Now Face to Face

by Karleen Koen

  “Are you drunk or just bent on ruining me?” Colley Cibber was outraged. “Our performance was a shambles—”

  Slane saw a child, one of his beggars’ legion, waiting for him, and he pushed past Cibber. The child whispered that four candles burned in the windows of Westminster Abbey: the signal from Rochester that meant, “I am taken, save yourself.”

  Slane gave the child a coin, as into his mind slipped the realization that his good friend Gussy, Augustus Cromwell, prelate and clerk, scholar and father, best of Jacobite couriers and secretary to the Bishop of Rochester, must surely have been arrested, too.

  GUSSY WAS late. He’d said he would be home by noon. Jane dipped a brush into the sand and whitener and scrubbed madly at her front step. Where was he? What had happened? Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him, Gussy had read to her the other evening, fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass.

  Where were her servants? Did they not hear her son Thomas crying? Cat had overturned the salt cellar when cleaning the table this morning, and Betty threw her apron over her head, crying that salt fell on the master’s chair. Oh, Jane would have liked to shake the pair of them to death. As it was, she put both Cat and Betty to scouring the pots with salt.

  Could they not hear Thomas? Why were they not seeing to their duties? Jane put down her brush and went into the house, and sure enough, her two servants were at the hearth scrubbing pots with brushes for all the world as if a child were not crying. Amelia was pouring salt onto the floor and stepping in it.

  Upstairs, Jane smoothed and kissed her child’s forehead, sat with him in a chair, and began to hum, “Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry, all the pretty little horses, when you wake we will take all the pretty little horses….”

  Where was Gussy? And now who else was crying? It was Amelia. No one cried as loudly as Amelia.

  Downstairs again, Thomas in her arms, she saw Betty brushing at Amelia’s face with a rag.

  “Salt in her eyes,” said Betty over Amelia’s roars.

  “I can’t see, Mama!”

  Jane dipped a rag in the bucket that held their drinking water, gave Thomas to Betty, put the rag to Amelia’s eyes.

  “Can’t see, can’t see—”

  “There now, yes, you can. All we need is more water.”

  “I hate you.” Amelia turned on Betty. “She put salt in my eye.”

  “I never—”

  “Hush! No one thinks you put salt in Amelia’s eyes. Be quiet, Amelia. Give me Thomas, and finish the pots. Where is Winifred?”

  But Jane saw, even as she spoke, placid Winifred under a chair and Harry Augustus sleeping in his basket. At least two of her children were bearable. She took Thomas and Amelia, who were quiet now, but sullen in a way boding no good, outside, to the garden. The vines she and Slane had planted were bedraggled now, ready to be cut down. There was lettuce and cabbage, turnips and marigolds, parsley. She set Thomas down where she could keep an eye on him, gave Amelia a stick with which to dig, and then picked up the hoe and began to loosen the ground.

  Fly, ladybird, fly, north, south, or east or west, fly where the man is found that I love best.

  By dusk, she had cleaned all the steps, swept the hearth, sung ten lullabies, made seedcakes, churned butter, herded in her cow, and fed the chickens. By dusk, her heart was a sick thing in her breast.

  Her children and her two servants sat around the hearth fire now, eating supper, bread and milk and jam. Jane stepped outside to walk by the river. As she walked, she made her plans. Tomorrow, she’d put on her best gown and hat and walk to the village of Richmond and catch a rowboat at the river steps. Once in London, she would go to Westminster Abbey, and if he was not there, then to Saylor House. He is disappeared, she would say to the Duke of Tamworth. He had been kind to them, for Barbara’s sake; he would help her. And she’d go to Barbara. Barbara would know what to do.

  Yes, she thought, standing at the river but not seeing it, that is a good plan. Things are happening, Gussy had whispered to her the last time she was in his chamber at Westminster. Some of the others—Goring, Sample—are going to make their escape. The plan has Slane’s blessing.

