Now Face to Face

by Karleen Koen

  The Duke of Marlborough’s funeral was in another few days. Perhaps by then he could present something to the King. He let it be inferred he would. He needed to present something soon; he could see it in the King’s eyes.

  Risk was part of the position he held, but a man got tired of risk, longed for certainty.

  Tell His Majesty we cannot do it, said Townshend, as tired as Walpole was. That meant dismissal—not immediately, perhaps, but down the road.

  He would not be dismissed. This was his life. He was destined for even greater things. Surely someone would break, run out into the open like a frightened hare, and he’d have him then, the hare that led to the bishop who led to glory.

  There was another name that had come up, whose trace he must follow. He sighed, tired of small fish.

  Christopher Layer was the other name.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  A WEEK LATER, SLANE, JUST BACK FROM PARIS, LOOKED AT THE lines sent him for the part he would perform at the end of August in London’s traditional Bartholomew Fair.

  He could not concentrate, and he put the lines to one side to play with his finch, to lay his hand atop the table and crumble bread upon it. The finch was flying about the chamber, and he waited for her to settle, to land on the table and hop to his hand for the bread. This was a new chamber he’d moved to, and she was not happy in it yet. He’d left the door of her cage open for days, but only today had she ventured out to fly. It was almost as if she sensed the trouble brewing, and preferred the confinement of her cage to the uncertainty of freedom.

  In the last week, some significant arrests had been made. Before, it had been the fringes Walpole mucked in, but in the last three days, he’d swept into his net three important agents—men who, if frightened badly enough, could give evidence against important nobles, secret Jacobites. The Bishop of Rochester was just a breath away from these noblemen, as their immediate superior.

  What source had Walpole stumbled upon?

  Slane had just seen one of the agents onto a boat for Ireland. The other two were under house arrest and he could not get to them.

  Tomorrow the Duke of Marlborough would be interred in Westminster Abbey, a grand event in which most of the court and the highest officers of the army would participate. It was all but accepted that Rochester, who was to conduct the funeral service, would be arrested immediately afterward, that others, dukes and earls, would join him in the Tower of London. The city rattled with expectation.

  Slane had met with Rochester for a long time yesterday, trying to persuade him to leave England clandestinely, not to perform the funeral service at all, but the old Bishop was adamant: Walpole will not run me from my duty, will not frighten me into unnecessary exile. And yet Rochester was frightened. His gout pained him so that even with crutches he could barely walk; his temper was so short that even Gussy showed the wear of bearing it.

  Slane could feel it, could feel Walpole’s mind moving over what was known, tenaciously searching. Walpole was calling him, this gosling—this prize an ambitious minister wished to present to his King—out into the open. He could feel that, too. A true gosling would be delivered to Walpole tomorrow; there would be no message, just the creature. It was Slane’s way of taunting Walpole and, perhaps, distracting him from his hunt of the others.

  They knew who had betrayed them in Paris. The betrayal was disheartening; the man was one Jamie had trusted totally. He had helped form the invasion plot itself. Save those you can in England, Jamie had written. Slane had gone to Rome to see him. I do not wish my subjects to suffer any more than they must. Help them, Slane, until you consider it too unsafe to do so. Succor Rochester. I know he failed us this time, but there are past loyalties to consider. And he is old, Slane, and alone. Jamie would think of that. It was one of the reasons Slane loved him.

  The finch dove low at the table. Slane did not move his hand. Exercises in patience were good for him, strengthening resolve, the ability to wait, to allow events to unfold. Walpole was a master of patience. Look how he prodded and probed, not giving up. Would he act tomorrow?

  Gussy, Slane had said yesterday, you must think about leaving England, my friend. He himself would travel soon, north and south, to encourage the leaders—they were hidden away in their country homes, like mice hoping the cat would pass them by—to leave England. He would offer them King James’s support. He knew, and they knew, that the offer meant little, for Jamie had nothing to give—no land, no houses, no great court offices that meant anything other than plotting. To leave meant exile and a hand-to-mouth life. Nonetheless, that was what he was requested to do, offer them Jamie’s profound gratitude and succor, such as it was.

