Now Face to Face

by Karleen Koen

  I will not weep, Slane thought.

  “Look out the window, Diana, and tell me if you see any ships yet,” said Aunt Shrew.

  “Stop it,” said Diana.

  “I must go.” Slane bowed to Aunt Shrew, and for a moment the two of them looked at each other. Under the jangles, the rouge, the harsh flippancy, she was as stunned as he. They had no idea what was happening, whether Ormonde had sailed or not. Slane had only just returned from an exhausting trip to Paris. He’d offered to go to Spain, to give Ormonde an order to invade immediately. The invasion is set for May tenth, they said. King James approves. Even a day may make a difference, he had argued. And so it did. This day was May seventh. Was Ormonde stopped in his tracks, or had he sailed? There was no way to know. They could only wait.

  “You have a care,” she said to him.

  And you also, my sweet friend, Slane thought.

  “Please give your grandmother my apologies and tell her I thank her for her nursing of me. Tell her I am a ragamuffin Irishman with no gratitude or manners in me,” Slane said to Tony.

  “Why are you still in the city?”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “All Catholics were ordered to leave. You have only until morning.”

  “Am I Catholic?”

  “I believe you told my grandmother so.”

  Slane took a breath. Tony’s forcefulness was a surprise. But why? He was of Richard Saylor’s blood. And the Duchess’s. “I haven’t prayed in so long a time I’ve forgotten what I am. I think the truth is, I believe in nothing.”

  “It might be well if you left the city for a time. If you stay, as my aunt says, have a care to yourself,” said Tony.

  Out on the street, Slane walked toward Hyde Park, to see with his own eyes the troops in camp. There had not been one whisper, one rumor of this. He felt the same sense of stunned stillness as when he’d been thrown from his horse, and lay on the ground. It was masterly upon the part of King George, and frightening. Was Ormonde stopped? What was known? How long had the ministry been intercepting Jacobite letters?

  Slane leaned a moment against the brick wall that enclosed one side of Hyde Park. Feeling sick, he touched his head, the bad pain of it with him again. He had waked early in the morning, waked to the sound of drums, the throb in his head matching the beat of the drums.

  Five days ago, six, if the Duke of Ormonde had landed then, these soldiers would have still been scattered across half of England, in their various postings. The first plan would have accomplished that. The Paris advisers clung to their second plan, their precious date of May tenth, saying King George would be gone. There was a possibility Ormonde would still be able to leave Spain. If so, all was not lost. Let him land, let there be one battle, just one battle, here, at England’s heart. For that I would give my life, thought Slane, to be able to look once into the faces of my enemies and battle them for the throne.

  “Here, now,” said one of the guards posted along the fence. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Looking at the King’s fine army.”

  “Never mind looking. You move on, unless you want to talk to my lieutenant and tell him why you linger.”

  He must find Wharton, must go to Arran, to North, to Lord Oxford, to Rochester, persuade them to hold strong, even in the face of this, to await Ormonde. Bad things come in threes. The saying stumbled over itself in his head. There had not been a whisper of this. God, he wanted to weep. The sight of James watching his English troops from across the river at Malplaquet was in his head so clearly. Not a whisper of this. That’s what came of losing Sunderland. They’d have been forewarned, if Sunderland had been alive.

  A FEW hours later, Tony walked with Diana to her townhouse. On the way, they passed the house in St. James’s Square where Barbara had lived when she was in London.

  Fortunate that Harry is dead, thought Tony. In his heart was the ache that was Barbara, only changed now, lessened by his wife. Thank God for that, thought Tony, staring at the tall, narrow front of the house, leased now, to someone else, so that Barbara might collect the rents. Barbara.

  “Do you think there will be war, Tony?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He took Diana’s hand. “Come back with my mother to Lindenmas. It is far enough away from London that you will be safe, at least for a time.”

