Taking Liberties, page 38
Mrs Hallewell met the men at the door; there were seven of them, six militia and a Revenue officer who looked at the inn sign and then at a list in his hand. ‘Are you the landlady, madam? Mrs Hallewell?’
‘I am.’ She invited them in. ‘You poor lads do look perished. This yere’s my cousin and her daughter, they’m staying for a while.’ Makepeace and Philippa bobbed politely.
The officer, Lieutenant Higgins, gratefully accepted a glass of ale on behalf of himself and his men. Looking for escaped prisoners along the Devon coastline was a cold and wearisome business.
‘No, us haven’t seen a stranger, not in this snow,’ Mrs Hallewell told him.
‘How many got away, Officer?’ Makepeace had been dying to know.
‘One hundred and nine, ma’am,’ Lieutenant Higgins told her. ‘They’ve recaptured fifty-odd so far but where the others have got to, nobody knows.’
‘Dead, in this weather, I wouldn’t wonder,’ Mrs Hallewell said.
‘That’s what I think,’ Lieutenant Higgins said, tiredly, ‘but we’ve got to look.’ He consulted his list again. ‘Who’s at the big house? T’Gallants, is it?’
‘Oh, that be the Countess of Stacpoole, Pomeroy as was,’ Mrs Hallewell told him and, greatly daring, added: ‘But her’s not likely to be hiding dangerous men, no more than me.’
‘No.’ He sighed. ‘Got to ask, though.’
As the men trudged away, Mrs Hallewell said, ‘Oh, my soul,’ and collapsed amid congratulations.
The lieutenant’s welcome at T’Gallants was colder. A regal Dowager was called to the door by her butler and her negative reply to the lieutenant’s questions lowered the poor man’s blood to freezing. He wasn’t asked to come in and seemed relieved that he was not.
But the incident had been salutary. For one thing, knowledge that the military had joined forces with the hated Revenue to look for escapers stiffened the village’s sinews. And it taught Diana that she must have a plan ready for another time.
That there would be another time, she was sure; she felt it in her bones like a doom. Discovery was inevitable.
To convince the nineteen of danger, however, was another matter. To them Babbs Cove was the end of the earth, a wild and successful ride away from Millbay. Soldiers had come and looked for them; soldiers had gone away. While they paid lip service to her anxiety, they saw no need for it.
They were becoming restive; they had been shut up too long. They had been digging their tunnel in awful conditions for months in the expectation of freedom. Now, before them, was the sea, their route home, but with nothing to float on it. They were brave men, all of them; they had fought well. Yet capture had shamed them, imprisonment had degraded them further and they wanted to go out in the open air, walk the beach, and stroll around Babbs Cove like free men.
Diana forbade it; she owed caution to the village, if to nobody else. Should the escapers be discovered, the more who could say: ‘I knew nothing of them,’ the better. They might be suspected but there would be no proof on which to convict them.
Only Lawyer Perkins sensed her concern and responded to it. ‘You really worried, ma’am?’
‘There’s a Revenue officer. Not the one who came enquiring, another,’ she told him. ‘If the Revenue service are among those hunting you, he will come sooner or later.’ There was no reason to feel that he would suspect her of harbouring some of the missing men, but she did. Was she investing Nicholls with supernatural instinct? No. If for no other reason, he would use the escape as an excuse to search T’Gallants. ‘He harasses us,’ she said, ‘he harasses me. I am afraid of him.’
‘Likely we’d better take precautions,’ he said and, having been initiated into the mystery of the shaft, began organizing a rehearsal for the day when Captain Nicholls turned up.
Two of the youngest sailors, one French and one American, both excellent rigging-climbers, used the ropes in the shaft to let themselves down into the cavern.
‘Haul away,’ Captain Totes shouted and the platform rose to Great Hall level for the evacuation to the shaft room on the upper floor.
‘We could take ’em all down to the cavern, ma’am,’ Perkins explained, ‘but if we had to stay down there too long in this weather, wouldn’t matter if they found us or didn’t, we’d be cold pork anyways.’
