Now Face to Face (17 page)

“Two of the clock in the morning, sir.”

For a coin, the beadle accompanied him down the darkness that was Half Moon Alley, past puddles of water, past waste and sleeping beggars, until they came to the Strand, the only straight thoroughfare in the old part of London, a crowded London filled with narrow, twisting lanes that had names like Cornhill Street and Threadneedle Row. The buildings here had lanterns hanging from them, giving out enough light to make one’s way. Down the Strand, toward older London, a church sat in the middle of the street. When Tony was younger, he and his sisters had watched the May Day dancing there, for there was a maypole near the church. It had been returned to its place of honor at Charles II’s restoration, as a symbol that Puritan domination was over and the old days were restored again. But the maypole had become unsettled in its foundation, too insecure to weave the streaming ribbons around, and three years ago Sir Isaac Newton, who was president of the Royal Society, had bought it to send to a friend in Wanstead to use as a telescope pole. London’s last maypole was gone. It was a sign of the times, said Tommy Carlyle, who said things like that, that the maypole had become part of a telescope.

There was no traffic on the Strand, as there always was during the day, as there had been earlier, after he’d heard from Charles that the duel was set, and he had walked down this street, not knowing where he went or why, but only that he must walk. Gone were coaches at this hour; there were no porters; even the linkboys, who held torches to light the way at night for carriages and pedestrians, had gone home.

I would never allow any cousin of mine to be spoken of in such a manner, Wart had said last night at Tom King’s tavern, those keen, hooded eyes of his bright with malice and wine. I will not allow it, said Charles, standing up, knocking over a chair. In the slow and drunken confusion within himself, Tony had known one thing: Charles must not duel again, not over Barbara.

Tony was passing the massive front of Northumberland House, still lived in by Howards and Percys, one of the last big houses left upon this street. In his grandmother’s girlhood, there had been a line of great houses from one end to the other, Essex House and Arundel, Somerset, Savoy, Salisbury. The houses had stretched in extensive splendor from entrances on the Strand all the way back to gardens and terraces that overlooked the Thames. After the great fire of 1666, when much of the city of London had burned to the ground, the nobility had moved on farther west—Covent Garden had been in its heyday—and speculators had bought the enormous mansions and their intricate gardens and torn everything down to begin again. His grandmother’s father had been such a speculator, nearly bankrupting himself in the process, but his grandfather had profited from it, and now, so did he. He owned half the tangled property and lodgings and buildings on the Thames side of the Strand. He was heir to twin legacies of wealth and personal courage.

Now he was at Charing Cross, the Strand’s end, where it joined two other streets to make one of the busiest junctions of the city. There was a popular saying that anyone who wanted to know what was going on in London had only to go to Charing Cross and stand at the railing surrounding the statue of Charles I in the center of the crossroads to see everyone and hear everything. There was a public pillory here, but Tony did not notice it nor the figure sagging in it; the sight was too common.

When he had passed this way this afternoon, there had been an apple woman standing at the statue of Charles I, her basket of apples at her bare feet, along with a pan of live charcoal and a plate of tin on which to roast apples for customers. Tell you fortune, kind sir, she’d said, if you buy an apple, but he’d only half heard her. Now, he wished to know his fortune, but she was nowhere to be seen.

I may be dead by dawn, he thought. He tried to envision again the scene he’d taken so for granted this afternoon, the sound of the carriages and wagons and carts carrying hay, the curses of the coachmen and wagoners mingling with the street vendors’ cries:

“Buy my fat chickens!”

“Long thread laces, long and strong!”

“Buy me four ropes of hard onions!”

“Green walnuts!”

“Knives, scissors to grind!”

