Now Face to Face

by Karleen Koen

  Chapter Ten

  THE SECOND CREEK AT FIRST CURLE CUT A DEEP MARK IN THE landscape of trees and underbrush, and in it a sloop lay at anchor, its sails furled. The trees made a frame of green and brown shadow, dappled with gold and orange; the sloop’s raffish bow was blue, and built to cut through the waters at a rapid pace, a necessity in the waters of the Caribbean, where pirates were as common as sharks. It was the blue that caught Hyacinthe’s eye. Mrs. Cox had not yet found him, and he was glad, but tired, too, almost ready to be found. The dogs were somewhere behind him, sniffing and marking trees, as he stood inside his haven of woods to watch.

  A man appeared from below the deck. It was Odell Smith, whom he hated, talking with Captain Von Rothbach, who had followed Smith up from the bowels of the sloop, and gestured with his hands as he spoke.

  “Are you as glad as I am to have those barrels loaded?” Klaus was saying.

  “God, yes—”

  Just then, the dogs, panting and breathless from their exploration, came up behind Hyacinthe. Harry’s ears pointed at the sight of the sloop. He lifted a paw and barked. Smith’s head turned, an abrupt, surprised turning, as did Klaus’s.

  Hyacinthe would never know what told him to run: something in the way Smith’s face changed, something in the way the skin at the back of his neck and along his arms prickled, something in the way his heart gave a sudden, pumping, mighty pulse. Smith did not call to him, but at once pulled himself up over the sloop’s side to run down the plank to the creek’s sandy bank.

  It was the dogs that made Hyacinthe stop. They had been running with him, the three of them mindlessly crashing through underbrush, leaping over tree roots, dodging low-hanging branches, as he urged them and himself on. Then, somehow, they were no longer together, and he was both trying to run and looking around him to see where they had gone, his breath rising like a fist in his throat. Behind him was the sound of Smith, running, as he was, and Klaus calling to them both; and it was this silent, desperate race between him and Smith that told him, even as his mind denied it, that this was no game or foolish fear, but instead something dangerous, dark, deadly, unknown. He heard barking and growling, and then Smith’s voice cursing.

  Oh no, he thought, please Harry, please Charlotte, run! He screamed the words in his mind. Then he heard the yelps. They pierced through the drumming in his ears, through the breath rising like bellows in his throat, through the burning in his lungs. One of the dogs was hurt. Do not turn back, the voice in him told him. Run. Run as far away as you can.

  But he could hear a dog crying now, piteous, begging, hurt cries, while the other one growled and barked, high, yapping, ferocious. He stood a moment, fighting the fear that rose like water drowning him. He almost wept with the enormity of the decision he was making. And he ran back, dazed and unseeing, full of angry and despairing valor, the boy in him dying, dead, as if he already foresaw his destiny.

  Chapter Eleven

  SIR JOHN ASHFORD, ON HORSEBACK, TROTTED DOWN THE ROAD to Tamworth Hall, a sprawling, wonderful Tudor and baroque edifice that was the principal house of the surrounding countryside. On either side of him were the fields belonging to Tamworth Hall, and he stopped a moment to look at them. Like his, they were scythed of grain and already gleaned.

  By tradition, what was left in harvested fields went to those who had no fields of their own. The gleaners, mostly women, sang snatches of old country tunes and talked among themselves as they filled ragcloth sacks and willow baskets. Those who worked diligently collected enough grain, when ground, to last their families the winter.

  Children had been everywhere, as much a part of the afterharvest as the field stubble in which the women worked. Playing with blades of grass or trying to eat unripened brambleberries, smaller children had sat under trees, within sight of their mothers. Babies had lain in baskets, their view the few loose silver-white clouds against the vast translucent blue that was an end-of-summer Tamworth sky.

  Now, those same babies lay in their baskets under great oaks and hazels, among the leaves and ferns of Tamworth’s woods, as their older brothers and sisters went a-nutting, picking the acorns and hazelnuts that had fallen to the ground. The Duchess of Tamworth, who owned Tamworth Hall and surrounding fields, allowed them also the too-ripe apples, plums, and pears her servants disdained to gather in her orchards.

