Taking Liberties (19 page)

The two drunks at the cider stall were sobering quickly. All over the market place there was commotion as townspeople were herded towards the gates, some of them protesting.

She turned to the soldier who'd told her to leave. ‘What's happening? '

‘Closing up. We got more prisoners coming in.' He turned away to order the cider woman to shut up shop.

Makepeace made as if to join the crowd edging towards the gates and then dodged back to where Josh was trudging towards the line of other prisoners.

‘I'll be back.' Her voice was covered by shouted commands and the banging as trestles were collapsed.

Josh kept walking. ‘Don't worry 'bout me. Take Pip home.' He paused. ‘Any vittles?'

‘They took 'em off us.' She could have cried; he was
hungry
.

The last thing she saw of him before being carried away by the crowd was a guard pushing him with the butt of a musket to make him hurry up.

At the gates they had to stand by as a detachment of marines brought in the new prisoners. They had been marched straight from the docks, their capture so recent that many of the faces were still black from gunsmoke. Only a few had shoes.

There were boos and catcalls from the onlookers as they trudged by, their eyes fixed sullenly ahead. ‘Teach you to blow up our lads,' somebody called out. But when the carts carrying the wounded started to come by there was no more booing; the misery contained in them was too great. A man stepped out of the crowd with a handkerchief and gave it to a sailor, one of the few sitting up, who was holding a bloodstained rag to his cheek.

‘Have this, son.'

A woman took a punnet of strawberries out of her basket and, for lack of anyone fit enough to take it, placed it on the tailboard between a pair of naked feet. Dell had taken off her fichu and was trying to tie it round a bloodied hand that trailed over the edge of the cart. One of the marines pushed her back into the crowd.

Whether the men were American or French, Makepeace couldn't make out; she didn't know uniforms and few of them had any. Philippa did; she'd had reason to. ‘They're American,' she said.

It shouldn't matter, Makepeace thought. They're somebody's sons.

But it mattered, if they were American, that they had lost their liberty in fighting for their country's. I'm proud of them.

She knew her allegiance now.

 
The business premises of Spettigue and Son, Law Merchants and Land Agents, were old and on a corner of the Barbican, one of a row of Elizabethan houses whose top storeys inclined in Tudor confidentiality to those on the opposite side of the street in front but with windows also facing the harbour on the side.

A bell jangled above the heads of Makepeace and Beasley as they stepped through the door, to which the clerks, sitting and writing at high desks, appeared too busy to pay attention. Instead, an aged footman in a floured wig took their cards and carried them on a tray to a room at the back.

A plump young man appeared in its doorway. ‘Delighted, don't ee know.'

Beasley coughed. ‘It's about some perishable goods we—'

‘Ah,' the young man said, no less delighted. ‘Show these good people upstairs, Godsafe.' He smiled at Makepeace. ‘Join you in a dash,'f you'll be so good as to wait.'

They followed Godsafe upstairs. ‘We wanted to see Mr Spettigue, ' Makepeace said.

‘That
is
Mr Spettigue, madam.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes, madam.' The old man was not put out by her incredulity; had probably met it before. ‘Old Mr Spettigue as was is no more. This is his son.'

The linenfold panelling of the room into which they were ushered glowed with two hundred years of polish so that in the light coming from its leaded casement they seemed to be encased in the midst of a dark jewel.

They were offered sherry and biscuits on another salver and left alone.

Makepeace glared at Beasley over her glass.

He shrugged. ‘Well, that's what I was told. A good man, they said.'

‘Huh.'

Once she had reconciled herself to the fact that the only course was to procure Josh's escape, she had turned to Beasley who'd advocated it all along, despite suspecting his motives for doing so.

He was fond of Josh, as she knew; it had been Beasley, recognizing Josh's gift for painting, who'd persuaded Joshua Reynolds to take the boy as a servant-cum-apprentice. It had come to nothing, though that hadn't been Beasley's fault—it was the great man's refusal to allow his many pupils to do more than hack work that had eroded Josh's patience to the point where he'd left him, joining his mother, Susan and Philippa on the boat to America. But sometimes Makepeace wondered whether Beasley was animated by more than just personal concern for the boy. ‘You want to spit in the government's eye,' she'd accused him.

