Now Face to Face (8 page)

“It is a good creek I’ve lost,” said Bolling, “a good, deep creek, and the last decent place on the river that ships can sail to without going aground. What the devil does she think she is going to do? Manage a two-thousand-acre plantation with two worthless dogs and a French maid to help?”

Bolling laughed, genuinely, darkly, amused, and the laughter was so spontaneous, and so unexpected, that Klaus, in spite of himself, began to laugh, too.

B
ARBARA AND
Hyacinthe picked peaches. Gone were the patches on her face, the beautiful gown and hoop, the stockings of silk. She’d borrowed a gown from Thérèse, for she possessed nothing plain enough, unless Thérèse took intricate laces off and laboriously unpicked embroideries. She wore a large straw hat with fluttering ribbons down the back, one she’d worn to fêtes on the grounds of Richmond House, outside London. There the Prince and Princess of Wales summered; there they would be at this very moment.

Her mind was on Bolling. He looked like one of those beefy overfed merchants who drove up in their coaches to call upon her in her grief. How sorry we are, madam, they had said, for your loss of Lord Devane, madam. They had soft faces and softer hands, but hard eyes, to assess loss. Theirs, not hers. Our deepest condolences, madam, they said, but there is the fact of Lord Devane’s debt.

The shafts of grief were silver-white and sleek, stabbing her. If she closed her eyes, it was a year ago, and she sat in a garden; Roger was still alive, so hope that they would at last make things right between themselves was still alive, dancing in her like a candle’s flame. Devane House was being finished, equaling the South Sea stock speculation in excitement, rising stone by stone to keep all awed and gossiping. He builds it for you, Barbara, friends said.

It was love, Philippe had told her. Roger loved me. And I him.

Barbara shook her head and looked around the orchard, as if she might see Philippe stepping out from behind a peach tree. But Philippe was in England, and she was in Virginia, wasn’t she?

“You might have been hurt, running under that horse the way you did,” she said to Hyacinthe, thinking, How tired grief makes one feel.

“You might have been hurt, also, madame. The Duchess said I was to look after you.”

Grandmama, overseeing from England. Barbara smiled. “Tell me what you saw and heard.”

Hyacinthe was just waiting for her command. “They went to the overseer. I don’t like that man, madame, and he doesn’t like me, this Mr. Odell Smith.”

“How do you know?”

“His eyes. It is in his eyes. The overseer was talking about us, describing us. And they were talking about barrels.”

“Barrels? What kind of barrels?”

“I don’t know. Barrels.”

“What did he say about us?”

“Just that we were here.”

“So we are.”

Her feeling of desolation was lessening somewhat in the late afternoon’s sun, in the movements of reaching up to pick, bending over to put away, in the satisfaction of seeing peaches begin to fill the basket. The trees in this orchard had not been pruned or grafted or cared for properly in a long time, longer than a year and four months. Jordan had been careless about more than cards.

She would send her grandmother peach brandy made from these very peaches. I’m homesick, she said sternly to herself. I’m far away from all that is familiar, and in a wild place. This will become home with time. There will be friends here, with time, won’t there?

“I am a slave, yes, like those here?”

Like those here? No and no, again. Never would he be locked into a house at night to sleep, never would he eat out of a communal bowl like an animal at a trough, or be chained to his place in a galley.

“You are my most treasured servant.”

“Yes, but I am a slave. Please answer, madame.”

Roger had given Hyacinthe to her in Paris six years ago. It had been, was still, the height of all that was fashionable to have a small black page to carry one’s train or fan, to bring one’s wine, except that this boy was far more than a page, just as Thérèse was more than a lady’s maid. Hyacinthe would ask until she answered. He was a child such as she had been, willful, curious, not easily put off or fooled.

“Yes, you are a slave. My slave. But much, much more. Now hush.”

