Now Face to Face (3 page)

“The chickens,” said Hyacinthe. “The Duchess said I must take care of her chickens, that you would be too busy with other things.”

There was another flashing, jagged blue-white streak of lightning, again very close, and Barbara thought: This is too much adventure. Are we going to drown on this colonial river? I didn’t come here to drown.

Loved ones came to mind. Roger, she thought, I may drown in a river and see you again, soon, after all. Harry, are you laughing at me, here in this storm, here in Virginia, in your place? Roger was her husband. He had died at Christmas. Harry was her brother. He had died in the summer a year ago. It was for them that she wore black, for them and for vanished dreams. The death of dreams. Nothing harder to overcome, so said her grandmother.

Lightning made another slash across the sky, the vibrating, earsplitting thunder following in an endless roar. Rain was falling in sheets now. Grandmama, thought Barbara, counting off people she loved, Tony, Jane. The slaves had rowed into a creek opening onto the river.

“Abandon ship!” the Governor shouted, but Barbara didn’t need his command to be galvanized. We really are in danger, she thought. And when in danger, one fled. She’d known that since girlhood.

Scrambling out in the rain and wind, she stumbled in shallow water and fell to her knees, but another lightning bolt, another rolling crack of thunder, had her up in seconds and running through rain that fell in pellets, stinging the skin where it touched. The slaves were heaving bundles and baggage ashore—her trunks and barrels from England, her tables and chairs, her remaining baskets of chickens. The cow, eyes rolling back white in its head, strained and pulled at the rope that held it in the galley.

Barbara kept moving upward, kept urging Hyacinthe and Thérèse to follow, the three of them scrabbling in the dirt of the hilly bank, toward a grove of trees above them, giants: pines, oaks, maples, silver-bells, cedars. She found herself half crawling on hands and knees upward as the rain pelted her. Underbrush scratched her face and arms, stabbed into her chest and belly. The wind rattled the trees above her as if they were thin saplings instead of oaks and pines hundreds of years old. It was a fierce storm. The colonials did not lie.

Barbara looked back to see the Governor. He was still inside the galley, where a slave was chopping at the mast with an ax. She heard the crack as it fell over like a tree. Then, the Governor and the slaves were out of the galley. They were all straining to turn it over on itself. Why? thought Barbara. The cow had either torn loose of her rope or been cut loose; she leaped out of the galley the moment it tipped over. Then the cow—Grandmama’s finest, thought Barbara; oh, well—was gone, splashing down the shore and away through the underbrush.

“Come back!”

The Governor was shouting, pointing to the heavens.

Come back to what? thought Barbara. Is he mad? Then, to her horror, she was blinded by flash and flames as a tree somewhere above them split open to its roots, and branches went flying everywhere, over her head, behind her, to the sides of her. There was the terrifying stench of scorched earth and tree, of fire and brimstone, of hell, as a deafening roll of thunder cracked on and on around them, making their ears ache with its sound. No more need be said.

Barbara turned around at once, sliding back down the bank, half carrying, half dragging Hyacinthe with her, back to the galley. Spotswood pointed beneath it. She scooted under, dragging Hyacinthe every inch of the way, somehow avoiding impaling herself on jagged edges of broken center mast. Thérèse was just behind them.

“The dogs?” Barbara said, ready to go back in the storm for them if she had to.

Thérèse unfurled her grimy, clenched apron, and there they were, their eyes bulging even more than normally with terror.

Good. Everyone was here, her family—Thérèse, Hyacinthe, the dogs. Spotswood was crawling in, on his belly.

The slaves were crowded at one end between the planks that served as benches. Among them were some of the chickens. Barbara could still smell the lightning, the scorch of the burned tree, could still see the explosion of tree and branches, hear the thunder in her ears. Rain pounded on the hull over them. Rivulets of water eddied under them, cutting deeper channels. At the point where the side of the galley did not meet sand, the storm’s dark was split with continual flashes of light, as thunder cracked and roared, like a monster prowling around, searching to eat them.

“Summer storms,” Spotswood said, after a moment, as if some explanation were necessary.

