Taking Liberties (40 page)

‘Looks like it. You're coming down the Pomeroy for supper every night from here on, you hear me?'

‘Yes.'

‘Open again.' She waited until the cheese was gone and then sat herself in the chair opposite the table. ‘Now you listen to me. I'm sorry for young Grayle, God knows, and I'm even sorrier for his ma, but he ain't died in vain. What happened to him was a stain on this country of yours and it
can't
be kept private. Mustn't be. John Beasley was right, people should know and be shamed.'

She got up so that she could walk about; she was getting into full flow. ‘Young Grayle ain't the only one. I'll wager there's hundreds suffering what he did. Do you know how many prisoners of war there are in Britain?'

‘No.' The Dowager was watching her curiously.

‘I don't neither,' Makepeace confessed, ‘but I know it's thousands. Just because you saw what was needed at Millbay don't mean it ain't needed in the other camps. What I
do
know is there's one in Portsmouth and another at Norman Cross. And Liverpool. Dozens, and every one of 'em sink-holes as bad as Millbay if I'm a judge. Maybe worse.'

She turned again and put her hands on the table to lean on it. ‘You know what Beasley wrote to me?'

Dumbly, the Dowager shook her head.

‘He wrote there's a subscription been raised for the prisoners at Portsmouth. See what you've done? Pricked the public conscience, that's what you've done, you and John Howard. And my friend Beasley'll make sure it stays pricked. You got an objection to that?'

‘No.'

‘Good. Now get to bed or we'll look a dandy pair of hags by the time our men come sailing back to us.'

She went and the Dowager was alone in a hall that seemed to have been swept and garnished, its walls still reverberating with a New England accent.

What
an extraordinary person.

She picked up the candelabrum and took it to the wreckers' window. She has stitched me together, she thought. The sutures are clumsy but they hold the wounds together.

Perhaps Martha Grayle would find some tiny comfort if her child's death proved of use to his countrymen. That was the letter she would write. ‘If it helps, my dear, he did not die in vain.'

Public attention, though . . . she shrank from the thought of it. They will use my name over and again, for the newspapers love a title. Cartoons will portray me as the Dauntless Dowager or some such vulgarity. Robert will hate it. Yet she's right, the Missus is right. I had not thought of it, but there are other Millbays, other young men starving and dying excruciating deaths.

I shall begin to agitate for exchange, she thought. It is nonsense that there is none for Americans. The more we send back, the more of our poor soldiers and sailors can come home. That's what I shall do.

She looked out at the empty cove. And when will you come back? I cannot live the rest of my life on the memory of one shipboard dinner.

Even knowledge that he was unlikely to did not hurt as badly as usual. Makepeace had done that for her, too; she did not regret any single action she had made in these last few months. Better a patched and painful heart than one of accreted stone, she thought.

Yes, that's what I shall do. I shall start a campaign for exchange.

 
‘Where be her ladyship today?' Mrs Nicholls asked.

‘Gone last Friday,' Makepeace said. ‘It's up to us now.'

‘Is ut,' said Mrs Nicholls, bitterly. ‘That's where you're wrong then.' She took off her mob cap, fetched her hat and coat and marched out of the hospital.

‘Damn you, Fairweather Fanny,' Makepeace said, angrily. ‘I wanted to spend time with my daughters.' They were going to be desperately shorthanded; Philippa had already taken leave to make the acquaintance of the stepsisters she had never seen until now.

Luckily, there were only fifty-two patients in at the moment. Either the war at sea's running down, she thought, or the British are managing to capture vessels without hurting anybody. Nevertheless, she and Tobias and Dell, who was coming in every day to cover for Philippa's absence, were attending to more than the menial work; the orderlies were allowing them to usurp theirs by changing dressings and administering physick.

She stalked up to their table under the loft where the orderlies, freed from the Dowager's cold eye, were gambling. She tipped it so that the dice fell on the floor. ‘We're shorthanded,' she snapped. ‘So you can get up off your fat arses for a change.'

