Now Face to Face (14 page)

“Bribery, pure and simple. Edward, you are witness to it. Two rose cuttings, a portion of the spinach seed, a lilac, and it’s done. The seed is yours. I’ll tell you what else mad old John Custis has for a lady like yourself: a secret in which no one believes. The best tobacco is grown from drained marshland. I’ve a friend from England, mad for plants, like me, who came to live among us for a few years. While here, he played with the art of growing tobacco, leased some land, drained a marsh, gave it a year to dry. And a year from that, there were plants twice the size of another man’s, and the prettiest tobacco leaves from them you’ve ever seen. Not a man here can be persuaded to listen to me, to do likewise. They don’t want the bother of it, you see, because there is always land over the next horizon.”

Finished with her buying, she and Colonel Perry walked down the long green laid out before the Governor’s house.

“When I was in England, I saw Saylor House,” said Colonel Perry. “Your grandfather was still alive then. It was spring, and I went into the gardens; there must have been two hundred Dutch tulips planted. Red, I remember, as true a crimson as I have ever seen.”

“You’ve been to Saylor House? I didn’t know. The House of Orange sent tulips every year to him because my grandfather and William of Orange were colleagues in war and because Grandfather supported William when he came over to replace King James. My cousin Tony still keeps the gardens open, and every winter the tulips arrive, for my grandfather is not forgotten by the Dutch.”

Perry moved in front of her so that she had to stop, took one of her hands in his, kneaded the flesh, gently, kindly.

“Have you any idea how kind you’ve been this last week, surrounded always by people? I know our horse race in your honor, our picnics and dinners, grand to us, must have seemed small to you, perhaps even ridiculous. But you have been all that is gracious, when you might have mocked us. You’ve made many a friend this week, Lady Devane. And you’ve just charmed John Custis. I assure you, that is no easy task. Everyone is talking of your kindness. They’re glad, and proud, that you have come to be among us.”

His eyes were alive and beautiful in his face, like matched stones; Barbara thought, Roger’s eyes were just that shade.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

There was no reason she should satisfy his curiosity. You are an honorable man, thought Barbara. Impulsively, she said, “I have a great debt against me. My husband was a South Sea director, and the fine against his estate is large. He owed other monies, for a house he built and stock and land he bought. And when the Bubble burst—well, our estate burst with it. I guess you might say I ran away.”

“Do you think to make your fortune here?”

“I think to do my duty to my grandmother. She wanted to know about First Curle, what it was, what it might be. I needed a time away from all the loss. But I think my fortune is in England. The cards there—the fine against my estate, the debt—are not played out yet. The longer I am here, the more I think about that. I’m going back in the spring to report to my grandmother on what I’ve found here, on what I’ve begun here, and to see to my estate.”

“Will you return to Virginia?”

“The river, the trees, the sky, certain people are growing into my heart. I would imagine I’ll always be coming back.”

They were at the Governor’s house, a large, solid, three-story square of brick, with windows set into its roof, and a white cupola as crown.

Inside its hall, he said to her, “What you’ve just told me will remain between us, Lady Devane—”

“Of course it will. I knew that before I spoke.”

A slight flush came to his cheeks. “I am honored by your confidence.” He spoke stiffly, quite unlike himself. “Farewell, until this evening.”

A servant appeared. “Mr. Randolph is here to see you, Lady Devane. He is in the garden.”

Walking out into the gardens, Barbara saw Randolph, her grandmother’s solicitor, at the edge of a small landscape canal the Governor had built in his gardens.

“Do you have it?” Barbara said, walking up to him.

“I do, but I must warn you that your neighbors will not be pleased. It unsettles slaves, madam, to see one of their brothers freed.”

Barbara took the paper from him and opened it. “I don’t think freeing one small boy is going to unsettle the colony.” There it was, the paper that gave Hyacinthe his freedom.

