Now Face to Face (43 page)

“You cannot do this, Lady Devane. Your neighbors will hate it, will hate you. It will stir up—”

“I can do anything I please. And I intend to.”

“You’re mad.”

“Very likely I am. What I saw in that planter’s barn would make anyone go mad. You may leave my service if you wish, but there will never be another slave upon First Curle as long as I have anything to do with it.”

He knelt, startling her because he was so big that the movements he made were always big, too. The eyes that looked at her were still a lively and a merry blue, but tears were coming out of them, at the corners, falling into his beard.

“Wild woman, I am yours, forever, your indenture for life. You know that what you do will bring you great odium? That those you count as friends will oppose it? And you?”

She nodded.

When she’d stood in the barn looking down at the body, she’d known it, known all that it would entail. But she’d also known that she was to do it. Who was there to fear? Her grandmother? The Governor? Captain Randolph or Colonel Bolling? King George? The Prince of Wales? There was no one and nothing she was afraid of any more. Absolutely nothing.

“Well, then, I’ll have to stay as overseer because no one else will.”

“Good.”

“Sleep well tonight, Lady Devane. Know that the angels watch over you. They bless you.”

A
S
T
HÉRÈSE
brushed Barbara’s hair, Harry sat on top of Barbara’s feet, sleeping, and every now and again, he moaned.

“He runs with Charlotte in his dreams,” Thérèse said.

“I forgot to read Wart’s letter.” Barbara took it from a pocket in her gown, opened it. “Come home,” Wart wrote in a short scrawl. “There is an adventure happening, and you are needed.”

“Oh, no…”

“What is it? Have I scratched my face, Thérèse?”

Thérèse brought the silver-and-ivory hand mirror up to Barbara. There in the mirror were reflected a few, first strands of gray, like shining silver purl among the red-gold of her hair. Like the silver maple leaf John Custis had once pressed into Barbara’s hand.

Hyacinthe’s, thought Barbara, and the boy we buried today. And the broken Barbara, her rebirth; she was a babe, crawling now, on her knees now, but soon, unfurling like the lily’s leaves. She could feel it, far down, under the broken glass, a tough, green, strong, slender, grief-tempered unfurling. A new birth. A new Barbara.

She wasn’t afraid, not even of the strands of gray. “Never mind,” she said to Thérèse. “It’s all right.” And she meant it.

Chapter Twenty-one

I
DON’T BELIEVE YOU
! Y
OU CANNOT DO THIS
! Y
OU ARE MAD,
insane! It is the fever speaking,” said Beth.

Tears were running down Beth’s face, and she wiped at them, staring at her father as if he were a stranger, as if he were an enemy. She was as angry as ever he had seen her, but the anger was not a child’s. It was certain of itself, calm, determined. It was a formidable thing to see in one so young. She’s like you, Margaret Cox had said to him. Yes, in his younger days, he had been formidable, too.

“In another month I will be one-and-twenty. I won’t let you do it. I will take you to court if I must.”

She turned away from him, her skirts whipping out, hissing in the movement. She walked out of the parlor, up the stairs. He heard the door of her bedchamber close, heard the key click as she turned the lock.

Edward Perry felt as if he had fallen, he felt the way he had the day he saw his son be thrown from his horse and lie still once his body hit the ground. He sat down and found that he was trembling. He touched his face and found that he was weeping. He tried to pray, but no words came. It was dark outside, but in a moment, he would call Cuffy and, fever or not, he would go to First Curle. Lady Devane—Barbara—Barbara would succor him. That he knew.

All his life he had lived here. A part of his life, this last part, he had tried to live in peace and with honor, not that he had not been honorable before, but gain, land, acquiring, had been foremost in his mind. If he bested a man, cheated a little, well, that was part of the game. Now he would have no peace and no honor, not among his neighbors, whom he loved, whom he had served as burgess and justice for all these many years, not from his daughter, whom he adored, whom he had trained, as he would have trained a son, to inherit his earth.

He called for Cuffy, ordered the sleigh harnessed, wrapped a cloak around himself. He was ill. He’d caught a fever, but he was going to Barbara. She had buried that boy today.

Outside, Cuffy helped him into the sleigh, tucked a bearskin around him, told him he should stay home.

“Do as I say.”

Bells on the sleigh jangled out. The night was dark, and it was snowing lightly, but Cuffy knew these woods, these paths, as well as Perry did. In two hours, he would be at First Curle. From there, he had to begin life anew. Grief for Beth’s anger twisted in him. He wept, and he was old to weep, he had not the resilience of the young, who wept as if their tears had no bottom. Tears had a bottom at his age, called death.

B
ARBARA WAS
silent. Perry waited, exhausted. Cuffy had had to carry him into the house, and now he lay, swaddled like a baby in bearskins, upon the bed in her other parlor.

