Taking Liberties (31 page)

She called softly to him. He looked both ways and hurried towards her. He was out of breath. ‘Decided. Ought to be. Here.'

She took his hand and held it against her cheek. ‘What's the time?'

‘Can't see.'

But just then the clocks of Plymouth told them it was half past eleven.

Makepeace kept turning her head to scan what length of the wall she could see. ‘He'll come out somewhere along here? You're sure?'

‘Philippa's sure. She's angry with you, not letting her come.'

‘There's the patrol, look. It passes every five minutes. He'll have to be quick.' She began rubbing her hands up and down, thigh to knee, knee to thigh.

The clocks struck the quarter. They seemed more distant than before, as if they were losing interest. It's a wild goose chase. It was just a picture, I knew it, he never intended to come.

More bobbing lights along the top of the wall, then darkness.

Beasley nudged her and pointed. ‘Something on the wall. There.'

Perhaps there was; the shards of glass that otherwise reflected the moonlight had developed a dark gap, as if somebody had flung a mat across.

She thought, afterwards, that she saw hands reaching up but her memory of the moment remained confused by the hell that broke out in it. The Plymouth clocks rang for midnight, the great bell of the prison began to toll, there was shouting, and from much nearer, so hideously near that the two watchers ducked, came the sound of musket fire.

‘ONLY a little cheese and fruit tonight.' After the landlord's funeral, she had been required, for form's sake, to partake of a pasty or patty, or whatever they called the thing, and was not hungry.

Joan, who had drunk too freely, had gone to bed.

‘Shall I therve it in the Great Hall, your ladyship?'

‘Of course.' She always ate there; she hoped there was no meaning in his question. ‘And send Mrs Green to me.'

When he'd gone, she crossed to the throne chair and made sure that its bolts were firmly in place. If the Frenchman disregarded her refusal to dine with him and came for her by way of the shaft he would find himself both mistaken and locked out. She must get the thing bricked up; she would not be prey to villains who thought to come and go as they pleased.

A rogue, she thought. A rogue and an actor. His speech at the inn praising the late Mr Hobbs had been a performance, a compelling one—which was why she'd been unable to drag her eyes away from him as he made it—but a performance nevertheless.

She looked out of the wreckers' window and saw
La Petite Margot
anchored in the bay, her riding light reflected in the water. On the beach, dark against the light sand, was a rowing boat, indicating that whoever had come ashore was still ashore.

He will be at the Pomeroy Arms, she thought, and went to sit in her favourite chair by the oriel window where scented night air came through its open lights with the sound of revelry from the inn.

She had been pleased by the encounter with her villagers, smugglers though they might be. Most courteous and respectful.

Why the Hedley woman had also been welcomed into their midst, she could not think, nor what she had wanted with Babbs Cove in the first place. Something to do with smuggling, perhaps; a woman like that would not scruple to make money from the trade. Well, she had gone away empty-handed as far as T'Gallants was concerned and it was to be hoped that this day would see the last of her.

Remembering how Mrs Hedley had seemed more at home among the people at the inn than she herself, the Dowager experienced . . . what was it? Wistfulness? Jealousy? But, of course, she was a common woman among commoners and spoke their language. Inevitably, she herself must remain isolated by her class from the people down there who talked and laughed together.

The loneliness of privilege, she thought, the privilege of loneliness.

It had been impossible not to contrast the funeral she had just attended with Aymer's, the emotion and camaraderie present in the impoverished little church with the lack of it in the over-decorated chapel at Chantries.

Past Pomeroys were recorded here and there on its walls, though their bones lay in the private chapels of other houses in other counties. There had been no memorial at all to Sir Walter.

Mainly, the wooden plaques on the walls of Babbs Cove's church bore witness to the price the sea demanded from its users. ‘. . . Drowned at sea in his seventeenth year.' ‘. . . Lost at sea, aged sixty.' Sons, husbands, fathers. On one plaque, fourteen names, ten from the same family, spoke of the loss involved when the
Jolly Harry
went down off Start Point in the gale of '89.

