Now Face to Face (40 page)

The tumult subsided. Ambition—opportunity—covered it over.

Chapter Nineteen

B
LACKSTONE WAS IN THE YARD, PLAYING HIS BAGPIPES
. R
ANGED
out behind him were all the slaves on First Curle, some holding candles, some pounding drums, some waving rattles. The sound of seeds in the rattles was like rain hissing. The drums, the rattles were exquisite things, carefully made from wood and stretched skin, or hollowed-out gourds or branches. Carving, feathers, beads, and shells decorated them.

They believe the drumbeat summons forth your heart, Blackstone had told her. The sound of the rattle summons forth spirit.

The sight was beautiful. Barbara opened the door wider. Blackstone broke off his playing and, as she stood in the opening of the doorway, he said, half laughing, “Wassail”—an old word, as old as England, meaning “wholeness to you,” “health to you.” It was a New Year’s blessing.

Up the steps, moving past her, he said to Thérèse, on the stairway in her nightgown, “I am firstfoot in this house this night. I bring you your luck in the coming year. See the color of my hair, Mademoiselle Fuseau? It means good luck for you. Now, if my hair were dark, you should not allow me in, for I’d bring bad fortune, but since it isn’t, here I am. Come along, ladies, I have the wassail prepared. You must drink a cup of it with the slaves and me.”

“It is the middle of the night,” said Barbara.

“Of course it is. When else can a new year begin?”

He began to play his bagpipes again, marching into one of the parlors and around the table and out into the hall again. Barbara and Thérèse pulled on boots and followed him outside, snow caking on the bottoms of their cloaks as they walked. The Christmas Day storm had shaken snow like white sugar over everything, knocking down trees and blocking the horse paths between plantations. Yesterday, the slaves had worked to clear paths to First Curle so that Barbara might receive any New Year’s company visiting once the sun rose. She had seen no one in several days; the weather had made travel impossible.

Crowded into Blackstone’s cabin, they drank wassail. The spiced ale, into which Blackstone had mixed rum, was strong; with three cups in her, Barbara began to sing, softly, the words of a melody Blackstone played every once in a while, a haunting melody. A melody of my home, he said to them, written before you English ever ruled us. It’s a tune of the mountains in which I was reared. My mother sang it.

“‘Morning has broken, like the first morning,’” Barbara sang, her voice husky and sweet. “‘Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird. Praise for the singing. Praise for the morning. Praise for them springing fresh from the Word.’”

Blackstone closed his eyes to the sound of her voice, moved by the fact of Thérèse sitting close enough to touch, moved by the presence of all these people in his small cabin, moved by the good fortune that had come his way in the last months. You flirt, accused Thérèse, and her Frenchwoman’s heart was cold. Yes—how could a man help it?—but with no motive save to pay tribute. Lady Devane was beautiful in her heart. He was a felon; his time had been given away as punishment for his loyalty to King James. She was not obliged to pay him a penny for the time he served. Jordan Bolling had paid him nothing. But she had said, I’ll give you the same as Smith received for his duties of overseer. Then, when your time is over, you’ll have something upon which to build. Hope had come into his life, like the first bird, like the first morning. The wassail and song brought tears to his eyes; so did the hope.

“New Year’s gifts,” said Barbara. “I have to give out New Year’s gifts. Come, stand up. Pipe us outside and over to the house, Blackstone.” She laughed. “I don’t think I can walk in a straight line.”

No one could, and it was wonderful: following her zigzag, the laughter in the night at themselves, the candles glowing, bobbing up and down with the movements of those who held them, the sound of drum and rattle and bagpipe. Once in the house, Barbara led everyone into her parlor and gave gifts: a cone of sugar to each slave, blankets for all, coats, gowns, shoes, clothing she’d taken from the storehouse. For Thérèse, there was a shawl woven by the French Huguenots who lived beyond the falls, the wool of it a rich red color, warm and vivid. Thérèse began to weep as Barbara draped it across her shouldres.

“What is it, Thérèse?”

“It is so beautiful. I miss Hyacinthe. He should be here.”

Yes, thought Barbara. John Custis had sent a small tree, a silver maple, up with the Governor. The note attached read, “Green on one side, silver upon the other. I am sorry about your boy. Plant this so he may see it as he moves toward you to return. The sun will catch the silver in the leaves and make them glint, and the glint will guide him home.”

Still weeping, Thérèse crawled into Blackstone’s lap.

“It’s the wassail,” Blackstone said looking at Barbara, who smiled to see such a large man look so sheepish.

“Hyacinthe was like my child,” Thérèse was saying into Blackstone’s chest. “I cannot bear it. I made him something for the New Year. I was so certain he would be back with us.”

Thérèse’s weeping changed the mood. The slaves were standing, going to Barbara, thanking her, grave in their courtesy and drunkenness. After they were gone, Barbara sat on the floor, her arms around her knees, staring at the fire for a long time, until she realized that Thérèse was no longer weeping. She had fallen asleep in Blackstone’s lap, and he, eyes closed, gently rocked her back and forth. So, she thought, they’re lovers.

Then Blackstone was standing, going up the stairs to put Thérèse in bed, coming down them again, nodding good night to Barbara. Alone, she walked around the parlor, touching this and that, the ornate carving upon the frame of one of the paintings she’d brought with her from England, a pewter dish in the cupboard, the threaded thickness of the embroidery upon the French chairs.

Upstairs, she pulled a gown over her nightgown and found wool stockings. Harry followed her back down the stairs.

