Taking Liberties (44 page)

The women stood outside their houses, holding their children and listening to the sound of pots being broken and of boots kicking stools and tables to matchwood, some watching stolidly, others cursing and shouting.

The Dowager hurried down from T'Gallants to give what protection she could. ‘This is unnecessary, Captain. There is nothing here.'

‘I know it, madam, but how do you?' He was as collected as ever, though his boots were dirty and his chin stubbled. She wondered how far the ponies had carried the empty barrels before he'd caught up with them. Miles, with luck.

She passed him to go to Rachel Gurney who was trying to hush a baby frightened at the rampage conducted inside their cottage. Her other children stood like soldiers, though a little girl winced as a splintered wooden doll came flying out of the open door.

‘Never you mind, my lover,' Rachel told her, ‘us can afford to buy you another.' She winked at Diana but she was pale; a winter's supply of flour was being mixed with cider and eggs on her kitchen floor.

At Mrs Welland's front-room shop, they ripped holes in her supply of sea boots and took shelves of knitting yarn outside to tip them into the mud. They took particular revenge on the Pomeroy Arms. Gun butts were smashed into walls only just plastered since the last raid. Diana sat with Mrs Hallewell outside on one of the benches, holding her hand as a stream of ale and rum swilled out of the door and ran in aromatic rivulets towards the slipway.

‘Round the back,' Nicholls told them. Mrs Hallewell's grip on Diana's hand tightened as his men disappeared round the corner leading to the well-head, but Nicholls was watching their faces so they kept them still.

Don't let them find it. Don't let them find it.

They didn't, but a shout came from Dell at a back upstairs window. ‘Will you look at the dirty bastards, they're pissing down the well!'

‘And now, your ladyship,' Nicholls said, ‘I should be glad if you would accompany me to T'Gallants.'

She said: ‘Have you a warrant yet?'

‘As a matter of fact, I have, but this is a personal matter. My men will stay here.'

They walked across the bridge and up to the house. She made him wait in the screen passage while she went and warned Mrs Green that she would be bringing the captain into the kitchen; men frightened Mrs Green and set her to muttering. Tobias was one of the few she accepted.

And de Vaubon, thought Diana, she likes de Vaubon. She didn't want Nicholls in the Great Hall because the Great Hall contained the chair that led to the shaft and, illogically, she felt that if he saw the chair he would know that there was a secret entrance to the house behind it. I am investing the blasted man with mystical powers, she thought. Nevertheless, once Mrs Green had scuttled out of the way, she led him to the kitchen, and saw with relief that Tobias was working in the garden outside its back door.

Nicholls asked permission to sit down. She nodded and remained standing.

‘May I have a drink of water?' he said.

‘You may not,' she told him. The response was unthinking, atavistic; the least hospitality to a warlock gave him power over you. ‘If you want water, I suggest you draw it from the Pomeroy's well. You cannot expect to be catered for in this house after what you have just done to those people down there.'

‘ “In this house”,' he repeated, quietly. ‘I belong in this house.'

She thought she'd misheard him. ‘I beg your pardon?'

He took his hat from under his arm and laid it on the kitchen table. ‘Your ladyship, let us not be hypocrites. We may confess that the likes of those women do not matter a jot to such as you and I.'

You and me
. She was somehow relieved by his lapse of grammar; he was not infallible. But not human either, she thought. He's a mechanism. Because he doesn't feel for other people, he thinks nobody else does. He believes human concern is a posture. He will always miscalculate other people's reactions; he imagines that wreaking havoc in the village impressed me. It was a display of power; power is all he understands.

Tobias was at the door. ‘Stay within call, Tobias. Captain Nicholls will not be long.'

He waited until Tobias had gone back to the garden. He said calmly: ‘I was born in wedlock, I am thirty-two years old and unattached, in excellent health. My salary is sixty pounds a year but my reward for contraband seizures this year has been two thousand and forty-two pounds. I have been promised a knighthood should I reduce the smuggling in the Plymouth District which, believe me, I shall. At which stage I shall enter politics.'