  Do we escape? She could not imagine leaving her life here.

  Gussy did not answer.

  Turning back to the house, she saw a horse tethered outside the chapel of ease, and she began to run, her heart rising up like a bird in her breast. Gussy was home. She forgot to curtsy to the altar inside the chapel, could only take him and hug him over and over.

  “Where were you? I was so worried—”

  “I was detained. They questioned me.”

  He was trembling.

  “Who? When?”

  “This morning. They’ve arrested the Bishop, Jane, and I thought they were going to arrest me, but they allowed me to leave. They looked in my chamber for letters, but I had had time to burn them.”

  She was trembling, an involuntary trembling that would not stop.

  “Robert Walpole himself came to me and told me I would hang on the gibbet and then be broken on the rack if I lied. He told me I would be buried in the deepest, darkest dungeon he could find for what was in the letters they’d found in the Bishop’s chamber, in my writing, he said. Then he smiled like a different man, Janie, and said that if I aided him, he would see I rose to be Bishop myself one day. ‘Tell me what you know,’ he said. ‘Save yourself, because the others are doomed.’ I told him, ‘I am innocent. My father-in-law is Sir John Ashford; my patron is the Duke of Tamworth.’ I think that is why they allowed me to go—I mentioned the Duke’s name.”

  “And the Bishop of Rochester?”

  “In the Tower. I must leave London, leave England. Some of us got away safely yesterday. Slane has been urging it. I think that is why Walpole ordered the Bishop arrested—he was afraid Rochester would leave England.”

  How calm she felt, below the screaming disbelief of this. Leave England? This was not happening, except that it was, like Jeremy’s dying.

  “We will say a prayer, Gussy.”

  The only thing worse than Jeremy’s dying would be his father’s hanging. Gussy must leave. She must face that, that he must leave.

  “The one you said to me when Jeremy died. Do you remember that, my love, how you held me in your arms and whispered these words. I hated you, at that moment, hated God, too, but I loved the words. ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.’ He will guide us, Gussy. ‘He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.’ Still waters, Gussy, green pastures, ours for the asking. ‘He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.’ You said that to follow King James was what God guided you to do. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with—’ What’s that?”

  They heard the jingle of horses’ harnesses, horses trotting by.

  “Slane always comes alone—”

  They held hands tightly a moment.

  “Leave now,” Jane said, “this moment—”

  “Augustus Cromwell.”

  The voice echoed in the chapel, bouncing off the stone walls. Gussy stood, as did Jane. A soldier was framed in the chapel’s doorway, a lantern in his hand.

  “In the name of King George, I am commanded to search your house for treasonous papers and to take your person with me.”

  “They followed me,” Gussy said. “That is why they allowed me to go, to follow me and see where I led them.”

  Calmly, Jane walked with her husband to their house.

  It was bedlam, soldiers searching, pulling things out of cupboards and trunks, the children and her maidservants crying. Jane took a crying child and sat down in a chair near the hearth. Feathers drifted down the stairs. They were tearing up her mattress, her pillows. Burn the
codebook and any letters if I am gone for more than two days, Gussy had once instructed her.

  One day, said Slane.

  She saw the agony in Gussy’s face as he held a child in each arm and one of the guards walked back and forth across a certain section of the floor. No! thought Jane.

  But a soldier lifted the loose floorboard, lifted out Jane’s green leather gloves. And letters. And a book that held Jacobite codes. Jane and Gussy looked at each other. Slane had told her to wait one day, but Gussy had said two.

  Fly, ladybird, fly where the man is found that I love best.

  They took him away, she and the children and the servants all crying, following after, out into the night, to where the soldiers had their horses, in her garden.

  “Oh, please,” she and the children begged, weeping.

  “Father!” the children cried.

  “I beg you, have mercy, there is some mistake,” she said, but they took him and rode away to London and left her there among trampled vines and weeping children. That was where Barbara found her, some time after ten of the night hour, sitting in her garden, silent and bereft, surrounded by crying children.

