Through a Glass Darkly: A Novel (17 page)

   "Diana," said Aunt Shrewsborough, walking across the space and embracing her niece. At first, Diana was stiff in her arms, but then suddenly, she melted and hugged her aunt. Aunt Shrewsborough stepped back, her hands still on Diana's shoulders, and looked her over. She sniffed.

   "It is all right now, girl," she said roughly. "The family is here."

   Behind her, Aunt Cranbourne followed and she, too, embraced Diana. Harold and Tony and Fanny came forward. The two men bowed. Fanny kissed Diana's cheek. Only Abigail remained by the door. She watched the scene being played before her without any expression. Diana smiled across at her. It was a pointed, cat's smile.

   Now the two aunts and Fanny were clustered around Barbara. Fanny kissed Barbara's cheek and said, "I am your cousin Fanny. Do you remember me?"

   Barbara smiled at the pretty woman whose cheek was so soft and fragrant. She had seldom seen these people since her grandfather's funeral, but none had changed so much that she did not recognize them. Of them all she herself was the most changed. She had been a thin, coltish ten–year–old. Now she was on the verge of young womanhood. The ten–year–old was still there—behind her eyes, in the impatient, long–legged way she moved, in the way her hair still rioted out of place. But her body and face were poised on the brink of adulthood, and she was both familiar and unfamiliar to all of them.

   "Of course she does not!" snapped Aunt Shrewsborough, pushing Fanny aside with her cane. "Move over, girl. Let me look at this child! Ye gods, kiss your great–aunt, Barbara! Look, Lizzie, she looks like Brother!"

   Her Aunt Cranbourne enfolded Barbara into her furs and laces. Her thin old shoulders were bony and she smelled of stale perfume and snuff. The two old women were looking her up and down as if she were a horse they were about to purchase. Aunt Shrewsborough poked at her with her cane, and Barbara obediently turned around for her.

   "God bless me," said Aunt Cranbourne, "but she will be a beauty! She is too thin now, but put some flesh on her and I swear she reminds me of myself forty years ago! Look at that hair!"

   Barbara, caught between them, smiled. She vaguely remembered these two old women. They were tinier and more wrinkled than her memory of them, and they looked distinctly odd with their big bright spots of rouge on their sagging cheeks and the red drawn crookedly around their lips. But they were family. They poked and prodded at her like family. There was something in them that reminded her of her grandmother. She felt suddenly enfolded in safety, the safety of family, who might criticize you and speak about you for all the world as if you could not hear, but still accepted you. It was something she never felt with her mother. With Diana, there was nothing but coldness.

   "I am so glad to see you," Barbara said, impulsively throwing her arms around them and hugging them. She kissed their cheeks with a hearty smack.

   "That voice," cried Aunt Shrewsborough. "Say something else!"

   Barbara blushed.

   "I am Tamworth—"

   Barbara looked at the plump, grave, tall young man before her. Yes, of course, it was Tony. The face might be older, the form taller, but those pale, shy blue eyes still belonged to the same fat boy she and Harry used to tease so. And beat upon. Except that now, it seemed he had forgiven her her childhood excesses, for he was staring at her with something like admiration and surprise in his eyes and saying, "Awful of me not to have called sooner, Bab. You—you are looking very well."

   Diana had been watching the cluster around Barbara with narrowed eyes. She looked as if she might be amused. Actually, she was relieved. She felt like a cat that has been rescued from a tree it thought it could climb only to find the limbs too high, the drop below too far. And like a cat, though she was glad to be rescued, she had no intention of making any of it easy on her rescuers.

   Abigail cleared her throat and looked across the room at Tony. He was staring at Barbara. She cleared her throat again. Harold nudged Tony in the ribs. He started and turned to Diana.

   "Aunt Diana. Offer you the hospitality of my home, and beg that you and my cousin make it your own—" He paused and glanced toward his mother. Abigail mouthed the word "duty." Tony bit his lip.

   "Duty!" said Harold and Aunt Shrewsborough and Abigail at the same time. Barbara laughed. Diana did not. She stood there, staring haughtily at each of them in turn, her beautiful face stern and, without its usual allotment of rouge, pale. She might have been a queen receiving penitents, rather than a desperate woman in a stained gown and no stockings.

   "Been remiss in my family duty, Aunt Diana," Tony said quickly, trying to spit the words out while he still remembered them. "Ask your forgiveness. As does my mother."

   "It is true, Diana," said Abigail, choosing now to sweep forward and join the others. "I allowed my temper to overcome my sense of responsibility, and I heartily regret it. From the bottom of my heart, I ask you to forgive me, and I join the duke in welcoming you and Barbara to my home."

