Now Face to Face (26 page)

“I’
M TIRED
,” Barbara said. “How long do you think we’ve been walking, Thérèse?”

“An hour or more. Harry! I don’t see him, madame. Madame!”

Barbara stumbled, and her cry of surprise turned to a scream as she fell down a bank she’d not known was there. She fell into water; at the sound of the splash, Thérèse cried out her name.

The shock of water closing over her head made Barbara lash out. Her head above the water now, she saw the light of the lantern, heard Thérèse calling her, and moved herself in that direction. The bank was close, but so steep she almost could not climb up it. But Thérèse was there, on her knees, hand extended down to help her, and Barbara crawled back up, the ties of her cloak nearly choking her, her heavy skirts fighting her every inch of the way. She coughed and sputtered and cried once she had gained the top, which was fine, because Thérèse was crying, too.

“We’re a pair of fools,” Barbara said. “Give me that lantern.” She stood, but all she could see was trees. She sat down, trying not to shiver.

It wasn’t so much that she was cold. It was more that she had really frightened herself. If this happened to Hyacinthe, she thought, did he survive? If there was no one to help him? I must not think of it. I must believe he is alive.

“Let’s just stay here,” she said, “until morning.”

You’ll become lost, Colonel Perry had said. You don’t know the woods well enough. She knew them well enough to find the second creek: She had just fallen into it. Thérèse sat down beside her. Barbara took her hand. “Hyacinthe has Charlotte with him. He won’t feel so alone with Charlotte.”

After a time, they fell asleep, waking to scream, one after the other, when Harry leaped out of the darkness and into Barbara’s lap.

B
ARBARA WOKE
. She heard a bagpipe and stood. “Here!” she cried over its sound, “over here! Wake up, Thérèse, we’re rescued.”

And there in the distance was the wonderful sight of lighted lanterns bobbing, as the sound of the bagpipes grew stronger.

“Thank God,” said Perry, when he saw the two of them.

Barbara ran to him, her skirts tangling around her legs. “I got lost.”

“Well, now you’re found.”

S
HE STOOD
in the misting rain, at a place where the second creek joined the river. They had given her her second day, but the rain had been falling for an hour, and any child of the country knew it would erase tracks, eliminate scents. She had been riding along the river in both directions all morning, looking for some sign, following Harry’s erratic lead, when Colonel Perry had ridden up to tell her they had found something farther upriver. She stood now on the bank, watching.

Across the river, a rowboat was grounded upon a small sandbar set close to the other shore. For several minutes now, the heads of slaves had been bobbing in and out of the water. Blackstone was there, too, swimming among the slaves. There was sudden activity in the rowboat as those inside it bent over to work with the slaves and Blackstone in the water. She pushed back the hood of her cloak and shaded her eyes from the rain with her hands. They had pulled something into the boat.

Perry put his arm around her. She held up her face, white and set, to the rain for a moment or two, eyes closed, and when she opened them again, the boat was rowing across the current toward them. Tony, she thought, where are you? I need you, now. When Roger had died, Tony had ridden through snow and ice to come to Tamworth, to comfort her. She had not appreciated, until this moment, his gesture.

They were having trouble landing the boat. Blackstone leaped out; the water reached to his shoulders, but he pushed the boat to the bank. A slave handed him something small, wrapped in a bit of blanket. It was too small to be a boy, Barbara saw. Blackstone walked up the bank, and it seemed to Barbara that three-quarters of him was leg. She wiped the rain out of her face, straining to read his expression. He seemed to want to say something, but all he did was kneel and gently unfold the blanket. Charlotte lay there, tangled in slimy weed. At once, Harry sniffed her body up and down and whined and pawed at her.

“Her back’s been broken,” he said. He pointed to her head, to a small hole and the puckered, whitened flesh around it. “Mercy killing,” he said. Barbara knelt to touch her. She pushed Harry aside, folded the blanket back around her dog, and picked her up.

“I’ll want to go home now,” she said.

She rode toward the house, Harry at a trot behind her, and Perry behind them both. At the barn, she dismounted. At the gate to the yard Harry ran past her, barking. She looked up and saw Thérèse standing in the doorway.

“He isn’t found,” she said. “But Charlotte is.”

Thérèse looked at the blanket-covered lump in Barbara’s arms.

“Hyacinthe isn’t dead,” Barbara said, pulling up strength, pulling up a ferocious determination from someplace deep inside her, “until he’s found.”

Chapter Thirteen

S
OME MILES UP THE RIVER FROM
A
UNT
S
HREW’S, THE
P
RINCESS
of Wales stepped onto the royal barge. The barge was draped with cloth of crimson and gold, its flags flying in honor of the occasion. She nodded her head graciously toward the oarsmen and their leader. She and the Prince of Wales were to spend several days at Hampton Court, and they were going there by river.

The visit was an impulsive thing—and therefore, an unusual thing, for Prince George was almost never impulsive. He was a creature of habit; one could set one’s watch by the unvarying routine of his days: audiences; official business in the morning; a drive in the carriage or a long walk in the afternoon; his nap; backgammon or basset at night; at nine in the evening, an hour or so alone with Mrs. Howard, his mistress. Not at eight-thirty, or a quarter until nine, but at nine sharp. Day after day after day, the same routines followed, the same paths in the gardens walked, the same partners chosen in cards or dance or bed.

