Taking Liberties (56 page)

He was squatting beside her now. ‘I don't blame you, Mama. I blame the company you have kept. That person just now, my dear, surely you can see that she is not a suitable friend for you.' Gently, he took the keys from her fingers. ‘I would prefer it if you did not go out and mingle with the people at the inn. Only last night I had to dismiss the creature you took on as maid—it appears she has been stealing food from the kitchens.'

The chatelaine jangled as he stood up. ‘You must rest in your room now and when it has thawed we will take you home. Alice has found a nurse, a most reputable woman, who will stay with you in the Dower House until you are better.' He kissed her cheek. ‘There, we will soon have our dear Mama returned to us, won't we?'

She nodded and, with the utmost tenderness, he led her out of the hall.

 
‘ “And lucky you are not to be prosecuted with full rigour of the law,” ' Dell said in a fair imitation of the Earl of Stacpoole. ‘I nearly told him, the number of times the law's paid me to get rid of its rigours . . . Anyway, he'll have that damn kitchen under lock and key by now. She'll never get food to the lads; they'll be famished.'

The women had to choose their moments to get together. One or other of the Stacpoole servants was always around. Even now, Philippa was sitting in the taproom playing cribbage with Zack, ready to warn the conference in the kitchen of any approach.

Outside the thaw was turning the air into grey gauze and it would soon be dark.

‘When are those Thurlestone buggers going to turn up with that boat, that's what I want to know,' Makepeace said. ‘We'll have to row food round tonight. Go in through the cavern and up the shaft. What do you say, Rachel?' They were the only strong rowers in the group.

‘He's been up on the cliffs again,' Rachel said.

They joined her at the kitchen window. They could just see the dark blue figure coming down from the headland opposite T'Gallants and the stitching of footsteps he left behind him. ‘He's got his bloody eyeglass under his arm. What's he been looking at?'

Makepeace said: ‘He senses something's up, I know he does. I've stopped being relieved when he goes out. I'd rather have him here, under my eye.'

There was triumph in the taproom. ‘Fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six and one for his knob and I won. Let's have another brandy, Maggie.'

‘She lets 'un win,' Mrs Hallewell said. ‘Well, that's one thing. Nicholls can't impound the brandy—Zack'll have drunk the lot.' She called, ‘Coming,' but stayed at the window, watching.

Dell shuddered. ‘Ladyship says he's a dog, he can sniff the air and smell people out.'

‘He'd sniff twenty fathoms of saltwater if I had my way,' Rachel said. ‘All right, we'll row round to the cavern tonight. Give me something to do.' Grief made her restless.

Makepeace was suddenly doubtful. ‘Perhaps you should stay with the children. I'll go on my own. We might be caught.'

‘Gil can stay with 'un. He's good with little 'uns.'

‘How is he?'

‘Fidgety. I told 'un, sneak into T'Gallants and you'll put her in danger. But I don't know how long that'll hold 'un.'

‘You didn't tell him she won't be going with him?'

‘Course not, never heard such silliness in all my life.'

Makepeace wiped her face with her apron and said again: ‘When are those Thurlestone buggers going to turn up, that's what I want to know.'

 
Every time the tiny, wasted talon squeezed her hand at the onset of pain, Diana got up, poured some of the laudanum into a spoon and trickled it into the little gasping mouth.

Like a mother bird with a fledgling, she thought. Except that you won't get big and strong.

‘Don't you be leaving me now,' Mrs Green had said, the last time.

‘I won't.' There is nowhere to go; I would rather be with you. And even you are leaving me.

The world had narrowed down to this dour room and the skeletal little woman in its bed. Beyond was numbness. There were things she supposed she should be doing; seeing to the other suffering creatures in the shaft room, making arrangements, but she didn't have the will to do them.

She had challenged something too big for her. The establishment of England had looked down with its unwinking eye, seen the troublesome ant, lifted a colossal foot and crushed the life out of it.

You and me, Mrs Green. Two madwomen together.

There was a twitch on her hand. Mrs Green's eyes were suddenly bright and sharp in her skull, like a blackbird's. ‘I'm paying, idd'n I?'

