Through a Glass Darkly: A Novel (3 page)

   "Here she is," her mother would say. "Give me a kiss, oh, do not squeeze so hard. You crease my gown. Take her away." And she would be carried away until the next day, unless she was bad, as she'd taken to being the older she became (screaming and stamping her feet, to the delight of her younger brothers and sisters), and was banished to her room altogether. It did not matter; Diana was soon gone anyway, and the latest addition to the nursery joined the others, perhaps making it safely into childhood but sometimes dying. She could remember each of the four little deaths she had witnessed as clearly as if she had borne the babies herself. Each death made surviving children more precious; it made each day of life more precious. She loved her brothers and sisters with all her heart. And they loved her in return, for her bravery, high spirits, and care. She looked at her mother's waistline. It had been nearly three years since a baby. Nothing showed. Red blended into red.

   "You are—is it fifteen? Yes, fifteen. Near to sixteen. Time to think of putting up your hair and meeting the world."

   "Meeting the world?" She knew better than to venture any curiosity, any small piece of herself that might be hurt.

   "Perhaps not the world, but a few friends, surely. It is time you learned some manners if this afternoon is any example of your conduct. This running about the estate as if you were a boy—"

   "It matters little here, Mother. Everyone knows me. And I was visiting tenants, not running—"

   "It matters in other places…such as London."

   London! All the world, her future, was in that word. Diana laughed to see her daughter's careful facade crack. "London indeed, my girl. New clothes, new friends, dancing, the court, a husband…"

   Of course, Barbara thought. A husband. It was time. She knew that. Whom had her mother unearthed? And why approach the subject in such a roundabout way? Why not present it in her usual forthright fashion unless he—she bit her lip. Harry had once told her and Jane the story of a French girl being dragged to the altar by her brothers while her bridegroom drooled and trembled and pawed at her, so ancient, so senile was he. I'll drag you willingly, Harry had teased, pulling on her. She had laughed. But behind her laughter was the knowledge that the same fate could happen to her, though not likely because her grandmother loved her so much. It was her duty to marry obediently, as her parents decided. She was not afraid of duty, and she looked forward to her own home, to children. But she had not expected to face it all today…and without the presence of her grandmother. That alone made a sudden fear pierce through her. She could feel it course from her head all the way to her toes. She tried to disguise it by lifting her chin and saying, "A husband? You have someone in mind?" Unfortunately, her voice shook.

   "Yes, I do. Someone interested in you. The Earl Devane."

   Her hands tightened in her lap. "I do not know him."

   At this, Diana laughed again, and Barbara willed herself not to show any emotion. How like her mother to taunt her this way. As she had done Harry earlier. She would not give her the satisfaction, she would not…she would not.

   "It is Roger Montgeoffry."

   She sat stunned, and she did not care if her mother saw. Roger, beautiful Roger, who used to come to visit Grandfather, who always had a kind word for her, a present. He was the handsomest man in the world. He was charming. He was everything. She had always loved him, always, and to think that her mother was arranging a marriage with him! It was like a holy miracle…it was too wonderful to be borne. She rose impulsively and hugged her mother.

   "Thank you! Thank you!" she babbled.

   Diana stared at her, nonplussed, then said slowly, "It is not final yet… only something he and I have discussed. He must see you, and there are a thousand details."

   "I will charm him, Mother. You will see." Her face was radiant in its happiness.

   "I had no idea you would be so…pleased," Diana said.

   Barbara kissed her mother's hand and ran from the room. She felt she would burst with happiness. She wanted to run through the halls screaming his name. She could not believe her good fortune. Roger…Roger…Roger.

   She burst into her grandmother's chambers without knocking. Her grandmother was already in bed, but not sleeping. Warmth, familiarity touched her like soothing hands. This room never changed. Dark paneling encasing the walls as closely as smooth leather gloves. Portraits of family members in heavy gilt frames hanging from faded velvet ribbons on every inch of wall space. Her grandfather's portrait above the fireplace. Enormous. His face young and smiling, dogs curled at his feet. Small, mismatched tables everywhere, littered with books and papers and bowls of late yellow autumn chrysanthemums and holly. Her grandmother's bed taking up half the room, its bed–curtains woven by her grandmother's mother when she had been a girl. A curious, fanciful pattern of flowers and birds. Yellow, green, red. Petals and feathers picked out in embroidery with painstaking care so many years ago.

