Taking Liberties (59 page)

He stepped in it, she thought hysterically, he stepped in it.

Tinkler came back with a measure, a ball of string and a fire-iron.

‘Very good,' Nicholls said. ‘Now, break out the arms.
Now
. I have left my pistol in the cavern with Challenor.'

The Great Hall became a war room, filled with the smell of gunpowder and the click of ramrods as they were pushed down barrels. Kempson-Jones was quicker than the rest, he held out a musket to Robert, who shook his head. ‘I must be convinced first.'

Nicholls had opened the wreckers' window and hung his line from it, positioning it by some point he could see below; he kept consulting his cuff which had measurements written on it. ‘Yes, yes, here or next door. This floor? Perhaps the undercroft.'

For the first time Nicholls the Obsessed became apparent to everybody in the room. He had snatched the tape from Tinkler's hand and begun crawling along the floor with it, looking at his cuff and back to the measure.

Kempson-Jones and Robert exchanged glances. Robert put his arm round Alice. ‘Captain . . .' he began, and then fell silent.

Nicholls didn't hear him. ‘The chimney, it must come off the chimney.' He picked up a poker and began tapping the blackened stones of the fireplace, the flames reflecting red on the pale skin of his face. ‘Clear this grate,' he said. ‘I want this grate cleared.'

Diana had a feeling of
déjà vu
, a suspension of time as if she were present at something she'd seen happen before without remembering what it was. He will find it, she thought, quite calmly. He is as excited as if he were making love; this is sex to him.

He crawled on towards her and then looked up and met her eyes. She sat still. You kept very still before animals with bared teeth.

There might have been no one else in the room for him; he looked at her hand gripping the arm of the throne-chair and his face became gentle.

‘Yes, I know,' he said, as if she'd told him something. ‘There is a chair like that at Dartmouth. Get away from it.'

It was almost an expression of love.

She didn't move.

He stood up.
‘I said get away from it.'
He pulled her to her feet and swung her so that she staggered.

‘Captain!' Robert protested.

He'd gone down on his knees again, pulling the rug away. ‘Do you see? See here?' His fingers traced the scratch marks in the stone like a beloved's skin. ‘Now then.'

He sprawled on the floor to explore the chair legs. Nobody else moved.

‘Yes.
Yes
.' He'd found the bolts. He got up, dusting his hands and knees, then positioned himself so that he stood with his back to the wall by the chair, his hand on its arm. He swung it outwards, not looking behind him, watching their faces like a fairground magician waiting for applause. ‘And that is how it is done.'

They stared at him, they stared at the black rectangle behind him. His smile widened.

‘Let us see what we shall see,' he said and turned to the hole to call down it. ‘All right, Challenor, raise the platform.'

 
Makepeace and Philippa, tightly holding hands, walked out of the door of the Pomeroy Arms with Josh beside them and began the march up the hill to T'Gallants, with a gun trained on their backs.

 
I could ram the chair at him, Diana thought.

Nicholls had his left hand on the rear of the chairback and the right hand flat on the wall on the other side of the shaft entrance, supporting himself as he leaned forward into the hole.

She envisaged his two sets of fingertips as they were squashed, one above the chairback, the other making tiny sausages against the wall. She would ease the chair away then, releasing the broken fingers, and he would fall.

The ropes began to move in the shadows of the shaft; they heard the deep rumble of the platform coming up. Nicholls put out a hand behind him. ‘A light, if you please.'

Robert shook himself as if from a dream, took up a branched candlestick and put it in Nicholls's hand.

Nicholls stepped onto the platform, holding the light high. When he spoke his voice was distorted by echo and happiness. ‘There is a room up there. I see the door.' There was a sudden flare of flame as he held the candelabrum downwards. ‘And another down there, on the floor below.'

She had reached the level beyond which terror loses its effect. Would he shoot them? No, he'd left his pistol with Challenor down in the cavern. Perhaps they would kill him. I beg you, God, don't let anybody kill anybody.

‘Lower away.' He was drifting downward; he was going to try the undercroft first as the more likely hiding place.