There was a longtime law, this young man had told her, stipulating that freed slaves had to leave the colony within six months of receiving their freedom, but it had not been put back into the revisions of the slave laws in 1705. Thank goodness. Perhaps, when she gave Hyacinthe this paper and explained to him what it meant, he would stop fretting.

“There is just a bit more of business,” Barbara said to him. “Come with me into the house.”

Randolph was an earnest, serious young man, rather like the man who had been Roger’s clerk of the household. “How might I purchase land, not in my name, but mine all the same?”

“You designate someone as silent trustee and put the land in that name. Where are we going, Lady Devane?”

“To my bedchamber,” she answered, lifting her skirts and half running up the stairs, as he followed hesitantly. “Thérèse,” she said as she entered the bedchamber. “I’ve brought Mr. Randolph up.”

He stood uncertainly in the frame of the door.

“The meeting of the Governor’s Council was very interesting to me, particularly the discussion of the granting of land. ‘To Jeremiah Clower, four thousand acres; to Edmund Jennings, ten thousand; to Drury Stith, three thousand.’”

To Randolph’s surprise, she lifted a pillow from the bed, and there were jewels, diamonds, pearls, emeralds, in earrings, in necklaces, in brooches and bracelets. Slowly, eyes wide, Randolph walked toward them.

“We keep them in the hem of Thérèse’s gown. I want you to take a portion of them, toward buying land. I am a fool for gambling.” Barbara smiled, but Randolph’s eyes were on the jewels. “And I want to gamble in land.”

Tobacco needs land. She’d heard it said over and over since she’d come here. Colonel Perry, Captain Randolph, and Colonel Bolling owned all the land around First Curle for miles—or so said Margaret Cox—land they didn’t use now, but would.

“And there is a letter from His Majesty.” She went to a table, rummaged among some papers, and handed Randolph the letter that had been waiting for her when she arrived in Williamsburg. “His Majesty is kind enough to say that I have to pay no quitrent at all.”

“S-so he does,” stammered Randolph. It was the law that quitrents, a tax, be paid to His Majesty upon any land bought, because the land was his. This letter, with its signature and seal of George I, freed Barbara from that tax.

“I will wear a portion of these tonight—the pearls, yes, Thérèse? But these”—she swept up emeralds and some of the diamonds as if they were nothing, and put them into his hands—“I give to you to safe keep and to use in purchasing land. Now, I really must say good-bye, Mr. Randolph. We’ll talk again tomorrow before I leave, for I have an idea of where we might buy land, and I know you will, too. Good-bye, for now, Mr. Randolph.”

Somehow, he was outside the bedchamber door. He stood a moment looking down at the jewels before carefully putting them in his pocket. He must give her a receipt for them. He would give her a receipt for them! His brother, her neighbor, had described her visits, the dogs her slave boy made do tricks, her singing of French nonsense songs to the children, who laughed in delight, she in gowns that a queen might wear. She is quite extraordinary, his brother had said, asking me one question after another about tobacco, about running a plantation.

Indeed, thought Randolph, she was extraordinary, and exhausting. At the idea of the amount of land he would be able to purchase with these jewels, at the idea of making the best purchase for the amount, at guessing at the future, a challenge he enjoyed, he thought: And she’s exhilarating.

C
OLONEL
E
DWARD
Perry did not go back to his cousin’s house as he had planned, but walked to the side of the Governor’s house, outside the gardens, the wall surrounding them, to a tall and spreading oak. From there, he looked up toward the windows of the room in which she stayed. He was deeply moved that she had confided so freely in him. A hundred men must have loved you for your face. Did any love you for your heart? I’m like a boy, he thought, besotted.

What is there that I remain so touched, so moved within, by you? It was as if, after all this time, he had stumbled upon something familiar, something he had long ago surrendered as gone, never knowing of the surrender until what had been lost was found again. Home was the river, whose sullen flow he’d watched for all these years. Home was the thick woods, the horse trails cut through them, the heavy heat of summer, the isolation winter storms brought, the simple, rough kindness of people whom he’d known all his life; yet all that seemed a dream now, faded beside the fact of Barbara’s presence at First Curle.