   Her grandfather's dogs lifted their heads from their place near the blazing fire, sniffed once or twice at her, then settled back onto their paws. Her grandmother's tirewoman, Annie, seated in a chair near the bed, frowned at her, as she always did. Dulcinea, her grandmother's cat, a fluffy, silver–white vision of pride and enormous condescension, raised her head from under her grandmother's hand and stared at her.

   "Oh, Grandmama…" She began to cry. She could not help it. She despised crying, but she had expected—she did not know what—and this… this was a dream come true.

   The Duchess of Tamworth, looking like a child's mummy in her layers of shawls, her lace nightcap covering her head like a limp pancake, struggled to sit up and motioned for Annie to light more candles.

   "Child! Child! What is it? Come here, here beside me. Move, Dulcinea. Move! Damned cat. She thinks she owns this bed! There, there, my pet, my little Richard. What is it? Tell your grandmother, and she shall try to help you out of trouble."

   Barbara smiled and wiped her eyes. It was a standing joke between them that she was always in trouble. Usually, of course, it was true. She snuggled against her grandmother's thin body. It felt like bones and nothing more were encased in the nightgown. Dulcinea, who had grudgingly moved to the foot of the bed, yawned and then began to clean her private parts with great delicacy.

   "You have spoken to your mother? And the news has made you sad? My darling girl, we both know it is time. I blame myself for putting it off. Roger is much older, I realize, but do not say no just yet. At least let us see what he has to offer. Of course, if you truly dislike the idea, there will be no marriage—not to him. Bab, what is it? Tell me."

   Barbara caught her breath. She was suddenly exhausted. "You do not understand, Grandmama. It is that I am so happy!"

   "Happy, my pet?" The shadows on her grandmother's face changed position.

   "Oh, yes. I have always loved Roger."

   What was this? the Duchess wondered, startled. Love? She tried to see the girl's face in the dimness. Only its sweet shape showed clearly. There were depths here apparently even she knew nothing of.

   "I did not know."

   "No," Barbara said. "No one did. What use was it to tell anyone?"

   The Duchess felt agitated. "You know it is not final? I understand your mother owes Roger much money. And there are dowry arrangements to be made." She had already been gathering information; to make Diana prove this marriage would benefit all concerned.

"I know he does not love me, Grandmama. It does not matter. I will make him love me." Barbara spoke with the clear confidence of someone nearly sixteen.

   "He is older than you, child. At least forty–two. There will have been other loves…things you cannot know about."

   "I do not care. I will make it happen."

   Seeing the sudden, hard, clean line of her jaw, which changed the sweetness to something else, the Duchess believed her. Like Richard. He never knew when to quit, and it finally broke him. The Duchess felt a kind of premonition clutch her heart.

   "Love is not always important, girl. There are other things—duty, devotion, children—between a man and a woman. Mutual love is so rare—" She broke off. The girl beside her was asleep, smiling even in her sleep. She pursed her lips. Dulcinea came to lie beneath her hand again. Annie snuffed out all but one candle.

   Tomorrow she would talk with Diana, find out why Roger would marry the daughter of a traitorous fool. And she would talk to Barbara. The girl could not go into any marriage with such a starry–eyed attitude. Not if she wished it—and herself—to survive. She began to pray, her greatest source of comfort. Dearest Father, protect this child beside me. Lead her not into temptation, but deliver her from evil. Let your light be about her always. Let your love, your teachings, be her guide. She glanced over at the portrait of Richard, knowing even in the dark exactly where it was. And bless the soul of my dearly beloved husband, Richard…Oh, Richard, there are times when I still need you so.

