Now Face to Face (38 page)

I came as close to dying as a man can on the prison ship over, Blackstone had told her during their journey together. It took me a year to feel like a whole man again. I vowed from that moment on to live each day as if it were my last. This is my home until my indenture is ended. I will know it, and I will love it. I do know it, and I do love it. She had liked that, repeating the words as she sat out at night on the steps to see the stars or watch the slaves do a ring dance: I will know it, and I will love it.

“Blood becomes you, Lady Devane.”

The dried blood of her morning’s kill was dramatic, vivid, startling, upon her face.

“I killed a stag today. The musket hurt my shoulder when it fired.”

“They’ll say when you go home to England that Virginia has made you a savage. They’ll blame me and add another year to my indenture once they know.”

Blackstone flirted, making her want to laugh. Disrespectful, impudent, her grandmother would say of him, though he was not; she would like him, just as Barbara did, for the impudence and joy with which he faced life.

The afternoon outside was darkening. Winter here can be fierce, Colonel Perry had warned her. Have all tasks done—firewood cut, grain stored, meat salted, candles made—for there will be days when the horse paths are impassable, and you are alone with yourself and God and all your deeds, good and bad, to remember.

Thérèse was lighting the lantern they set in a window each night for Hyacinthe, so that he could see his way home to them.

“I think we should plant both Digges seed and the old seed,” she said, picking up a map from the table, as well as the quarrel in which she and Blackstone were engaged. He was excited about her idea of growing a special sort, and willing to go further even than she, willing to plant nothing but Digges seed. That was why she had chosen him as overseer when Odell Smith left: After the journey with him, she had a feeling he was a gambler, like her—maybe even more of one than she was, unafraid to risk.

“What if the Digges seed does not take? What if the seedlings don’t survive the spring? We know how the other tobacco grows, for you’ve grown it here spring after spring. What if we have little or no tobacco for next fall’s casking? My grandmother would not be pleased. And you will not be the one facing her, Blackstone. I will.”

You must plant more seed than you now think, said Colonel Perry. A seed for the blackbird, a seed for the worm, a seed to grow, is what we say as we plant.

Blackstone stayed where he was, towering over her, his words falling with force like stinging rain. She liked that about him, too, that he fought for what he believed.

“I will nurture those seedlings as if they were my own babies,” he said. “I will sleep out in the fields with them. I will have Mama Zou say special prayers for them.”

“I’ve decided. A mix,” said Barbara. “A mix of our old seed and the new. We have to learn this new tobacco, Blackstone, see how it does. You can’t know that, yet.”

“You’re a stubborn woman, Lady Devane.”

She made him a bow, the way one man would to another. “Thank you.”

He had found a marsh he thought they might drain. He was excited about that, too, making her tell over and over again Major Custis’s story about the tobacco grown in one.

Major Custis has a theory, said Colonel Perry, that a man, like the plants of the earth, endures death and rebirth inside himself over and over again, and unless he is willing to endure that, he will die inside. Major Custis would say—here Colonel Perry had pointed to the lilies in the garden—Look, look at those. Their long, pointed, green leaves are listless now, brown, dying back to nothing. They rest, they go within, back to the earth from which they come; they ask not why, but know that in the spring there will be green furl and buds: hope become visible, faith become visible. And then glorious bloom.

Are you saying there will be glorious bloom for me?

My dear, there can be nothing else. Endure your servant Hyacinthe’s absence with faith, I beg you; trust in the Lord—and Barbara had had one of those mad moments in which she imagined she saw Roger in his eyes. Except that Roger would not have told her to trust in the Lord, for he had not believed in God. He had been fashionable and disdainful in his disbelief. Yet she did not sleep well that night. She tossed and turned and dreamed confused dreams of Devane House, of running down long corridors at St. James’s Palace holding lilies in her arms.

“We are not finished, you and I. Sit,” Thérèse said, picking up the scissors. Obediently, Blackstone sat down again in the chair.

Barbara sat, too, and Harry leaped into her lap. She picked up a comb to comb the dog’s hair. The firelight played over her and the dog in her lap, and all was shadow and fire, light and the darkness of the dried blood against her pale skin.

“I’ve walked all around the marsh I would drain,” said Blackstone, “We would need to make a dam at one end and a canal at another.”

“How long do you think it would take?”

“Well, now, that depends upon how many men work upon it. With five men, I think we could be done within a year.”

“So that a year from spring, I might have it as a field?”

“You might.”

The beds were being made for tobacco seeds. The ash of burned cornstalks, as advised by Colonel Perry, was being tilled into the beds, and soon the precious seeds would be sown.

As soon as the last frost was gone in the spring, when she would be leaving for London, the slaves would begin to till the fields, breaking up the winter earth. All day they hoe, Blackstone said. It is hard work. Precious seedlings would be moved onto the small mounds of earth called tobacco hills.

There came into the parlor the far-off sound of a wolf’s howl. It was part of the winter here. Barbara touched the dried blood on her face, thinking that when she returned to London she would send Colonel Perry Roger’s book of drawings by the sixteenth-century Italian Palladio. Colonel Perry wished to build a large house for Beth, as part of her dowry; he would enjoy the delicate, intricate craftsmanship Palladio displayed. She could just see his fingers tracing the drawings. It would give her pleasure to send them. She could see his surprise, see him gently turning the pages, absorbed. He had an eye for beauty, as Roger had had.

“Grandmama,” she had written in a letter, “I know you would like him very much.” And to Colonel Perry she had said: Come to England. I want you to meet my family. There was an idea in her, to introduce the two of them, the Duchess and Colonel Perry. She had the oddest feeling, like a tickle, that they would like each other, and more. It made her want to laugh, the thought of her grandmother and Colonel Perry.

