Taking Liberties (2 page)

She could have given way and become a cowering ghost in her own home but she found defiance from somewhere. The man waxed on terror; she must deprive him of it. As a defence she appropriated boredom, appearing to find everything tedious, complying with the demands of his marriage bed as if they were wearisome games rather than sexual degradation, earning herself thrashings but withstanding even those with seeming indifference.

It was protection not only against her husband but
for
him; in the sight of God she'd taken him for better or worse, his escutcheon should not tarnished by any complaint of hers.

Nor her own. Though by no means as long as the Stacpooles', the Countess's ancestry was equally proud. After a somewhat dubious foundation by Walter Pomeroy, a ruffian who, like Francis Drake, had charged out from Devonian obscurity to fling himself and a large part of a mysterious fortune at the feet of Elizabeth, thereby gaining a knighthood and the Queen's favour, the Pomeroys had conducted themselves with honour. Young Paulus Pomeroy had refused to betray the message he carried for Charles I though tortured by Cromwell's troops. Sir William had gone into exile with Charles II. At Malplaquet, Sir Rupert had saved John Churchill's life at the cost of his own.

The wives had been equally dutiful; happy or miserable, no breath of scandal attended their marriages. Like them, the Dowager threw back to the Middle Ages. Had the Earl been a Crusader, his absence in the Holy Land would have provided his Countess with blessed relief from abuse yet she would have defended his castle for him like a tigress until his return. In this disgraceful age, other women might abscond with lovers, run up debts, involve themselves in divorce, travel to France to give birth to babies not their husband's, but Pomeroy wives gritted their teeth and abided by their wedding vows because they had made them.

One's married name might belong to a ravening beast but the name was greater than the man. For Diana, true aristocracy was a sacrament. One did not abandon Christianity because a particular priest was venal. It was the bloodline that counted and its honour must be upheld, however painfully, with a stoicism worthy of the Spartan boy gnawed by the fox. Better that Society should shrug and say: ‘Well, the Countess seems to tolerate him,' rather than: ‘Poor, poor lady.' One held one's head high and said nothing.

Such public and private dignity had discommoded Aymer, put him off his stroke. Gradually, a spurious superiority was transferred from him to her that he found intimidating—as much as he could be intimidated by anything—and even gained his unwilling respect. After that, like the bully he was, he turned his attentions to more fearful victims so that she was spared infection by the syphilis that caused his final dementia.

By then she'd plastered her hurts so heavily with the appearance of finding things tiresome that its mortar had fused into bone and blood. The naive young girl had become static, a woman who moved and spoke with a lassitude that argued fatigue, her drooping eyes seeming to find all the world's matters beneath her, thus making people either nervous or resentful at what they interpreted as disdain. If they'd peered into them closely they might have seen that those same eyes had been leeched of interest or warmth or surprise by having looked too early on the opening to Hell. Nobody peered so closely, however.

Under the influence of the 1770 malmsey and the Earl's absence, his funeral party threatened unseemly cheerfulness. Instead of sitting in her chair to receive condolences, the Dowager Countess circled the great room at her slow, giraffe-like pace to remind the more raucous groups by her presence of the respect due to the departed.

There was a hasty ‘We were remembering, your ladyship . . .' and then reminiscences of Aymer's japes, the time when he'd horse-whipped a Rockingham voter during the '61 election, when he'd thrown his whisky and cigar at Jane Bonham's pug because it yapped too much, causing it to burst into flame, the time when . . . Endearing eccentricities of the old school. ‘We won't look on his like again.'

There was necessity for only one verbal reproof. Francis Dashwood was being overloud and humorous on the subject of her husband's last illness—
Dashwood
of all people—and met her arrival with defiance. ‘I was saying, Diana, the pox is a damn hard way to go.'

The Dowager Countess hooded her eyes. ‘For your sake, my lord, one hopes not.'

