Taking Liberties (16 page)

‘Wouldn't you just hate to be married to him?' Lady Edgcumbe whispered.

By the time they left the kitchens, Prole's slate was full and he'd brought out another.

‘Now I will see the Black Hole,' Howard said.

‘The what, sir?'

‘The Black Hole. The
cachot
. The punishment cell. Don't haver with me, Sergeant, I know there's one here.'

There was. It turned out to be a stone cube fifteen feet square in a compound of its own. A vertical light in each side, like an arrow slit, gave it a medieval air though it was probably the newest building in the prison.

A soldier with musket a-slope stood on guard at its iron-braced door. In response to Sergeant Basham's nod, he leaned the gun carefully against the wall, sorted through the keys of a chatelaine hanging from his belt, unlocked the door and swung it open, quickly picking up his musket again.

Equally quickly, the ladies applied their vinegar handkerchiefs to their noses; heat and stink came roaring out at them like disembodied demons, as if the soldier had unloosed the cover to Hell. The cube held six men and a bucket. Sun from the slits lay across the panting bodies in stripes.

One man turned his head slowly towards the door, then turned it back.

‘Water, where's their water?' Howard demanded.

Basham pointed to the bucket.

‘Then what do they use for their evacuations?'

Basham shrugged. It appeared to be the floor.

‘I insist fresh water be fetched for these men immediately. I shall not leave until it is.'

While it was brought, the two women moved away; to witness such suffering was obscene in itself. ‘What have they done?' wailed Lady Edgcumbe.

‘Tried to escape, ma'am. Need to be made an example of.'

‘How long do they have to stay in there?'

‘Forty days, ma'am.'

‘And they come out alive?'

‘Ain't lost one yet.' Sergeant Basham sounded regretful.

In order to get to its last port of call, the hospital, Howard's party had to cross the main compound where the Sunday market was now well under way. There was a festive feel to it which even the presence of armed guards lounging against the circumference fencing and others watching from turrets did not dispel.

Bunting hung over the entrance gate; some of the prison vendors shouted their wares like professional hucksters; crowds of chattering townspeople haggled over their purchases.

The stalls displayed beautifully carved boxes, horsehair rings, ships in bottles, corn dollies, clogs, drawings, picture frames. One man, presumably ungifted, had laid out what seemed to be his possessions on a groundsheet: a powder horn, a pair of worn shoes and a rather fine brocade waistcoat. A French prisoner was entertaining children by using his long fingers to make shadow pictures of animals on a wall. Another man, a hat at his feet, was playing a flute.

Vendors from outside the prison had been allowed in; there were apple and vegetable stalls, two cows were dispensing milk, a booth selling ale and cider was doing a brisk trade.

It might have been any normal market in any town square anywhere in England.

But Diana Stacpoole, now seeing through John Howard's eyes, was looking at its underbelly. There was desperation. She saw old heads on young shoulders, faces impassive with hopelessness—and a common denominator to these men who came in different heights and colours from different parts of the world: they were all thin. They wore gauntness like a uniform.

A visitor in the smock of a farmer heaved up a piece of earthenware piping lying in a corner with a view to buying it. In the blink of an eye, a nearby prisoner snatched at the crushed and yellowing nettles the pipe had been hiding and tucked them in his shirt.

A dog at that moment running around the compound and being watched by a dozen pairs of hungry eyes was, she felt, taking a risk.

She looked for her companions. Lady Edgcumbe was poring over a stall selling wooden puzzles. Howard was questioning the flute-player whose answers were being recorded on Prole's slate.

She waited until the interrogation was finished and he was walking away, then fell into step beside him.

‘I had been led to believe that there were good conditions here,' she said. This was the place the Admiral and her companions at the civic reception had been complacent about. ‘Yet these men are starving.'

He was composed. ‘It's the contractors, of course, the usual venality—supplying short weight, made shorter by theft by the prison staff. The provision for the men that the government has laid down is generous enough; it is the avarice of subordinates by which such humanity is nullified.'

