Taking Liberties (17 page)

‘Where's this lot from, sir?' one of the guards asked him, conversationally.

‘The
Canaan
. We captured her off Dartmouth this morning. We can cover this one, Peters.'

Evening sun shone on the rows of men with a soft rose light that failed to give any colour to the pallor of their faces. Diana had never imagined such wounds; some had been mercifully bandaged but others . . . there were collops of bloodied skin hanging loose, bits of bone poking through flesh, one man's brains were on show, another's intestines.

One man who seemed uninjured died as she looked at him; she saw the muscles of his face smooth into relaxation, the sun into which he'd been staring reflecting gold in his open eyes. Close his eyes, she thought, somebody close his eyes. As she moved forward to do it, a man lying next to the corpse put up a hand and tugged at her skirt hem. ‘Water, ma'am. Please, I need water.'

It might have been a signal, all over the grass men began begging for water. The naval surgeon became angry. ‘Get them water, for the love of God. Where are the damn orderlies? Where's the doctor?'

‘Don't come in Sundays,' Basham told him.

‘Don't come . . . ? Fetch him. I can't manage all this on my own.'

‘He'll be drunk,' Basham said indignantly, as if the doctor's insobriety was an urgent appointment.

‘Then get another one from the damn town.'

Basham nodded at a guard who went off grumbling: ‘I'd give 'em water. I'd've let the buggers drown.'

Water. I must get water. The Dowager looked around; at that moment she'd have sold her soul to see a pump. ‘Where is there water?' she called to Basham.

He became aware of her and came up. ‘Get me shot, you will. Come along now, there's a good lady.' He tucked her arm firmly under his and led her off towards Captain Luscombe's house.

All the way she begged him to let her take water to the men. It was like walking away from Golgotha; it was against every tenet.
I was thirsty and ye gave me drink.

They won't let me, God, they won't let me
.

‘Don't take on now, ma'am,' Basham said. ‘We'll see to them.'

‘Then in the name of Jesus do it,' she said.

As he left her at the gate of the house, he said: ‘They was in
our
waters,'scuse me for saying so, ma'am. Could've been our men wounded.'

Later she was to realize that the point was well made. But she hadn't seen British wounded nor, for that matter, American wounded; she had just seen suffering men being allowed to go on suffering.

In any case—this was when she could think logically—there was an excellent hospital for Royal Navy men in Plymouth; it had been built on Edgcumbe land, and had one of the lowest mortality rates among service hospitals in the country.

But I have seen Millbay's and I am ashamed.

To the Dowager, England's honour and her own were indistinguishable. Her family and Aymer's were the aristocracy and therefore the representatives of their country. Now it was as if the uncaring inhumanity of Millbay had been laid at her door. And she could not bear it.

A footman informed her that Mr Howard and his servant had already gone, Captain Luscombe was overseeing the disposal of the new prisoners and would be back when he could. He showed her into the parlour where Lady Edgcumbe was drinking Luscombe's sherry like medicine. He poured a schooner for Diana and left.

The two women sat and sipped in silence. Lucy got up and poured them more sherry.

The Dowager was remembering the times when Aymer had beaten her, debasing them both. It's the same, she thought. She was being bruised and debased by her own country. It was allowing Plymouth merchants to enrich themselves by cheating the most miserable of beings of their food, while those meant to look after them were complicit in the theft. Injured men were left in the care of absent drunkards unfit to tend pigs.

‘We could get up a public subscription,' Lucy Edgcumbe said, after a while. ‘Build a decent hospital. Whether people would subscribe for war prisoners, I don't know.'

‘They would if they saw what we've just seen.'

‘That's it. They don't.'

The smell of honeysuckle came through the parlour's open window, bewildering in its sweetness. Somewhere in a garden hedge a nightingale began its crescendo.

‘Mr Howard will surely rouse the public,' Lucy said. ‘He was very cross when he left.'

‘Good.'

‘A giant in his way, I think.'

