Now Face to Face (13 page)

“I cannot leave him alone.”

“We speak of a servant boy of ten or more years, a slave. We’ll find someone to see to him while you’re away. Otherwise you insult the Governor and the most important men in the colony, the men who grow the best tobacco. You’ve said over and over how much you want to talk with them about tobacco.”

He snapped his fingers.

“Mrs. Cox! Mrs. Cox could come to stay with him; she won’t be going to Williamsburg, the journey fatigues her too much. She’s too round,” he whispered, making Barbara laugh, as if Mrs. Cox’s extreme roundness were a secret. “You have only to ask her. She is fond of you, and you are a neighbor. We take care of one another here. All we have is one another.”

“You have all the answers, it seems. You tempt me, Captain.”

He looked at her straight in the eyes a moment, because her words struck him to the heart, because he had never expected to like her the way he did. Desire, yes; but like, no.

“Do I?”

“Yes,” she said, looking back at him. There it was, he thought, that bold vitality of hers, that directness, that made him think about her for hours.

“I’ll go and saddle a horse for you,” he said.

As he stepped over the fence and went toward the paddock at the edge of the house clearing, Barbara watched. Then she walked up and down the oyster-shell paths, so as not to watch him anymore.

I’m in mourning; I won’t be dancing, she thought. She’d noticed in the house that he’d looked at the miniatures. One of the miniatures was of her grandfather. If you decide on any wildness, you just look at that miniature, Bab, her grandmother had said, and remember who your grandfather was, the finest man I ever knew. Barbara sighed. I am only flesh and blood, Grandmama, not a saint.

The other miniature was of Roger. She touched the toe of her boot to some straggling marigold, thinking to herself: Marigold is for grief. She touched at vervain, whose meaning she could not remember, then reached down and snapped a leaf of rosemary, for remembrance. She held it to her nose.

Remembrance. Roger, I am flirting quite seriously with a sloop’s captain, a colonial. His face intrigues me, the moods and thoughts passing over it. He is not simple, like so many others here. His birth in another land, his schooling, his life of adventure, shows. He is not married, like Charles, nor a shy boy, like Mrs. Cox’s grandsons, who ride over to see me but can think of nothing to say once they are here. I am lonely, Roger. I miss a man’s arms around me, a man’s presence in my bed. And the dark is in me again, that old darkness I hate.

Wind moved in the pine trees that were on the other side of the house, and at the sound, lonely, mournful, Barbara crushed the leaf of rosemary between her fingers, looking out at the tobacco fields visible from where she was.

Had Roger ever really known her, known the girl behind her eyes? Toward the last, she’d thought he had—and thought he loved her even more for the knowing.

Her cousin Tony knew her, the girl inside, and Tony loved her. Mrs. Cox’s grandsons made her think of Tony, with their grave silence, their tall shadows. Marry me, Bab, Tony had said. But she hadn’t.

Will I ever marry again? she wondered. And does it matter, if I need not do it for family or policy—indeed, cannot, since I have nothing at this moment to offer, and would give a man who marries me an impossible debt.

What harm did it do to follow her whims, to feel alive again in a way that only lying with a man brought? It meant nothing to either of them. The Captain was leading a horse toward a stump that served as a mounting block.

There is a widow, said Mrs. Cox, over in the next county, whom Klaus Von Rothbach has been courting for a year now. It would be a good match for him; she has much land. Mrs. Cox had smiled, the smile a crease in her plump, knowing face. A land-wealthy widow is a find here, she said. Marrying Lettice Bolling was a clever maneuver. On her death, he received her parcel of land. But it isn’t much, said Mrs. Cox. This widow has much.

Klaus had not mentioned his widow. That’s a lie, thought Barbara, not to mention her, when it is so clear what is between us. Her lover, Charles, stood in the plantation yard with her now, among the marigolds, frowning evenly at her as he so often did. You’re a tease and a liar, Barbara, he’d said.

Well, she had been a tease, but Charles was the liar. She hated liars. Roger lied, whispered the girl inside her, and Barbara shook her head to that. No, not really. Yes, really, said the girl. Klaus had not mentioned the widow. Did it matter?

Yes, it did.

Latching the gate behind herself, she stepped up onto the stump, pulling herself into the sidesaddle, avoiding Klaus’s hands held out to help. She tucked her skirts about her. The gown she wore today belonged to Beth Perry. Thérèse was even now stitching up others for her, plain ones, useful ones, the cloth brought from Colonel Perry’s storehouse. She wore no hoop, which upset Thérèse, but what was the purpose of a hoop to bell out skirts when one might go sailing in a dinghy or ride through tobacco fields? She’d wear a hoop in Williamsburg, and patch her face again, and be all that was expected of a countess from London, as she asked about tobacco.

“I’ll race you to the road,” she said with that abrupt willfulness that so charmed, and she turned the filly’s head in that direction.

She remembered later, while she watched Klaus tease Mrs. Randolph, watched him make her serious-minded neighbor, Captain Randolph, smile, and then remembered it again on the way home with him, as he picked mint and presented it to her with a three-cornered smile. He was teaching her the constellations in the night sky. “I’ll be back at dark,” he said, “to show you Orion.” She remembered vervain was for enchantment.

Chapter Six

B
ARBARA HAD BEEN IN
W
ILLIAMSBURG FIVE DAYS
. T
ONIGHT
there was to be a grand, final fête in her honor at the Governor’s house. Tonight, she would see Klaus. Now, she and Colonel Perry were walking through the garden of John Custis, Colonel Perry’s cousin, at the edge of the village. It was a delicious day, cool, clear, the day before her last here in the village. She was pleased with her time spent here; she’d met council members, burgesses, wives and daughters, made friends, asked a hundred questions about tobacco, and now, happy, she was buying plants.