There had been a babble of sound from hurdy-gurdy players, ballad singers, water carriers, pie men, bellows menders, London street life at its most vocal, anything and everything for sale. A man could walk up to another man or woman and buy cherries, early peas, spiced gingerbread, milk, eels, watercress, muffins, rabbits. He could buy lavender, brooms, chairs, old clothing. Each season had its vendors: Spring was flowers and herbs; June meant tubs of mackerels; autumn was plums and pears and walnuts; Christmas was wheelbarrows of rosemary, bay, holly, laurel, mistletoe. If he died tomorrow, he would die without ever hearing or seeing or smelling any of this again. He must make certain this duel was kept as secret as possible, must make certain that everyone promised not to speak of it nor admit to it, so that Barbara’s name was protected as much as possible. I hate duels. He remembered her saying that, remembered her telling of how a duel had changed Harry. He remembered the scandal surrounding the duel over her last year, how, oddly enough, the participants in it were not blamed and reviled as much as she was.

The street in which he lived was not far from here. It, too, was quiet. There were candles burning for him in the entrance hall of his house, and the footman who normally escorted him to bed sat sagging in a chair, snoring. The heels of Tony’s shoes seemed to click loudly against the black-and-white marble squares of the large hall, but the footman slept on.

His grandfather had built this house at the height of his fame and glory as a warrior, when it seemed to all the world that Louis XIV of France might do as he pleased, except that Louis’s generals had had to face Richard Saylor, made first Duke of Tamworth. The house contained the required elaborate baroque trimmings of those times, intricate plastered ceilings with priceless paintings from Italian and French artists among the plaster insets and also inside gilded ovals above every door.

This house, Saylor House, was one of the sights of London, filled as it was with marble busts of great men, Marlborough and Godolphin, Prince Eugene and King William, men who had been friends of his grandfather; French and Dutch furniture stood in its many formal rooms, as did collections of porcelains and medals, cameos and paintings. In the great parlor well-known tapestries hung on the walls, their scenes celebrating the first duke’s military victories. It had been thought at one time that Tony’s grandfather would replace Marlborough as Captain General of Her Majesty Queen Anne’s armies.

There was a huge portrait of his grandfather in the hall; magnificent stairs climbed up on two sides to meet overhead in a wide landing, and portraits were hung under each ascending stair, one of Tony’s grandfather and one of his grandmother, the creators of this house. And the creators of a legacy it was Tony’s duty to uphold and add to, as he had done most properly by the possessions and land and rents his bride-to-be would bring—possession and lands and rents now in jeopardy, whether he lived or died.

You are a good boy, Tony. My boy. The man who had said those words had become, in the years before his death, no longer the mighty general of this portrait, but rather a travesty of it, frail, forgetful, trembling, old, and mad as a March hare. Yet the gentleness, the sense of goodness had remained. No madness could vanquish that. The quality of mercy is not strained, thought Tony. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.

Despite the illness, or as some said, the devil, or whatever took his grandfather’s mind in those last years, there had been no one like him. Tony continued to look up at the portrait. Placed near was another, smaller portrait, a portrait of Tony’s father, a soldier also, who would have been duke before Tony, but had died in the marshlands of Flanders, cut to pieces by French soldiers taking revenge against Tony’s grandfather, it was said, revenge against Richard, the general, the Lionheart, whom the French feared so. Tony’s father had died fighting, they said, screaming his scorn to the last at the enemies who surrounded and killed him. The character of hero, the stuff of legend.

Was I in my father’s thoughts? he had asked his mother when the news of the death had come to them. Do not be ridiculous, his mother had said; there was no time. Of course he thought of you, said his grandfather, tall and golden, the madness unmanifest yet, sweeping up the boy, Tony, into his lap—in those days his grandfather had seemed larger than life in all ways. There is a second of time, Tony, no more than a blink, before death, when a dying man’s mind flies faster than any bird to what is beloved in his life. Therefore, Tony, he thought of you…. I see your father in you. But the great soldier who spoke was now a broken, old man. Come here and give this old madman a hug, the old soldier said, as the boy to whom he spoke threw himself into his grandfather’s arms. Memories of his grandfather possessed a mellow tint in Tony’s mind, like old gold, like treasure put away, buried. His times with his grandfather had been golden, always.

