by Karleen Koen
You will know by now that my Jeremy is dead. He died peacefully in our arms. It is the Lord's will, and he suffered so that at last, I was thankful to let him go. He loved the painted book that you sent to him. I read it to him over and over. Thank you for that, Barbara. The others are well. I cannot write anymore. Not today.
"Shall we cancel the Christmas play?" asked the Duchess, holding her.
"No," Barbara whispered, huddled against her. "Let us have this one Christmas together, as it used to be."
* * *
Everyone sat in the great parlor, wreathed with evergreen and holly, a huge yule log burning in the fireplace, amid whispering, rustling, waiting. Hyacinthe sat near the Duchess, his eyes shining with anticipation, and the younger servants giggled and fidgeted restlessly among themselves. This year, once more, Lady Devane was playing a lazy, insubordinate maid to Perryman's Duchess. The older servants whispered to the younger ones that one had not seen anything until one had seen Lady Devane and Perryman play off each other. Vicar Latchrod agreed, his nose red; he had already been tippling at the Christmas punch.
The Duchess sat dressed in her finest, as she did every year for this Christmas Eve play held in her honor, parodying her, one of the highlights of Tamworth's year. She wore a black velvet gown, and diamonds glittered on her fingers and around her throat and even in her lace cap. Her legs were aching, and she was tired. Very tired. Death, too much death. One never knew from where it would come. Young Jeremy had died from an inflammation of the lung. Harry by his own hand. Richard of a broken heart. Dicken and Giles and her grandchildren from smallpox. But it could have been measles, consumption, gout, humors of the blood, fever, rickets, palsy, a cut or sore or cold that did not heal. She glanced down at Roger, propped in that bed that had been carried down and set up for him. How careful the footmen had been not to hurt him as they moved him, yet still he could not suppress a groan or two. He lay back now against the pillows with his eyes closed. His mouth was pinched in, and his cheeks had a flush the Duchess did not like, and he had lost so much weight in these last weeks that he no longer resembled himself.
He opened his eyes and, seeing her, tried to smile. The old wistfulness was still there. You were the handsomest man I ever saw, barring Richard, thought the Duchess. He thought the world of you. She blinked her eyes at the sudden tears welling in them. She would not cry tonight. This was Barbara's night. She had worked so hard for it. She and Thérèse and Hyacinthe had wreathed every room in the house and all the mantels and windows and Tamworth church and chapel. There were bay–scented candles burning. They would have their Christmas dinner tomorrow in this room with all the servants. A Christmas as it used to be. The Duchess thought of all those Christmases she and Richard had shared, when her sons rose tall and handsome around her, with their young wives and families. There was no Christmas as it used to be. Roger made a restless movement, and she leaned over him.
"Save your strength for the play. In her girlhood, Barbara could convulse a saint when she was in the mood—Roger, what is it?"
She leaned over farther so that she was near his face.
"Take care…of her," he whispered.
"Take care of her," snapped the Duchess. "You are a fine one to give me orders. On Christmas Eve. You are dying, and I am old. What can I do? You just take care of yourself! That is what you do!"
He gave a weak laugh, a ghost of itself. "I should…have married you, Alice.…"
He was charming to the last. Even dying could not extinguish that. "Bah!" she said to cover her feelings. "I would not have had you! Not on a silver platter! Now hush. The play is beginning."
Barbara was wonderful. The serving maids and footmen screamed with laughter. She was outrageous, hilarious, running over to snatch the vicar's wig and wear it herself, dancing with St. George and his dragon, parodying the lord of misrule so that even those who acted with her could not help laughing. Hyacinthe cried with laughter, wiping tears from his face and holding his stomach. When Barbara whacked Perryman's Duchess across the rear with a broom, the Duchess went into such a fit of coughing laughter that the play stopped until she was well again. Even Annie was surprised into a grim chuckle or two. When the play was over, everyone stood up and whistled and cheered and clapped, and called her name. Barbara curtsied to the audience and picked her nose and tried to wipe it on Perryman. Hyacinthe bayed with laughter; Justin pulled off his wig and waved it; Thérèse laughed and clapped; the Duchess wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. Hyacinthe released the dogs, and they ran to Barbara, excited by the noise, and leapt and flipped in the air, and everyone clapped even harder. It was the best play ever, they all agreed.
"Punch and ale," said the Duchess, stamping her cane on the floor. "Punch and ale."
Barbara walked over to Roger, breathless, perspiring with her performance.
"He looks tired," she said to Justin, who nodded his head and went to fetch the footmen to carry him upstairs. Barbara bent down.
"Did you like me?" she asked. "Did I make you laugh?"
Roger stared at her, his mouth compressed. "I…hurt…"
She felt his forehead with her hand. Then with her lips. Was she wrong, or was he too warm?
"Annie!" she called, a rising note in her voice. "I should have left you upstairs," she said to him.
His eyes were bright, so blue against the terrible whiteness of his face. A bright, burning blue.
She put her ear to his mouth. He seemed to want to say something.
