Taking Liberties (38 page)

She sent one of the soldiers for a pitcher of fresh water. ‘I'm very sorry,' she told Josh.

He said: ‘Look after the Missus for me,' then stooped and the heavy door was slammed and bolted behind him.

‘And Captain Luscombe presents his compliments, ma'am, and will you call at his house,' the corporal said.

 
‘It is regrettable,' Luscombe told her, ‘but rules are rules, your ladyship, and I am being harried by Major Huntley to ensure they are kept.'

Major Huntley was his
bête noire
. The military presence, responsible for the prison's security, did not sit well with the navy in charge of the camp's day-to-day running.

‘And I fear, dear lady, that you have been responsible for yet another escape. Did you hear the alarm bell last night?'

‘No.' She was coldly offended. ‘How am I responsible, Captain?' And then knew. ‘Grayle.'

‘Yes. He dug under the fence like a terrier, using those hands you gave him. Made a hole big enough to get out into the road and disappear down it.' Luscombe shook his head; he was becoming a very tired man.

An awful glee overtook her.
Run. Get away. Go home to Martha. Oh, run.

‘We caught him, of course. Fellow the size of a tree and artificial hands tends to be noticeable. But I thought . . . before he goes into the Black Hole . . . you might like to have a word with him.'

She looked at her own hand for a moment before she touched Luscombe's arm. ‘I beg you, Captain. This is not civilized. The boy has suffered enough.'

‘I'm sorry, your ladyship. But if he's able enough to escape, he's able to do his forty days.'

She pressed her lips together. ‘One hopes he will be allowed the use of the hands in that time. You won't take them away from him?'

He smiled a little. ‘No. I don't think even Lieutenant Grayle can dig through concrete.'

‘Where is he?'

‘Out in the garden.'

There were two guards with him again. His arms had been tied behind him once more and he was standing by an arbour that was covered in dog-roses, bending down towards the flowers as if putting the look and scent of their petals into a mental pocket for later. From the corner of his eyes he saw her coming and grinned shamefacedly. ‘Mighty sorry, your ladyship.'

‘Lieutenant, how could you?'

‘Seemed like a good idea at the time, ma'am. The hands worked just dandy, dug like a gopher.' He sucked at his excellent teeth. ‘Would've made it, too,'f I hadn't run into a patrol.'

‘I hope you weren't looking for a cliff this time.'

‘No, ma'am. You taught me that. This time I was going home to Mommy and Henrietta.' He smiled down at her. ‘Guess you better delay that letter to my ma again.'

‘Guess I had.' She broke off a trail of dog-roses and carefully threaded the broken end through a buttonhole of his jacket, so that the scent could reach him. ‘I'm afraid they don't last long.' On impulse, she stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. ‘Good luck, Lieutenant.'

‘Good-bye, ma'am. See you in forty days.'

 
The Dowager had hoped to ease the burden on the women working in the hospital by hiring others, but recruitment was slow to the point of nonexistent. Plymouth's middle-class husbands would not countenance their wives donning a mob cap and emptying enemy chamber pots. And among the working people, with so many men employed in the war, women had their hands full managing their children, homes and vegetable plots as well as trying to keep their husband's shop, stall, livery stable, smallholding, or whatever it was, from going under while he was away.

‘And there are so many ships coming and going that even the prostitutes are too busy,' Diana said, bitterly.

‘One's enough,' Makepeace said.

Diana said, gently: ‘If we had another like her, we would be fortunate.'

‘I know.' Dell still had her airs and graces—she had become a figure of fun to the orderlies—but she worked as hard as anybody.

‘I notice that she won't touch the men,' said Diana, still gentle. ‘She leaves washing and lifting to Tobias.'

‘That's what I don't like about her,' Makepeace burst out. ‘The way she treats Tobias. As if she's better than he is because he's black.'

‘Perhaps she has to feel that she's better than somebody.'

‘Well, she ain't.' She looked at the Dowager. ‘You think I'm hard on her.'