“It is not summer!” Thérèse snapped, in French, forgetting to speak English, forgetting the courtesy due the Governor of one of His Majesty King George’s colonies.

It was clear she had been pushed beyond endurance: traveling for weeks aboard a crowded ship whose sway made her ill; arriving in a colony whose inelegance took them all by surprise; her mistress catching a fever but, too impatient to wait to be fully well, insisting they journey to her grandmother’s plantation at once—all of them drenched now because of Lady Devane’s impetuosity, and frightened, under a galley in a dreadful storm.

Thérèse’s starched, white, lace-trimmed cap was gone, and her dark hair was plastered around her pretty, soft face, a face covered with mud and scratches and beaded blood. A chicken peered over one shoulder, silent, blinking. Barbara began to laugh. She could not help it. They could not have begun to imagine this in England. She held her hands over her mouth to stop herself, but that just made it worse.

Crouched beside her—they could not have been any closer if they were lying together in love—Spotswood, his official wig gone in the storm, water eddying down his face, his buckskin coat smelling like an old goat, gave a snort, suddenly amused himself. He was also relieved. He’d expected to face another storm under this galley, one of tears or rage. Fragile butterfly, indeed.

There was a smear of dirt across her cheek, as well as several scratches. Her gown was soaking, ruined, torn. Had she ever been so wet before, so bedraggled and dirty? So, he thought, you have your grandfather’s courage—and more, I think: something of your grandmother’s stamina and firmness. Good. If ever you will need them, it will be here.

“Have I welcomed you to Virginia?” he asked, testing a jest, still not absolutely certain whether she would decide to take offense.

Barbara laughed harder than ever.

T
HAT AFTERNOON,
Spotswood called orders to the slaves rescuing baggage and whatever else they could find now that the rain had stopped. The sky was as clear, as hard a blue as if there had never been a storm. Barbara’s page, Hyacinthe, had disappeared into the woods above the bank. Thérèse searched through an open trunk for dry clothing.

Barbara sat on the incline of the bank, watching, trying to take it all in, but she could not stop shivering. I must learn all of this, she was thinking, how to salvage oneself, make do, repair loss. It was clear there was going to be much making do here. But she needed to stop shivering first.

She looked up, and Spotswood was standing over her. Without his wig, he seemed sterner; his face was sun-lined, disciplined, the face of the soldier he had once been. He served under your grandfather, her grandmother had said. I’ll write him a letter that reminds him in no uncertain terms of his duty. The Governor looked both angry and concerned. What was in that letter? wondered Barbara. With her grandmother, there was no telling.

“Mademoiselle Fuseau,” he said to Barbara’s servant, “find the Peruvian bark.” This was a fever water that made the fever stop. He knelt and took Barbara by the arm.

“Here, now, come along, Lady Devane, and we will just walk around this little curve of the creek. She needs to be put into dry clothing at once,” he said to Thérèse, who was following. “That’s it. Come along, Lady Devane, a few more steps. There we are. Mademoiselle Fuseau, if you please.”

He left them alone. Barbara opened her mouth to take the bitter mixture, held out her arms so that Thérèse could begin to unfasten and unhook things.

I am ill again, damn it, Barbara thought, shrugging and moving impatiently out of this and that. Take it all off, she thought, all the garments of mourning: black leather gloves, like another skin; black gown, once tight at the waist and sleeves but loose now; black undergown; whalebone hoop; stays, their ribbons and laces black; chemise; the garters tying her black stockings; black shoes. All of them off, the required dark garments of mourning, signifying loss. Her brother was dead, and her husband. Within the last year, both had died.

“I knew it. I knew it,” Thérèse was murmuring in French. “You were out of bed too soon. Anyone could see it. ‘Stay another few days,’ I said, but no, we must go to the plantation. As if the plantation will not wait. Barbarous place. Barbarous river. What are we going to? Have you thought of that? Their principal town is little more than a village, and I am kind to call it that. Plantation. What does that mean?”

“Our paper about it says house and barn and cookhouse. Slaves. There’s a well. There are fields for growing tobacco. And many acres, Thérèse, some two thousand needing three men, three overseers, to see to them.”

