Taking Liberties (47 page)

‘He takes after his father, I think,' the Dowager said, smiling with what Makepeace considered indulgence. ‘Just as conservative in his attitude to women. I fear that latterly I have been a thorn in Robert's side.'

‘You should stand up to him.'

Diana turned away so that Makepeace didn't see her face. ‘I didn't stand up
for
him. That was the trouble; I didn't stand up for my son.'

Makepeace could see there was agony here, but she was incapable of understanding anyone who didn't assert herself against abuse. In the working-class area of Boston where she'd grown up, most women had jobs to augment the family income as well as their housewifely duties. They had barrows or stalls from which they sold fish, or they brewed ale, or ran a ferry. If they had no brothers, they took over their father's business; when their husband died they took over his, too. Mrs Hobart had been a farrier, Mrs Lidgett manufactured the pipe staves her trader husband sold to Barbados.

They didn't fit the picture of the ideal of femininity drawn in the etiquette books, they were mostly leather-lunged, horny-handed women whose husbands frequently complained of their strongheadedness, but they were generally honoured as fellow-labourers in life's vineyard. There was a comradeship among men and women there which Makepeace had expected to find when she married, and had been fortunate that in neither husband had she been disappointed.

No, she didn't understand the Dowager's marriage, nor was she allowed to pursue it because Diana changed the subject.

She has no conception, Diana thought. She was wedded to human beings whereas I was dangled from the fingers of a Cyclops who threatened to munch me up and throw away the bones. Stand up to him? He could stamp on me—and did. He would have pursued me with hounds; he would have taken Robert away from me.

Such a gentle child, oh my dearest little boy, dragged to bearbaitings and hangings by his father in order to make a man of him, terrified I would protest and we would both get a beating for being women. Of course he chose to ally himself to Aymer's world, not mine; I failed him.

But who stood up for me? Not the law. The law sanctioned every beating I received, every rape, every threat . . . What the Missus can never know, God save her from it, is the unbridled tsardom of a savage man given wealth and power with the law of marriage on his side.

‘Andra's a splendid lover, too,' the Missus was saying, shockingly. ‘I miss bedtimes, I can tell you. Don't you?'

‘With my husband?'

‘With de Vaubon. You spent the night with him.'

‘We had dinner,' the Dowager said, blinking.

‘Is that all?'

As Makepeace walked back to the Pomeroy, it seemed appropriate, after what she had heard, to see that the stream from the reed bed under T'Gallants's bridge was frozen and hung suspended between bridge and beach in an immobile carving of ice.

‘Not even a kiss,' she told Dell, because she had to tell somebody.

‘And a lusty fella like that one.'

‘I know. What's the matter with him?'

‘It's the matter with her,' Dell said, ‘that's what it is.'

Dell had taken to going up to T'Gallants in order to help in the house: Mrs Green was becoming increasingly ill. She went up again, soon after the conversation with Makepeace, and took her specialized knowledge with her.

The Dowager paused in the act of stuffing the plum pudding into its bag. ‘Lots of them?'

‘T'ousands,' Dell assured her, ‘and not one of them can get it up if they don't, if you'll pardon the expression. Pitiable, really.'

‘Pitiable,' said Diana, musing.

‘Weak in spirit, weak in body, that's what I used to say to meself. Scared they'll be found out in their weakness. They're frightened of you, so they are, I used to say to myself, and taking it out on you accordin'. Ah well, me girl, that's what you're paid for.'

‘Good Lord,' Diana said. Aymer was reducing by the minute. It appeared he had not been the unique monster she'd imagined, but one of thousands. She angled the memory of him into a different position to see if it was possible that he had, in fact, used her weakness and fear to compensate for his own, like a schoolground bully. Her long struggle to assume passivity and boredom had been effective in decreasing his violence, that was certain. But the violence sprang from impotence and fear, if Dell's experience with other men was to be believed, and in this Dell must be regarded as the expert. Thousands like him, she said, a common, almost humdrum, condition.

