains.”
Such men should own mountains, Barbara thought, as she sat down in the chair held for h
er to listen to the eerie, strange songs. They sounded like nothing she had ever heard before. Wild chants from wild priests, she thought, which mock the finished and careful grandeur of this hall, aping its English counterpart across the sea.
There was a moment when she looked at those around her and was startled by what she saw. Pride that she should be entertained by these wild men, but fear in the pride, mixed with hate, masked with politeness. Hatred, said Hyacinthe, I see hatred in their eyes. The Iroquois are fools to make a treaty with us, thought Barbara. How will there ever be enough land for these men, and for the tobacco that eats it so quickly? We will dishonor our treaties with them, as we’ve dishonored agreements with other Indians, with the savages on our borders.
Colonel Perry had described it to her, how those whose land this once was had found themselves paying tribute to those who stole from them; the tribes became thin of men and women, a shadow of themselves from rum, smallpox, tribal war, death. How had Colonel Perry put it? Virginians were greedy for land, greedy for titles of honor, for sinecure, to be named sheriff and colonel, councillor and clerk. I have been ruthless in my time, as ruthless as Valentine Bolling, he said.
She knew greed; it was the currency of court and London. The South Sea Bubble had broken on greed’s sharp edge. Her husband and brother had died of it. How did one live wisely in a world of greed? If the Iroquois were to declare war on us, the Governor had said the day she attended his council, not even the King’s army could defeat them. Push us into the sea, you Iroquois, she thought, for we will take your land. The tobacco eats it, and always we must have more.
They sang to her, and danced a slow, fierce dance to the rhythm of their own voices, just as she’d seen the slaves at First Curle do on certain moonlit nights. And there was not another sound in the hall, and her heart swelled. Wildest grief for all that was gone filled it to the brim, but that was all right, a good thing; the grief was properly appeased by their songs, for it was as if they read her heart and sang the words to honor its fullness.
When they finished, she stood and walked to them proudly, handed them silently her fan with its ivory endsticks. One of them unfurled it so that he might see the scene painted on it, of Tamworth. She carefully unscrewed the heavy earrings from her ears, pulled from her hair both the feathers and the brooch that held them in place, and, curtsying deeply, held them up as tribute in her outstretched hands.
“Wonderful!” cried Colonel Perry, his words ringing up into the ceiling.
“Yes!” Spotswood echoed, and suddenly there was the sound of clapping in her ears and more shouts, as one man or woman after another took up a cheer.
LATER, SHE sat watching the dancing, which had resumed, in a more sedate manner, once the Iroquois had left the hall. It had been quite an evening. The Governor, caught up in the spirit she’d begun, had ended by giving the Indians his own coat and wig.
“They’ll keep maroon settlements from forming. They’ve agreed to it—any of our slave runaways they come upon in the mountains will be returned to us,” Spotswood said to her, his soldier’s face flushed, pleased at the success of her gesture, the success of this evening of which everyone was talking. “Excuse me, Lady Devane, I must see to the fireworks.”
“‘Maroon’? What does it mean?” Barbara asked Perry, at her side.
“It came from a Spanish word meaning wild, untamed,” answered Perry, slowly. Barbara saw that he was watching his daughter, Beth, who was dancing with Klaus. “Maroons are slaves who have escaped their bondage. In Spanish Florida and in the islands of the West Indies below us there are settlements of former slaves who have run away from their masters. The settlers have not enough numbers to defeat them and so must live at peace with them. What distressed you so before?”
“Colonel Bolling said something that hurt me. I asked him for peace between us; I said that both our loved ones were dead, that my brother had cut his throat with a razor, that the score between us was even. And he replied that that was possible only if the razor was dull.” She didn’t tell the rest, of Klaus and the rooftop kiss. “The deed I have includes the rolling house and storehouse on the second creek, so that I might, if I wished, take all the goods in the storehouse for mine.”
“Never deal with a man when your foremost emotion is anger. Bolling would issue suit against you in county court, and there the jury would be made up of men who owe him for what they’ve bought from him. They would find against you, if you insisted upon all, because your claim would seem too much to them. He is known to them, and you are not. To say half the goods in the storehouse are yours is better, a fair portion acknowledging Colonel Bolling’s labor of past years. I was a hard trader in my time, Lady Devane—”
“I don’t believe you.”
“No man got the better of me. But I’ve learned patience and wisdom.”
“And what wisdom do you offer me?”
“That another man’s gain may also be my own.” He stood, frowned.
