Now Face to Face

by Karleen Koen

  “Tony is to marry.” She gave the letter to Thérèse.

  She opened another, from Jane, reading news about the children, about Ladybeth Farm, where Jane was staying. “I am in despair,” Jane wrote. “Gussy does not love me anymore.” Nonsense, thought Barbara. Silly Jane. When Barbara got home, she’d see it settled. It was all the strain of the last year, Jane’s losing Harry, losing Jeremy, birthing Harry Augustus.

  There were two letters left, one from her mother, one from a writer unknown. From her mother, anything was possible, from kind words to cruel. She chose the other letter, reading it slowly once, then once again. Robert Walpole sacrificed Roger, the letter told her, allowed him to be scapegoat, so that other ministers of the King might survive.

  She spread out the broadsheets enclosed, feeling ill as she looked at the pictures there—particularly an obscene drawing of Roger, buttocks exaggerated and plump as he raped a figure that represented Britannia. She read the letter once again, looked at the broadsheets. Was it true? Could it be so? She pushed the letter away. I am too upset for this tonight, she thought.

  She opened her mother’s letter, which was short, to the point. Tony had fought a duel but was unhurt; however, his opponent had died. Tony was to be married—would be married by the time Barbara received this letter—thanks to the interference of the Duchess. Barbara was a fool and a coward to have run away to Virginia. She might have been Duchess of Tamworth, rather than letting Harriet Holles have that title. Quietly, Barbara folded the letter up. And greetings to you, too, Mother, she thought.

  I cannot believe Robin would betray Roger, she thought. They were friends. I cannot believe that Tony, my sweet, grave Tony, has fought a duel and the man died. How Tony must be suffering over that.

  The obscene picture of Roger was in her mind. What vileness. What cruelty. But cruelty was everywhere. Look at what lay in the barn. God is everywhere, said Colonel Perry. Let it be so. It must be so.

  “You’re certain it isn’t Hyacinthe.”

  “Yes,” said Thérèse.

  In the corner was an altar Thérèse had made. There was a pillow for her to kneel upon, a homemade carved wooden cross of Blackstone’s. Like Thérèse, he was Catholic; he’d carved it the first year of his indenture. Thérèse prayed for Hyacinthe there. Sometimes for hours, she prayed. The times, she told Barbara, in which my mind goes around and around over him, I must pray or go mad.

  She was there now, kneeling in her nightgown and the New Year’s crimson shawl, fingering the beads of her rosary. Barbara took a pillow from the bed and knelt beside her. Her girlhood had been one of prayers; every evening her grandmother read prayers, and there was church on Sunday, she and Harry laughing at Vicar Latchrod’s droning sermons, in a way they would have never dared to laugh at their grandmother. She’d let the habits drop once she married Roger. It was not fashionable to believe in God, and so, to please him, she had not. But now, like Thérèse, she must, or go mad. Bless me, God, in what I am about to do.

  Did Robin betray Roger? Why?

  SHE RODE early to see the vicar the next day, but at first, he would not perform the service.

  “Unless it is your boy, I cannot,” he said. “The service is for baptized Christians only.”

  “My servant was a baptized Christian,” Barbara said, the line of her jaw standing out.

  The vicar looked her up and down. He’s heard already that we don’t believe it Hyacinthe, thought Barbara.

  “He must be buried today. He was my dear servant. I swear it.” The lie didn’t trouble her at all.

  Captain Randolph and Margaret Cox were waiting at First Curle when she returned with the vicar.

  “Colonel Perry has a fever,” Captain Randolph said. “There is another letter for you. The ships are arriving, one after another, to gather up tobacco, so more may come for you over the next months.”

  Barbara took it from him, recognizing Wart’s scrawl. “You didn’t have to come,” she said to them, “but I am so very glad you have.”

  The afternoon was cold and dreary, threatening more snow. If she’d been in England, there would have been so much to do—funeral invitations to write and send; gloves, mourning rings, and black hatbands to give out; a white-velvet child’s pall to buy for the coffin, which should have lain in state in the house for a while. But she was not in England.

