Taking Liberties, page 41
She heard a maid coming from the kitchen and went upstairs, smiling despite everything. She’d lost all dignity, eh? Lost all dignity and gained the world.
She gripped the balustrade. And soon to lose that.
She kept to her room most of the day, trying to catch up on sleep yet constantly waking from nightmares. But when she dressed for dinner, she did it with care and put on the same gown she had worn for her Frenchman. Whatever they put her through tonight, she would face it without the hypocrisy of mourning clothes.
Her appearance when she swept into the Great Hall was not commented on, though her daughter-in-law’s eyes gave a roll towards Robert.
Alice withstood the shock of blue turquerie bravely, however: ‘Mama, dear, we have invited Captain Nicholls for dinner. So useful in getting us here and soon to be knighted, he tells me, so we can hardly leave the poor man to the mercies of the inn. I thought we might play a little whist afterwards, and I know you do not care for cards.’ Alice loved them.
Captain Nicholls arrived and followed the Dowager and her son in to dinner with Alice on his arm.
A refectory table and some rather beautiful Queen Anne chairs had been found among the furniture in the undercroft and were now rendering the awful dining room a little less awful.
Robert himself held her chair for her; she touched his hand as she sat down but he would not smile.
The meal itself was probably the best T’Gallants had seen in years. Alice had brought her own silver, napery and glassware and Mrs Smart, while complaining bitterly at the inconveniences of the kitchen, had risen magnificently above them. The Dowager, however, ate little and joined in the conversation even less, though most of it was directed at her in the form of questions.
‘By the by, Mama, did you ever discover the whereabouts of your acquaintance’s son? The Grayle person?’
‘Thank you, Alice, yes. He is dead.’
‘There you are then.’ Apparently that finished the matter.
A little while later, a question she had expected from Robert long before: ‘Mama, where is Tobias?’
‘He left after I gave him his freedom,’ she said, languidly.
Alice tutted. ‘What did I say? What can you do with these people?’
Nicholls asked: ‘Isn’t that your negro at the inn? I thought it was.’
All niggers look alike. ‘A replacement.’
‘Well, I would not have employed another one,’ Alice said. ‘Ungrateful and cunning, I always said so.’ And the conversation turned to the untrustworthiness of black servants and the wilfulness of the working classes in general.
What is Nicholls doing here? Be sure it was by design; Nicholls did nothing through accident. He was not courting her anymore, thank Heaven, but he was courting Robert and Alice; staring at them as if they were exhibits but being, for him, positively fulsome.
Kempson-Jones was watching her. ‘You must forgive an old friend showing professional interest, ma’am, but should you not eat more? In this weather one needs fat on one’s bones.’
Not as much as yours, she thought. And how dare he inveigle himself back into the household. She’d never liked the man—an antipathy that was now probably mutual since she had dismissed him without ceremony from Aymer’s bedside after it had become apparent that the leeches, the blistering, and the Venice turpentine mixed with horse dung had been mere infliction of torture at a guinea a time.
She put him in his place: ‘Perhaps you would employ your professional interest on my housekeeper, Doctor; she is very ill. Please look in on her after dinner.’
It was too cold for the men to linger in the dining room after the cloth was drawn. The three men and Alice took a card table near the fire and played whist.
Diana wrapped her shawl closer round her shoulders and perched herself on the sill of the wreckers’ window, trying to see beyond her reflection into the snow-flecked darkness.
Dear Father in Heaven, allow Jan and the others to come home safely. But if that is not to be, send another boat and give my men, my man, passage to France. And look to Tobias in his prison. If you put a price on these things, let me pay it, however high. In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, amen.
Between hands, Alice complained of draughts. ‘How you abide this house, Mama, I cannot think. So cold, so grim. I declare I could not sleep last night for unearthly sounds and whispers. I am certain it is haunted. And that dreadful old woman upstairs, she will murder us all in our beds before we can leave, I know it. Our rubber, I think, Captain Nicholls.’
‘You are a most excellent player, ma’am.’
