Taking Liberties (24 page)

‘More sophisticated, Londoners.'

The Dowager suspected that it was not so much to do with sophistication than with the fact that London was less plagued by escaping Americans than were Plymouth and Exeter. She forbore to say so. A good man, Captain Luscombe, and with none of the prejudice with which her appeal had been met by what she was beginning to think of as ‘Aymer's set'. He was genuinely concerned for the prisoners in his care, ashamed that the Admiralty kept him too short of funds to house and feed them properly and had been stung by John Howard's damning report on conditions at the hospital.

‘Splendid,' he said again. ‘Thank you, your ladyship, and be assured that the money will be well spent.'

She smiled at him. If Luscombe thought that was the end of her interest in the matter, he was mistaken. A good man, but not a good administrator.

The money was indeed going to be spent well—she would see to it. Overwhelmed by his responsibilities as he was, Luscombe would of necessity have to leave the improvements to subordinates who had already proved themselves not only lazy but corrupt. There must be changes—the doctor would have to be dismissed for a start—or wounded men would continue to die unattended and in filth.

However, she would have to go carefully; female interference was never welcome.

She said prettily: ‘Now that my interest has been aroused, Captain, I do hope that I may not be excluded from helping in other ways. Mr Howard writes to me of his insistence that a new hospital should be built.' She raised her hand to show that she understood the good captain's instant alarm. ‘Yes, I know, he has no conception of the disruption and cost such a project would entail. But that old warehouse to the north of the prison—one glimpsed it the other day. Might that not be much more cheaply and effectively brought into use? Does it belong to the Admiralty?'

She didn't add that she knew it did. She'd already inspected the place.

Luscombe was doubtful. ‘I agree the warehouse would be healthier, dear lady,' he said, ‘and it certainly belongs to the Admiralty. But it's outside the perimeter fence. Couldn't be guarded.'

The solution was staring him in the face though the Dowager refrained from rubbing his nose in it; one mustn't irritate men by appearing clever. She said: ‘Of course, how foolish of me,' but kept the conversation going on the subject, waiting, issuing hints so light that they landed on him like feathers, until he said thoughtfully:

‘I suppose we could move the fence.'

She greeted the idea like the discovery of gravity. ‘What a splendid thought, Captain. You gentlemen are so inventive. Would you wish me to engage some of Admiral Edgcumbe's own workmen on the project? He is enthusiastic for it and you know how slow official channels would be otherwise.'

She overwhelmed him with powerful and noble connections. ‘The beds . . . perhaps you would wish me to employ the people who supplied the furniture for our servants' quarters at Chantries. The Earl found their work both cheap and of good quality . . . I know that Lady Edgcumbe is eager to see to the provision of linen . . .'

By the time she'd finished with him, she was virtually the unofficial site engineer in charge of contractors, responsible only to him.

‘My dear Lady Stacpoole, I hope you will not overtire yourself on these matters. You have your own concerns—I hear you are moving to Babbs Cove. Will the journeying not be too much for you?'

She waved away such triviality. ‘Yes, I am moving tomorrow—the Admiral is lending me his barge again—but it is not too far, one can come back and forth fairly easily.'

‘Then I should be grateful for your assistance.' He wiped his face with a large handkerchief. ‘I will not hide from you that this continuing influx of prisoners proves a great trial, a great trial. The French—well, they are the French and always recalcitrant but the Americans . . . rioting only yesterday over the state of their food, escape attempts . . .'

‘You are beset, Captain. In the circumstances, I think you manage wonderfully. I have written to Lord North to say so.'

‘Did you?' He was pitifully grateful.

‘Indeed.' While carefully stressing Luscombe's industry to the Prime Minister, she had not scrupled to expound the prison's evils. She didn't tell him this, either.

‘I have had Grayle brought to the garden room,' Luscombe said.

‘Thank you. I hope to have the contraptions fitted on him today. Have you received any reply from the Admiralty?' Of the many scarifying horrors at Millbay, it seemed to her that the retention in prison of a handless man was the most shameful. She had included it in her letter of protest to the Prime Minister.

