Taking Liberties (49 page)

One by one, shapes had begun to rise up out of the ground, using their elbows to lift themselves, like demons struggling out of Hell. ‘I didn't know what to do, Mithuth: get their attention or wait 'til I thaw Josh and M. de Vaubon.' In view of what was to happen, he felt he'd been right to do what he did, which was to wait.

Man after man had emerged, most seeming to know where they were going, and had run off, dozens of them. ‘After fifty I lotht count.' There'd been no sound from the prison.

Then, Tobias said, a peculiar thing happened. A big black man lifted himself out of the hole and stood, looking around, and in the quiet of the night had called: ‘Babbs Cove.'

‘Like he wath thummoning a hanthom cab,' Tobias said. ‘Josh mutht have given him her ladyship'th methage. “Babbs Cove.” Like that.'

‘He could have woken the guards,' said Makepeace.

‘He didn't care. When I thaid, “Here,” he lifted M. de Vaubon out of the hole and carried him acroth the road.'

And that, Tobias said, was when the trouble began. The prison's alarm bell had started to toll and escaping men, still coming out of the hole, panicked. Some, seeing help at hand, ran over the road after Bilo and followed him to the coach. By the time they'd got de Vaubon inside and prepared the horses, about a dozen men had forced themselves into the coach with him.

‘It wath a muddle, Mithuth. I had to go.'

‘I know.'

The bell was clanging and more men came up out of the hole by the minute, grabbing the door handle of the coach and piling in. ‘I could have beaten them off but I didn't have the heart.'

‘No.' She patted his hand. ‘Of course you didn't.'

‘We were overloaded, any more and the team couldn't have pulled. Tho we had to thet off.' He was nearly in tears.

‘There wasn't anything else you could do,' she said.

‘I didn't thee Josh. That big one who called out, he wath the only nigger man came out. I'm thorry, Mithuth.'

‘It wasn't your fault,' she said.

Despite the alarm bell ringing into the night, they'd encountered no checkpoints on the road, which had been virtually empty.

‘I'm thorry,' he said again.

She looked at him; he'd said nothing about getting a coach through snowdrifts and bitter cold but in the candlelight his face, like his hair, was tinged with grey. ‘She'll never be able to pay you,' she said. ‘You go home and rest now.'

‘Thegregating,' he said. ‘They won't thtop it, will they?'

Suddenly she didn't know how to face him. ‘I hate them, Toby,' she said.

‘They don't underthtand.'

‘Time they bloody did,' she said. ‘ “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”? Whose? Not my Josh's, not yours.'

Tobias said: ‘I
will
get him out, Mithuth, I thwear.'

When he'd gone, she sat where she was, too depressed to move.

She watched Philippa bring platters to one of the tables, followed by Mrs Hallewell carrying a pile of bread and Dell with the big pot of lobscouse. Zack was filling tankards.

Automatically, the men from the coach fell into line, a few of them helping others who had trouble standing. Most had sores around the mouth; some, despite the heat in the taproom, shivered with fever.

She heard Philippa's clear voice say with distaste: ‘You
wait
.' Abell, who had been in line to have his plate filled, nodded and went uncomplainingly to the rear.

Oh well.

Sighing, Makepeace hauled herself to her feet and set about helping.

In the bedroom upstairs, the Dowager helped Bilo strip off de Vaubon's clothes and wash him. His shattered leg was withered and had pus emerging from one of the wounds where there had been stitches. His skin was hot to the touch and he kept coughing. When she needed him lifted, Bilo did it as easily and carefully as a mother her baby.

‘How long has he been like this?' she asked in French.

‘Two days. But he crawl through the tunnel like a snake. Nothing stop the chief, not him.' His accent had a heavy and exotic emphasis—African, she thought.

‘Thank God they didn't segregate you, Bilo,' Diana said.

‘Pfff. That is Americans, the specks of dirt, not French. The chief keep me with him always. I look after him. I want to stay there, he is too sick, but he say, “Bilo, we go, I have an appointment with a lady.” You are the lady?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then you look after him good.'

She nodded. ‘You go and get some food now.'

