Taking Liberties (15 page)

‘You're forgetting Josh,' the girl shouted back. ‘I'm not leaving him.'

Oh, dear Lord. She hadn't forgotten Josh but this talk with her daughter had been like a stoning—rocks thrown at her from all directions; she'd had to dodge them. There'd been so many.

‘I smuggle money to him,' Philippa went on. ‘In the prison. We go there on Sundays, Dell and I, and we see him sometimes. We're going to help him escape. You can escape from Millbay. Some men have done it.'

‘You think I'd leave that boy in prison?' She'd got up now and was walking the room. ‘Leave Joshua to rot? Betty'd turn in her grave. Lord, Philippa, what do you . . . ?' She stopped in front of her daughter and leaned down to peer into her eyes. ‘Damn me,' she said slowly. ‘You think I'm one of the tyrants.'

It came rushing out. ‘You're American but you've never been back or sent any money to help the cause of freedom or said anything or, or
anything
.'

‘No.' Such a gulf of experience between them, bigger than the Atlantic. ‘No, I gave up the cause of freedom when they tarred and feathered your Uncle Aaron. I don't like causes, they hurt people.' She sighed. ‘Don't worry about Josh. We'll stay 'til I get him exchanged, or buy him out or something. That's easy. I can cope with that.'

And now it was Philippa grabbing for
her
hand. ‘I know you can.' It was an accolade of sorts.

Makepeace left her then and went to find Beasley. He was in his attic, sitting hunched, staring out of the window.

After she'd told him what needed to be told, she said: ‘And young Joshua is a prisoner of war in one of the gaols here. We got to get him out.'

SINCE the Earl of Stacpoole's philanthropy towards inmates of gaols had been restricted to the dictum ‘the bastards should've stayed out', his Countess's only acquaintance with imprisonment had been marriage itself. She was therefore unprepared for the contradictions of Millbay.

As the Edgcumbe carriage, followed by Tobias and a footman in a cart piled high with hampers, approached the prison, her nose was offended. ‘How many men does the place hold?'

‘Over seven hundred, I believe,' Lady Edgcumbe said, ‘and more arriving every day.'

It was a hot, blazingly sunny day and following the prison's high perimeter wall was like encircling a noisome planet. She had an image of being led into labyrinthine tunnels dripping with sewage and wondered why she had gone to such trouble to enter them. Lady Edgcumbe, whose charity had been distributed in darker areas than her own, seemed sanguine enough, however.

Heading for Captain Luscombe's house, they drove into the prison's main gates which were open and along a track that took them once more out of the prison grounds to a lane on the other side. On the way, they passed a compound where boards and stands were being set up as stalls.

‘The Sunday market,' Lady Edgcumbe said.

‘There's a market? Here?'

‘Oh yes. The prisoners make all manner of artefacts in their spare time. It's very popular with the townspeople. One can pick up quite surprising bargains. Why do you smile?'

‘My husband would not have approved. I'm not sure I do.'

‘But why should they not earn some money?'

‘They're given an allowance, I'm told. Why should they make a profit?' Decent treatment need not include indulgence; these men were the enemy after all.

The captain's house was a pleasant Queen Anne building on the other side of a lane from the prison's back entrance. The ladies' carriage had to wait to draw up to the gate because a hackney coach was already blocking the approach and a dispute was in progress between its passenger, a man with a high, carrying voice, and its driver whose deeper grumbling contained words the ladies, being ladies, affected not to hear. Another man, standing back and carrying a large satchel, had the dress and demeanour of a servant who'd witnessed such scenes before.

‘I am prepared to pay the fare, my good man,' the passenger was saying. ‘But you drove too fast despite my repeated requests for you to go slower. Therefore you deserve no extra emolument. However'—the thin, precise sentences cut like squirted lemon across the driver's complaint—‘to show you that it is not being withheld through parsimony, I shall give the present you
would
have had to the next poor person we see. Kindly wait until . . .'

The driver didn't wait. Still grumbling, he whipped up his horses, throwing up a disapproving trail of dust as his coach rocked away down the lane and setting the ladies in the carriage to flapping their fans in an attempt to disperse it.