Seven years to make a tobacco man, Bolling had said. In seven years, she would be eight-and-twenty, quite old. There was commotion on the road cutting through her meadow. Someone else was coming. Many people were coming. Her dogs began to bark.

A two-wheeled cart, hitched to a horse, pulled in under her pines. Men and a young woman dismounted from horses. Dogs, which had come with them, barked. Her own dogs ran out to challenge.

A woman, quite large, as round as one of the great barrels of tobacco called hogsheads, was helped down from the cart by two of the men.

“Hush those dogs up,” she told them and gave her hand to an older man, much older. His face was seamed, his silver-white hair worn long and loose, like a woman’s, like that of the Cavaliers and courtiers of Charles I’s day, odd and out of fashion these days. Like Tony’s, thought Barbara.

The dogs, snarling at hers, nevertheless obeyed the whistle of one of the young men and jumped into the cart one after another. Her own dogs went wild, thinking themselves the reason. The lone young woman laughed, bent down to the pugs, held out her hands.

“Call them,” said Barbara; Hyacinthe clapped his hands, and the pugs ran to the orchard.

“There is Rosie, madame.”

There, tied to the back of the cart, was her grandmother’s cow, the storm’s victim, rescued, it seemed, by these people. Barbara walked out from under the peach trees, stopping under one of the pines. There must be at least seven people in her yard, not to mention half a dozen dogs.

“I am Lady Devane,” she said, her husky voice, her mother’s voice, a stark contrast to her angelic face under the big hat.

“I am Margaret Cox, your neighbor,” said the round woman, her eyes—bright, dark buttons—lost in her plump face. “These are my grandsons, Bowler, James, and Brazure. This is Colonel Edward Perry, another neighbor of yours and mine, and this is his daughter, Beth. Colonel Perry found this cow, Lady Devane, and thought it might belong to you. Now, we have brought you some supper, and a little something extra to settle you in and welcome you. James, Brazure, take it out of the cart before the dogs eat it.”

“I am delighted—
we
are delighted—to make your acquaintance, Lady Devane,” said Edward Perry, his voice calm, peaceful, like the sound of reeds in a river. The bow he made was quaint and old-fashioned, and the eyes in his seamed face were lively and kind. Barbara liked him at once. He was dressed all in black, plainly, like the Quakers of London.

Barbara watched as the young men shyly brought forward three hams, two unplucked geese, sacks of something, and a basket of candles.

“Cornmeal in those sacks. One of my sons-in-law owns a grist mill,” said Mrs. Cox. “Those candles have been made with bay myrtle. They smell sweet when you burn them.”

“All for me?” Barbara smiled, her grandfather’s smile, charming, dazzling. That smile’s a gift, said her grandmother, none of your doing at all, numbing those who see it, so mind how you use it, Bab. I am minding, Grandmama.

“Come into the house. I can’t take supper alone. I won’t take supper alone. You must all join me.”

She remembered this, country kindness, neighbor looking after neighbor. It was a good thing, a far better end than Colonel Bolling would have made to her first full day at First Curle. Kindness begat kindness. She could feel her heart open again. How kind they were to make her first evening alone here less lonely.

“Please,” she said, meaning every word she spoke, “it would make me so happy.”

“Well, then,” said Mrs. Cox, “it will have to be done, won’t it?”

“Tell me,” said Barbara to them all as they entered the house, “how difficult is it to grow tobacco?”

C
OLONEL
E
DWARD
Perry took a heavy silver goblet from the silver tray Hyacinthe held before him. He surveyed the parlor, which was still in disarray but already changed by the fine table and chairs, by a painting brought from England and set upon the plain mantel. Plump, naked nymphs with deliciously rounded flesh lolled in some dark garden. The lushness of the pose, the skill and craft of the brushstrokes, fed his soul.