Her mind went to Devane House, roamed the vanished chambers and parlors Roger had created. Her mind was much on Devane Square these days, on salvage, repair, beginning again. The fire spat and flickered in the fireplace. Barbara smiled at the idea of bringing her grandmother a beau, and slowly combed Harry’s coat, amicably talking tobacco with Blackstone. She thought, now and again, about Klaus Von Rothbach and what she would say to him when she saw him again. Thérèse finished cutting Blackstone’s hair.

Barbara excused herself and went up the stairs, the dog following. She opened the wooden box and sorted through the land deeds there. “Buy more land,” she always wrote to Randolph in Williamsburg, “as much as you can.” The new-bought land lay beyond the falls of the four rivers, because all the land along the rivers themselves was sold, even if not settled. They own it, Mrs. Cox told her. Colonel Perry, and Captain Randolph and Robert Carter. They hold it in keeping for sons and grandsons.

And now, I, too, hold something in keeping, thought Barbara, something not Grandmama’s, but my very own.

D
OWNSTAIRS
, T
HÉRÈSE
said, “You flirt with her.”

Blackstone laughed and pulled her into his lap, but she slapped at him and stood up. “Do you desire her?”

“I desire all women, Thérèse, old and young. She is beautiful, but far above the likes of me. You have my heart. I merely admire her.”

“Have you a heart? Does any man?”

“Don’t be angry, Frenchwoman, because I think a woman beautiful. Come and sit on my lap and give me a kiss.”

“No.”

He stood, walked out into the hall. She couldn’t help but admire the length of him, the way he walked and moved, the way his head sat upon his shoulders.

“There is always and only now, Thérèse. Do not spoil that.”

“Don’t you spoil it,” she snapped.

Fiercely, Thérèse swept up his locks of hair and beard, carried them to the fire, threw them in. She knelt, thinking of Harry, of his unfaithfulness, which she had ignored because it was easier to do so and also because one did not expect men of his station to be faithful, particularly not to women like her, servants. She had seen the admiration in Blackstone’s eyes, like snapping sparks of a fire. It had made her angry. What are we to them? she wondered. Nothing? Everything, Harry had said, but still he had loved others. It isn’t love, he’d said.

What was it, then?

Spring: In the spring she would be far and away. And in the meantime, she might give John Blackstone her body, but she would be quite careful about her heart.

T
HE AFTERNOON
was darkening, and the housekeeper began to move from table to table, lighting candles. “I see her at church in the Perrys’ pew. Old Colonel Perry has taken a great fondness to her. He is always visiting.”

The housekeeper of the plantation that belonged to William Byrd, absent in London, gossiped the gossip of the county to Klaus, who was doing what he always did once in from a voyage, riding from plantation to plantation, catching up on news and seeing friends, orienting himself again to home. He had not gone to First Curle, though his mind circled around and around it, around her who lived on it.

“There is no word of her missing boy, Captain Von Rothbach. She rode all the way to World’s End looking for him, talked with those foreigners settled there—in their own tongue, I’ll have you know.”

The falls of the river were called World’s End. The foreigners she spoke of were Huguenots, Protestants the Catholic kingdom of France had exiled. William Byrd settled them above the falls, upon uncultivated land his father had laid claim to years earlier. Byrd had given ten thousand acres to the Huguenots, though they farmed only a hundred; ten thousand acres was nothing to men like Byrd and Perry, who held deeds to hundreds of thousands. I will have much land, thought Klaus, if I marry my widow. The thought was comforting, as if the land would erase the memory of Hyacinthe.

“She brought an Iroquois up from Williamsburg to see if he could find any trail the boy might have left, but the Iroquois found nothing. They say that’s when Odell Smith decided to quit her, at the sight of the Iroquois. She asked the Governor to send out the rangers to hunt for her boy, but the Governor said they must wait until spring, when the mountain passages were open and clear. He wanted none of his rangers caught on the other side by early snows.”

“Yes, I saw the boy’s description posted at the ferry crossing.”

The boy was not a slave. Klaus’s uncle told him she had granted Hyacinthe his freedom while she was in Williamsburg. How was your voyage, Klaus? Bolling asked. You don’t look yourself. She’s thrown me out of the storehouse, you know. Dumped my half of the goods as close to the river as she could and told me begone.

Why?

She said, Because the razor wasn’t dull. It killed my brother dead as dead can be.

“They are posted at every ferry on this river, Governor’s order. She has closed down the other two quarters of First Curle. When Odell Smith left, she offered his post to that wild man, that Scotsman, and since Ephraim Crawley had been second overseer all these years, and not a criminal either, as he put it, he left her service also. The word is she is not going to plant those quarters across the river; she is going to plant only at First Curle.”

“Only at First Curle,” Klaus echoed. Odell was working for his uncle now, at a quarter beyond the falls. It had been good to know he would not have to see Odell. Now I can forget it, he’d thought to himself. I wish I could forget her as easily.

The door to the library opened and Beth Perry entered, stopping at the sight of Klaus.

“Captain Von Rothbach. I had heard you were back. How good to see you.” She held out a book to the housekeeper, who took it from her.

“Finished it, did you? Well, take another. You know Colonel Byrd will not mind.”

“How was your voyage?” Beth asked Klaus.

He did not answer.

“Where did you go?” Beth persevered.

“Jamaica, Curaçao, Tobago, Martinique. Islands. Blue waters so clear you see the fish swimming near the bottom. Lagoons hidden like precious pearls. Mountains rising up like a backbone in the distance. An adventurer’s world, a pirate’s world.”

Beth went to the shelves that held Colonel Byrd’s many books, which he shared with neighbors. It was the custom here, those having more, to share. She touched the spine of one. “Lady Devane recommended a book called
The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,
but I do not see it here. You know, of course, that her boy is missing.”