Taking Liberties (55 page)

He went back to the game.

Little shards of cold found cracks in the glass and penetrated the thick shawl. Outside the snow blew in gusts, sometimes allowing a glimpse of the cove, obliterating it the next.

Tinkler was beside her, bowing. ‘Your ladyship, Challenor found this in the coach you were using last night. He asked me to give it to you.'

It was her portrait. She had forgotten it.

‘What is that, Tinkler?' Alice, from the other end of the room.

‘A painting, your ladyship. For her ladyship.'

Alice came bustling over. ‘A painting? Let me see. My goodness, it is
you
, Mama. How unusual. Rather primitive, is it not?'

They all followed her, taking it in turns to hold the canvas at arm's length to the light, cocking their heads, commenting. ‘It has caught you in a certain mood, Mama, no doubt of that.'

‘The brushwork is good but, as the Countess says, unusual.'

Robert, very cold. ‘Is this the famous portrait painted in prison?'

Alice, very high. ‘In prison, Robert?'

‘I did not mention it to you, my dear. George Grantley took me aside to tell me: my mother sitting for a black man in Millbay Prison.' Her son had dropped his reserve now. ‘I wonder that did not get into the papers, like all the rest.'

‘A black man,' said Nicholls, softly. ‘An artistic black man.'

She told Tinkler to take the portrait to her room. They resumed their cards, she sat on at the window.

 
She was awake very early the next morning so that she could go to the kitchen and find food for the men in the shaft room. She took her holdall for the purpose. When she looked for Dell to help her, she found the Irishwoman's bedroom empty and there was no sign of her anywhere else. First she went to the Great Hall and looked out.

Nothing. Ice cliffs, ice fields and houses frozen into an ice-blue sky empty of birds, like a scene in glass; Babbs Cove seemed suspended in a space of its own. Sheep were a dun-coloured, immobile huddle in the pasture just below Ralph Gurney's farm. A tiny figure that could be seen carrying fodder to them along a track cut deep in snow was the only moving thing in the landscape.

She went to the kitchen. As she gathered up scraps and bread, taking a slice from this, a cut from that, so as not to leave gaps, she tried to work herself up into a fury that she was being forced into thievery in her own home.

Instead, she knew she was frightened; there had been something ominous about Nicholls, after all. Why the portrait had alerted him to something wrong, she could not imagine, but she had seen the change. By the time he'd left to return to the inn, he had reverted to being a hunter.

She put the food in the holdall and hurried through the sleeping house to the shaft room. The men were irritable from hunger and she didn't blame them—what she and Dell were managing to provide was little enough for twenty toddlers, let alone grown men. ‘I am sorry,' she told them, ‘but with luck the boat will come tonight. Just a little longer.'

She fetched them water and left to go to Mrs Green. Kempson-Jones had looked in on the woman and had diagnosed that she was dying—something Diana could have told him—and that there was nothing to be done but continue with increased doses of laudanum.

Alice, not an unkind woman, had instructed the two maids to take turns sitting with the patient and when the Dowager entered the room Eliza was dozing in a chair by the bed. Mrs Green was in a drugged sleep.

Between them, they saw to her. ‘I will relieve you in a little while, Eliza. First I must go down to the village.'

‘Ooh, your ladyship, you're not supposed to go out.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

The girl was flustered. ‘His lordship said. You was too poorly, he said, and to tell him if you wanted the keys to the doors. For your own good, he said it was.'

‘Nonsense.'

She fetched her cloak, realized that nobody had given her chatelaine back, fetched the keys from the kitchen, unbolted and unlocked the front door—to see Makepeace hurrying towards her across the courtyard. ‘Has anything happened?'

‘Yes.' She was out of breath. ‘Is there anyone about?'

‘No. The maids were up with Mrs Green, so everyone is late rising.'

They went into the Great Hall and sat near the still-warm ashes of the fire. ‘Is it Nicholls?'

