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Authors: Diana Norman

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BOOK: Taking Liberties
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Makepeace nodded in sympathy. ‘Blood money,' she said.
As in Boston, so here; the hatred of smugglers for the Customs was compounded by the reward paid to captains of Revenue cruisers for handing over captured men to the navy. Makepeace sometimes thought that it was the unremitting impressment of its men, more than taxes, which had scattered the seeds of hatred along the American coastline.
‘Well, don't you let him come rummaging round while I'm at the hospital. I'm starting next week.'
‘Me too.' Ready for a fight, Philippa looked round from the chair on which she was standing to clean the windows—evening sun showed up marks. Dell was chopping potatoes in the kitchen for Mrs Hallewell to put with lamb in the pasties that were Zack's and Simeon's supper.
Makepeace had been afraid of it. ‘You can't come, Pippy. It's not decent for an unmarried girl to . . . to see hospital sights.'
‘Dell isn't married and you said she could go next time.'
‘Well, Dell's circumstances are exceptional.' She often wondered what the village made of Dell.
Philippa clambered down from the chair. ‘Please come outside, Mama.'
Zack gave a whistle of anticipation.
They went into the forecourt. The setting sun washed beach, inn and houses with pink, emphasizing the loom of T'Gallants on its clifftop by a gold rim while leaving its landward side in darkness.
‘She'll be lonely up there now her maid's gone,' Makepeace said.
Philippa ignored her. ‘You are not going to stop me coming to the hospital, Mama. I will not be left behind this time. It isn't as if it's dangerous.'
‘Philippa, it won't be decent.' Having never been inside one nor knowing anybody who had, Makepeace's idea of a hospital was guesswork. ‘There'll be nakedness, screaming, sickness like you've never known. You'd have to empty pots for men with limbs blown off. You're too young.'
Quietly, Philippa said: ‘I'm not too young to know about men's limbs being blown off. I saw it happen.'
I keep forgetting, Makepeace thought. The prim little person before her had witnessed more atrocity—and survived witnessing it—than she had.
‘I'll discuss it with ladyship,' she said.
From the window, Zack said: ‘You let the maid help out if her wants to. Reckon when your parts is blown off, it don't matter who sees ee.'
‘Oh shut up,' Makepeace told him. But she knew she had lost.
 
On the day before they set off for the hospital, two men arrived on horseback and took the Dowager's coach and team away. It was Zack, looking after the horses during Sanders's absence, who alerted Makepeace.
‘What you doing?' Makepeace shouted at them, emerging from the inn with Dell behind her and her unloaded pistol in her hand. Zack was already threatening the newcomers with a pitchfork.
‘All's well, madam,' one of the men said, nervously, eyeing the pistol. ‘We're sent by the Earl of Stacpoole.' They were identically and smartly dressed in cocked hats and caped coats.
‘Don't care who you're sent by, that's her ladyship's property.' She thrust the pistol into Dell's hands. ‘Make one move with them horses, she pulls the trigger and that man there'll toss your carcases on the dungheap.'
‘Sure, it'll be a pleasure, Missus.' Dell was all at once an O'Neill who'd been hunted too far through the mountains of Connaught by English soldiery.
Up at T'Gallants, the Dowager was biting her lip but protesting that it was all right. ‘Those are my son's coachmen and apparently he has a need for the equipage. They are to take it back to him.'
‘Only got the one, has he?'
Diana tried to smile and couldn't. ‘I will not hide from you that my son disapproves of my activities at the hospital and does not wish to aid me in them. It is understandable that he would prefer it if I returned to our estate in Bedfordshire.'
Makepeace didn't think it was understandable at all. ‘I can send 'em away,' she offered.
The Dowager shook her head. ‘He has the right, it is his coach. However, we are in a difficulty now that yours, too, is away. How are we to get to Plymouth?'
‘Easy. We'll hire a couple of ponies off Ralph Gurney, go along the cliff path. Zack tells me it's quicker, anyway.'
From the oriel window, the Dowager watched Makepeace stride back across the bridge, take the pistol off the other woman and gesture rudely with it.
One of the men was pleading for something—refreshment, probably; it was a long way to the next hostelry. Makepeace pointed at the horse trough and went inside.
Robert, don't reduce us both to this.
She had written to him, apologizing for losing her temper.
 
