Now Face to Face (80 page)

We cannot convict the highest Tory bishop in the land because we think he
may
be guilty, said Townshend. They had not one scrap of independent evidence that their guesses were correct. All this time, all these questionings, all the letters with their codes broken—and no independent evidence to verify.

Why were there no arrests? asked the King. Walpole did not tell him that, as yet, he could furnish no proof that would stand up in an English court of law. The King expected results. He had led the King to expect results. He did not at this moment know if he could produce them. It drove him wild to see all he desired so close within reach, yet be unable to grasp it, legally.

He questioned again and again about a gosling. No one had anything to say. France, as a source of information, had completely dried up. I can give you nothing, said the Prince de Soissons. There is no more news.

Walpole kept the tension building with hasty little broadsheets announcing the names of those taken up for questions and promising, at any moment, arrests of high personages in the kingdom. All he could do was hope to frighten one of the chief conspirators into making a false move. It was a war of nerves, but his own were wearing thin. Other ministers want us to fail, said his brother-in-law. They want us to fall over our own feet. We must make arrests.

On what basis? How?

I’m to have a child, Diana had told him. Your child. Concentrated as he was on this plot, he was mildly interested, mildly excited, congratulating her, handing her a bag of coins.

Fool, she hissed, can you think of anything but Jacobites? I need a husband. I’ll see to it, he said. He would, eventually. A child. After all this time. Amazing. Perhaps it was an omen, an omen he’d succeed in this.

Today, he met with a little man named Philip Neyoe, who swore he had important information and, for the price of a guinea, would give it over. Amusing, that this little man came to dicker and bargain, as if a King’s minister were a merchant. Walpole was tired of seining through the small fish, but he had no other choice. So seine he would. But not kindly.

The Duke of Marlborough’s funeral was in another few days. Perhaps by then he could present something to the King. He let it be inferred he would. He needed to present something soon; he could see it in the King’s eyes.

Risk was part of the position he held, but a man got tired of risk, longed for certainty.

Tell His Majesty we cannot do it, said Townshend, as tired as Walpole was. That meant dismissal—not immediately, perhaps, but down the road.

He would not be dismissed. This was his life. He was destined for even greater things. Surely someone would break, run out into the open like a frightened hare, and he’d have him then, the hare that led to the bishop who led to glory.

There was another name that had come up, whose trace he must follow. He sighed, tired of small fish.

Christopher Layer was the other name.

Chapter Forty-eight

A
WEEK LATER
, S
LANE, JUST BACK FROM
P
ARIS, LOOKED AT THE
lines sent him for the part he would perform at the end of August in London’s traditional Bartholomew Fair.

He could not concentrate, and he put the lines to one side to play with his finch, to lay his hand atop the table and crumble bread upon it. The finch was flying about the chamber, and he waited for her to settle, to land on the table and hop to his hand for the bread. This was a new chamber he’d moved to, and she was not happy in it yet. He’d left the door of her cage open for days, but only today had she ventured out to fly. It was almost as if she sensed the trouble brewing, and preferred the confinement of her cage to the uncertainty of freedom.

In the last week, some significant arrests had been made. Before, it had been the fringes Walpole mucked in, but in the last three days, he’d swept into his net three important agents—men who, if frightened badly enough, could give evidence against important nobles, secret Jacobites. The Bishop of Rochester was just a breath away from these noblemen, as their immediate superior.

What source had Walpole stumbled upon?

Slane had just seen one of the agents onto a boat for Ireland. The other two were under house arrest and he could not get to them.

Tomorrow the Duke of Marlborough would be interred in Westminster Abbey, a grand event in which most of the court and the highest officers of the army would participate. It was all but accepted that Rochester, who was to conduct the funeral service, would be arrested immediately afterward, that others, dukes and earls, would join him in the Tower of London. The city rattled with expectation.

Slane had met with Rochester for a long time yesterday, trying to persuade him to leave England clandestinely, not to perform the funeral service at all, but the old Bishop was adamant: Walpole will not run me from my duty, will not frighten me into unnecessary exile. And yet Rochester was frightened. His gout pained him so that even with crutches he could barely walk; his temper was so short that even Gussy showed the wear of bearing it.

Slane could feel it, could feel Walpole’s mind moving over what was known, tenaciously searching. Walpole was calling him, this gosling—this prize an ambitious minister wished to present to his King—out into the open. He could feel that, too. A true gosling would be delivered to Walpole tomorrow; there would be no message, just the creature. It was Slane’s way of taunting Walpole and, perhaps, distracting him from his hunt of the others.

They knew who had betrayed them in Paris. The betrayal was disheartening; the man was one Jamie had trusted totally. He had helped form the invasion plot itself. Save those you can in England, Jamie had written. Slane had gone to Rome to see him. I do not wish my subjects to suffer any more than they must. Help them, Slane, until you consider it too unsafe to do so. Succor Rochester. I know he failed us this time, but there are past loyalties to consider. And he is old, Slane, and alone. Jamie would think of that. It was one of the reasons Slane loved him.

The finch dove low at the table. Slane did not move his hand. Exercises in patience were good for him, strengthening resolve, the ability to wait, to allow events to unfold. Walpole was a master of patience. Look how he prodded and probed, not giving up. Would he act tomorrow?

Gussy, Slane had said yesterday, you must think about leaving England, my friend. He himself would travel soon, north and south, to encourage the leaders—they were hidden away in their country homes, like mice hoping the cat would pass them by—to leave England. He would offer them King James’s support. He knew, and they knew, that the offer meant little, for Jamie had nothing to give—no land, no houses, no great court offices that meant anything other than plotting. To leave meant exile and a hand-to-mouth life. Nonetheless, that was what he was requested to do, offer them Jamie’s profound gratitude and succor, such as it was.

