Now Face to Face (44 page)

Trying to attach a moral to ease his own conscience for writing common vulgarity, she thought. Writer’s trick. Defoe was full of them. She opened to another place:

Then he walked about the room, and taking me by the hand, I walked with him; and by and by, taking his advantage, he threw me down on the bed, and kissed me there most violently.

The Duchess read as fast as she could to see what else happened to this Moll Flanders. Only the kiss, but the girl was clearly on the road to perdition.

Shocking, low, common, and wicked.

She ought to close the book now and read a book of sermons, prepare herself for the seriousness of the morrow, when she saw her only grandson carry the legacy of the family forward. She would. In a moment. She smoothed back the first page.

The Preface. The world is so taken up of late with novels and romances, that it will be hard for a private history to be taken for genuine…. When a woman debauched from her youth, nay even being the offspring of debauchery and vice, comes to give an account of all her vicious practices, and even to descend to the particular occasions and circumstances by which she first became wicked, and of all the progression of crime which she ran through in three-score years, an author must be hard put to it to wrap it up so clean as not to give room, especially for vicious readers, to turn it to his disadvantage….

Now I will read too long and have to hurry Annie to dress me. Defoe, you rogue, the Duchess thought, you’ve done it again.

Chapter Twenty-three

N
OT FAR AWAY, ALONE WITH
S
LANE IN A PRIVATE CHAMBER AT
the Deanery of Westminster Abbey, the Bishop of Rochester fumed.

“I tell you, he is in a tavern somewhere, drunk as three lords.”

“He has sworn temperance until the invasion,” Slane said quickly. They were quarreling about the Duke of Wharton.

“There is not a temperate bone in his body. I don’t trust Wharton, Slane, and I don’t like him. I never have!”

“I remind you that no one,” said Slane, “has done more for us in the last months than the Duke of Wharton. I remind you that ten thousand pounds of his own fortune was in the packet we just sent to Paris. I remind you that all of London expects Robert Walpole’s resignation from the ministry at any hour. That is due as much to Wharton as to anyone.”

“Robert Walpole has survived far more than this. The day he resigns as a minister is a day I dance naked in the streets. Wharton fools you. He is impious, immoderate, and unstable! I tell you—”

“And I tell you I will listen to no more. You let your bad temper and impatience cloud your judgment.”

“Slane…”

The word was either a plea or a threat, but Slane was out the door, refusing to quarrel further, walking swiftly down hallways and corridors. I’ll argue no more this day, he thought. He begins to make me doubt myself.

“Rochester is too old a man, too ill with gout, to bear this burden,” Slane had written in a letter to Jamie, a letter he did not send but threw into the fire to watch burn. The Bishop of Rochester isn’t a true Jacobite, said Louisa, Lady Shrewsborough. He came to us because he saw that King George and his Whig ministers would do more to destroy the Church of England than revolution. Remember that, my pretty Slane. It makes a difference in Rochester’s commitment.

Too old, thought Slane, the leaders here are all too old. He envisioned them—Rochester, others, who with Rochester formed the English head of this invasion. He moved lithely, silently, quickly, with a grace that was sudden and sure, that made him, on stage, a magnet for all eyes.

Once at Gussy’s chamber, having walked to it without a conscious thought to do so, he knocked upon the door and walked inside. The fire blazed and crackled red-gold in the fireplace of the small room. Every surface was covered with papers, as was a narrow bed. Gussy, squatting at the fire, was stirring something in an iron pot. He glanced up as Slane came in, but said nothing, simply smiled. Quiet was Gussy’s way. It was an immense relief after Rochester’s temper.

Rochester is excitable and too ambitious, Slane had been warned. You are to keep him pacified, keep him to me, Slane, said Jamie, for I fear no man can lead my way into England save Rochester, who is also courageous and subtle. Jamie was correct. Rochester was the strongest of those here. He was brilliant, determined, clear thinking—but also violent of tongue when in doubt, indecision, or fear. The closer the invasion loomed, the more indecisive he became.

“I’ve made some spiced ale,” said Gussy. “Sit down and share a cup with me. I almost did not recognize you. You look like a great lord in those fine clothes.”

“I perform tonight.”

Slane filled his lungs with the smell of the spices, his heart with the peace that was part and parcel of this small chamber. Outside, afternoon dusk was falling over London, and old snow lay in white-gray piles against buildings. Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, so each prelate of each church in London—St. Clement Danes, St. James Garlickhythe, St. Magnus the Martyr—each prelate in all of England had intoned to begin Advent, the season of vigil and prayer before Christmas and the New Year.

Slane looked out Gussy’s window—frost-rimmed, like windows everywhere. Where was Wharton? Late. Was that a good sign or a bad one? Rochester had so irritated him that he could not tell. He picked up an invitation from among the papers on Gussy’s table, the card thick, the ink dark, the writing swirling and ornate.

“You’ve been invited to the wedding of weddings, I see.”

“My wife and Lady Devane are great friends. For Lady Devane’s sake, His Grace has always been kind to me. I am honored to be invited to his wedding.”

Lady Devane. Barbara stood looking at Slane the way she had in his dream. They were in a garden in Italy, just as they had been once upon a time, and her lovely heart-shaped face was raised to his, her eyes amused, questioning, and something more, and he leaned forward, knowing suddenly that he must kiss her. But in his mind Slane turned away. He had no time for her now.

“Was I sharp? I meant nothing. My mind is on Wharton and how late he is.”