"I…love…you," he whispered. She held his hot, dry hand all the way up the stairs.
* * *
She sat tiredly in the window seat in Roger's bedchamber. Finally, the snow had stopped. It had snowed all this Christmas Day. They had not gone to church; no one had come to carol to them. Even the Christmas dinner was muted and quiet because the Duchess did not feel well enough to come downstairs, and Barbara got up from the table every few moments to check on Roger. She could not help it.
I would like to walk to Tamworth chapel, she thought, and sit awhile. Say a prayer for Jeremy, for Harry. For Roger. The snow outside was as white as Harry's face in death. She closed her eyes. Charles and Mary would be married now. She remembered her own white wedding gown, trimmed with green. How excited and happy she had been. Her brothers and sisters had crowded around her, loud in their love and excitement. How tired I am, she thought. It was as if the Christmas play had taken the last of her strength. Jeremy's death and doing the play in spite of it and Roger's fever. She must write a note to Jane and Gussy. Dear little Jeremy. How white the snow was. Tomorrow she would go outside and build a snowman with Hyacinthe before Roger's window. He would like that. And she would pick more holly to put in his room. He was sleeping now. When he woke, she would tell him about the snowman and the holly. And how in just four weeks, it would be their anniversary. They would be married—
Justin made a sound. She lifted her head.
He stood staring down at the bed. She felt her heart begin to beat so rapidly that it hurt her head. She stood up. Justin looked at her.
"He—" He did not finish.
She tried to run to the bed, but it seemed to take her a long time, an eternity of time. Roger lay on the bed, not restless now, not tossing and turning as he had done all night and into the day, so that she could not eat her dinner, could not say Christmas prayers, could not think of anything but him. He lay still, and peaceful.
Timidly, she reached out and touched his face, his beloved face, which was too thin. He would look better when he had some of his weight back. The fever was gone. He was cool to the touch.
"Lady Devane," Justin said, his voice breaking as he took her by the arm. "He is—"
"Do not say it, Justin."
She could hear how calm she sounded. How cool. Like Roger's forehead. She sat down on the bed and took Roger's hand in hers. "Do not say it just yet, and then it will not be true."
She felt something splinter inside herself, but did not know what it was. She heard Just
in leave the room, and she was glad, glad to be alone with Roger for a moment, just the two of them, because until someone said the words, cried and screamed, it would not be true. He was alive until someone said he was dead and began to grieve.
"I loved you so," she, said to Roger, who did not answer, who did not move, who did not even breathe, but lay there, so silent, so peaceful, handsome to her even in illness, even in death. She rocked back and forth now, his hand against her breast, the beginning of grief welling in her, grief that seemed dark, bottomless, opening like a dark chasm beneath her. "Since I was a little girl," she said to Roger, and in her mind was a sudden shining memory of how handsome he had looked atop his great black horse, smiling down at her, the child who loved him, smiling and leaning down and lifting her up, up into the sky it seemed, and putting her before him in the saddle, holding her close with one strong arm, his horse leaping forward under them; she could feel the power of that leap still if she closed her eyes, propelling them forward, faster and faster, past gardens and cottages and hedges, and her hair streamed out behind her and he laughed, and she felt—in her childhood—there would never be a moment as good as this one. Never. Galloping with Roger Montgeoffry holding her on his great black horse across the tender green fields and pastures of Tamworth.…
Chapter Twenty–Eight
The snow fell and fell and fell. It was impossible to get in or out of Tamworth, even by sled, for the horses stumbled in the drifts. Roger lay in the great hall, huge candles burning at the head and feet of his hastily built coffin, a coffin of raw boards. He lay packed in snow, but even so, he was changing, his face somehow sinking in, pulling toward the earth, the faintest but most inevitable of shifts. "We must close the lid," the Duchess said to Barbara gently. "Tomorrow, if the snow should stop even for a short while, we must bury him. Vicar is ready." But I am not, thought Barbara. The notes informing family and friends of his death lay piled neatly on a table. How late into the night, as the candles burned down to guttering stubs, had she and Thérèse and Annie written, their pens scratching over the paper, writing words, terrible, final words…and now the snow made their being sent impossible, just as it made the ordering of elaborate coffins or funeral palls or invitations or mourning rings and gloves from Maidstone impossible. The church bell would toll, muffled by the snow which had transformed the landscape, and only she and her grandmother and the servants and those neighbors who might brave the snow would attend his funeral service. He would lie in Tamworth vault; there was no place else to entomb him.
It is not fair, Barbara thought, leaning her swollen face against the icy panes of a window. He will be buried with no pomp, no ceremony, and it is not fair. She wanted crowds; she wanted a long lying–in–state as mourners filed past his coffin; she wanted an elaborate funeral procession, the carriages draped in black, black bridles, black feathers on the horses; she wanted weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Sitting cross–legged on the cushions of a window seat, staring out at the snow which made all impossible, she rocked to and fro. He would lie in Tamworth vault; yet surely he had planned to lie beneath the stone floor of the church Wren had begun to build for him at Devane Square. They had never discussed it, yet surely it was his plan. Not to lie in the vault of her ancestors, near the coffin of her brother. He and Harry had not spoken in the last years of their lives, yet now they were equals in death. Would their ghosts rise up from their coffins and bow coldly and make peace? Surely death had taken the edge from Harry's temper…as it took the edge from all things….