  SLANE LEAPED down from the horse and pounded on the Cromwells’ front door with both fists. Barbara opened it, then shut it behind her, standing before him on the front step. He was startled, not expecting to see her.

  “Gussy—”

  “Taken.”

  “When?”

  “This night. He was gone when I arrived. Jane has only now fallen to sleep.”

  “The children?”

  “As well as can be expected considering soldiers tore their house apart and took their father away before their very eyes.”

  He heard the anger in her voice, and the deep sadness, as if she knew grief and loss well.

  “Amelia screamed for an hour,” she told him. “Winifred was silent, but like a clinging burr. Finally, she whispered, breathlessly, as if she were afraid to say it, ‘Bad men took my father away.’”

  There on the steps with Slane, Barbara put her hands to her face. I won’t cry, she thought. Enough tears have been shed this night.

  Slane pulled her down the stairs, pushed her against the house so that her back was against it, and, with a kind of sigh, leaned into her.

  My beloved, my darling, my heart, Barbara thought, whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. You are not taken, Slane, not yet.

  “Why do you cry?”

  “Jane is my”—her voice broke—“the children cried so—you are here.”

  “Barbara,” he said, and then he was kissing her, greedily, selfishly, as if there were no time for all that must be done. And there was not. He kissed her neck, her ears, and then, wonderfully, how clever he was to know just what she wanted, her mouth again. More, she thought. You are alive, and well, and now there is no time. So let us make time. More. He raised his head, and in the dark, she could half see, half feel the smile on his face. She traced it with her fingers. She loved his mouth, the shape of it.

  “I love you,” he said. He said it in French, in Gaelic, in Italian.

  She began to laugh. She’d never felt more alive in her life.

  “Say no to me now, Barbara, for I have no manners left to stop if you should later want it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Say yes to me again, so I am certain you mean it.”

  “Yes.”

  He took her hand and led her. Thoughts whirled in her like small bats: You’re mad, Barbara, you never do this lightly, you’ll regret it, we may never see each other again, you don’t want to be grieving over a man who has to flee England, grieving over a lover locked in the Tower, grieving over a beloved beheaded. For once in your life, Barbara, be sensible, she was thinking, but they were in some shed, and he was piling hay with one hand, the other holding her, as if she would run away. How little he knew her. And then with great clarity she thought the words she wished to live by: Keep thy heart with all diligence, yes, her heart, her mind, her soul must do what they must do. The bats settled their wings and were still.

  Her fingers fumbled with buttons, with hooks, with the hundred and one intricacies of her jacket and dress, hose and garters, the traps and intricacies of a woman of fashion. He had pulled off his coat and flung it on the hay. He was saying her name, and the way he said it, the desire in his voice, was enough, it was right; her heart went upward to meet that desire the way a dove does its mate calling. And then he was pulling her into the hay beside him, and there wasn’t time to think anymore; there was only time to feel, to touch, taste, be with this man, join him in that deepest of joinings, the one with the most promise, the one with the most heartbreak. It had begun to rain, and the smell of rain, damp leaves, musk, shadow, came into their lovemaking. They were both still half dressed.

  Against ever-expanding bands of sensation, Slane was aware of different things: her arms cool and smooth, her thighs sleek and silky, the arch of her neck, her kisses on his face, dream kisses, rain kisses, raining down. Like the earth outside, he was parched for this, and he would have it, every bit of it, as much as he wanted and more. There was no stopping. He put his hands to her hips to move her against him, lost himself to the movement made. The rain cooled the place where they lay, and the sound of it was mixed, steady, and drumming, into his heartbeat, into the rhythm between them. There was nothing else—no failure, no fear, no arrests, no friends gone, perhaps lost forever like fathers and brothers before them—there was only this woman who held him, whom he held.