‘No. My dear, you are only ill.'

‘I'm paying.' There was another tug on her hand and Diana leaned down to bring their faces close together.

‘I pushed 'un down the shaft,' whispered Mrs Green.

Diana leaned even closer. ‘Good,' she whispered back.

The blackbird eyes widened in astonishment until the entire iris was exposed, then they crinkled. Wheezes came out of the mouth in what Diana was terrified might be penitential sobs, but Mrs Green was laughing.

Well, there goes my hope of salvation. She felt better for it.

She sat on, administering to the pain when it was necessary, through the ensuing sleep and the quiet death with which it finished.

 
In the end, it was considered best that Zack and Rachel should row the food round to the cavern. Makepeace had never handled the shaft platform whereas Zack and Rachel had helped to use it often while hiding contraband at T'Gallants at times when the Revenue had been expected to search the inn. ‘Us can make that dang thing go up and down, quiet as a zephyr,' Zack said.

Makepeace was uneasy about it but Rachel said: ‘ 'Sides, they Stacpoole servants like ee.'

‘That's because I buy them drinks,' Makepeace said.

‘Well, buy 'un plenty tonight then. Make sure the buggers sleep tight.'

 
Diana, sitting at the wreckers' window, saw the darker shadow that was a rowing boat enter the thin gleam cast on the water below by the many candelabra with which Alice insisted the Great Hall should be lit to make it warmer and less forbidding. The long thin shape of the boat was there and then it was gone into the darkness, heading for the cavern.

The Missus, she thought, with love. You can depend on the Missus.

Makepeace would wait until the light was snuffed and then the men in the shaft room would be fed.

She hadn't dined with Robert and the others. Robert seemed to think she was sulking: ‘Now Mama, we must start as we mean to go on. Dr Kempson-Jones says you must eat.'

But she had stayed without answering where she was at the window and eventually they had left her alone. When they finished eating, they came into the hall and began playing whist by the fire. She barely noticed their presence any more than she had their absence. They had moved beyond her mental pale; she was aware of them like encircling trees; as individuals she no longer found them interesting.

Nicholls had made Alice nervous by telling her something over dinner and was now reassuring her.

‘You are perfectly safe, your ladyship. I walked to the coastguard's hut today and sent a signal to Plymouth. I expect reinforcements tomorrow.'

Robert was behind her. ‘I think it is time you went to bed, Mama, you look very tired. Kitty shall sleep in your room tonight—to make sure you are not disturbed.'

 
Rachel and Zack returned to the Pomeroy in a temper; Rachel, particularly, was raving, and had to be hushed in case they heard her in the taproom.

‘Slipped into the cavern, didd'n us, and what was there when we got inside 'un? A Yankee and a Frog, bold as bloody brass, sitting on they bloody rocks dangling a home-made fishing line in the bloody sea.
And the cover to the cavern open, so's they could see by T'Gallants's lights
.'

Zack nodded. ‘Strung the netting back they had, only a crack mind but still . . .'

It was too appalling for comment. Makepeace asked the only question worth asking. ‘Had they moved the netting earlier?'

Zack nodded. ‘Reckon they had. Them lads been up and down that shaft rigging all day, catching fish and crab and eating 'un raw. Said they was hungry.'

‘I'll give 'un hungry,' Rachel said. ‘They moved that bloody cover sure as eggs to give 'emselves daylight to see by. And now we know what Nicholls was looking at through his bloody telescope, don't us?'

 
Unaccustomed sea air made Alice tired. Though worried about being murdered in it, she was eager to get to her bed and did some prodigious yawning to prove it.

Nicholls, taking his cue, said good night and left for the Pomeroy Arms.

Alice retired. Robert and Kempson-Jones smoked a last cigar over their port before following her example.

Tinkler put a cover over the fire, snuffed the candles and went to bed himself.

Nobody at T'Gallants saw the moon cast a silver path over the sea from the Sound to Babbs Cove nor the tiny white dot that appeared in it.

 
Makepeace opened her bedroom window and dodged as another snowball hit the casement. ‘
What?
'

‘Open up. Open
up
!'