The passenger was unperturbed and stood where he was, his eyes on the lane's few pedestrians. Spying an elderly woman leading a goat, he went up to her and pressed some coins in her hand, tipped his hat, said, ‘God bless you, ma'am,' and turned in to the house, followed by his servant.

‘That oddity, I presume,' said Lady Edgcumbe, blinking, ‘is our great philanthropist Mr John Howard.'

The Dowager, too, was disappointed. She had expected this supposed Herculean cleaner of Britain's Augean prison stables to be somehow
large
, in attitude if not in body, but John Howard was meagre in both: a thin, spindle-shanked man in the plain coat of a Puritan.

His nod to Lady Edgcumbe and herself was perfunctory and he refused Captain Luscombe's offer of cake and Madeira with an impatient: ‘No, I thank you. I prefer to be about God's work at once.' He seemed to be conferring a favour on Millbay by being there at all. When he was told that the two ladies wished to join his tour of inspection, he weighed the matter before nodding. The Dowager wondered, perhaps unworthily, whether if they hadn't been titled they would have been refused.

Behind his back, Lady Edgcumbe caught Lady Stacpoole's eye. ‘Trade,' she mouthed. Diana nodded; the man was bourgeois. Furthermore—a phrase of her maid's entered her head—he thought no small beans of himself.

Captain Luscombe was not to accompany them. He explained the arrangement of the prison's day-to-day running which, though he was the overall governor, was in the hands of the army, while guard duty alternated every day between soldiers of the 13th Regular regiment and the local militia. Today was a Regulars' day and they were to be conducted on the inspection by a Sergeant Basham.

After following Luscombe across the lane and through a guarded wicket into the grounds of the prison, the party was handed over to a beefy, blank-faced soldier whose eyes appeared to have been skewered to look permanently to the front.

‘Mr Howard's to be shown anything he wishes, Sergeant,' Luscombe said.

‘Yes, sir.'

‘But perhaps the ladies shouldn't be introduced to the French quarters.'

‘No, sir.'

‘Are the French so amorous?' asked Lady Edgcumbe, amused.

‘Naked, ma'am,' said Sergeant Basham over her head.

‘Naked?'

‘They gamble,' said Luscombe. ‘They wager anything, even their clothes. I'll say this for the Americans, they keep themselves better ordered.'

‘All that can be said for them, sir.'

‘Sergeant Basham doesn't like the Americans,' explained Luscombe. ‘They make his job harder. Very difficult prisoners, Americans. Always riotin' or protestin' or tryin' to escape. Off you go then, Sergeant.'

‘Yes, sir.'

It was not at all what she'd expected. The Dowager's first impression was of bleached neatness. Packed earth had turned grey under the heat of the sun, to match surrounding palings and walls. No litter, no trees, not a blade of grass. The prison buildings were grey blocks. She wondered why a scene of such sterility should smell so badly—the place appeared to be empty. Where were the prisoners?

‘The Meadow, ma'am,' Basham said. ‘It's the exercise yard. We won't be going in.'

‘I wish to see it, Sergeant,' Howard snapped.

One by one, the inspection party was allowed to climb the steps of one of the four wooden towers, one on each corner, from which armed guards kept watch over the scene below. When it was the Dowager's turn to view she realized that this was where the prison's stink came from: six or seven hundred men crowded, presumably for hours, in an area which had no sanitation, or none that she could see. ‘The Meadow' was a misnomer; so was ‘exercise yard'. There was no grass and no room for exercise.

The compound was large but black with bodies as if a swarm of flies had landed on a biscuit. Men pacing the perimeter faced the constant interruption of having to step over the squatting figures of their fellow-prisoners. No shade, no room for sport or games, just clusters of sitting men which, even in that congestion, managed a demarcation between what she supposed—and Sergeant Basham confirmed—were the different nationalities. ‘Yankees don't mix with the Frogs, Frogs don't mix with the dagoes,' Basham said, with satisfaction, then pointed to a particularly black group on the far side. ‘And nobody don't mix with the niggers, Frog or Yankee.'