‘Yes,' said the Dowager, and realized it was true. Great Hercules in the guise of an irritating, persistent, pedantic little man. ‘Yes, he is.'

And she was ashamed again that Hercules of the Augean stables was a commoner who did not have the same responsibility for cleaning them as the leaders of the nation. Those men she'd seen, those
children
, might be the enemy but her country had made a promise to treat them with decency, if for no better reason than, tit-for-tat, British prisoners of war should receive the same courtesy.

The bargain was not being kept. Her nation, which should be as fastidious in honour as herself, had broken faith.

‘Excuse me, your ladyships.' It was the footman. ‘But her ladyship expressed a wish to interview one of the prisoners and he's under guard in the garden room, waiting.'

Lieutenant Grayle. Captain Luscombe's order that the boy be produced for her was being obeyed though the sky fell in. She had forgotten—they had all become Martha's sons to her. ‘Very well, I shall come.'

This, after all, had been the object of the exercise.

She was led to the back of the house where a small, white-wood room gave on to the garden.

Lieutenant Grayle took up most of it, an enormous figure with his back to the setting sun so that his outline was that of his uncle as she had last seen Martha's brother, like the etching of a Viking outlined in gold. He dwarfed the two guards standing on either side of him.

‘You are Lieutenant Forrest Grayle? Of Virginia?' But she knew he was; she had been taken back twenty-seven years.

‘Yes, ma'am.' He stared fixedly over her head; he might have been taking lessons from Sergeant Basham.

‘I am Lady Stacpoole,' she said, gently, ‘I knew your mother a long time ago. She has written to me asking after your welfare. Would you like me to write back to her on your behalf?'

‘No, I thank you, ma'am.'

Probably he didn't understand. ‘You don't want me to write? I believe I have sources through which a letter could reach her.'

‘No, I thank you, ma'am. I don't want you should write to my mother.'

This was hopeless. The sun, which was sending its last rays into her eyes, was hiding his from her. ‘May you not sit down?' She indicated a chair.

One of the guards prodded the boy with his musket's butt. ‘Sit when the lady asks you.'

As he moved to the chair, she saw that Grayle's arms were at an unnatural angle behind him and she said: ‘Are you pinioned?' To the guards: ‘Untie him, please.'

‘Ain't wise, your ladyship,' one of them said. ‘Despite all, he can still make a run for it. Knocked down Sergeant Lewis once and run for the gates.'

‘I doubt he will try to escape at the moment.' She turned to Grayle. ‘Will you?'

‘Not tonight, ma'am.'

‘So untie his hands, please.'

There was a guffaw from both guards. ‘Can't do that 'zackly, your ladyship,' one of them said while the other fumbled at Grayle's back, releasing his arms from the rope that had imprisoned them. ‘Show her your hands, son.'

For a moment, the Dowager thought the boy was going to knock the three of them down; she could almost feel the violence surging up in him. But after a moment his eyes went back to the point above her head and he allowed himself to be pushed round to face the light, the overlong cuffs of his dirty coat turned back by the guards to display what they had hidden. Which was nothing.

Lieutenant Grayle had no hands.

ON the first Sunday after the finding of Philippa, she and her mother, Beasley and Dell walked along the Hoe towards Millbay. It was a beautiful, very hot day. Sunday or not, the streets were too crowded with military supplies on their way to the docks to warrant using the coach, whereas the Hoe was a pleasant way to take, arm-in-arm among the strollers, listening to the band.

Both the band and the atmosphere of holiday were having to compete with loud booms coming from two ships of the Western Squadron which were testing their guns on a target out in the sparkling Sound.

Beasley and Makepeace were arguing.

‘They won't
do
it,' Beasley said for the third time.

‘Of course they will,' Makepeace said. ‘If the commander of the prison won't, I'll go higher. I'll get Rockingham to approach the Admiralty and tell them I'll outfit a frigate or something . . .'