And all your own teeth. She couldn't see where this was leading.

His eyes were on hers, like a diner's on his plate.

‘I realize I should have approached the Earl first on the matter but as your ladyship is a mature woman, I felt that etiquette could be disregarded in this case.'

She felt blindly for a chairback and sat down opposite him on the other side of the table. ‘Captain Nicholls, are you asking me to
marry
you?'

‘It would be fitting,' he said. ‘We both see that, do we not? People laugh at my mother, I laugh at her myself, but in this she is correct: the family tree she has drawn shows that our blood conjoined three generations ago. There is also reason to believe that the marriage between Jerome Pomeroy and Polly James was legal and binding. I make no claim, of course, but his lordship will see the justice of our union as well as its happiness.'

She was almost sorry for him. He had no conception that he was outrageous. She could imagine him as a little boy sitting with his mother by candlelight, her finger following the botany of a carefully drawn tree, his name on it underlined perhaps, as her own would have been, resentment poured into his ears like poison.
‘You'm the true Baron Pomeroy, Walter. T'Gallants is ours by rights, the place of our ancestors.'

How sad and how horrible; she must deal gently.

She said: ‘It does not do to live by bloodline, Captain.' Good God, would she have said that a few months back? ‘By your own credentials, you are making your own way—'

‘You will be conscious of our ages,' he said, staring at her. ‘Mother has established your date of birth, you are thirty-nine, a difference between us of no consequence. She believes you to be yet fruitful, though, again, it is of no consequence.'

She stopped being sorry for him. ‘Captain, it is unnecessary for you to continue. I have no intention of marrying you.'

He'd paused for a moment, not because she had spoken but apparently to check some mental list. He began again, having found the next item. ‘You can appreciate that I am careless of your straitened circumstances and am in a position to offer you the comfort your position demands. T'Gallants can be restored to its former glory—'

‘The house,' she said in amazement. ‘You want the house.'

‘I belong here,' he said. ‘We belong here together.'

Thirty-two years, she thought. He has lived thirty-two years and nobody has noticed that he is insane. Efficient, zealous, incorruptible, a most excellent customs officer—and mad as a rabid dog.

She was afraid now. She should never have allowed this . . . this
thing
to enter her house. The eyes should have told her they were windows into a blind, fixated mind.

Such a petty ambition, to own T'Gallants, a bourgeois obsession for so ambitious a man, yet to him a pinnacle. Each time he sailed past, she thought, he looked up, seeing it as rightfully his, hating the usurpers who lived in it, waiting to be rich enough to buy it, forestalled . . . He would marry to get it . . .

‘Tobias.'
Would he murder to get it?

‘Your ladyship?'

The panic ebbed; she was being ridiculous. But for a moment she had been very, very frightened. ‘Captain Nicholls is leaving.'

He sat where he was. ‘You are rejecting my proposal?'

‘I am.'

Tobias held the kitchen door for him while the list in the man's mind was folded away, its items unbought. It seemed to the Dowager that he reverted from madman to customs officer but his face had shown no change of expression at any time; it was her own perception that had seen it distorted behind bars.

He stood up. ‘You asked me for my warrant, your ladyship. Here it is.' He put a hand inside his coat and brought out a handkerchief.
Her
handkerchief—she could see the Stacpoole crest embroidered on one corner above the lace; a vulgarism she had always thought. It had been a present from Alice.

How unpleasant, he had kept the thing next to his heart, imagining that was what real suitors did.

And then she remembered woods by a fingerpost and hiding in them, getting the handkerchief out to wipe the sweat off her face, while ponies with empty barrels galloped into the distance.

He knew she'd been there as part of the deception. She thought: He can't do anything, he can't; as evidence in a case against me it would be useless; I could have dropped the thing at any time.

Indeed, he was showing neither triumph nor anger. He wasn't a stage villain:
your-handkerchief-madam, you-dropped-it-and-are-now-in-my-power
. He didn't say anything. He merely put it on the table as he went.

