Now Face to Face (33 page)

“Have a look at Lumpy,” she said. “He’s had a bath and is fit to bed the Queen. You look exhausted, young man. How was your interview with His Majesty? Am I to visit you in the Tower?” She cackled and played a card with a grand jangle of bracelets.

“I was asked not to duel again.”

“A reasonable request, I must say. You owe me twenty pounds.”

Tony went to stand behind her so that he could see her cards. He leaned down and kissed the top of her wig, smiling a little at her hand. She was going to win.

“You owe me twenty pounds, nephew, not a penny more, not a penny less. Leave this Harriet Holles now that you have scandal on your coattails, marry a Tory, and I will forgive you the debt, leave you all my funds in my will, and dance with blue satin shoes on at your wedding.”

“I thought the goldsmith fled with all your funds, Aunt Shrew. Sir Alexander”—Tony turned to Pendarves—“who other than the late Earl Devane owns land off Tyburn Road?”

“The Grosvenors, Lord Scarborough. I have no idea who else.”

The door opened, and Laurence Slane came into the chamber; his expression was somber, the dark brows elegant slashes above the dark eyes.

“You look full of news, Slane,” said Aunt Shrew.

Slane looked over at Tony, who knew suddenly that his title of duke, his legacy of fame from his grandfather, did not matter. He was not, after all, to be let off lightly.

“It’s Masham, isn’t it?” Tony said.

“Not dead?” said Aunt Shrew, putting down her cards with a crash of bracelets.

“Yes,” said Slane. “Tom Masham is dead.”

T
ONY WALKED
down Russell Street toward the central piazza of Covent Garden. The sellers of fruits and vegetables at Covent Garden were gone now. The three shacks were just beginning their revels. A little flower girl stood at the commemorative column in the center of the square; at her begging, he bought some bunches of flowers from her, and at the coin he gave her, she ran away whooping into the dark. Across, under an arcade, he saw a young woman sitting at the windows. She played a game of solitaire, looking out into the square every once in a while. She was attractive—there to be purchased, if a man wished. All cats are alike in the dark, said Charles, and no woman is worth devotion. You are wrong, Charles, Tony thought.

A carriage rolled by, the horses’ hooves clip-clopping on the cobblestones. Words said today echoed in his mind, like the last round of a church bell:

Friends never betray, do they?

Your grandfather was an honorable man, a grand seigneur.

Tom Masham is dead.

Barbara could have married him. He had been so far gone in love he would have rushed off to be wedded to her by special license. She could have been the Duchess of Tamworth, and the estate left to him would have been plundered to nothing as the Devane debt ate it up, for anyone who married Barbara, married the debt. It was the law. You’re a good boy, Tony, my boy. I have killed a man, thought Tony, and over nothing. Heartbreak pales compared to this anguish.

He separated one bunch of flowers from among the others and put it at the base of a column that was in the center of the plaza. In honor of his grandfather, the grand seigneur, who created the legacy he now carried.

Then he laid a second bunch down by the first, for his father, whom he had known only a little, but who had died as bravely as a man may die.

Then he put down a third, for Barbara, as a final farewell to the woman who had not taken advantage of a callow, lovesick fool, who taught, as his father and grandfather had, that honor knows no sex, no age, no limit; honor knows only, and finally, behavior.

Chapter Fifteen

P
HILIPPE, THE
F
RENCH
P
RINCE DE
S
OISSONS, STOOD AT ONE OF
the long windows in the great parlor of Saylor House, staring at handsome gardens in which leaves floated down langorously, as if they had all the time in the world, to rest upon straight gravel walks and beds of flowers. Gardeners were about, raking them into piles, burning them. It was a scene of order, decorum, nature brought to man’s bidding, the design of the gardens emulating on a miniature scale those across the Channel at the palace of Versailles. Versailles had been the wonder of civilized Europe in its building, and every royal house had copied its design; even these Hanovers, who had fought France during the wars and who now ruled England, had a small duplicate in their continental province.

Philippe had just come from the English court, which like all royal courts made every effort to duplicate the intricacies of French court etiquette and yet could not compare in any manner to the original. He was looking down at these gardens, so very French in their design: the avenues, the landscape pool, the fountain. This parlor, too, was filled with objects and furniture created by the finest of French craftsmen, even though the man who built it had defeated the French in battle. His companion, Tony’s mother, Abigail, was dressed in a sack gown, the height of current fashion, a style from the French court.

It was clear to Philippe that the humiliating peace treaties of 1713 and 1714 meant nothing; France was merely resting, allowing her precious boy King, the great-grandson of Louis XIV, time to grow into a man. The regent, who guided the young King, knew a masterly retreat was sometimes part of the battle.

Sniffling came from Abigail’s direction. Philippe had brought her the news of Tom Masham’s death. It was all London was talking of this morning, her son’s duel and Masham’s death.

“‘The moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, and time passes, and I sleep alone.’ I quote from Sappho, the tenth Muse, my dear Abigail.”

And when his dear Abigail, no Muse, did not answer, because of course she did not know who Sappho was, Philippe smiled thinly at the gardens, having succeeded in amusing himself at her expense. Roger, he thought, you would have known the verse. I miss you still. Will I ever recover from your death?

“Sappho was a Greek poetess,” he said.

“Was? Is she dead?”

“As she lived six centuries before Christ, one can only assume so.”

