by Karleen Koen
He walked to the sea, calm now. In his mind was the memory of the celebration only a few days before. In his mind was the sight of the destruction he’d walked through, trees uprooted, buildings nothing but boards, bodies of men, women, and animals lying bloated in the sun, survivors sitting stunned and silent amid the dead. He looked to the left. He looked to the right. His stomach gave a growl of hunger.
Which way?
That was the question, wasn’t it? Which way? For a moment, a terrible futility filled him, and he wanted to shake his fist at the sky, curse God, but then into his mind came the memory of sitting before the fire at Tamworth, listening breathlessly as Madame read the story of Robinson Crusoe. His boy’s heart lifted a fraction. Then more. Well, yes. Of course.
What would Crusoe do?
Fall
And now abideth faith, hope…
Chapter Fifty-two
SEPTEMBER…
Perryman ordered Tamworth fowls fattened on rice boiled in milk. They’d be sent to Saylor House for Michaelmas Day. The Duchess was there because Lord Russel had been arrested. Off she and Annie and Tim and Bathsheba went to London once the news was known. In the Duchess’s woods, children hunted for double nuts, two on a stalk, said to ward off rheumatism, toothache, the spells of witches. Evenings were cool enough for a cloak, and the trees under which the children scampered wore the colors of autumn: gold, russet, red sunset, amber.
In London there were rumbles, whispers, seethings as others were arrested, high nobles: Lord Orrery, Lord North, the Duke of Norfolk. And a man no one had heard of, Christopher Layer. Broadsheets appeared: A reward was offered for any word of Lucius, Viscount Duncannon, a Jacobite spy. People locked their doors at night, afraid of spies, afraid of an uprising by all the secret Jacobites said to be in London, Jacobites who would storm the Tower, release the imprisoned, kill anyone who did not cross himself and swear allegiance to King James.
September, said the almanac, wife, into thy garden and set me a plot, with strawberry roots, of the best be got. Slane looked at the body at his feet. It lay in the mud on Privy stairs, near to St. Stephen’s, where the House of Commons met, where the ruined palace of Whitehall reigned, home of His Majesty’s Treasury. Robert Walpole was Lord of the Treasury, lord of Whitehall.
A King’s messenger stood guard against the curious crowd who’d gathered around the body. What were you doing in this part of London? wondered Slane. No good, his middle told him. The man, Philip Neyoe, was one of their agents, a courier and scribe under Gussy. Slane hadn’t heard word of him since Gussy’s arrest, had been searching London for him.
Someone ought to cut Lord Russel’s throat for giving out your name, said Louisa.
He will give out no more. Slane had accomplished that, made Charles believe he had more to fear from him than he had from Walpole. No guard will keep me from you, he’d told Charles. All Walpole had was the name. It must be driving him mad not to have more.
Slane had sent Walpole another gosling, roasted this time, with a white rose in its mouth. Anything to distract him, to threaten him, to make him uncertain.
“He was living in that house there,” a man near Slane said, pointing out a house that backed onto the river. “I saw him.”
An official had arrived, told the King’s messenger to keep the crowd back. The official touched Neyoe with the toe of his shoe, his face showing disgust at the white, doughy look of the body. At his signal a pushcart was wheeled forward and the body was heaved into it, like garden fodder or trash, carted away.
Slane followed the cart and official through archways and a garden to a back court of Whitehall. The official disappeared into a doorway. The carter walked away from the cart; Slane stepped forward, rifled through sodden pockets, and took a piece of paper just as the official and other men came through the doorway. Slane was walking out the courtyard entrance as the official began to shout. He tossed his hat over a fence and unfastened his cloak and folded it under his arm.
On the street, busy with people, Slane took his time to sift through the apples in an apple woman’s basket.
“Picked only yesterday off trees in Chelsea, and sweet as your sweetheart’s lips,” she told him.
Slane bit into an apple.
“Not sweet enough,” he said, and winked.
The apple woman laughed. “I like a man of passion.”