She went back down the aisle and stopped at Lawyer Perkins's bed. ‘How's the leg?' An ulcer on his calf that had begun to heal during his first stay in the hospital had grown so big after returning to prison quarters and an inadequate diet that he'd been sent back, unable to walk.

‘Better by the day.' He never complained.

‘Good.' She drew a page of
The Passenger
from her pocket. ‘What's this?'

‘A newspaper?'

‘Very good. What is this on it?'

He adjusted his spectacles and took the paper. ‘Ain't that grand? They've finally got round to printing the Declaration of Independence over here. You read it, Missus?'

‘I did.'

‘Gratified? It's a mighty pretty piece of work. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . .” I tell you, missus, it still makes my hair stand on end.'

‘Does it? Where does it condemn slavery then?'

‘Ah.'

‘Yes, ah.' She'd picked the latest edition up from the post office on her way in that morning; Beasley had sent it to her without comment. Everybody had paid for her anger since.

‘My boy Josh is out in that stinking hole this minute for trying to get back into this war for equality. He's black. He going to be equal with all men when he goes home?'

Sam Perkins took off his spectacles and cleaned them on his shirt. ‘You know, Missus, I was in that room in Philadelphia two years back. July the second, I'll never forget, and a darn hot day it was. We tried, the New England delegations near
bust
themselves tryin' to include abolition in that there Declaration. But South Carolina and Georgia, they objected, and they objected strong. Were we to jeopardize the birth of a United States of America for them two varmint peoples?' He looked up at her. ‘Would you?'

‘Yes. It's either freedom for everybody or it ain't freedom.'

He shook his head. ‘We were not. For once, all the clocks were strikin' together. We were making a nation. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”.' He put on his spectacles. ‘
All
men. It'll come, Missus.'

She sat down on the end of his bed and let her hands hang between her knees, suddenly tired. ‘I hope so.'

‘You be sure it will. Soon as the war's over and we get goin', it'll come.' He took a look around. ‘Any news?'

She sighed and looked around for herself; imparting information about the progress of the war to the prisoners was strictly prohibited. The patients on either side were asleep. ‘Told you about the League of Armed Neutrality, did I?'

She attempted to remember the things Beasley had told her in his latest letter. ‘Catherine of Russia's trying to get all the powerful states in Europe, Prussia, the Dutch, Portugal, places like that, to join a pact of armed neutrality against the British, whatever armed neutrality is, and they say she'll likely succeed.'

Perkins clapped his hands like a child and she had to hush him. ‘Holy Latin, ma'am! We can't lose, that's what it means. What are the French doing for the war?'

‘Not much.' Newly arrived Americans tended to be scathing, not to say vitriolic, on the subject of the French intervention for which they'd had high hopes. ‘Oh yes, they're sending a fleet under some admiral whose name I can't remember to the Caribbean to harry the British in the West Indies.'

‘Grand.' Mr Perkins smiled at her. ‘You ain't too interested in the war, are you, Missus?'

She looked up and down the rows of bed and the moaning, suffering men in them and she thought of young Lieutenant Grayle. ‘It's dandy for blowing boys' arms and legs off,' she said.

‘Ain't one of 'em wouldn't lose an arm or leg iffen he got Liberty in its place,' Perkins said.

‘Liberty,' she said, hauling herself up. ‘It better be worth it.'

She leaned forward until her eyelashes were nearly touching Lawyer Perkins's spectacles. ‘
You
got any news for
me
?'

‘I heard they begun digging,' he said.

 
Having spent most of the afternoon paddling, Philippa and the Dowager sat on two lobster-pots and watched Makepeace's younger daughters build sandcastles. Their Aunt Ginny was asleep in her bed at the Pomeroy, still recovering from over a week's journey in a coach with two lively little girls.

‘It is sad that your mother can't be spared from the hospital for long,' Diana said. ‘I am sure Sally and Jenny were hoping to spend more time with her, as she was with them. But, as you and I know, the work is vital.'