He began to climb the stairs; the light from the candle did not quite reach the marble busts in their niches or the intricate carvings of the stair’s balustrade and handrail, details of finest craftsmanship, among which he had lived most of his life. He did not stop at his bedchamber, but went on up to the next floor, where his grandfather’s library was. The library contained Latin and Greek and French and Italian and English leatherbound books, many of them rare, printed in Amsterdam. Their pages were thin, crinkling when turned, and the print was tiny and difficult to read. All the knowledge of the men of science and philosophy in the Western world was in them, from Plato and Aristotle to Cicero and La Rochefoucauld to Spinoza and Newton and Locke, men who had spent their lives searching for the meaning of existence, for the truth of the link between them and their Creator. “Reason is God’s crowning gift to man,” they wrote. Or “I think, therefore I am.” “There is nothing in the mind except what was first in the senses,” they wrote. Or “No man is an island.” “The nature of God is incomprehensible.” Tony had spent much time in here these last months, searching for some answer, some sense to the world, some peace to his heart, but he had found nothing to satisfy the ache that was Barbara’s absence.

There was a writing table, attached by hinges among the carved bookcases, and there would be pen and paper. He set his candle down and pulled forward a chair, dipping his pen in ink and scratching out the words to his grandmother, the Duchess. If she received this letter, he would have died, and so he asked her to do what she could to comfort his mother. His grandmother would never forgive him if he died, which made them even, for he found that he was unable, even with death hanging over his head, to write that he forgave his grandmother for sending Barbara away.

The Duchess possessed a hard mind. It moved like quicksilver. She had known how much he loved Barbara, had likely calculated down to the last penny what marrying Barbara would have done to his estate—it would have destroyed it—and so she had taken matters into her own hands. No conversation with him, no request to factor his passion against Barbara’s debt, to think of his duty to the family, to put that duty above love—just the deed of sending Barbara away. The betrayal had been staggering. He ended the letter with an abrupt signature.

He took another sheet of paper to write a letter to Barbra, but he no more than scratched her name, then held the pen motionless until the ink dripped from it into a blot.

Propped against a wall was a portrait, a portrait of Barbara, one he had taken from the stored inventory of her estate. It had been painted when she was fifteen and newly married. She smiled at the viewer, and her smile was lovely, and she was lovely, beauty already evident in large eyes and heart-shaped face. Two pug dogs lay at her feet. A small, black page boy held her fan. She wore diamonds and a flowing satin gown. Tony had taken the portrait like a thief and hidden it away here. I love you, he thought. I will never love anyone the way I love you. He could not eat. He could not sleep. He could not think. Because of her.

He scratched out a note to his mother and sister, telling them of his love and regard—Perhaps there will be no need for them to read these, he kept thinking—then scattered sand on the paper to dry the ink. He rummaged through a drawer for his seal and sealing wax, but could find neither, so he folded the letters and wrote out the names. He would leave it to a servant or his mother to send them should the news be fatal. Fatal. He could feel ice coalesce around his heart, and he tried to steady his breathing, which had become uneven. The sound of his heart was loud in his ears. He was tired from the rush of emotions, aware that time was passing.

What if my hand trembles when I fire the gun? Tony thought. How could my hand not tremble when I fire the gun?

He stood. He must go and find dueling pistols. He began to rummage through the drawers of the ornate armoire in his chamber, scattering shirts and gloves, cravats and waistcoats, stockings and shoe buckles, but he could not find the dueling pistols. Finally, he did not try, but sat down upon the bed.

Time was passing, perhaps his last moments on earth. Who would grieve for him if he died? His sister, Mary; his mother; his grandmother—but in her grief would be fury at him for dying. Your duty, she would say, likely over his grave, was to live, not die. His great-aunt Shrew. To whom, by the way, he owed twenty pounds. She would likely dun his estate for it. Charles, his sister’s husband. He moved away from the thought of Charles. Wart—who truly knew what Wart felt? The Princess of Wales. She was one of the most learned women he knew, and she would find this action of his, a duel, singularly stupid, particularly if he died. Who else? A servant or two. And Barbara: She would grieve for him. She loved him—not in the way he wished, perhaps, but she did love, and when Barbara loved, one knew it. He was considered the unworthy Tamworth, no swan such as Barbara was and her brother, Harry, had been. Silent, people said of him. A bit slow, they said. Eccentric, they whispered. So he was. So he was not. Which Barbara also knew.