  She allowed him to hold her hand a moment. They were standing before her townhouse. “You’re kind, Tony. Does your wife please you? You act as if she did.”

  “She does.”

  “Barbara would have pleased you more, you know. In every way.”

  Diana ran up the steps, leaving Tony to stand in the dark, staring after her.

  INSIDE THE house, a man stepped out of the dark of the hall, pinned Diana against a wall, began to kiss her neck, her shoulders, pushed her gown down, roughly.

  “Eat, drink, and be merry,” whispered Charles, “for tomorrow, we die. Sit on that table. Pull up your gown. Yes, like that. What if we die on the morrow, Diana?”

  He bit the tip of her breast, uncovered now. “I leave for Lindenmas tomorrow. I must have something to remember. Your leg, here, where your stocking stops, is smooth, Diana. I have only to think of you to feel desire, and no whore but you satisfies me any longer. Does that please you, whore?”

  In the dark, Diana lay back on the table; there was the sound of candlesticks falling. “Which of us,” she said, digging her nails into his sides, as he entered her and began to move, and the table swayed with the movement, “is the more faithless and lying? Which of us is the true whore?”

  AT SAYLOR House, even though it was dark, Tony found his mother in the garden, overseeing the footmen. At her orders, they were burying all Saylor House’s silver plate and china, and there was much of it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “There will be looting. And don’t think for a moment they will overlook Saylor House.”

  He shook his head at his mother, but found himself only moments later thinking, What would I miss if the house should be looted or burned? The idea of Saylor House being burned touched off something fierce in him. They’d do it, if only to take revenge on my grandfather, he thought, who might have saved James II and therefore the throne for the House of Stuart. But Grandfather chose otherwise, and so do I. He looked around at the walls of Saylor House, festooned with the finest carving, with heavy portraits and velvet damask. My home, he thought. No one will have it, if I must die defending it. There would be children with Harriet. This is theirs.

  By morning, he had all his grandfather’s journals and plans of maneuver in a neat pile to send back to Lindenmas with his mother. And he walked to St. James’s to call on the King, to offer his services in whatever manner might be useful.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  IN VIRGINIA, THE RAINS OF APRIL HAD LED TO THE WARMTH of May, and at First Curle, the seedlings sat in their tobacco hills. Shirt off, sun warm on his back, Blackstone hoed in his garden, the fresh smell of the soil good in his nostrils, the sound of the hoe breaking up clods satisfying, his mind moving over what he’d plant in this soil, moving over Thérèse, missing her; missing Lady Devane, too. She’d be proud of the seedlings. They did well in their hills. They’d do even better in the drained swamp. The finest tobacco on the river, someday. His hoe hit something, and he leaned down to pick up an arc with a grimed ribbon hanging from one end.

  Turning it over a time or two in his hand, he put it into his pocket and continued to hoe, placid in the sun, in his work and thoughts, when suddenly there came a picture of the boy, Hyacinthe, sitting behind Lady Devane on her horse, a bit of shining silver at his neck. It shows I belong to her, Blackstone saw the boy saying, showing the metal arc held with ribbon at his neck. I am proud to belong to her.

  At once he put down the hoe, went into his house, and rubbed soot onto the metal, watching the darkness turn to that dull shine that was silver. He found a cloth and worked at the metal until the arc was as it had once been, shining an
d beautiful, the Devane crest raised slightly at its center.

  What did it mean?

  Colonel Perry was in Williamsburg. All the burgesses were in Williamsburg, at their assembly, where they made laws and listened to that which England desired of them. Could this wait until Colonel Perry’s return?

  No, thought Blackstone. I’ll ride into Williamsburg and show the Colonel myself.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  THE BUDS OF THE HAWTHORN, ENGLAND’S CLEAR SIGN OF MAY, began to open, to fill the air with their sweet fragrance. In every village and every town, word of the plot was sent by special messengers as soon as possible from London.

  “It’s a detestable and terrible thing,” Tim said to Annie. “We must be prepared.”

