Dark Angels

by Karleen Koen

  Alice joined Renée, who sat on cushions in a corner, dreamily picking at embroidery.

  “What are you thinking of? Or should I say whom?” Alice asked her. Lieutenant Saylor’s pursuit of Renée had been noticed by all, just as Renée had been noticed by all. She was the belle of the visit. That would be a good match, thought Alice. In France, Renée had not enough fortune or name to be appealing, no matter how lovely she was. In England, loveliness often overcame those obstacles. “We’re going to have such fun in the next few days.” Picnics, dancing on the village green, a treasure hunt, a horse race, sailing were planned.

  “I’m glad they’re gone, glad they’re punished,” said Renée.

  Yes, thought Alice, we all are. But will we end up paying for it in the end?

  MUCH LATER THAT evening, when the night’s dancing on the green of Dover’s village was done, and the carriages rolled back up the hill to the castle, and yawning courtiers found their beds, certain men strolled in the late night, went down the cliffs to the water to swim—or stood talking on a parapet that overlooked the sea in the late hours of the night. King Charles and the Duke of Buckingham spoke for a long time.

  And then still later, King Charles watched the bobbing of lanterns that showed the path his brother, his cousin, and his son walked as they came back up to the castle from the sea, where they’d been swimming. He sent a Life Guard to fetch them, and after a time there was a little cabal of family, Life Guards stationed along the parapet to keep everyone else away, though sleep likely did that.

  “Send me back with her,” said Monmouth after his father explained what Buckingham had told him. “I’ll kill Monsieur, run a sword right through his heart.”

  King Charles smiled in the dark. “While I can’t fault your sentiment, I’m afraid that’s no solution, Jamie.”

  “You’re too young to ruin your life. I’ll do it,” said the king’s cousin Prince Rupert. “Send me.”

  “No one is killing anyone.” The king’s brother, the Duke of York, was perturbed, but then, of them all, he had the least humor.

  “However, the notion of sending someone back with her is an excellent idea.” King Charles leaned an elbow on the thick ledge of the stone wall. “Someone who could report daily, so that if I must demand a separation for her, I can tell our cousin Louis that I do it on the basis of clear evidence. She won’t do it; her pride’s too great.”

  “You forget her faith,” said York.

  All of them were silent a moment. For a princess of France to separate from a prince of France would be a huge thing, a terrible scandal that would involve the pope and the Church of Rome. And there were reasons now, known only to King Charles and York, not to wish an upset to King Louis of France.

  “Whom might we send?” said King Charles, making, as only his brother knew, a decision that might change the destiny of the war they were plotting.

  They were silent again, the sound of the sea in their ears and now and again silver bells.

  Monmouth broke the silence. “Send Saylor. He showed wit and courage in Tangier and certainly in the situation with the black mass.”

  No one spoke. Lieutenant Saylor was rumored to be lovers with Monmouth’s wife. Saylor was discreet in it; the Duchess of Monmouth was not. Sauce for the gander was sauce for the goose in Charles’s court, but Monmouth was young and much indulged.

  “He speaks French,” said Prince Rupert. “You could send him back as a tutor for her. She’s told everyone she is going to improve her English. Monsieur would accept it. It might not be liked, but it would be accepted.”

  “That Monsieur dares dismiss her favorites,” said York, finally catching up in anger over what the king told them. “At the very least, we’d have someone in the household, a spy that Monsieur cannot dismiss without displeasing you, which will displease King Louis. Send me. I’ll run Monsieur through and eat his heart.”

  Prince Rupert and Monmouth laughed, and Prince Rupert slapped York on the back as if in congratulation. They talked more of whom else they might send but kept coming back to Richard Saylor.

  “His discretion is excellent,” said Prince Rupert. Not only did he not play the part of swaggering lover to a high-ranking duchess before the court, he would not name the woman involved in the black mass, claiming she had worn a mask, that she’d run away before anyone could question her. The page swore the same thing. “To have called in the French priests was brilliant. We might have had a nasty incident on our hands.”

  “True,” said King Charles.

  “Monsieur’s gentlemen won’t be pleased. It was Saylor who arrested them,” said York.