She passed on to where Alice was exciting herself over the alterations she proposed for Chantries. ‘. . . for I have always thought it sadly plain, you know. Robert and I plan something more rococo, more
douceur de vivre
as the French say, more . . .' Her voice trailed away at the sight of her mother-in-law but she rallied with triumph. ‘Of course, dear
Maman
, none of this until we have altered the Dower House
à ton goût
.'

The Dower House, the overblown cottage on the estate that Aymer had used as a sexual playroom for his more local liaisons. She had never liked the place. Robert and Alice were expecting her to set up home in it—the conventional dower house for the conventional dowager—no doubt to spend her days embroidering comforts for a troop of little Alices and Roberts. Extend twenty-two years of imprisonment into a lesser cell.

‘Make it nice for you, Mater,' Robert said.

‘Thank you, my dear boy.' This was not the time to discuss it, nor did she want to hurt him, so she merely said gently: ‘We shall see.'

He was, and always had been, her agony. It had been a mistake to have the baby in her arms when Aymer strode into the room after the birth; it should have been in its cradle, she should have pretended indifference, complained of the pain of its delivery. Instead, she'd been unguarded, raw with an effusion of love. Immediately, the child had become a hostage.

She had failed her son, could have failed him no more if she
had
run off; he'd been taken away from her: a wet nurse, a nurse, a tutor, school—all of them chosen to distance her from the boy and put his reliance on the caprice of a father who'd both terrified and fascinated him. Her mind trudged round the old, old circular paths. Should she have stood against Aymer more? But revenge would have been visited on the boy as much as her; warring parents would have split him in two. Yet what had she been to her poor child? A figure drifting mistily on the edge of a world in which women were cattle or concubines.

By the time she'd achieved some definition of her own, it was too late; both son and mother were too distanced from each other for the relationship that might have been. Individuality had been stripped from the boy, not a clever child in any case, and he'd opted for a mediocre amiability that offended no one and proved impossible for his mother to penetrate. She'd tried once to explain, said she'd always loved him, was sorry . . . He'd shied away. ‘
Can't think what you mean, Mater
.' Now, here he was at twenty years old, a genial, corpulent, middle-aged man.

And devoted to his wife. Whatever else, the Dowager Countess could have crawled in gratitude to her daughter-in-law. In this sallow, jealous little woman, Robert had found refuge and clung to her like ivy to a wall, as she did to him.

The couple talked to each other always of things, never ideas, but they talked continually; they were happy in a banality in which Diana would have been pleased to join them if Alice hadn't kept her out so ferociously that Robert, once again, was taken from her.

Yes, well.

Tobias was at her side. ‘A methenger for Lord North, your ladyship. '

Alice almost elbowed her aside. ‘What is that, Tobias?'

‘Methenger at the door, your ladyship. For Lord North.'

‘I'll see to it.' She bustled off.

Tobias hovered. ‘A letter came today, your ladyship,' he said, in a low voice. ‘Addrethed to the Countess. Her ladyship took it.'

Diana said lazily, ‘Lady Alice is the Countess now, Tobias.'

‘I think it wath written before hith lordship died, your ladyship. It wath for you.'

‘Then her ladyship will undoubtedly tell me about it.'

Tobias was the most trusted and longest-serving of the footmen but even he must not imply criticism of Alice.

‘Diana, don't tell me you're retainin' that balbutient blackamoor. Never could see why Aymer kept him on. Niggers look such freaks in white wigs, in my opinion. And the lisp, my dear . . .'

Diana's raised eyebrow suggested it was unwise of the Duchess of Aylesbury to include ‘freak' and ‘wig' in one sentence, the edifice on her grace's own head being nearly a yard high and inclined to topple, making her walk as if she had the thing balanced on her nose.

Actually, it was typical of Aymer, on finding that Tobias's blackness and lisp irritated his guests, to promote him to the position of head footman and thereby confront visitors with his announcements.

It was also typical of Tobias that he had kept the place by sheer efficiency. Poor Tobias. Alice and Robert, not having the assurance with which Aymer had flouted social taste, would undoubtedly get rid of him.

