Now Face to Face (92 page)

It looked as if Charles, the others, would not be tried at all, would simply endure prison for a time. But Christopher Layer would be tried, and so would Gussy, because there was direct evidence, evidence admissible in a court of law, and because Walpole wanted them beheaded. He would behead them and exile Rochester.

Except that Slane was going to snatch Gussy from the Tower. How, he wasn’t certain yet. He’d take Layer, too, if he could. “Do it,” wrote Rochester, “do whatever you can to humiliate Walpole. I should have left England when you first warned me. Thank you for your message about the bill of pains and penalties. It is a shock to me, but I shall fight. It will be a duel of honor between us, and though he may come out the victor and exile me, he shall not come out the victor with the public.”

Barbara touched the collar at her neck.

“I have lost so many people I love. I can’t lose you, too. I won’t be able to bear it. I really won’t. I’ll break, Slane.”

Time shortened. He could hear his heart beating. There was so much they had to say, to plan.

“Do you love me?”

“You know I do.”

“Tell me again.”

“I love you.”

He threw the two pieces of a broken coin on a table, and his finch in her cage fussed. Jane had told him the custom: Break a crooked ninepence and each take a piece. Then you were betrothed, she said. He wondered what was going through Barbara’s head—thoughts of her position, surely, and Devane Square, and the birth of her mother’s child. Men were around her, too, seeing her rise, knowing her fine was to be reduced, seeing her again as an asset in the marriage market, someone to bring fortune to family, and fame.

“Marry me,” he said.

She looked from the pieces of coin to him, her expression grave.

“When?”

“Someday.”

“I can’t have children, Slane.”

They had never discussed it. He had never pursued the tremor he’d heard in her voice the first time they lay together. Was this why? He could feel the shock of her words in himself, and he hated himself both for feeling it, for showing that he felt it.

“Put the coin away,” she said.

I do plight thee my troth, he had been going to say to her. So much to do: go to Italy, report to Jamie, go to France, begin to make a life there. The letter was already off to his mother. “Find me a regiment,” he’d written. He was going to become an officer in the French army. When I have a home, he was going to say, I will send for you. If you still care for me, come. If not…And then they were to have kissed the way men did when one has knighted the other, chastely, briefly, pledging fidelity to an ideal.

“Come and walk with me, Barbara.”

“No, it’s too dangerous.”

“Pull the hood of your cloak up over your hair. No one will know you.”

They walked the twilit narrow streets around the Tower, walked as a man and his sweetheart might, openly, for all the world to see. He bought her something to eat, and they passed by windows in which families were gathered by candlelight. They sat on the river steps, the enormous wall surrounding the buildings that made up the Tower dark and massive behind them. He told her things in Gaelic: that she was his beloved, that he hated to abandon her—things he could not yet bring himself to say in English. “I wanted children with you,” he said in Gaelic. “I wanted a son to replace the one lost to me. This breaks my heart.”

In his chamber, they lay in his bed. She stroked his face, and he felt a little peace.

“Tell me more about your life in France.”

“You know my mother is married to a French duke, my sister to another. I have an uncle who commands a regiment of Irish soldiers under the French flag.”

“So that you could have them buy you a command. You would be a wonderful colonel.”

He shivered. There was a misty vision in his mind, of Barbara singing in a beautiful room, the doors open to the outside, silk draperies with cascading tassels, wood floors polished and shining, someone playing a lute. A man in uniform stood near watching her, a man wearing an eyepatch, missing a arm. Was it himself? The more he tried to see, the quicker it disappeared. There were women who followed armies—whores, yes, but wives, too, who camped outside the army’s camp and followed husbands over mountain and river, who nursed the wounded when the battles began. He could envision Barbara doing both, thriving on it. The vigor and passion in her would rise like cream.