The men had been put in numbered groups to await their turn on the platform as it could only carry four at a time. They were intrigued and amused: ‘Ascendin’ to Heaven at last, ain’t we, Cap’n Totes?’
Once again the Dowager heard the thunder caused by hoisting ropes, chains and ratchets, as she had on the night when the Frenchman had burst in on her. The chair-door was swung open. Giggling and a little nervous the first group got onto the platform . . .
It was as the third group was readying itself to go up that the yelling began, translated by the echo in the shaft into a thousand satanic screams. Abandoning the platform, everybody ran upstairs, Diana after them.
Topman Mitchell, a superstitious youth from Georgia, was backed against the hidden room’s passage wall, shaking. ‘Ghost! Demon. Stood right there.’
‘Where?’
Mitchell pointed a trembling hand at nothing. ‘Right there. Glory keep me, it was horrible.’
‘It was my housekeeper,’ Diana said. ‘She’s ill.’ But they were off like hounds in the hunt for demons. By the time they were rounded up and the escape procedure begun again, an hour had passed before they were all assembled in the hidden room.
Lawyer Perkins stared at them over his spectacles. ‘Gentlemen, I suggest we start walking to Millbay right now and give ourselves up. Cut out the middle man.’
The Pomeroy Arms, too, was being afflicted by noises.
Zack, a jack of all trades like most sailors, had cobbled a high sole to the boot which was to adorn de Vaubon’s shortened, crippled leg.
He watched the Frenchman pull it on. ‘Now stand on ut,’ he said. ‘See if it evens ee up.’
‘Merde.’ De Vaubon collapsed onto his bed, gasping with pain.
‘Hurt, do ut?’
‘Putain de merde. Suis un estropié toujours, nom de Dieu, un invalide. Yes, it does.’
‘Take the damn thing off,’ Makepeace begged him.
‘No. Give me the looking glass.’ He regarded himself. ‘My God. Quelle gargouille.’
‘You weren’t no Adonis to start with,’ Makepeace said. ‘Anyway, she thinks you’re pretty.’
‘She is not to come here.’ De Vaubon wagged a finger. ‘You hear, Missus? Two days. Two days and I walk to her like a veritable man.’
She grinned at him. ‘You looked veritable enough to me when we stripped your britches off.’
‘I go to her on my two legs or not at all.’
She would never understand men. ‘All right. Two days.’
‘What be he talkin’ about?’ Zack was not sensitive to matters of the heart.
For two days a regular thumping from the upper bedroom shook bits of plaster from the taproom ceiling.
‘What’s he doin’ up there?’ Zack asked.
‘He’s marching up and down,’ Makepeace said. ‘Trying to get the strength back in his leg so’s he can go up to T’Gallants and make love to her ladyship.’
‘Don’t need his leg for that, do he?’
When he was ready, they saw him off at the door. Dell was in wedding tears and the other women weren’t far off. Makepeace had brushed his coat and hat (once Jan Gurney’s, the only ones that fitted him). Philippa had polished his boots. One by one they kissed him, Rachel whispering something in his ear that made him tut-tut. Mrs Hallewell tucked a sprig of dried bird’s eye in his buttonhole—she used the leaves for tea—for good luck.
Before he left the area of light extended by the Pomeroy’s candles, he turned and waved his hat, then stepped into moonlight reflected on snow.
‘Level peggin’ so far,’ Zack said with pride.
He made it to the bridge where he had to lean against the balustrade and take off his hat to wipe his forehead. After that it was torture to watch him as he staggered and halted and pressed on again. The women at the inn door instinctively extended wavering hands out, like mothers ready to catch a toddler if it fell.
‘Does she know he’s coming?’
‘He don’t think she does, he wanted to surprise her. But I sent Bilo to tell her. Woman needs to be ready at a time like this.’
They watched him until he reached the courtyard, then Makepeace went to her bedroom and wept for Andra Hedley.
In her bedroom at T’Gallants the Dowager Countess of Stacpoole abandoned mourning and put on a wrapping gown of blue silk, held at the waist by a fringed sash of deeper blue and hitched up on one side to show a flowered petticoat in the manner of a Sultan’s favourite. Turquerie had been fashionable when she’d bought the dress; she hoped it still was.