A certain Mrs Gurney—from the dates, the Dowager presumed she was Jan's mother—had lived to the age of fifty-seven, her death bewailed by the seven children given to her by a husband who'd drowned twenty-eight years before.

‘Mithith Green, your ladyship.'

The Dowager turned to lecture the only living soul in Babbs Cove who had not attended Henry Hobbs's funeral—and, seeing it face to face for the first time, was stopped by the woman's appearance. ‘Are you ill, Mrs Green?' In the candlelight, the caretaker's skin showed livid over gaunt bones.

‘Well enough.' The voice was hoarse, as if it were rarely used.

‘Please sit down.'

The woman groped at the chair arms before lowering herself into it. Her eyes roamed the hall like someone seeing it for the first time, and every so often they darted back to some spot as if attracted by a sudden movement invisible to anyone else. This, with her hanging grey hair and the constant working of her mouth, would, the Dowager felt, have condemned her to the stake in the days of the Witchfinder General.

Her quarters were on the yet-unexplored upper floors of the west wing but some stimulus kept her on the move by night, using passageways that only she knew, filling the house with murmurs and restlessness as if she awoke its ghosts as she went.

After the funeral, the Dowager had asked one or two of the villagers about her but the response had been vague. ‘Oh, she don't have much to do with us.' ‘Keeps herself to herself, your ladyship.'

‘Mrs Green, I wish to talk to you about the Frenchman who illegally entered this house last night . . . Do you have pain?' The woman had winced.

‘I'm all right.'

‘He calls himself Guillaume de Vaubon and I have reason to know you aided him in—'

The woman had smiled, showing broken teeth. ‘Gil. He's the only one.'

‘The only one of what?'

‘Good to me. Kind, he is. Not like some.'

‘Nevertheless, I am most displeased . . .' Again, she stopped; it was difficult to talk to a woman watching something over your shoulder that wasn't there. How could she dismiss a semi-deranged creature? What would become of her? ‘Have you friends in the village? Relatives?'

‘No. Nobody don't care for me.' The answer was almost casual, yet probably true. ‘Cruel hard, men are. Only Gil—he be good to me.'

Diana began making mental excuses for her. Apart from her lapse in letting the Frenchman in—undoubtedly, it was she who had raised the bolts on the chair-door—the woman could not be accused of neglecting her position. T'Gallants was as clean as one person could keep it, and she had refused entry to Captain Nicholls and his Revenue men in a manner worthy of a Royalist retainer denying the master's castle to Cromwell's troops. To dismiss her because her appearance and manner were unfortunate would be uncharitable.

‘Very well, Mrs Green. I shall overlook it this time, though not again.'

When she had gone, the Dowager sat on.

So the Frenchman was kind, was he? So rare in Mrs Green's experience. So rare in mine.

Oh, face it, woman. You want him to come—as you have never wanted anything.

Today, at the inn, watching him talk, she had been riven. An ugly, overlarge, common, criminal foreigner had set her body and soul agape. She could not understand it, certainly did not wish it. To be wrenched by desire like that, and for such a man, was inappropriate and undignified.

And it terrified her.

An invitation to dinner, inevitably to an
affaire
. . . did she flatter herself? No, the man was French, for him it would be
de rigueur
, a habit, an automatic seduction to which he undoubtedly subjected any woman catching his fancy. For her, it was unthinkable. She had position, honour, to uphold; she could not tumble into a smuggler's bed like some trollop he'd picked up in port.

No, she would not succumb.

Why not? Old age is ahead of you, my dear, and mere self-respect is a cold companion to it.

She knew why not. Because
physically
she could not; she had been Aymer's wife and their marital bed had been so terrible she was condemned to lie on it forever. The extraordinary liquidity of flesh she had felt on looking at the Frenchman today had dried up in the panic of what might be demanded of her tonight.

I am
frightened
.