He was reluctant to go, but hunger drove him out eventually.

Diana looked at the labels on Makepeace's pots of ointment. One, less terrifying than most, said, ‘Comfrey and honey. Dress it always warm.' The smell was soothing and she smeared it liberally but carefully on the suppurating leg.

The scar on his face had healed but it would always look as if someone had used a black crayon to score angrily into the flesh. Carefully, she put out a finger and ran it down his forehead and nose, across his lips to the greying stubble on his chin, as if she were tracing the line of a Praxiteles Adonis.

His eyes opened and squinted at her. ‘There you are,' he said in English.

‘Here I am.'

He closed his eyes again. There was icy-cold water in the bedroom's ewer and she wrung out a cloth in it to put across his forehead.

Rachel came in. ‘How is he?'

‘So ill.'

Rachel picked up one of his hands. ‘Gil,' she said, quietly. ‘Gil, you seen the
Lark
or
Three Cousins
in your travels?'

His eyes stayed closed but his forehead wrinkled. ‘Missing?'

‘Yes, Gil. Weeks now.'

Rachel nodded and got up to go.

Diana followed her to the door. ‘Will he live?'

‘Him?' Rachel was impatient with her. ‘Course he will.'

When Makepeace came in she had the same air of restrained resentment, as if the Dowager had taken some unfair advantage, but she softened when she looked at the man in the bed. ‘Fever,' she said.

‘His leg's festering and he keeps coughing.'

‘Keep on with cold cloths, try and cool the blood.' Makepeace inspected the leg and approved of the balm. ‘He's clean, he's comfortable. I'll send up some herbal tea: see if he'll take it. And pray. That's all we can do.'

‘I'm so sorry, Missus.'

Makepeace went to the window and looked out of it. ‘This is a fine to-do,' she said, wearily. ‘Still, we can't send the buggers back, I suppose. They'll have to go to T'Gallants, we can't keep 'em here.'

‘I'm not having him moved,' Diana said, quickly.

‘Of course not, you—' Makepeace's temper was on the shortest of fuses. She fought it down. ‘What are we going to do? How are we going to get them away?'

‘I don't know.'

Having fallen on the lobscouse like wolves, very few of the men had eaten hugely, some very little. ‘Thank you kindly, ma'am, but I reckon my belly's shrunk,' one of them said.

They were deloused in the inn's scullery, a forbidding little structure out at the back. About a pound of crushed fleabane leaves was put into its boiler, releasing the peculiar smell of cats' pee. Zack shaved the men's heads before they went naked into its steam, Simeon herded them through and handed them a blanket to wrap themselves in when they emerged like wet, sheared sheep from a dip.

In the kitchen, Dell, Philippa and Mrs Hallewell dressed weeping ulcers and sores and then sent their patients through to the taproom where Makepeace, Rachel and Mrs Welland sorted through piles of clothing that the village women had contributed to find breeks and shirts to fit each one.

‘I'm grateful, Rachel,' Makepeace said when they'd dressed the last one.

‘Weren't expecting an army,' Rachel said.

‘Neither was I.' Makepeace looked at her squarely. ‘An enemy army, Rachel.'

‘Reckon they are,' Rachel said, slowly. ‘Draggly-lookin' enemy, though.'

‘What I mean is . . .'

‘What you mean is, will us give 'un away.' She shook her head. ‘Look at 'un,' she said. ‘I seen pigs kept better. Near dead, some of 'em; sending 'un back'd finish the job. Us Babbs Covers are smugglers, we ain't in the killin' business. 'Sides, we owe a debt for The Night We Fooled Nicholls.'

‘Looks like you're going to pay it,' Makepeace said.

Rachel was right. Faced with such need, it was impossible not to respond to it, and the men surrendered themselves to the women like grateful children. Not one of them asked what was going to happen next; for the moment it was enough that they were out and somebody was being kind to them.

In the afternoon, young Jack Gurney came running in, his face alight with bad news. ‘Coastguard up on the cliffs.'

