Now Face to Face (88 page)

S
ET ME
a plot, of strawberry roots, the best be got.

Chapter Fifty-three

O
CTOBER
…

Wrapped in shawls, the Duchess sat in Saylor House gardens with Harriet. Too old, I am too old for all this, she thought. I ought to have stayed at Tamworth.

Harriet was describing her morning at Walpole’s house. He’d had a tragedy. His daughter had died two days ago and lay now in state in London.

“The parlors are so crowded there is no place to sit,” Harriet was saying. “Everyone is there, but the Walpoles are allowing only a select few to come upstairs to see them. They say Mrs. Walpole is beside herself with grief. Everyone is talking of the King’s speech to Parliament, of his threat that there will be more arrests. Who else, do you think, Your Grace? I myself would never have imagined Charles, not in a hundred years—”

“Arrest is not proof. We have laws that a man may not be found guilty on someone’s hearsay. There must be direct proof of treason. Remember that,” said the Duchess.

“We played the game of who Duncannon is while we waited. Molly Hervey made us all laugh by suggesting he was the King’s dwarf.”

“Who knows who he is?” the Duchess snapped. “It could be the dwarf. It could be the Duchess of Kendall’s favorite groom. It could be the gardener there.” She pointed with her cane to one of the garden servants raking smooth the gravel in the broad garden walks. “I’ve lived through too much not to know that nothing is as it seems. We can all wake up tomorrow and find our worlds tipped over.”

John must be ruined, considering the coin he was spending now, and the coin he’d lost in the South Sea, and the coin he’d given to King James’s invasion. Jane and Mary were heartbroken; Gussy was in the Tower; Charles, and other friends from long ago, like Norfolk and North, were locked in cells, allowed to see no one. Tears were in her, and she was too old for tears. Passion was in her, and she was too old for that, too; passionate regret, passionate guilt, rough gravel in her chest for the mistakes she’d made in this long life, mistakes whose fruit she was yet reaping, whose results were playing out before her eyes even now. Those she now loved were caught in them, just as those she loved had been caught in them years before.

Not settled, after all this time, all these years, all the men and all the women, among them herself, plotting, lying, pushing, pulling, quarreling over who was right and who was wrong so that their man might win.

“Poor Mary,” said Harriet.

No visits of any kind, no letters were allowed anyone in the Tower. Men had died with their eyes closing on the oozing bricks of their cells.

“Here’s Mary,” said Harriet. “Look away so she won’t think we’ve been talking of her.”

“Why shouldn’t she know we’ve been talking of her? A fine family we’d be if we didn’t. Mary, come and sit by me. We’ve been talking of you. Harriet, take the baby and go amuse him. You’ll be fine,” the Duchess said, patting one of Mary’s hands. “This will pass. There are others worse off than you.”

Like Jane, thinner each day as she dragged her children hither and yon, from drawing room to official chamber, talking of Gussy’s innocence, carrying letters of reference that spoke of his character and goodness, attempting to make someone listen, attempting to be allowed to see him.

Her father was beside her, doing what he could among Tories and uncertain Whigs, to twist the arrests into a sign of Walpole’s ambition to break the back of the Tory party and the might of the Church of England. Odd that so much was true: Gussy was treasonous and innately good; Walpole was overweeningly ambitious and a clever tracker of treachery.

“‘If October you do marry,’” Harriet was chanting.

Love will come, but riches tarry—so Barbara had told Jane’s little girl Amelia, playing with her, teaching her the rhymes she and Jane had grown to womanhood upon. Marry in green, ashamed to be seen. Marry in gray, you’ll go far away, said Barbara the other day, trying, like the Duchess, to keep Jane’s spirits up.

If Gussy died, what would Jane do? Harriet said she could find her a position as lady’s companion, but what would happen to the children? No one wished to take on a companion who brought along four children. I will care for her, said John, his jaw setting full and stiff. She is my own dear girl. How the devil would he care for her if he himself was impoverished? It hurt the Duchess to the core of her being to see her old friend’s trouble.

Tony walked out of the house and dropped his black gloves—he’d have received these mementos today at the Walpoles’—onto the bench beside his sister. “You look pale,” he told her. “Walk around the garden with me.”

“Walk with your brother,” said Harriet. “I’ll see to little Charles.”

What would you do if you knew the secrets I keep? thought the Duchess, her eyes on Tony, who looked pale himself. You keep secrets, Tony.

He kept his love for Barbara secret. She knew it. She suspected Harriet knew it, too, but Tony said nothing, only was more grave, more stiff, more demanding of everyone around him. He would be furious if he knew what she knew.

It is this Christopher Layer who implicates Charles, Tony had told her, and Layer’s evidence is full of wild contradictions. There’s nothing in it about the Bishop of Rochester.

That was whom the men in a chamber at Whitehall hunted: Rochester. Walpole was convinced the Bishop had headed the invasion plot. The King desired to see him beheaded, wanted Jacobitism crippled once and for all, frightened to death by Rochester’s fate.

Did Rochester head the plot? the Duchess asked Sir John, who told her she already knew far too much and did not need to know that, too.

Barbara said the cruelty of the interrogations had broken this Layer person, and nothing he said could be depended upon. She’d overheard Walpole telling Diana this, debating whether to bring Layer to public trial and show what chaff he rested accusations of treason upon. He thinks he will ride into the King’s clear favor if he convicts the Bishop of Rochester, Barbara had told her. But maybe Walpole won’t be able to take a bishop’s head. Maybe there won’t be the evidence. There have to be direct witnesses. There have to be letters. Some say there are neither, just supposition and guess and unsworn testimony.