  Blackstone and all the slaves were at the grave, dug this morning. The vicar, clearly disapproving, made the service short. Onto the coffin Barbara and Thérèse threw clods of dirt and some rosemary Thérèse had found frozen in the garden.

  “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life,” said the vicar, and it was ended.

  “There is going to be a fine freeze this night,” Blackstone said.

  “How do you know?” Margaret Cox’s question was sharp. Tobacco seedlings had to survive this and other shifts of weather until April, when, as leggy plants, they were moved into hoed fields during the rains that came that month.

  Blackstone pointed toward one of the slaves, the one from whose foot several toes had been severed. “He is never wrong.”

  “I must be off,” said the vicar, looking toward the sky.

  “I’ll have to be going, too,” Mrs. Cox said. “You’ll understand if I don’t stay with you this afternoon. William, are you coming with me?”

  Captain Randolph nodded his head. Barbara understood. They would be seeing that their seedbeds were covered with an extra layer of hay, just as Barbara would do today.

  “With your permission,” Blackstone said to Barbara, once Randolph and Mrs. Cox were gone, “the slaves would like to send him on his way properly before we cover the grave and then attend to your seedlings.”

  “Yes. Let them do what they wish.”

  It was wild and strange, and in Barbara’s eyes, wonderful, far better than the vicar’s thin, reedy voice reading the funeral service. One of the slaves put a homemade bow and three arrows into the grave. Another came forward and poured something over the coffin. Another broke bread and threw it into the grave. The yard slave put a knife beside the bow.

  “Rum,” said Blackstone, explaining each gesture. “‘I give libation to the Earth because she receives the dead in her pocket,’ that is what he is saying. ‘Receive this food,’ the other is saying. ‘Forgive them that they did not offer it first to you, O Mother Earth, as should be. They are ignorant in their hearts, like children untaught.’ The slaves give him the bow and arrows, the knife, the food and rum, to sustain and protect his spirit on his long journey home.”

  “Home?”

  “They believe their souls return at death to the place from which they came.”

  Now the slaves were throwing dirt upon the coffin. One after another they came and scooped up the cold, damp earth and threw it down. As some of them shoveled dirt onto the coffin, others began to sing; the sound of the words rose up lone and fierce to the low, gray clouds, alien, odd, somehow right. Someone began to beat a drum slowly. The three women Barbara owned—Mama Zou, the yard slave, the girl Belle—tore at their faces with their fingernails and added their cries—higher, piercing—to the men’s.

  “They mourn. ‘It is your grandchild who has died,’ they are telling the Earth,” said Blackstone. “‘Bless him,’ they are saying, ‘upon his journey.’”

  An impulse rose in Barbara. She felt suddenly as if pieces of herself were crying out for relief. She moved into the circle of slaves who were dancing in place, and pulled out the pins in her hair and shook it free, pulling at her face the way the women were doing. She stomped and shouted the way the men did.

  “I weep,” she cried. “I mourn, I do not approve! Bless this child! Bless me! Bless all of us! Take this grief from me. Take it.”

  Blackstone put his arms around Thérèse and rubbed his chin in her hair as he watched. She is not the least ashamed, he thought, his eyes following Barbara as she danced and cried and sang. She acts like no duke’s gr
anddaughter now, no countess with her lace and patches, but some kind of wild woman. Free. Desperate, fierce, grieving, as much a part of the circle of slaves as if she were one of them.

  He could see the slaves were startled, but they moved aside for her after a moment, accepting her and her feelings. Did she know she honored them by honoring their customs? She was saying, Yes, your gods are my gods. She would be blessed for that. They would bless her.

  Her grandfather had been a famous general. Everyone had known of Richard Saylor, had heard some story of his bravery in battle, his kindness and steadfastness in life. The slaves would say her grandfather’s spirit walked in her. If she were a man—my commander—I believe I would follow her to hell, Blackstone thought. Just like this, with her hair down, her face wild, and her spirit free.