   The speech was well done. There was just the proper amount of sincerity in it, but no warmth. Warmth would not have been Abigail. Everyone looked hopefully at Diana.

   "You may all of you just turn yourselves around and go home—" Diana began coldly.

   Oh, no, Barbara said to herself. She was standing next to Tony, and somehow his hand found hers. and he squeezed it. She felt like crying.

   "I have no need of your charity—not at this late date. Where were you months ago when I was almost begging in the streets? Where were you when the bill collectors chased me out of my own home? You have been waiting to see if I would fail or succeed before you chanced having anything to do with me. Well, I am going to succeed and I have no need of any of you now."

   There was a silence. Fanny was staring at Diana, her soft mouth a trembling O. No one ever spoke so to her mother. Harold looked embarrassed. Tony stared down at the buckles on his shoes. Aunt Shrewsborough raised one eyebrow. She sniffed. She looked at her sister.

   "I read no mention of a marriage in any of the papers," she said to everyone in general. "Did you, Lizzie?"

   "I did not," said Aunt Cranbourne.

   "Which means," continued Aunt Shrewsborough, in a hard voice, "that your negotiations are not final. I would not look a gift horse in the mouth if I were you, niece. From the sight of you and this place, Roger Montgeoffry can have you for a song if he waits long enough. Is that what you want, Diana? Because if it is, we will all walk back out that door! You can bargain from a position of power—at Saylor House—with the family firmly behind you. Or you can take your pride and stay here with it. It will not keep you warm at night. Accept Abigail's offer. Overlook its tardiness. Think with your brain, not your temper, girl!"

   Diana looked around her. Not a muscle in her face moved to give any indication of what she was feeling.

   "Think of Barbara, Aunt," Tony said suddenly into the silence. His speech had not been rehearsed, and Abigail turned to look at him, her face relaying her surprise. "Granddaughter of a duke. Lived all her life at Tamworth Hall. To come to London to—to this! Not used to it. Can see it by looking at her. Let her come to Saylor House, Aunt Diana, please!"

   "Well said, boy!" exclaimed Aunt Shrewsborough, rapping him on the arm with her cane. Barbara smiled up at him, her gratefulness in her eyes. Tony was beginning to act like a friend. She had a feeling that she could count on him to help her. Suddenly, she felt ashamed for all those times she and Harry had tormented him. He had just been slow. He could not help that his mind did not match theirs in the speed of their thinking and their speech. And they had made him pay for it. How they had made him pay. She linked her arm through his and squeezed it.

   "Thank you," she whispered.

   Aunt Shrewsborough was not finished. Like the expert card player she was, she had saved an extra trump.

   "I have a letter from your mother," she said, shaking her cane in Diana's face. Again, Diana did not move, but this time her face changed slightly, and Aunt Shrewsborough nodded, satisfied with the reaction, minute though it was. "She wrote me over a week ago wanting to know what the devil was going on here, Diana. She says she has not heard a word from you. She asked about Barbara—about the marriage. She said she would come up here herself if she did not hear from me. Now, I wrote her back that everything was under control, but I can just as easily post a special messenger and tell her to pack her bags and bring herself up here. And if I do, Diana, I do not have to tell you what will happen, do I?"

   Diana was silent. She bit her lip. No one said a word. No one had to. Each of them had dealt, at one time or another, with the Duchess when she was angry. No more needed to be said.

   "Perhaps you are right," she said slowly. "Perhaps we might come to some accommodation."

   Barbara hugged everyone around her. After she hugged Tony, he stared after her with a dazed expression on his face. Abigail walked forward calmly into that last bit of space left between her and Diana. Their cheeks touched. With the edge of her apron, Clemmie wiped the perspiration that had gathered on her upper lip in spite of the cold. For a moment, she thought Diana had overplayed her hand, but Diana had been born under a lucky star. She always landed on her feet, always. Even now, she was allowing the men to kiss her hand and the women to hug her as if she were conferring a personal favor on them, when Clemmie alone knew that last night she had come close to sending a letter to Aunt Shrewsborough begging for money. Clemmie had been all set to send Meres to deliver it. Diana had not done it at the last minute, just as she had not given in on the negotiations, trusting somehow that her luck would change.

   Amid the hugging and kissing, Abigail was informing Diana that she would send footmen and a carriage tomorrow. Aunt Shrewsborough and Aunt Cranbourne were arguing over which of them Barbara had gotten her white complexion from.