“Not Christian, then?”

Abigail dabbed at her face with a handkerchief, and spoke without irony. Very little in life was amusing to Abigail, who was daughter of an earl and had become mother of a duke, two distinctions she never forgot.

“No.” The irony in Philippe’s voice was deadly, stinging, and completely unobserved by her, one of the reasons they remained good friends. “How much longer must I endure these tears, Abigail? I must tell you I find you quite bourgeoise.”

“I don’t care how you find me. This duel, that vile broadsheet, now this death—it is all too dreadful. I have never been so upset. I have wanted nothing but my son’s happiness, always.”

“Nonsense. You want nothing so simple as happiness for your son.”

The Hanovers had not rested securely in England since the South Sea Bubble, and though France was required by treaty not to succor one James Stuart, also called the Pretender, she was also required by survival to do that which was best for herself. He and the French ambassador had talked long into the night of that.

“Would you rather that Tony had allowed the insult,” he asked, “and that the gossip flying through town this day was of how the Duke of Tamworth is a craven weakling who will allow anything to be said of the women of his family? He acted honorably. He acted the man. I would have done the same.” He had done the same—too many times, now, to remember.

“He might have died.”

“But he has not died. It is Masham who has done so.”

Philippe sighed at the further sounds of Abigail’s tears. Turning around, he faced her, and after watching her for a time, limped over to her. The limp was from an old battle wound. He bore another wound, a dueling scar from a sword across his face—a proud, arrogant face, reflecting the man inside. Philippe was a prince of the blood, related to the royal houses of Valois and Capet. Pride was something he had suckled in with his wet nurse’s milk.

He sat down upon a footstool near her. “What if I can make your son’s marriage take place in sooner than a year?”

“You? Can you do that?”

“I can do many things, my dear Abigail. Do you desire it? You have only to command me.”

She stared at him a moment, her face puffed and proud. He knew what she would say. She hated and feared Barbara, if only because Barbara was Diana’s daughter. She wanted her son safely married, to anyone but Barbara.

“Yes.”

“It is done, then.”

“How? What will you do? You leave for France today.” She put her face into her handkerchief and began to weep again. “I will miss you so.” And then, looking up at him, her fleshy determination showing through the tears: “Sooner than a year?”

He could read her mind. She was calculating: When might Barbara return, at the soonest? He nodded.

“You are very kind, Philippe, more than kind.”

I’m not kind at all, thought Philippe. It was love, he’d told Barbara when she’d asked if Roger had loved him. She might have answered the same, if he had been foolish enough to ask her, but he was not as foolish, as impulsive as Barbara. Roger had loved her, more than Philippe had seen him love anyone, except her grandfather Richard Saylor. He did not forgive her for that. He would never forgive her.

“B
ARBARA,” SCRIBBLED
Tommy Carlyle. With wig and rouge off he was just a large, almost ordinary-looking man wearing a diamond earring in one ear. In a bedchamber, sitting at a desk, he wrote, “Barbara, you must come home.” He looked around at what he had assembled to send to her: pamphlets and broadsheets from over the summer. From one to the next, the image of Roger’s face became larger and larger, while others’ faces became smaller. Walpole had sacrificed Roger, made him scapegoat for everyone else, so others would survive. It was so clear. And no one would listen. Perhaps Barbara would not listen, either, but he had to make the attempt. He wrote out, carefully, slowly, what he thought. “Roger became scapegoat,” he wrote, “don’t you see it? Walpole could have made the fine on his estate less, but he chose to safeguard others. Come home, Barbara, and fight him. I have known him for twenty years, and I begin to think him the most ruthless man I know. I would never have said so a year ago. Come home.” It was the least he could do for Roger, who had been his friend. There were very few people to whom he accorded that word.

J
ANE GLANCED
outside the window of her mother’s kitchen at Ladybeth Farm. The window had many small leaded panes of clear, thick glass, beveled at the edges and slightly uneven in the middle, at the spot where the glass had been broken off its blowpipe after it was whirled and flattened, so her view of the outside was distorted. But not so distorted that she could not see the afternoon was dark, overcast. The wind was picking up; it reminded her a little of her daughter Amelia, in the random, heedless, almost happy way it scattered the leaves about.

“No,” her mother said irritably. She and her kitchen servant stood at opposite ends of the great oak table used for baking. The tabletop was a scene of plenty, a cornucopia of wooden bowls of brown eggs and yellow-white butter Jane had helped form; burlap bags spilling out walnuts and currants; hard cones of sugar, now broken; piles of fine white flour and grated breadcrumbs.

“It is three pounds of fine flour to a pound of caraway comfits to a pound of butter, a quart of cream, a pint of ale yeast, eleven eggs, and a little rosewater with musk,” said her mother.

They were making caraway cakes to send to her father in London. On a large wooden frame suspended from the ceiling oatcakes hung limply on lines strung from wooden end to wooden end. Bread for him was already cooling on shelves in the pantry. Never mind that her father could buy fresh bread in London. Her mother had made puddings also, covering the tops of the bowls carefully in brown paper. And into the servant’s saddlebags, along with the cakes and bread and puddings, would go further jars of her mother’s jellies and jams: cherries in jelly, green apricot, white quince. Never mind that her father had taken much with him.

Jane leaned over to poke at the fire with the long-handled toasting fork. Sparks spun upward and a piece of coal jumped out.