Now Face to Face (53 page)

“What if he doesn’t wake?”

“He must. He will.” Sir John put his arm around Jane, and they walked toward Ladybeth.

“Tell me what is happening? Tell me why the letter is so important. Tell me what you hide, Father. I know you hide something. You have since New Year’s. You can trust me.”

Without breaking his stride, he hugged her to him, carrying her against his side a full step or two, so that she was lifted off the ground. “I know I can trust you, Janie, but this I cannot share.”

“Gussy? Does it involve Gussy?”

“No.” He said it so quickly that she knew it did.

T
HE WOMAN
in Tamworth’s woods stopped. Her pupils, if anyone had cared to look, were distended, so that the odd green shade of her eyes could hardly be seen. She gave a cry, bent over, panting like a dog in summer when there is no water near. Her belly heaved, rippled, as if it had a life of its own. It did: a life trying to be born.

The woman walked a few steps farther, stopping when the pain was too enormous, holding on to trees, panting. Another step. Another. The pressure was so great. The child would be born in the mud and cold.

There was the back of a great house. The woman walked a few steps, fell. She began to crawl, stopping when the ripple of her belly, the pressure, seemed as if it would burst her apart. Making little cries, she managed to crawl to the kitchen garden, where green sprouts showed through the hay covering. The woman lay on her side, her body making spasms that arched her into the shape of a bow. “Help,” she tried to say, but no words came out of her mouth.

Annie sat by the fire in the kitchen, waiting for water to boil. Pulling a book out of her pocket, she put it in her lap, glanced around. There was only Tim, sitting at the great oak table cracking open walnuts. She began to read.

“‘One morning he pulls off his diamond ring, and writes upon the glass of my sash in my chamber this line—“You I love, and you alone,” ’” Annie read, her heart palpitating with the boldness of it. It was Defoe’s book, which the Duchess had given her to burn, and which she had been reading since.

“What are you reading?”

Annie started, slipped the book into the pocket of her apron. “Nothing.”

“Something. The Defoe book,” said Tim, standing.

Annie stood, too, moved so that there was some distance between her and Tim. Their time together with the Duchess in London had made him much less afraid of her. In fact, sometimes he dared to tease her. He would not be above chasing her down. He was bold and impudent, a bad servant. No wonder the Duchess adored him.

“It is not the Defoe book. It is a book of sermons—What’s that?”

“Your left eye squints when you lie.”

“Hush. Listen.”

“It’s the wind. It is cold enough for January outside.”

Annie went to the kitchen door, opened it, and stepped outside.

“Tim!” she cried. “Hurry!”

S
LANE OPENED
his eyes, but with effort. It hurt to lift his eyelids, hurt more than he could have imagined such a thing hurting. Carefully, he felt the bandage at his brow, but just the touch of his hands made him wince. He sat up carefully, the throb in his head intensifying, like a drummer tapping harder and harder. He felt sick.

Where am I? he thought through the drumming. Then: How long have I been here?

He tried to stand, but could not. He sat on the bed, willing himself upright. The effort made him grit his teeth and break into a sweat. Standing, he felt sick, as if he would faint. The throb in his head was becoming all there was. It was hard to keep his eyes open against it. He managed to pull on his breeches under his nightshirt. He kept his head completely level. Even the slightest jar to it made him groan.

Out in the hall, he had to stop, one hand to the wall, to keep from falling. His head was large, enormous, a giant iron ball someone was hitting with a mallet. At any moment the iron would split open and he would be nothing. He groped from one piece of furniture in the hall to another, trying to get his bearings, to keep concentrated upon what he was doing. There were stairs. Careful, one foot down slowly, hand on the railing, careful, then the other foot, pull yourself with your hands, keep your head level. God, the pain.