My mind is on Rochester, and how impossible he is. Blackbird, you gave me too hard a task. Rochester is too old. He is not completely ours. He dislikes the invasion plan. His enthusiasm of the autumn has faded. His fears overwhelm him, overwhelm me.

And yet we persevere in spite of them. We make such progress, Jamie. I lie awake, unable to sleep. I am that elated. I make you copious notes—about what I observe here, about your followers and what you will find after you are King; I burn these, but they stay in my mind because I’ve committed them to paper. You are going to be King, Jamie. I can see it.

Gussy handed Slane a goblet and gently clinked his to it.

“Christ be with you, Slane. Do the children of Rome go a-gooding? No? Well, here, on St. Thomas’s Day, children gather in groups and go from house to house, singing, and in return they’re given coins, the coins to give them good things, thus it’s called a-gooding. There’s a sweet song they sing: ‘Well-a-day, well-a-day, Christmas too soon goes away, then your gooding we do pray, for the good times will not stay.’”

And here will be one of your most faithful servants, Jamie. Christ be with you, Gussy. Christmas gone, thought Slane, the New Year tomorrow. This is the longest stretch of time that I’ve stayed in one place in years.

“Has the Duke of Wharton spoken to you of Christopher Layer?” asked Gussy.

“No. Who is he? What does he want?”

“I will leave Wharton to tell you. I know this only: Layer has been to Rome, has spoken to King James himself.”

Gussy was excited for some reason. The Blackbird received many people, too many. Beggars cannot be choosers, Lucius, he’d say. One of them may be my salvation. How am I to know unless I speak with all? But that wasn’t the sole reason Jamie did it. He must hear and see the love brought him, feel close to the country that was his by birth, or break from bitterness.

“What was it about the gooding song that made you sad?”

Sadness had been there on Gussy’s face. Slane had seen it.

“My son died last Christmas, Slane. He loved that song. In his last days, his mother sang it over and over to him, and he, like a small bird, repeated it until he could not. He was a beautiful boy. Already he knew his catechism. My wife, Jane—”

Slane watched Gussy stop himself, as if he’d said too much. Gussy’s words moved him, touched on wounds within himself. He, too, had lost a son. Because he liked Gussy so much, he was curious. This tall, silent, diligent man always kept himself in the background, took Rochester’s rages and upsets without a word, was up at all hours deciphering the letters that came in code, writing letters in reply, so that Rochester’s replies were as immediate as possible. Not a scrap left this chamber in Rochester’s handwriting. It was a precaution Rochester absolutely insisted upon. Suspicious letters were opened at the Post Office. King George and his minister did not forget that there was another claimant for the throne. Codes, ciphers, were always used, but still the risk was great.

To correspond with King James, or with anyone known to be connected with James, was high treason. Day after day, simply by dipping his pen into the inkpot and setting another’s words to paper, Gussy committed the crime of high treason, yet he never complained. There was a wife and many children somewhere—not here. Some trouble there, Rochester had told Slane, gossiping about his favorite clerk, the way anyone would, even a bishop of the church, even the irascible leader of an invasion.

Slane probed. “Do you take your wife to the Duke of Tamworth’s wedding, Gussy?”

“No.”

“A shame. She would like to see it. It is all everyone is talking of.”

“She is some distance away, at her father’s farm.”

Ah, her father’s. So there was some trouble between them. Gussy had a house in the hamlet of Petersham, not too far from here, an easy journey for a wife to make to attend London’s most talked-of wedding.

“Your wife’s father is Sir John Ashford, am I right in that?”

“Yes.”

A staunch Tory, no Jacobite, yet friend to many a man that was. A keeper of secrets, loyal, steadfast, Rochester said. The kind of man who is the salt of the English earth.

“My poor father-in-law. He has taken the defection of the Duke of Wharton hard.”

In a very public gesture last month, Wharton had abandoned the Tories and gone over to the Whigs. He had become the fair-haired follower of Lord Sunderland, King George’s favorite minister. It was the kind of posture and maneuver that London loved. People fed on it like flies on carrion, talking of nothing else, wondering what it meant in the long struggle between Robert Walpole and Lord Sunderland for the King’s favor.

“My father-in-law disapproved of Wharton, of course,” said Gussy, “but relished it that the Duke’s speeches in the House of Lords so infuriated the King’s ministers, so inflamed opinion. It takes all my wits not to tell my father-in-law the truth, that Wharton is a spy in the heart of the King’s cabinet. He says Wharton’s leaving the Tories shows he thinks the party is finished.”

“Make your father-in-law join us. Then he will know all our schemes and not have to fret.”

“One Jacobite in the family is enough, thank you.”

“Not if we win, Gussy, only if we hang.” Slane stretched, tension, tightness leaving him, though not the sadness Gussy’s words about his son had produced. Coming to this room and talking with Gussy had calmed him. He must be calm and alert for tonight, when he performed before the Princess of Wales and her ladies, in honor of the bride-to-be in London’s famous wedding tomorrow.

The Blackbird shall make you an earl, Gussy, Slane thought, for your quiet strength, and your silent travail, and your wife, whom you clearly love, will be a countess. Perhaps she will love you again if you are an earl.

There was a knock at the door. Slane felt his heart leap. Wharton. Another man he had grown to like, as different from Gussy as night was from day. Wharton at last. As promised. Damn Rochester, thought Slane, that he should make me doubt my instincts.