But she knew, because he wanted her to know, that it was his warrant. She had refused him and she was now as much his quarry as any brandy-runner along the coast. He intended to hunt her down with the rest.

 
Makepeace didn't know which was the more surprising—that Captain Nicholls had asked the Dowager to marry him or that he was worth over two thousand pounds a year.

‘What's he want with T'Gallants?' she said. ‘He could buy St James's for that. For three thousand, King George'd probably let him have it.'

‘It was not amusing,' Diana said. ‘The man is . . . you didn't see him.'

‘I saw what he did to the Pomeroy. And poor Maggie's going to have to take her water from the stream until the spring clears that well.'

‘I hope you are grateful I didn't tell him that T'Gallants was yours or you would even now be the pursuit.'

‘Well, I ain't going to marry him either.' Not having observed him in action, Captain Nicholls was small beer as far as Makepeace was concerned; she had other matters to trouble her. ‘I'd have thought Andra and the Gurneys would be back by now.'

‘If the wind in Normandy is anything like this, they won't leave Gruchy until it has blown itself out.'

Both of them were having to raise their voices in the Great Hall against the irritation of rattling windowpanes and the thunderous pounding of sea as it reared itself against the cliffs below and fell back. Makepeace went to the wreckers' window, looked out and came back again. ‘What am I going to do about Josh?'

‘There is nothing you can do.' The Dowager sneaked a glance towards the newspapers that Makepeace had brought from Exeter saying that there was mention of ‘that exchange business' in some of them. John Beasley's help with the campaign was proving invaluable; he had virtually taken it over and Makepeace's restlessness was preventing Diana from reading about it.

She went on: ‘If you would like my advice, there is nothing you
should
do. It is too big a risk. The young man's last attempt at escape proved disastrous. Better to wait until we can effect an exchange.'

‘Exchange, exchange.' Makepeace started off on another circuit of the room. ‘The government's never going to agree to it and if it does it'll take years. They're
tunnelling
, I tell you, they're not waiting to die of hunger and disease, they're getting out.'

‘He'll only be recaptured, Missus. Forty more days in the Black Hole.' Forrest Grayle, she thought, how can you forget Forrest Grayle?

‘Not if I'm waiting at the other end of the tunnel to get him away. Blast and bugger it, if I only knew
where
. And when.'

‘It would be most unwise. Your duty is to Philippa and the little girls.'

Makepeace looked down at the smooth head of her friend and wanted to thump it. Instead of breaking the news gently, as she'd intended, she said abruptly: ‘De Vaubon's in Millbay. He's in the hospital.'

Later, when she'd returned to the Pomeroy Arms, she was sorry to have shocked the woman—but not too sorry.

‘Then it was another matter, oh yes,' she told Philippa. ‘Her precious Frenchman, a different kettle of fish from some poor black lad. I said to her: “If I know him, he'll try that tunnel if he can. You going to sit on your arse while he drags his poor leg around the streets of Plymouth looking for somewhere to hide?” They'll catch him if he doesn't get help, I told her, and in his condition the forty days'll kill him. He's older than the others. They
will
catch him, Pippy. He was always noticeable but with that face of his now . . .'

‘Did you tell her that?'

‘No,' Makepeace admitted, ‘I didn't tell her that. But I told her the rest.'

‘What did she say?'

‘Nothing.'

The Dowager's still figure had become stiller, as if the wind coming through the cracks of the hall's windows had done her howling for her.

Remembering it, Makepeace was sorry again. ‘I was too strong,' she said. ‘Andra would be cross with me for it.'

From the other side of the taproom, Zack was calling for ale.

Philippa got up and went to the barrels, turned a spigot, filled a tankard and took it to him.

Watching the contained, neat little figure, Makepeace thought how wonderful she was. Shipwreck, Susan's awful death: she had survived these things, scarred undoubtedly but not fundamentally altered nor shaken in character. She had come unstained through her sojourn in the sewers of Dock—and that too had displayed her independence, perhaps a form of insistence that her mother attend to her for once. She is a complete person, Makepeace thought.