He had managed to get upon a lower floor. He was in a wider hall, far wider. Likely this hall held the bedchambers of the owners of the house. He put his hand to the nearest door, opened it, gritted his teeth at the nausea in his middle. I’m going to faint, he thought. He saw that he was in a withdrawing chamber, with draperies the color of pale butter. There would be a bedchamber beyond, windows he could look out of.

So there was.

He leaned a moment on the knob of the door, wondering if he could walk to the windows. There was a great four-poster bed with its curtains drawn nearly closed. Portraits in heavy gilt frames hung from faded velvet ribbons. A cat leaped from nowhere and wound itself around his legs. He moved toward the light of the windows, but one of the portraits caught his eye.

He stood a moment before it, swaying. Beautiful girl, captured in that moment of time in which she was moving into womanhood, with diamonds in her hair and around her neck, diamonds upon the edge of the glorious fan she held open.

“Barbara,” he said, aloud.

“How do you know my granddaughter’s name, Laurence Slane?”

Startled, he turned, and the sudden movement was his undoing. His head seemed to burst open and, as the cat wove between his legs, he fell.

“T
HE AFTERBIRTH.
Did she push it out? If I don’t get all the afterbirth, she’ll die.” Everything about Annie was sharp, efficient. The Gypsy woman lay on the floor before the kitchen fire, and the cries of a newly born baby were louder and louder, rising up to the high, dark, vaulted kitchen rafters. A bell among a series of bells, an indication that someone upstairs wanted a servant, began to ring.

“The Duchess’s bell! Now of all times!” Annie looked over at Jane, who had walked in in the midst of the birth and now held the woman’s shoulders. “Go upstairs for me, Jane. See what it is she needs. Tim! Give the child to Cook and go with Jane.”

Upstairs, in the bedchamber, Jane half walked, half ran toward the bed, speaking so fast that half her words were swallowed, “Your Grace, Annie could not come to you. The Gypsy woman—you remember, she sat in church three Sundays in a row—well, she is in your kitchen at this moment and just gave birth to a baby. It is a boy, and she is in a very bad way. Almost starved.”

The Duchess was staring at Tim’s hands. They were covered in blood. Tim looked down at them. “The baby,” he said. “I was holding the baby.”

Without a word, the Duchess pointed toward the other side of her bed, and Tim walked around to see.

Dulcinea sat upon Slane’s chest, purring loudly. Tim looked over to the Duchess, staring at him from among her nest of bed pillows, the cap she wore dwarfing her thin face.

“Are you all right, ma’am?”

“Apart from having strangers barge into my bedchamber at their will, I’m fine. Take him to his bed, Tim. Jane, is this Gypsy woman going to die?”

The groan Slane made at being moved made Jane clutch her hands.

“I’m not certain, Your Grace. Please, Your Grace, may I go now? I am worried for the woman.”

“Yes, yes, go on.”

“Well, Dulcinea”—the Duchess stroked the cat, who had leaped up onto the bed—“Gypsies in my kitchen, actors in my bedchamber.” She pursed her lips. How did Slane know Barbara? How?

Her mind slipped into fret for Barbara, for the depth of Barbara’s heartache. Roger, and now Hyacinthe, gone. Please, God, Barbara has been through enough. Lead her to green pastures, to still waters. Anoint her head with oil, fill her cup with joy. Come home, Barbara. Come home. Let us comfort you.

“T
IM, TELL
Annie what has happened.” Jane pulled the covers back over Slane. “She’ll know what he needs. And bring back with you the poultice my mother made. I think I dropped it on the table.”

Slane was groaning, knotting his hands into fists.

“I have a letter for you. It came three days ago.” Jane spoke quietly. “Can you hear me? Do you understand? Do you know who I am?”

Without opening his eyes, Slane gritted his teeth, a groan coming through them. “Yes. Read it.”

Jane had to bend over him to hear him. She took the letter from her pocket, but for a moment was unable to open it. My whole life is in this letter, she thought; then: Jane, stop this. You are being fanciful. You are a woman with four children, whom few know and fewer see. What do you know? Nothing. You are nothing in this life.