‘And why not?' He saw no other purpose to government than having its eye spat into.

Still, the escape had to be made. Makepeace's idea was that, somehow, Josh should scale a wall or two, that she'd pick him up in the coach at a prearranged spot and gallop off with him. Beasley had pointed out that this was too naive, not to say dangerous. ‘There are guards, woman, patrols. They've got guns. We need expert help.'

Only he could make contact with the sort of people who had it; he was privy to an underworld of which she knew little and wished to know less. It was not so much criminal, though criminals could be found in it, consisting more of the disaffected, dissenters, the dispossessed, anarchists like Beasley himself, liberals for whom the Liberal Party was too Tory, the overtaxed, the underpaid, Catholics, Protestants who fought for Catholic emancipation, anti-slavery campaigners for whom the campaign was too slow, offenders against sexual mores, publishers of sedition and the unpalatable, cartoonists who went too far.

What always amazed Makepeace was that these square pegs for whom the English establishment provided no square holes could recognize each other's discontent, as if they were an order, like the Masons, who identified themselves not with a secret handshake but a sort of occult snarl.

In the search for Philippa, Beasley had looked up the Plymouth chapter of snarlers and, through them, had met English men and women who not only sympathized with the American cause but were prepared to put themselves in jeopardy by advancing it.

Such a one, he'd been secretly advised, was Mr Spettigue of Spettigue and Son, law merchant and land agent.

Yet, having glimpsed the man, Makepeace found difficulty in believing it. ‘If that molly's a spy,' she said now, ‘I'm a hippopotamus.'

‘He's not a spy,' hissed Beasley, as nervous as she was, ‘he's a supporter of freedom.'

‘Not in those breeches, he ain't,' Makepeace said.

And indeed, when the door opened and Mr Spettigue came in—‘Mrs Hedley? Mr Beasley? Wonderful sorry to keep ee waitin”—his walk, which was splay-legged, like a child with knock knees, suggested either extreme modishness or restrictive trousering, and probably both. A strong whiff of camellias came in with him.

He was plump and dressed in pink and white, very tight as to sleeves and breeches, very long on lace. He had a lorgnette attached by a ribbon to a buttonhole. His wig was raised so high over its pads at the front that it gave the impression of a large egg balanced on a small egg-cup. He looked like a baby's rattle.

‘Wonderful fine day, what?' he said.

He approached a chair opposite theirs and perched himself cautiously on its arm—the tightness imposed by the macaroni style required a mainly vertical stance—smiling foolishly and blinking.

Abruptly Beasley got down to business. ‘Perishable goods.' It was the password. ‘Pastor Thomas told me you could export some for us.'

‘Fine man, Pastor Thomas. Said you might be callin'. Perishable goods, eh? Dare say, dare say. One has, ye know. Prob'ly could again. When, if you don't mind one askin'?'

A velvet beauty spot adorned one cheek and he brayed rather than talked, in the exaggerated vowels of an Old Etonian.

‘As soon as possible.'

‘Taken delivery yet, have you?'

‘No.'

‘Multiple goods? Or a single item?'

‘Look,' Makepeace said, impatiently, ‘we want to get an American prisoner out of Millbay. Can you help us or not?' She caught Beasley's look. ‘Well, I don't want him reckoning it's turnips we're talking about. It's an escape and either we're going to trust each other or we ain't.'

Beasley apologized. ‘Mrs Hedley likes to get things clear.'

‘Don't she, though.' Mr Spettigue, who'd rocked a little, regained his equilibrium and look of idiocy. He addressed Makepeace. ‘Well, ma'am, not to beat about the old bush,'fraid we have to leave the prison end of things to the gentlemen concerned. Leapin' over walls, tunnellin', that's up to the inmates, can't help there. Any case, your countrymen seem to do wonderful well without assistance, what?'

So he'd caught her American inflexion when she'd snapped at him. Clever. In Plymouth it passed as a Devonshire accent, which it resembled.

Mr Spettigue, she began to think, was not the fool he looked.

