Taking Liberties (50 page)

They went into a windowless room warmer than the rest of the upper floor. ‘Chimney from the hall be that side,' Ralph said. ‘Makes 'un cosy.'

It was not an adjective the Dowager would have used. It was a reasonably sized box, perhaps twenty-five feet by twenty-five with a high ceiling, but it was solely a box: no furnishings, no ornamentation, nothing to relieve the eye or spirit. The only pleasant thing about it was a faint whiff of good tobacco lightly touched by brandy and perfume.

‘The stuff we used to store yere,' Ralph said fondly, then caught the Dowager's eye. ‘Not now, o' course. Come over here, look.'

‘Over here' was a stout, plain wooden door with a hefty bolt. He opened it and she was assailed by a blast of cold sea air. She could hear waves booming in the cavern below. The house was never quite free of the sound; she had assumed it came from outside, sea against cliff but, of course, it was internal, the beating heart of the cavern.

Ralph lowered the lantern. ‘There's the entrance to the hall, look. See 'un? Bit of the way down? That door in the wall's the back of the dang great chair in the Great Hall. Further down there's an entrance to the undercroft. 'Tis possible to step on the platform there and go up or down, gettin' off at any of the three floors. Your old Pomeroy ancestors, they knew a thing or two about hiding places.'

She nodded, bemused.

‘Course, you need a chap at the bottom to handle the ropes and ratchets.'

She peered but could see nothing.

‘I'll row round and get they pulleys fixed up,' he said, ‘then 'twill be all ready if so be we got to hide the buggers.'

The ‘we' was greatly comforting. ‘I'm grateful, Mr Gurney.'

She was; the escapers were none of this man's responsibility. He did not allow patriotism to interfere with business but nineteen of England's enemies—twenty-one if you counted de Vaubon and Bilo—hardly constituted free trade. The village women saw only nineteen vulnerable men in need, not what they represented, but she did not think such a feminine view was Ralph Gurney's. His help was in return for hers on The Night They Fooled Nicholls.

He confirmed it. ‘You'm welcome, my dear,' he said. ‘One good turn do deserve another. Though has to be said, I wadd'n expecting half Millbay to come visitin'.'

‘Neither was I.'

 
After five days, the sky cleared, the snow stayed in sparkling, solid sculptures that the sun turned rosy at dawn and amber at evening but did not melt. Icicles like glass bunting decorated the cottage eaves.

Devon was not used to weather like this. Women took unaccustomed buckets of snow indoors to melt them and struggled with washing from the line that had to be folded by hitting it. Children slid joyfully down the slipway on trays and made a snowman, put a cracked chamber pot on its head, draped it with seaweed and called it Captain Nicholls, though it more closely resembled a rather rakish Poseidon.

Diana went into the Great Hall to find some of the younger escapers missing.

‘Down there, ma'am.' Lawyer Perkins pointed to the bridge where an uproarious snowball fight was in progress.

‘Would you be good enough to call them in, Mr Perkins.'

When they were assembled before her, she said, clearly: ‘There are such things as coastguards. For all I know, they are walking the cliffs at this minute and have seen a group of noisy men in what they know to be an almost manless village. You gentlemen may be bent on returning to prison but I am not, nor are the families whose food you are eating and whose clothes you are wearing.'

There was a scattered chorus of: ‘Sorry, ma'am,' ‘Sorry, ma'am.'

She looked them over. Were they suitably ashamed? They were undoubtedly on the mend; most of their sores had cleared up, they were less skeletal and there was a sparkle to most of them which, the Dowager felt, must be dimmed as quickly as possible.

‘The kitchen garden is not overlooked,' she told them. ‘As long as you set a lookout, you may take exercise there—without shouting. You will also find logs and a chopping block, I should be grateful if you would employ them.'

They were chastened, though not for long. The logs were chopped virtually to matchsticks but after that there was little for them to do. And nineteen men, most of them young, with nothing to do and nowhere to go proved to be difficult guests.

Captain Totes, senior officer of the Americans, and Capitaine Laclos, senior officer of the French, found each other unbearable.