There was nothing to be done but send the escapers upstairs and pray. After a dreadful thirty minutes, the boy came back to report that the coast, literally, was clear. But it was a warning that patrols were out. The men must be moved. Philippa and Dell went ahead to light a fire in T'Gallants's Great Hall.

After dark, each man was given a guide to get him through the drifts and across the bridge. They dare not use a lantern in case a watcher had been left on the cliffs. Nearly all the escapers were in a form of collapse, as if they had used up every last modicum of energy and will to get out of Millbay and foundered now that had been achieved. Some needed help to walk.

Makepeace watched, stony-eyed, from the door of the inn as Sanders put Able Seaman Abell's arm round his shoulders and disappeared with him into the darkness.

Zack came and stood by her. ‘What be going to do now?' he said. ‘On ay dons la merde, as Gil would say, bless 'un. On ay dons la merde, that means—'

‘I know what it means,' Makepeace told him. ‘And we're in it all right.'

 
On the second night, Diana called downstairs in a panic for Makepeace to come up. ‘He's dying.' De Vaubon's breathing was rapid and shallow, his lips were livid.

‘Sit him up.' Bilo hauled him higher on the pillows. Once they'd applied more cold cloths to his head and a warm one to his left side, which seemed to be hurting him, there was little to be done. Bilo stood by the door, muttering quiet invocations, Makepeace sat on one side of the bed, muttering her own, Diana sat on the other saying nothing, her eyes never leaving de Vaubon's face, her body and mind fused in an entreaty one word long:
Please
.

Just before dawn, the patient began to sweat and each time Diana wiped his face, his skin was cooler. When light came through the window, he was breathing easily in a deep, genuine sleep and Diana was transformed into a living thank you.

She had to leave de Vaubon's convalescence in Makepeace's hands. Though she visited him when she could, her attention had to be directed towards the state of affairs at T'Gallants.

She would have liked to switch places with Makepeace but felt it unwise. Any soldiers who came to the village looking for escapers might think it suspicious if they saw her living away from a house that was known to be at least nominally hers. Besides, Makepeace was slow to get over her antipathy for the nineteen in general and Able Seaman Abell in particular. She had been heard to prescribe a lingering and painful death for him.

The village women were generous in supplying what food they had, but the raid by Nicholls and his men had destroyed or stolen much of their winter supplies and Diana was concerned that they were leaving themselves short.

‘Don't ee worry, woman,' Rachel said, as she presented a ham and two dozen eggs. ‘ 'Tis only 'til we've fattened 'un up a bit, then 'un can live on pulses like the rest of us.'

Ralph Gurney led a pony and cart down the hill, bringing a salted pig and straw and clean sacks to make palliasses. ‘Oh my dear soul,' he said when the Dowager took him into the Great Hall. Despite its size, it looked crowded.

Diana asked the question constantly on her and Makepeace's mind. ‘What are we to do with them if Jan and the others do not come back?'

‘They'll be back, oh, they'll be back, don't ee worry.' He exuded confidence. ‘Havin' trouble with the boats, I reckon, and holed up in France for a bit drinkin' Calvados and toasting the
femmes
.'

‘I'm making this their dormitory and day room for the duration, ' she said. ‘If they are all in one place it will be easier to move them in an emergency. I'd put them in the undercroft or down in the cavern right away, but it's so cold and some are still sick.'

‘If that happens, why don't ee hide 'un in the shaft room, ma dear?'

‘Shaft room?'

‘You mean to say you an't found it?' He slapped his knee. ‘You come along o' me.'

He picked up his lantern and led her upstairs to the maze of passages she had never fully explored. It was cold and dark up there, Ralph Gurney's boots woke echoes from the stone. Hearing a whisper of sound down one side passage, he called out cheerily: ‘Evenin', Mother Green,' and went on.

Ralph stopped and turned to face a blank wall. ‘Yere.' He was enjoying himself.

‘Where?'

‘Yere.' He reached out to an empty sconce, one of a series that were stuck along the passages like a collection of pipe bowls attached to a stem. He pushed it sideways, then kicked at the wall, leaving a scuff mark from his boot. A section opened slightly, creaking. ‘You want to oil they hinges,' he said, and pushed the door fully open.