“‘Rochester has bolted,’” she read. “‘Come immediately. We’ve come apart at the seams.’”

Slane groaned. “Any signature?”

“No.”

Gussy. It was Gussy’s handwriting. Her hands trembled.

Slane reached up, startling her, and took her wrist; he opened his eyes. There was a trickle of blood seeping down from the bandage.

“I…have…to leave,” he breathed, slowly, a breath between each word. Speaking was costing him great agony. “Help…”

“Help you?”

How? Was she to sneak into this house and bring him out a back stairway, this when he could not stand? She’d be seen. She’d be caught. She could never do it. Gussy’s handwriting. Something in her hardened.

Did she not know this house as if it were her own? Had she and Barbara not hidden in every passage, in every chamber at one time or another just for the sake of doing it, the pair of them swallowing their laughter until they had to laugh or choke? Jane is cunning, Harry. She could just hear Barbara saying it. Yes, there had been many a time when her thinking of a story to tell had saved the three of them from caning. She couldn’t
say
it—Barbara and Harry had had to do that—but she could think of it. Just stand there and cry, the way you always do, Barbara would say. Leave the talking to Harry and me. Your weeping softens them, Jane, so that Harry and I have an easier time of it.

She would bring her father in a back way. She knew a door seldom opened; she would go right now and see if it was locked, and if it was, she knew where the key was. She knew a back stair. They would spirit Slane away. It would just have to be done. The handwriting was Gussy’s.

“Rest now. Drink what Tim brings. It will be better for you if you do.”

“I…must…be…awake.”

“You must be well. Father and I will take care of you. I promise you that.”

He opened his eyes again, with great effort, and stared up at her.

Measuring me, thought Jane. She let him see all her fear and all her courage. He closed his eyes again. She took that as a sign that he agreed. When Tim returned, she had the bandage off and was dabbing at the blood as gently as she could. She made Slane drink several spoonfuls of the thick syrup Annie sent, put her mother’s poultice upon his forehead, which was so horribly bruised and swollen about the brow and into and around the eye. She tied on another bandage.

“Tim, I’ll sit with him. I’ll stop in the kitchen before I leave home. Thank you, Tim.”

When she was certain Tim was gone from this floor, she opened the door and began her explorations. The door leading outside was unlocked. It squeaked when she opened it. She’d have her father bring oil for its hinges.

E
VENING SETTLED
around Tamworth, dark going into its far corners, behind chairs, under tables with a familiarity that brought quiet to everyone. All through the house, people did the things that brought them comfort, made the event of the afternoon settle into something smaller, something they could understand. Downstairs, Perryman lit a few candles to take away evening gloom. In the kitchen, Cook fussed over pots and kettles that held the Duchess’s supper. The parlor and bedchamber maids gossiped about the Gypsy woman, now up in the attic chambers with her child. “Bad luck,” they told one another. “It is bad luck to have a Gypsy in the house.” Tim sat by the fire, whittling a stick, thinking about the birth he had witnessed, the woman’s great pain and her courage, thinking about the child slipping out like some small miracle, thinking about God and Mistress Barbara across the sea and the book she’d read them last year, about old Robinson Crusoe and his adventures. Larger worlds, thought Tim, content by the fire, content with his life, with his position, with his world. There are larger worlds out there than we, sitting by the fire, can ever know.

“I found her by the garden. Tim carried her in. She was in the last stages of childbirth and nearly starved to death. She must have been in the woods since the parish officials cast her off.”

Annie, as tired as she had ever been, sat in a chair by the Duchess’s bed, drinking a glass of wine the Duchess had told her to pour for herself. The Duchess, too, was drinking wine, a little before her supper to help her digest better.

“Will she live?”

Annie shrugged.

“She may stay here until she is well or dies. Where is Tim?”

Annie smiled grimly. “Resting. All the men are exhausted.”

“He said Barbara’s name.”