Thanks to the goodwill of the new owner, I am able to remain at T'Gallants and fulfil what I see as my duty. But do not cast me off, my dear boy. Repudiate me, explain to all and sundry that I am gone eccentric in my old age, but do not cast me off.
 
Her distress was for him and the man he had become. Underneath that increasing corpulence, that too-young middle age, was the desperation for an authority like his father's. If he could not control his mother, what hope was there of commanding the rest of his life or his position at Court, which he held by inheritance as his father's son and was, in fact, beyond his capacity? He might be revealed as the small boy beaten and terrified by a man he had nevertheless regarded as the acme of what a nobleman should be. He had seen obedience accorded to Aymer by vast estates, heard his father's opinions received respectfully by men of high standing, witnessed his father's behaviour overlooked and excused because of his wealth. He had taken Aymer's form and forced his own character into it like a hermit crab into a much bigger shell.
 
Robert, I beg you to understand I do not adopt another point of view from contrariness. I do not believe that I shall bring the government down by administering to wounded men, but will help to uphold it, for if we do not show principle and humanity when we fight rabble, we are no better than they and have lost our cause.
 
Over and over during his childhood, her heart had broken as if it mended itself only to break again. When she'd tried to protect him, the intervention had cost him a heavier beating than if she had not. She could still hear his agonized: ‘No, no, Mama. Don't interfere, Father is right.'
 
If I broke my wedding promise to love your father, I hope I held true in honouring and obeying him. But your nature and mine are different from his and it would do violence to both if we continue to distort them into his image now that he has gone.
 
She sealed the letter.
I can't return to being the woman I was. I am not that woman anymore. Be free of him, my darling boy, as I am.
 