  Chapter Twenty

  THAT NIGHT, BLACKSTONE STOOD BEFORE BARBARA IN THE PARLOR. He had been summoned there.

  “I am freeing the slaves,” she said to him, as cool as if she had announced the choice of a different field to hoe for spring. “There will be a prison ship in the river in the spring, and you are to go and choose men from it, buy up their time—”

  “The tobacco seedlings, the fields, the marsh—” Blackstone stammered. He was so surprised.

  “That work will all be done. You are in charge, to decide when each slave is to be freed. It can’t all be done at once, I understand that. As we add a man, we will free a slave. I have much land patented. We’ll send the slaves there, have them build the dwelling that I must build to keep the deed to what I’ve surveyed and patented. We’ll give them the wages we would give anyone else. Also some acres of land among the various tracts I’ve bought, so that they have something.”

  “Your grandmother—”

  “My grandmother placed me in charge of this plantation. She has every confidence in me—has always had confidence in me. And you’re free, too.” She held up a paper; it was the paper marking Blackstone as criminal, sealed by the keeper of the Tower of London, stating the amount of time he was to serve. She walked to the fire and threw the paper in. “You do not owe me any more time.”

  “You cannot do this, Lady Devane. Your neighbors will hate it, will hate you. It will stir up—”

  “I can do anything I please. And I intend to.”

  “You’re mad.”

  “Very likely I am. What I saw in that planter’s barn would make anyone go mad. You may leave my service if you wish, but there will never be another slave upon First Curle as long as I have anything to do with it.”

  He knelt, startling her because he was so big that the movements he made were always big, too. The eyes that looked at her were still a lively and a merry blue, but tears were coming out of them, at the corners, falling into his beard.

  “Wild woman, I am yours, forever, your indenture for life. You know that what you do will bring you great odium? That those you count as friends will oppose it? And you?”

  She nodded.

  When she’d stood in the barn looking down at the body, she’d known it, known all that it would entail. But she’d also known that she was to do it. Who was there to fear? Her grandmother? The Governor? Captain Randolph or Colonel Bolling? King George? The Prince of Wales? There was no one and nothing she was afraid of any more. Absolutely nothing.

  “Well, then, I’ll have to stay as overseer because no one else will.”

  “Good.”

  “Sleep well tonight, Lady Devane. Know that the angels watch over you. They bless you.”

  AS THÉRÈSE brushed Barbara’s hair, Harry sat on top of Barbara’s feet, sleeping, and every now and again, he moaned.

  “He runs with Charlotte in his dreams,” Thérèse said.

  “I forgot to read Wart’s letter.” Barbara took it from a pocket in her gown, opened it. “Come home,” Wart wrote in a short scrawl. “There is an adventure happening, and you are needed.”

  “Oh, no…”

  “What is it? Have I scratched my face, Thérèse?”

  Thérèse brought the silver-and-ivory hand mirror up to Barbara. There in the mirror were reflected a few, first strands of gray, like shining silver purl among the red-gold of her hair. Like the silver maple leaf John Custis had once pressed into Barbara’s hand.

  Hyacinthe’s, thought Barbara, and the boy we buried today. And the broken Barbara, her rebirth; she was a babe, crawling now, on her knees now, but soon, unfurling like the lily’s leaves. She could feel it, far down, under the broken glass, a tough, green, strong, slender, grief-tempered unfurling. A new birth. A new Barbara.

  She wasn’t afraid, not even of the strands of gray. “Never mind,” she said to Thérèse. “It’s all right.” And she meant it.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I DON’T BELIEVE YOU! YOU CANNOT DO THIS! YOU ARE MAD, insane! It is the fever speaking,” said Beth.

  Tears were running down Beth’s face, and she wiped at them, staring at her father as if he were a stranger, as if he were an enemy. She was as angry as ever he had seen her, but the anger was not a child’s. It was certain of itself, calm, determined. It was a formidable thing to see in one so young. She’s like you, Margaret Cox had said to him. Yes, in his younger days, he had been formidable, too.