She watched Aymer's memory scuttle round the kitchen floor, squeaking. No, she would never be able to dismiss him quite like that, but it helped, by the Lord Harry, it helped.

She looked across the table at the former prostitute. Dell was hanging the cauldron over the fire, her face a pitted moon in the light of the flames. ‘Were none of them ever kind to you?'

‘Kindness, is it? D'you know, I don't think so? Not what you'd call kind. If there was, wouldn't I be in bed with the darlin' this minute? A man like that, he'd be above rubies.'

They hung the pudding from a hook so that it dangled in the boiling water, then Dell walked carefully back over the ice to the Pomeroy Arms where she sought out Makepeace in the kitchen.

‘I done me best,' she said.

‘Good.'

 
There was a bad quarrel between Simeon Lewis and Rachel Gurney about the church service Rachel wanted held for the safe return of
Lark
and
Three Cousins
. In the absence of a regular parson, the slow-spoken Simeon was regarded as the next best thing, and his inclination was for a service of remembrance.

‘That's for the dead,' Rachel screamed at him. ‘I ain't praying for Jan's soul as if 'un were dead!'

Simeon shouted, ‘Face facts, woman, they ain't a-coming back.' He and Zack had three grandsons among the missing.

The row took place in the Pomeroy's taproom and it was dreadful for everybody to see two people, usually monuments of calm, in such distress. Mrs Hallewell was in tears; her husband had been among those who hadn't returned when the
Swallow
was lost at sea.

Eventually, Simeon gave in. The weather was too bad for a priest to get to the village, so it wasn't a proper service but Simeon's deep voice begged God to return ‘thy missing mariners to them as do love them, where they belong'.

Diana, as lady of the manor, was allowed to give a reading. She chose from the Litany: ‘ “That it may please thee to preserve all that travel by land or by water; all women labouring of child . . .” ' Eddie Gurney's wife, Cissy, was getting near her time. ‘ “. . . all sick persons and young children; and to show thy pity on all prisoners and captives.” '

It seemed to Makepeace that the combined entreaty rose up to the ears of the Almighty with enough power to scorch a hole in the chapel roof as it went. But when they trooped out, the flat surface of the cove before them remained still and undisturbed in a quiet made more intense by the first sprinkling of snow.

Diana's heart ached for them all. We are a village of the incomplete, she thought.

A wind came up and drove the snow inland, piling it up against obstructions but scouring cliff edges and quaysides clean. The lane at the top of the Babbs Cove slipway and the T'Gallants bridge might have been swept by a Titan's brush.

The coastal path, too, remained clear but nobody came along it. It seemed to those who endured the ensuing days and days of waiting as if Babbs Cove had become an iceberg which had been calved and allowed to float away from the mainland into a featureless sea.

And then, one morning, a galloper and his horse, both of them steaming from the ride along the cliffs, reached T'Gallants with a message from Mr Spettigue in Plymouth.

Minutes later, Diana was running from the house to the Pomeroy Arms, Tobias and the galloper behind her. ‘Missus, Missus, oh God help us, it's tonight. They're breaking through tonight.'

THEY had hoped for a longer warning than this. Helplessly, almost indignantly, Makepeace said: ‘We're not ready.' She turned on the galloper as if it was his fault. ‘How do you know it's tonight?'

He looked anxiously around the taproom where Zack was in his usual place, listening hard, Simeon was in his, pretending not to, and Mrs Hallewell stood at the door of the kitchen, a cloth in her hand.

‘You can speak out, young man,' Makepeace told him. ‘Everyone here knows what we're about.' Ever since The Night They Fooled Nicholls, the village women had shown that they were prepared not only to turn a blind eye to the two escapers when they arrived but would help to get them aboard the boats for France.

Only, Makepeace thought in despair, there
are
no boats for France.

‘If you say so, ma'am.' He was a slender youth, his fresh face made fresher by his ride. ‘It was a French prisoner. He managed to dress up as a woman and join a gaggle of . . .' He paused, embarrassed. ‘. . . ladies who were leaving a celebration given by one of the guards. He came out through the gate with them in the early hours of this morning. Brave man, actually. The tunnellers had sent him ahead, as it were, to alert Aloysius—'

‘Aloysius?'