  Annie handed Cook the ancient muskets and swords the Duchess had ordered pulled down from the walls of the great hall. All the servants at Tamworth would be given them. Anything left over would go to the militia.

  An hour later, an odd procession set off across Tamworth’s lawn: Tim carrying the Duchess, the coachman pushing a wheelbarrow that held a rigid wooden chair, Cook carrying weapons, and the beemaster and Perryman bringing up the end.

  Tim sat the Duchess in the chair at the edge of the meadow. Cook wrapped a blanket around her legs. The beemaster handed her Dulcinea.

  “Go on,” the Duchess said to them, “duty calls.”

  The news of a plot had been read aloud in Tamworth village yesterday after a soldier beating a tattoo on a drum had summoned a crowd to listen. In loyalty to King George, Tamworth village prepared itself for invasion by forming a militia, with Sir John Ashford as its commander, a commander of farmers’ sons; of the village smith, Vicar Latchrod, and Squire Dinwitty; of a few of the village weavers; and of servants from various households, including her own.

  The Duchess shivered, and it was not from cold; she was thinking of an old verse: Thunder in May frightens summer away. I am old, she thought, too old for all of this. In her grandfather’s time, when Cromwell and King Charles I had battled, estates from both sides had been burned to the ground, as brother turned against brother, and father against son. If she had to watch Tamworth burn, she would die from the sight of it.

  She looked out to the field, to the men marching there.

  You make a fine commander, she thought, watching John, who did not deign to notice her. The Duchess stroked Dulcinea. Cook ruined the marching drill by bowing to the Duchess every time he passed her chair. Squire Dinwitty quarreled about what should be done. If the Duchess knew Squire Dinwitty—and she did—he was indignant that he was not commander. One of the farmers’ sons kept tripping over the long pike he carried.

  Not a pretty sight, thought the Duchess.

  The beemaster stood where he was and hummed. He’ll be gone within the hour, summoned by his bees, thought the Duchess.

  “We may as well surrender,” she called out to Sir John, but he ignored her.

  Not even in this crisis did he relent and speak to her. He paid her the debt, as he’d promised, but by mortgaging his farm to a moneylender in London. Fool. Appalled at what he had done, she refused to touch the bag of coins. Moneylenders charged a rate of interest that was often impossible to pay. She who loved Tamworth as if it were a piece of her soul knew what it must have done to him to have mortgaged Ladybeth so desperately. She would have allowed him as long as he needed to pay the sum back, but no. Pride goeth before destruction. Someday she would take the coins and have them melted down and cast in the form of a donkey and send it to him, with her compliments. View yourself, she’d say. Ass.

  Dread, thought the Duchess, I am filled with dread, truly afraid. Any day—such was the word—Ormonde was landing with a force of men. And the Duchess of Marlborough had written to tell her that her husband, a soldier who, like Richard, had defined the times of King William and Queen Anne, was dead, after a long time of suffering. Was it an omen?

  They had belonged to her other life, that life of policy and intrigue, a life she had been born for, had played until her last card was taken from her, that card being Richard.

  Oh, Richard, she thought, the last of the warriors is gone. His funeral will rival the pomp of yours. But King George was ordering it put back, fearing what mobs in London might do. Richard, I wish you were here with me. Another war looms; more bloodshed, more anger and revenge. It should be finished, Richard, but it is not.

  “Picture an anthill,” wrote Louisa, her sister-in-law, from London, “which has just been stepped upon. So it is in London, among the offices of the ministers. Men come and go at all hours, and no one in London sleeps, expecting Ormonde and his fleet daily. The wildest of rumors fly about. No man or woman speaks freely or leaves home for more than an hour at a time. The naming of those who are supposed to have headed this plot range from the ridiculous to the foolish.”