“We’ll welcome the dawn, mighty hunter,” she whispered to him. “Wassail, my Harry dog.”

She walked to the river, then turned to follow a path along its bank to the second creek. In the distance, in a sky still more shadow than light, was smoke spiraling up from a chimney, the one in the slaves’ house. This was a day of rest for the slaves. They were cooking the game they were not supposed to hunt—a law they and Barbara ignored—as well as two small pigs she’d given them. The meat was roasting outside in a pit they’d dug yesterday. She could smell snow and pine tree and roasting pig, delicious, wonderful, the river a dull, snow-iced murmur to her other side.

The sky was the color of a shell streaked with rose. The sun fell in patches before her as she walked back toward the house. Smoke was spiraling from the kitchen-house chimney. Curious, she went to see who was there. Blackstone smiled at her as she stepped up into the kitchen.

“Your cheeks are as scarlet as plums,” he said. “Have you slept at all? Neither have I. I’ve been making an oatcake of Scotland. There is more wassail made, for your guests this day.”

Pots hung from an iron bar in the fireplace—a cavern of a fireplace, the width of the kitchen house. Barbara leaned over and smelled the wassail. Any guest who drank much of this today would have to spend the night. Along small ledges at the back of the fireplace, built to put food upon so that it would stay warm, she saw thin cakes piled like so many Shrove Tuesday pancakes.

“I hear a bridle jangling. First guest of the New Year for you, Lady Devane.”

This early it could only be Colonel Perry. He wouldn’t mind her cloak and boots and hair hanging down about her shoulders. She stepped outside and was startled to see Colonel Bolling atop his horse at her picket fence, and with him Klaus Von Rothbach. She could not imagine why they were here but instinctively she didn’t like it.

“We have news,” Bolling called when she was close enough to hear.

She had heard that a solitary tobacco ship or two was beginning to show in the rivers. Were there letters from home? she wondered—the best of New Year’s gifts—and she lifted her skirt to run, sudden, vivid joy in her heart, joy which must have showed upon her face because Bolling said, quickly, stopping her mid-step, “It’s about your servant boy.”

“L
ADY
D
EVANE,
this way, please…”

Barbara could not move, unable to believe that this was how the day ended. A musty smell tickled her nose—hay for the cattle and horses; it was an undertone to another smell, one of death, something rotting, decayed. In spite of a lantern lighted, the barn was almost as dark as the January night outside the door. Her breath came out in little white clouds of puff. Cold, it was so cold. Beside her, cloaked, gloved, booted as she was, Thérèse made a sound, like a sob pushed back.

Under the wavering light of the lantern held by the owner of this plantation lay a blanket-covered mound. Hyacinthe, they said. The body of a boy had been found down the river, caught in a tangle of brush, preserved a little by the cold. A miracle that the body had been seen at all. Or so Colonel Bolling, in his official position as one of the justices of the county, had come to tell her.

Someone took hold of her elbow. Colonel Perry. Yes, she must do what she must do. Grandmama, she said in a quick prayer, send me your strength. I do not think I can stand this.

It took tremendous effort to lift her foot, to make the first step of the fifteen or so paces to where the body lay under the blanket, but she did it, Thérèse beside her, maidservant, friend, Hyacinthe’s other mother.

As the planter pulled back the blanket, Barbara’s heart gave a mighty lurch. It will jump out of my chest, she thought, as a hundred images, a hundred memories of Hyacinthe jostled one into another in her mind. She looked down, thinking, as she’d done the dawn she killed the stag, I will never forget this. It will mark me all my days.

The boy was naked. He had the long, gangling legs of a growing boy; the bones of the knee, the thigh showed. Something had eaten away flesh from fingers, from genitals and toes. His features were soft, almost formless, most of the face gone to bone. Who was this? How could she know?

“I am not certain it is he,” she said. The words came out a whisper. Her throat was closed tight. She was frozen in horror at this death, for all death, for life. Colonel Perry still had hold of her elbow, thank God. The shock of what lay at her feet held her breathless, numb.

“Is this the boy, Mademoiselle Fuseau?” Colonel Bolling said; he leaned against one of the horse stalls, arms folded, face impassive.

Thérèse was weeping too hard to answer. Words were echoing through Barbara’s mind. It was last spring, and she sat in one of London’s most beautiful churches and listened to Robert Walpole give the eulogy for Roger. “No man is an island…” Walpole had read, intoning the words of Roger’s favorite poet, Walpole’s voice echoing and stern from the pulpit of the exquisite church. “Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main….”

“The boy must have wandered from the plantation, become lost in the woods. Who knows how long he lived there before he fell into the river and drowned?” It was the sheriff, who had met them at this plantation, who spoke.

“Her boy was not raised to the woods. How would he survive?” Bolling said.

“What of the dog?” said Perry. “Someone shot the dog in the head. It was a deliberate act.”

“The dog’s back was broken, wasn’t it?” said Klaus, who had accompanied them on this journey. “Perhaps someone came across her, dying, and killed her. Out of mercy.”

“Why hasn’t that person stepped forward then, to tell us?” said Bolling. “Everyone in the county and two more besides knows about the boy.”

Barbara walked across the barn and pulled one of the heavy doors open, stepping out into freezing night. The darkness of it was complete, making her blind for a moment. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Then she saw a pinpoint of light, feeble, a candle in the window of what must be the plantation house in which they would stay this night. She began to walk toward that light. It is the great mix of feeling, that is why I feel so ill, so faint and weak, so out of time and place, she thought to herself as she walked. Hyacinthe. Dear one, brother, child, sweet servant, Roger’s gift.