  “Perhaps his presence may remind them to act as gentlemen,” said King Charles.

  “Perhaps not,” answered York.

  “It seems to be decided. If you’ll excuse me, then, Father.”

  The other three were silent as Monmouth left them.

  “Young hound,” said Prince Rupert when Monmouth was far enough down the parapet not to hear. “His wife is a spirited gal. Did he think she’d take all his indiscretions without some of her own?”

  King Charles and York made no answer. Queen Catherine was too religious and too kind to be indiscreet, and while kindness was not her strong point, the Duchess of York had found solace in food. Prince Rupert wasn’t married. He could be as indiscreet as he wished.

  “I like that boy. I’d send him to France before Monmouth’s duchess ruins his reputation and makes your son hate him. Now, with your permission…” Rupert bowed, then walked down the parapet as Monmouth had done to a tower that held stairs.

  King Charles and his brother listened to the sound of his steps and then to the sea and its endless roar.

  “We ought to just keep her here.” It was York.

  “You above all people know we can’t do that and why.”

  “My little Anne is to go back with her. Ought I to refuse to send her now?” The Lady Anne was York’s young daughter, near the age of Princesse Henriette’s daughter. It had been thought it would do the little cousins good to know each other.

  “To do so would cause great offense and raise suspicion. It isn’t to our interest to do that, as yet. There is always the possibility that Monsieur will behave himself.”

  The brothers stared out into the night as the surf below them clawed the cliffs. They knew King Louis’s brother, their cousin, from their exile. Both of them had been at the French court, had seen the French royal prince both at his finest and at his worst. His best could be very fine indeed; his worst, a tyrannical, vengeance-seeking fury that might last weeks.

  “Just the three of us, Charles,” said York. The rest of what had once been their large family was dead from imprisonment, from smallpox, from beheading, from bitterness.

  “A holy trinity,” said King Charles, only half jesting.

  It was true there were only three of them left, but the holy piece of it had shifted. He and York weren’t close now, as once they’d been. The Duke of Buckingham saw to that.

  TWO DAYS LATER, Richard turned his horse down the avenue that led to Tamworth. Burned-out oaks, a remnant of the war, lay charred and ruined and rotting on each side of him. The avenue had been replanted with straight lines of limes, but the limes were young yet. Near some of the fallen oaks had sprung new trees—dug up and planted elsewhere, twenty years old now were these children of the old oaks, and while it would be another thirty before they were even a shadow of the spreading grace of their forebears, it was a sign, Richard’s mother said, that left alone, most things heal.

  The war had been over for twenty years, but the house whose gables he could see in the distance still bore its scars. There were wings and buildings that, once burned, had never been replaced. Ivy and lichen covered their stone foundations, crawled up charred timbers. Until ten years ago, his mother had served as housekeeper in her own home, serving the Roundhead, which is what those who’d taken the side of Parliament in the civil war were called, for the soldiers of the Parliament ha
d cropped their hair short, a great contrast to the king’s men, who wore long flowing locks called lovelocks. The Roundhead had taken Tamworth as booty during the war. It was he who had replanted the woods and orchards, bought new livestock, rebuilt barns and stables, but he’d left the house itself alone. He was a London man, part of the city Puritans who were the mainstay of Cromwell’s rule, and the house and estate were his reward, but he could never stay long. He missed the squalor and fuss of London, said Richard’s mother, and she’d smile a certain smile, and Richard would wonder just what her part was in the Londoner’s longing to leave.

  Followed by his groom, Richard trotted his horse into the curve of the courtyard. Vases of flowers sat in the opened windows of the first-floor parlor. His mother and Susannah must be at the end of one of their housecleanings. Four times a year, his mother and her servant scoured the house from its attics to its ground floor—fresh sand, beeswax, and oil of roses part of their arsenal to repel moths, fleas, dust. The house rose three stories, and there were bays rising the same three stories on its front ends. It had been built to honor Queen Bess by a courtier who had pleased that queen.