In their beds, Philippa and Dell sat up. The three women had been sharing a room since the arrival of Nicholls and the Stacpoole men. As supposed relatives of Mrs Hallewell, they could hardly command separate accommodation in the face of paying guests.

‘What is it, Mama?'

‘Rachel. Somebody behind her . . . oh God, it's Gil.'

And Nicholls was asleep thirty feet away at the end of the passage. At least, she prayed that he slept.

They threw on shawls and wraps and went downstairs in their bare feet so as not to make a noise.

Rachel fell over the threshold in her haste to get in. ‘They're
yere
, they've come, oh God bless 'un, there's a sail, a
sail
.'

‘The lugger? Oh, thank you, Lord, it's the Thurlestone lads.'

De Vaubon limped in. ‘It is not,' he said. ‘She's too big for a lugger. ' Quietly, to Makepeace, he said: ‘Not the
Lark
or
Three Cousins
either.'

‘Don't see nothing,' Dell said.

‘There,
there
. Far out.'

‘Warship.'

‘Too small. And she keeps going about.'

Straining her eyes, Makepeace managed to make out a speck which might have been a mere sparkle of the moonlight except that, as Rachel said, it was slowly, very slowly, moving back and forth on the water.

‘White sail, ain't it?' she said. ‘Can't be a free trader then.'

‘Revenue?'

‘The bugger's
signalling
,' Rachel said in exasperation. ‘Let me at that bloody lantern.'

She ran for the stairs, but Makepeace got there first. ‘Quietly, girl, or you'll have to explain Gil to Nicholls.'

The inn door opened and the room went still, but it was Zack. ‘There's a vessel out there,' he said.

Josh came in, smelling of the stable, where they'd made him up a bed in its loft.

‘Does nobody sleep around here?' Dell asked.

‘Let's hope Nicholls does.'

Everybody tiptoed up the creaking staircase and crammed into Makepeace's bedroom.

Rachel counted. ‘Flash, flash. Pause. Flash, flash, flash.
All right to come in?
Thank ee, Lord, oh thank ee. It
is
them, it's my Jan.'

She picked up the lantern but Makepeace stayed her arm. ‘They can't come in, Rachel.'

‘Bugger to that, they're coming.'

‘Rachel, they can't. Nicholls could wake up any time and see them. And if it
is
Jan he'll have goods on board.'

‘Take 'un a long time to come in anyways,' Zack said. ‘Tide's against 'un.'

Scrubbing the tears off her cheeks, Rachel began sliding the lantern's shutter back and forth.
Stay off
. ‘But I'm bloody rowing out to 'un,' she said, ‘Maggie's looking to the kids.'

‘You're not going without me,' Makepeace told her. ‘If it is Jan, he's maybe got Andra with them.'

‘And me,' Dell said.

Makepeace patted her shoulder. ‘You can't row,' she said. ‘And who's to get the breakfasts if we're not back by morning? You stay.'

‘What'll I tell them? Where are you supposed to be?'

Makepeace was at a loss. That Andra might be waiting for her beyond the cove drove every other thought out of her head.

‘I'm coming,' Josh said, ‘I'm the only one in a regular navy.'

‘Mama,' Philippa said, quietly.

‘Tell 'un Cissy 's having her baby,' Rachel said impatiently. ‘She's due to pop any minute.'

Philippa pulled at her mother's sleeve. ‘You do realize there may be danger. That ship could be anything.'

‘Vessel,' Makepeace said automatically. ‘Whatever that thing out there is, she ain't square-rigged.'

‘Vessel, then. I wish you would not go.' The girl's face was as composed as ever but her eyes were stricken.

Makepeace laid her hands tenderly on her daughter's shoulders. ‘Been worth it for you and me, hasn't it, Pippy? Bad as it's been.'

Philippa nodded.

‘And you know if it's pirates out there, they'll be sorry once I get aboard.'

Philippa nodded again.

‘Then you keep that lantern filled and guide us back in. And tell Nicholls we're birthing a baby. Something.'

De Vaubon came away from the window where he'd been looking out. ‘Don't worry for the pirates, Philippa. I shall protect them from your mother.'