Captain Totes: ‘Ma'am, I demand a room where my men and I can get away from that gamester and papist blasphemer.'

Capitaine Laclos:
‘Qu'est-ce qu'il a dit? Mon Dieu, il a besoin d'un coup de pied au cul.'

Had Captain Totes not been quite so righteous, the Dowager might have sympathized with him more. Laclos—who'd arrived wearing a woman's skirt—was an inveterate swearer and gambler, always losing his clothes in games of dice: there'd been one occasion when she'd entered the hall to find him scrambling under the bed covers to hide the fact that he was totally naked.

Totes was a Vermont Puritan who seemed to have run his ship ably but with the rigour and sermonizing of an Old Testament prophet. He would have kept T'Gallants to a similar regime—a prayer meeting morning and night, three times on Sundays, no cards, no gambling, no talking about women—but since none of the Americans had been among his previous crew, few were inclined to obey it.

The Dowager sighed. If these were the officers, what might she expect from the men? Patiently, she explained to them both that they must share what accommodation there was. ‘What would happen, gentlemen, should there be an alarm and you were in different parts of the house? You must adapt your behaviour to each other's sensibilities.'

‘I doubt M. Laclos has sensibilities,' Totes said. ‘By the grace of God, ma'am, when can we go back home?'

The question was asked again and again by all of them, as if she could spirit sailing vessels from air. Some were eager to get back into the war, most were desperate to see their families.

She told them and told them. There would be a vessel to take them to France eventually. If
Lark
or
Three Cousins
don't arrive soon, she thought, the Missus will have to buy a boat.

She was sorry for them—and she really was—but, in the meantime, would they all be so good as to behave.

It was the invaluable Jack Gurney, having the time of his life, who first saw the search party coming down the lane and used paths that only he knew to get to the Pomeroy Arms ahead of it.

There was no time to do anything except send Zack up to de Vaubon's room to tell him and Bilo to be quiet and ask the boy to warn T'Gallants.

Mrs Hallewell met the men at the door; there were seven of them, six militia and a Revenue officer who looked at the inn sign and then at a list in his hand. ‘Are you the landlady, madam? Mrs Hallewell?'

‘I am.' She invited them in. ‘You poor lads do look perished. This yere's my cousin and her daughter, they'm staying for a while.' Makepeace and Philippa bobbed politely.

The officer, Lieutenant Higgins, gratefully accepted a glass of ale on behalf of himself and his men. Looking for escaped prisoners along the Devon coastline was a cold and wearisome business.

‘No, us haven't seen a stranger, not in this snow,' Mrs Hallewell told him.

‘How many got away, Officer?' Makepeace had been dying to know.

‘One hundred and nine, ma'am,' Lieutenant Higgins told her. ‘They've recaptured fifty-odd so far but where the others have got to, nobody knows.'

‘Dead, in this weather, I wouldn't wonder,' Mrs Hallewell said.

‘That's what I think,' Lieutenant Higgins said, tiredly, ‘but we've got to look.' He consulted his list again. ‘Who's at the big house? T'Gallants, is it?'

‘Oh, that be the Countess of Stacpoole, Pomeroy as was,' Mrs Hallewell told him and, greatly daring, added: ‘But her's not likely to be hiding dangerous men, no more than me.'

‘No.' He sighed. ‘Got to ask, though.'

As the men trudged away, Mrs Hallewell said, ‘Oh, my soul,' and collapsed amid congratulations.

The lieutenant's welcome at T'Gallants was colder. A regal Dowager was called to the door by her butler and her negative reply to the lieutenant's questions lowered the poor man's blood to freezing. He wasn't asked to come in and seemed relieved that he was not.

But the incident had been salutary. For one thing, knowledge that the military had joined forces with the hated Revenue to look for escapers stiffened the village's sinews. And it taught Diana that she must have a plan ready for another time.

That there would be another time, she was sure; she felt it in her bones like a doom. Discovery was inevitable.

To convince the nineteen of danger, however, was another matter. To them Babbs Cove was the end of the earth, a wild and successful ride away from Millbay. Soldiers had come and looked for them; soldiers had gone away. While they paid lip service to her anxiety, they saw no need for it.