“What is it?” Barbara asked, seeing his expression.
“My daughter enjoys her dance with Captain Von Rothbach a little too much.”
“You don’t like him?”
“I like him very much. But time on the same piece of ground for more than a generation gives a man notions of gentility. My grandfather, like the Captain, left a warm bed across the sea somewhere and came here for a better life. I respect my grandfather for it; I thank him for it, for his hard work was the beginning of my inheritance. But I want something more for Beth.”
The dance had ended, and Beth was walking toward them, her fine eyes—her father’s eyes—alight and happy. And with her was Klaus. Joining them, too, was the plump, dark-eyed older woman he had danced with before. His widow, Barbara thought.
“I hear you have a voyage to make within the morrow,” Perry said to him.
“Yes. I’ll sail back up the river this very night, board my sloop, and be gone.”
“He came down to dance with me,” said the older woman, and Klaus looked at Barbara, who lowered her eyes before what was in his. I intend to play straight and fair, and so must you, she thought, but she could feel again the kiss between them, taste it, and regret not pursuing it.
“You make me too aware of how old I am,” Perry said, making a gesture that brought his daughter to his side.
“The fireworks are beginning,” someone said, and they walked outside. The first explosion was wonderful, a pinwheel whirling out sparks. Everyone clapped, and in the light, Barbara saw the Iroquois staring up at the sky.
“Will you go with me tomorrow, before we leave, to the Iroquois camp?” she said to Colonel Perry. “I want to bargain for some things.”
“Swamp myrtle, dogwoods—what else will you send your loved ones in England?” he said, smiling.
Moccasins for Jane, a buckskin gown for Grandmama, a tomahawk for Tony. I am glad this night is ending.
“So your brother, Harry, cut his throat with a razor,” Perry said softly, as fiery designs above them outdid the stars. “What grief for you.”
“How did you know my brother’s name was Harry?”
“You told me.”
“No, I never said his name.”
“You did, you must have. Or someone else mentioned it.”
“No one would know.”
“Your maidservant knows, your boy. One of them said it. What is it? You look so distraught. How have I distressed you?”
“You haven’t distressed me. I’ve distressed myself.” The darkness in me again, the kiss, pain for Roger are all tangled in my heart. I saw him in your eyes when I came down from the rooftop. I felt quite wild in that moment, topsy-turvy, as if he were not dead, and all the grief, the devastation, the coming here, were a dream.
“I am tired, Colonel Perry, so tired. Will you excuse me?”
Later, when she lay in her bed, she thought, Roger is never coming back. That part of my life is over. I have to acknowledge it. It was hard to let go of that which you loved. There had been t
oo much letting go in her life. Since she was fourteen, she had been losing those she loved: her father, her brothers and sisters, Harry, Roger. She pounded her fists into the bedcovers. Hard, hard to see them die. I begin to lack trust in life, she thought. Diversion, there is that in my dalliance with Klaus. If I begin with him, I do not have to look at my losses. I use him the way I used Charles, and before Charles, Richelieu.
It was love, said Philippe.
Roger, she thought, you betrayed me. And then you tried to woo me back, but you died before you could make a life between us come true. I hate you for dying. I hate you for leaving me with debt and despair. I wished I’d lain with Klaus; anything other than to feel what I am feeling now.
She floated down into dreams of Venice in winter, of the time of Carnival, when all dressed in disguise. She saw mist drifting up from canals, saw revelers dressed as Pantaloon and Columbine, two characters in Italian comedy, capering in the narrow streets. There was in her ears the sound of dream heels tapping over arched stone bridges, in her eyes the sight of dream snow falling on the shoulders of black capes, capes that swept the stones of the piazzas. While on every head, male and female, was the large, dark, tricorn hat tipped forward, attached to a black or white mask, which left only the mouth to be seen. There stood Roger, in a long cape, in tricorn hat and in black mask, beckoning. She ran as fast as her skirts would allow, ran with all her heart and all her soul to him, and once reaching him, she could do nothing more than stare at his white glove, the tiny pearl buttons fastening it, before taking the hand so enclosed and bringing it to her mouth to kiss tenderly, for he was her beloved. You left me alone, she said. I thought I would die from it.
The mouth visible under the Carnival mask smiled its beguiling smile. The fish that is not catched thereby, alas is wiser far than I. I left Virginia, she told him. I had to. They wanted to eat Hyacinthe.
Never mind it, he said. Come and dance the gavotte with me.