by Karleen Koen
"Come to my rooms in the city," he was saying, and his voice was like silk against her bare skin. "Tonight. I want to comfort you. I want you—"
"Barbara."
She stepped out of the shadows into the hall. Tony stood framed in the doorway. Charles stepped out behind Barbara and Tony's face changed.
"Guests are beginning to leave," he said abruptly.
* * *
And so they were gone, the last of the guests. Her mother was getting drunk. Aunt Shrewsborough had left early with Mr. Pendarves. Walpole had gone back to St. James's Palace with the king.
Over, thought Barbara, looking around at the dirty plates, the wilting flowers, the guttering candles, the smudged glasses. All over.
She gathered her hat and veil and gloves and cloak. Thérèse and Hyacinthe were gone, back to Devane House with Montrose and White.
"Shall I escort you home?"
Tony was abrupt, and she knew why. She shook her head, and outside she shivered in the cold, dark air and raised her face to the night.
"To Devane House?" asked her coachman. She hesitated. Come to my rooms tonight, Charles said. And if she did, if she knocked on that door, what lay behind it for her?
"Drive me wherever you wish. Just drive until I tell you to stop."
The carriage lumbered through the streets, some of them lit by lanterns attached to the houses, others of them dark. Down Cockspur Street to Charing Cross with its bronze statue of Charles I, down the Strand to the large gate of Temple Bar, onto Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill, St. Paul's Cathedral rising in all its glory. She had the carriage stop so that she could stand and look at it. This is my favorite building in London, Roger had said. She ordered the coachman to take her to London Bridge, easily crossed now, its daylight traffic of carriages and carts and wagons and pedestrians gone with the night. Houses and buildings towered on both sides of the bridge, some of them leaning out at their back over the water and shored up with long poles. The upper front stories of the houses and buildings were joined across the middle of the bridge by iron bars so that they would not topple backward into the Thames, roaring down between the stone arches.
Barbara leaned over the stone railing and listened to the water rushing below her. Boat–shaped outworks of piles in the riverbed protected each pier of the arches of the bridge, but they also forced the river water into dangerously narrow and fast–moving channels between the arches. Watermen who made their living carrying passengers up and down the Thames in small boats regularly shot the bridge, which meant going through those arches in the river's dangerous, rushing current in their small boats, but most passengers disembarked on one side and walked around. If boat and waterman made it through the arches of the bridge without sinking, the journey continued. Every year, someone died who attempted to shoot the bridge. Barbara remembered a drunken summer night with Harry and Charles when she had wanted to do it, had bet with Harry that she could and she would have if Charles had not picked her up bodily and carried her out of the boat, Harry laughing like a wild man at her. She smiled and shook her head at the memory. Before her were ships, many ships, at anchor, their sails furled, shut against their wooden masts. They reminded her of birds, ducks and geese sleeping in a pond, heads tucked into their wings. She could see the lantern lights burning on their decks and below. This was the Pool of London, on the east side of the bridge, the side closest to the sea, and ships from other lands anchored alongside British ones.
She stepped back from the railing, the sound of the river rushing through the arches, the great water wheel that turned at one end to supply the city with water, in her ears. Charles's rooms were near here. So he kept them still. For the occasional actress or opera dancer—or widow—that took his eye. It had hurt when she first knew him, and it hurt now. Nothing changed and everything changed. Her thoughts were clear, like the March night. She would not begin again. The woman of the summer was gone, and she would not allow even Philippe's words, which still echoed at the back of her mind, to bring her back again.
"Home?" asked her coachman, anxious for her to be back in the coach, disliking the streets at night.
"Home," she said.
Cradock sat dozing in the hall, starting awake as she shook him by the shoulder.
"'You did not have to sit up—"
"His grace is here, ma'am, and has been for some time."
He stood against the windows of the gallery, his face shadowed, for only a single branch of the candelabra was lit.
She walked toward him, thinking how glad she was that he was here.
"Where have you been?"
She stopped short.
He crossed the space between them, surprising her, and he grabbed her by the shoulders, hurting her, shaking her, his face hard and furious.
"Where were you? By God, Barbara, if you were with Charles, I swear I will kill him!"
She pulled out of his hands tiredly. "I was not with Charles."
He stared at her, his head lowered, like a bull still on the verge of charging.
"Not at his rooms, perhaps, but somewhere else with him, Bab? Where? Where else with him?"
"How do you know I was not at his lodgings?"
"Because I waited there."
She stared at him. He looked away, a muscle clenching in his jaw.
Her head hurt. She felt like crying. And she was tired of crying. Of feeling like crying. When did one get over grief and go on with the business of life? Love. It was love. Well, she had asked for it, and she had gotten it, and it was going to take her more than a while to recover. More than a while. She sat down in the window seat.
