Now Face to Face (75 page)

Chapter Forty-four

A
CARRIAGE LUMBERED CLUMSILY DOWN A DIRT ROAD
. B
ARBARA
bounced from one side of the carriage to the other. In the fields, grain was beginning to show its precious heads. Laborers in other fields scythed the long grass, their blades flashing in the sun. Wildflowers peeped out of ditches and fields: crimson pimpernel, crimson corn poppy, golden agrimony. Barbara closed her eyes, smelling the cut grass in which wild marjoram grew, smelling summer, smelling home. In Virginia, Blackstone would have the seedlings all moved. They would not be seedlings now, but plants. He and Kano would be pinching back some leaves, nurturing others. Had he bought any indentures from the prison ship, and how was dear Edward Perry? He should be with her, going to meet her grandmother. She heard the sound of bleating, opened her eyes to see a stone circle fence, and in it, men shearing sheep. Lambs, outside the circle, bleated and cried for their dams, who bleated and cried at being sheared.

“We turn into the avenue of limes,” said Thérèse.

“Tell the coachman to stop.”

The sound of the horses’ hooves in the dirt was no louder than the beat of her heart. She opened the door, tossed Harry out, then jumped down.

“You go on ahead,” she told Thérèse and the coachman, and she began to walk down the shaded avenue toward the house. Home of her childhood, haven of her girlhood, her wonderful, unfettered girlhood, when she’d run through the fields and pastures as free as any boy, free until the day she left to go to London to marry Roger. Oh, Grandmama, she thought, how good it will be to see you again.

There was the house now, visible at the end of the avenue of trees, quite perfect, exactly what should be at the end of such an avenue. The brick of it mellow, faded, covered in most places by ivy. The child she’d been, playing at fairy cups with Jane, looked at her with solemn eyes; the girl she had been, who had sat in those bays upon many a day, barefoot and dreamy, waved at her. The wild young woman who had inspired duels and desired what she couldn’t have ran across the expanse of lawn, skirts swaying, arms creamy white in lacy sleeves. Hello, Barbara, she said to all her selves.

She called for Harry and walked around one of the long sides of the house. Her grandmother sat on the vast flagstone terrace, dozing, as always she did. Nothing changes, and everything does.

Barbara stood where she was, tenderness in her heart welling, it seemed, without end. Grandmama. Dearest Grandmama, she thought, how small you are, sitting there in your chair. Have you always been that small? Barbara smiled, all her love in that smile. There were no words for what this woman meant to her. Her heart felt like a summer wildflower, open and bold to the sun, full of love.

Harry barked; Tim, leaning against a huge stone vase, straightened and saw Barbara. She put her finger to her lips, lifted up her heavy skirts and began to walk up the grassy steps in that graceful movement so particularly her own, her face alight and smiling.

Dulcinea leaped from the Duchess’s lap to run at Harry. The pair, old friends, met halfway and wrestled one another on the grassy steps. The Duchess lifted her head, opened her eyes, pursed her lips.

“Tim!”

At once, he knelt by her.

“I dreamed I saw Lady Devane, there, on the steps.”

“It is not a dream, Your Grace.”

Dulcinea and Harry dashed into the shrubbery in a merry, remembered game of chase.

“Grandmama,” Barbara called from a middle step. “I decided to come home. I have come to report to you about Virginia.”

Then, quickly, she was at the top step, she was kneeling, she was putting her head against the Duchess’s breast.

“Precious, precious girl, darling child, I thought I’d dreamed you. Tim, I thought I’d dreamed her. Barbara, pet, sweetling, my dear child. You are back.”

The Duchess was stroking Barbara’s hair, rubbing her cheek back and forth into the red-gold of it as if she could not get enough.

Better than Defoe, thought Tim, wiping at a tear in his eye, and it’s our life.

Then the Duchess sat up straight. “You’ve picked a fine time to come home.”

“Do you mean because of the invasion?”

“Worse. Your mother is here.”

In the great hall, Thérèse and Annie were supervising the servants bringing in boxes and trunks from the carriage.

“Have you pulled the crossbows from the halls and issued them to the parlormaids to protect us from the invasion?” Barbara teased Perryman. “I might have been a Papist Irishman, you know, coming in to cut Grandmama’s throat for the Pretender. There!” Barbara made an evil slashing motion across her own throat. “‘Die, dread Duchess,’ I might have said, and ordered you to give me all the Tamworth silver for my king. But first, I’d say, kiss this rosary, and swear upon the holiness of the Pope, over all.”

“She has not changed,” Perryman said to the Duchess. “Not a bit.”

Yes, she has, the Duchess thought. My girl has become a woman.

The Duchess motioned for Tim to take her over amid the boxes and trunks.

“Hyacinthe?” The Duchess said his name quietly to Thérèse, so that Barbara might not hear.

Thérèse struggled not to cry, and the Duchess asked no more.

“I’ve learned the ways of the colonial savages,” Barbara was saying, “and if you do not obey me in every way, I will cut your hair from your head and wear it upon my belt; a scalp, it’s called, with the flesh dried to leather upon it. I’ve brought you a scalp, Perryman. You must wear it instead of your butler’s wig.”

