Now Face to Face (16 page)

Though Slane himself was twenty-eight, he’d been in his first battle at the age of fourteen, fighting this man’s relatives—this man’s father and grandfather—in the French wars. And then, too, he had grown to manhood in exile, belonging to no one, to no place, to no home, his family estates in Ireland given to those who had chosen William of Orange over James II. Belonging nowhere brought out a man’s instincts for survival, and it made him old before his time.

He felt little but contempt for these young noblemen of George I’s, who had never fought a battle or done without anything. It was said that Robert Walpole, one of the King’s ministers, bragged that every man has his price. In this world, under this reign, it was true. The South Sea Bubble had proved it.

“Your Grace, the play is over,” Slane said. “We need to lock our doors and go home for the night.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Slane could see Cibber wringing his hands nervously, not wanting to offend so noble a patron, but wanting, like everyone else, to be out of the theater and into bed.

Tony stood up. He doesn’t even know where he is, Slane thought.

“Come with me, Your Grace, it’s time to leave,” Slane said cheerfully, thinking: The duel must be set.

It will end in a duel, that mincing hulk of a courtier Tommy Carlyle had said today. You mark my words, Slane.

This was likely the Duke’s first duel. There was in Slane’s mind the memory of his first battle. He had scarcely slept the night before it, and his hands had been shaking so before the cry of battle began that he had dropped his sword and nearly cut off his foot.

Once they were out on the street, Slane wished the Duke well, said good-bye, and, whistling, began the walk to his lodgings, which were near. He was thinking about Rochester’s glee over this quarrel. Young dogs, Rochester had said, impious and godless, just like this present reign.

Keep discontent stirred until I come: Those were his orders from Jamie. The broadsheet Rochester was writing about this duel over a South Sea director’s widow would do that. But now Slane made a mistake; he looked back and saw that the Duke of Tamworth was still standing where he’d left him, with that same hushed, stunned expression on his face. Cursing himself even as he turned around—he had a weakness for hurt creatures, birds with broken wings, dogs whose ribs showed through their fur—he walked back.

“What day is it, Slane?”

“The seventh of October.” And then, when the Duke said nothing else: “My lodgings are near. You can rest there awhile.”

Slane stopped at the pie shop below his room and bought a meat pie and a jug of ale. Inside his chamber, he lit a candle and put down the food.

“Sit down.” He waved his hand toward the single chair that came with this lodging.

“Hello, darling,” he said to the finch in the birdcage on the table that also came with this lodging. “Did you miss me?” He opened the door of the cage. The finch hopped out, and Slane crumbled some of the crust from the pie for her; she hopped over to eat it.

“Her wing was broken.” He stroked the finch’s tiny back with a finger. “I got her for nothing at the Sunday market nearby.”

Slane whistled and held out his hand, and the finch hopped up on it. He raised his hand, and at another whistle the finch flew to his shoulder. “Brave girl,” Slane said. “I love you.” After a moment, as if secure with Slane’s shoulder as a launching post, the finch took flight and flew around and around the chamber, finally perching atop a post of the bed, cocking her head to one side, and singing. Tony smiled then, a grave smile, the smile like an unexpected good deed, and at the sight of it, Slane found he had to stand up abruptly, move to the opened window, and sit in it, to be anywhere but somewhere where he could see this man’s face, and thus his pain.

“From my window, Your Grace, I’ve looked down more than once to wave at thieves and highwaymen on their way to Tyburn gallows. The carts pass from Wych Street into Drury Lane on their way to Tyburn Road. There’s a whore’s parade out here at dusk, but I regret to say you’ve missed it. Have some of the pie, Your Grace. Here is a knife; just cut yourself a small piece and eat. Now, have a swallow from that jug. Good. You’ll feel more yourself with your belly full.”

