Now Face to Face

by Karleen Koen

  “‘Cut them on Monday, cut them for health,’” Clemmie muttered as she set out the gown her mistress would wear this day. The sounds coming from her—she resembled nothing so much as a barrel, round and large—were a rumble, but clear enough so that the words “Monday” and “health” emerged.

  “You sound like my mother’s familiar, that great crone Annie. Be quiet or I’ll send you to Tamworth to do penance for me.”

  “‘Cut them on Friday, cut them for sorrow. Cut them on Saturday, your true love tomorrow—’” came from Clemmie’s direction.

  There was a knock on the door, imperious and impatient. Diana and Clemmie looked at each other; there was only one person who would have pursued Diana to Hampton Court.

  Robert Walpole, one of the King’s ministers, First Lord of the Treasury, and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and surely one of the most hated men in England at this moment, opened the door and walked inside, just as if he and Diana had not been quarreling since June.

  “By God’s blood! You might have at least let me know you were going to leave London,” he said, pulling off his dark periwig, tossing it upon the bed, running one pudgy hand through cropped hair, taking in the spectacle of Diana at her dressing table, one stocking on, one off. The garter tied round the leg with the stocking on it featured an embroidered motto in bright thread.

  “‘My heart is fix’d, I cannot range.’”

  He quoted the motto on the garter. He knew it because he had given her the garter, and the stockings, too.

  She was in her chemise and stays. The chemise was white lawn, as sheer as nothing, and through it Walpole could see her bare legs, her thighs, the dark hair between. The stays had been embroidered with silver thread, and over her shoulders she wore a Spanish shawl, its garish colors suiting her dark beauty. Her breasts rose out of the stays, almost completely uncovered, lush, full. Walpole was not a man easily discouraged, but the continued quarrel with Diana was telling on him. She had been his mistress for a long time, but since Barbara’s leaving in June, they had been quarreling, and it hurt his heart.

  “How dare you leave without telling me where you were going?”

  She blamed him for the fact that Roger’s fine was not more reduced, blamed him for Barbara’s leaving. “Diana, I will not abide this treatment. No woman is going to deal with me so. I could wring your neck like a chicken’s and not regret it once—”

  Tiny scissors went sailing past his face. Just to the left of him they bounced from the painted paneling and fell like an ivory-and-gold butterfly to the floor. If they’d hit an eye, they would have blinded him. The action seemed to calm him.

  “Everyone is talking of the duel,” he said. “I’m told Tom Masham is quite ill.”

  The throwing of the scissors had not surprised him, but the immediate weeping that followed these words did. Diana was capable of the most beautiful weeping he had ever seen a woman do, with no reddened eyes, no dripping, red nose, just tears running down that once-matchless face from still-matchless violet eyes. It meant nothing when she did so, except that she had decided tears would obtain whatever it was she wished to have. But he knew her well enough to know that she wept genuinely now.

  Some emotion within her was touched, some truth, some need. He was so used to her tricks and lies that it threw him off stride. Walpole felt his own throat tighten with emotion. Diana had had her share of sorrow. Children dead, her daughter widowed, gone away. Damn it, she was the most immoral, selfish, ruthless bitch he had ever had the misfortune to know, the fortune to bed, and the stupidity to care about. He went to her and knelt down at her side and took her in his arms, crushing her against his great belly. She felt as supple as any man’s dream of an odalisque. He desired her, as he always desired her, and he loved her, the more fool he. Her weeping broke his heart.

  He held her to him, and she was soon ruining his fine shirt with her powder and rouge and lead eyepaint, spoiling his expensive waistcoat and the lace cravat around his neck. Now, he thought. He half dragged, half carried her to the bed, and lay down there beside her. They had been quarreling for two months. He held her close and stroked her bare back under the Spanish shawl, his hands roaming to the front of her stays, untying the laces, as he murmured to her, determined, concentrated.

  Clemmie, seeing which way the wind blew, put the gown away and closed the door to leave them alone.