The dogs leapt unexpectedly into her lap and licked at her face.
"Come," said someone.
Thérèse. Her dear Thérèse. And Hyacinthe, standing solemnly, taking her hand, leading her away, as if she were the child and he the grown–up. "You must rest now," said Thérèse. The two of them led her to her bedchamber; actually, four of them, with the dogs winding in and out of her skirts, knowing something was wrong, wanting to lie in her lap, to lick her hands, to offer their devotion for Roger's going. Such a final going. So much more final than she could have ever dreamed.
"Do not cry," said Thérèse. "Hush now, madame. We will stay with you while you rest."
And so they would. Her family. No more brothers and sisters. No Roger. No child. But two dogs and a page and a serving maid.
* * *
Rosemary, that was for remembrance, and all the holly she could gather as she stomped through the snow, her hands blue with cold, and ivy leaves, forever green. Nothing else to lay atop his coffin. Only bare branches rimmed with frost. No need for black gloves. No need for mourning rings. No way to buy them. No one to give them to. Look who bore his coffin in: Squire Dinwitty, Tim, Perryman, Justin, two grooms. Lord Devane, who dined with princes and laughed with kings and served under generals. The church was as cold as ice. All of them shivered in their cloaks. Vicar Latchrod's teeth chattered as he hurriedly read the funeral service.…I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord, he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.…Roger had not believed in God. Murmurs of condolence surrounded her, a blur of chapped faces and doffed caps. They were in a hurry to go home, to sit before their fires, and she could not blame them. The sun shone as she walked out of the church. Everyone's boots crunched in the snow, which glistened wetly, like tears. Icicles hung from the bare, brown branches of the trees. If the sun shines on them long enough, they will weep too, thought Barbara.
"We shall send out the notes today," said her grandmother, staring up at the sky. "In the spring," she said, staring just as intently at Barbara's face, "you could hold a memorial service for him. In London."
"Yes," Barbara said, her face changing slightly, becoming more alive, "so I could. I want a marble bust and a memorial tablet and—" she stared at her grandmother. "I miss Harry," she said, her face changing again. "He was with me in Paris, Grandmama, when Roger left before—"
Her grandmother patted her hand. "It must be a fine service," she said. "One befitting his station. You must plan it carefully."
"Yes," said Barbara. "Yes, I must."
* * *
Montrose burst into the small room at Devane House which White was using as a bedchamber. His face was red from the cold outside, and he still wore a cloak and gloves.
"Is there a letter for me?"
Without waiting for an answer, he shuffled through the papers and notes on White's table, found what he was looking for, and ripped past the seal.
"Oh, God," he said. "Oh, God, it is true—"
"What is true? Francis, what is wrong?" White got up from his comfortable chair by the fire.
"Lord Devane is dead."
"I do not believe you!" White strode over and snatched the letter from him, as Montrose sat down on the bed, the expression on his face dazed.
"I heard it in White's," he said. "Someone was speaking of it, and I said, repeat yourself, sir, and then when he did, I threw a cup of coffee in his face, Caesar. I did. And I ran all the way I here, and I said to myself over and over as I ran, it is not true, it is not true.…oh, God." He looked up at White. "I may have to fight a duel."
In spite of his shock, White laughed, which made Montrose laugh also.
"Lord Devane will be so amused—" Montrose broke off. Suddenly, without warning, he began to sob. White stared past him, past the letter with its words which must be true since they were written by Lady Devane herself, to the windows misted with cold, misted the way a memory is around the edges. Many brave men lived before Agamemnon, but all unwept and unknown they sleep in endless night, for they had no poets to sound their praises, Lord Devane had said. Clerk away in my library, such as it is. Knowing he had no funds, knowing his pride. Write your poems. And I will be your patron. I have an urge to be someone's patron, and it may as well be you, and he had laughed, throwing back his head. The handsomest man White had ever seen, charmed by the sight of him, his laughter, his warmth, his compliments. And his kindness. Kindness to a stiff–necked young poet with a
crippled arm and a soul burning to write. I never once told him how much he meant to me, thought White, staring once more at the words of the letter. And now it is too late. He is dead.
* * *
Carefully, black brows pulled together in heavy concentration, Walpole poured more brandy into the three glasses on the table. Across from him sat the Duke of Montagu, glassy–eyed. And to his left was Carlyle, without his wig; it hung from the tip of a drapery rod. The four brandy bottles they had finished were arranged in the center of the table, candles burning in their narrow necks. A memorial, Carlyle had said, when he fixed in the first candle, to an absent friend. The waiters at White's were under strict orders to look in on Robert Walpole and his party of two every fifteen minutes so that they did not burn down the house in their drunken grief.