One leg swinging out easily, Slane began to talk of the theater—of Cibber and his miserliness; of the actress who had come in drunk this afternoon, so that all of them had had to act around her, and how she had fallen asleep in the midst of saying her most important line. He talked easily, yet all the while he was thinking of Rochester. This reign does not control the passions of its young men, said Rochester, and it does its best to break the back of the Church of England. It’s why I became Jacobite, Slane, because I saw that George of Hanover is no friend to the Mother Church, but buys our bishops and prelates the same way he buys the loyalty of the Whigs. The authority of the Church is besmirched, compromised time after time. Everything is for sale these days, Slane, even God.

As he spoke, Slane noticed a child holding a candle in the street below. She set the candle into the mud of the street and ran off, her form just visible for a moment in the light. The candle was a signal to him. Thank God, Slane thought.

“Your Grace, I must take my leave of you. I have a lady whom I’ve promised to see this evening, and I mustn’t make her angry by keeping her waiting. Stay here as long as you like.”

The candle signaled that there was a letter in from France, or possibly Italy, an important letter that only he and a few others would see. Let it be the plan for invasion, he thought, moving to stare at himself before a piece of chipped mirror, as if he did, indeed, go to see a ladylove. In a way he did—though Rochester would blanch at being called such. But the Bishop was certainly someone Slane must keep wooed.

The face in the mirror was a face a woman would look at twice, and many did. There were dark brows above widely spaced and equally dark eyes. The nose was broad, as was the mouth. Handsome, people called him. Lady Shrewsborough had said, You’re the handsomest thing I have laid eyes upon in many a day. She was an ancient relative to the Duke, who sat right now in Slane’s only chair. If your manners match your face, she’d said, come call upon me, and we’ll play a game of cards. I can tell much about a person by the way he plays cards.

And now, thanks to her, Slane was becoming as fashionable in the drawing rooms of London as he was upon the stage. All to the good. The deeper he burrowed into the heart of this court, the more he could aid Jamie.

The Bishop of Rochester was impatient. Slane saw Rochester rather than himself in the mirror. Where is our invasion plan? the Bishop would ask. Upon its way, Slane would assure him. He would talk to Rochester for hours, settling him the way one settled a restive hawk: We invade in the spring, as you advised; during the election, as you advised.

Rochester would rub his hands together. Seven years, he’d say, as he always did. It has been seven years since there was an election of men to the House of Commons. All of England will be quarreling over votes. More than one man will be thinking to himself of the old days when there was a Stuart upon the throne, rather than this foreigner.

The Swedes would supply troops, or the Spanish. There would be risings here, among all those who would have risen in 1715, who had been waiting. Slane and Rochester had cut England into military districts, setting loyal Jacobites back into place, setting them to plot again, to secretly collect arms and coins.

I can feel the fever, Slane, Rochester said. Can you? It’s our fever still racking us from the South Sea Bubble, for the way King George and his ministers tricked us. The hue and cry over final fines given to South Sea directors remained. No one thought the fines were high enough. So many had lost fortunes in speculation in South Sea stock that there was no fine, no punishment large enough to repair the sense of outrage and damage. People had lost trust in King George, saw his ministers as greedy and corrupt, as benefiting when South Sea stock had been rising but refusing to do what must be done once it began to fall. One of the King’s ministers, Robert Walpole, had been burned in effigy in August. It was said he would be dismissed because people hated him so.

Slane could see the Duke of Tamworth’s stillness reflected in the mirror, and while a part of him had sympathy for the man, there was another part that was cold, remote. Tony was the enemy, a man who could be hated in particular on account of his grandfather, Richard Saylor, if for nothing else. Saylor had supported William of Orange. King James II had said of him, a famous soldier, famous in every court for his tactical skill and his handsome manners, “He has the courage of a lion and the kindness of a saint.” Lionheart, Richard Saylor had been called, after another famous warrior of English history. And so Slane could look at his grandson Tony and feel both sympathy and scorn.

Once, he would have felt only scorn. Have I not the edge I should? he wondered. The years of intrigue were telling on him, years of going from court to court, of begging arms and money for Jamie, of seeing plans fail, one after another, to invade here and conquer. It wore on him to deal with an irascible man like the Bishop of Rochester, who would as soon curse a man as bless him; it wore on him to hear Rochester’s doubts and fears echo his own. God save me, thought Slane; God save the Blackbird and me.