He knelt before her, his young face earnest and surprisingly handsome. It was odd how she could be with Tony for weeks and never notice how he looked, and then look up and think, He is growing handsome. The clean planes and angles of his face. The nose. The mouth, the clear eyes. No regrets in them yet. As she had…It was love.
"Marry me, Barbara. Let me take care of you."
She could only stare at him. He opened his mouth and she put her hand on it quickly. "Hush, Tony. If you say one more word, I will begin crying, and if I begin crying tonight, I will not stop. You had too much wine at the reception—"
He kissed the palm of her hand.
"No!" she said sharply,
The word reverberated between them, splintering something; she saw its damage, saw the bones of the relationship changing with it, and she felt a terrible swell of sorrow. I have lost my dearest friend, she thought. He stood up and walked away from her. With his back to her, he said, "What will you do?"
"I have signed the petitions for my allowance, for the dower lands. Cradock and Justin are provided for. They will seek new positions. Montrose will continue to work on clearing the estate. I am closing the house and going back to Tamworth."
"Such clear–eyed purpose."
She flinched at the sarcasm in his voice.
"Good night, Barbara."
She watched him walk away.
Outside, in the cold dark, he took the reins of his horse from the coachman, but he did not mount. The coachman, holding a lantern, waited.
"Leave me."
The man hesitated, but seeing the young duke's face in the lantern light, did as he was told.
Tony stood at the side of his horse. He raised his fist and slammed it down into the leather of the saddle. The horse shied and neighed and pulled against the reins.
"I knew it was too soon," he said into the dark. "I knew it!"
Thérèse was not in the bedchamber, and Barbara did not search for her. Instead, she picked up a candlestick and walked into the smaller adjoining room, where, in Roger's dreams, she was to have planned her household and written her letters and embroidered her cloths. And played with their children. She sat down on the floor, her knees drawn in tightly to her chest. Still in its corner sat the cradle. Gently, with a fingertip, she touched the edge of the cradle, and it rocked. She put her head on her knees.
"Why do you cry?"
Thérèse was kneeling beside her.
"You know," Barbara said.
Chapter Twenty–Nine
The Duchess floundered through layers of sleep and opened her eyes. Annie, thin, brown, grim, leaned over her.
"Lady Devane is here."
"Here? Here? Where did she go?" And then, as Annie opened her mouth, "I know! Never mind your lectures. I forgot. I am old. Do not stand there staring at me! Send her to me! Go on!"
She pushed herself up against her pillows and straightened her huge lace cap, which had slipped to the side of her head during her nap. She retied the bows crisscrossing the front of her velvet bed jacket and noticed that The History and Present State of Virginia lay open at her side for all the world to see. She shoved it under a pillow. The sound of barking dogs, shrill, high, yapping, came to her ears. Dulcinea, who had been dozing beside her, lifted her head at that sound and twitched her ears. The barking grew louder, and Dulcinea mewed and jumped off the bed and ran out the door. The Duchess did not mind her fickleness. She smoothed the folds of her bed jacket and waited…and waited. Barbara did not come to her.
She frowned; she fidgeted; she pursed her lips. Finally, she rang her silver bell, inordinately pleased with its demanding, high, continuous clang. Breathless, Annie ran into the room, and the Duchess glared at her.
"Call Tim for me."
"Let it lie—"
"Very well. I will call him myself. Tim! Tim! Come here, Tim!"
"She needs to be alone—"
"Do not tell me what she needs!" She had hoisted herself to the edge of the bed, and her legs hung over it, thin and spindly. She kicked her feet in their embroidered slippers out defiantly. "There you are, Tim. Where have you been? Take me to Lady Devane." And as Tim picked her up and carried her from the room, she looked back at Annie, who stood with her hands on her hips, frowning at her.
"Bossy old stick. Telling me how to run my family. I will dismiss her," she said to Tim. "I will. The older she becomes, the more impossible she is." Tim was too wise to answer.
She knocked on the door of Barbara's bedchamber, and even though there was no reply, she had Tim open the door and carry her in and set her in a chair and then she dismissed him with a wave of her hand, her eyes darting about the room, weighing, assessing. Barbara stood at the window, staring out, and she was still dressed in her traveling gown. She had not even taken off her hat, and it was a dashing hat. Black silk with black and white trailing feathers, the Duchess noticed. She also noticed a certain set to Barbara's profile, and she glanced over at Thérèse, who was unpacking a trunk, and Thérèse looked away from her quickly. The Duchess's eyes narrowed. She cleared her throat.
"Grandmama," Barbara said from the window, and the Duchess heard the tiredness in her voice. And something more. Something she did not understand…yet. She retied a bow on her bed jacket, glancing up at Barbara as she did so. Barbara said nothing, not one word of the memorial service, of London, of the will, of all the things the Duchess had expected her to bubble over with. If the enemy seems hesitant, attack him, Richard always said. Hit him strong and hard with your foot troops. She had always found it a good principle in many things besides warfare.