  She’d given him this land, much favor, and an earring, a large pear-shaped pearl that Sir Francis Drake had brought back from his sojourn around the world. The pearl was long gone, sold to support King Charles I in his war against the Roundheads, but Tamworth was theirs again, the Londoner simply a tenant for a time who restocked the barns and fishponds and kept the house from going to the rats and owls, said his mother, and for that, we’ll bless him. The parlors had dark paneling, the staircase deep, steep stairs; there was an overgrown labyrinth in the gardens.

  “Master Richard,” said his mother’s servant, Susannah, in surprise when he walked into the kitchen. She was at a long table, rolling out dough. Before her, lying in flour, were the flattened circles she’d finished. The kitchen was cool and dim, the doors at each end open to the beauty and breezes of summer. A skinny child sat at the end of the table, making animals out of leftover dough.

  “I didn’t see you in the fire’s ashes last night.”

  Susannah read leftover ashes, the sunset, and animals’ entrails. She read palms, people’s expressions, and the snuffing out of a candle by wind. She prophesied the sweetness of a summer’s honey by the way the bees swarmed and warned about early frosts if the swallows and wrens nested in a certain tree. Richard took her prophesies for granted.

  “What’s this, Annie?” he said to the child. “No smile for me?”

  The girl frowned at him, stuck out her tongue. Swiftly, Richard moved around the table, grabbed her before she could dart away, and swung her into the air. She never made a sound, just stared at him in scorn. He kissed her soundly on both cheeks before setting her back on her stool.

  “Frown at me again, and there will be another kiss,” he warned, and Annie looked down at the table, a flush under her sallow skin, but out of the corners of her eyes she followed Richard’s every move.

  “Where’s my mother?” Richard rummaged among the earthen bowls to see what Susannah was putting into her pies.

  “On the hillock. There’s cheese over there under a cloth, and I’ve bread from yesterday. Annie, find the quince jam for Master Richard. We roasted a chicken yesterday. I was for putting some of it into my pies, but I’ll give it to you instead.”

  Richard was out the door, bending a little so the center timber didn’t strike his head. “Bring it to me, Annie, if you would be so kind.”

  “There now, I told you not to pine for him,” Susannah said to her granddaughter when he was outside. “You thought the Lord didn’t hear your prayers, didn’t you? Find the pint of ale and take that to him, too. From the looks of him, he rode straight here.”

  The hillock was to the northwest of the house. Richard stepped down the terrace that had been his father’s project for the last years of his life. Cromwell’s soldiers had torn the stones from their places, for nothing more than meanness, said Richard’s mother, and it had been his father’s work to order them set into place, from his bed at the window, to select new stones to replace those broken, so that it was woven all together into a gracious whole. Stone balustrades had been carved by a marblesmith in Maidstone and shipped piece by piece lying in straw in a wagon. There was lawn beyond the terrace, another of his father’s projects, lawn that lay level and flat for a time before rising in green coolness into the hillock, where spreading, ancient oaks the Roundheads had left alone grew, and in summer bluebells bloomed, and at its top the stream could be seen meandering through fields before it wound its way back into the woods, and the Tamworth village church tower rose above the trees, and the chimneys of their neighbor’s farm showed.

  Near the crest of the hillock, Richard saw his mother asleep under the oaks in what his sisters described as the fairy circle. He moved softly, not wanting to wake her just yet; but his mother’s eyes opened when he was within a few feet of her, and she smiled. Richard knew, without putting thought to it, her love for him. In memories that had no words to them, she’d held him close, rocked him, cradled him, murmured his name, sung to him, and walked through fields with him. She’d fed him pasties and sweetmeats from her own fingers, porridge and French ragout with a spoon. Sometimes he thought she read his mind. He knelt now on one knee, and they hugged, and she pulled him down beside her, and they looked up through the oaks at the sky, their profiles identical, the same straight nose, the same slant to the eyebrow.

  “The wheat is planted, and barley and oat. Sir Winston”—he was their neighbor—“brought some Dutch seed from London, which Squire Dunwitty and I are trying in some of our fields. Old Mistress Marrow is selling the family farm and the flour mill. I think you should purchase them. We could borrow from Lizzie’s husband.” Elizabeth was one of his sisters, the married one, who’d captivated a lord, an earl, and brightened all their prospects.