  Coins and muskets must be collected, hidden away in safe places, for another time, for the next time, so that they could say—when the next chance presented itself—“See, we have many arms, much coin awaiting us in England.”

  The finch hopped onto the table.

  “Yes, sweetheart, that’s it. Come and take the bread.”

  He coaxed her as sweetly as if she were a woman he loved. He was anxious to see the woman he loved. Such rumors about her. She’d not been still this last month. Slane smiled at the thought of that.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Startled, the finch flew at once to the highest perch in the chamber, a peg that held some of Slane’s clothes. In another moment, Slane was at the window, and out of it, dropping down onto a porch roof. No one knew where he was, save Louisa and Gussy.

  Instincts up, like a cornered animal’s, he scanned the street below, but saw no soldiers, no King’s messengers sent to arrest. There to his right was the bulk of the Tower of London, its high, massive wall a barrier no one penetrated, few escaped. Some Jacobites—those captured in 1715, those whose heads had not been severed from their bodies—languished there still, in dark, forgotten dungeons. Fitting, somehow, that Slane should be near.

  He dropped to the street, tensed, a cat ready to spring. The drop started his head aching. He walked across the street and into another alley, and from the shadow of a doorway, watched.

  A man walked out of the building in which Slane lodged: Louisa’s servant, her most trusted one. Slane stepped out onto the street and called his name.

  “You’re to come at once,” the man said.

  “What’s happened?”

  “I don’t know, sir, but something. She’s been weeping all the morning.”

  Rochester must have been arrested. Finally Walpole had made a move. He could feel a tremendous tension inside himself. Who was next? And would Rochester hold firm?

  In the carriage, he again questioned the servant, but the man could tell him nothing but that a note had arrived this morning, and that Lady Shrewsborough had fallen to her knees on reading it and begun to weep.

  Slane climbed her stairs two at time, and there she was, sitting in a chair, her face so pinched-in that it made his heart hurt.

  “You’ve come,” she said.

  “Close the door,” he ordered the servant. He took her hands in his, rubbed them tenderly. Your brother was called the Lionheart, he thought, but so might you be a lion’s heart, dear Louisa.

  “Is it Rochester? Is he arrested? When?”

  “It’s Lumpy. He’s married.”

  “I don’t understand.” He did not. His mind was somewhere else completely.

  “Lumpy. He’s married Diana.”

  Slane was silent, struggling to take in the news, not to follow a sudden impulse to laugh.

  “They went down to Fleet Street like a common sailor and his whore, and were married this morning. They are now on a journey to his home in Newcastle. He did not even have the decency to tell me to my face, but wrote me a letter, which I spat on before burning, curse his ancient hide. I ought to have known she was up to no good. She’d been like a Christmas pie, all sweet inside, since she returned from Tamworth last month. Said she and Alice had reconciled. Said seeing Barbara filled her heart with joy. Called on me especially to t
ell me, she said. Her telling of it brought a tear to Lumpy’s eyes. ‘Oh, Sir Alexander, I’ve hurt my ankle and it is not well yet. May I lean upon your arm?’”

  She mimicked Diana with precise bitterness, and Slane was glad to see the rage. It would hold the pain at bay.

  “I was thrown off the scent by the worry about this invasion, by these terrible rumors about Rochester and other men who are my old friends. I was the only family she had in London, she said. Could she stay near? Which ought to have warned me at once, since nothing truly frightens Diana. But I was stupid. And all the time she was stalking Lumpy. ‘Sir Alexander,’ she called him. Stalking him like a cat, smiling at him in that way she has. ‘Dear Aunt Shrew,’ she said to me yesterday—yesterday, Slane—‘how glad I am to be with you.’ Curse her lying, tiny pebble of a heart. I loved that man. Unfair tactics, sashaying around all plump and smooth. Of course he succumbed.”