‘They'll get used to it,' Philippa said. ‘It is always work with Mama and it is always vital. She is not a motherly person.' She said it without bitterness and smiled at the Dowager's shock. ‘I used to mind. I think it was why I stayed away so long, to punish her, but I have come to see that she is a leopard and cannot change her spots.'

The weather was holding—just. Though the breeze was still warm, it was forcing energetic little waves nearly to the bare legs of the children and coating their red curls with sand.

‘Should we interfere?' asked the Dowager, worriedly. Jenny had just jumped on Sally's sandcastle and was being made to pay for it. Diana was unused to little girls, especially such as these.

‘I don't think so. Yesterday Mama let them fight it out. They are very like her.'

‘Oh dear,' Diana said. ‘In that case the country will need a new form of government.' She was pleased to hear Philippa laugh. ‘And you, my dear, are you like your mother or your father? I met Sir Philip once, very briefly, but long enough to recognize a gentleman of great quality.'

She kept trying to place this ill-assorted family of Makepeace's but was lost for class pigeonholes. The grave, collected girl beside her was certainly more the father's daughter than the mother's, and yet the resilience and composure she had shown in the face of the hospital's horrors had been . . . unsuitable. A nicely reared young woman should not have known about such things, let alone coped with them.

Yet why not? The world is so much wider than I thought it was.

‘I wish I'd known my father,' Philippa said. ‘He died just before I was born so I don't know whether I'm like him or not. I don't think he was interested in mathematics.'

‘Are
you
?'

‘Yes. Aunt Susan used to say it was not an attractive trait in a female but she allowed me to study the subject. Mama seems to think that mathematics is bookkeeping and vice versa but Andra says he will find me a good tutor.'

‘And what is
he
like? Your mother tells me he is a mine-owner.'

‘He is a mine-owner now. He was a miner. I remember him before I went to America, rough looking but with a mind interested in everything and with a great will to make the mines less dangerous. A very kind person, too: he wrote to me every week while I was in America.'

‘Did he?'

‘Yes. He said there was no reason why a female should not be a mathematician or anything else that she pleases. He believes in the equality of women with men.'

‘Goodness gracious.'

‘And so do I,' Philippa said. ‘I wish he would come home. You might not think it, but Mama is lost without him.'

The Dowager said: ‘Jan Gurney will bring him back when smuggling starts again, I'm sure.' And shook her head at herself. ‘Dear, dear, I make it sound like the beginning of the hunting season.'

Philippa smiled. ‘Do you disapprove?'

The Dowager looked down at her bare toes and sighed. ‘I am learning neither to approve nor disapprove of anything; I find myself confounded at every turn. There are more things in heaven and earth, Philippa Horatio, than have been dreamt of in my philosophy. And now I think we really must intervene.'

They went running to prevent Jenny Hedley's inhumation in the sand.

 
Josh came out of the Black Hole on the same day that Bosun Tilley took over as chief orderly at the hospital.

Like all the men who had served their forty days' punishment, Josh was too weak to be sent back to prison quarters immediately. The area round his mouth showed the signs of scurvy. He was put by the door at the end of the ward now reserved for negroes.

Tilley looked at him impassively. ‘Beef tea and fresh vegetables.'

‘Why not champagne while you're about it?' Makepeace said, bitterly. With the departure of the Dowager, the kitchens had gone back to their bad ways.

‘You,' Tilley commanded Payne. ‘Go and fetch the head cook.'

The cook was fetched and shown the bag of bones held together by skin that was Josh. ‘Beef tea and fresh vegetables,' Tilley told him. ‘Beef in the tea and the vegetables fresh. Get 'em.'

They were got.

He was a small man with the tight, muscular body of a dancer—the result of a life spent on swaying decks—and the inclination of a tyrant. Though they scurried about more in an effort to impress him (as they had not for the Dowager), it was obvious that the days of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were numbered; they didn't move fast enough.