‘Philippa tells me she owes her a great deal. And she has obviously put her old life behind her.'

‘Mmm. Maybe. Well, let's get on . . . What's to be done about the men coming in tomorrow?'

Thanks once more to the Dowager, Royal Navy ships bringing wounded enemy prisoners into Plymouth had been ordered to signal their number as they reached the Sound so that a message could be sent ahead to the hospital. Tomorrow there was to be an influx of eleven—for whom there were not enough beds.

‘I suppose we could put the less serious cases in hammocks,' Diana said. She rubbed her forehead. ‘I'll have to beg them from the quartermaster, obstructive man that he is. How very tiring.'

To Makepeace, who had never heard ladyship utter a personal complaint, this was a confession of exhaustion.

And no wonder, she thought, with what she's up against. Makepeace, who considered herself a champion at organizing, recognized that in the Dowager she had met her superior. Yet the woman faced obstruction everywhere. The male orderlies in particular resented her. ‘We didn't have all this to-do before
she
come,' Payne had grumbled to Makepeace.

‘I heard the patients kept dying.'

‘Why not? Buggers came here to kill
us
.'

And Payne was typical of lower ranks who regarded the wounded, French and American, as hardly worth the saving.

The upper echelons, on the other hand, didn't mind saving them as long as it didn't cost much. But it did. The hospital was full because the Dowager fought tooth and nail to keep the patients in it until, in her opinion, they were able to survive the return to prison. And a full hospital meant extra men to guard it. The Dowager's demand for cleanliness and good food involved more work and expense for the laundry and kitchens.

And when winter came, there would be even greater demands in the way of blankets and firing.

The hospital's success was damning it.

Makepeace patted her hand. ‘You stay here, I'll get the hammocks out of that bastard.'

Watching her go, Diana knew that she would. She saw a Frenchman put up his hand to touch Makepeace's shadow as it went by. Others tried to detain her to talk.

The common touch, Diana thought. She knew it was her loss not to have it; Makepeace Hedley made the patients feel better just by her presence, whereas her own daunted most of them. Where she gave quiet reprimands to the orderlies and was resented, Makepeace yelled at them in Anglo-Saxon and produced not only activity but a grin. After she'd told the prison's head cook that his soup was nothing but piss and pigswill, the hospital broth had begun to contain some nourishment.

Freckles, the Dowager decided. If one had as good a supply of them as Makepeace Hedley, people didn't take one amiss whatever one did. Freckles and courage and a high spirit and that mysterious common touch.

 
Three new women swelled the hospital nursing ranks. Having circulated every institution she could think of with a request for medical maids, the Dowager unearthed a pair of twenty-year-old female twins from the local asylum.

‘Not prepossessing, I fear,' the asylum matron said. ‘Tireless workers, though, and I shall be sorry to let them go, but they have been here since children and become very dull-witted. A change may brighten them. You'll make sure they are returned each night?'

‘Yes.' They were big women and stood round-shouldered, blank-faced and unexpectant, like a matching pair of carthorses. She thought: the Missus will be cross with me for taking advantage of the half-witted.

‘Tireless, you say?'

‘Oh yes. They'll work 'til they drop.'

‘I'll take them,' the Dowager said.

The third recruit was a volunteer.

‘I wouldn't have sunk to it, your ladyship, not never, being who I am and having a regard for what people think, but when I heard you was in charge, I thought: Fanny, if her ladyship can lower herself, well then, being family, you can too.'

‘It is exceedingly hard work, Mrs Nicholls, I don't think . . .'

Mrs Nicholls flexed large hands in lavender fishnet gloves. ‘My goodness gracious, I can scrub and clean when I'm put to ut. Had to when I was puttin' my Walter through his educating through now, being who he is, we got a maid to do ut. I said to Walter: “ 'Tis succourin' the enemy, Walter, do ee mind, you being who you are?” But he said: “Mother, if 'tis her ladyship, you go ahead because her can do no wrong in my eyes.” '

Eyes, thought Diana. Why do her eyes always conflict with what she's saying? However, beggars could not be choosers . . .