He turned her on her back, kissed a shoulder. Tomorrow was Friday. Charles must receive his single white rose, wrapped in a crude drawing of a man hanged. It always amused him to send Charles that. I can touch you whenever I please, he’d told Charles. When he left, he must arrange for the roses to be delivered.

“I want you to leave,” she said.

He moved his hands to her breasts, his mouth to her neck and her ear, moved himself into the shape of her naked body. She quieted, sighed, moved his hand to the slight swell of her belly, a movement that excited him.

“Not now,” he said. “There is nothing you can say to make me go. I shall go soon, but I have a little something to do first. Night is passing, your friend has died, you are naked and sighing under my hands. You want me. I want you. This is not the time for talk, Barbara.”

Yesterday a public herald had announced two November trials, Layer’s and Gussy’s. The city was seething again, a volcano that did not quite spew. The time was chosen well. Guy Fawkes Day was in November. Fawkes, a Catholic, had tried to blow up Parliament a hundred years ago. The trials would be after Guy Fawkes Day, after Queen Elizabeth’s Day, when candles were lighted in windows in memory of her reign and the end of Popery. The King and his ministers played upon the old fear that Jamie would make England Catholic again. Slane would try to take Layer and Gussy before the trials, so that Walpole lost his public display.

He closed his eyes on fierce and bright pleasure, forgetting everything else. When it was finished, she nestled against his back, stroked his abdomen with light fingers, whispered to him that he must not tempt Fate. She pressed her cheek against his back.

“I adore you,” Barbara said in French. “Friend, dear one. Darling. Month of blood, so November was called in the old days. Slane, I begin to feel afraid, and it is not a feeling I like. Do you know what Colonel Perry says? To know there is good in every event, to believe it. My grandmother says that he is a dreamer and a madman, or a true holy man. But wouldn’t it be lovely if there was good in all things, a good maybe we were too small to see, but a good nonetheless? Could it be that simple? To look for the good?”

“Sleep, my sweet. I’ll wake you before morning.”

“I want you to leave. Now,” she said in English.

Something rattled claws at him, a warning so urgent that he had to be silent a moment.

“I’ll leave after Gussy’s trial. I swear it.”

The claws’ rattling lessened but did not cease.

Barbara started to tell him of her feeling that she wouldn’t see the Virginia garden, but she didn’t. She kept her cheek against his shoulder blade, thinking of the expression on his face when he’d learned she was barren.

This death, the coming trials, makes us all feel fragile, makes us all madmen, thought Slane. The feeling in his middle persisted. One of us is in danger, he thought.

He got up from the bed and stood at the window and looked up into the cold night’s stars, looked at the Tower, lights shining in various towers within it. He thought of Gussy, of friendship, of love, thinking things he seldom allowed himself. His dreams of sons were ashes in his mouth. Who knew what twists life held? Where is your good in this, Colonel Perry? he thought. The broken pieces of ninepence sat abandoned on the table.

Marry in yellow, ashamed of your fellow, marry in black, wish yourself back.

It was only in the late night, when dawn was near, that he thought beyond himself, to her, to what her barrenness must mean to her. He woke her, and she sat up, bewildered and sleepy, like a child. She must have been a beautiful child, all wild hair and wilder heart. Weren’t we all so, once upon a time? A demanding child, he imagined. She liked to win, said Jane. She liked to shout. She cried the hardest and the loudest when hurt.

“What sorrow it must give you,” he said, “that there will be no children. Tell me.”

The expression on her face touched him to his soul. If he’d had a thousand diamonds, he’d have poured them into her lap to ease her sorrow.

“I can’t speak of it.”

“Marry me.”

“No. You go, do what you must do, think on me, on what I cannot give you as well as what I can. And if there comes a time when you want me as I am, when you see me not as something imperfect and flawed, but as a woman with whom you wish to share life, then ask again.”

“What will you say?”

“Who knows, Slane? Do we have to know now?”

No. Because he already knew. She loved him.

One of them was in danger. He felt it again. Which one?