Barbara was up to something. The Duchess could feel it. If she’d had more heart, she’d have questioned her, found out, but she was too dispirited.

The King won’t be happy if Walpole can’t give him Rochester, la, la, la, Barbara sang.

They’d broken Layer. What did that mean?

What, in God’s dear name, had been done to Gussy? It drove John to despair, she could see it in his eyes, and it drove Jane, what might be happening to the man they loved in a dark cell of the Tower of London.

Visitors were entering Saylor House gardens: Colonel Edward Perry and Sir Christopher Wren. Wren, small, alert, like the bird that shared his name, darted toward the Duchess.

“I’ve found a book in which there is an interesting fact, a reference to nomads of the desert sands carrying their bees with them when they travel,” he said.

She was moved a little past regret and fear, but only a little. “How?”

“It does not say. Baskets, perhaps?”

Perry, Wren, and Pendarves had become fast friends. Like ancient boys, the three were always together. They liked to sit in the afternoons in Devane Square’s church to watch Wren, busy, as driven as any bee, up among the workmen on the scaffolding, among the woodcarvers and painters, as if not a one of them could paint a stroke or chip a splinter without his knowledge.

“I’ve had a thought about Hyacinthe,” said Wren. “Could it be that he discovered the overseer in some crime, and was killed for that?”

That was another thing they did, discuss everything that had to do with Barbara, including what had happened to Barbara’s servant and why. Perry’s bringing of the collar had been a shock. Barbara had been ill for days over it, carried it now in a sadness in her eyes.

“What kind of crime?” asked the Duchess.

“Well, Colonel Perry informs me that it is not unknown for colonials to smuggle. Perhaps the boy saw something.”

Edward Perry met the Duchess’s gaze with the serenity of a marble angel. He had fine eyes, a clear stunning blue, angel’s eyes, Barbara called them. I used to think I saw Roger in them, she said. The Duchess had another fancy. She thought it possible to see Perry’s soul, a clear thing, full of joy. Unlike her, he had no regrets, no unconfessed sins that pressed him down, made it difficult to breathe, sleep. She envied him that.

“Smuggle, do you?” She frowned.

“We’ve been known to. Your duties upon us are unfair when tobacco sells low. We must put food upon our tables to feed our children, the same as you.”

“If the boy caught him smuggling,” said Wren, “he might have killed him.”

Wren had an imagination, was building plots, rather than churches, in the air. She sniffed and didn’t bother to answer.

“I must go,” said Wren. “I’ve carvers working on the altar rail at Devane Square church, and you cannot trust a carver not to whittle too much of his own ideas into what is already a perfect design.

“I’ve taken the liberty of drawing what I think might be a handsome building to put planters’ tobacco in for your port,” he told the Duchess. “I’ll show you when you come by later.”

“I need a simple port building, not a monument.”

“Nothing fancy, good, strong brick. You could make it there. Perry here has brickmakers among his slaves—”

“Had,” Colonel Perry interrupted gently. “I no longer own slaves.”

“Well, your daughter, then. Simple lines, I thought, a column or two, three, making a porch, where the men might gather and talk. If you were to put in a tavern, a few beds for those who have far to travel and might like a night to rest, it would be sound commerce. You’d have the makings of a town.”

“Are you going to design the tavern, too?” The Duchess’s question was tart. They took it upon themselves to redo First Curle. Barbara was in the thick of it, urging them on.

“I might. I did the college building in Williamsburg, you know. Why not a port building and a tavern? Wren’s, you could call it. Now, I really must leave. Think on those nomads. How on earth would they transport bees? I am intrigued by the question.”

Wren was bowing to Harriet, walking down a gravel path to the gate the way he always walked, as if there was always much to do and little time to do it.

“Who is Duncannon?” Harriet said to Colonel Perry. Jests about Duncannon were fashionable among the young people.

“Who?”

“The King’s dwarf. Isn’t that wonderful? We laughed and laughed over it.”

“I have another for you. Who is Duncannon?”

“Who?”

“Robert Walpole’s horse.”

Harriet gave a trill of laughter, and the baby in her arms laughed too, clapped his hands.

“Your port,” Colonel Perry said to the Duchess, “I am not the only one who might be interested in putting some coin into it. Wren is interested, so are Sir Alexander, here, and Lady Shrewsborough, Sir John Ashford.”

“Sir John hasn’t an extra coin. The South Sea ruined him.” She spoke harshly, too harshly, but she couldn’t help it. John’s plight upset her. And what the South Sea didn’t take, contributing to Jamie’s failed invasion did. Not to mention this arrest. John had left his farm, his fields, to deal with it. I was more selfish than you, Richard, always. I only knew how to love when it was too late. For what do I sit here and yearn? Peace? Quiet? Lost love? That the dead rise from the grave and walk with me again? Forgive me, I would say to the dead. I didn’t know.

Tony was pushing Harriet away. The old Duchess sat here at Saylor House and saw it, a perfectly good marriage—the possibility of true tenderness in it—going sour. Because Harriet was not Barbara. Well, she would never be.

“Carlyle was at Walpole’s today,” said Colonel Perry.

“That surprises me,” answered Harriet.

“Walpole would not receive him. Carlyle said he would return later, with Barbara.”

Tony and Barbara had quarreled over Carlyle. You abandon him, she’d said. Tony told her not to interfere in matters that did not concern her. The running of my house and my estate and my men in Parliament are my affair, he’d said to her, as cold as ever the Duchess had heard him, no concern of yours.