Now Face to Face (23 page)

“’G
RAPES GROW
wild there in an incredible Plenty and Variety—’”

Annie, tirewoman to the Duchess of Tamworth, read aloud to lull her mistress, who was in a difficult and prickly mood.

The book told of Virginia and was written by a colonial; since Barbara had left, it was the only thing the Duchess ever wanted to hear.

I’ve sent my precious Barbara to a paradise, thought the Duchess, thinking the thoughts she thought every day now; I have, except that it is so far away. It will be months yet before a single letter arrives, and ships wrecked themselves upon treacherous shoals, and storms turned them over into the sea, and lovely young granddaughters like Barbara drowned. Pirates—she’d lately heard there were pirates along the colonial coast. What if pirates had captured the ship Barbara was upon?

“‘—some of which are very sweet, and pleasant to the Taste, others rough and harsh, and, perhaps, fitter for Wine or Brandy.’”

“I had a thought of pirates,” said the Duchess.

“There is no mention of pirates here.”

Thin, brown, impatient, Annie tapped the page of the book, a book she was tired of reading. By now, she knew more about Virginia than a body ought to know. Yesterday, it had been the colonial savages the Duchess fretted over.

“It’s your stomach, isn’t it? You’ve got wind again. If you had drunk savory tea this morning as I asked you to, you would be calm even now.”

I have sent my dearest soul to a paradise of grapes, will not know for months if she has even arrived safely, thought the Duchess, and all my servant can do is babble of savory tea. Annie is a stubborn old stick. “I do not want tea.” The Duchess spoke with the terrible dignity of the impossible-to-please. My servants ought to be more patient, more considerate of the old, the infirm, she thought.

A servant had come into the long, echoing gallery in which they sat, a favorite room because all of its many windows viewed gardens: lawn, terrace, the maze, the woods. Both women turned to glare at him.

“Sir John Ashford is here,” the servant announced.

“Is he? Things have come to a pretty pass when my oldest friend must be announced like a peddler come to sell his wares. Where is your mind, Perryman? Admit him at once. You ought to have known to do so.”

And as the servant moved to do as he was told, the Duchess said to the view of the gardens, “My servants are impossible and ought all to be dismissed. I am old and too soft-hearted—”

“Old, yes. But soft-hearted? Never.”

Sir John strode down the length of the Duchess’s gallery, his boots heavy, dull, solid-sounding on the wood floors. Annie, the Duchess’s guardian and keeper, her confessor and goad, thought: Good; she can torture him awhile and allow the rest of us a respite.

The Duchess held out her hands to Sir John, and he kissed her cheek, making a hearty, smacking sound as he did so.

“I’ve quarreled with my beemaster today. I want to send bees to Barbara in Virginia,” she said.

“Impossible.”

“Precisely what he said. I might have known you’d be no help.”

“There were letters for you in the village, and I thought I would bring them by. This one is from the Holleses, and seeing how proud you are of the marriage the young Duke is making, I thought you’d want to see it at once.”

Dropping letters in the Duchess’s lap, Sir John pulled close a chair and sat down heavily in it, his eyes moving over her.

The Duchess appeared tiny settled back in her chair, and so she was. Time had reduced her, had long ago peeled away any trace of youth. In the passing, it had exposed her, the way water exposes shells upon a beach, so her essence was there for all to see in dark, snapping eyes, in the bones of her elegant, finely drawn face, as slim as a greyhound’s.

Strength was in that thin face, and impatience, and sharp intelligence, but also, since her grandson Harry’s death last year, a new frailness, as if she was, before everyone’s eyes, drying up to nothing, and the next strong wind would whirl her away. She was carried everywhere by a footman because her legs were too weak, too brittle, to hold her.

Sir John was, by contrast, bluff and hale, as sturdy as one of her oaks outside. He had been her neighbor for thirty years, her friend for even longer.

She had opened her letter from the Holleses.