“Acres of what, I ask you? The house I grew up in in France as a girl was better than some of those I saw from the river this morning. You are soaking wet. Wet to the skin, madame. Those chickens. Did you see? Drowned in a moment. We might have been drowned, too. I shiver every time I think of it. Drowned or burned to nothing by lightning. We will not put on a hoop. What can a hoop matter in this wild place? Who will know? Who will see? Savage. Barbarous. I am going to pray for us tonight.”

“Good—do that, Thérèse. I depend upon your prayers.”

Laced up in fresh stays, those unyielding undergarments every lady must wear to pull her waist in as small as possible, to push up breasts, to make the body, whether it wished to or not, conform to fashion, Barbara held up her arms for a dry gown to be pulled over her. Black, of course. I will be glad when I no longer wear black, she thought. I will be glad when I no longer feel loss. Surely there comes a day when you no longer feel loss. It’s because I’m ill that I feel it so terribly this moment. Surely, it’s that.

She leaned against Thérèse as they walked back around the curve, where she sat down, abruptly, in a patch of sunlight, raising her face to the hot sun. Over her Thérèse piled gowns and shawls and cloaks, anything dry she could find. Her dogs huddled into her lap, and Thérèse began unpinning her hair. It was red-gold, curling, one of her beauties, but then there was very little about Barbara that was not beautiful, as she was well aware.

“You are wet yourself,” she tried to say, but the effort made her head ache terribly, so she simply allowed Thérèse to have her way, to untangle her hair, to dry it with a shawl, to brush it. It was soothing to have her hair brushed; when she was a girl, her grandmother had always brushed it for her. The dogs were warm in her lap, and the shivering seemed a bit less; after all, she was nearly over the fever. Her eyelids felt heavy, and the sun was warm on her, and she snuggled into the sand with the dogs, like one of them, and fell asleep.

It was a good, long nap. When she opened her eyes, her dogs were gone and it was late afternoon. She sat up. The fever seemed to be gone, too, but her heart was aching. It was the sudden, unexpected, coming-from-nowhere missing that was part of grief. She was more than familiar with it by now. Some days on the crossing over—nothing to see but sky and sea—she’d thought she’d go mad from it. She missed Roger. She missed her brother. She missed home. What on earth am I doing here? she thought. Insane, her mother had said, raging at Barbara as only her mother could do. I cannot believe you do this idiot thing.

Barbara looked around. The Governor had made camp with the decisive action of a born soldier. She approved. Wet clothes—gowns, chemises, stockings, hoops, shawls, breeches, cloaks—were spread over the bushes everywhere. Her table and chairs, still in their oilcloth, propped up the back of a shelter made of the boat’s sail. She counted the baskets of chickens that had survived the storm. One…two…yes, three. She felt better.

“I captured some of the others.”

It was Hyacinthe, who had come up behind her. “See, madame.”

She did see. There they were, captured chickens on their sides, silent, defeated by storm and boy, for Hyacinthe had tied their legs together with rope.

“Very clever.”

“Are you well now, madame?”

No, darling, I am not well. My heart hurts for all I’ve lost and feels as if it will never heal. And I think I may have been a fool to come here.

“Much better now. Thank you.”

“The cow is still gone.”

If she remembered correctly, she had fallen asleep listening to Thérèse lament chickens. Really, it was too much of her grandmother to instill a sense of obligation into two servants who were not even her own. When she went back to England, she’d tell her so.

Spotswood walked down the bank from the trees above, holding a dead rabbit by its long ears. He marched to where she sat, pleased with himself.

“Supper,” he said.

“However did you manage that?”

“The slaves can snare rabbits and birds and anything else in these woods. Help me, boy.”

He knelt at the fire and began to skin the rabbit. Barbara watched. When she’d been a girl, her brother, Harry, had taught her how to skin game he’d caught. And just as Hyacinthe was doing, she and Harry and Jane had hacked branches into a rough spit, and the three of them had cooked Harry’s kill in Tamworth’s woods.