Chapter Two

When Barbara awoke a few hours later, she found she had been put into her own bed, and she lay there waiting for Harry. He would come; she had no doubt of that. There had been no chance to talk since his expulsion from Oxford; he had appeared at Tamworth shamefaced, sulky, only to be followed almost immediately by Diana, whose bloodred lips had shaped sentences that changed both their lives forever. Outside she could hear the night wind rustling dryly through dead leaves, invisible fingers searching, scrabbling, for what? Her mind floated gently, probing the bits and pieces of thought that had bobbed to its top while she slept.

   "Match is totally unsuitable…now more than ever." Her mother's words to Harry echoed in her mind. Why? Because Father had fled to France during the summer's investigation conducted by Parliament? "Hens' scratching!" her grandmother had snorted about the investigation then, before Father had run away. "Digging in the dirt to see what they can turn up!" He never even said good-bye. Sir John Ashford's voice had carried clearly the day he had ridden over during summer's hottest hour, his face flushed and sweating. He found her grandmother in the stillroom. She stood silent while he shouted. "Like a rat!" Her father had run like a rat, he said. Lost his nerve.

   Words clashed together and fell apart in her mind. Tory, Jacobite, treason. Her grandmother's abrupt questions. The shade of the stillroom. The coolness. The smell of drying herbs. Sir John's face. Veins standing out on his forehead. The sun shone jewellike through the jars of red and orange and plum jellies. Father had never said good-bye. Just disappeared in the dead of night. They sent her away. Harry, home for the summer, had explained.

   "He is not a traitor, Bab." His dark, handsome face, Diana's face, was strained, pinched at the nostrils. They had sat under the shade of one of the great oak trees. He kept jabbing at the smooth green lawn with a stick as he talked.

"Politics. It is all politics, my little innocent sister. Hanover or James III. King or Pretender. But who is the Pretender? One is a Protestant; one is a Catholic. One is supported by a majority of the powerful men in this country. One is not. It is so simple, Bab. Not the divine right of kings, but the divine right of power. He who has promised and can uphold those promises wins. Father backed the loser. He always has!"

   His face was bitter. She stared at him. Poor Harry. He was too young, too handsome for bitterness, and yet there it was, the black slimy worm in the glistening red apple. Their father had gambled away his inheritance. Everyone knew it. Harry's school was paid for by their grandmother, who also gave him a small allowance. But not enough for him to live in London like other young men his age. And now Father had risked the last bit left to him—his title. She reached out her hand to him. He turned away from it, his face bleak. She could be content with the obscurity of disgrace; after all, what had she ever known but Tamworth? She had never been farther than Maidstone for the fair. But Harry. Harry had been to Oxford. To London. He had seen what life offered. He hungered after its treats and could not have them. No wine. No women. No song…and no Jane. Strange that one man's actions could touch so many other people, like a single, thoughtless breath of wind coming in an open window and blowing the playing cards every which way. "Any alliance we form now is crucial." Ah, Roger. She shivered and sat up in the bed. Somehow her father's act had reached out and brought Roger within her grasp. The thought whirled around in her head just as the leaves did outside in the dark night.

   She threw back the bed covers and swung her feet over the edge. Legs dangling, she sat there, her hair hanging down, thick, curling, falling about her shoulders like a lion's mane. She felt she could jump out of her skin. Her chamber, her very life, seemed suddenly too small for her. She understood now how Harry must feel. She looked around her, knowing even in the darkness where every item, no matter how small, was located. This was her refuge, her nest. How she had resisted her grandmother's suggestion that she move down to the next floor and enjoy a larger apartment. No. She would stay in the nursery wing. She had lived here all her life. Everything was to her liking: the small, cramped sizes of the rooms, the way they ambled about with no rhyme or reason, some feeding into others, some being approached only through odd little halls and narrow little stairs. During the day, she could hear her brothers and sisters reciting their lessons. She was nearby when they cried at night. Nearby to comfort, to scold, to love, for she had always taken care of them.

