Read Now Face to Face for Free Online Page A

were the talk of London. There was the landscape pool, long and sleek, with swans afloat on its surface. There was Roger, standing with another man. Marry in green, afraid to be seen, she heard Jane chanting to her children. Marry in red, wish yourself dead. The chants of girlhood. If in October you do marry, love will come, but riches tarry.
    How glad she was to see him. Her heart felt like a bird rising to the sky. Impatient, impetuous, the way she could be, she picked up the soft material of her gown and began to run to him in her ivory-heeled satin slippers.
    Roger, she called. I have to speak with you. The man standing with him turned to face her. It was Philippe.
    Barbara woke, her heart beating, Philippe still vivid in her mind, standing before her in all his solid hauteur; that dueling scar across one cheek. Dangerous Philippe, her enemy, her foe, a snake. She hated him. It was hard to wake to hatred.
    She sat up, taking in her surroundings. She was in the attic of the house on First Curle, a room that spread across the two chambers below. She touched her left breast. Her heart was aching, a literal ache. Philippe hurt her, even here.
    She stepped over Hyacinthe, who slept bundled in a blanket on the floor beside the bed. The dogs had abandoned her in the night and slept with him. Harry raised his head. She shook her head and put her finger to her lips.
    She found a shawl, wrapped it around her shoulders, opened the door, and slipped down the stairs. Trunks and barrels crowded the hall. She could hear the Governor snoring. His bed was in one of the two chambers that made up the downstairs of this house, a simple house, sturdy, solid, like a cottage on one of her grandmother’s farms.
    Lifting the latch to the door, she stepped out into cool dawn, as a dog went running past her. Harry. As impetuous as her own dear brother, thus his name. Charlotte was the lazy dog, who would sleep as long as Hyacinthe did. Barbara stood on the steps of the house.
    Four huge pine trees, so large she could not have encircled their trunks with her arms, were before her in the house yard. Beyond, a road ran through a meadow that became woods. To her left, behind a fence of rails, was an orchard. A chicken landed in the yard from nowhere. Then she saw that there were chickens in the trees. There they had roosted for the night; with the sun’s light, they were waking.
    Back in the house, she walked down the hall to the door at the other end and stepped out into this yard. This side of the house faced a creek, but the creek could not be seen, nor could the river up which they’d traveled. That made the house seem like a secret, like an afterthought set in woods and fields. There was a picket fence here, with tobacco fields on its other side. A garden here took the whole yard, a garden cut into rectangles outlined with oyster shell. In one corner of the yard was the privy house. Barbara went to it and opened the door, the smell a familiar, privy smell. So. The kitchen and well, smokehouse and woodpile were to her right.
    She knelt at a rectangle of neglected garden, moving leaves and debris to see what there was. Some herbs: straggling marigold and lavender and marjoram, a cabbage head, lamb’s lettuce, and a vine. A wave of homesickness spread over her, so strong she thought she might die from it.
    Grandmama, she thought, it is not as we imagined. There is forest all around. There is neither lawn nor landscape pool nor fountain. In her mind was Tamworth Hall, the home of her girlhood, its twisted chimney stacks, the grape arbor, the terrace, the fish ponds, the deer park, the woods she walked through to reach Jane’s house, the lane to church. She could see Devane House in its splendor—the marble from Italy, the paintings by Verrio, a green silk bedchamber. The dog Harry appeared to sniff among the herbs, and she shooed him away, stood, wearily, feeling far older than her one-and-twenty years.
    Who’d planted the daffodils and lilies