Now Face to Face (101 page)

“I need a woman to go to the Tower with us, a woman who will wear an extra gown over her own. She has only to do that and then disappear. We’ve money for her. Do you know someone who doesn’t mind seeing the last of London once she’s done?”

Tim nodded. Annie had known he would.

“What else?” he asked.

“Someone to drive a carriage or cart. Sir John will drive one, the one with Gussy in it. Someone needs to drive another, with Jane and myself.”

“Done.”

“This is no game, footman.”

He stood, looked down at her, impudent, bold, tall. No wonder the Duchess adores him, thought Annie. If I had a heart, I might, too.

“The Duchess will miss us.”

“Leave that to me.”

“Tim has a sweetheart,” Annie said later to the Duchess. “He’s been scowling like a singed cat in the kitchen for days. A lover’s quarrel, the cook thinks.” Annie coughed.

“I don’t like the sound of that. Go and rest.”

“I am fine.”

“You are not. You are getting ill. I won’t have it.”

“I am fine. You fret like an old hen over her one chick.”

“Bah. Go ahead and be ill. Little I care. No one listens to me anyway.”

T
HREE DAYS.

“Well, now,” Jane said, to the turnkey in the wardroom that led to Gussy’s cell, “I have wonderful news. The King is going to accept my petition for mercy tomorrow night. I think that my husband will not die after all.”

Jane smiled and handed the turnkey a small sack of coins.

“You and the other gentlemen here drink a toast to that. Will you?”

“God bless you, Mrs. Cromwell, that we will, with all our hearts.”

She followed the turnkey up the short twisting staircase, and at its top, he unlocked the door of Gussy’s cell. She and Gussy sat together on the bed.

“Tomorrow afternoon. Annie helps, and a woman Tim found.”

“What woman?”

“A woman of the streets, who will be given enough to disappear from London. Tomorrow,” whispered Jane, “my mother takes the children to Gravesend.” Ships sailed from Gravesend, a village east of London. Barbara had sent word of a ship.

There was a knock at the door.

“Visitors,” said the turnkey.

Jane went down the stairs, passing through the wardroom, where guards and their wives and children were gathered at one end by the fire, as was their habit. It was what had given her the idea in the first place: The guards paid more attention to their families than who came in and out. They expected nothing of her. No one did. She was too meek and quiet.

“God bless you,” one of them called. “We’ll drink to your husband’s good fortune tomorrow.”

Outside the wardroom was a long flight of stairs, at the end of which stood friends of Gussy, men he’d gone to school with.

“They allow only two inside his cell,” she said to them. “So I may not go with you.”

Later, going up the stairs to be with Gussy once his visit with his friends was ended, Jane paused a moment. She felt odd, had been feeling so since yesterday. She shook her head and walked into the cell. This was her last night with Gussy, if her plan failed. They lay together on the bed, holding each other, for hours.

Winter

…charity, these three

Chapter Sixty

D
ECEMBER MOVED ON FROSTY FEET TOWARD THE BIRTH OF
the Christ….

The day.

“Drunk as ever I’ve seen him, over that sweetheart of his,” said Annie. She put her hand to her head. “When he shows himself again, you’ll need to punish him.”

“Fever,” said the Duchess. “Have you a fever? Does your head ache? I knew it. Go to bed.”

“I am fine.”

“You are ill.”

T
HE DAY.

The children were gone with Jane’s mother to Gravesend. This is the last day of my old life, thought Jane. Farewell, Barbara.

B
ARBARA SAT
in Walpole’s office, a tiny cubicle near the chamber in which the House of Commons met. She could hear the shouting from where she sat. Roger’s fine was the subject, and it was as if an unhealed wound had been touched, men shouting and bellowing about the South Sea Bubble, the trickery and treachery of His Majesty’s ministers and stock jobbers.

The Tories had jumped on the question, and for two days now there had been long speeches and much posturing. All the old feeling against Walpole was up; Skreen, he was being called to his face and in the venomous little broadsheets. He’d chosen his time well, though, for many of the members were absent, already out of London, gone to their country homes for the season. Robin, thought Barbara, do you never misstep? What was happening with Jane? She did not know.

She heard a great shout. Today would be the vote, Robin told her. She went to the door, looked down the hall. What did it mean? The shouting continued, and then men were streaming from the chamber out into the lobby. She saw Wart and Tony, who had been watching the proceedings in the Commons since they began. A tall man beside Wart turned, and it was the Prince de Soissons.

Barbara became wary instantly. Philippe. He bowed to her.

When did you return? she thought, and then was distracted by Robin, coming out of the chamber, his face red. She walked to him.

“What I’ve put up with,” he said to her, taking her hands, “you cannot imagine. The things said of me.” And then, with a smile, “It’s done. The fine is relented entirely.”

Like that, one hundred thousand pounds of debt disappeared. She felt like fainting.

“Thank you, Robin.”

He was leaving soon, to go to his country home, taking the boxes and boxes of notes about Rochester and the invasion, to see how he might proceed against a bishop. They were going to doom the Bishop to exile. His Majesty was pleased. He’d have rather had a headless body, but exile would do. Jane, thought Barbara, how do you do?

“Go and see my mother before you leave town, Robin.”