   She was queen of this small kingdom; her dearest subjects slept in adjoining rooms; her bedchamber held her kingdom's treasures. Birds' nests she had lovingly saved. (You had to be so careful; harming a robin was bad luck. If you took their eggs, your legs would break. If you were holding one when it died, your hands would always shake…Annie said so.) And in them, not eggs, for she could not have borne to keep the young from their mother, but instead a potpourri of herbs and flowers she made herself every autumn. A small French box of fragrant, inlaid wood holding hair ribbons that curled into obedient circles, her few jewels. The toilette set her grandmother had given her for her thirteenth birthday, composed of ivory and silver, the comb, brush, mirror, and matching candlesticks laid out carefully and with great pride on a small table. An old Dutch chest, inside which lay some of her mother's ball gowns, lavender sprinkled among their folds.

   She would brush her hair until it crackled with life and then try on those gowns. Anne and Charlotte hung on her every movement as she swayed about the room in an old pair of high–heeled shoes she had stolen from her grandmother's wardrobe. "Oh, Bab, you are so beautiful!" The gowns rustled; they shimmered. They were the symbol of all she would one day possess— when she became a woman. How carefully she would fold them away (Anne and Charlotte begging to help), caressing the velvet, the lace, and then closing the lid, somehow secure that one day the secret they represented would be known to her. This chamber was her cocoon; she was the chrysalis, encased, content, putting away bright gowns as she put away dreams. But tonight she felt that her wings had unfolded and were as shimmering with magic as those gowns. This room was suddenly too small. Tamworth was too small. The world was too small to hold her soaring spirit—

   "Bab!"

   Harry's white face was floating in her doorway She scrambled across the covers and lit a candle before he could run into anything. The smell of brandy burned her nostrils at the same time as the smell of smoking wick. She felt her wings fold back into themselves. He had been drinking. He would be difficult, ready to quarrel. He would not be able to share her joy.

   And then she saw his face as he sat down on the edge of the bed. Its handsome darkness was marred. His beautiful, violet eyes ("I want your eyes!" she always told him. "I have more need of them than you do!") were swollen with weeping. His mouth, with its full lips, was grim and unnaturally thin. And she remembered that while she had gained her heart's desire this day, he had lost his. He sat down heavily on the bed, and she pulled the covers up to her shoulders and rubbed her feet against the sheet for warmth, her own joy forgotten.

   "Harry, I am so sorry…" The words fell between them softly like the faded petals of a summer flower. He put his hands to his face. She saw his shoulders heave, but he made no sound. She sat quiet and still, awed by the emotion radiating from him. This, too, was love, she thought, the words slipping through her mind quicksilver slick, dropping into the well that was her feeling for Roger. This pain, this desperation. I will know it. I will know it all. The good with the bad…oh, Roger. She felt rich, powerful, blessed. The wings on her back gave a strong flutter.

   "Did she tell you?" His hands were away from his face now, the words quick and harsh. She breathed in the brandy. The shadows of the room hid his feelings, but his voice did not. It betrayed him. She shivered.

   "I…she…I overheard."

   He made a bitter sound, half laugh, half cry. "Ah! You 'overheard.' Oh Bab! Someday you are going to overhear something that will singe your pretty little ears."

   She said nothing. What was there to say?

   "Well, tell me, my dearest sister"—the sarcasm in his voice hurt even though she knew it was not meant for her—"how did you like my part in the comedy Mother and I played this afternoon? Was I not heroic? Did you note how gallantly, how firmly I defended my love? How cleverly I argued? I was a man. But not the man our mother is."

   "Harry," she said breathlessly, the violence under his words frightening her. "She—you were not ready for her—"

   He laughed softly. "No. I was not. I walked into that room like a cock on a dungheap, ready to fling her words back into her painted face. I thought she had come down to skewer me for being expelled." He laughed again, a grating, unpleasant sound. "And I was ready for that. Oh, I was ready. Of course I was in a duel, I was going to tell her. When a man calls your mother a whore who would sell her soul for a guinea, it is your duty to defend her honor, even if such a quality does not exist in her."

   "Who said that?" She grabbed his arm and tried to see his face more clearly.

   "I should have killed him. I misjudged my aim. Or perhaps my heart was not truly in it, knowing that what he said was true."

   "Harry! Who would say such a thing to you?"