  Where was Tony? There was no word from him. He should come to see to her. The Jacobites would murder her in her bed because she was Richard Saylor’s widow. Richard would have been Jacobite, but for her. Who knew that? She and God and Annie. The times made her think of it. It was not something she wished to think upon. It was a regret.

  She was old for regrets, but she had them. Barbara, Harry would have been in this, and you and I would have been fretted to death. He’d have involved us in his plotting; we would not have been able to say no to him. War. I am afraid.

  MAY MOVED to its middle part in the calendar. Robert Walpole sat alone in a garden, pudgy, strong fingers moving, slowly, methodically, along the back of the bench, his face, with its plump jowls and perennial jolly-squire smile, showing little, only the steady, almost unblinking stare indicating the forward movement of a mind that was practical, tough-fibered, amazingly shrewd, and born to the task at hand.

  The view from the bench upon which he sat was of the Thames River, its boats, wherries, small yachts, even a barge or two. He was surrounded by the buildings that had formed the texture of his life: St. Stephen’s Chapel, in which the House of Commons met; the Treasury Building, made from what had been a royal cockpit, an arena for a favorite and bloody sport in which roosters were pitted against one another to fight until death. The cockpit was among those buildings left of Charles II’s Whitehall Palace, which had once covered these grounds in its sprawl.

  This was a place of odd little courtyards, a magnificent church, a prison, private gardens and houses, lanes, alleys, narrow streets, the law courts, buildings spared when Whitehall burned, half their stone fronts barnacled with small taverns and shops, hundreds of years of history, of intrigue and machinations, plottings and secrets, all squeezed between the river and the royal parks. This was his life. He knew every nook, every odd corner, every silent garden here. And it was to one of these gardens, small and half forgotten, that he came in times of turmoil to think.

  Another invasion attempt.

  The troops were still encamped in Hyde Park. The King’s mistress, the Duchess of Kendall, drove with the King’s granddaughters to look at them daily. The royal family was outraged, and under that outrage, fearful, the Prince of Wales blustering, full of bravado.

  His Majesty, upon the other hand, was another story: quiet, mostly silent, listening to the daily reports of his ministers as information was slowly gathered in, as the best of their agents broke Jacobite codes. Who, he asked Walpole, are the chief plotters?

  There was no one with them, and the King spoke English—fairly well, better than Walpole would have imagined. Walpole had a sudden, startling moment in which he remembered all the times he or another minister had tossed off quick, slighting remarks, trusting that the King’s English left him unable to grasp them.

  Sunderland knew, thought Walpole, knowing the way Sunderland always did certain things, how good the King’s English was. How he must have laughed at me at times. How he must be relishing this moment, and my discomfort, in the hell in which he burns.

  Walpole told His Majesty the names, names he and Lord Townshend had carefully pieced together fro
m references in the letters. No one was named directly; all had a code name or cipher given them.

  The King had been silent a long time.

  There were no great surprises; still it was hard to know that a man who had bowed before you only the other evening in a drawing room had also actively and carefully plotted treason against you for a year or more.

  Proof? he had asked after a moment.

  Here was the hard part.

  Nothing yet which will stand in court, though we have someone in Paris who is supplying information, Townshend and Walpole said. There’s the matter of reference to the gift of a dog which might aid us. It’s mentioned in letters we know are Jacobite.

  His Majesty was not impressed.

  How pleased I would be, said His Majesty, to see the back of this insidious plotting broken once and for all. Something like a trial, said His Majesty, someone significant losing his head would give people pause. How grateful I would be for pause.

  Tap, went Walpole’s fingers upon the bench.

  Rochester.

  Would it be possible to capture the best-known, the wiliest, the most outspoken of Tory bishops? Rochester led this; all the signs in the letters pointed to him; a dying wife, his gout, his calling as a priest.

  To convict him of treason.

  Off with his head.

  And so break the bad habit Tories had formed of consorting with Jacobites when things did not go their way? It would break the Church, too, make it more amenable to policy.