Now Face to Face (9 page)

“You are for King George?”

“I am for no one I love being hurt by war.”

“Very wise.”

Later, Barbara stood out in the yard, seeing them off. It was quite a sight: restless horses, barking dogs, lanterns being lighted, Mrs. Cox being helped into the cart. She said to Barbara, “You won’t find a better neighbor or finer friend than Edward Perry, Lady Devane.”

A moment later, Colonel Perry looked down at Barbara from his horse.

“You won’t find a better neighbor or finer friend than Margaret Cox,” he said. “I will call upon you tomorrow to see how you do.”

The cart was moving off in the dark, its entourage with it.

“If you don’t have enough meat in your smokehouse,” called Mrs. Cox, “you let us know. My boys can kill anything moving.”

Walking into the house, Barbara said to Thérèse, “Who is it Colonel Ferry reminds me of? I cannot put my finger upon it.”

Thérèse looked at her in surprise and didn’t answer.

“You know. Tell me.”

“Lord Devane.”

Roger? Roger had been the handsomest man who ever lived, time doing nothing more than frost and refine that which was already beautiful. Everybody had said that he was ageless.

“The color of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, his gestures, his manners,” said Thérèse. “If Lord Devane were seventy-and-something—I think so, madame.”

The eyes, thought Barbara. His eyes are like Roger’s, that same color of faded sapphire. Her heart ached its familiar ache. There would never be someone like Roger again. How could there be?

“Digges seed,” she said, aloud.

“What?” said Thérèse.

“Nothing, just something I was thinking.” She’d grow tobacco to get over Roger.

Were they safe at home? They must be. They were her talismans, her dears. Were they in danger?

Of course not. Spotswood’s talk, Colonel Perry’s: just old men playing soldier. Yet in her mind was a memory of Italy, of the Jacobite court there with its backbiting and ennui, the fatal flaws of a court in exile. Yet within that milieu had been bold and committed men who could take back a throne. She’d flirted with one of them in a garden, and thought, If there were ten thousand like you, King George would sail back to Hanover tomorrow.

Chapter Three

I
N
L
ONDON, BACKSTAGE IN A CROWDED THEATER,
L
AURENCE
Slane, an actor all the rage in the city, moved the oil over his face that would take the paint and rouge from it. Behind him, down the corridor, he could still hear the applause from the audience, still hear the name Laurence Slane being called.

“They are throwing fans and orange peels,” said Colley Cibber, who owned this theater and wrote the plays for the troupe. “Go back onstage and let them have another look at you.” Cibber was excited. It had been a while since anything had livened up audiences the way this Laurence Slane did.

Slane moved past stacks of painted scenes—of castles, drawing rooms, forests—past the ropes that brought the curtain down, past his fellow actors and actresses, and stepped out onto the stage, ignoring the ladies’ fans that littered it.

Directly to his right and his left were the best seats in the house, in boxes rising one above the other, those inside all but onstage themselves. Sometimes, depending on how well tickets sold, the audience sat in chairs directly upon the stage. In these boxes this evening, standing, applauding him, were a group of the King’s ministers and their wives, also some members of the famous Tamworth family, including the present young Duke and one of his aunts.

Candles in lanterns were flickering at the stage’s end; just beyond,

Slane could see the pit—the cheapest tickets, because the audience stood—and past it were the benches and then behind them the galleries, holding yet more people, footmen and servants in the upper ones. The clapping had increased at the sight of him, and he stood a moment, allowing it, the smell of orange peel sharp in his nostrils.

From the pit, someone held up a rough bouquet of white roses. The signal at last. Slane felt his heart swell open with an emotion like blood lust, like the moment when a man takes his first step toward a seen enemy in battle.

The signal meant the Bishop of Rochester would see him.

He leaned over to take the roses and held them aloft a moment, over his head like a trophy—indeed they were a trophy—before walking off to the sound of his name called over and over again, to the clatter of more ladies’ fans hitting the stage, the stamping of feet upon the floor.

“I am going to extend the play,” Cibber said, blinking like the rabbit of a man he was. “Four—no, five more days.”

Most plays enjoyed only a brief life before the audience tired of them and began to throw things at the actors and actresses. “You are performing bears, like the ones baited by dogs across the river,” Cibber told the actors. “Keep them entertained, or they will turn on you.”

Standing before a bit of chipped mirror, holding the roses crooked in his elbow, Slane removed the rest of the paint on his face. Though the face that stared back at him was calm, the mind behind it was leaping.

He had received the signal. The Bishop of Rochester would see him.

Weeks of the most careful maneuver and intrigue lay behind these white roses. Rochester, a bishop of the Church of England, was a leader in the Tory party, a faction of the English Parliament that King George chose to ignore—to his peril. Slane was a gosling, part of an elite corps of spies for King James III. He’d been here in London since June, to make an identity for himself, and to see Rochester, who trusted no one—and with good reason.

