Taking Liberties (4 page)

After that their correspondence became increasingly constrained as Diana entered Hell and Martha's independent spirit conformed to Virginian Anglicanism and slave ownership. Eventually, it had ceased altogether.

The Dowager returned to bed and this time went to sleep.

 
In one thing at least her son resembled her: they were both early risers. Diana, making her morning circuit in the gardens, saw Robert coming to greet her. They met in the Dark Arbour, a long tunnel of yew the Stuart Stacpooles had planted as a horticultural lament for the execution of Charles I, and fell into step.

The Dowager prepared herself to discuss what, in the course of the night, had gained initial capitals.

But Robert's subject wasn't The Letter, it was The Will.

She knew its contents already. Before the Earl's mind had gone, she had been able to persuade him to have the lawyers redraft the document so that it should read less painfully to some of the legatees. Phrases like ‘My Dutch snuffbox to Horace Walpole that he may apply his nose to some other business than mine . . . To Lord North, money for the purchase of stays to stiffen his spine . . .' were excised and, at Diana's insistence, Aymer's more impoverished bastards were included.

Her own entitlement as Dowager was secured by medieval tradition—she was allowed to stay in her dead husband's house for a period of forty days before being provided with a messuage of her own to live in and a pension at the discretion of the heir.

As he fell into step beside her, she knew by his gabbled bonhomie that Robert was uncomfortable.

‘The Dower House, eh, Mater? It shall be done up in any way you please. We'll get that young fella Nash in, eh? Alice says he's a hand at
cottages ornés
. We want you always with us, you know'—patting her hand—‘and, of course, the ambassador's suite in the Mayfair house is yours whenever you wish a stay in Town.'

‘Thank you, my dear.'

‘As for the pension . . . Still unsteady weather, ain't it? Will it rain, d'ye think? The pension, now . . . been talking to Crawford and the lawyers and such and, well, the finances are in a bit of a pickle.'

The Dowager paused and idly sniffed a rose that had been allowed to ramble through a fault in an otherwise faultless hedge.

Robert was wriggling. ‘The pater, bless him. Somewhat free at the tables, let alone the races, and his notes are comin' in hand over fist. Set us back a bit, I'm afraid.'

Aymer's debts had undoubtedly been enormous but his enforced absence from the gaming tables during his illness had provided a financial reprieve, while the income from the Stacpoole estates would, with prudence—and Robert was a prudent man—make up the deficiency in a year or two, she knew.

‘Yes, my dear?'

‘So, we thought . . . Crawford and the lawyers thought . . . Your pension, Mama. Not a fixed figure, of course. Be able to raise it when we've recouped.' He grasped the nettle quickly: ‘Comes out at one hundred and fifty per annum.'

One hundred and fifty pounds a year. And the Stacpoole estates harvested yearly rents of £160,000. Her pension was to be only thirty pounds more than the annual amount Aymer had bequeathed to his most recent mistress. After twenty-two years of marriage she was valued on a level with a Drury Lane harlot.

She forced herself to walk on, saying nothing.

One hundred and fifty pounds a year. A fortune, no doubt, to the gardener at this moment wheeling a rumbling barrow on the other side of the hedge. With a large family he survived on ten shillings a week all found and thought himself well paid.

But at five times that figure, she would be brought low. No coach—fortunate indeed if she could afford to keep a carriage team—meagre entertaining, two servants, three at the most, where she had commanded ninety.

Beside her, Robert babbled of the extra benefits to be provided for her: use of one of the coaches when she wanted it, free firing, a ham at salting time, weekly chickens, eggs . . . ‘Christmas spent with us, of course . . .'

And she knew.

Alice, she thought. Not Robert. Not Crawford and the lawyers. This is Alice.

Ahead, the end of the tunnel framed a view of the house. The mourning swags beneath its windows gave it a baggy-eyed look as if it had drunk unwisely the night before and was regretting it. Alice would still be asleep upstairs; she rarely rose before midday but, sure as the Creed, it was Alice who had decided the amount of her pension.