“They write to tell me they invite me to come and visit.”

“Very proper, since you are their future relative…. I have decided I am returning for the autumn session of Parliament. I stay at Ladybeth only a few days.” Sir John was half shamefaced, as if he were confessing a crime.

“Well!” exclaimed the Duchess.

Sir John never returned to London for the autumn session. He meandered in sometime after Christmas and considered the House of Commons fortunate to have his presence. But the setting of the South Sea fines had everyone stirred. Sir John had spent all the summer in London, fighting the amounts Walpole and the other ministers wished to exact from directors. It was all he had talked of when he’d first returned home, was talking of even now.

“Word is Walpole does not wish the King to dissolve Parliament; word is there may be no election come spring. This, when they’ve put it off for seven years! Word is Walpole is telling the King times are too unsettled for an election, that Whigs will lose too many places.”

He had begun to glower, to puff up, ready for battle. He and she usually quarreled over such things.

“I do not trust that bastard Walpole—forgive my language, Alice, but if you could have seen his maneuvers to protect the King and the ministers and South Sea directors—”

“Did he succeed?”

“You know very well he did.”

The war between the factions of Whigs and Tories for power with the King was as old as the Duchess. She was unimpressed.

“Well, then, that is his task, is it not? As a king’s minister himself? Whether a minister is a Whig or a Tory, he is still a servant to the King and must do his bidding.”

“His task,” said Sir John, becoming very red in the face, “is to bring those who deserve punishment before the public to take their punishment for lying and cheating rather than screening them from harm! ‘Skreen Master’ is what Walpole is now called, and Skreen Master he is!”

“Bah,” said the Duchess. It was a favorite expression of hers. “Tories have done nothing but fall over their own feet since King George came to the throne. Never mind Walpole. You must stop fighting among yourselves and pull yourselves together to make this coming election count for something. If there are enough of you elected to Parliament, the King will have to make some of you ministers again.”

“Are you telling me how to make policy?”

“I certainly am. There was no one better than I in my time.”

“Your time has passed, Alice. Things are different now.”

“Are they? Do people no longer claw over one another for survival when the stakes are high and the losses immense? Do people no longer betray those who help them, if betrayal will serve better?”

“Why do I put myself to the task of visiting you?”

He grabbed for his hat. Her assessment of court, of life, always upset him. “I deliver your letters like a footman, and you lecture me as if I were a green boy who had never seen London. I’ll take no more of it. And for your information, we have pulled ourselves together. We are going to put aside our differences and thwart every act the King’s ministers attempt to pass. So there!”

Bowing, folding over like a stiff wooden puppet, he was furious and stuttering.

The quarrel would not last; it was simply a picking up of where they had left off. They’d be talking again by tomorrow—quarreling again, too. Quarreling with him adds years to my life, the Duchess always told Barbara.

Invigorated, she looked down at the letters he’d brought her. Though she lived quietly here in the country, rather than in the hustle and bustle of London and court, she kept up an enormous correspondence and delighted in it. Opening one letter after another, she saw that they were filled with talk of Robert Walpole, the King’s minister, made First Lord of the Treasury last spring as reward for his handling of the South Sea Bubble.

“Walpole is the champion of cheats and swindlers,” wrote one.

“The King does not like or trust him,” claimed another. “Walpole will not last six more months as minister.”

She looked over to a portrait hanging among the many others in this long rectangle of a room. Her dead Richard gazed out serenely from inside his painted world.

I remember these skirmishes in the highest reaches of power where Walpole now is, the Duchess thought. Betrayal, often by the very men who had maneuvered you into the circle of power, came with the honor of serving the King; one survived, or one didn’t.

“Will you visit the Holleses?” asked Annie.

“No.”

“Is there a letter from the Duke?” asked Annie.

“No.” The Duchess answered tersely. Richard, she thought—it was her habit to converse with her dead husband, usually aloud—Tony is even more stubborn than I am. I cannot bear it. I love him. Why does he not forgive me?