  “Diana…” Walpole’s fingers kneaded the bare flesh of her back, then drifted again to her front; he had finally opened the stays. God, her breasts. He wanted to put his face between them. He wanted to touch them, lick them. It had been too long since they’d lain together.

  “Barbara ought to be here. She ought to take advantage of this duel—” she was saying.

  He kissed her mouth, kissed her face, and unbuttoned the buttons of his breeches at the same time; he was nothing if not single-minded. Diana had been out of his bed for too long over this quarrel, and while women were easy to find, a woman like Diana was not. He could feel the desire in him like flame, licking at him the way a woman might, tongue hot and pointed. Her tears only made him desire her even more. He found her weeping extraordinarily erotic.

  He groaned and bit her neck, even though she tried to move away. Her breasts were bare now, and he moved over onto her, stopping the litany of her daughter’s name with his mouth. And then he could not help himself—the sight of her, her near nakedness, her smell, her lushness, their quarrel, her anger with him, his with her, made him a wild man.

  He pulled off the chemise and held her legs apart with his and was pushing into her. And then he was home, he was in his glorious, wanton, maddening Diana, and only he knew he loved her and how dangerous that made their relationship. For she had no compassion, no kindness in her. She was brutal and primitive, the most selfish person he had ever known in his life; God help him for loving her. If his wife had been dead—and thank God she was not—he would have married her, knowing that he could count on neither loyalty nor passion to hold her. She was a wild beast; for this moment he tamed her, made her bend to his will, but for this moment only.

  God, those thoughts made him frenzied. He wanted to crush her with his desire, his need. He wanted to scream it into the morning. He moved against her steadily, purposefully, quickly for a heavy man. He spent himself in her, and his tongue was down her throat, all inside her mouth, here, there, everywhere, he wanted her so, he needed her so. And she lay like a rag doll under him and did not caress him or kiss him back once. And then there it was, that peak all men climbed for, making him shiver, making him groan, making him sink against her and whisper her name. He had enough sense—but only just enough—not to tell her he loved her.

  She wiggled out from under him; he half expected her to get up, to order him out, but she lay quiet beside him, and he thought to himself: Yes, she has missed my presence in her bed. We will mend this yet.

  Sleep was coming over him with the safety of that thought, with the satisfaction of desire. God, he needed sleep. He had not had a peaceful night’s rest since they had begun to quarrel, and now the mob in the streets was howling for his head—they called him Skreen Master, old Skreen, screening the guilty, called him many another vile thing. He felt like a bear baited by hounds, those pitiful motheaten bears pulling against their chain while dogs lunged at them, dogs whose jaws locked until death once they had you in their vise. The things said of him, written of him. He had feelings, like any other man.

  God’s wounds, it was good to be here in bed with Diana, his terrible, selfish love, who would forgive him. He’d make her forgive him. Sunderland. Wily, corrupt viper of a fellow minister he had no choice but to clasp to his bosom. There was a rumor that there were to be changes in the ministry, that the firm of Townshend and Walpole, as he and his brother-in-law liked to call themselves, was out—never mind that the Walpole of it had saved the King’s favorite minister, the viper himself, from being forced to resign in disgrace. Trust; there was no one to trust at these levels…. He was asle
ep, like a baby, large and sated, for the moment.

  Diana leaned up on one elbow and stared at him, beached beside her. She pushed him, and he rolled over with a snore. His shirt had opened to show the thick, dark, curling hair on his chest. His breeches were open, too, and he was exposed there, satisfied, limp. He had not even taken off his shoes.

  “Rutting hog,” she said. She pulled his wig from the table and wiped between her legs with it.

  Later, when he woke, she was at her dressing table again, and Clemmie was kneeling to tie a garter upon her leg. Walpole sat up in the bed and began to pull off his crumpled clothes, throwing them to the floor. Dark, thick hair covered his shoulders, arms, hands. In his middle years, he was stout, solid, with legs like the trunks of trees.

  “‘My heart is fix’d, I cannot range.’ I cannot range, sweetling, for you have my heart. First decent rest I have had since you told me you never wanted to see me again.”

