Now Face to Face (22 page)

The dance had ended, and Beth was walking toward them, her fine eyes—her father’s eyes—alight and happy. And with her was Klaus. Joining them, too, was the plump, dark-eyed older woman he had danced with before. His widow, Barbara thought.

“I hear you have a voyage to make within the morrow,” Perry said to him.

“Yes. I’ll sail back up the river this very night, board my sloop, and be gone.”

“He came down to dance with me,” said the older woman, and Klaus looked at Barbara, who lowered her eyes before what was in his. I intend to play straight and fair, and so must you, she thought, but she could feel again the kiss between them, taste it, and regret not pursuing it.

“You make me too aware of how old I am,” Perry said, making a gesture that brought his daughter to his side.

“The fireworks are beginning,” someone said, and they walked outside. The first explosion was wonderful, a pinwheel whirling out sparks. Everyone clapped, and in the light, Barbara saw the Iroquois staring up at the sky.

“Will you go with me tomorrow, before we leave, to the Iroquois camp?” she said to Colonel Perry. “I want to bargain for some things.”

“Swamp myrtle, dogwoods—what else will you send your loved ones in England?” he said, smiling.

Moccasins for Jane, a buckskin gown for Grandmama, a tomahawk for Tony. I am glad this night is ending.

“So your brother, Harry, cut his throat with a razor,” Perry said softly, as fiery designs above them outdid the stars. “What grief for you.”

“How did you know my brother’s name was Harry?”

“You told me.”

“No, I never said his name.”

“You did, you must have. Or someone else mentioned it.”

“No one would know.”

“Your maidservant knows, your boy. One of them said it. What is it? You look so distraught. How have I distressed you?”

“You haven’t distressed me. I’ve distressed myself.” The darkness in me again, the kiss, pain for Roger are all tangled in my heart. I saw him in your eyes when I came down from the rooftop. I felt quite wild in that moment, topsy-turvy, as if he were not dead, and all the grief, the devastation, the coming here, were a dream.

“I am tired, Colonel Perry, so tired. Will you excuse me?”

Later, when she lay in her bed, she thought, Roger is never coming back. That part of my life is over. I have to acknowledge it. It was hard to let go of that which you loved. There had been too much letting go in her life. Since she was fourteen, she had been losing those she loved: her father, her brothers and sisters, Harry, Roger. She pounded her fists into the bedcovers. Hard, hard to see them die. I begin to lack trust in life, she thought. Diversion, there is that in my dalliance with Klaus. If I begin with him, I do not have to look at my losses. I use him the way I used Charles, and before Charles, Richelieu.

It was love, said Philippe.

Roger, she thought, you betrayed me. And then you tried to woo me back, but you died before you could make a life between us come true. I hate you for dying. I hate you for leaving me with debt and despair. I wished I’d lain with Klaus; anything other than to feel what I am feeling now.

She floated down into dreams of Venice in winter, of the time of Carnival, when all dressed in disguise. She saw mist drifting up from canals, saw revelers dressed as Pantaloon and Columbine, two characters in Italian comedy, capering in the narrow streets. There was in her ears the sound of dream heels tapping over arched stone bridges, in her eyes the sight of dream snow falling on the shoulders of black capes, capes that swept the stones of the piazzas. While on every head, male and female, was the large, dark, tricorn hat tipped forward, attached to a black or white mask, which left only the mouth to be seen. There stood Roger, in a long cape, in tricorn hat and in black mask, beckoning. She ran as fast as her skirts would allow, ran with all her heart and all her soul to him, and once reaching him, she could do nothing more than stare at his white glove, the tiny pearl buttons fastening it, before taking the hand so enclosed and bringing it to her mouth to kiss tenderly, for he was her beloved. You left me alone, she said. I thought I would die from it.

The mouth visible under the Carnival mask smiled its beguiling smile. The fish that is not catched thereby, alas is wiser far than I. I left Virginia, she told him. I had to. They wanted to eat Hyacinthe.

Never mind it, he said. Come and dance the gavotte with me.

Chapter Ten

T
HE SECOND CREEK AT
F
IRST
C
URLE CUT A DEEP MARK IN THE
landscape of trees and underbrush, and in it a sloop lay at anchor, its sails furled. The trees made a frame of green and brown shadow, dappled with gold and orange; the sloop’s raffish bow was blue, and built to cut through the waters at a rapid pace, a necessity in the waters of the Caribbean, where pirates were as common as sharks. It was the blue that caught Hyacinthe’s eye. Mrs. Cox had not yet found him, and he was glad, but tired, too, almost ready to be found. The dogs were somewhere behind him, sniffing and marking trees, as he stood inside his haven of woods to watch.

A man appeared from below the deck. It was Odell Smith, whom he hated, talking with Captain Von Rothbach, who had followed Smith up from the bowels of the sloop, and gestured with his hands as he spoke.

“Are you as glad as I am to have those barrels loaded?” Klaus was saying.