  “Louisa, I have no words—”

  “I have, and plenty of them, if I ever lay eyes on either of them again, at which point I will end hanged at Tyburn Tree for murder. Promise me you’ll be there to pull on my legs so that my neck breaks clean. And tomorrow I must go see my old friend Marlborough buried. And perhaps I’ll see them arrest Rochester, too. And there will be talk of this marriage—people will know by then. Tommy Carlyle knows of it; he saw them on Fleet Street. He has already called to tell me he saw them coming out of a church, and so I told him the truth, pretended I did not care, said they had my blessings, but I know he did not believe me. Everyone will be laughing over it tomorrow, and I will have to pretend I do not care, and I do. I love that man, Slane!”

  He raised her hands to his lips, kissed them.

  “I know you do.”

  His action broke past the rage, and she began to cry, her wrinkled face puckering in like some grotesque child’s, the weeping that way too, open and abandoned, the way a child might weep. Slane pulled her forward into his arms, thinking, My dear, dear Louisa; and she wept in them, wept the way a woman of passion weeps, deeply, completely. It would have been frightening to see if he had not had a mother who was a woman of passion also. There was nothing halfway in such a woman’s love. To have her at your side was to have vigor and force and determination mingled with startling tenderness. How tender they could be. His wife had been so; and his mother had loved and lost and yet on she marched into life, fan furled, head tilted. Like a cat that must heal its wounds, she might go and leave life awhile, might retreat into a convent or some chamber of her house, but always, always, she emerged, faith in something—in herself and in her God—intact once more. I must experience tears as well as joy, my little one, she’d told Slane. That is life, and I want all of life. I will have it. And so love had come to his mother again, because she was not afraid of its coming.

  He held Aunt Shrew close and patted her back, and thought, I will stay with you, dear friend, all this day and tonight, too. I’ll see that you are rouged and dressed to within an inch of your life tomorrow. You’ll go to the funeral, go on pride if nothing else. You must go anyway, so that we see what happens with Rochester. Ah, sweetheart, you are as brave and gallant as a man. Too bad of Pendarves to break your heart.

  Barbara would be at the funeral tomorrow. Her cousin, the Duke of Tamworth, would march near the front of the procession in honor of his grandfather, Marlborough’s colleague and fellow general. O noble warrior, O valiant man, we will not see your like again.

  Barbara would be there as the King’s guest. She had been at Hampton Court almost since arriving from Virginia.

  Rumors were rampant: that Barbara would be made lady-in-waiting to the Princesses, that she was the King’s new mistress, that she was the mistress of the Prince of Wales, that the pair shared her. People were talking about Devane Square, saying that it was going to be made what it once had been; people were saying Walpole had explicit instructions from the King to see her fine reduced, that the King was going to build a palace where Devane Square had been.

  EARLY THE next morning, Slane was up, and walking through St. James’s Park from Louisa’s house. There were fields between Piccadilly and Tyburn Road, and in those fields he’d find rose-a-ruby blooming, so Jane said. Jane had told him about the red flower, one of the last ones thriving as August turned to fall and chill: The country maids believe, said Jane, that if they don’t have a sweetheart before it goes out of flower, they will have to wait another year, until it blossoms again. It would not do for Barbara to wait another year for a sweetheart.

  A great bunch of rose-a-ruby picked, he walked to Devane Square, passing the few townhouses finished, the church. More rumors: that Sir Christopher Wren, quite old now, was wild to finish this church. It is my best, he said, a jewel of its kind. Sir Gideon Andreas held large notes against Barbara’s estate and could take Devane Square, except that the King demanded otherwise, it was said. Barbara had clearly maneuvered herself into a good position since she’d returned.

  Slane walked to the fountain. Moss scaled its sides, scaled the stone figure of a nymph. The house had been beyond, he’d been told. There was nothing now, except a landscape canal. One could see the church spire of the hamlet of Marylebone. The bell in the spire of the church at Marylebone began to ring as Slane walked around the fountain, gazing at the nymph from every angle. The sculptor had left nothing much to imagine. There was the slim grace of the naked body, the sweet roundness of the arms, the long back curving into hips and buttocks, the beautiful stone face half hidden by cascading hair. What kind of man were you, Devane, thought Slane, to show your wife so? Did you brag or did you love?