North was coming back. Normally those in the room would not have noticed his entrance but they did now. He had a paper in hand and greyness about the mouth. She didn't hear what he said but the reaction of those who could told her what it was; the man might have been releasing wasps into the room.

He made his way to her to kiss her hand. ‘Forgive me, your ladyship. I must return to London. The French have finally come in on the side of America and declared war.'

It had been inevitable. She said coolly: ‘We shall beat them, my lord. We always have.'

‘No doubt about it, your ladyship.' But he looked older than he had a few minutes before.

She heard Dashwood talking unguardedly to Robert in his loud voice. Dashwood was always unguarded. ‘Bad enough shipping supplies to our armies already, now we've got the damn French to harry us as we do it. I tell you, Robert, our chances of beating that lawless and furious rabble have grown slimmer this day.'

The Dowager was shocked. Locked away in looking after her husband, she had paid scant attention to the progress of the war, assuming that mopping up a few farmers and lawyers, which was all that the population of the American colony seemed to consist of, would be a fairly simple matter. That the war had already lasted two years must, she'd thought, be due to the vast distances the British army had to cover in order to complete the mopping up. That the rebels could actually win the war had not crossed her mind.

She glanced enquiringly at Lord George Germain who, as colonial secretary, was virtually the minister for war.

‘Y'see, ma'am,' he said, ‘we were countin' on Americans loyal to King George bein' rather more effective against the rebels than they're provin' to be.' He saw her face and said hurriedly: ‘Don't mistake me, we'll win in the end, but there's no doubt the entry of the French puts an extra strain on the Royal Navy.' He brightened. ‘There's this to be said for them, though, their entry into the war will give it more popularity with our own giddy multitude. They've always gone at the frog-eaters with a will.'

There was also this to be said for the news: it cleared the room. Nearly everybody in it had a duty either to the prosecution of the war or a protection of their investments.

She was enveloped in the smell of funereal clothes, sandalwood from the chests in which they'd been packed away, mothballs, stale sweat, best scent and the peculiarly sour pungency of black veiling. The gentlemen raised Diana's languid hand to their faces and dropped it, like hasty shoppers with a piece of fish; her female peers pecked at her cheek; inferiors bobbed and hurried away.

No need to see them to their carriages, that was for Alice and Robert now.

She was left alone. It was an unquiet, heavy room. On the great mantel, a frieze looted from Greece preserved death in marble as barbarians received the last spear-thrust from helmeted warriors in a riot of plunging horses. The red walls were noisy with the tableaux of battle, Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet. Mounted Stacpoole generals posed, sword aloft, at the head of their troops, cannons fired from ship to ship at Beachy Head and Quiberon Bay.

And now France again. It had been no platitude to assure North it would be beaten, she was sure it would be, just as America would be; Aymer had always said that was what France was for, to be beaten by the English. ‘
One Englishman can lick ten bloody Frenchman. And twenty bloody Americans. And a hundred bloody Irish
.' Though it was taking overlong to force America's surrender she accepted his precept, just as she'd accepted his right to tyrannize his fiefdom through right of blood even while she abhorred the tyranny itself.

I'm his creature, she thought.

She walked to the windows to try and recapture the uplift of freedom she'd felt on leaving the chapel but the horizon beyond the lake marked a future she did not know what to do with.

As Countess of Stacpoole, Aymer's hostess, charity-giver, political supporter to his Tory placemen, his loyal behind-the-scenes electioneer and, at the last, his nurse, she had at least known employment. All gone now.

She took in deep, hopeless breaths. She should be smelling roses, there was a neat mass of them below the terrace, but she couldn't rid the stink of decay from her nostrils. Since his death they'd burned herbs but, for her, the odour of that jerking, gangrenous body still haunted the house, like his screams.

His reliance on her had been shameless, demanding her presence twenty-four hours of the day, throwing clocks and piss-pots at doctors, even poor Robert, shrieking that he wanted only her to attend him—as if their marriage had been loving harmony.