‘What can be done about it?' she asked.

‘What I
am
doing.' And, suddenly, he was angry—but at her. ‘Lady Stacpoole, do you realize that Millbay has a lower rate of death than many a civilian prison? Despite some of its men being brought in wounded? Do you know that we allow more of our criminals to die of neglect and fever than are executed each year? Do you care? Do you know that even when they have served their sentences many are still kept in their filthy cells because they cannot pay some arbitrary fee to get out? I tell you, by their standards, Millbay is passable. Not good enough, but passable.'

He recovered himself, stopping his fussy little fingers from flickering by clutching them together. ‘Yet you are right, there is considerable undernourishment here, and I am concerned about the hospital. The men appear to fear it, preferring to treat their own wounds and illnesses. They allege that the doctor is a drunkard. I am going there now but you may not wish to accompany me—it is likely to be unpleasant.'

Lady Edgcumbe caught them up. ‘Where are we going now?'

‘The hospital,' the Dowager told her.

Howard said: ‘I should point out that my own continuing good health, despite exposure to gaol fever in the hundreds of prisons I have visited, is an immunity given to me by God.' Lesser mortals, they inferred, might not be similarly blessed. ‘Temperance and cleanliness are my preservatives.'

‘Then let us hope they will be ours as well,' Lady Edgcumbe said, brightly.

But suddenly there was activity; whistles were being blown and guards were marching into the market place, driving the prisoners away from their stalls and back to their barracks. Visitors were being bustled to the exit.

‘What is happening, Sergeant?'

‘Sounds like a new consignment of prisoners coming in, sir. Afraid that's the end of the inspection.'

‘Why?'

‘New prisoners being brought in, sir.' Basham was patient.

‘So you said. Your orders, however, were to show me what I wished to see. I wish to see the hospital. Until you have other instructions to the contrary, I insist on seeing it.'

Not a man of initiative, Sergeant Basham glanced around for orders which nobody had the time to give him. They had a brief glimpse of Captain Luscombe pulling on his coat as he hurried down the track that led to the prison gates, brushing away civilians and military who tried to delay him with questions. ‘Won't be nice for the ladies, sir.'

‘What applies to Mr Howard applies to us, Sergeant,' Lucy Edgcumbe told him.

They followed him as he led the way to a dilapidated cottage on the edge of the prison grounds.

Behind them, the market place was now empty, the last civilian stragglers being ushered out of the gates as a long column of ragged, weary men limped through them, accompanied by marines with muskets, heading them towards the barracks. The Dowager thought of the shelved hammocks in the Americans' quarters and Lady Edgcumbe whispered: ‘Where on earth can they go? There is no room.'

Presumably to make it more difficult to transport wounded men to it, the hospital was on the cottage's upper floor, though the downstairs appeared unoccupied and free of furniture.

An upstairs dividing wall had been knocked down to make a ward large enough for a dozen beds. Some of the rubble from the alteration still lay on the floor, and the resultant dust was on everything.

There were only three patients, two of them groaning. The third was manifestly dead. Nobody else was in the room.

Even Sergeant Basham felt this called for an explanation. ‘Men only brought in yesterday, sir. Wounded during the capture of their vessel. Attendants must have just left to make the disposal arrangements, sir.'

‘Sergeant,' said Howard, quietly, ‘go and fetch some people to take this poor fellow away.'

When he'd gone, they waited, unable to help the living men because the dead one transfixed them as if demanding an attention he'd not received in life.

He'd died screaming, head thrown back, jaws open at their widest, legs drawn up. He'd emptied his bowels in dying and flies were clustered on the ordure and on the bandage round the top of his head where the blood showed black. Rigor mortis had set in.

Two warders arrived with the sergeant. As they carried the sheeted, ungainly bundle past the other beds, one of the men struggled to sit up. ‘Is he daid, is ol' Billy daid? He'd stopped yellin', I s'posed he was better.' He was a young man. A bandage was wound round the length of one of his legs but left its shattered toes exposed.