  Thinking of this—that part of the tradition of Tamworth Hall, of Ladybeth, his own nearby farm, and of others, was to provide for the less fortunate—Sir John felt a peace within himself, a sense of rightness and balance that he’d lost when he was in London—that, in fact, he’d not felt since the South Sea Bubble. Like others, he had lost funds in the fall of stock, seen bankruptcy and ruin stare him squarely in the face.

  Perhaps, he thought, now all will be right again. We’ve made it through another year, another harvest. His farm, the rituals of the countryside, the rites of harvest and sowing, of seasons and nature, all unvarying, folding one into another, made a firm, bright, continual thread in his life from which he took comfort and derived supreme steadfastness.

  Sir John began to hum an ancient harvest song, “Harvest Home,” as he nudged at the sides of his horse with his spurs. The lane to Tamworth Hall was just ahead. The hall, with its great octagonal bays, twisted chimney stacks, and rambling size, was as much a part of the landscape as the lane to church or the hawthorn that bloomed every May. It had been there in his father’s time, and his grandfathers’, and he could no more imagine life without the great house—it watched over them all; it was a place of recourse should need arise—than he could imagine awaking one morning to find there was no sun in the sky.

  Autumn, thought Sir John. Burning leaves. Frost on the grass in the mornings. Brambleberries to pick. All is right with the world.

  “We have plowed, we have sowed, we have reaped, we have mowed, we have brought home every load”: It was a tune older than he was, older than his father and grandfathers, part of ritual, part of tradition, part of life itself. He rode under the lime trees in the avenue that led to the big house of Tamworth Hall, the home of his dear friend the Duchess of Tamworth; he was singing out the words, his voice rising up in a rumble to mingle with autumn sky.

  “’GRAPES GROW wild there in an incredible Plenty and Variety—’”

  Annie, tirewoman to the Duchess of Tamworth, read aloud to lull her mistress, who was in a difficult and prickly mood.

  The book told of Virginia and was written by a colonial; since Barbara had left, it was the only thing the Duchess ever wanted to hear.

  I’ve sent my precious Barbara to a paradise, thought the Duchess, thinking the thoughts she thought every day now; I have, except that it is so far away. It will be months yet before a single letter arrives, and ships wrecked themselves upon treacherous shoals, and storms turned them over into the sea, and lovely young granddaughters like Barbara drowned. Pirates—she’d lately heard there were pirates along the colonial coast. What if pirates had captured the ship Barbara was upon?

  “‘—some of which are very sweet, and pleasant to the Taste, others rough and harsh, and, perhaps, fitter for Wine or Brandy.’”

  “I had a thought of pirates,” said the Duchess.

  “There is no mention of pirates here.”

  Thin, brown, impatient, Annie tapped the page of the book, a book she was tired of reading. By now, she knew more about Virginia than a body ought to know. Yesterday, it had been the colonial savages the Duchess fretted over.

  “It’s your stomach, isn’t it? You’ve got wind again. If you had drunk savory tea this morning as I asked you to, you would be calm even now.”

  I have sent my dearest soul to a paradise of grapes, will not know for months if she has even arrived safely, thought the Duchess, and all my servant can do is babble of savory tea. Annie is a stubborn old stick. “I do not want tea.” The Duchess spoke with the terrible dignity of the impossible-to-please. My servants ought to be more patient, more considerate of the old, the infirm, she tho
ught.

  A servant had come into the long, echoing gallery in which they sat, a favorite room because all of its many windows viewed gardens: lawn, terrace, the maze, the woods. Both women turned to glare at him.

  “Sir John Ashford is here,” the servant announced.

  “Is he? Things have come to a pretty pass when my oldest friend must be announced like a peddler come to sell his wares. Where is your mind, Perryman? Admit him at once. You ought to have known to do so.”

  And as the servant moved to do as he was told, the Duchess said to the view of the gardens, “My servants are impossible and ought all to be dismissed. I am old and too soft-hearted—”

  “Old, yes. But soft-hearted? Never.”