It was surprisingly quiet. She hadn't expected to witness exuberance but the dull buzzing that arose from the yard had a menace to it. Not flies, she thought. Hornets ready to swarm. Sergeant Basham, of whom she had formed no high opinion, suddenly appeared as her outnumbered and beleaguered defender. She was glad of him, glad of the guards' muskets, gladder yet to reach the ground and walk away.

Howard's servant, Prole, had produced a slate and chalk from a satchel. The slate had ‘Overcrowding' written on it.

The next stop was one of the American dormitories, a long, low building with huge barn doors at either end that today stood open, each guarded by an armed soldier. Sparrows flirted in the rafters and a row of small, high windows threw splashes of sunlight onto a swept earthen floor.

Except for a few men occupying beds that neatly lined each side, it was empty.

Good enough, the Dowager thought it; not unlike her son's old dormitory at Eton, although even at Eton the smell had been somewhat fresher than Millbay's.

She glanced down the row of beds. All the men in them were too old to be Lieutenant Grayle.

‘How many sleep in here?' Howard asked.

‘Varies, sir,' Basham said.

‘I see hooks,' said Howard.

Now he mentioned it, so did the Dowager. Fitted into the wall and pillars, descending in straight lines of three. ‘Hammock hooks.' Howard counted them. ‘For three hundred and fifty hammocks.' He turned sharply to one of the occupied beds. ‘How many men sleep in here, my son?'

The answer was slow in coming; the man in the bed looked at Howard as if the latter were laying on a puppet show for children, it amused him but he was too old for it. It was the same look, the Dowager thought, as Sergeant Basham's; different men, one skeletally thin, the other fat, who, for undoubtedly differing reasons, despised these questioning civilians.

‘Like you said.'

Howard nodded. ‘Overcrowding again, Prole.'

Prole bent to his slate.

Three hundred and fifty
. Howard's question changed the Dowager's perspective; what had seemed a dormitory, quite good enough, became a box. The little high windows were all at once pigeon-holes. At night men slept here in three hammocked tiers, as if a ship cramming on sail were turned on its side. In the Dowager's mind's eye three hundred and fifty mouths gasped for air.

‘Inevitable, sir.' Sergeant Basham was volunteering a statement, his eyes fixed on the doors at the far end. ‘Prisoners taken daily from American privateers, one hundred to three hundred men a time, sir. Extra prisons being built, sir.'

‘Meanwhile these men suffocate.' Howard turned back to the man in the bed. ‘Do you receive your due allowance of rations, my son?'

The American's eyes slid towards Sergeant Basham. ‘Pay no mind to him,' Howard said, sharply, without looking, ‘I'm the one to attend to. Are you fed and clothed according to regulations?'

‘What regulations might them be?' The American's hands were linked behind his head to form a pillow. Against the clean, undyed cotton ticking of the mattress, his skin showed dull yellow.

Howard tutted. ‘Regulations and Victualling Rates to be displayed in the prisoners' quarters. Make a note, Prole. How else can the men know what they're due, Sergeant?'

Sergeant Basham remained silent, his expression suggesting what he thought the Americans were due.

‘You are ill, my son.' Howard's voice lost some of its acidity when addressing the man in the bed. ‘Why aren't you in the hospital?'

The American's mouth went into a rictus of a grin. ‘You seen the hospital?'

After Howard had prayed over the man—‘My God, my God, give me the victory over all unkindness, through Jesus Christ, our Lord'—the party turned to go.

There was a yell from behind them. ‘An' put on your slate it's the first clean bedding we seen in two years.' The American had struggled up on one elbow. With his other hand he was directing a gesture at Sergeant Basham that was new to the Dowager but one she interpreted as impolite and, in the circumstances, rather brave.

The kitchens, their next stop, were not in use: ‘It being a Sunday, ' Sergeant Basham said, ‘and the rations already distributed.'

John Howard, however, rootled in store cupboards until he found a leftover loaf. ‘Is this an example of the prisoners' bread? It is very brown.' He sniffed it. ‘And the flour is musty.' Scales were produced from Prole's satchel, the loaf was weighed and found to be four ounces short.