Dear God, she would never be free of Aymer's chains; she was condemned to sexual timidity until she died. Daylight was too bright for eyes used to the dimness of a cell; safer, so very much safer not to venture out into it. Though the gaoler be dead, she thought, I am still his prisoner.

Therefore the bolts on the legs of the chair-door that led to the shaft were firmly planted in the stone of the floor. As a reminder to herself, she had dressed in black, though it was her best black and did contrast well with her complexion. She was waiting to hear knocking on the wall that would not be answered.

The knock, when it came, fell on the front door. It was a thing she'd not considered—that he would make a conventional entrance.

‘M. Guillaume de Vaubon, your ladyship.'

Tonight he was dressed respectably enough in a quiet frock coat with silver buttons. A plain cocked hat was under his arm and an equally plain wig, tied behind with a bow, adorned his head. Except for his size and the sword, which looked unfashionably serviceable, he was unalarming.

Diana breathed a little easier; she could cope with him.

He even bowed. ‘You look most charming, madame. However . . .' He turned to Tobias who was about to close the doors. ‘The lady requires a cloak.'

‘Yeth, sir.'

He went past her to the chair, tutted to find it wouldn't move and drew up the bolts. ‘We go this way, I think. It is quicker.'

She said: ‘I am not going down there. Alone? With you?'

‘Most certainly not,' he said. ‘Where is the maid?'

‘Asleep.'

He swung the chair outwards. ‘Then Tobias comes too. I must think of my reputation.'

It was like a reprieve. ‘
Tobias comes too
.' How could she not go? There was a silver world outside and on this mad night she would allow herself a little madness. After all, she had been dying to see where the shaft went.

He stretched out a hand. ‘Are you afraid?'

‘Certainly not.' She took his hand and stepped through the doorway into blackness—and onto a platform. Tobias joined them carrying her best grey silk cloak and its huge, matching bonnet. While she tied the bonnet strings, the Frenchman put the cloak around her shoulders without emphasis.

He called, ‘
Faites descendre
,' and and the ropes on either side began to move, giving the impression that the walls around them were going upwards rather than that they were going down.

The three of them descended, terrifyingly, first into darkness and then into a glow.

Into a cavern.

Into where the mermaids went.

A shelf of rock ran round three sides of a tiny lagoon on which floated a small boat. Two men stood on either side of the shaft, easing the ropes so that the platform landed gently on the shelf. A lantern reflected its candle onto the water that in turn sent its flame onto the rock walls in wobbling patterns of light.

A hand like granite in sandpaper took the Dowager's and helped her off the shelf and into the boat. ‘
Attention, madame, ça glisse
.'

‘Alphonse,' said his captain.

‘Good evening, Alphonse.'

‘Mathurin.'

‘Good evening.'

‘Madame.'

Once aboard, the Dowager looked around, seeing no exit. It was like being on a boat in a dark bottle but two powerful strokes took them to a part of the cavern wall that gave a little as the boat's prow touched it.

De Vaubon stood up and pulled a bit of the wall aside like a curtain, and she saw that it
was
a curtain, a long thin hanging of living gorse and grasses that had either matted naturally or been sewn together.

‘Down.'

They crouched while he held it up, passing it from one hand to the other as they went through.

Then they were out in the cove and gentle night air. The light from her own house shone at the top of the cliff above her. She looked back and couldn't see the gap they had come through. She said so.

‘The Revenue does not see it either, not yet,' de Vaubon said.

‘Are we going to your ship?' she asked.

He was pained. ‘Madame, I beg you.
Margot
is not a ship. She is
un cotre
, a cutter.' He gathered his fingers into a bunch and blew a kiss with them towards the boat. ‘Seventy foot. Square-rig and fore-and-aft on both masts. Crew, forty. Cannon, sixteen. The most speedy vessel on seven seas. Yes, she is mine. Yes, we dine aboard.'

Even in the moonlight, it was difficult to see the cutter from the angle of the rowing boat, just a slim black shape on black water. Which grew bigger.