The official and the carter appeared in the narrow arch of the courtyard, looked from one direction to another. The official barked something at the carter, and the carter, hesitantly, pointed toward Slane.
“These don’t feel as if they were picked yesterday,” said Slane. “They feel older. I want to buy at least a dozen, but I want good ones.”
“You.”
Slane looked up from his searching, his expression pleasant, unruffled.
The official, red-faced, angry, was glaring at him. Slane could sense his uncertainty. Slane smiled at the carter, offered him an apple.
“You look like a man of discretion,” he said. “Are these as fresh as she claims?”
“Did you see a man come from that courtyard there? It could only have been a few moments ago.” The official was impatient. Slane offered him an apple, but he shook his head.
“A man? In great haste? Why, yes, I did. That way?” Slane pointed toward a narrow opening leading to a side street.
“Or was it that way?” Asking the apple woman, who shrugged, Slane pointed in the other direction.
The official heading one way, the carter the other, Slane bought a dozen apples.
“It was you came out of that courtyard,” said the apple woman.
“Was it?” asked Slane. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“Didn’t want to.”
He pinched the apple woman’s cheek, asked her if she wanted a cloak, gave her the one folded under his arm, and then began to eat apples as he walked down Whitehall Street. In the broad expanse of the park by St. James’s Palace, tossing an apple core over his shoulder, he leaned into a tree and pulled the sodden paper from his pocket.
The ink was smeared, not legible in many places, but what was legible made him swear out loud. Code names for Rochester, for Gussy, for Lords Orrery and North. Details about Ormonde’s expedition, questions as to number of troops, commanders, ships. Names of lesser agents. Did Walpole have this information yet?
Leaving the park, Slane headed west along the river, back to the stairs where the body had been found. He went to the house that had been spoken of as Neyoe’s and knocked on the door to see what he could learn. A woman answered.
“I’m looking for a lodging,” he said, smiling at her charmingly, “and was told you had chambers to let.”
She frowned and called someone; Slane saw the King’s messenger who’d been with the body.
At once, he put his hand to his face and backed away, so that the man might not see him clearly. At the bottom of the steps, he walked quickly away, even though the messenger called him to come back.
Later, disguised—it was easy to borrow wigs and clothes from the theater—he watched the house. It took a day to determine that the house belonged to the King’s messenger, a man named Modest Welsh, that the woman who’d answered the door was Mrs. Welsh.
Several days later, he finally saw the man who said he’d seen Neyoe at the house.
“Oh yes,” the man answered, surprised at Slane’s accosting him. “A carriage would come for him, and he’d go off for hours. I saw him in the going and in the coming.”
“Did he often come and go?”
“Often enough,” said the man. “Now, if I may be so bold, why is it you ask?”
But by then Slane was walking away. So. Neyoe had been in the custody of a King’s messenger, been taken somewhere for questioning, brought back to stay under lock and key. Slane stood at the back garden wall of the house, examining it. The wall was higher than a man, and its side gate was locked.
Had Neyoe tried to escape? Any man who managed to climb that wall would
look down into the Thames. Had he tried to escape and drowned? Or had he been killed?
Neyoe, thought Slane, Walpole found you first. You knew enough to convict Rochester. It was the Jacobites’ hope that Walpole would be unable to go to trial. It meant dismissal if he could not take Rochester to trial; all Slane’s sources of information told him that. Barbara told him that, offering the information with a dazzling smile.
Did Walpole have the information upon the note found in Neyoe’s pocket? Or had Neyoe for some reason—let there be a reason—not yet given it to him? What did you tell Walpole, Neyoe? Slane thought. Everything? Nothing? Or something in between?
SET ME a plot, of strawberry roots, the best be got.
Chapter Fifty-three
OCTOBER…
Wrapped in shawls, the Duchess sat in Saylor House gardens with Harriet. Too old, I am too old for all this, she thought. I ought to have stayed at Tamworth.
Harriet was describing her morning at Walpole’s house. He’d had a tragedy. His daughter had died two days ago and lay now in state in London.