I was unaware my soul needed feeding, he thought, but it clearly does. His lively, kind eyes went to Barbara, who was speaking to her page boy in rapid French, then moved to serving dishes of silver—plates, goblets, trays, unpacked but not yet put away, upon the table. Though he possessed some rich things himself, he had not been able to keep himself from touching these plates, this tray, could not help but run his fingers along the design, feeling the heaviness of the metal, marveling at the craft of the silversmith who had made the intricate design of grapes and leaves over which his fingers played.

Lady Devane was singing to them, now, some French nonsense song, her maidservant harmonizing with her, and he, like the others in the chamber, was struck silent at the beauty and liveliness here in Jordan’s plain parlor.

Jordan’s parlor no more, thought Colonel Perry; her presence already vibrates through it. She has the shining patina of that silver I cannot keep my eyes from—and, I wager, the solid inside, the strength that bends but won’t break easily. She must have graced the court. Why did she leave it to come among us?

When he’d gone to England as a younger man, he’d heard an Italian opera for the first time, and had found himself weeping, because the beauty of the music, the voices, was so unexpected, so fiercely fine and perfect. There was something of that emotion in him now, here in this simple parlor transformed by paintings and French chairs, by silver goblets and the sure and certain grace of the young woman singing to them. What is there here that I am so touched, so moved within? he thought, as another song began.

“Tell me of this,” he said to Barbara later, when the singing was finished and she sat near him, fanning herself with an exquisite fan. He pointed to it, and she handed it over.

He examined the scene painted on its furled-out sections: a rose garden, and yew trees beyond.

“It is Tamworth Hall, where I grew up. This is the rose garden my grandfather planted.”

“The famous Duke of Tamworth?”

“Yes. He planted it in the last years he lived, when he was frail and unwell. My brother gave this fan to me as a gift for my sixteenth birthday.”

What sadness in that lovely face, thought Perry. “Your brother?” he prodded gently.

“Harry. He’s dead now. All my brothers and sisters are dead.” She changed the subject abruptly. “What is the best tobacco seed?”

“Digges seed, from the Digges plantation on the York River, but the man to ask is Major John Custis in Williamsburg, not I. You’re thinking of planting a crop of tobacco?”

“This is a tobacco plantation.”

“Let me tell you that my tobacco merchant in London writes me a melancholy story, Lady Devane, of the ruinous effect of the South Sea Bubble—”

I cannot escape you, Bubble, thought Barbara. She clenched her hands around her drawn-in fan.

“—and its consequences to trade. I think tobacco will sell low again. We endured ten years of sales worth little or nothing the last time prices fell. I think we may be coming to such a time again. A wise man or woman would pull in his—or her—horns and live small.”

“Would she?” Barbara smiled at him. He was kind to warn her. “Thank you for your advice.”

“Not my advice, simply my opinion. Tobacco grows best on virgin land. We grow perhaps three years of crops upon a field before moving on to clear others, leaving old fields to rest. That is why only a portion of this plantation is planted. Jordan was looking to his tomorrow, to the tobacco he would need to raise four and five years from now. Tell me the news of England. Are the South Sea directors fined yet?”

“Parliament was determining the final amounts of the fines when I left England.”

“I read a great hatred of Robert Walpole in my letters. Do you think he will last as a minister to the King?”

“He was my late husband’s dear friend, and my husband always said that Robert is a rock around which the water must flow.”

“Even with his defense of the King’s ministers over this South Sea debacle? The writers of my letters say the people despise him, that King George must eventually dismiss him.”

Barbara shrugged.

“Will the Pretender invade?” he asked.

This was the second time within days that this question had been voiced. Surely this was just old men playing soldier, yet Colonel Perry’s words disturbed her now, as the Governor’s had not. The clans had risen in Scotland at the end of 1714. James had landed and been declared king. Would he attempt invasion again?

“He had not done so when I left.”

“I see from your face you think he will not. Yet my letters from England are filled with nothing but talk of how unhappy all are with King George and his ministers. It would be the perfect time.”

“Do not say so.”