“We must be careful in how we see each other from now on. You mustn’t come here again, Barbara.”

“Why?”

“I have a feeling.”

“Yes. So do I. Please leave, Slane.”

“I will. Soon.”

T
ONY POURED
himself another glass of wine. Barbara had called Carlyle’s death a failure of friendship. And more than that, a failure of stewardship. He was your man, and so you were to take care of him, almost as if in marriage, Tony, in sickness or health. He was a valuable man to you, and you let Robin blind you. You are Robin’s tool. Tomorrow someone or another will tell you that Carlyle was a sodomite and not worth your regard; someone will discuss his flaws, his faults, tell you you did what was right, but they will be lying, Tony. And if you believe them, you will be lying, too. To yourself.

She was harsh. She was very harsh. And she was always right.

I
N
R
OME,
Philippe stood before Michelangelo’s statue called the
Pietà,
of the dead Christ in his mother’s arms. Ensconced among the treasures of St. Peter’s Basilica, it was one of the sights of Rome. He remained where he was for a time, contemplating the genius of a man who managed to instill both grief and grace into a block of marble, until he saw the same priest he’d seen for the last four days. Then he moved along the assigned path, from one statue or painting to another, before at last standing at the magnificent altar of dazzling green marble and gold. At a side altar, he lit the required seven candles, then walked out of the dimness of St. Peter’s into the bright sunlight of the piazza that spread before the church and through which all Rome passed.

He had three more days in which to perform the ritual. He must wait, so he had been told in Paris, for contact from Jacobites. He had no doubt they would contact him. A convert such as he would not be ignored.

Walpole had hurt Roger beyond what was necessary for expediency, and how? By not doing all that could be done; by, with a subtlety that Philippe could respect, encouraging events to a fuller shape than might have happened had he let them alone. The thoughts drove Philippe mad, goaded him almost beyond endurance. He understood necessity, understood there came a time when one could do nothing further for a doomed friend, but to have used that doom, to have deepened it, for one’s own purpose was unforgivable, particularly unforgivable because it was Roger. Devane House had not had to be destroyed. Philippe had accompanied Roger to commission paintings for it, had accompanied him when he sifted through antiquities from ancient Rome—with the eye of a master—to display in his Temple of the Arts. In his mind, he could see Roger, the grace of him, reflected in those choices. Devane House had been all that was best in Roger.

At night, Philippe woke from a restless sleep and paced the floor, going over in his mind every word of his conversations with Rochester, with Tommy Carlyle, going over the events of the South Sea Bubble. Barbara was right. Roger had been made scapegoat. It was a brilliant tactic upon Walpole’s part. But Walpole was not the only one of brilliancy and cleverness in this secret drama.

High Jacobites in Paris were the ones Philippe insisted upon seeing, and they had at first not believed in his sincerity. Weeks he had waited for them to receive him, while events in England took their course. Philippe read the dispatches sent by the French ambassador. More arrests. A tax proposed against Roman Catholics of the kingdom. The suspending of an act which allowed those imprisoned to be brought before a judge and told what they were charged with. Clever of Walpole to suspend English justice to his need. The publication of a reward for any information concerning one Lucius, Viscount Duncannon, said to be a secret spy for the Pretender.

He did not waste the time they made him wait. He called upon Lord Bolingbroke, the ambitious courtier of Queen Anne who had fled England in 1715. He and Philippe strolled the gardens of the estate outside Paris upon which Bolingbroke now lived. I long for my home, said Bolingbroke. I long to serve my country again. I am a wiser man than once I was. I am humble.

Humble? Bolingbroke? No. But clearly anxious to be back in England.

Bolingbroke and Walpole were old enemies. Old hatred, nourished lest it die, was a useful thing. Walpole joins King George’s most trusted ministers, said Philippe. I think if he is able to bring the Bishop of Rochester to trial, he will be foremost among them.