‘Where one comes in,' he continued, ‘is usually at the next stage, findin' 'em boats for France, puttin' 'em in safe refuges while they wait. That's the difficult bit of the proceedin's. Not easy, if I may say so, what?'

‘I've got my own boats up in Newcastle,' Makepeace said, ‘and I've got my own coach here.'

‘Mmm. Thinkin' of gallopin' the goods up the length of the country, eh?' Mr Spettigue blew out his cheeks like a goldfish. ‘Not sayin' it can't be done but . . . well, we've lost a fair few consignments on coaches. All the stoppages, d'ye see. Militia checkpoints, inns, turnpikes. Dangerous. Long way to Newcastle. Get him to France, my advice. Nearer, safer.'

‘I'll buy a boat down here then. Put my boy in it and shove him off.'

Mr Spettigue hummed again, ‘Mmm. Few flaws, though. Need a crew for one thing. An' somewhere to stay a while if the wind don't suit.' He shook his ridiculous head sadly. ‘Which it invariably don't.'

‘What then?' She was beginning to score her hands up and down over her knees.

Mr Spettigue looked in pain at the stretching muslin of her skirt. ‘Don't distress yourself, dear lady. Got more up our sleeves than our elbows, what? Now then, refuge, refuge. What do we have? Not easy, this.'

He got up and tottered to the window, opening it to look out, as if the view was a ledger containing details of escapers' hiding places. Immediately, the beautiful room was filled with noise from the harbour's fish market below and, further away, the gunfire of practising cannon. Midway between the two sounds, one high, one deep, came the tolling of a bell.

‘If that ain't a coincidence,' Mr Spettigue said. ‘Hear that?'

‘What is it?'

‘That, dear lady, is Millbay Prison's alarm bell signallin' another escape.' He wagged his head. ‘Tut, tut, this goes on the place'll be empty.'

‘You mean somebody's just escaped?' Beasley asked.

‘Just
discovered
somebody's escaped. Roll call, d'ye see. Poor Captain Luscombe—that's the prison commander. Not efficient. Nice man.' He turned back. ‘An' poor me, if I may say so. More perishable goods to be dealt with, I expect, what?'

‘How do they hear about you?' Makepeace asked.

Mr Spettigue waved his scented, plump hands vaguely. ‘Word gets around, don't ye know. And, of course, one ain't the only perishable goods merchant in the county, though I have to say most of one's refuges have already got some American or another champin' to get home.'

He looked back out at his panoramic ledger. ‘There is a place,' he said. ‘Owner recently died and one's expectin' the new owner to want to sell.' He glanced back at them, slyly. ‘One's been usin' it for other business purposes. Big house. On the sea. Bracing and all that.'

He came back to the arm of his chair, beaming and blinking and looking for all the world, Makepeace thought, like a toddler expecting praise for having used a chamber pot. ‘Does one gather that cost ain't a stumblin' block, Mrs Hedley?'

‘No, it isn't.'

‘There y'are then. Suggest you put in an offer to buy. Always sell again. Might buy it myself then, would have done already if Mrs Spettigue and the children weren't so settled out at Plympton. Bit further along the coast than one would like but ideal in other respects.'

Makepeace was still trying to envisage Mr Spettigue as a family man. ‘I've got a house,' she said. In fact, she had three. ‘I don't want another. We're staying at the Prince George, I want this business done with.'

‘Dare say you do, ma'am, dare say. But while our American friends might appear to be poppin' out of Millbay like rabbits, one's informed it takes plannin'. Guards ain't too amenable an' every escape puts 'em on their mettle. Might be some time before they're lax enough to allow another.' He shook a finger at her. ‘My advice: keep a room at the inn but buy the house. Remote, I grant you, but that's all to the good, and the crossin' to France is guaranteed.'

She was deeply disappointed; she had expected some
deus ex machina
who would spirit Josh out of Millbay immediately so that she could take him home.

Mr Spettigue, encouraging her, said: ‘Bein' a house-owner gives one validity for loiterin' around, d'ye see. Avoids suspicion if one has to be here any length of time.'