They were becoming restive; they had been shut up too long. They had been digging their tunnel in awful conditions for months in the expectation of freedom. Now, before them, was the sea, their route home, but with nothing to float on it. They were brave men, all of them; they had fought well. Yet capture had shamed them, imprisonment had degraded them further and they wanted to go out in the open air, walk the beach, and stroll around Babbs Cove like free men.

Diana forbade it; she owed caution to the village, if to nobody else. Should the escapers be discovered, the more who could say: ‘I knew nothing of them,' the better. They might be suspected but there would be no proof on which to convict them.

Only Lawyer Perkins sensed her concern and responded to it. ‘You really worried, ma'am?'

‘There's a Revenue officer. Not the one who came enquiring, another,' she told him. ‘If the Revenue service are among those hunting you, he will come sooner or later.' There was no reason to feel that he would suspect her of harbouring some of the missing men, but she did. Was she investing Nicholls with supernatural instinct? No. If for no other reason, he would use the escape as an excuse to search T'Gallants. ‘He harasses us,' she said, ‘he harasses me. I am afraid of him.'

‘Likely we'd better take precautions,' he said and, having been initiated into the mystery of the shaft, began organizing a rehearsal for the day when Captain Nicholls turned up.

Two of the youngest sailors, one French and one American, both excellent rigging-climbers, used the ropes in the shaft to let themselves down into the cavern.

‘Haul away,' Captain Totes shouted and the platform rose to Great Hall level for the evacuation to the shaft room on the upper floor.

‘We could take 'em all down to the cavern, ma'am,' Perkins explained, ‘but if we had to stay down there too long in this weather, wouldn't matter if they found us or didn't, we'd be cold pork anyways.'

The men had been put in numbered groups to await their turn on the platform as it could only carry four at a time. They were intrigued and amused: ‘Ascendin' to Heaven at last, ain't we, Cap'n Totes?'

Once again the Dowager heard the thunder caused by hoisting ropes, chains and ratchets, as she had on the night when the Frenchman had burst in on her. The chair-door was swung open. Giggling and a little nervous the first group got onto the platform . . .

It was as the third group was readying itself to go up that the yelling began, translated by the echo in the shaft into a thousand satanic screams. Abandoning the platform, everybody ran upstairs, Diana after them.

Topman Mitchell, a superstitious youth from Georgia, was backed against the hidden room's passage wall, shaking. ‘Ghost! Demon. Stood right there.'

‘Where?'

Mitchell pointed a trembling hand at nothing. ‘Right there. Glory keep me, it was
horrible
.'

‘It was my housekeeper,' Diana said. ‘She's ill.' But they were off like hounds in the hunt for demons. By the time they were rounded up and the escape procedure begun again, an hour had passed before they were all assembled in the hidden room.

Lawyer Perkins stared at them over his spectacles. ‘Gentlemen, I suggest we start walking to Millbay right now and give ourselves up. Cut out the middle man.'

 
The Pomeroy Arms, too, was being afflicted by noises.

Zack, a jack of all trades like most sailors, had cobbled a high sole to the boot which was to adorn de Vaubon's shortened, crippled leg.

He watched the Frenchman pull it on. ‘Now stand on ut,' he said. ‘See if it evens ee up.'

‘Merde.'
De Vaubon collapsed onto his bed, gasping with pain.

‘Hurt, do ut?'

‘Putain de merde. Suis un estropié toujours, nom de Dieu, un invalide.
Yes, it does.'

‘Take the damn thing off,' Makepeace begged him.

‘No. Give me the looking glass.' He regarded himself. ‘My God.
Quelle gargouille
.'

‘You weren't no Adonis to start with,' Makepeace said. ‘Anyway, she thinks you're pretty.'

‘She is not to come here.' De Vaubon wagged a finger. ‘You hear, Missus? Two days. Two days and I walk to her like a veritable man.'

She grinned at him. ‘You looked veritable enough to me when we stripped your britches off.'

‘I go to her on my two legs or not at all.'

She would never understand men. ‘All right. Two days.'

‘What be he talkin' about?' Zack was not sensitive to matters of the heart.