That was the extraordinary thing about the Missus, Beasley thought, she doesn't recognize the impossible. ‘You can outfit the bloody fleet,' he said, irritably. ‘Missus, listen to me—they won't
do
it. They can't. He's not a prisoner of war, he's a rebel, he's been convicted of high treason. It's the law, it's policy. Admit Americans are prisoners of war and you admit America's a sovereign nation, like France. That's the point, it's why England's fighting the goddam war in the first place, to prove it isn't.'

‘Oh, hush.'

He'd raised his voice and a clergyman on his way to church turned a scandalized head, tutting. Beasley glared back at him but continued more quietly. ‘You'll just draw attention to yourself, which'll give them a nice clue as to who's helping him if and when he manages to escape. They'll pick him up in no time.' He added with gloom: ‘And us.'

‘
Escape!
' Makepeace said. ‘That's typical of you, you can't think of anything less'n it's breaking the law.'

‘It was Philippa's idea,' Beasley said sulkily.

‘She's a child. It's a child's idea.'

Makepeace felt uplifted, her spirits gliding with the seagulls Philippa had been returned to her—a sign, she felt, that God was relenting and would soon send Andra back too. As for Josh, she would buy him out. She was a wealthy woman and over these past years had become used to procuring what she wanted through money. Money, enough of it, never let you down.

Soon she would be shepherding both her lambs northwards. She imagined the scene as Ginny came running out with the two little girls to greet Josh and their long-lost sister. Oh, and Dell.

She turned her head to where Philippa was walking behind her with the one cloud on her blue horizon.

Dell.

Left to herself, Makepeace would have loaded the prostitute with gold and said good-bye, but Philippa refused to be parted from her. ‘I owe her a great deal, Mama, and she wants a new life.'

She ain't having yours, Makepeace thought. She had the sense not to say so; Philippa's attachment to Dell was strong, as was Dell's to Philippa, and there was no doubt she had done a kindness for which she could never properly be repaid. But Makepeace couldn't stand the woman. Not because of her past trade, nor her disfigurement, nor even the admirable, matter-of-fact stoicism with which she bore it. It was her cockiness. In the novels Makepeace had read, a woman shamed acted like a shamed woman; Dell was cheerful.

The outing to Plymouth's shops to buy her and Philippa some decent clothes had been of teeth-clenching embarrassment. With her disfigured face and in a dress that shouted harlotry, Dell attracted attention. Given a choice, she would have dressed herself at Makepeace's expense in exactly the same style. ‘I need a low-cut bosom, d'ye see,' she said artlessly, ‘it shows I've got
some
decent flesh on me bones.' It was true that her body skin was very fine. ‘And a hat now, it must be big to shade me poor face from the sun. Will you look at that one with the roses, isn't it
gorgeous?
'

She was given no choice. In a light blue linen dress over a white flowered petticoat and with a fichu around its neck and hatted by a simple, wide-brimmed leghorn, she looked, to Makepeace's eyes, considerably less alarming. Lovely, Philippa said: ‘And isn't she brave?'

Makepeace added a light veil, which Dell accepted graciously because, she said, her pimp would then not notice her if they met in the street.

And her lies. When she'd contracted the illness, where, who had nursed her through it, how she had fallen so low: these events were uncertain because she gave different accounts of them to different people.

It was the same with her history. One day she was descended from the great O'Neill of Ulster, the next from the pirate queen of Connaught, Grace O'Malley. She'd been an actress in Dublin before smallpox ruined her career. No, she'd been a friend to Emily, Duchess of Leinster. She'd been forced to leave Ireland because the Duke had designs on her virtue. No, a scion of the Ascendancy had secretly married her and brought her to England, only to abandon her at the insistence of his family, horrified at his entanglement with a Catholic.

She backed up these claims by acting out her idea of a well-born lady so that the sight of a mouse sent her into hysterics and a pretended faint, a baby into a frenzy of diddumsing. She passed beggars with her nose exaggeratedly in the air and was even capable, if they hadn't noticed, of going back to pass them again.

There was one, and only one, consistency in all the stories. At some point she had stood on an English quayside, penniless and weeping, and, for lack of Christian help, been pulled into a life of sin.