  Sir John strode down the length of the Duchess’s gallery, his boots heavy, dull, solid-sounding on the wood floors. Annie, the Duchess’s guardian and keeper, her confessor and goad, thought: Good; she can torture him awhile and allow the rest of us a respite.

  The Duchess held out her hands to Sir John, and he kissed her cheek, making a hearty, smacking sound as he did so.

  “I’ve quarreled with my beemaster today. I want to send bees to Barbara in Virginia,” she said.

  “Impossible.”

  “Precisely what he said. I might have known you’d be no help.”

  “There were letters for you in the village, and I thought I would bring them by. This one is from the Holleses, and seeing how proud you are of the marriage the young Duke is making, I thought you’d want to see it at once.”

  Dropping letters in the Duchess’s lap, Sir John pulled close a chair and sat down heavily in it, his eyes moving over her.

  The Duchess appeared tiny settled back in her chair, and so she was. Time had reduced her, had long ago peeled away any trace of youth. In the passing, it had exposed her, the way water exposes shells upon a beach, so her essence was there for all to see in dark, snapping eyes, in the bones of her elegant, finely drawn face, as slim as a greyhound’s.

  Strength was in that thin face, and impatience, and sharp intelligence, but also, since her grandson Harry’s death last year, a new frailness, as if she was, before everyone’s eyes, drying up to nothing, and the next strong wind would whirl her away. She was carried everywhere by a footman because her legs were too weak, too brittle, to hold her.

  Sir John was, by contrast, bluff and hale, as sturdy as one of her oaks outside. He had been her neighbor for thirty years, her friend for even longer.

  She had opened her letter from the Holleses.

  “They write to tell me they invite me to come and visit.”

  “Very proper, since you are their future relative…. I have decided I am returning for the autumn session of Parliament. I stay at Ladybeth only a few days.” Sir John was half shamefaced, as if he were confessing a crime.

  “Well!” exclaimed the Duchess.

  Sir John never returned to London for the autumn session. He meandered in sometime after Christmas and considered the House of Commons fortunate to have his presence. But the setting of the South Sea fines had everyone stirred. Sir John had spent all the summer in London, fighting the amounts Walpole and the other ministers wished to exact from directors. It was all he had talked of when he’d first returned home, was talking of even now.

  “Word is Walpole does not wish the King to dissolve Parliament; word is there may be no election come spring. This, when they’ve put it off for seven years! Word is Walpole is telling the King times are too unsettled for an election, that Whigs will lose too many places.”

  He had begun to glower, to puff up, ready for battle. He and she usually quarreled over such things.

  “I do not trust that bastard Walpole—forgive my language, Alice, but if you could have seen his maneuvers to protect the King and the ministers and South Sea directors—”

  “Did he succeed?”

  “You know very well he did.”

  The war between the factions of Whigs and Tories for power with the King was as old as the Duchess. She was unimpressed.

  “Well, then, that is his task, is it not? As a king’s minister himself? Whether a minister is a Whig or a Tory, he is still a servant to the King and must do his bidding.”

  “His task,” said Sir John, becoming very red in the face, “is to bring those who deserve punishment before the public to take their punishment for lying and cheating rather than screening them from harm! ‘Skreen Master’ is what Walpole is now called, and Skreen Master he is!”

  “Bah,” said the Duchess. It was a favorite expression of hers. “Tories have done nothing but fall over their own feet since King George came to the throne. Never mind Walpole. You must stop fighting among yourselves and pull yourselves together to make this coming election count for something. If there are enough of you elected to Parliament, the King will have to make some of you ministers again.”

  “Are you telling me how to make policy?”

  “I certainly am. There was no one better than I in my time.”

  “Your time has passed, Alice. Things are different now.”

  “Are they? Do people no longer claw over one another for survival when the stakes are high and the losses immense? Do people no longer betray those who help them, if betrayal will serve better?”

  “Why do I put myself to the task of visiting you?”

  He grabbed for his hat. Her assessment of court, of life, always upset him. “I deliver your letters like a footman, and you lecture me as if I were a green boy who had never seen London. I’ll take no more of it. And for your information, we have pulled ourselves together. We are going to put aside our differences and thwart every act the King’s ministers attempt to pass. So there!”