"You heard the will?" Her voice was precise and hard, no sentiment in it.
"Ah, yes."
"And…?"
"I am inheritor of the estate. An estate that is two hundred fifty thousand pounds in debt."
The Duchess's mouth fell open.
Barbara smiled at the expression on her grandmother's face and looked back out the window. Spring at Tamworth almost made her forget the problems left in London. It was a lovely, gently greening time. Young lambs raced in the meadows. Peas and early spinach were tender green shoots in the gardens. Willows along pond and river edges stood peeled white, the rich smell of their bark following you, as the women and children dried them in strips by the riversides to weave them later into the sturdiest of baskets, willow baskets. Spring baskets.
"The estate," she said, not looking away from the green view of the window, "is entangled almost beyond fixing. It is a certain thing that Parliament will take a portion of it toward the relief of South Sea sufferers. What portion I do not know, and I may not sell a thing or take a penny from it until they decide. I pawned jewels in London to have some ready coins. I may emerge with Bentwoodes mine though, when all is said and done. Because Tony reminded the solicitors that it was my dower."
The Duchess's ears pricked up the way Dulcinea's had at the first sound of barking. Tony. Something had happened. With Tony.
"He chose not to come with you?"
"He chose not to come with me."
The Duchess did not like the way she said that. Follow up with cavalry, said Richard. Riding in hard and fast. "The memorial service…it went well? Everyone was there?"
Barbara laughed, and, the Duchess's eyes went quickly to Thérèse, who once more looked away from her. Ride in hard and fast.
"Lord Charles was there?"
"You need not worry about Lord Charles," Barbara said sharply. "He and I have quarreled. And Mother and I have quarreled. And Tony and I—" She stopped. "I am tired from the journey, Grandmama. You must forgive my bad manners. I stopped to see Jane in Petersham, and the stopping delayed us a day, and I was already tired."
"Jane does well?"
Barbara sighed. "We saw Jeremy's grave. It is…so small."
"The death of one's child is a hard thing to get past."
"I would not know."
Barbara unpinned her hat and took it off and jabbed a long hatpin tipped with onyx into the soft silk.
"I showed her Harry's memorial tablet."
"Did she approve?"
"Yes." And the Duchess heard the catch in her voice.
"What else did you bring from London with you?"
Grief, thought Barbara. Bitter, hard grief. And regret. And a half–dozen paths suddenly open before me, none of them good.
Montrose had found the plans for Devane House. Sketches by Roger, some by Wren, some even—impossibly—by herself. Found them in a small box Roger kept locked, along with a pair of her gloves, leather gloves she had worn in Paris. What shall I do with them? Montrose asked her. She took them. Dreams, she thought, that had turned to dust in both our hands. He would never live in his Devane House now, the great lord, surrounded by beauty, by his children. And neither would she. The words "burn them" came to her lips but she could not say them. She put them back in their wooden box, and brought them to Tamworth. Parliament could have the rest. But not this.
"I brought the marble bust of Roger."
"Ah, and does it look like him?"
Barbara turned away at last from the view of the window and looked at her grandmother. She shook her head, and her eyes were full of tears, which she did not shed. "No."
* * *
Thérèse and Hyacinthe stood at the edge of the Duchess's high bedside while she took a moment from her questioning to throw a pillow at Dulcinea and the dogs, who wrestled and growled together at the foot of the bed. The high bed gave her an advantage. She towered over them, like a queen.
"So," she said, looking at the two of them once more, "there was no one unexpected at the memorial service. Nothing unusual happened." She slapped her hand hard on the bedside table, and it trembled, and a sheaf of papers slid to the floor. "I think you lie!" she said harshly.
Thérèse and Hyacinthe looked at each other and then away. Hyacinthe's lower lip trembled. Thérèse looked down at her shoes.
"Yes, lie," said the Duchess. "Do you know what I do to liars?"
"The Prince de Soissons," said Hyacinthe in a gulp. "He was there. He was not invited. I heard his grace saying to Madame Barbara that his mother had invited him, and his grace asked Madame Barbara what was wrong and later—ouch!"
Hyacinthe glared at Thérèse.
The Duchess concentrated on him, the weak link broken to her will.
"Did they speak? Did they?"
"I did
not see it," answered Thérèse swiftly, looking down at Hyacinthe with a glance that told him to be quiet or else. "There were so many people there, you understand—"
The Duchess kept her eyes on Hyacinthe. He shrank before her.
"The truth."
"I saw them. They spoke."
"And did you hear what they said?"
"No. But I heard what Lord Charles said."
"Lord Char—what did he say? What? And when?"
"He came to see Madame Barbara just before we left for here. She and Lady Alderley had had a quarrel. Such shouting heard all over the house, your grace. Lady Alderley did not want Madame Barbara to come here—"
