Now Face to Face (5 page)

Barbara laughed and clapped her hands for the dog to come to her.

“Good dog!” she said to him. “Mighty hunter. Savage one.”

Spotswood pushed a stick into the ground near the fire and set the wig upon it to dry. It reminded Barbara of the rotted heads of traitors hanging above the city gate of Temple Bar in London. The heads that hung there now belonged to the nobles who had supported the Pretender’s invasion attempt in 1715—a frightening year, that, with the old Queen dead; a new, foreign King, disliked; and invasion.

“The Seneca rip off the crown and hair of the head of an enemy and wear it on a thong at their side,” Spotswood said. “The trophy is called a scalp. It looks rather like that wig. More dried blood and loose skin, of course.” He extended his arm. “Feel this.”

She rubbed two fingers over the soft sleeve of his coat. The coat was ornately embroidered with peak shells, purple and white.

“A buck’s skin, softened and dried over smoke by a Seneca Indian maiden. You insult a man here by calling him buckskin. It means he is an oaf, an ignorant, a man of the backwoods, half savage.”

I must send Grandmama a buckskin gown, all worked in these pieces of shell, she thought, and Tony a coat like this, and something for Jane’s children. Jane was her closest, her dearest friend. Tony was her cousin, the present Duke of Tamworth. He loved her. She sighed, and the Governor heard.

“You must be exhausted, Lady Devane, after this day we’ve had. Your maidservant has made a bed for you in the shelter. We’d best sleep, for we’ll make an early start in the morning. Good night.”

“Pleasant dreams, Governor.”

On the other side of the fire, he wrapped himself in a blanket and, with his back to her, lay down on the ground, as if it were a feather bed. She considered him. Yesterday, he’d worn a satin coat and white stockings, had silver buckles on his shoes; there had even been a black silk patch shaped like a quarter moon on his cheek. One must be ready for anything here, she thought.

There was a sound. A rustle. A slave in ragged breeches, on the other side of the fire, glanced at her and then quickly away, pointing to the fire. He was adding wood to it. That must be his task, thought Barbara, to add wood all the night. In another moment, he was gone. It seemed to her she heard music. She settled the dogs, sleeping themselves, against Hyacinthe, and walked along the bank of the creek until she saw the slaves’ fire. They were around it, and one of them held something to his mouth. It made a light, flutelike sound. She took a step forward, and the slaves stood, one after another. The music stopped.

“May I join you?” she said. “The music you make is so beautiful.”

They made a place for her among them. She sat down, bunching her skirts in about her knees. The slave played a short pipe, cut carefully from wood, hollowed out, holes for sound carved. It must be dear to him, she thought, to have survived the storm. A craftsman, she thought, a musician, here in Virginia’s wilds. There was something haunting and piercing about the tune he played. She looked up to the sky and its hundreds of bright, shining stars, little pinpoints of light in the darkness, order in the chaos.

Go, and catch a falling star, she thought; get with child a mandrake root. The lines were from Roger’s favorite poet. Tell me where all past years are, / Or who cleft the Devil’s foot. Tell me, God, she thought, where Roger went, or how to live without him.

The wind came through the trees, rubbing branches together, making them creak and moan and cry, like grieving women. The slave piped his sweet song. His friends listened gravely. There were twigs and sticks in their braids, and scars upon their faces, scars that looked as if they had been deliberately made. When? By whom? thought Barbara.

How beautiful this night, this fire, these men with their scarred faces and twisted hair were; so beautiful, hurt was almost eased. This place was tamed only in places. Savage, as Thérèse said, dangerous, barbarous. Good. It suited her heart.

Tobacco. Barbara thought of the Governor’s words this evening, of the words she’d heard from those who came to visit in Williamsburg. They’d been talking tobacco, too. It was this colony’s most important crop.

When I grow it, thought Barbara, it will have to be the best.

Chapter Two

I
T WAS THE FOLLOWING NIGHT ON THE PLANTATION OF
F
IRST
Curle, and six slaves gathered at the small kitchen building, settled back on their heels, and at long last, ate. They had been in the fields until past dark. Tobacco leaves were being harvested. It was nothing but labor for the slaves until the leaves were casked in the big barrels called hogsheads, until winter came and its cold gave them respite from the tobacco plant everyone grew here.

Light came from the kitchen’s fire, a glow they could see reflected through the kitchen’s opened door. The oldest of them by many years sat on the steps. With reverence, the other slaves called her Old Grandmother. She was cook, now that she was too old for the fields. She looked like something carved from petrified wood, all hollows, wrinkles, bone, her hair a thin, white, grizzled halo on her skull, her legs brittle twigs.

Squatting down before the others, his fingers dipping into their communal bowl of cornmeal and hog’s meat, one of the slaves told of the new mistress who had come to them this day. She was young. The slave, always a wit, pointed to the youngest slave among them, a girl. Not that young. He pointed to Old Grandmother. Not that old. She came with another woman—a servant—and a boy, a slave like them, but not like them either. The Governor’s galley slaves, who ate with the plantation slaves, agreed.