  He chuckled, plumped up the pillows, and settled himself back into them, for all the world as if he were in his own bedchamber, among his own family, the picture of good humor and sincerity. He was good-humored and sincere in it most of the time, two of his most valuable traits.

  “Clemmie, my dumpling, my fine, fat cow, a cup of wine, if you please. Where are you going, pet?”

  “I am supposed to walk with the Prince in the garden. This duel has upset him. He will complain about Barbara to me. A year,” she was saying to her frowning self in the mirror, “it will likely take a year before she can be home again. If she were here, we could act—”

  And do what? thought Walpole.

  “It is a colony, for God’s sake—what will she find to do there? I go half mad when I think too much upon it, all she gave up,” she was saying.

  Tommy Carlyle, one of the more outrageous courtiers, had appeared at court with a black band around his arm just after the news was everywhere that Barbara had gone to Virginia. For whom do you grieve? he had been asked. I grieve for Lady Alderley’s failed ambitions, he answered. London and court had laughed over the answer for weeks.

  “—She could never be satisfied watching hemp—”

  “Tobacco,” corrected Walpole, absently.

  “—grow on the wrong side of the ocean. She is too headstrong, impulsive. She always was. I blame my mother for all this.”

  And me, and anyone else you can, he thought. Except yourself.

  “I am writing to her, this very day, to come home now,” Diana said. “And by the by, I am leaving for London this afternoon.”

  What’s she up to? wondered Walpole. No good. “Come here and let me comfort you, my sweetheart. Let me hold you in my arms. Last time, I had thought only of myself, but this time, I will see you pleasured, too—”

  “She would not have left, if the debt were not so large. The debt would not be so large if Roger’s fine had been reduced.”

  “Diana, I could do no more than I did. How many times must I tell you that in time, the fine will be reduced. Although this broadsheet has done little to help. People are muttering about the South Sea again, as if it were autumn a year ago and the stock was just starting to fall. When memories are not so vivid, I will see that the fine is reduced.”

  If I am still a minister, he thought. Besides, Barbara’s young. A journey to a colony was a moment in the longer span of her life. In a year or so, he’d have a fair portion of the fines returned; the King had promised from the beginning to support it. Will they use the Bubble against me for the remainder of my reign? the King had asked.

  Yes.

  “I said, come here.”

  To his great surprise she obeyed; but afterward, when she had finished her dressing and left him alone, he felt desolate. He lay back against the pillows on her bed, staring up at the design woven in the canopy above him, thinking about the broadsheet, so vicious, striking sharply and accurately, like a snake, to wake memories of loss and anger at that loss. The viper Sunderland, the King’s favorite minister, argued that Tories ought to be allowed in the cabinet. They would not intrigue with the Jacobites here, he said, if they saw that they might be ministers. The policy of excluding them is wrong-headed. Is it? Walpole asked himself. Am I wrong-headed?

  Only time would tell. A man had to trust time and himself and very little else.

  “YOU ARE eating too much toast,” said Annie. “She has eaten too much all day,” she said to their visitor at Tamworth Hall. It was Jane Cromwell, who was Sir John Ashford’s daughter.

  Scarlet leaves, scarlet berries, scarlet ribbons in her hair, thought the Duchess. October is a scarlet month. From where she sat, she could see a certain Tamworth hillock with its ancient oaks, dropping acorns now, their leaves a wonderful autumn mix of yellow gold and crimson. Jane and Barbara had used to sit under the oaks when they were girls and play at supper with the acorns as cups. Fairy cups, they had called the acorn shells, for the shells were small enough that wood fairies and sprites might drink from them.

  On the ground now, under the oaks, were the ripe acorns, hundreds of them. The birds would leave the shells behind, but there were no more bright-eyed girls to gather them up and play. One was off to the colony of Virginia; the other was in the Duchess’s parlor, with four children of her own, who had come one after another, like the steps of a stair. I don’t like the way Jane is looking, Sir John had told the Duchess before leaving for London, determined to bedevil the Whigs this last session of Parliament. There is some trouble between her and Gussy. Now, Grandmama, I must ask you to look after Jane for me, Barbara had said, cajoling and charming as only Barbara could be. Bah, as if she needed asking. Harry and Jane had courted in the apple orchard. Jane was hers, as all things of Tamworth’s were hers.