‘I fear that they are obdurate. There can be no exchange.' To do him credit, Luscombe was humiliated personally by having to keep Grayle captive. ‘The young man does not help himself, having twice attempted to escape—a marvel in itself, I suppose. He had help, of course, but if he does it again I fear he may face the Black Hole. I have made an exception in his case so far.' Luscombe sighed. ‘I hope the fitting goes well, though I fear it is no sight for a lady.'

‘Captain, my husband's final illness was prolonged and distressing. Having attended on him throughout, I can make some claim to being a nurse.'

He laughed politely, as she had intended him to, as if she'd said she made a good fist at sweeping chimneys. Yet she found herself wondering why female professional nurses should attract such opprobrium or, for that matter, why they were the sort of women to whom opprobrium was attached.

The sexual element, she supposed; decent women being expected to have no familiarity with the male body other than their husband's. Were men so intrinsically vile that, even when ill, they might be expected to ravish their carers? Or women so abandoned that the sight of male anatomy, however frail, sent them into a fury of lust? Or sensitive to the point that they must faint at the sight of a boil? She recalled Aymer's body as it had been towards the end. What a strange conception it was that men had of women.

She left the problem and, calling for Joan, proceeded to Captain Luscombe's garden room and Lieutenant Forrest Grayle.

The guards were used to the arrangement now and left him unbound in her presence; today they had even gone outside into the garden to smoke their pipes. Good, perhaps she could persuade the boy to talk to her.

‘Well, they are finished, Lieutenant,' she said. ‘Mr Rutley has worked to the casts as best he can and now we must see if the result fits.'

She had hired the artificer who produced wooden legs for amputees at the naval hospital in Plymouth to carve artificial hands, working from casts she'd had made by the Millbay cook from plaster applied to Grayle's stumps.

Artificer Rutley had been intrigued, having made single hands a-plenty for various wounded but never two. ‘Careless of him,' he'd said, ‘losing both.'

‘I gather he was trying to raise a sail that had come down during the battle for his ship. A piece of cannonball sliced through the rope and his hands with it.'

The information had been vouchsafed to her by Captain Luscombe who'd had it from the master of Grayle's ship. Grayle himself said nothing of it. Since the evening when he'd refused her offer to write to Martha, he'd said nothing at all.

Today he sat in a chair, leaning forwards and staring at the carpet, his capless, Viking head hanging down with indifference to everything about him.

‘Stand up, Lieutenant.' The Dowager had learned not to show sympathy. ‘Go ahead, Joan.'

‘Let's take our jacket off. There. Us'll leave the shirt for now. Now our sleeves up, there's a good boy.' Joan insisted on treating her charge like a baby which, in many ways, Diana considered him to be.

The stumps were exposed; they'd been instantly plunged into a caulking barrel by a crew member who'd been hauling on the rope with him, cauterizing them in the smoking pitch and preserving the young man's life, but the result was unpretty.

The Dowager reached into her holdall and brought out the hands Tobias had fetched that morning from the naval hospital. A harness attached to the wrist section, which ran nearly to the elbow, was for buckling around the shoulder. With considerable skill, Rutley had articulated the wooden fingers by inserting steel spirals at the point where there should be joints. By using his right hand to shape the fingers of the left, and vice versa, Lieutenant Grayle would be able to pick things up, even to grip.

Unresisting, the boy allowed Joan to insert his stumps into the arm section, standing like an ox while she buckled on each harness.

‘There, now we'm vitty.' Joan's Devon accent, the Dowager noticed, had gained force since her return to her home county. ‘In't we splendid, your ladyship?'

‘Indeed we are.' Perhaps we should have painted them flesh-coloured, she thought. Artificer Rutley had gone for serviceability rather than aesthetic effect; the raw wooden fingers with their steel insets suggested the claws of a raptor. However . . . ‘Don't you think they're splendid, Lieutenant . . . Oh, my dear boy.'