I’ll be cold in this. Then she thought: But not for long. She wished that Makepeace hadn’t sent Bilo to warn her; she would panic, was panicking. It was so . . . so deliberate. Like waiting for the dentist.
Why couldn’t he have taken me when I sat by his bed?
He wasn’t well enough, you fool.
Dear Lord, she’d grown so thin; she had no bosom to speak of. She examined her brushed hair in the looking glass; that was one thing about being fair, you couldn’t see the grey.
She piled it on top of her head and pinned it, leaving a lock to trail over one shoulder—oh help, straight as a pea stick. She rushed down to the kitchen, warmed her curling iron and turned the tress into a ringlet.
And so pale. Dell had borrowed her rouge and not brought it back. She pinched her cheeks and wished she were dead.
There were whistles of admiration from the nineteen when she went into the Great Hall.
‘Going to a ball, ladyship?’
‘I’m escortin’ her iffen she is.’
She paid them no attention and went to the oriel window. And there he was, oh my darling, limping ferociously into the courtyard. The lamp at the archway shone on a face snarling at pain.
She ran through the screen passage to open the door to him. ‘Sweetheart, you ought to be in bed.’
He hauled himself up the steps, smiling. ‘I agree, madame.’
She helped him up to her room and didn’t leave it for two days.
It seemed to her that they nearly drowned in love, wallowing and diving like dolphins in turquoise waters around a palm-fringed, tropical archipelago. Sometimes they pulled themselves up onto golden sand and lay in the sun to rest and talk.
‘I do like love,’ she said. ‘It’s slippery and warm.’ It was as if she’d lived in arid cold all her life until now. And it was funny, love was funny; he made her laugh.
‘I cannot go on like this without food, woman,’ he told her. ‘You are exhausting my reserves.’
‘Perhaps they’ve left us some at the door.’ She got out of bed and pulled on a wrap—she couldn’t get used to being naked standing up.
‘No.’
‘All right,’ she said, letting the wrap go. ‘But it’s chilly.’
‘Come back to bed, then.’
‘I thought you were hungry.’
‘I am.’
He loved the contrast of her whiteness against his dark, scarred skin. ‘It is a pity you are so ugly,’ he’d say, kissing her, ‘I have to hide my repulsion.’
‘You do it very well.’
Neither of them mentioned her marriage, though his extreme gentleness when they’d first made love suggested he thought he would be countering terror. But seeing him struggle up the hill had made him vulnerable and she was ready for him.
He talked about his children and the grandchildren he hoped to have. When he mentioned La Petite Margot and her crew, it was with pain. Without them, he said, he would abandon the war—it was doubtful if he was strong enough to captain a vessel, in any case.
‘What will you do?’
‘We will take up politics. We will work for the day when Louis is toppled and the Republic of France is born. Ah, then you will see, there will be liberty for all, enlightenment, the philosophy of Voltaire and votes for women.’
When they weren’t politicking and voting, they were to spend their days in his château at Gruchy. That was what he liked to talk about most, their future together.
‘I shall teach you to cook, you barbarian. I will allow you some roast beef—your English beef is not at all bad when cold—perhaps I will concoct a roulade in your honour. Roulade de boeuf à la Diana.’
‘No lobscouse?’
‘No.’ He had taken against Makepeace’s lobscouse, though it had done him well. He’d fattened up a little on it at the inn.
He was her Scheherazade; she listened to him, enchanted by the pictures he painted of the little yacht they would sail together, the smuggling runs back to Babbs Cove when the war was over to keep their hand in and meet old friends. She revelled in him while she had him because it wouldn’t be for long.
He’s so complete, she thought. He didn’t have to ask if his looks and the fact that he was crippled bothered her; for one thing, she showed that they did not; for another, he was too assured. They bothered him because he knew he was probably facing constant pain and would find it difficult to stand on a swaying deck again, but in essence he was the man he’d always been.
‘And I will have you,’ he said.
She couldn’t bear to tell him that he wouldn’t.