   The candlelight threw odd shadows on his face. "It matters little whom I dueled with," he said softly. "A friend, or so I thought. Our lady mother in her wisdom and avarice has petitioned Parliament for a divorce. The news of it has for the moment eclipsed even the pitiful, half–baked rebellion brewing in Scotland."

   She lay back on the bed, stunned. "Sweet Jesus in his heaven above," she whispered. A divorce…No wonder Harry could not have Jane.

"Yes," he said, mocking her tone, "Father's flight left her reeling, but she has landed nimbly. She has become the most fervent Whig of all, and begs the Parliament, humbly, to sever her ties with a treasonous Jacobite who has besmirched her lineage. She is, after all, the only daughter of the great Duke of Tamworth, the hero of Lille, the defender of England's foes at home and abroad—do not look at me so! I am quoting you directly from the pamphlet she has had distributed to plead her cause. She only wishes to live her life quietly in the king's service—which caused my friend to utter the words which I fought him over. Though God knows he is correct."

   "When did this happen?" she demanded.

   The tone of her voice made him focus on her. She lifted her chin.

   "Are you angry?"

   "No one told me!" she cried out. "I have a right to know!"

   He tried to take her hand but she pulled it out of his grasp.

   "I am not a child," she said. "Why does everyone treat me so?"

   But Harry's attention had drifted from her. He was staring into the darkness over her shoulder, darkness the light of her solitary candle could not penetrate.

   "She thinks if she is divorced from Father she may be able to save some of the properties. Some…I missay her, Bab. All of them. She will have them taken from Father and given to me. I will be the new viscount, and Father will be banished forever—erased. A mistake the Lady Alderley made in her wild youth. I will inherit his debts, his title, his estate, and more than likely I will go to debtors' prison before I am twenty trying to salvage the mess. All hail the new regime, Bab. Those who do not will be crushed." He quoted softly into the dark:

   "Farewell Old Year, for thou with Broomstick Hard

   Had drove poor Tory from St. James's Yard.

   Farewell Old Year, Old Monarch, and Old Tory.

   Farewell Old England, thou has lost thy Glory."

   His words, faintly treasonous, froze her heart and overlaid the anger she felt. Oxford and London had already seen the flashes of unrest. Men were massed in Scotland waiting for the Pretender to sail across the sea to march at their head toward London. Sweet Jesus, Sir John had been shouting about it to her grandmother only the other day, "Hang them all, now! Every suspected Jacobite among the Tory scum!"

   "Nonsense!" her grandmother had snapped. "It is a tempest in a teapot!"

   "It is rebellion, woman, pure and simple!" And on and on they went. They loved to argue with each other. Sir John would ride over with the latest memo from court. (More than likely her grandmother knew it already. Someone in her wide circle of friends would have written.) And they would begin their debate. Her grandmother liked to switch sides; one day she would argue the Tory position, the next day the Whig. The point was not to be consistent; it was to win the day's argument. "I do believe that man has kept me alive longer," her grandmother would say, as she watched Sir John ride off in a fit of temper, knowing full well he would return as soon as he had fresh powder in his own guns. But then her grandmother's loyalty was above question, unlike…? Her thoughts ran and leapt and fell over themselves.

   When she married Roger, she would be wealthy. That was why her mother wanted the match. She would be wealthy and surely she could persuade Roger to give Harry money, to find him a position in the government, something with a handsome salary, if Jane would wait. Would refuse to marry her cousin. If Harry did nothing rash, like proclaiming himself for the Pretender and joining their father in France.

   "I will talk to Grandmama," she said, her words spilling out into the silence. "I have news of my own, Harry—"

   "Who do you think wrote to Mother?"

   She blinked rapidly in the darkness. "I—I do not understand," she whispered.

   "I should have seen it coming. God! What a fool I am!" He slammed his fist on the bedside table, and the burning candle fell over onto the bed. With a cry, Barbara slapped at it before it could set the bed covers alight. You drunken fool, she wanted to say, angry as much over what he implied as she was over his carelessness. How like Harry, upsetting things and leaving others to deal with them. Well, the candle was out, her hands were smarting, and he went on talking in the darkness as if nothing had happened.