  Bowing, folding over like a stiff wooden puppet, he was furious and stuttering.

  The quarrel would not last; it was simply a picking up of where they had left off. They’d be talking again by tomorrow—quarreling again, too. Quarreling with him adds years to my life, the Duchess always told Barbara.

  Invigorated, she looked down at the letters he’d brought her. Though she lived quietly here in the country, rather than in the hustle and bustle of London and court, she kept up an enormous correspondence and delighted in it. Opening one letter after another, she saw that they were filled with talk of Robert Walpole, the King’s minister, made First Lord of the Treasury last spring as reward for his handling of the South Sea Bubble.

  “Walpole is the champion of cheats and swindlers,” wrote one.

  “The King does not like or trust him,” claimed another. “Walpole will not last six more months as minister.”

  She looked over to a portrait hanging among the many others in this long rectangle of a room. Her dead Richard gazed out serenely from inside his painted world.

  I remember these skirmishes in the highest reaches of power where Walpole now is, the Duchess thought. Betrayal, often by the very men who had maneuvered you into the circle of power, came with the honor of serving the King; one survived, or one didn’t.

  “Will you visit the Holleses?” asked Annie.

  “No.”

  “Is there a letter from the Duke?” asked Annie.

  “No.” The Duchess answered tersely. Richard, she thought—it was her habit to converse with her dead husband, usually aloud—Tony is even more stubborn than I am. I cannot bear it. I love him. Why does he not forgive me?

  “Why does he not write?” she said to Annie. “I am old. I might die at any moment.”

  “He will write. Allow it time. He will forgive you. I feel it in my bones. He is the best of the lot.”

  The Duchess looked at her.

  “As sweet as his father, God rest his soul,” said Annie. “Sweeter. Kind. As bright as his uncle Master Giles was. Quiet. It is all hidden away. He will be the best of them, it will turn out, when all is said and done. Mark my words.”

  Sweet Jesus, thought the Duchess, the rest of them had died. Who knew how they might have turned out? In the gallery in which she sat, a huge clock began to
drone the hour. It was five in the afternoon.

  One, chimed the clock.

  Tony, thought the Duchess. Word was he had spent the summer in London drinking, drowning his lover’s sorrow at the unexpected departure of Barbara, whom he thought he loved.

  Two, chimed the clock.

  Tony had been so angry when he discovered Barbara was gone. How dare you, he’d said to the Duchess. The truth was you thought I was not good enough for her, Grandmama, but I am.

  He did not forgive her her deceitfulness in the manner of Barbara’s quiet leavetaking, unknown to anyone until too late. He had estranged himself from her. He, whom once she had considered most unworthy to inherit Richard’s title, had come, over the last years, to mean much to her. There were within him certain signs of his grandfather’s mettle.

  We are not pieces upon a chessboard, Grandmama, he had said to her. We are living, breathing creatures with a heart and a soul. He was no fool. He saw at once that she had maneuvered Barbara away from him.

  Three, went the clock.

  A wanton woman, some called Barbara. There were missteps in her past, errors of judgment and impulse, but was she wanton? Ah, Barbara, I will not have you become like your mother—and here the Duchess’s thoughts were as cold as a river running in winter, as if Barbara’s mother, Diana, were not her only daughter, her only surviving child. Once the fairest woman at any court, Diana was still beautiful, as Barbara, Diana’s daughter, was. Beauty is as much a curse as a blessing to a woman, thought the Duchess. Grandmama, I mean to do better, Barbara had said. Do you? Can you, when the gift of your face and young body may bring you so much with so little effort?

  Four.

  Your fault, Roger. Your fault she was wild, your fault she is bankrupt, and what good does it do either of us to say so? You are as dead as Richard.

  Five.

  Family, family was all. She and Richard had built a fortune upon ashes, had made their name as honorable, as known as any in the land. Tony must safeguard it, must now add to it. It was his duty. He might love a hundred women, but marry only one, the one who most added to family fortune and name. And this he was doing, it seemed, despite his drinking and debauchery. He had made an alliance to marry the Holleses’ oldest girl. It was a triumph; they were a good, strong family with much land and in favor with this court.