When she said that she would have to take up T’Gallants’s reins again—‘It isn’t fair to leave all the work to Dell and Philippa’—he insisted on joining his fellow prisoners in the discomfort of the Great Hall.
‘Stay in bed,’ she begged him. ‘You’re not completely well yet.’
‘It is against my honour.’
‘I thought you didn’t believe in honour.’
‘Personal honour, woman, you would not understand. I am not a plaything, I cannot continue as your pleasure slave.’
‘Not even tonight?’
‘What time?’
When she returned to the cold, it was to find the Americans somewhat embarrassedly pretending she’d never been away and the French looking on her and de Vaubon with the indulgence of proud parents.
It was magical to see him playing dice with Laclos or scandalizing Captain Totes with his atheism or hauling himself up the staircase to go and talk to Mrs Green. As if he’s a real person, she thought; he didn’t seem real to her.
She had more patience with the other men now, encouraging them to talk to her about their homes and families. Tobias, she saw, was doing the same thing, listening particularly to the Americans, even Able Seaman Abell.
‘I hope that young man is being polite to you, Toby,’ she said. She had warned Abell at the start: ‘Mr Abell, if you so much as forget to say thank you to Tobias when he serves your dinner, you must leave this house and fend for yourself.’
He’d been indignant. ‘I got manners, niggers or no.’
Such a strange young man, she thought him, illiterate and bigoted but he could be trusted to help with the chores and to watch from a window more than the others, his eyes searching for danger as they had once looked out for water snakes when he set gossamer fishing nets in the creeks of his South Carolina home.
He begged her to teach him to read. Being busy and, she thought, cunning, she had suggested he learn from Tobias, but it appeared he could not accept the gift of literacy from a black man, so Lawyer Perkins was teaching him. ‘The more advantages that Gullah has, maybe the less he’ll oppress those who ain’t got any,’ Perkins had said.
It was at Lawyer Perkins’s feet that Tobias sat mostly, when he had time, listening to tales of the pepperbox house in Massachusetts where clients were attended to in the parlour while Mrs Perkins cooked corn hash in the kitchen, where grandchildren crawled on the floor and may-apples grew in the yard.
‘I been explainin’ to Tobias here about the drafting of the Declaration of Independence,’ he said, when she went and sat with them one evening. ‘I was telling him we New Englanders tried mighty hard on the slavery question. “All men as they are sons of Adam have equal right unto liberty,” as John Adams told ’em. The Missus says we should’ve tried harder and maybe we should. We voted for the achievable. But abolition’ll come soon. Sure as God made little apples, it’ll come.’
She glanced towards de Vaubon: ‘Did you never think of including women among those with the right to vote?’
Perkins smiled. ‘John Adams’s wife, Abigail, a real nice woman, she wrote John some such thing. But when you ladies rule our hearts, why’d you need a vote? No, ma’am, can’t say we gave it a thought.’
When she and Tobias were washing up in the kitchen later on, he said: ‘Mr Perkinth and Mr Abell: a funny country that’th got the two of them in it.’
‘It’s not a country yet,’ she said, absently. She was thinking about the coming, delicious night.
‘Will be, though, won’t it? And all new. An old country would have thent thomeone like the mathter to Philadelphia, wouldn’t it?’
The thought of Aymer framing a Declaration of Independence made her smile. ‘What do you mean?’
It was the newness of America that had impressed him, that it should send a homely man like Perkins to one of its greatest meetings. ‘New,’ he said. ‘It can thtill be shaped.’
‘I suppose it can.’
‘It nearly abolished thlavery in Philadelphia, Mr Perkinth thaid tho. Might do it yet.’
He had her attention now. She said: ‘Just think if there was nowhere to sell slaves to. The trade would stop.’
‘It will need all the help it can get,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ she said. He was suddenly so strange. ‘What is it?’
And Tobias made his horrifying proposition.
Chapter Twenty-two
‘No,’ she said, ‘I won’t allow it.’ ‘You gave me freedom, your ladyship.’
‘Not in order for you to give it away again.’
‘It’th my freedom,’ he said, ‘I can do what I want with it.’