‘I confess to surprise that you choose to stay here, Mama,’ Robert called. ‘Mama?’
Diana turned reluctantly. ‘I’m sorry, Robert?’
‘Why do you stay here?’
‘I like it.’
She saw her son glance at Kempson-Jones before she turned back to the window.
They began another rubber and their voices resumed an unheeded, half-heard accompaniment to her preoccupation, like a string quartet played in another room. Alice’s querulous tremolo, Robert’s viole da braccio and the bland sul tasto of Kempson-Jones. It was only when Nicholls spoke that her attention was caught. She could not type his voice, it had the quality of producing silence, like the snow, deadening other sound.
‘. . . over one hundred.’
‘I thought they had been recaptured?’
‘I fear not, your lordship. We are still hunting down some forty.’
Alice was squeaking.
He knows something, he knows.
‘. . . a renowned smuggling area. I suspect the inn and the entire village.’
More squeaks from Alice.
‘. . . John Paul Jones has been sighted.’
‘Did I not say, Robert? I begged you not to expose yourself to danger. The villain will hear of an earl in an isolated house, you will be kidnapped, it will be the Earl of Selkirk over again and the rest of us murdered in our beds.’
‘My dear, the Earl of Selkirk was not in residence and . . .’
Gratefully, Diana relaxed. Nicholls was frightening them. He thought the house was still theirs and, having failed to get T’Gallants by marrying into it, he was hoping to scare Robert into selling it cheap. Poor, bourgeois little man; he wasn’t hunting, he was shopping.
You should have enquired of Mr Spettigue, Captain. It doesn’t belong to any of us here, it’s the property of the woman who served your breakfast this morning.
She saw her reflection smile and then stop smiling as Kempson-Jones’s loomed up behind it. He addressed her indulgently as if she were a child. ‘What is out there that pleases you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Ah.’ Again the exchange of glances between him and Robert.
He went back to the game.
Little shards of cold found cracks in the glass and penetrated the thick shawl. Outside the snow blew in gusts, sometimes allowing a glimpse of the cove, obliterating it the next.
Tinkler was beside her, bowing. ‘Your ladyship, Challenor found this in the coach you were using last night. He asked me to give it to you.’
It was her portrait. She had forgotten it.
‘What is that, Tinkler?’ Alice, from the other end of the room.
‘A painting, your ladyship. For her ladyship.’
Alice came bustling over. ‘A painting? Let me see. My goodness, it is you, Mama. How unusual. Rather primitive, is it not?’
They all followed her, taking it in turns to hold the canvas at arm’s length to the light, cocking their heads, commenting. ‘It has caught you in a certain mood, Mama, no doubt of that.’
‘The brushwork is good but, as the Countess says, unusual.’
Robert, very cold. ‘Is this the famous portrait painted in prison?’
Alice, very high. ‘In prison, Robert?’
‘I did not mention it to you, my dear. George Grantley took me aside to tell me: my mother sitting for a black man in Millbay Prison.’ Her son had dropped his reserve now. ‘I wonder that did not get into the papers, like all the rest.’
‘A black man,’ said Nicholls, softly. ‘An artistic black man.’
She told Tinkler to take the portrait to her room. They resumed their cards, she sat on at the window.
She was awake very early the next morning so that she could go to the kitchen and find food for the men in the shaft room. She took her holdall for the purpose. When she looked for Dell to help her, she found the Irishwoman’s bedroom empty and there was no sign of her anywhere else. First she went to the Great Hall and looked out.
Nothing. Ice cliffs, ice fields and houses frozen into an ice-blue sky empty of birds, like a scene in glass; Babbs Cove seemed suspended in a space of its own. Sheep were a dun-coloured, immobile huddle in the pasture just below Ralph Gurney’s farm. A tiny figure that could be seen carrying fodder to them along a track cut deep in snow was the only moving thing in the landscape.
She went to the kitchen. As she gathered up scraps and bread, taking a slice from this, a cut from that, so as not to leave gaps, she tried to work herself up into a fury that she was being forced into thievery in her own home.