  “Mother’s cabbages have not blanched,” Jane was saying to Annie.

  “Did she put them on a stone floor?”

  They might have been discussing a treaty, so serious were they, but fall was a time of purpose and activity for a country housewife: making preserves, harvesting and storing vegetables and herbs, making rushlights and tallow candles sweetened with beeswax, salting and smoking meat, preserving eggs in salt, protecting potatoes from frost; fall was a time of harvest and storage, a time to hoard against the cold, snowbound days of winter, when frost rimmed windows and kitchen pails.

  Barbara would be seeing to something like it in Virginia, she or her servants. The Duchess imagined a vast platoon of servants against the large bulk of a handsome stone house; some of the servants would be dark, like Hyacinthe. The Duchess saw a smaller Tamworth when she thought of Virginia.

  “Such a silly thing,” Jane said. “On the way over, I thought I saw a witch.”

  Jane, always the possessor of a sweet and tremulous smile, had it still. She’d lost a child last year, a boy four years old. No hoyden like Barbara, no rogue like Harry, Jane had always reminded the Duchess of the violets in her woods, their timid petal faces hidden, drooping away from the bold gaze of the world, which hurried by, thinking, because it did not have the patience to see, that there was nothing there. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

  The Duchess had never liked that verse. No one with any sense would want this earth, what with its greed and malice and ill-doing. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. That was more like it. Look after Jane, Grandmama. So ordered Barbara, keeper of the Duchess’s heart. Even wood violets ought to have their day.

  “No such thing as witches. Superstitious nonsense. This is 1721, not 1621,” she said.

  “Gypsies,” said Annie. “I have heard there are Gypsies about.”

  “Have Perryman warn the stable boys to keep an eye out, Annie. I will not have Gypsies camping in my woods. They’ll rob us blind.”

  “Yes,” said Jane. “I must have seen a Gypsy woman in the woods.”

  “I have a mind,” said the Duchess, “to send Barbara geese, sheep, a cheese press, and bees.” Though her beemaster was being difficult about it.

  “I do so miss B
arbara,” Jane said.

  “And I have a mind to plan another herb garden for spring. Of course, I am old. Not as strong as I once was. My mind wanders and will not stay on its task, Jane…. Angelica and anise for the herb garden…perhaps broomwort and balm.”

  “I could help you, while I am here.”

  “Caraway and chamomile.”

  “Comfrey and coriander and cowslip,” said Jane.

  Jane humors me, thought the Duchess, in my dotage. Good, I need humoring, and taking care of. We’ll have the roses back in those cheeks, Janie, yes, we will. You’ll bloom again in the sun of a Tamworth autumn, planning my herb garden. Your mind will be busy with something other than grief.

  “I have a cowslip pudding recipe in my mother’s old receipt book; sweetest thing you ever put a tongue to. Pennyroyal and peony and pansy. Rosemary and rue,” the Duchess said.

  “Rue water kills fleas,” said Annie.

  “Thorn apple and thyme and violet. Such a pretty song I’ve made, Jane,” said the Duchess. “You must harvest the herbs on a fine dry day, only the best of them. Dry them in the shade. Put them in bags to dry, and when they crumble, pour them into wide-necked bottles—”

  “—securely stopped,” finished Annie.

  Jane looked down at her hands. “I cannot stop thinking of Jeremy.”

  Jeremy was the child who had died. Of course Jane could not stop thinking of him.

  “He was always afraid of the dark. At night, I sometimes dream he calls to me. ‘Mama,’ he says, and I wake thinking the coffin is too tight, the sides press in on him. He was afraid of the dark.”

  “I’ll want a good herb garden. There will be no shirking if you’re to help with it. What about a kitten for those children of yours, heh? Dulcinea, shall we give Jane one of our kittens?” Dulcinea was the Duchess’s cat. The Duchess named all her cats Dulcinea.