A ship headed for England lay in one of the creeks that bordered the village; the letter to her grandmother was already in the captain’s hands. But there must be more; she must send gifts to everyone she loved.

The Custis garden sprawled over several acres. Some of it was made up of clipped hedges, flowers in precise formation, young trees planted in orderly lines. Across a ravine, however, the garden became wilderness, its native trees—cedars, pines, oaks—left in all their splendor, smaller trees under them, as well as shrubs and wildflowers. The trees themselves, here and across the ravine, were very nearly a riot of golds, scarlets, clear butter yellows. Once in a while a leaf-strewn gust came up to whip her skirts and try for her hat.

“A dogwood, perhaps, Lady Devane?”

Custis walked her down one of his brick walks.

“Your grandmother the Duchess will want a dogwood for her garden. They bloom in the spring, Lady Devane, and are our loveliest of flowering trees, with white blossoms the size of your face, and a fragrance beyond compare. The Indians make a potion from the bark for fevers. I have sent several fine specimens to the Royal Society. Myself, I prefer lilacs. I am cultivating as many of them as I am given. They do not do as well here as they might in other places, but I have a weakness for them. I search all the woods, you know, like the village idiot, dig up what I like, watch it grow. My friends allow me the run of their woods, indulge my follies, think me mad. They send me things from far and wide—seeds, roots, young trees.”

“Do not allow this man to fool you. He knows more of plants than anyone in the colony, Lady Devane,” said Colonel Perry.

Custis pointed to shrubs at the edge of the ravine; bright red berries clustered like drops of blood on their branches. “Swamp holly. Those berries will be there until spring. You could send your grandmother a swamp holly and some of our jasmine. And some of our mountain cowslips, pretty things, Lady Devane, just what a woman would like, with clusters of trumpet-shaped blue flowers. I have them planted in my flower beds here. Beautiful in the spring, beautiful. Oh, and a pomegranate, she will have to have a pomegranate tree, with scarlet flowers in the summer and a red fruit later. Our cousin, Will Byrd, who’s in England now, gave one to the King.”

“Lady Devane brought rosebushes with her,” Perry said.

Custis’s nose quivered. He might have been smelling a delicious dish for dinner. “Not the Tamworth rose—”

“And spinach seeds,” continued Perry. “Her grandmother’s spinach is equally famous.”

Barbara smiled. Colonel Perry’s gentle teasing of his cousin was as beautiful, as bracing, as the day. “Will you take me across the bridge, Major Custis, and show me your wild garden?”

She began to walk down the side of the ravine. Stepping stones had been set in the side, then led to a wooden bridge, which crossed over the water of a stream at the bottom of the ravine. Already the mood of the garden was changing. The formality was gone. The skirts of her gown brushed against pine cones, acorns, piles of bright leaves. “I would like to send a dear friend of mine a dogwood, such as you spoke of, and I know my grandmother would be delighted with one,” she said. “Would you sell me two from your garden?”

“I might. What would you pay me with?”

Be forewarned, Colonel Perry had said, John Custis would just as soon snap off your head as look at you. He likes people less and less the older he becomes. But if he takes a liking to you, there’s no firmer friend.

“English shillings, a rose cutting, a spinach seed, a French fan, a hogshead of tobacco, a chick or two hatched from Tamworth chickens, fine cream from my cow, who survived one of your storms, a French song sung just for you. What else might you wish?”

A smile moved quickly across his face and was just as quickly gone. He liked her answer.

He pointed to a tree. “Waxy white, fragrant flowers in the spring, Lady Devane, as large as a cabbage. We call it swamp laurel. And this is a mulberry. Our savages here weave the bark into cloaks.” He bent down and picked a branch from the ground. At its tip was a cone of crimson seeds. “From the swamp laurel,” he told her, presenting it to her as if it were frankincense and myrrh—and for him, as Colonel Perry told her later, it was. “Send this cone of seeds to your grandmother with Major John Custis’s compliments, and tell her in seventy years she’ll have the finest trees in all England.”

Barbara followed him across the little bridge. The water under it was crowded with leaves swirling away to their destiny. “Everyone says there are two varieties of tobacco grown here, orinoco and sweet-scented.”

“Your land is best suited for sweet-scented. Count your blessings, Lady Devane, for it brings the highest prices. Though Jordan Bolling grew a good orinoco, too. The Dutch like the stronger tobacco—that’s the orinoco—as do the French and Spanish. The trouble is that orinoco won’t keep in storage over a year and has to be sold quickly, while sweet-scented loses weight in the hogsheads, so that packing it can be difficult. Too much and it might catch the mold. Too little and it rattles to nothing.”

“What would be the very best tobacco seed?”

“Your overseer should have seed, but since you ask, the Diggeses on the York River, north of here, have a famous sweet-scented, known in London, fetching the highest prices.”

Everyone said the same, Digges seed.

Major Custis pointed out a tree with leaves that shimmered like a gauze gown. “Silver maple. Exquisite. The leaves are green on one side, silver upon the other, so that when the wind moves through them, they shimmer. Your grandmother would like a silver maple. I know it. They please my heart, Lady Devane, and as Edward here will tell you, I’m a crusty soul with a difficult heart.”

“Then my grandmother must have a silver maple. How would I purchase Digges tobacco seed?”

“You’d ask mad old John Custis what he desired for it.”

“Every rose cutting I’ve brought is yours for your kindness in indulging me this morning, and I have to tell you, the lilacs at Tamworth Hall are among the finest ever I’ve seen. My grandmother might be persuaded to part with some cuttings…if someone dear to her asked.”