The Princess made her way back to her chair under the gilded, painted wooden canopy, smiling to her ladies, who were excited to be making the journey and who chattered among themselves like birds, the skirts of their long gowns belling under their cloaks like the cups of so many flowers.

Yesterday afternoon, as she strolled with him through the gardens of Richmond House, the Prince had said to her, “Let us go to Hampton tomorrow.” And then, as she showed her surprise, he said, “We will have a fête. Yes, a small fête. Lady Alderley would like that. She is taking her daughter’s absence so hard.” And he had smiled in a satisfied, pleased way to himself, and afterward bragged to one and all of his plans.

The Princess allowed one of her ladies to settle a soft woolen lap robe about her. She smiled at one of her favorites—a young maid of honor, as the young, unmarried women who served in her household were called. She smiled at Harriet, who would marry the young Duke of Tamworth. It was a good match, the joining of the strong Whig Holles family with a family whose fame was legend—including scandals and disloyalties, but that was another story. The others watching (someone was always watching) she ignored as she waited for her husband, who was at the other end of the barge with the musicians. She could hear his voice, always too loud, and now and then the murmurs of a quite different voice, a woman’s voice, low, husky, unmistakable. The voice of Lady Alderley, of Diana, aptly named for the huntress of myth.

Courtiers leaped to the right and left as the Prince walked in to join the Princess under the barge’s canopy. On his arm was Diana. She curtsied to the Princess.

“Please, my dear,” said the Princess, looking directly into Diana’s famous violet eyes. They had snared many a man, including the one most disliked in London at the moment: Robert Walpole. Diana and Walpole had been lovers for some years. She had survived being tied by marriage to Alderley, an infamous Jacobite, to become lovers with Walpole, a man whose loyalty to the Hanovers was unquestioned. She always landed upon her feet, like a cat.

“Sit here, beside me. We would enjoy your company…. I’m told there is no word from Lady Devane in Virginia. How you must fret,” said the Princess. She made it her business to know everything, all the gossip, all the scandal, all the happenings of those who served court.

“I pray to God, my daughter is well.” Diana, her low voice sending a shiver up even the Princess’s spine, looked away, out to the river, as if she could not bear her sorrow, allowing the Prince and Princess the sight of her profile, somehow poignant in its imperfections, the sags and lines overlying what had once been matchless beauty. It was still an extraordinary face.

Laurence Slane could do no better than the way she plays this role of tragic mother, thought the Princess: the sadness in the eyes, that throbbing undertone of grief in the voice. Diana had somehow managed to turn the Prince’s rage at Barbara’s leaving to her advantage. Lady Alderley is looking unwell today, he told her. Or, Lady Alderley seems sad. He put his own emotions upon Diana. Clever huntress. Manipulator of men.

There was a lurch, as the barge was pushed away from the bank. The oars were uniform in their straightness against the sky. Then came a barking command, and the oars dipped down in unison, like weathered brown birds, into the water. The breeze from the river lifted the edges of the ladies’ small lace caps and played with the long curls of the men’s wigs. There was a murmur of talk as the musicians began to play.

Tommy Carlyle, an immense, hulking man with rouge on his cheeks and a diamond in one ear, said, “I shall not give you my opinion of the French because I am very often taken for one of them, and several have paid me the highest compliment they think it in their power to bestow, which is, ‘Sir, you are just like ourselves—’”

“So…” said the Prince, slapping his hands together. “We are on our way.” He spoke with a Hanoverian accent, which courtiers mocked behind his back; the “w”s were “v”s and the “p”s were “b”s; his most famous remark had become “I hate all boets and bainters.” But at least he spoke English, unlike his father, who conversed with his English subjects in Latin or French.

“I shall only tell you,” continued Carlyle, “that I am insolent; I talk a great deal; I am loud and peremptory; I sing and dance as I walk along; and above all, I spend an immense sum in hair powder, feathers, and white gloves.” There was laughter from those who had heard him.

The Prince smiled, thinking the laughter was for him, for the excursion he had caused to come into effect. He was as happy as an overgrown boy today. They had not been on an excursion in months, and Hampton was one of their favorite palaces.

It was a beautiful palace, a grand Tudor spectacle of red brick and twisting chimney stacks and mullioned windows and stone gateways. It contained three large interior courtyards, the last of which had been redesigned by Sir Christopher Wren. Wren had torn down the Tudor facings and created a formal, baroque series of state rooms, their classical façades even and perfect, window matching window. The Wren courtyard looked out on the gardens. If one came to Hampton Court by river, it looked as if it had been built yesterday. But entering by coach or horseback through its front, one was transported back a century and a half to the Tudors, to Henry VIII and Elizabeth and Bloody Mary.

“The ghost of poor little Queen Catherine runs along the gallery of the state apartments,” the Prince said, telling his favorite ghost’s tale of the palace. A few seats from him, his mistress, Mrs. Howard, smiled sweetly as she tried to hear over the music, but her sweetness paled and died against the dark drama of Diana.