He has fine clothes, said the witty one, the teller of this story. Soft clothes. His voice in the darkness conveyed those clothes Hyacinthe wore, warm and whole, a master’s clothes on a boy like them. He described the shine of the buckles on the boy’s shoes, the sweep of the feather in his hat, the glow of the silver collar around his neck.

There were two dogs, also—such dogs! Never had he seen such dogs. Uglier than the overseer—a comment that was much enjoyed. The teller of tales went to the steps, where the glow from the kitchen’s fire made a backdrop for him, bulged out his eyes to show the way those dogs’ eyes bulged, curved out his arms to show the way their legs bowed out. He stooped over and held his hand over the step to show how small they were. And so worthless, so useless, they had not even smelled him when he’d peered in the window of the house earlier to see what there was to be seen.

“Overseer.”

The word dropped into their eating, their talking, like a stone into water, and they became mute. The only sounds now were the wind in the trees, and fingers scraping the wooden bowl.

Odell Smith, the head overseer of First Curle, walked up. He had been making the rounds, locking the basement, the corn house, the smokehouse, the barn, upset by this day, upset by the arrival of Barbara and her entourage.

“Finish eating,” he ordered them, roughly. “There’s work tomorrow. Much work. We have to get the leaves in the tobacco barns. You all know that. Sinsin, take the galley slaves with you to the slave house. A new mistress has come. Lady Devane she is called, from across the sea, from England, where the king of us all lives. You are to obey her as you did Master Bolling. That’s all.”

Scratching at his freckled hands, which burned always from sun, Odell walked to his own cabin, by the slave house, near the first of the two deep creeks that made this plantation worth what it was. This afternoon he had been summoned from the fields by a slave boy dressed as finely as he had ever seen a man dressed; he could hardly believe his eyes. Or his ears: The boy told him that his new mistress was here and wished to see him.

New mistress? What new mistress? His thoughts awhirl, he had gone to the kitchen house to talk to the slave there, old Mama Zou, who knew everything she shouldn’t, but there were two young women with her, preparing a supper for themselves and the Governor of this colony. The Governor. Governor Spotswood himself had come all the way up the river to First Curle. Odell Smith had never seen the Governor, had heard of him only.

One of the young women was a countess. Odell had never seen a countess, either. She was the one with hair a lighter shade than his, but with red in it nonetheless, with big eyes and a face shaped like a heart. He had been too surprised to stutter more than a few words and scratch at his hands helplessly.

The Countess had been full of questions for him: Where were the slaves? When could she explore the plantation and the other quarters of it across the river? Was he drying tobacco? When could she see that? Would he join her and the Governor for supper? He would not.

What was Colonel Bolling going to say? That was the question in Odell’s mind now as he walked up the plank steps of his cabin. It was bad enough for that duchess in England to send someone over from England to look over them, but to send a woman? And here he was with a storehouse filling higher with barrels of Colonel Bolling’s contraband tobacco, tobacco they did not send to England, as was the law, but sold in islands south of here for a better price.

Why, this countess owned the creek out of which they’d ship those barrels; she owned the storehouse in which they sat. What if she discovered their smuggling? What were they going to do?

Odell was not much of a scholar. He knew enough to write his name, order goods, figure hogsheads, read bills of lading from the tobacco ships. How would he put everything into a note? He did not even have paper. All the paper was in the house, where she was. On second thought, after he had locked the slaves in, he would ride over and tell Colonel Bolling in person. That way, it became not his problem, but Colonel Bolling’s. Colonel Bolling would see to it, the way he saw to everything.

I
N THE
early morning, in the attic bedchamber in the small main house of First Curle, Barbara lay dreaming in bed. She dreamed of Devane House, dreamed she was walking from one ornate chamber to the next, all about her polished marble, mirrors, gilded paint, intricate carving, inlaid floors. The furnishings were exquisite, the finest men made: footstools, chests, armoires, cabinets; Chinese vases as tall as she was. On the footstools and chairs were stiff crewel, colored threads, satins, velvets, striped silk, tassels.

She searched for Roger, walked through room after room, through echoing galleries and large parlors, searching. She knew he was here, just ahead of her, just a chamber beyond. She could feel it. She had to speak to him. It was imperative that she speak to him. In one of the chambers was Jane, her childhood friend, with her children. Barbara picked up a little girl who grabbed the necklace she wore, a necklace of rubies and diamonds. Be careful of your necklace, Jane said.

Necklaces I have by the dozens, Barbara replied, but no beautiful babies like yours.

Barbara set down the child. She opened doors that led to wide terraces that overlooked expansive gardens that were the talk of London. There was the landscape pool, long and sleek, with swans afloat on its surface. There was Roger, standing with another man. Marry in green, afraid to be seen, she heard Jane chanting to her children. Marry in red, wish yourself dead. The chants of girlhood. If in October you do marry, love will come, but riches tarry.

How glad she was to see him. Her heart felt like a bird rising to the sky. Impatient, impetuous, the way she could be, she picked up the soft material of her gown and began to run to him in her ivory-heeled satin slippers.