They had been planning an invasion since word of the magnitude of the South Sea Bubble reached them. Jamie, the Pretender, King James III, son of James II, nephew of Charles II, brother to the traitor queens, Mary and Anne, had been crowned in 1715 in Scotland as King of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. But Scotland was as far as Jamie had advanced toward his crown. His generals had lost the battles to the generals of George of Hanover, already here.

“The South Sea Bubble has burst too many dreams,” wrote Rochester to Jamie, who was in Italy. Rochester was the most cautious, most wily of the undiscovered Jacobites, nominal head of all Jacobites in England. “The Hanoverian and his ministers”—Whigs, the other party of Parliament—“are hated as never before. Come at once and claim your throne,” he wrote. So they were.

Outside, Slane saw King George’s ministers waiting for their carriages. One of the wives among them beckoned to Slane.

“Let me introduce you,” she said. “Robert Walpole, Lord Townshend, Newcastle, this is Laurence Slane.”

Slane bowed to the men, listened to the women compliment his performance, their voices high, like those of excited young girls, their eyes soft, admiring. He pretended not to hear how handsome they declared him.

“Lovely roses,” said one of them. “Are they from an admirer?”

“I’m sure you have nothing but admirers,” gushed another one.

Slane divided the roses among the women present, smiling into the eyes of each as he gave over her share. Amused, feeling predestined, he kept one apart and presented it with a bow to Robert Walpole, the minister who had managed to save King George’s ministers from dismissal for their parts in the South Sea Bubble. There was much hatred against Robert Walpole for that. It was on the streets, written in the broadsheets that dripped gossip, sung in the street-corner ballads.

It was good, this hatred, reminding people that there was another king for the asking. Thank you, round Robin, Slane thought.

Plump, heavy-lidded, a great maneuverer of men, Walpole stared at the white rose, then at Slane.

“For His Majesty, King George,” Slane said, “with all my compliments. Tell him that tonight he is in this lowly actor’s thoughts as never before.”

“Come and seize your throne,” Rochester had written Jamie and his advisers as the public cried out for the heads of King George’s ministers to be delivered upon platters. Invade, now.

Spring, Slane would tell the Bishop of Rochester when he saw him.

We invade in the spring.

Chapter Four

B
ARBARA KICKED AT HER HORSE’S SIDE WITH HER BOOT HEELS,
urging it forward along the edge of a fence. The fences these Virginians made were called worm fences because they undulated like a worm moving upon the ground. She had drawn a picture for her grandmother in the notebook, showing how the fence timbers met and angled first one way, then, at the next meeting, another. Her grandmother would be amused to have a worm fence, would likely want one made upon Tamworth. She was several miles from the house, at one of the fields in which slaves were harvesting tobacco. Hyacinthe sat silently behind her on the horse. This place consisted of the house in its clearing; then, scattered through cleared woods, fields. Across the river was more land, more fields, watched over by two more overseers.

Here, in this field, slaves were cutting down tobacco stalks, leaving each stalk atop the small hilled mound on which it had grown, moving on to the next stalk and the next.

“Not all the tobacco is ready at the same time, ma’am,” said Odell Smith, her reluctant guide in this. “I spend much time riding from field to field judging what should grow a few days, a week more. The weather is my enemy. The tobacco must grow as long as we can allow, but autumn rains, due in another few weeks, or an early frost might ruin what is not yet cut.”

“So that you have to rely on your instinct,” said Barbara.

“Instinct and good fortune. If we had more slaves, I could gather in more tobacco.”

A girl was gathering the scythed stalks by the armful and carrying them to the edge of the fields. Barbara moved her horse to a rough scaffolding there; from it hung drying stalks from yesterday and the day before. She stared at the leaves, only just beginning to dry. This was what Virginians depended upon. This was made into the snuff that all fashionable men inhaled in London and Paris and every city and town of Europe.

“We air the stalks a few days before taking them to the barn,” said Smith. “Then comes the drying, Lady Devane, which is most important of all.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, if the weather is damp—and it usually rains in September—we have to light fires in the barns to help dry the leaves. You’ll know the tobacco barn when you see it. It has planks missing to better air tobacco. If the leaves aren’t dried just right, they catch the mold, and ruin in the hogsheads. The merchants find rot.”

“And what do they do then?”

“They throw the tobacco out, but you’ve still paid freight for it to cross to England. And a duty when it arrived in London.”

“Thank you, Mr. Smith. I’m going to ride on, explore a little.”

Every day, she tried to ride out farther and farther, learn the boundaries of the plantation. When she knew every horse path, every tree, every field, then she would know First Curle and be its mistress in the truest sense of the word.

“If you’ll wait a bit, Lady Devane, I’ll saddle a horse and come with you. I don’t like you to be out alone.”

“No, thank you. What you do here is far more important to me.”