“Must you free them?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.

She twisted a strand of hair. “Must you free them all at once, then? Is there some way to see that Beth does not suffer too much, does not lose too much for your action?”

He could give everything to Beth, save one plantation. They might work out a plan by which slaves were gradually freed, as others were bought. He would have nothing to do with their buying, but Beth was her own mistress. There was a place farther away, small, upon which he might live. He looked around himself.

He might live here, in these rooms that would be full of Barbara’s presence after she left them. He might run her storehouse for her, live on the wages she paid, let it all go, let all of it, the land, the seeing to so many people.

“What of your place as burgess, as justice?” she asked.

“I imagine those will go, with my actions.”

“You do much good.”

“I can do good whether I am a burgess or not.”

What if I do not give Beth all, he thought, but two-thirds now, with the promise that I will pay her for every slave freed, that they will be freed over some five years. What if I take my third—must it be a third? I have so much. A fourth, an eighth would be enough—and live from that.

Barbara pulled blankets up around his shoulders. He had a fever, and she was truly worried for him. “Are you going to free them? It is a large thing that you do.”

“I am.”

She smiled. It was her grandfather’s smile. “I’ve thought to do the same. We’ll be despised together, I suppose. The two of us.”

He held out his hands, and she took them in hers. Pieces of a soul, he thought, closing his eyes, the fever in him hot, deep; fear hot and deep, too, for what he was about to do. For all he lost in the doing of it, for all he gained, pieces of a soul split in two and joined again.

“Show her,” the angel said. She shows me.

Chapter Twenty-two

I
T HAS COME
.”

Tim, the Duchess of Tamworth’s footman, held up the book just delivered to the back door of Saylor House in London. “What is it called?”

Annie took the book from him—it was a New Year’s gift from Tony to the Duchess—and opened to the front page.

“The Fortunes and Misfortunes Of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c.—”

She stopped abruptly, frowned at Tim, and went upstairs to find the Duchess, who was resting. She heard the Duchess humming as she walked into the bedchamber, which had become completely the Duchess’s own from the moment of her arrival; she’d brought her own bed from Tamworth, and it was now set up in splendor in the chamber along with various small tables, their tops a litter of papers, books, vases of flowers from the King, from Tony, from his bride-to-be, Harriet, from the Duchess’s many friends in London. Well may she hum, thought Annie, and in her disapproval was pride. The Duchess had been fussed over like a queen since she had arrived.

Annie read her the remainder of the title page:

“…Who was Born in Newgate, and during a life of continu’d Variety for Three-score Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, Five Times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest, and died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums.”

The Duchess pursed her lips, waved her hand vaguely.

“Leave it there on a table, and I will look it over later and decide if it is fitting—”

“I can answer that question now.” Nevertheless, Annie laid down the book, saying warningly, “You must rest. You have the performance to see tonight, and tomorrow is New Year’s.”

New Year’s. Tony married Harriet Holles tomorrow night. Finally, a wedding in the family again, a glorious wedding, the wedding of Tamworth’s heir. My visit to London has been fruitful, thought the Duchess. She had been able to pour oil on troubled waters, move things forward by her devising. She was quite pleased with herself.

Closing her eyes obediently, but not so tight that she did not see the door close behind Annie, the Duchess snatched up the book. Daniel Defoe’s latest. Defoe birthed books the way some women birthed babies, one after another.

She looked over to her window. The cold outside had misted the panes. Winter seemed to last a long time this year. It was Barbara who had introduced her to the writings of Defoe. She’d brought
Robinson Crusoe
to Tamworth last year and kept them all enthralled with it. The Duchess was fretting: no letter yet. Barbara’s absence was an ache. Does she make her place in Virginia? she wondered each night before she slept. Is she well? Bees, she wanted to send Barbara bees. It was really only the queen that needed to be transported, her friend, Sir Christopher Wren, had decided. Would Virginia house and field bees tend a foreign queen or even accept her in a hive? asked her other friend, Sir Isaac Newton. What if the queen had not been mated? The three of them had many long discussions over the project.

The Duchess tapped her finger against the book, Tony’s gift to her. Tony had forgiven her completely, fussed over and cosseted her the way he’d done before. And though there was no letter from Barbara, Robert Walpole said a ship from Virginia was docking this very day. Perhaps there would be a letter upon it. The absence of a letter—of Barbara—was the sole imperfection in this, her winter of triumph. But then, if Barbara were here, there might not be a wedding taking place.

She leafed through the pages of the book, pausing now and again to read when a sentence caught her eye:

…if my story comes to be read by any innocent young body, they may learn from it to guard themselves against the mischiefs which attend an early knowledge of beauty.