  “In another month I will be one-and-twenty. I won’t let you do it. I will take you to court if I must.”

  She turned away from him, her skirts whipping out, hissing in the movement. She walked out of the parlor, up the stairs. He heard the door of her bedchamber close, heard the key click as she turned the lock.

  Edward Perry felt as if he had fallen, he felt the way he had the day he saw his son be thrown from his horse and lie still once his body hit the ground. He sat down and found that he was trembling. He touched his face and found that he was weeping. He tried to pray, but no words came. It was dark outside, but in a moment, he would call Cuffy and, fever or not, he would go to First Curle. Lady Devane—Barbara—Barbara would succor him. That he knew.

  All his life he had lived here. A part of his life, this last part, he had tried to live in peace and with honor, not that he had not been honorable before, but gain, land, acquiring, had been foremost in his mind. If he bested a man, cheated a little, well, that was part of the game. Now he would have no peace and no honor, not among his neighbors, whom he loved, whom he had served as burgess and justice for all these many years, not from his daughter, whom he adored, whom he had trained, as he would have trained a son, to inherit his earth.

  He called for Cuffy, ordered the sleigh harnessed, wrapped a cloak around himself. He was ill. He’d caught a fever, but he was going to Barbara. She had buried that boy today.

  Outside, Cuffy helped him into the sleigh, tucked a bearskin around him, told him he should stay home.

  “Do as I say.”

  Bells on the sleigh jangled out. The night was dark, and it was snowing lightly, but Cuffy knew these woods, these paths, as well as Perry did. In two hours, he would be at First Curle. From there, he had to begin life anew. Grief for Beth’s anger twisted in him. He wept, and he was old to weep, he had not the resilience of the young, who wept as if their tears had no bottom. Tears had a bottom at his age, called death.

  BARBARA WAS silent. Perry waited, exhausted. Cuffy had had to carry him into the house, and now he lay, swaddled like a baby in bearskins, upon the bed in her other parlor.

  “Must you free them?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  She twisted a strand of hair. “Must you free them all at once, then? Is there some way to see that Beth does not suffer too much, does not lose too much for your action?”

  He could give everything to Beth, save one plantation. They might work out a plan by which slaves were gradually freed, as others were bought. He would have nothing to do with their buying, but Beth was her own mistress. There was a place farther away, small, upon which he might live. He looked around himself.

  He might live here, in these rooms that would be full of Barbara’s presence after
she left them. He might run her storehouse for her, live on the wages she paid, let it all go, let all of it, the land, the seeing to so many people.

  “What of your place as burgess, as justice?” she asked.

  “I imagine those will go, with my actions.”

  “You do much good.”

  “I can do good whether I am a burgess or not.”

  What if I do not give Beth all, he thought, but two-thirds now, with the promise that I will pay her for every slave freed, that they will be freed over some five years. What if I take my third—must it be a third? I have so much. A fourth, an eighth would be enough—and live from that.

  Barbara pulled blankets up around his shoulders. He had a fever, and she was truly worried for him. “Are you going to free them? It is a large thing that you do.”

  “I am.”

  She smiled. It was her grandfather’s smile. “I’ve thought to do the same. We’ll be despised together, I suppose. The two of us.”

  He held out his hands, and she took them in hers. Pieces of a soul, he thought, closing his eyes, the fever in him hot, deep; fear hot and deep, too, for what he was about to do. For all he lost in the doing of it, for all he gained, pieces of a soul split in two and joined again.

  “Show her,” the angel said. She shows me.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  IT HAS COME.”

  Tim, the Duchess of Tamworth’s footman, held up the book just delivered to the back door of Saylor House in London. “What is it called?”

  Annie took the book from him—it was a New Year’s gift from Tony to the Duchess—and opened to the front page.

  “The Fortunes and Misfortunes Of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c.—”