‘Partly. He's been questioning Josh, asking all sorts of questions: where did he learn to draw, how long has he been in your employ, things like that.'

‘What did Josh say?'

‘Not much, you know Josh. I sent him off to the stables and gave Nicholls a piece of my mind but the bastard's suspicious, no doubt of that.'

‘He's got instinct. He's like a dog. Missus, that boat must come soon. Is Gil all right?'

‘Yes, Rachel's taken his boots away, but that's not the thing.' Makepeace took Diana's hands in both of hers and held them tight. She was very pale. ‘You've
got
to sail with the boat when she comes. They're going to put you in a madhouse.'

DIANA laughed. She said: ‘It would be a rest after T'Gallants.' Makepeace bounced their joined hands up and down in irritation. ‘Sanders was drinking with Challenor late last night and he came and told me this morning. They're going to put you away. That's what they've come down for, to have you certified.'

‘Servants' fantasies.' She was still smiling.

‘Servants know things; you aristocrats talk in front of your footmen as if they were sideboards—I saw that when I was married to Philip. I tell you, they are going to have you put away.'.

Diana said: ‘Dear Missus, listen to me. Robert wants me to live in the Dower House on our estate so that he and Alice may keep an eye on me; he's a man who wants everything ordered, and I have proved disorderly. That is what the servants have heard, if they've heard anything. It is why T'Gallants was sold over my head, so I would have nowhere to go but the Dower House.'

She raised Makepeace's hands and put them to her cheek. ‘What Robert does not know is that he sold the place to you and that you are allowing me to stay on.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes. It has been bad enough for his reputation to have his mother putting up hospitals for enemy prisoners, but I assure you that to have it known that she's in Bedlam would be worse.'

‘What a noodle.' Makepeace appealed to Heaven. ‘It wouldn't, don't you see? It would explain
why
you put up hospitals for prisoners. ' She blew out her cheeks. ‘What have they brought a doctor with them for then?'

The first twinge of doubt crossed the Dowager's mind. Why had they? With troubles coming from all directions, she hadn't questioned it.

She said, because it was true: ‘Alice always fancies herself ill with this or that; she likes to have a doctor on hand.'

Makepeace didn't believe a word of it. ‘Go to France with Gil anyway,' she said, earnestly. ‘Have a happy life.'

‘I can't.'

‘I didn't believe it when you said that yesterday; I can't believe you're saying it now. Why
not?
'

So difficult. Diana got up and walked away from her to the wreckers' window. ‘It would be dishonourable.'

Behind her, Makepeace sagged with frustration. ‘He'll marry you. First chance he gets, he'll marry you.'

She turned round. ‘I don't mind if he doesn't. Missus, if my marriage was virtue and Gil and I are sin, then the world is upside down. I am prepared to shout that from the dome of St Paul's itself.'

‘What then?'

So
very
difficult.

‘Dishonour's the wrong word,' she said. ‘Betrayal is a better one. I failed Robert. What he is today is not just his father's fault, it is mine. How I could have done differently, I don't know, but I should have found a way. I failed him when I was a prisoner in that marriage and I've failed him since I've been free of it. Instead of the noble Roman matron he would have liked me to be, I have shamed him before his King and his party.'

And, Hokey, don't they need shaming, Makepeace thought, but she kept quiet. Let her talk it out; I'll find a way around this.

‘I have associated with people and causes Robert despises, I've been what Shakespeare called a hissing and a byword. And, though my son wouldn't believe it, I've done it for his honour and the King's because they were
wrong
. Treating those prisoners as she did, England was dishonouring herself. She is still dishonouring herself by refusing to exchange the Americans.'

‘Ye-es,' said Makepeace, cautiously.

‘Eccentric, wild, mistaken, rebel, even traitor, they can call me all these things. The Tory press already has.'

‘Ye-es.'