   "You just see you protect it, young lady!" Aunt Shrewsborough said. "There is not a mark on it, and a white complexion is a lady's first beauty. Balm of Mecca. I use balm of Mecca nightly."

   "Grandmama gave me her milk of roses—"

   "What!" cried Aunt Cranbourne, her tiny body quivering with outrage. "I begged Alice for years to give me that recipe, and she always refused. What is in it, Bab? What?"

   "We must go," Harold said, coming up to them.

   Both of them turned on him like tiny, vicious harpies. He backed off. They turned back to Barbara.

   "You be sure you come to see us," Aunt Shrewsborough told her sternly. "I will tell you a thing or two about handling this Lord Devane of yours—"

   "A handsome man!" said Aunt Cranbourne. "If I were ten years younger, I would give you a run for your money, Bab. Come along, Louisa, they are waiting for us. Diana, you did the right thing. I want that recipe now! Do not forget it!" There was more kissing and hugging and talk, and then the room was bare and empty again: the babble of talk, the scent of powder and snuff and perfume, the swish of heavy skirts and petticoats, starched linen, gone. They might never have been there, except that Barbara felt so relieved inside.

   In the silence Diana sat down suddenly, as if she had lost strength in her legs. She looked at Clemmie, still against one wall, shapeless as a huge, silent leech, and began to laugh. Clemmie shook her head and grinned, the gaps in her teeth black as night.

   Outside, Tony said, almost to himself, "Barbara has grown up." Behind him, Harold winked at Fanny, who giggled. Behind them, Abigail said nothing. She had not heard.

* * *

   Saylor House was all Barbara had expected and more. From the moment the carriage Abigail had sent wheeled them between the gate towers and into the courtyard, Barbara's heart swelled with pride. The house was massive, symmetrical, solid, rising three stories to a hipped roof, punctuated at regular intervals with dormer windows and massive chimney stacks. In the center of the roof was a marble cupola used by the family in the hot summer for al fresco dining and entertaining. Behind the chimney stacks, a white stone balustrade ran along the roof's perimeter to protect anyone who might wish to stroll on the roof and enjoy the view, still a lovely one—even though the surrounding property was rapidly filling with buildings. It was possible to see St. James's Square to the west and across the Marlborough House gardens to St. James's Park on the south. There were stone benches carved into the balustrade so that guests might sit down, and when the Duchess had lived there, she had huge pots of blooming flowers and shrubs placed all about so that the roof was like another garden, but closer to the sky. The front of the house had matched windows blinking evenly across each story. A simple outside stair curved upward to the double doors of the entrance, encased in marble and topped by a pediment.

   Two footmen ran down the stairs to open the carriage doors. A butler, short and plump, with a pouter–pigeon–like chest and stomach, stood majestically before half of the entrance doors that opened to welcome them. Barbara followed her mother up the stairs.

   "Lady Saylor awaits you in the great parlor," the butler said.

   "Thank you, Bates," said Diana. "Bates, this is my oldest daughter, Mistress Barbara Alderley. Barbara, this is Bates. You have been with Saylor House since its beginnings, have you not, Bates?"

   "I certainly have, Lady Alderley. I am happy to make your acquaintance, Mistress Alderley. May I say that you have the look of your grandfather, and may I say how pleased we are at Saylor House to welcome you."

   Barbara smiled at him, but all her attention was on the great hall she now was standing in. It was the most beautiful room she had ever seen; all its proportions were perfectly equal. The floor was cut into great, even, alternating squares of black and white marble. The hall itself rose up into two stories, and the tall windows cut across the front of the house kept it from being dark or closed in. An intricately carved wooden staircase rose along each far side of the wall to meet directly ahead of her on the second floor as a spacious landing. Each arm of the staircase balustrade was carved in the shape of a pineapple, the fruit being the base, the leaves flowing upward to join the top railing. The carver had captured every seam, every crevice of the fruit. Barbara walked farther into the hall. In front of her was a great central door cut into the wall, its position exactly matching the entrance door behind her. And above her, on the second level, was a door that exactly matched the one on this floor. The frames of all the doors were surrounded with marble columns that met above the doors to form pediments. Into the walls on this and the floor above were cut evenly spaced ovals, outlined with laurel wreaths, in which sat marble busts. Barbara did not yet know it, but they were busts of the most famous men in Queen Anne's reign: Marlborough, Godolphin, Prince Eugene, Prince George, Sunderland, Somers, and Cowper. To know who they were was to begin to realize the extent of her grandfather's power. Two huge portraits hung on the side walls, in the shadows created by the staircase. The portraits faced each other across the room. Walking forward to look at the busts, Barbara noticed and went to the one of a woman.