Instead, she knew she was frightened; there had been something ominous about Nicholls, after all. Why the portrait had alerted him to something wrong, she could not imagine, but she had seen the change. By the time he’d left to return to the inn, he had reverted to being a hunter.
She put the food in the holdall and hurried through the sleeping house to the shaft room. The men were irritable from hunger and she didn’t blame them—what she and Dell were managing to provide was little enough for twenty toddlers, let alone grown men. ‘I am sorry,’ she told them, ‘but with luck the boat will come tonight. Just a little longer.’
She fetched them water and left to go to Mrs Green. Kempson-Jones had looked in on the woman and had diagnosed that she was dying—something Diana could have told him—and that there was nothing to be done but continue with increased doses of laudanum.
Alice, not an unkind woman, had instructed the two maids to take turns sitting with the patient and when the Dowager entered the room Eliza was dozing in a chair by the bed. Mrs Green was in a drugged sleep.
Between them, they saw to her. ‘I will relieve you in a little while, Eliza. First I must go down to the village.’
‘Ooh, your ladyship, you’re not supposed to go out.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
The girl was flustered. ‘His lordship said. You was too poorly, he said, and to tell him if you wanted the keys to the doors. For your own good, he said it was.’
‘Nonsense.’
She fetched her cloak, realized that nobody had given her chatelaine back, fetched the keys from the kitchen, unbolted and unlocked the front door—to see Makepeace hurrying towards her across the courtyard. ‘Has anything happened?’
‘Yes.’ She was out of breath. ‘Is there anyone about?’
‘No. The maids were up with Mrs Green, so everyone is late rising.’
They went into the Great Hall and sat near the still-warm ashes of the fire. ‘Is it Nicholls?’
‘Partly. He’s been questioning Josh, asking all sorts of questions: where did he learn to draw, how long has he been in your employ, things like that.’
‘What did Josh say?’
‘Not much, you know Josh. I sent him off to the stables and gave Nicholls a piece of my mind but the bastard’s suspicious, no doubt of that.’
‘He’s got instinct. He’s like a dog. Missus, that boat must come soon. Is Gil all right?’
‘Yes, Rachel’s taken his boots away, but that’s not the thing.’ Makepeace took Diana’s hands in both of hers and held them tight. She was very pale. ‘You’ve got to sail with the boat when she comes. They’re going to put you in a madhouse.’
Chapter Twenty-four
DIANA laughed. She said: ‘It would be a rest after T’Gallants.’ Makepeace bounced their joined hands up and down in irritation. ‘Sanders was drinking with Challenor late last night and he came and told me this morning. They’re going to put you away. That’s what they’ve come down for, to have you certified.’
‘Servants’ fantasies.’ She was still smiling.
‘Servants know things; you aristocrats talk in front of your footmen as if they were sideboards—I saw that when I was married to Philip. I tell you, they are going to have you put away.’.
Diana said: ‘Dear Missus, listen to me. Robert wants me to live in the Dower House on our estate so that he and Alice may keep an eye on me; he’s a man who wants everything ordered, and I have proved disorderly. That is what the servants have heard, if they’ve heard anything. It is why T’Gallants was sold over my head, so I would have nowhere to go but the Dower House.’
She raised Makepeace’s hands and put them to her cheek. ‘What Robert does not know is that he sold the place to you and that you are allowing me to stay on.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. It has been bad enough for his reputation to have his mother putting up hospitals for enemy prisoners, but I assure you that to have it known that she’s in Bedlam would be worse.’
‘What a noodle.’ Makepeace appealed to Heaven. ‘It wouldn’t, don’t you see? It would explain why you put up hospitals for prisoners. ’ She blew out her cheeks. ‘What have they brought a doctor with them for then?’
The first twinge of doubt crossed the Dowager’s mind. Why had they? With troubles coming from all directions, she hadn’t questioned it.
