Now Face to Face (19 page)

The servant went to the window, raised it, and pointed; Aunt Shrew made a motion with her head to Slane, who got up from his chair and joined the steward at the window.

“I think you’d better see this,” he said to her.

She put down her cards, and, low-heeled mules slapping against her feet, joined Slane at the window, peering out to her garden below; she might be old, but she still had the eyesight of a hawk. She shook her head and gave out orders to the servant.

“Fetch His Grace upstairs at once and tell Lucy and Betty to make the bed ready in the blue bedchamber.”

She settled herself again at the card table, which was a delicate thing, made early in the reign of Queen Anne when card playing had become very popular. The cards she and Pendarves gambled with were very small, very thin rectangles, depicting the various companies, bubbles that burst, springing from nowhere the summer before last, when speculating in stocks had reached such heights. There had been companies for, among other things, importing large jackasses from Spain, insuring marriages against despair, and making salt water fresh.

“Tony,” she told Pendarves, “is asleep out by my garden wall. In his cups, drunk as a beggar, I wager.”

She picked up her cards, laid down two. “I’ve won.”

Pendarves stared down at the cards that had betrayed him. It was not as though he did not need a bath. Particles of snuff pressed themselves into the corners of his mouth, vying with liver spots and wrinkles on his face. There was dirt under his fingernails and all across whatever parts of his feet were visible in their slippers. The servant appeared in the doorway again.

“His Grace won’t come up, ma’am.”

“What do you mean, he won’t come up?”

Aunt Shrew went to the window.

“Tony!” she called down. “Come up here and play me a hand of cards if you won’t come and sleep. You owe me twenty pounds, you know. I ought to have you arrested for debt.” There was silence from her as Tony called something back, something that neither Slane nor Pendarves could make out.

She sat down again at the card table, frowned, shuffled the cards, and began to deal them out, but only to herself. She pursed her lips and stared at the cards, moved one here, one there, dealt herself some more, staring at each one as she turned it over.

“Are we not to sleep today?”

Pendarves was undressing, motioning for Slane to help him, as if Slane were a valet. Who knows? he had said to Aunt Shrew. Slane may have been a valet in his time. Those dark eyes have secrets in them.

“She’s forgotten the bath,” he said in a low voice to Slane. Naked now, in the bed, Pendarves was not a pretty sight. “We’ll leave it that way, heh?”

“Something’s happened. It’s in the cards.” She tapped one of them. “Tell me, Slane—you know everything that goes on in this town. Why was my nephew sleeping out by my garden wall, if he’s not drunk, and why was he not drunk at this hour of the morning, when he has been so all the summer? And why does he not come upstairs to join us now?”

“You give me more credit than I deserve. I don’t know.”

She tapped another card with a fingernail. “See this. Scandal.” Some of the powder caked in the wrinkles on her face flaked off onto the table. She flicked it away impatiently. “I see scandal in the cards. My sister-in-law the Duchess is upset. She’s in the cards, too. And Barbara—Barbara’s turned up, which surprises me.”

“I hate it when she does this,” Pendarves said to Slane.

“October is a scarlet month, the Duchess always says,” said Aunt Shrew. “Scarlet for the leaves on the trees. Don’t try to tell me you know nothing about this. Everything that happens in this town somehow comes to your ears. Tell me what you know.”

The broadsheet was being written in great glee by men who were happy to slander and slight the Hanovers. It would be printed today or the next, so that in another few days the duel would be common knowledge.

“There was an argument,” Slane said.

“Late at night and in a tavern, no doubt.”

“And an insult made, and His Grace, the Duke, had to defend his honor.”

“His honor? Someone insulted Tony? No one would do that. There is nothing to insult.”

“They insulted a member of the family.”

“What member? Who spoke the insult?”

“Tom Masham.”

“A duel—there has been a duel, with Tony as one of the principals.”

She moved from card table to dressing table. It was covered with pots of rouge—carmine, French, china wool—and pots of powder: plain, French brown, and orris for the hair; orange flower, à la reine, and maréchale for the face. There were curling papers for hair and wigs, and ribbons and feathers and jewels tossed about as carelessly upon its surface as if they were made of paste, although they were not. She rooted through the debris of her dressing-table top with the thoroughness of an expert as Slane came to her, took her hand, bent his head to kiss it in farewell. This was a breach of etiquette—he ought not to kiss her hand, only bow over it—but she encouraged his forwardness. She peeled off the patches, smacked a powder puff against the table to loosen powder before flouring her face with it. Preparing herself for war, thought Slane.

“Where are you going?” Pendarves asked her plaintively.

“Out.”

Now that her face was stark white, with fresh layers of powder caked into every wrinkle and crevice, Aunt Shrew pursed her lips to spread more crimson rouge across them, never minding that much of it eased up into the myriad of wrinkles around her mouth, too.

“Tony Saylor is too even-tempered to fight another man over an insult, even when he is drunk,” she said. “Someone must have said something about Barbara. My great-niece, Slane, in Virginia now, as great a beauty as she is a hoyden—”

“Like her aunt,” put in Pendarves, softly, to Slane.

“—and Tony is wild for her. If this duel becomes public knowledge, it will put a crimp in that marriage his mother is so proud to have arranged. It nearly broke my heart to learn that Abigail had allied him with that Holles clan. Whigs”—she said the word as if she were speaking of infidels or devils—“to the core. There’s nothing worse. Tory I have always been, and Tory I stay. This may give me time to find a nice Tory girl for Tony. Lord Oxford ought to have a niece or something somewhere. After the election in the spring, there will be more Tories again in the House of Commons—”

Pendarves shook his head—no—at Slane.