And not from niggardliness. The Dowager acquitted her daughter-in-law of that at least. Alice had many faults but meanness was not among them; the object was dependence,
her
dependence. Alice's oddity was that she admired her mother-in-law and at the same time was jealous of her, both emotions mixed to an almost ludicrous degree. It had taken a while for Diana to understand why, when she changed her hairstyle, Alice changed hers. A pair of gloves was ordered; similar gloves arrived for Alice who then charged them with qualities that declared them superior.

Diana tended old Mrs Brown in the village; of a sudden Alice was also visiting the Brown cottage in imitation of a charity that seemed admirable to her yet which had to be surpassed: ‘I took her beef tea,
Maman
—she prefers it to calves'-foot jelly.'

Yes, her pension had been stipulated by Alice. She was to be kept close, under supervision, virtually imprisoned in genteel deprivation, required to ask for transport if she needed it, all so that Alice could forever flaunt herself at the mother-in-law she resented and wished to emulate in equal measure. Look how much better I manage my house/marriage/servants than you did,
Maman
.

Nor would it be conscious cruelty; Alice, who did not suffer from introspection, would sincerely believe she was being kind. Dutifully, the Dowager strove to nurse a fondness for her daughter-in-law but it thrived never so much as when she was away from her.

No
. It was not to be tolerated. She had been released from one gaol, she would not be dragooned into another.

The Dowager halted and turned on her son.

He was sweating. His eyes pleaded for her compliance as they had when he was the little boy who, though hating it, was about to be taken to a bear-baiting by his father, begging her not to protest—as indeed, for once, she had been about to. Let it be, his eyes said now, as they had then. Don't turn the screw.

If it were to be a choice between offending her or Alice or even himself, then Alice must win, as his father had won. He would always side with the strong, even though it hurt him, because the pain of not doing so would, for him, be the greater.

So protest died in her, just as it always had, and its place was taken by despair that these things were not voiced between them. She opened her mouth to tell him she understood but, frightened that she would approach matters he preferred unspoken, Robert cut her off. Unwisely, he said: ‘If you think it too little, Mama, perhaps we can squeeze a bit more from the coffers.'

Good
God
. Did they think she was standing on a street corner with her hand out? All at once, she was furious. How dare they expect that she might beg.

‘Thank you, Robert,' she told him with apparent indifference, ‘the pension is adequate.'

He sagged with relief.

Oh no, my dear, she thought. Oh no, Alice may rule my income but she will not rule me. She had a premonition of Alice's triumphs at future gatherings: ‘Did you enjoy the goose,
Maman?
' Then,
sotto voce
: ‘Dear
Maman
, we always give her a goose at Michaelmas.' Unaware that by such bourgeois posturing she reduced herself as well as her mother-in-law.

Oh no. I am owed some liberty and dignity after twenty-odd years. I'll not be incarcerated again.

So she said, as if by-the-by: ‘Concerning the Dower House, it must be held in abeyance for a while. I am going visiting.'

He hadn't reckoned on this. ‘Who? When? Where will you go?'

‘Friends,' she said vaguely, making it up as she went, ‘Lady Margaret, perhaps, the De Veres . . .' And then, to punish him a little: ‘I may even make enquiries about Martha Pardoe's son, Grayle as she now is—I believe you saw the letter she sent me.'

He was horrified. ‘Martha's . . . ? Mama, you can't. Involving oneself for an American prisoner? People would think it . . . well, they'd be appalled.'

‘Would they, my dear?' He always considered an action in the light of Society's opinion. ‘Robert, I do not think that to enquire after a young man on behalf of his worried mother is going to lose us the war.'

She
was
punishing him a little; he should not have been niggardly over her pension but also, she realized, she was resolved to do this for Martha. It would be a little adventure, nothing too strenuous, merely a matter of satisfying herself that the boy was in health.

‘Well, but . . . when do you intend to do this?'