She said, because it was true: ‘Alice always fancies herself ill with this or that; she likes to have a doctor on hand.’
Makepeace didn’t believe a word of it. ‘Go to France with Gil anyway,’ she said, earnestly. ‘Have a happy life.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I didn’t believe it when you said that yesterday; I can’t believe you’re saying it now. Why not?’
So difficult. Diana got up and walked away from her to the wreckers’ window. ‘It would be dishonourable.’
Behind her, Makepeace sagged with frustration. ‘He’ll marry you. First chance he gets, he’ll marry you.’
She turned round. ‘I don’t mind if he doesn’t. Missus, if my marriage was virtue and Gil and I are sin, then the world is upside down. I am prepared to shout that from the dome of St Paul’s itself.’
‘What then?’
So very difficult.
‘Dishonour’s the wrong word,’ she said. ‘Betrayal is a better one. I failed Robert. What he is today is not just his father’s fault, it is mine. How I could have done differently, I don’t know, but I should have found a way. I failed him when I was a prisoner in that marriage and I’ve failed him since I’ve been free of it. Instead of the noble Roman matron he would have liked me to be, I have shamed him before his King and his party.’
And, Hokey, don’t they need shaming, Makepeace thought, but she kept quiet. Let her talk it out; I’ll find a way around this.
‘I have associated with people and causes Robert despises, I’ve been what Shakespeare called a hissing and a byword. And, though my son wouldn’t believe it, I’ve done it for his honour and the King’s because they were wrong. Treating those prisoners as she did, England was dishonouring herself. She is still dishonouring herself by refusing to exchange the Americans.’
‘Ye-es,’ said Makepeace, cautiously.
‘Eccentric, wild, mistaken, rebel, even traitor, they can call me all these things. The Tory press already has.’
‘Ye-es.’
‘The one thing they have not been able to call me with any truth is a whore. But the moment I run away with a Frenchman, our family is shamed forever. There would be jokes, cartoons; they’d sing songs. The Depraved Dowager, they’d call me. I have inflicted a great deal on my son, but I will not subject him to that. Don’t you see? Worse even than that, the scandal sheets will say: “That is why she did what she did. She is merely a trollop; the hospital was her excuse to parade among naked men.” ’
She came down the Great Hall towards Makepeace, wagging the keys to the house, like a female St Peter sent to teach humanity manners.
‘I will not do it, Missus. It would negate everything that has been achieved. John Howard would be made a laughing stock, called a procurer, his work set back years. Any woman raising her voice on behalf of men left to bleed to death on an earth floor would immediately be howled down.’
She stood over Makepeace for a moment and then went back to her window. ‘I won’t do it,’ she said.
And she won’t, Makepeace thought. She breathes a different air from other people.
Diana was looking at the stone-set floor of the Great Hall and seeing a battlefield dotted with strategic positions she had held and abandoned and which now, seen from the rear, had not been worth holding in the first place.
Pride in her family—lost. Honour and riches because a man had once waded in bloodied foam to rob the dying.
Faith in England’s infallibility—lost.
Belief in the inferiority of other classes, other races—lost, and well lost.
Conviction after conviction lost, overrun by a superior and wiser army, until she was driven back to this redoubt. And this last ditch she would hold because to surrender it would mean that all she had learned in these last months, everything she had tried to put right for her country, would be soiled.
She could not live with that knowledge, even with a Frenchman who was more to her than her life. Tobias had given up his freedom in order to better the world; she could do no less.
‘I won’t do it,’ she said again, quietly.
Makepeace thought: I don’t know if she’s right or wrong—thank God, I don’t deal in principles, only people. But I’ve come to love that skinny piece of bloodstock over there and she must be saved from herself.
She said: ‘You realize that what you and Gil have found together doesn’t happen every day.’
‘Yes.’
‘And at our age especially, it’s a gift from God.’
‘Yes.’
‘And he won’t go without you.’
Diana looked up quickly. ‘You’ve got to make sure he sails on that boat, Missus. Another spell in prison will kill him.’