Her body seemed to be bloodless; she was very, very cold.

The Great Hall had become a gallery of sculpted figures in which nothing moved nor, it seemed, even breathed. They could hear the faint sigh of sea against rock. Outside the windows, the fog drifted more purposefully than it had—a light breeze was getting up. A seagull yelped, seeming a long way away.

Nothing continued to happen. Mrs Smart looked anxiously towards the kitchen from which the smell of baking bread was becoming very strong. Alice decided to collapse and Eliza had to light a taper from a coal and waft the charred end under her mistress's nose.

Squinting, Macklin started aiming his fowling piece at the stone apples carved into the ceiling and Tinkler took it away from him. Robert's foot tapped.

After a while, he went to the shaft. ‘Have you found anything, Captain?'

The reply came back garbled by distance. ‘Nothing.'

Robert grunted. ‘Didn't I say?'

Tinkler said, almost to himself: ‘He's still got to try up top.'

The platform was coming back up the shaft. They waited to see Nicholls transported past the hole and up.

Instead, the platform stopped at the Great Hall level. Nicholls lurched out of it with a gag in his mouth, his hands tied at his back and de Vaubon behind him, pushing a pistol against his spine.

‘Allons.'
The platform began a descent.

‘Good afternoon,' de Vaubon said, over Nicholls's shoulder. He looked around the room. Tinkler was still holding Macklin's fowling piece. ‘Put down the gun or I shoot this one where he stands.'

Tinkler stood for a moment, looking at the weapon in his hands as if he hadn't seen it before, then knelt down and placed it on the floor.

‘Move away from it,' de Vaubon said.

Tinkler moved away from it.

Weakly and very slowly, Diana edged to the wreckers' window so that she could hold herself up against a mullion.

Only then was there a reaction. It was Alice's.
‘It's John Paul Jones!'

De Vaubon tutted. ‘Madame, please. I am French.'

He shifted so that Nicholls's arms were hooked backwards in one of his own. ‘All of you to that wall.' He waved the pistol towards the oriel window.

He's come for me. She couldn't think of honour, of country, of anything. They had done that for her with their doctors and their keepers, their locked doors; they had left her the only option: to go with him. I can spend the rest of my life with him.

Even in that precious moment she knew she was wounded; everything done undone, every gain of her fight for betterment lost, her allies deserted and their work made harder by her defection.

I'm so sorry, she told them, but they made it too hard for me. And I love him very much.

The man she loved very much was pointing a gun at her. ‘Did you hear? To that wall.'

Blinking, she went and joined the small crowd by the oriel window. The cook was shuddering. Diana put her arm round her. ‘It's all right, Mrs Smart.' Alice had her face hidden in Robert's coat. Robert himself stood like a pillar of salt, unmoving, his eyes staring straight ahead.

The platform had gone down. Now it rumbled up again; out of it stumbled Challenor and his fellow-coachman, both with their hands tied but apparently otherwise unharmed. Behind them came two men, red stocking caps on their head, each with a cutlass at his belt and a pistol in hand. In French, de Vaubon said: ‘Tell them to begin.'

One of them nodded and shouted down the shaft.
‘Allons-y.'

The room vibrated as the platform went upwards.

The other man went and gathered up the arms from the oriel and carried them across to the shaft entrance, putting them beside it on the floor. Then he crossed the room and went down the screen passage. They heard him open the front door—nobody had locked it since Nicholls came in.

De Vaubon took his arm out of Nicholls's and made him sit down on the floor. The man's face above his gag was white and blank, his eyes made slow blinks which closed them completely for a second or two before they opened again.

‘Alors.'
De Vaubon settled himself comfortably on the sill of the wreckers' window, the boot of his bad leg on Nicholls's shoulder. ‘Which of you is the earl?'

The question was answered by Alice who flung herself on Robert, shrieking, ‘No! No, don't take him.'

‘Madame . . .' de Vaubon began and then stopped as the door opened and Makepeace, Josh and Philippa were pushed into the room. ‘Who are these?'