  “What of a child?” he managed to ask, to see what she would have him do, before it was too late and he could do nothing.

  “No children for me, Slane,” she said, very softly.

  Later, he would explore the vibration he heard in her voice. Now, he closed his eyes to the pleasure. She was whispering his name, biting a little of his ear, saying “Ah” in a soft voice as she moved, kissing his neck, his ear, his cheek, his mouth, running her tongue over his lips, across his teeth. He twisted his hands in her hair. Barbara, you are a wanton witch who has my heart, he thought, I knew you would be generous in love. And then he stopped thinking; there was only her, only him, only this between them, and it wasn’t enough, there must be more, there would be more, he must have her again and again. He said her name as he moved toward that which his mother called the losing of souls, the intertwining of man and woman and desire and God into one.

  When it was over,—the frenzy of the end left both of them laughing, then silent, chastened—he held her close. I cannot let her go, and I must, he thought. He stroked her hair, her bare back; the riding jacket had left her person, and somehow they’d pulled off her stays, in their need to touch each other’s flesh. Into his mind came the knowledge that this act was not random, that her being here when he’d arrived was not random, that there was now an allegiance between them. He remembered the day Jamie had knighted him, one of the proudest days in his life. His mother had wept, and his heart had been so full that he’d thought it would burst. Scots pipers had piped a song of valor and war, and the sound of the pipes rising up in the vaulted church hall was as piercing, as deep as walking into war beside men you loved. He’d been fourteen. I pledge you my undying loyalty, he’d told Jamie, and meant it. He kissed the top of Barbara’s head. She, too, had his loyalty.

  That which was, intruded. Gussy, Rochester. Jane asleep in the house. Everything that must be done. She must have felt his thoughts, because she sat up and began to pull her stays about her. He wished he could see her face clearly, but he couldn’t.

  “Let me help you,” he said, and together they tied the stays. At one point, he took her hands in his and kissed them, and she moved toward him and they held each other a long moment. How small you are, how slight, delicious woman, Slane thought. She put on her jacket, he his shirt, and, holding hands, they walked out of the barn.

  In the house, she lit a candle, and now he could see her face. At the expression upon it, he said, “I love you
.”

  She ran to him and put her head to his chest, a movement that touched him, made something in him move and settle deeply, at the unspoken covenant between them.

  “Come and see Jane,” she said and led him to the bedchamber where Jane slept, all the children in the bed with her, nestled as close as they could get. Back in Jane’s parlor they talked in whispers.

  “I want to ride on to Tamworth,” Barbara said. “I must warn Sir John, tell him about Gussy.”

  “He may already be arrested.”

  “So he may, but I must make the effort. I was ready to leave when you arrived.” She smiled, touched his face a moment. “I will leave now if you will stay here for Jane. She and I have talked. She wants to go to London in the morning. She has an aunt there with whom she can stay. She’ll do more for Gussy in London than anywhere else. She has to begin the rounds of calling on people, Slane, asking for favors, for support.”

  Yes, Barbara must do her duty, too. For all that was said of her, for all the duels, flirts, mistakes, she was a person of duty. “What did they take from here?”

  “A codebook and letters.”

  Gussy will hang, Slane thought.

  “Will they behead him?”

  He didn’t answer. Barbara stood up and walked to the door and opened it. He found her leaning against her horse, crying.

  “Don’t tell Jane what you believe,” she said. She put her hand on her horse’s pommel; Slane helped her swing up in the saddle, then kept one hand around the ankle of her boot.

  “You can ride safely at night?”

  “There’s enough moon to see. I will be careful. I rode all over one end of Virginia for weeks looking for my servant. Take care of her, Slane. I’ve written a letter to my mother, telling her I had to go to Tamworth for a few days. See that she gets it, or she’ll tear London apart searching for me. Remind Jane to call on Tony, on Aunt Shrew, to enlist their aid. She and I made a list of those in London who might help her.”