‘The one thing they have not been able to call me with any truth is a whore. But the moment I run away with a Frenchman, our family is shamed forever. There would be jokes, cartoons; they'd sing songs. The Depraved Dowager, they'd call me. I have inflicted a great deal on my son, but I will not subject him to that. Don't you
see?
Worse even than that, the scandal sheets will say: “That is why she did what she did. She is merely a trollop; the hospital was her excuse to parade among naked men.” '

She came down the Great Hall towards Makepeace, wagging the keys to the house, like a female St Peter sent to teach humanity manners.

‘I will not do it, Missus. It would negate everything that has been achieved. John Howard would be made a laughing stock, called a procurer, his work set back years. Any woman raising her voice on behalf of men left to bleed to death on an earth floor would immediately be howled down.'

She stood over Makepeace for a moment and then went back to her window. ‘I won't do it,' she said.

And she won't, Makepeace thought. She breathes a different air from other people.

Diana was looking at the stone-set floor of the Great Hall and seeing a battlefield dotted with strategic positions she had held and abandoned and which now, seen from the rear, had not been worth holding in the first place.

Pride in her family—lost. Honour and riches because a man had once waded in bloodied foam to rob the dying.

Faith in England's infallibility—lost.

Belief in the inferiority of other classes, other races—lost, and well lost.

Conviction after conviction lost, overrun by a superior and wiser army, until she was driven back to this redoubt. And this last ditch she would hold because to surrender it would mean that all she had learned in these last months, everything she had tried to put right for her country, would be soiled.

She could not live with that knowledge, even with a Frenchman who was more to her than her life. Tobias had given up his freedom in order to better the world; she could do no less.

‘I won't do it,' she said again, quietly.

Makepeace thought: I don't know if she's right or wrong—thank God, I don't deal in principles, only people. But I've come to love that skinny piece of bloodstock over there and she must be saved from herself.

She said: ‘You realize that what you and Gil have found together doesn't happen every day.'

‘Yes.'

‘And at our age especially, it's a gift from God.'

‘Yes.'

‘And he won't go without you.'

Diana looked up quickly. ‘You've got to make sure he sails on that boat, Missus. Another spell in prison will kill him.'

Yours is going to be a different prison, Makepeace thought, but they'll shut you up in it—and it'll kill you, too. She got up and turned to the door. ‘Well, all I can say is I agree with Robert, you're as mad as a March hare. Oh, hello, Robert.'

The Earl of Stacpoole stood in the doorway. She felt he was not pleased to see her. ‘You have just taken my name in vain, madam. May I ask what you are doing here?'

She'd been looked down on by a lot of nobility in her life but not, she thought, by as big a piss-pot as this one.

‘I've come to inspect my property,' she said. ‘Now get out of my way.'

She pushed past him and went out.

Robert stared after her. When he turned round his jowls were streaked with red. ‘That female bought this house?'

‘Yes,' Diana said. ‘That lady is Mrs Hedley.'

‘And what was she doing here, may I ask?'

‘She came to impart some servants' gossip. They say you are planning to commit me to a madhouse. Oh.' His face had changed; she was suddenly very cold. ‘Oh, Robert.' She slumped down on the windowsill and buried her face in her hands.

He was blustering. ‘Nonsense, Mama. It is not like that at all; of course you will not go to a madhouse.'

He advanced on her, reasonable and solicitous. ‘My only concern is for you. You must see that your behaviour these last months can only be interpreted as deranged. I realize it was brought on by Papa's death but others . . . well, others, people I respect, our sort of people, have frankly called it mad.'

Yes, she thought. Mad people do not do what they are told, therefore if you do not do what you are told, you are mad.
Quod erat demonstrandum
.

The more he justified himself, the angrier he became. ‘Perhaps you have not seen the papers lately. I can tell you the storm you have raised rages ever higher. Each time the matter of prisoners' exchange is brought up your name is mentioned,
our
name. Well, it must stop. I have done my best to persuade you, even forbid you, yet you have persisted. Dr Kempson-Jones is prepared to say—in court, if necessary—that for your own good—
your own good
—you must be restrained.'