The man ushering them in with his gun said in painful French:
‘Les gens de l'auberge, mon capitaine. Ils essayent aller pour . . . pour le garde-côte.'
He had a red handkerchief tied over the lower half of his face.

‘Uh?' For a moment de Vaubon was off his stride. ‘They try to go for the coastguard, is that it?'

He's seeing they don't get any blame for this, she thought. Oh
Lord
, I love him.

‘Look from the window all of you,' de Vaubon said. ‘You see my men occupy all the village.' His mouth twitched as he added: ‘It is useless to resist.'

He's always wanted to say that, she thought.

Everybody turned to the oriel. Armed men lined the track at the top of the slipway, their backs to T'Gallants, guns trained on an opposite line of women. Diana saw Zack, miming terror, being held up by one of his grandsons, the enormous figure of Jan Gurney pointing a pistol at a grinning Rachel.

They're home. She looked across at Makepeace, who was looking back at her. Makepeace gave a slight nod.

The platform was coming down; Diana had a brief glimpse of familiar faces going past before the Frenchman who stood by the shaft pushed the chair back into place. She was left with an image of Bilo, winking at her.

That too. My lambs are escaping—and Robert will never even know they were there.

Perhaps there were days like this, when every good thing in Heaven was poured onto a trembling soul below. There couldn't be many; this was hers.

Makepeace thought: We're late, we've missed the best part.

It had worked amazingly well. Once de Vaubon had a pistol to Nicholls's head it was bound to. But she would have liked to see his entrance. There he was, bless him, the largest and ugliest thing in the room, and still the most vivid, one foot up on the sill now, dominating everything just as he had at Henry Hobbs's funeral feast—and what a long time ago
that
was. The plump daughter-in-law was carrying on and clinging to her plump earl who was very pale and considerably less pompous. Dignified, though, she had to give him that.

He dumped his wife into the arms of the doctor and stepped forward. ‘I am the Earl of Stacpoole. I protest at this outrage. What do you want, sir?'

‘To begin, food.' De Vaubon nodded at his men. ‘The kitchens.'

As the men went past them on their way out, Diana heard Mrs Smart mutter: ‘Froggy devils.' Then professionalism got the better of her. She shouted: ‘And take my bread out the oven.'

Vibration tickled the soles of their feet as the platform came up and went down, up and down, rattling like a giant tinker's cart as it went past the closed chair-door.

‘I wish better treatment for prisoners of war,' de Vaubon was saying. ‘I wish Americans exchanged. I wish the French exchanged quicker. You will tell this to King George.'

‘I shall do no such thing.'

‘Yes,' said de Vaubon. ‘You will. I take a hostage to make sure of it. One of your women, I think.'

Alice began to moan.

De Vaubon put his head on one side, apparently considering. ‘I take the thin one.'

‘That's the Earl's mother,' said Makepeace, helpfully.

And then Diana knew what they were all about. With guile and infinite care, they were removing her from the hook on which she had been speared.

‘Pack some clothes, madame. And be quick or I miss the tide,' de Vaubon said to her. ‘That woman can help you. Yes, you, red hair. André, watch them.'

The man who'd brought the women and Josh up from the Pomeroy gestured with his gun at the door and obediently Diana went towards it with Makepeace. As they went out, Diana heard Robert begin to beg for her.

Going upstairs, Makepeace said: ‘This is Andra.'

‘How do you do, Mr Hedley,' she said, politely. ‘I've heard so much about you.'

‘And me about you.' He pulled the handkerchief down from his face. ‘Tha'll have to hurry, pet. I'm sorry, I'd have liked to chat.'

In her bedroom, she and Makepeace wrapped their arms around each other and then stood back.

‘Your idea?' Diana asked her.

‘Rachel's really. She mentioned John Paul Jones and I thought: Well, why not?' She jerked her thumb at her husband. ‘The old alchemist here supplied the finer points.' She gave one of the grins that made her momentarily and astonishingly beautiful. ‘Everybody gains. Gil gets you, the Millbay lads go home, Robert gets rid of a mad mother and everybody's sorry for him.'