Tears were coursing down Grayle's cheeks. ‘Take 'em off.'

‘Try them,' the Dowager pleaded.

‘Take 'em off, take 'em
off
.' He was shaking his arms so that the hands wobbled on their harness like floppy gloves. He sank back into his chair. ‘I don't want 'em, I don't want anything.'

She sat down beside him. ‘Of course you do. You want freedom, you keep trying to escape.'

‘So I may find a cliff and throw myself off it.' The boy's voice went into a wail. ‘They don't let you kill yourself in here. I know, I've tried.'

In the shocked silence, the Dowager's eyes sought her maid's.
What's to be done?
Joan raised her hands helplessly.

Diana had tried to imagine what it was like for the boy, his captivity doubled, tripled, by the extra imprisonment of handlessness, unable to dress or feed himself, open a door, write a letter, turn the leaves of a book . . . in her mind, she had listed the thousand things he could not do.

Viciously, he yelled one more: ‘I can't even wipe my own arse.'

She hadn't thought of that one.

What to do, what to do? She had been so pleased with the artificial hands, sure that they would provide him with some capability—which, given a little adjustment and practice, she was still certain that they would.

He'd gone into the pit of despair that only youth could dig for itself; having been beautiful, healthy, rich, the object of an adoring mother, he could not tolerate to be less than he had been.
When you are my age, young man, you will know that life is to be valued under almost any circumstances and be less careless with it.

Should she refuse to remove the hands and say that he must learn to use them, thus compounding the very helplessness and dependence that was maddening him?

She said: ‘Very well. We will take them off. They need adjustment. In time they will be of greater use than you think. I want you to look ahead, think of the estate in Virginia you will inherit, the servants who can make up for any deficiencies . . .'

‘I ain't going back. I ain't never going back. D'you think I'd let Miss Henrietta see this freak? She'd run a mile.'

Of course. There would be a Henrietta, very young, very pretty.

‘Not if she loves you. You can still walk, talk, make her happy.' She thought to herself he still had the other pieces of his anatomy which Henrietta might appreciate if she truly loved him, but one did not talk of such things. ‘And think of your poor mother and her great joy when you return to her alive after the war.'

‘I ain't never going back.'

‘
Lieutenant
.' The rap of her voice snapped his head up so that he looked at her for the first time. ‘I am sending you safely back to Martha Grayle one of these days if I have to use parcel post.'

He said wearily: ‘It don't matter. Why are you concernin' yourself with me?'

‘Let us say I consider myself
in loco parentis
. You
will
go back. And if your attitude to adversity is anything like your countrymen's, it will be sooner rather than later since America will have abjectly surrendered. In the meantime I shall see that those arm pieces are padded, which should help the fit. Next week you will start to use them. I have not gone to trouble and expense in order for them to go to waste.'

As Joan unbuckled the harness, the boy said, looking at her: ‘America won't surrender, ma'am. Not nohow.'

She surprised herself by saying: ‘Good. Then neither must you.'

But I
want
America to surrender, she thought. Why am I encouraging the enemy? Because he wasn't the enemy to her; he was a beaten child, as all the maimed and sick of Millbay were beaten children. She had lifted the flap on a dark cellar of misery and had been allowed a glimpse that had thereby made her responsible for it.
In loco parentis
. Who would lighten it if she did not? To let the flap fall and walk away would be desertion of a call even higher than that of country.

It was rather jolly, billowing along a coast of such amazing diversity. Cliffs changed colour from the slaty blue-grey of gneiss to red sandstone, flecked by sudden white beaches and splintered by mysterious caves.

Tobias had gone to Babbs Cove by road, driving the coach and taking linen and china and other necessities she had purchased in Plymouth from her alarmingly dwindling resources. The barge was carrying the beds and such pieces as Lucy Edgcumbe had insisted on giving her for her new home: an easy chair, a charming writing bureau, a looking-glass.