‘My brother-in-law, ma'am, Mr Spettigue. You see, ma'am, their intention is to escape en masse so it was necessary to let us know in order that we can make our dispositions for them.'

He finished off the tankard Philippa had put in his hand. ‘With that in mind, and with your permission, I will be getting back.'

Zack hobbled to the door of the inn as the young man unhitched his horse and prepared to mount. ‘Yere,' he said. ‘Be you married to Spettigue's sister, then?'

‘No, he's married to mine actually.'

‘Family man?' Zack had encountered Mr Spettigue at Henry Hobbs's funeral and hadn't got over it.

‘Oh yes.' The boy seemed puzzled to be asked. ‘Devoted husband and father.'

Zack came in, brushing snow off his shoulders.

‘We'll never get through, let alone get back,' Makepeace said. ‘
Look
at it.' Outside the windows, fat white flakes were performing an hypnotic downward dance against a background of grey.

‘It may be a blessing in disguise,' Diana said. ‘It will cover their tracks; it might even slow down pursuit.'

From the stables came the ‘whoa-up' of men persuading horses into their traces; somebody had been acting while they havered. Sanders came in: ‘Ready, Missus.'

Makepeace turned towards the stairs to fetch her cloak. ‘You're not coming, Sanders.'

‘No, Missus. Tobias is up.'

The Dowager hurried outside. The coach was ready in the forecourt, snowflakes melting as they touched the horses' backs. Tobias was on the driving box, muffled to the ears, adjusting the tarpaulin over his legs. ‘You may get down, Tobias,' she said. ‘I can manage the team.'

There was a scarf round his mouth and she saw his eyes above it crinkle with something like amusement. He pulled the scarf down. ‘Not in thith, you can't, your ladyship.'

She couldn't remember him contradicting her before. ‘I can't let you do it, there may be shooting. It isn't your business.'

‘Yeth, it ith,' he said.

She brushed snow out of her eyes, not believing he wouldn't obey her. ‘You don't even know where to wait.'

‘Yes, he does.' Makepeace had come out of the inn, fully wrapped and booted. ‘I showed him on the map. Anyway, I'll be with him.'

Dell had come with her and went straight up to the coach and held up her hand to Tobias. He leaned down and took it for a moment, then touched her face. ‘I'll be back, girl,' he said.

Well
. While Makepeace and Diana were exchanging glances, a whip cracked and they heard the squeak of wheels on packed snow. Then the coach had moved away and Philippa was holding on to Makepeace to stop her running after it. ‘No, Mama! What will Andra say if he comes home and finds you shot?'

‘He can't go alone.' Makepeace was struggling. ‘I've got to be with him.'

‘Mama, you can't drive. Ages ago, he'd decided to go alone if the call came. He told me so, he said you'd been talking to him about Josh and liberty and such; he wanted to do it.' She took her mother back into the inn.

‘That's what he told me,' Sanders said.

Diana followed them, tight-lipped. ‘You've been talking to Tobias, Missus?'

‘Why not?'

‘Because I should have been consulted. I didn't give that man his freedom so that he could put his life in danger.'

‘Then it wasn't freedom, was it?' Makepeace shouted at her. She slung her cloak off her shoulders and hung it back up on its peg and let her forehead rest against it. ‘He's right, isn't he?' she said. ‘We couldn't do anything if we went.'

‘You could get in the bloody way,' Zack said. ‘Or you could make your zilly selves useful and getting summat to eat for they poor buggers when they get here. Famished they'll be, lessen they feed 'un well in Millbay, the which I doubt. Don't know about this Josh o' yourn, but Gil's a man as likes his vittles.'

It was the age-old occupation for women, to busy themselves for the return of their men, and it gave them something to do.

It had already been decided that de Vaubon and Josh should be taken to T'Gallants where, if there was a search, they could be hidden in the cavern at the bottom of the shaft. Philippa and Diana went up there to prepare beds, as well as Mrs Green, for the forthcoming arrival.