This was how it would be—she would have to explain her comings and goings. And suddenly she could not bear the constraint they put on her any longer. She shrugged. ‘In a day or two. Perhaps tomorrow.' To get away from this house, from the last twenty-two years, from everything. She was startled by the imperative of escape; if she stayed in this house one day more it would suffocate her.

‘Tomorrow? Of course not, Mama. You cannot break mourning so soon; it is unheard of. I cannot allow it. People would see it as an insult to the pater's memory. Have you taken leave of your senses?'

‘No, my dear, merely leave of your father.'

She watched him hurry away to wake Alice with the news. She was sorry she had saddled him with a recalcitrant mother but he could not expect compliance in everything, not when her own survival was at stake. People would think it a damn sight more odd if she strangled Alice—which was the alternative.

I shall go to the Admiralty, she thought. Perhaps I can arrange an exchange for young Master Grayle so that he may return to his mother. Again, it can make no difference to the war one way or the other. We send an American prisoner back to America and some poor Englishman held in America returns home to England.

Odd that the subject of John Paul Jones had arisen only yesterday. Had not Jones's intention been to hold the Earl of Selkirk hostage in order to procure an exchange of American prisoners? Goodness gracious, I shall be treading in the path of that pirate. The thought gave her unseemly pleasure. She stood at the edge of the yew-scented Dark Arbour, marvelling at how wicked she had become.

When had she taken the decision to act upon Martha's request?
Why
had she taken it? To outrage her family in revenge for a niggardly pension? Not really. Because of the picture Martha had tried to draw of her son? If she understood it aright, Lieutenant Grayle had a physical likeness to his maternal uncle.

An image came to her of Martha's brother, a young man in a rowing boat pulling out to sea with easy strokes, head and shoulders outlined against a setting sun so that he was etched in black except for a fiery outline around his head.

Dead now. He'd joined the navy and one of Martha's letters had told her he'd been killed aboard the
Intrepid
during the battle of Minorca in 1756. She'd put the mental image away, as with the other memories of her Devon summers, but its brightness hadn't faded on being fetched out again.

His nephew had ‘such a desire that all may have Liberty', did he? Well, she might enjoy some liberty for herself while procuring his. It would give her purpose, at least for a while.

But, no, that even hadn't been the reason for her decision. It was because she owed Martha. For a happiness. And the debt had been called in: ‘. . . as you too have a son . . .' Because Martha agonized for a son as she, in a different way, had agonized for hers. Perhaps she need not fail Martha's son as she had failed her own.

Then she stopped rummaging through excuses for what she was going to do and came up, somewhat shamefully, with the one that lay beneath all the others, the one that, she realized in that second, had finally made up her mind.

Because, if she didn't do it, she'd be bored to death.

She stepped out from the arbour into sunlight and walked across the lawn towards the house to tell Joan to begin packing.

TWO hundred and fifty miles north of Chantries, Makepeace Hedley was also about to receive a letter from America. Since it had been sent from New York, which was under British control, its voyage across the Atlantic had been more direct, though no quicker, than that of the one delivered to the Countess of Stacpoole the day before.

As with most of Newcastle's post, it was dropped off at the Queen's Head by the Thursday mail coach from London and was collected along with many other letters by Makepeace's stepson, Oliver Hedley, on his way to work.

Further down the hill, Oliver stopped to buy a copy of the
Newcastle Journal
at Sarah Hodgkinson's printing works.

‘Frogs have declared war,' Sarah yelled at him over the clacking machines, but not as if it was of any moment; the news had been so long expected that she'd had a suitable editorial made up for some weeks ready to drop into place in the forme.

Oliver read the editorial quickly; its tone was more anticipatory than fearful. Wars were good for Newcastle's trade in iron and steel, and mopped up its vagrants and troublemakers into the army. True, the presence of American privateers, now to be joined by French allies, meant that vessels sailing down the east coast to supply London's coal were having to be convoyed but, since the extra ships were being built on the Tyne and Wear, it was likely that the area's general prosperity could only increase.