Coins and muskets must be collected, hidden away in safe places, for another time, for the next time, so that they could say—when the next chance presented itself—“See, we have many arms, much coin awaiting us in England.”

The finch hopped onto the table.

“Yes, sweetheart, that’s it. Come and take the bread.”

He coaxed her as sweetly as if she were a woman he loved. He was anxious to see the woman he loved. Such rumors about her. She’d not been still this last month. Slane smiled at the thought of that.

There was a knock at the door.

Startled, the finch flew at once to the highest perch in the chamber, a peg that held some of Slane’s clothes. In another moment, Slane was at the window, and out of it, dropping down onto a porch roof. No one knew where he was, save Louisa and Gussy.

Instincts up, like a cornered animal’s, he scanned the street below, but saw no soldiers, no King’s messengers sent to arrest. There to his right was the bulk of the Tower of London, its high, massive wall a barrier no one penetrated, few escaped. Some Jacobites—those captured in 1715, those whose heads had not been severed from their bodies—languished there still, in dark, forgotten dungeons. Fitting, somehow, that Slane should be near.

He dropped to the street, tensed, a cat ready to spring. The drop started his head aching. He walked across the street and into another alley, and from the shadow of a doorway, watched.

A man walked out of the building in which Slane lodged: Louisa’s servant, her most trusted one. Slane stepped out onto the street and called his name.

“You’re to come at once,” the man said.

“What’s happened?”

“I don’t know, sir, but something. She’s been weeping all the morning.”

Rochester must have been arrested. Finally Walpole had made a move. He could feel a tremendous tension inside himself. Who was next? And would Rochester hold firm?

In the carriage, he again questioned the servant, but the man could tell him nothing but that a note had arrived this morning, and that Lady Shrewsborough had fallen to her knees on reading it and begun to weep.

Slane climbed her stairs two at time, and there she was, sitting in a chair, her face so pinched-in that it made his heart hurt.

“You’ve come,” she said.

“Close the door,” he ordered the servant. He took her hands in his, rubbed them tenderly. Your brother was called the Lionheart, he thought, but so might you be a lion’s heart, dear Louisa.

“Is it Rochester? Is he arrested? When?”

“It’s Lumpy. He’s married.”

“I don’t understand.” He did not. His mind was somewhere else completely.

“Lumpy. He’s married Diana.”

Slane was silent, struggling to take in the news, not to follow a sudden impulse to laugh.

“They went down to Fleet Street like a common sailor and his whore, and were married this morning. They are now on a journey to his home in Newcastle. He did not even have the decency to tell me to my face, but wrote me a letter, which I spat on before burning, curse his ancient hide. I ought to have known she was up to no good. She’d been like a Christmas pie, all sweet inside, since she returned from Tamworth last month. Said she and Alice had reconciled. Said seeing Barbara filled her heart with joy. Called on me especially to tell me, she said. Her telling of it brought a tear to Lumpy’s eyes. ‘Oh, Sir Alexander, I’ve hurt my ankle and it is not well yet. May I lean upon your arm?’”

She mimicked Diana with precise bitterness, and Slane was glad to see the rage. It would hold the pain at bay.

“I was thrown off the scent by the worry about this invasion, by these terrible rumors about Rochester and other men who are my old friends. I was the only family she had in London, she said. Could she stay near? Which ought to have warned me at once, since nothing truly frightens Diana. But I was stupid. And all the time she was stalking Lumpy. ‘Sir Alexander,’ she called him. Stalking him like a cat, smiling at him in that way she has. ‘Dear Aunt Shrew,’ she said to me yesterday—yesterday, Slane—‘how glad I am to be with you.’ Curse her lying, tiny pebble of a heart. I loved that man. Unfair tactics, sashaying around all plump and smooth. Of course he succumbed.”

“Louisa, I have no words—”

“I have, and plenty of them, if I ever lay eyes on either of them again, at which point I will end hanged at Tyburn Tree for murder. Promise me you’ll be there to pull on my legs so that my neck breaks clean. And tomorrow I must go see my old friend Marlborough buried. And perhaps I’ll see them arrest Rochester, too. And there will be talk of this marriage—people will know by then. Tommy Carlyle knows of it; he saw them on Fleet Street. He has already called to tell me he saw them coming out of a church, and so I told him the truth, pretended I did not care, said they had my blessings, but I know he did not believe me. Everyone will be laughing over it tomorrow, and I will have to pretend I do not care, and I do. I love that man, Slane!”

He raised her hands to his lips, kissed them.

“I know you do.”

His action broke past the rage, and she began to cry, her wrinkled face puckering in like some grotesque child’s, the weeping that way too, open and abandoned, the way a child might weep. Slane pulled her forward into his arms, thinking, My dear, dear Louisa; and she wept in them, wept the way a woman of passion weeps, deeply, completely. It would have been frightening to see if he had not had a mother who was a woman of passion also. There was nothing halfway in such a woman’s love. To have her at your side was to have vigor and force and determination mingled with startling tenderness. How tender they could be. His wife had been so; and his mother had loved and lost and yet on she marched into life, fan furled, head tilted. Like a cat that must heal its wounds, she might go and leave life awhile, might retreat into a convent or some chamber of her house, but always, always, she emerged, faith in something—in herself and in her God—intact once more. I must experience tears as well as joy, my little one, she’d told Slane. That is life, and I want all of life. I will have it. And so love had come to his mother again, because she was not afraid of its coming.