“Barbara…”

There was no mistaking Diana’s voice. From the bend in the stairway, Diana stared down at Barbara, as if seeing a ghost, then ran down the steps to embrace her.

“I knew you’d come back. I told everyone you’d come back. No one believed me, but I knew.”

Barbara stroked the tears from her mother’s face with her thumbs and kissed her mother’s cheeks, one then the other, and Diana crumpled down in a heap on the very last stair, sobbing as if her heart would break. Barbara sat down beside her and put her arms around her and rocked her back and forth, as Annie and Thérèse and a servant went up the stairs, Barbara’s boxes in their arms.

It was as if Diana were the child, and Barbara the mother, thought the Duchess, watching. But isn’t that how it always was? It was Barbara who was mother to her brothers and sisters, not Diana, ever. Such tenderness in Barbara’s face, her touch. New tenderness, deep and true. How will anyone resist her? thought the Duchess.

“I’ve seen the King, and I’ve seen the Prince and Princess, and now I am home for a while, no more curtsies and false smiles…. Everyone still expects invasion,” Barbara said to her grandmother.

“And the Bishop of Rochester?”

“It is said he will be arrested before this month of July ends.”

Other servants were in the hall, now: Cook, the groom, the stable boys, various maidservants, all to see Barbara. The word that she was home was spreading through Tamworth. By nightfall, everyone in the village and nearby houses would know it.

“The Prince!” said Diana, reviving at once and interrupting Barbara’s greetings to servants. “You’ve seen the Prince of Wales? Good. What did he say?”

“Nothing of importance. Ah, I must take off this gown, these shoes, all my feathers and froth. I’ve made a report for you about Virginia, Grandmama, a long report. I’m draining marshes and freeing slaves and making a special tobacco.”

Barbara stood. I want to walk to chapel, she thought. I want to explore every room of this house. I want to lie at the foot of Grandmama’s bed and tell her everything about Virginia. I want to see Jane, my dear and true friend.

“Is Jane at Ladybeth?”

The Duchess shook her head. Barbara kissed the top of Diana’s head, kissed her fingertips at her grandmother, ran up the steps.

“She saw the Prince,” Diana said to the Duchess. “I could not have arranged it more perfectly myself. ‘Nothing of importance.’ Bah. I would imagine he was astounded. She is more beautiful, is she not, Mother?”

“Leave her be. She has only just arrived. You have your own business to contend with, Diana.”

“She is my business.”

It begins, thought the Duchess. I haven’t the strength for it, but it looks as if my Bab has. What happened to you in Virginia, my pet? More than we imagine.

In her grandmother’s bedchamber, Barbara could hear Annie and Thérèse in the next-door chamber, her grandfather’s. Annie was questioning Thérèse, gathering information to be duly reported later. Barbara smiled. She went to the footstool on which, as a girl, she’d sat listening to many a lecture. She touched all the items on her grandmother’s bedside table: the miniatures; the books; the vase filled with roses, a mix of wild ones and ones from her grandfather’s garden. She went to the large portrait of her grandfather that hung over the fireplace, put her hand against the dried paint, smiled up at him. She had no idea how much she favored him at that moment.

She left the bedchamber to roam in and out of rooms on the lower floors; everything about her—the dark Jacobean paneling, the ancient chests and cupboards, the creaking steps and floorboards—was familiar and welcoming, a comfort to her, a touchstone of her girlhood. In the attic rooms she touched the things that had belonged to her brothers and sisters, held a doll a moment to her breast. Never would she have believed that out of them all, only she would survive.

In Annie’s straightforward, neat chamber, she noticed the corner of a book peeping out from under a pillow. At once a spark of old mischief was in her to see what Annie hid. The intrigues of Tamworth, precious beyond words.

“‘The Fortunes and Misfortunes Of the Famous Moll Flanders,’”
she read. Interesting. She put the book in the pocket of her undergown. She would change and walk to chapel. Later, in the quiet of the evening, she would give her gifts and begin to tell her grandmother of Virginia.

In the woods, Harry ran ahead of her, roaming but always circling back to keep her in view. In the stream that ran through her grandmother’s woods stood the new servant someone had spoken of. Bathsheba. She was silent, Cook said. Perryman called her a Gypsy and sniffed dismissively: Annie’s whim. Standing bare-legged in the water, her skirt pulled up and bundled into the band at her waist, the woman gathered something, pulling green bunches of it and tossing them near the stout basket that must contain her babe. An idiot, said Cook. Pitiful, said Perryman.

“What do you gather?” called Barbara as her dog ran forward and barked. “I am Lady Devane, come to see my grandmother.”

The woman did not answer, in fact stood more still than Barbara would have believed a being could stand, her hands filled with mint and water flags, with their purple banner of a flower. But her eyes went to the babe, a pale green flicking, as Barbara bent down to the basket and pulled back the ragged linen with which the child was covered. He lay there smiling. Sweet little idiot, thought Barbara, precious child of God.

“Your child has eyes the color of the mint you gather. He’s beautiful. I leave you to your harvest.”

Bathsheba tucked the linen carefully around her child, put the mint and water flags into the basket with the child, and hoisted it up.

“Voice be the same,” she said to the child, “but the heart be different.”