‘Then we shall be pleased to have you aboard, Mrs Nicholls,' she said.

So Captain Nicholls's mother joined the team and, indeed, proved nearly as tireless as the twins. Makepeace said: ‘She may have spawned a blasted Revenue man, but she's a good worker. What've you got against her?'

There was a time when the Dowager would have turned the question aside as impertinent, a probe into personal matters. Now she said: ‘I don't know what it is—I just feel I've been infiltrated.'

 
It was a week later that the Dowager returned to the hospital after leading the twins back to the asylum to find Makepeace waiting for her. ‘Aren't you ready? What is the matter?' It was time to collect the ponies and go home.

‘Ladyship . . .' For once, Makepeace was wordless.

They hurried together up the length of the ward to the curtained section where they put the dying. The sound of loud snoring came from behind it. ‘We don't know what it is. The guard heard Josh hammering on the door inside the Black Hole and when they opened up, he was like this. I sent for the town doctor.'

Lieutenant Grayle was too large for the bed, his bare feet hung over the end. The snoring came from a mouth that had twisted on one side. ‘We've done everything,' Makepeace said and added, awkwardly: ‘We took the hands off. So's the harness wouldn't rub.'

She sent Tobias to fetch a chair so that the Dowager might sit beside the bed. Now she couldn't stop talking. ‘Doctor'll be here soon. Big strong boy like that, he'll pull through. Would you like some tea? Oh, my dear woman, don't look like that.'

Neither the patient nor the woman sitting beside him heard her.

Such a nice-looking boy he must have been, Makepeace thought. Gawky. Should be sitting under a tree now, courting a girl, not dying, mutilated, in this sink-hole thousands of miles from home.

She went outside to swear.

Philippa said: ‘I don't think she'll be able to bear it.'

‘She'll have to. Bastards, didn't they do enough to that boy? I pray God to put them in a Black Hole to die, and make it soon.'

‘She feels about him like we do about Josh. She knew his mother.'

‘I know.'

‘I've brewed some tea.'

Makepeace put her arm around her daughter. ‘Shouldn't have brought you here, should I? But I tell you, Pippy, I don't know what I'd have done without you.'

They went and drank tea in the loft. After a while, Payne blustered up to them. ‘Here, you can't stay all night. Time you was off.'

Makepeace looked at him and he went away.

The Dowager was thinking of Martha. Perhaps she's asleep and dreaming that her son has come home, she thought. The Admiralty will signal their navy and they will send the letter. ‘We regret to inform you that your son, Lieutenant Forrest Grayle . . .' I must bear it for her until then. How can I? I must. I am
in loco parentis
.

The sprig of dog-roses she'd picked for the boy was still in his buttonhole, withered now. The hands she'd had made for him hung over the end of the bed on their harness, still with traces of dried earth on the wood and metal fingers he'd used to scrabble for freedom.

They brought her tea, which she didn't touch because she didn't notice it. When it got dark, somebody put a candle on the other side of the bed.

The town doctor came in, made a brief examination and went out again. ‘It shouldn't be long,' he told Makepeace, ‘not with breathing like that. Inflammation of the brain, I should say. One of those things that can happen to the healthiest.'

He looked around, unused to seeing so much attendance in a place where death was common. ‘Is he somebody special?'

The breathing stopped in the early hours.

They put his hands back on so that they should be buried with him and the Dowager took the withered dog-roses from his coat to send to Martha.

The sun was rising as they rode along the cliff path. Just before they got to the ferry, Makepeace said: ‘If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to see Josh escapes from that place. You object to that?'

‘No.'

‘Is it my fault?' the Dowager asked. ‘Not at all,' Lucy Edgcumbe told her, determinedly cheerful, ‘it has been presented to us as a promotion and I am sure that it is.'

‘Ireland, though.'

‘Ireland.'

The two women looked out on the sloping gardens of Mount Edgcumbe, considering the troubled land to which Admiral Lord Edgcumbe had just been appointed Vice-Treasurer.