“You’re fretted for her, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll do it.”

Now here was Tony, a smile on his grave face.

“It’s done,” she said. “Walk me to my carriage, cousin.”

Outside, as they waited for her carriage to be brought forward, someone called her name. She turned; there was Wart, and with him was Philippe.

“We wanted to congratulate you,” Wart said. “Everyone who knows you is glad, Bab.”

“I congratulate you, Barbara,” Philippe said. “You have risen, like a phoenix, from ashes.”

Which you did not expect, thought Barbara, and did not want.

Her carriage was here. Philippe held open the door for her before Tony could. She climbed inside without touching the hand he held out to help her.

“I will call upon you very soon,” he said.

The carriage pulled away.

W
HARTON AND
Philippe walked down the street. Philippe stopped to buy a sprig of Christmas holly from a street vendor’s basket. Carefully, fastidiously, he pushed it into his buttonhole, surveyed the scene before him: carriages and sedans, clerks from Whitehall walking to coffeehouses and taverns, someone selling fresh water to drink, someone selling herbs to bring good fortune.

“A pity she isn’t a Jacobite,” he said. “We must make her one.”

I
N THE
carriage, Barbara felt numb. I’ve done it, she thought. I’ve survived Roger’s debacle, triumphed over it. She closed her eyes, began to tremble. Someday, she thought, someday soon, I must grieve over all I’ve lost in this, but not today. Today I want to walk around Devane Square and say to myself, I’ve done it. I want to send love and blessings to Jane. Jane.

I
N HER
mind, Jane rehearsed the plan. This afternoon, she would bring friends yet again to see Gussy, as the guards had seen her do these last weeks. But this day Gussy would leave as one of them, if the guards and God allowed it. There was the carriage. Tim sat atop it. He grinned his broken-toothed grin at her, nodding his head. Dear Tim. Dear Annie. Their presence gave her strength, made her think she might succeed. There was no way ever, ever to repay them. Her father would try to give them coins, but Jane doubted they would take them. They did this for love of Tamworth and the Duchess and Ladybeth, all that they knew. They did it for love.

Inside the carriage, Jane said to the woman, “You understand everything? You are to go up to his cell with me, first.”

Jane put her hand to her back, which was aching. Was it the child?

“What is it?” said Annie, sitting grim and sober beside the woman.

“Nothing; a little pain.”

Tim pulled the carriage into the yard beside the Tower. Jane watched as he drove it back outside the gates. There was every possibility she would never see the other side of these walls again.

She and Annie and the woman walked across the yard, through the arch of Martin’s Tower, under which was a bridge that crossed the moat. The afternoon was leaden, clouds like gray pillows. I am mad, thought Jane, completely mad to be doing this. It isn’t going to work. They walked through yet another archway of yet another tower, down the path toward the entrance to all that was behind the walls, massive, thick walls.

My plan is too simple, thought Jane. I am a fool.

It was dark inside this last archway, an archway that would put them in the heart of all that was the Tower of London, like a small town behind its massive walls. The Tower held more buildings than Williamsburg, Barbara had said.

Jane stood a moment in the open space, breathing in air. I must not fail, she thought. I must be brave. But Barbara was the brave one, not she. Someone must stop this now, she thought, but who?

There, ahead, was the tower in which Gussy was jailed. Leaving Annie in the downstairs chamber, Jane walked with the woman up the stairs to the wardroom, and just before opening its door, took a deep breath that she felt all the way to her womb. Cramps in her womb. Something was happening. Annie knew. Courage.

She took Tim’s woman by the hand and marched her into the wardroom, talking as fast as ever she had.

“I am to see the King tonight,” she said to the woman, knowing the guards clustered by the fire would hear. “I am so beside myself I can hardly think. Where is the turnkey? Hurry, and open the door of my husband’s cell.”

Following the turnkey up the twisting stairs, Jane talked all the while, her heart pounding so hard she didn’t know how her voice sounded over it.

“I must change my gown. My servant is coming here to help me change, turnkey. Let me know when she arrives, please. I can’t go to the King in this gown.”

Jane dropped a coin into the turnkey’s hand; she and the woman went inside, and Jane continued to talk, to Gussy now, chattering on as the woman took off the hooded cloak she wore, took off the second cloak under that, and then began to take off her gown. Under it was another gown.

Jane picked up her skirts, and fetching out of a pocket in her undergown the wig and little bag of rouge and powder she had brought, she dropped these on the bed. As Gussy began to pull the gown over his head, Jane walked through his opened cell door and down the twisting stairs with the woman, saying to her as they crossed the wardroom, “My servant should be in the chamber below. Send her to me, or I will be late to see the King. Hurry. It will be dark soon.”

She walked the woman out the door, walked halfway down the stairs to meet Annie.

“Thank you, God bless you,” she whispered to the woman. “Be gone from London now.” The woman nodded her head.

Annie had the hood of her cloak up over her head and a handkerchief to her face. She was weeping loudly.

“Never mind crying, my dear friend.” Jane patted Annie’s arm. “I am to give the King my petition tonight, and I know all will be well.”

Annie climbed up the short, twisting stairs to the cell with Jane, Jane talking all the while, Annie crying behind the handkerchief as if her heart would break. Gussy had on the gown and wig.