“—and His Majesty will have to offer us places in his ministry.” She stared critically at the ancient, ravaged, grotesquely painted woman in her mirror. “I was a beauty in my day.” She tossed her head like a filly to the mirror and to Pendarves, watching.

“Still are, Lou.” Pendarves winked lasciviously from the bed.

Her high cackles filled the bedchamber. She reached up and pinched one of Slane’s cheeks—he was still standing by her—hard enough to bring tears to his eyes. Fingers dug into his cheek, she pulled his head down so that it rested upon one of her scrawny shoulders. They stared at their reflection in the mirror—she, ancient, lively, painted, and patched, he, dark-eyed, young, untouched, yet, by time.

“You’d have been wild for me, Laurence Slane,” she said to him. “Nothing would have done but that you would have had to have me.”

“I am wild for you,” Slane answered, and he meant it.

“The plan is on its way,” he said, very softly. She was a Jacobite, one of the most loyal. In the mirror, their eyes locked, and they smiled at each other.

Chapter Eight

D
USK HAD ARRIVED AT
F
IRST
C
URLE
. S
MOKE FROM THE
kitchen-house chimney swirled upward, then broke apart in the evening sky. Slaves had been driving wedges of wood, called gluts, into the trunk of a fallen tree; and when Odell Smith called to them to stop, they put down their wooden mallets and began to walk toward the kitchen house. From now until dawn, their time was mostly their own.

“Finish up, Belle,” Odell Smith called to the half-grown girl who had the task of chopping the branches of the fallen tree into kindling. Somewhere in the distance, dogs were barking; as the girl finished a last bit of branch, he glanced in the direction from which the sound seemed to come.

“Bring the ax to me,” he said. When she laid it at his feet, he reached out, putting his hand to her shoulder, a round shoulder, taut with young, worked muscle. His hand stayed there until the girl, stepping back, turned and ran, leaping over the fallen tree, her youth and something else making her fleet. Smith, his face slack, stared after her for a time before he reached down to pick up the ax. The barking of the dogs was louder, and again he looked for them but didn’t see them.

Like the slaves, he began the walk to the kitchen house, to his supper, thinking, so her boy is near. Damn him for the trouble he gives us, running away. When I find him—but Odell didn’t allow himself to finish the thought, because when he found the boy, there was nothing he could do. In a tree above, Hyacinthe remained still, the sound of the wind and his own heartbeat loud in his ears. Certain the overseer was now far enough away, he climbed down, whistled for the dogs, wove his way in and out of trees, past fields, toward the clearing in which the house sat. He carefully skirted the kitchen house and burrowed into the cave he’d made behind the wood piled high in the woodshed. The dogs burrowed in with him.

“Hush,” he commanded, “no more barking.”

He shared with the dogs the food he had stolen from the kitchen house. His head was hurting a little, but he had the barkwater here, and the small brown bottle of the rum. The rum tasted bad, made him light-headed, happy, sleepy. He didn’t miss Thérèse and Madame so much when he drank it. There were other things here that he had stolen: Smith’s whip, the man’s pillow, a blanket. He and the dogs slept on the pillow and blanket.

Soon Mrs. Cox would appear with her enormous bulk in the doorway of the house, and she’d call for him over and over. Last night, she’d sent for her grandsons to ride over to search for him. She sat in Madame’s fine chairs, luckily armless so that her girth had a place to go. She smoked a pipe. He didn’t want her here. He didn’t want anybody here. Go away, he had told her rudely, but she had laughed at him. I am going nowhere, she said, and neither are you. So he ran away.

Last night, they’d talked of locking him in the cellar when they found him. He’d heard them. She won’t like it, he’d heard Mrs. Cox say to a grandson, but what else can I do? He’s been gone since this afternoon. Give him to me when you find him, Smith had said. I’ll teach him how slaves must behave. Imbeciles. Idiots. Barbarians. He knew how to behave.

Hyacinthe thought about walking to Williamsburg, but these stupid colonials might think he was a runaway slave and put him in the county gaol. Well, they weren’t going to find him. He was going to live here in the woodpile and spy and spy and spy until Madame was home again. Then he would tell her all the bad things her servants did while she was gone, how Smith made the girl, Belle, afraid. Mrs. Cox caressed the dogs but frowned at him. Then she crept up the stairs to look at Madame’s gowns, to touch them with her hands. She didn’t care if he lived or died. She liked the dogs better than she liked him.

She would give him to Odell Smith if she found him, he knew she would, and Smith would whip him with this whip he’d stolen. Smith did not like him, it was in the overseer’s eyes. He would whip Hyacinthe until the flesh of his back fell down in ribbons. Kano, who was a slave here, had been whipped that way. His back showed it, the scars ugly and thick, like rope corded under the skin. It was true, and Hyacinthe was going to tell Madame that, too.

He shivered. The night was here. It dropped suddenly, taking all the light. This was when he was afraid, when he wanted to walk back to the house and stay there, maybe even in the basement if he had to. He pushed the dogs over and crept under the blanket, making himself as small as possible. The thing about running away was, it was hard to go back. He could not go back, not now, not until Madame was home, because she would understand. Pride, she would say to him, pride will make you trouble every time, Hyacinthe. And, later, after she had scolded him, she’d tell him something she’d done as a girl, like the time she ran away with Monsieur Harry to Maidstone, or when she and Jane gave the pigs the brandy. I was punished severely, she would say, as you should be, but she wouldn’t punish him much, because she knew that half the punishment for bad behavior was facing up to it.