Up until now, he had been content, particularly in these recent years of his life, living in a serenity that made him feel he flowed as beautifully, as powerfully, as the river. It was as if God had blessed him in every possible way, and he, aware of those blessings, had tried to return them. She touches my heart in a way I do not understand, he thought, and I am frightened by the depth of my emotion.

He would go to the church just down the green. It would be quiet inside; no one would be there. He would sit down upon a pew and pray about this, yet again. Prayer was his habit now, though he’d come to it late, only some fifteen years ago, when his son had died. The boy, like his daughter, Beth, had entered his life late, from a younger wife, a woman he’d loved, who had died bearing Beth. Prayer had changed his life, had saved him from the madness the grief of his son’s dying brought. It would save him, now, from being a fool, or if it didn’t save him from that, he would be guided, as always he was, to what it was he had to do with her; for somehow, some way, he and she were inextricably linked. All that being near her did was draw them closer, and so he must accept it. He must ask, until he was answered. It was almost as if they were pieces of a soul, split in two and found again. A poet’s thought—which, again, frightened him, coming up from some place deep within him, a place he’d not explored before, indeed had not known existed.

“A
LAW
that tobacco must go to England, a law that the hogshead must be a certain size, a law that a planter must be fined if he casks the sprouts growing on the stalks after the leaves are cut—what a number of laws they have for tobacco,” Barbara said to Thérèse.

Nicotiana
is its Latin name, she thought as Thérèse unlaced her gown, repeating in her mind Major Custis’s words: There is a native species here, grown by the Indians before the first one of us ever landed. It was sacred to them, and still is, despite us. When you smoke a pipe of tobacco with an Indian, you do not do so for enjoyment, but rather to sanctify a pact or treaty or deed. They offer it to the water to ensure good fishing, scatter it in fields to ensure good harvest. Sacred, you see. They are not prodigal with it, as we are.

She would cultivate fewer plants, grow less tobacco, but the best. Sort, it was called: tobacco, grown by certain planters, that could be counted upon for quality. Colonel Perry had a sort; so did Captain Randolph. So would she, beginning with Digges seed. There were no records of Bolling’s tobacco to look at, no account book about his tobacco growing. Doubtless his uncle had taken them. So be it. She’d write to Jordan’s London merchants; better yet, she’d visit them when she went back to England.

She’d make her own sort, the best sort, from the best seed. She pictured Tony, Wart, Charles, all the fashionable young men she knew, holding snuff to their nostrils, sneezing, the snuff made from her sort. She could make her sort fashionable; she knew she could. Those at court thrived upon being in fashion, spent days and nights fretting that a gown might not be the latest style or worrying over the placement of a patch. She would send a hogshead to the Prince of Wales’s favorite tobacconist, with her compliments.

She heard the sound of a harp and sighed. Musicians practicing for tonight. In another couple of hours or so, the downstairs would be filled. She raised milk-white, slender arms over her head and thought about a sweet, mild tobacco. Could a tobacconist mix lavender in among the crushed leaves? Or mint. Lady D, the snuff they made might be called. Or perhaps—even better—The Duchess, for her grandmother.

Thérèse had laid her gown for this evening across the bed. There were the jewels and feathers, the ribbons and laces, the stays that would pull in her waist and push up her breasts and so constrict her that she would not be able to run ten steps without losing her breath. There were the patch box, the rouge puff, the accoutrements of a lady.

She went to the window. It overlooked the gardens. The Governor had built this house and planted these gardens. He patented land for himself, explored, had a plantation near the mountains, was always occupied. He left his mark.

I go to Williamsburg at the Governor’s command to represent the people of this county as a burgess, Colonel Perry said, and I have the honor to serve on county court. It is my duty to know as much as I can about those I serve. My neighbors’ needs are what I take to Williamsburg when the Governor calls an assembly to make laws; their troubles are what I listen to and decide about on county court day. How can I make a fair decision if I do not know my neighbor and his needs?