“God, yes—”

Just then, the dogs, panting and breathless from their exploration, came up behind Hyacinthe. Harry’s ears pointed at the sight of the sloop. He lifted a paw and barked. Smith’s head turned, an abrupt, surprised turning, as did Klaus’s.

Hyacinthe would never know what told him to run: something in the way Smith’s face changed, something in the way the skin at the back of his neck and along his arms prickled, something in the way his heart gave a sudden, pumping, mighty pulse. Smith did not call to him, but at once pulled himself up over the sloop’s side to run down the plank to the creek’s sandy bank.

It was the dogs that made Hyacinthe stop. They had been running with him, the three of them mindlessly crashing through underbrush, leaping over tree roots, dodging low-hanging branches, as he urged them and himself on. Then, somehow, they were no longer together, and he was both trying to run and looking around him to see where they had gone, his breath rising like a fist in his throat. Behind him was the sound of Smith, running, as he was, and Klaus calling to them both; and it was this silent, desperate race between him and Smith that told him, even as his mind denied it, that this was no game or foolish fear, but instead something dangerous, dark, deadly, unknown. He heard barking and growling, and then Smith’s voice cursing.

Oh no, he thought, please Harry, please Charlotte, run! He screamed the words in his mind. Then he heard the yelps. They pierced through the drumming in his ears, through the breath rising like bellows in his throat, through the burning in his lungs. One of the dogs was hurt. Do not turn back, the voice in him told him. Run. Run as far away as you can.

But he could hear a dog crying now, piteous, begging, hurt cries, while the other one growled and barked, high, yapping, ferocious. He stood a moment, fighting the fear that rose like water drowning him. He almost wept with the enormity of the decision he was making. And he ran back, dazed and unseeing, full of angry and despairing valor, the boy in him dying, dead, as if he already foresaw his destiny.

Chapter Eleven

S
IR
J
OHN
A
SHFORD, ON HORSEBACK, TROTTED DOWN THE ROAD
to Tamworth Hall, a sprawling, wonderful Tudor and baroque edifice that was the principal house of the surrounding countryside. On either side of him were the fields belonging to Tamworth Hall, and he stopped a moment to look at them. Like his, they were scythed of grain and already gleaned.

By tradition, what was left in harvested fields went to those who had no fields of their own. The gleaners, mostly women, sang snatches of old country tunes and talked among themselves as they filled ragcloth sacks and willow baskets. Those who worked diligently collected enough grain, when ground, to last their families the winter.

Children had been everywhere, as much a part of the afterharvest as the field stubble in which the women worked. Playing with blades of grass or trying to eat unripened brambleberries, smaller children had sat under trees, within sight of their mothers. Babies had lain in baskets, their view the few loose silver-white clouds against the vast translucent blue that was an end-of-summer Tamworth sky.

Now, those same babies lay in their baskets under great oaks and hazels, among the leaves and ferns of Tamworth’s woods, as their older brothers and sisters went a-nutting, picking the acorns and hazelnuts that had fallen to the ground. The Duchess of Tamworth, who owned Tamworth Hall and surrounding fields, allowed them also the too-ripe apples, plums, and pears her servants disdained to gather in her orchards.

Thinking of this—that part of the tradition of Tamworth Hall, of Ladybeth, his own nearby farm, and of others, was to provide for the less fortunate—Sir John felt a peace within himself, a sense of rightness and balance that he’d lost when he was in London—that, in fact, he’d not felt since the South Sea Bubble. Like others, he had lost funds in the fall of stock, seen bankruptcy and ruin stare him squarely in the face.

Perhaps, he thought, now all will be right again. We’ve made it through another year, another harvest. His farm, the rituals of the countryside, the rites of harvest and sowing, of seasons and nature, all unvarying, folding one into another, made a firm, bright, continual thread in his life from which he took comfort and derived supreme steadfastness.

Sir John began to hum an ancient harvest song, “Harvest Home,” as he nudged at the sides of his horse with his spurs. The lane to Tamworth Hall was just ahead. The hall, with its great octagonal bays, twisted chimney stacks, and rambling size, was as much a part of the landscape as the lane to church or the hawthorn that bloomed every May. It had been there in his father’s time, and his grandfathers’, and he could no more imagine life without the great house—it watched over them all; it was a place of recourse should need arise—than he could imagine awaking one morning to find there was no sun in the sky.

Autumn, thought Sir John. Burning leaves. Frost on the grass in the mornings. Brambleberries to pick. All is right with the world.

“We have plowed, we have sowed, we have reaped, we have mowed, we have brought home every load”: It was a tune older than he was, older than his father and grandfathers, part of ritual, part of tradition, part of life itself. He rode under the lime trees in the avenue that led to the big house of Tamworth Hall, the home of his dear friend the Duchess of Tamworth; he was singing out the words, his voice rising up in a rumble to mingle with autumn sky.