They were shaggy Dartmoor ponies with an independent eye—and no side-saddle.
‘How are we to ride them?'
‘Astride.' Makepeace was wearing a large, faded, tammy overdress, borrowed from Mrs Hallewell, such as had been popular in the twenties. It was tied down the front and showed only a plain linen unrevealing bodice. Her hair was tucked into a voluminous mob cap. The ensemble had been agreed as a uniform for the hospital where the less attention women attracted the better.
In one movement, she reached between her legs, grabbed the back of her skirt, brought it through and began tucking it into the dress's ties.
The Dowager glanced anxiously at Tobias and saw him blink. ‘People will see us.'
Makepeace glanced around. ‘What people?'
A glorious summer was turning into a glorious autumn. On their left the sea might have been lacquered blue and was scattered with bad-tempered, becalmed little fishing boats waiting for shoals to pass by. The path went along moss-coloured, russet-capped cliffs, sometimes descending to dunes where daisies grew among spiky grass before rising steeply back to views of the glittering Channel and short-springing turf starred with yellow cinque-foil and clicking with grasshoppers. Butterflies, disturbed by the beat of the ponies' hooves, flew up from the umbellifers and bounced around the riders in the clear air.
Down again to a white beach where Makepeace suddenly yelled ‘whee' and cantered her pony along the water's edge, throwing up spray, and the Dowager, shouting the halloo, held on to her hat and followed her. Tobias kept to the sand, smiling.
There were people: the occasional women and children gathering molluscs on the white beaches, a shepherd, the chatty ferryman who took them over the estuary of the River Erme.
Awkwardly, the Dowager said: ‘You will note that Tobias is free of his collar, are you not, Tobias? It was my oversight that he wore it so long. M. de Vaubon pointed it out.'
So did I, but I'll wager not so nicely. Poor thing, she has to mention his name.
As they approached the outskirts of Plymouth, the women let down their skirts, left the ponies at the nearest livery and hired a carriage to take them the rest of the way, Makepeace sitting in the front with Tobias.
‘This is very expensive,' said Diana from the back.
‘I'm a very rich woman,' Makepeace said. It hadn't sunk in until now that the Dowager was not, yet she remembered the Stacpooles being renowned for their wealth. That damn son's keeping her short, she thought.
At the gate into the hospital compound, the Dowager said: ‘Primrose.' Captain Luscombe's passwords were unimaginative and had not been changed since the previous week anyway. ‘And here we are,' she said.
So many. Makepeace's eye was pulled down a vista of suffering that seemed to her at that moment to have no end. ‘We had an influx last week,' the Dowager said. ‘The
Parrot
, forty-nine wounded, which brought us up to eighty-seven. God send we have no more for a while, there are only beds for ninety.'
A warehouse, thought Makepeace. It
is
a warehouse—for perishable goods.
She followed the Dowager up the aisle, wanting to see Josh but unable to stop looking at each face as she passed, finding a rainbow of men, mostly white but a heavy sprinkling of black, here and there a Lascar, one Chinese. Only a few looked back; once a man was well enough to take an interest in his surroundings, Diana had told her, Dr Maltby sent him back to the prison.
‘This is Hedley,' the Dowager said. ‘Hedley, meet Watts, Farnham, Payne and Davis. Hedley is here to take some of the domestic work off your hands, gentlemen.'
It was obvious from that moment that there would be no objection to women doing the menial work.
‘ 'Bout time,' said Payne. ‘All very well your layin' down rules, your ladyship, but there's too many patients. Near a hundred on 'em, that's . . .' There was a pause as he worked it out. ‘. . . that's twenty-five each.'
Makepeace would have had more sympathy if, when she and Diana had come in, the orderlies hadn't been sitting round a table under the stairs to the loft, playing cards. Taking the work off those hands, she thought, wouldn't take much lifting.
‘I hope to remedy that today,' the Dowager said. ‘Have the patients had their morning drink?'
‘Not yet.'
‘Then get to it.' Even Makepeace jumped. This was a countess with a whip in her boot.
Watching them go, the Dowager said: ‘You will find their initials instructive. W. F. P. and D. War, Famine, Plague and Death. I call them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Now then. Take that basket and pick up the soiled linen in the bucket by each bed and take it to the laundry. You will find your young man behind that curtaining where we put the more seriously ill. You may have two minutes with him, no longer. There's work to be done.'
‘Yes'm.'
Dragging a big washing basket, Makepeace lifted the canvas sail that separated five beds near the door from the rest of the ward. Josh was in the middle bed, gasping. His eyes were closed.
Makepeace fell on her knees beside him. ‘Josh dear, Josh. It's Missus. I'm here to make you well.'
Either he didn't hear her or else he was concentrating too hard on the business of getting air in and out of his damaged lung. She stroked his hair and put her cheek against his. It was dry and hot.
‘Hang on, Josh. You're going to get well. Missus is here.'
His upper torso was naked except for a bandage, which was white and clean, like the pillow under his head. She could have cried with gratitude for that at least. ‘Hang on, lamb pie. Keep breathing.'
‘Missus?' It was the tiniest whisper of precious air.
‘Yes, Josh. Here now. Keep breathin', boy.'
‘Missus,' he said comfortably, and turned his head so that it rested on her hand. She let it stay until she saw he was asleep and then, as she kissed him, she slid it away and went out.
There was work to be done.
Chapter Sixteen
THEY established a routine. Makepeace and Philippa attended the hospital on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Dell and Tobias took their place on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. The Dowager went in every day, to see to correspondence, prevent the cooks and the quartermaster selling too many of the hospital's supplies for profit, do the ordering, try and find more nurses and ensure that the orderlies didn't slack. Tobias, her escort, also went every day and became part of the team—treated as a menial, like the women, and, like the women, working four times as hard as the other men.
Everybody went in on Sundays because, otherwise, the hospital would have been virtually deserted—that was when three out of the four orderlies took a day off.
The women were not allowed to outrage propriety by staying overnight so that during the hours of darkness, the patients were left in the care of one orderly and the guards.
BOOK: Taking Liberties
13.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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