“Why does he not write?” she said to Annie. “I am old. I might die at any moment.”

“He will write. Allow it time. He will forgive you. I feel it in my bones. He is the best of the lot.”

The Duchess looked at her.

“As sweet as his father, God rest his soul,” said Annie. “Sweeter. Kind. As bright as his uncle Master Giles was. Quiet. It is all hidden away. He will be the best of them, it will turn out, when all is said and done. Mark my words.”

Sweet Jesus, thought the Duchess, the rest of them had died. Who knew how they might have turned out? In the gallery in which she sat, a huge clock began to drone the hour. It was five in the afternoon.

One, chimed the clock.

Tony, thought the Duchess. Word was he had spent the summer in London drinking, drowning his lover’s sorrow at the unexpected departure of Barbara, whom he thought he loved.

Two, chimed the clock.

Tony had been so angry when he discovered Barbara was gone. How dare you, he’d said to the Duchess. The truth was you thought I was not good enough for her, Grandmama, but I am.

He did not forgive her her deceitfulness in the manner of Barbara’s quiet leavetaking, unknown to anyone until too late. He had estranged himself from her. He, whom once she had considered most unworthy to inherit Richard’s title, had come, over the last years, to mean much to her. There were within him certain signs of his grandfather’s mettle.

We are not pieces upon a chessboard, Grandmama, he had said to her. We are living, breathing creatures with a heart and a soul. He was no fool. He saw at once that she had maneuvered Barbara away from him.

Three, went the clock.

A wanton woman, some called Barbara. There were missteps in her past, errors of judgment and impulse, but was she wanton? Ah, Barbara, I will not have you become like your mother—and here the Duchess’s thoughts were as cold as a river running in winter, as if Barbara’s mother, Diana, were not her only daughter, her only surviving child. Once the fairest woman at any court, Diana was still beautiful, as Barbara, Diana’s daughter, was. Beauty is as much a curse as a blessing to a woman, thought the Duchess. Grandmama, I mean to do better, Barbara had said. Do you? Can you, when the gift of your face and young body may bring you so much with so little effort?

Four.

Your fault, Roger. Your fault she was wild, your fault she is bankrupt, and what good does it do either of us to say so? You are as dead as Richard.

Five.

Family, family was all. She and Richard had built a fortune upon ashes, had made their name as honorable, as known as any in the land. Tony must safeguard it, must now add to it. It was his duty. He might love a hundred women, but marry only one, the one who most added to family fortune and name. And this he was doing, it seemed, despite his drinking and debauchery. He had made an alliance to marry the Holleses’ oldest girl. It was a triumph; they were a good, strong family with much land and in favor with this court.

Gloire,
as the French phrased it, which meant service above all else to pride of name, of family, of house, which meant putting duty foremost, something one of the Saylors’ rank must always do.

“Tony does what he should,” the Duchess said. “I am pleased.”

Her eyes went from one to the other of the different portraits in the gallery. Richard’s importance, his position and hers, the distance they had climbed, were here for all to see in the painted faces of the great. Charles II was here, and his brother, the fool James II, who had abandoned England.

James II’s daughters were here, ruling queens after their father, Queen Mary and Queen Anne, as well as Mary’s husband, the Dutchman, King William. A family no better than mine, estranged and broken apart like mine, thought the Duchess. It happens to us all, doesn’t it? Even in the highest reaches.

“His Grace will write,” said Annie. “I feel it in my bones.”

“Your bones have been known to be wrong.”

“I am going to brew savory tea,” said Annie.

“I don’t want savory tea—” But Annie was gone. Annie never listened. She was a stubborn old stick who had to have her way, who bossed and bullied. And she herself was old, infirm, apt to lapse into daydreams. Her servants knew that. They ought to be more obedient, as ought her family, accepting that she acted for the best, always.