“The parlors are so crowded there is no place to sit,” Harriet was saying. “Everyone is there, but the Walpoles are allowing only a select few to come upstairs to see them. They say Mrs. Walpole is beside herself with grief. Everyone is talking of the King’s speech to Parliament, of his threat that there will be more arrests. Who else, do you think, Your Grace? I myself would never have imagined Charles, not in a hundred years—”
“Arrest is not proof. We have laws that a man may not be found guilty on someone’s hearsay. There must be direct proof of treason. Remember that,” said the Duchess.
“We played the game of who Duncannon is while we waited. Molly Hervey made us all laugh by suggesting he was the King’s dwarf.”
“Who knows who he is?” the Duchess snapped. “It could be the dwarf. It could be the Duchess of Kendall’s favorite groom. It could be the gardener there.” She pointed with her cane to one of the garden servants raking smooth the gravel in the broad garden walks. “I’ve lived through too much not to know that nothing is as it seems. We can all wake up tomorrow and find our worlds tipped over.”
John must be ruined, considering the coin he was spending now, and the coin he’d lost in the South Sea, and the coin he’d given to King James’s invasion. Jane and Mary were heartbroken; Gussy was in the Tower; Charles, and other friends from long ago, like Norfolk and North, were locked in cells, allowed to see no one. Tears were in her, and she was too old for tears. Passion was in her, and she was too old for that, too; passionate regret, passionate guilt, rough gravel in her chest for the mistakes she’d made in this long life, mistakes whose fruit she was yet reaping, whose results were playing out before her eyes even now. Those she now loved were caught in them, just as those she loved had been caught in them years before.
Not settled, after all this time, all these years, all the men and all the women, among them herself, plotting, lying, pushing, pulling, quarreling over who was right and who was wrong so that their man might win.
“Poor Mary,” said Harriet.
No visits of any kind, no letters were allowed anyone in the Tower. Men had died with their eyes closing on the oozing bricks of their cells.
“Here’s Mary,” said Harriet. “Look away so she won’t think we’ve been talking of her.”
“Why shouldn’t she know we’ve been talking of her? A fine family we’d be if we didn’t. Mary, come and sit by me. We’ve been talking of you. Harriet, take the baby and go amuse him. You’ll be fine,” the Duchess said, patting one of Mary’s hands. “This will pass. There are others worse off than you.”
Like Jane, thinner each day as she dragged her children hither and yon, from drawing room to official chamber, talking of Gussy’s innocence, carrying letters of reference that spoke of his character and goodness, attempting to make someone listen, attempting to be allowed to see him.
Her father was beside her, doing what he could among Tories and uncertain Whigs, to twist the arrests into a sign of Walpole’s ambition to break the back of the Tory party and the might of the Church of England. Odd that so much was true: Gussy was treasonous and innately good; Walpole was overweeningly ambitious and a clever tracker of treachery.
“‘If October you do marry,’” Harriet was chanting.
Love will come, but riches tarry—so Barbara had told Jane’s little girl Amelia, playing with her, teaching her the rhymes she and Jane had grown to womanhood upon. Marry in green, ashamed to be seen. Marry in gray, you’ll go far away, said Barbara the other day, trying, like the Duchess, to keep Jane’s spirits up.
If Gussy died, what would Jane do? Harriet said she could find her a position as lady’s companion, but what would happen to the children? No one wished to take on a companion who brought along four children. I will care for her, said John, his jaw setting full and stiff. She is my own dear girl. How the devil would he care for her if he himself was impoverished? It hurt the Duchess to the core of her being to see her old friend’s trouble.
Tony walked out of the house and dropped his black gloves—he’d have received these mementos today at the Walpoles’—onto the bench beside his sister. “You look pale,” he told her. “Walk around the garden with me.”
“Walk with your brother,” said Harriet. “I’ll see to little Charles.”
What would you do if you knew the secrets I keep? thought the Duchess, her eyes on Tony, who looked pale himself. You keep secrets, Tony.