  “I’m going to go away for a time. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. I’ve met a woman I want to make my wife. I’ll be asking her father’s permission to court her. She’s French, Mother.”

  His mother turned on her side to regard him. Annie appeared, lugging a basket that weighed almost more than she did. Richard sat up, fished in the basket for the first thing he could grab, and ate it ravenously as Annie and his mother laid out a starched cloth and placed food neatly on it. Between bites of cheese and chicken, he described Renée to his mother, told her how he’d known he loved her from the moment of seeing her, told how he was going to France to guard Princesse Henriette, except that it was a secret, and that Renée was her maid of honor, so he would be able to continue his courting.

  He smiled that smile of his, and Annie, restless as a titmouse, was pinned to a moment of stillness by its beauty. She had to run behind a tree to recover. She lingered in the background, blending herself into the oaks so that no one might notice her and so that she could listen as much as she wanted.

  “Louise Renée de Keroualle…” His mother repeated the name softly. “What do you know of her family?”

  “They live in Brittany.”

  “So her father hasn’t a place at court?”

  “No, I believe not. I think her marriage would be blessed by the princess, and there might be a favor given. I know King Charles thinks her very beautiful and pleasing, so there might be a place for her at this court after we’re married.” He swallowed down the ale as if it were water, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, not the least doubt in him that everything would go his way. “I thought to walk over to the Ashfords and see if Sir Winston will loan me his horse. I’ve ridden Pharaoh too hard. He has the heart to take me back, but I don’t wish to lame him.”

  “You leave today?”

  “Yes, the French court departs soon.”

  Jerusalem Saylor was silent. Her son had ridden the miles from Dover simply to tell her he was in love, and that he left for France, with no more mind to it than if he were walking across the fields to Ladybeth Farm. She patted
her lap, and Richard, who’d eaten enough to be sated for the moment, laid his head there, and she smoothed his forehead with her fingers, grateful to have him to herself for even these few moments. You’re to leave him be to be a man, Dicken had told her before he died. You’re not to cling on him. He has his way to make.

  “Annie,” Jerusalem said, “run and tell Susannah that Master Richard leaves in a few hours. He’ll need food and drink to take with him. You’ll ride Mandy back to Dover—” She put her fingers over Richard’s mouth. “I can do without her for a few days. Effriam is going with you?” Effriam was Richard’s groom. “Well then, he’ll fetch her back. Now, close your eyes and rest a while.”

  She lifted her eyes from his face a moment and stared out at Tamworth, allowing herself the luxury of the feel of Richard’s forehead cupped in one of her palms. She guarded Tamworth for him, had loved it from the first moment of viewing it as a bride, not yet knowing how its seasons, its roof over her head, would at times be her only constant. To everything there is a season, she had learned in this place, learned in anguish and in joy, and surely the anguish had carved out the preciousness of the joy, seasoned and prepared it, for joy was what she felt at this moment, little as it was, that her son should be lying in solid sleep before her, a man now overlying the boy, taking him farther away from her each time she viewed him, and yet the boy in him had ridden many hard miles to tell her his news.

  RICHARD OPENED THE door of Tamworth church, dipping his fingers in the holy water and kneeling a moment toward the direction of the altar. He moved aside the panels of the side chapel and stepped in. His father was here and his grandfather and his grandfather’s grandfather. Their coffins were beneath his feet, beneath the broad stones on which he stepped. Tablets in memory of them were among the stones and fastened to the walls. Sunlight was dimmed, cooled, changed to something else as its light was filtered and stained through the colored glass of a window, a window his father had had made by artisans in Italy to celebrate the restoration of King Charles II. They’d mortgaged a farm, and it had been quite a day the day the window arrived. It had sat in state at the front of church for three Sundays in a row, so that all of Tamworth, all of the district, could view it. The vicar had blessed it with holy water. The village blacksmith had soldered it into place, and his father watched from his bed the burning of the boards that had covered the hole of the window for some twenty years, for the Puritans didn’t trust joy in their worship, no joy or beauty, either. Everything must be as stark as their souls.