  Only the outward was captured in this stone, none of the inward, and so to Slane’s eyes it was not nearly beautiful enough. He dropped a blossom of the rose-a-ruby in the nymph’s arms and blew her a kiss before walking back toward Aunt Shrew’s, back toward this day on which Rochester and who knew who else might be arrested.

  “PET, IT is not that I do not love you….”

  Pendarves stepped back, as if Diana were a witch and he the newt that would be tossed into her brew. She was in his bedchamber, but not upon the bed, rather sitting in a chair, skirts raised, head thrown back, eyes closed, touching herself, giving herself pleasure, as boldly as any whore. More boldly. He couldn’t take his eyes from her hand, moving in a sure, circular rhythm against herself. She made sighing noises in her throat and bit her lip and put her other hand to her breast. She could completely satisfy herself this way, and Pendarves found it more exciting, and more frightening, than anything he’d ever seen.

  “You must stop….” He couldn’t catch his breath. He was too old for this on so frequent a basis, he’d tried to tell her that, but she didn’t seem to understand, and he—well, he was weak, a man, flesh and bones, after all. Sometimes it crossed his mind that she was a witch and trying to kill him. Like metal near a magnet, he moved closer to her, cursing his weakness, yet unable to overcome it. Diana put her hand on him and growled. She is going to kill me, thought Pendarves. Then, as she began to unfasten the buttons upon his breeches: What a wonderful way to die. The next thing he knew he was fainting, and it wasn’t the first time. His last thought was the hope he always hoped these days—that he’d wake alive.

  THE FUNERAL was over. People milled about one of the courtyards of Westminster Abbey, the Bishop of Rochester among them, as well as Robert Walpole and the King of England. If there was to be an arrest, there was no sign of it, but there was a tension in the courtyard, a tension that had been inside the cathedral and that was almost visible, so present was it. People vibrated with it, rustling and talking, something restless and odd in their rhythms, looking again and again to Walpole, to the King, to Rochester, waiting for the façades to fall, almost willing it.

  Barbara, following an impulse to be alone, to escape the unnerving tension, some of which was her own—everyone had stared and whispered when she had entered the cathedral as part of the King’s household—had managed to find a quiet spot behind one of the supports o
f an archway. She hid in its shade and took a moment to gather her wits. Gussy was here. She did not know what she would do if they took Gussy away. Or Wart. She did not know if she could be silent in the face of that, be discreet.

  She heard the sound of someone’s footsteps, a distinctive footstep, halting, short, as if someone possessed a limp. Finally, she thought, here we are, face to face. What would he say to her?

  “You dropped this,” Philippe said. In his open hand was a medal. She knew it at once. “James as our only salvation,” the Latin upon it read. Prince of darkness, she thought, how you would adore to trap me. Well, you won’t. What had Tommy advised? Never reveal your thoughts. It’s court, pet, he told Barbara. The motto of a court is caress the favorites, avoid the unfortunates, and trust nobody.

  “It isn’t mine.”

  The dead are not dead, the slaves sang, and yet the Duke of Marlborough had just been given his death song, and Roger was gone, and she and Philippe seemed doomed to be left behind arguing over whom Roger had loved best. That was what this was ultimately about, wasn’t it? Whom Roger had loved best?

  “How proud Roger would be,” he was saying, “to know you are giving yourself to so worthy a man as the Prince of Wales. I congratulate you upon your cleverness.”

  Cruel man, with your smooth and malicious voice, how dare you insult me so? Do you think me fifteen and a girl still? Do you think I have learned nothing, that I have no weapons, no claws of my own? She knew what to do. She’d thought it over carefully. Here was a man, if ever there was one, to use. She must not let her anger with him interfere in her use of him.

  “Wouldn’t he be proud of the pair of us? My curtsying to a frog and your aiding a false friend.”

  She had him, this man of ice, this man of disdain and deliberate cruelty.