He kept his love for Barbara secret. She knew it. She suspected Harriet knew it, too, but Tony said nothing, only was more grave, more stiff, more demanding of everyone around him. He would be furious if he knew what she knew.
It is this Christopher Layer who implicates Charles, Tony had told her, and Layer’s evidence is full of wild contradictions. There’s nothing in it about the Bishop of Rochester.
That was whom the men in a chamber at Whitehall hunted: Rochester. Walpole was convinced the Bishop had headed the invasion plot. The King desired to see him beheaded, wanted Jacobitism crippled once and for all, frightened to death by Rochester’s fate.
Did Rochester head the plot? the Duchess asked Sir John, who told her she already knew far too much and did not need to know that, too.
Barbara said the cruelty of the interrogations had broken this Layer person, and nothing he said could be depended upon. She’d overheard Walpole telling Diana this, debating whether to bring Layer to public trial and show what chaff he rested accusations of treason upon. He thinks he will ride into the King’s clear favor if he convicts the Bishop of Rochester, Barbara had told her. But maybe Walpole won’t be able to take a bishop’s head. Maybe there won’t be the evidence. There have to be direct witnesses. There have to be letters. Some say there are neither, just supposition and guess and unsworn testimony.
Barbara was up to something. The Duchess could feel it. If she’d had more heart, she’d have questioned her, found out, but she was too dispirited.
The King won’t be happy if Walpole can’t give him Rochester, la, la, la, Barbara sang.
They’d broken Layer. What did that mean?
What, in God’s dear name, had been done to Gussy? It drove John to despair, she could see it in his eyes, and it drove Jane, what might be happening to the man they loved in a dark cell of the Tower of London.
Visitors were entering Saylor House gardens: Colonel Edward Perry and Sir Christopher Wren. Wren, small, alert, like the bird that shared his name, darted toward the Duchess.
“I’ve found a book in which there is an interesting fact, a reference to nomads of the desert sands carrying their bees with them when they travel,” he said.
She was moved a little past regret and fear, but only a little. “How?”
“It does not say. Baskets, perhaps?”
Perry, Wren, and Pendarves had become fast friends. Like ancient boys, the three were always together. They liked to sit in the afternoons in Devane Square’s church to watch Wren,
busy, as driven as any bee, up among the workmen on the scaffolding, among the woodcarvers and painters, as if not a one of them could paint a stroke or chip a splinter without his knowledge.
“I’ve had a thought about Hyacinthe,” said Wren. “Could it be that he discovered the overseer in some crime, and was killed for that?”
That was another thing they did, discuss everything that had to do with Barbara, including what had happened to Barbara’s servant and why. Perry’s bringing of the collar had been a shock. Barbara had been ill for days over it, carried it now in a sadness in her eyes.
“What kind of crime?” asked the Duchess.
“Well, Colonel Perry informs me that it is not unknown for colonials to smuggle. Perhaps the boy saw something.”
Edward Perry met the Duchess’s gaze with the serenity of a marble angel. He had fine eyes, a clear stunning blue, angel’s eyes, Barbara called them. I used to think I saw Roger in them, she said. The Duchess had another fancy. She thought it possible to see Perry’s soul, a clear thing, full of joy. Unlike her, he had no regrets, no unconfessed sins that pressed him down, made it difficult to breathe, sleep. She envied him that.
“Smuggle, do you?” She frowned.
“We’ve been known to. Your duties upon us are unfair when tobacco sells low. We must put food upon our tables to feed our children, the same as you.”
“If the boy caught him smuggling,” said Wren, “he might have killed him.”
Wren had an imagination, was building plots, rather than churches, in the air. She sniffed and didn’t bother to answer.
“I must go,” said Wren. “I’ve carvers working on the altar rail at Devane Square church, and you cannot trust a carver not to whittle too much of his own ideas into what is already a perfect design.
“I’ve taken the liberty of drawing what I think might be a handsome building to put planters’ tobacco in for your port,” he told the Duchess. “I’ll show you when you come by later.”