Farewell, young Duke. You’re off to duel and perhaps die, and I’m off to plot, and perhaps die for that, too, in the end. We have more in common than you imagine. If your grandfather had stayed loyal to James II, the pair of us might be here together, plotting. Or we might never have had to plot at all, for we would have won if your grandfather, and others like him, had stayed loyal.

Outside, in the dark, Slane thought of Barbara. He must use this duel to his own ends, and besmirch her name. He did not like it. He thought of Charles, Lord Russel, who had been her lover, and that made the doing of it easier. He did not like Charles, his temper and pride. If it were not for Charles, the young man sitting in Slane’s chair might not be facing death. Would Barbara grieve if her cousin Tony died? He loved her, but did she love him?

Once upon a time—in Italy, and as Viscount Duncannon—Slane had courted Barbara for a brief moment. She had been capricious, charming, estranged from her husband, and oddly—and to Slane’s mind, very sweetly—chaste. She was teasing, but was never won; she was not what people imagined at all. It seemed she had eventually abandoned chastity. I would have been better for her than Charles, he reflected.

When he accepted this mission to London he’d thought she would be here, and that since she knew him he’d have to stay burrowed out of sight, far behind the scenes of the action, the danger, the cleverness and daring that would be necessary intriguing to him. What was it his mother had accused him of? That he needed danger to feel alive. There had been a kiss between Barbara and him, a kiss they’d begun, once upon a time, in a garden; he was Viscount Duncannon, and she was, well, Barbara, Lady Devane, sister to Harry, a committed Jacobite. Now there was irony all around: One of Richard Saylor’s grandsons, Harry, had been a Jacobite. The wrong grandson died, thought Slane, but perhaps that is going to be rectified in the next few hours.

Then all of Richard Saylor’s grandsons would be, at last, dead.

D
ARK
. I
T
was so dark in the street that Tony stumbled over nothing from the sheer blackness of it. He held out his hands before him and woke, not knowing where he was for a second. There were some candles burning. In their light, he saw a birdcage, its door open, a finch in it. So. He was in Laurence Slane’s lodging, and he was to fight a duel. The darkness was no dream; he was living it.

In another few hours he was going to face a man across a morning’s mist. In his mind, he saw Hyde Park, heard the silence there, the breathless quiet that was early morning. In his mind’s eye, he saw two men pacing off, turning, and firing at each other. One of them fell.

He walked to a window and looked out, wondering what time it was, but this part of London, shabby now, its time of fashion past, had no lighting, no lanterns on the buildings, and he could see nothing, though he could hear talk, laughter, songs, quarreling from the customers of the taverns and alehouses below. To be near the theater at which he performed, Slane lived in one of the side streets off Covent Garden, an open plaza in London’s very center, where vendors sold fruit, vegetables, herbs.

He had not meant to fall asleep. After Slane had left, he meant only to sit awhile longer in the chair. But he had lain down upon the bed and closed his eyes, and that was the end of that.

He must leave. Surely the hour of the duel was close. What is the time? he thought, walking out into the street, toward the plaza of Covent Garden. All the stalls under the arcades that surrounded two of the sides of the plaza were closed, but faint light could be seen through the open windows and doors of three shacks, built haphazardly in the plaza, like stray thoughts the original architect would have hated. Inside, the revelers drank and sang; the whores would be picking pockets, the patrons would be too stupefied to care. These taverns stayed open all the night; it was in one of them that he’d quarreled with Tom Masham.

In his mind’s eye, Tony saw Charles rise from his chair. If you don’t fight him, Tony, Charles had said, I will. Tony glanced up at the sky. Stars. Night had dissipated clouds and haze from coal smoke to leave stars visible. They had never seemed so bright, so clear. A beam of light from a lantern bobbed up and down. It was a beadle, a parish officer who patrolled the streets at night with lantern and club. Tony asked him the time.