Howard went to him. ‘Your friend has gone to a better place. Let us pray together, my son.'

The other patient, whose torso was bare, had a large and pus-stained piece of lint on his stomach. Apart from some dirty swabs that lay on the floor to which flies had attached themselves, there was no sign of dressings or medicaments. The open door of the room's only cupboard revealed that it was empty.

Prole's chalk squeaked frantically over his slate.

Again, the suffering men were striped with sunlight, this time coming from a hole in the lath and plaster ceiling. To the end of her days, the Dowager was never to be rid of the memory of light as a form of corporal punishment.

She thought: Did they allow us to see this charnel house because they thought it was
all right?

Howard finished his prayers and turned to the other bed. Gently, he lifted an edge of the lint on the stomach injury. ‘This wound has maggots.'

‘Maggots eat the gangrene, sir,' said Sergeant Basham. ‘Best thing for it, doctor says.'

‘And where is the doctor?'

‘Sunday, sir. Don't come in Sundays.'

I don't know what to do, the Dowager thought. We are all standing here like an audience. I am standing here watching this.

‘Sergeant,' said Howard quietly, ‘I want both these men to be taken to the Royal Hospital in town immediately. I shall go at once to Captain Luscombe to arrange the necessary order but in the meantime you are to fetch two litters and have a cart—with
shade
—standing by.'

‘Captain's busy at the moment, sir . . .'

There was a call from below. ‘You up there, Joe?'

‘Showin' visitors round,' Basham called back with irony.

‘Come down here and help with this lot. And Captain Luscombe says the visitors to go back to his house immediate.'

Basham breathed with relief then his tone sharpened: ‘Out you go then, ladies and gents. No more to see today.'

‘You know who my husband is, Sergeant?' Lady Edgcumbe had stepped forward, very small against Basham's bulk, very deadly.

‘Yes, ma'am.'

‘Then get some help for these men.'

‘Yes'm. Moment we can, ma'am. Now outside,
if
you please.' He swept her and Howard and Prole towards the stairs.

Diana ignored them; she had to do
something
.

The man with the wound in his stomach was delirious and calling for his mother. She wiped his face with her handkerchief and did the same for the other, then, helplessly, she stood between the two beds, waving the air over the man on her left with her fan, the other with her hat.

The boy with the shattered leg managed to grit his teeth against pain long enough to thank her. ‘I wish my mammy was here too,' he said.

‘Where is she?'

‘Maryland, ma'am, Frederick County.' His hands were at his sides, griping the dirty palliasse on which he lay. He was being brave. ‘I hurt awful bad, ma'am.'

‘They'll have you better soon.'

‘Be good.' His round, countryman's face crumpled suddenly. ‘I don't want to die. I'm skeered, I don't want to die.'

She leaned over him so he could see her face. ‘Then don't. Fight. Your mother would want you to fight.'

The boy stared at her. Perfect white teeth showed in a panting grin. ‘She would, wou'n't she?'

A heavy hand landed on her shoulder. ‘Out, ma'am, or you'll have to be carried. There's more arrivin'.' Basham had come back for her.

She glanced up at him. ‘Get some help . . .
help
them.'

‘Out, ma'am.'

He had her arm. She was forced to the top of the stairs and then had to stand back as a litter was carried up and past her, then a smoke-blackened, injured man came by, helped by another, then more, another litter.

‘Hold up down there,' Basham called. ‘Make way for her ladyship. '

She stepped in blood as she went down.

Outside the cottage, carts had come in, filled with wounded. Guards were heaving those who couldn't walk off the tailboards like sacks of wheat, one to each end, and about as gently.

How will they find room in the cottage for so many?

‘Go easy, there, blast you.' Followed by an orderly, a Royal Navy surgeon was going along lines of men who already lay on the ground, stooping over some and muttering. ‘These are men, not meat. And someone fetch blankets. And some water.'