TAKING LIBERTIES
Diana Norman

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2003

Copyright © Diana Norman 2003

Diana Norman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780007235230

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007405329

Version: 2016-02-09

DEDICATION

To my friend and agent, Sarah Molloy

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Keep Reading

About the Author

Author’s Note

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

As the immediate family and the priest emerged from the crypt in which they had delivered the corpse of the Earl of Stacpoole to its last resting place, his Countess met the gaze of the rest of the mourners in the chapel and saw not one wet eye.

Which made it unanimous.

Perhaps, for decency, she should have paid some of the servants to cry but she doubted if any of them had sufficient acting talent to earn the money. For them, as for her, the scrape of stone when the tomb lid went into place had sounded like a gruff, spontaneous cheer.

Nevertheless, she satisfied herself that every face was suitably grave. The lineage of the man in the crypt was ancient enough to make William the Conqueror’s descendants appear by contrast newly arrived; there must be no disrespect to it.

Despite twenty-two years’ sufferance of many and varied abuses, the Countess had never encouraged a word to be spoken against her husband. Under her aegis, existence had been made as tolerable as possible for those who lived and worked in his house; floggings had been reduced, those who’d received them had been compensated and she had learned to employ only servants too old or too plain to attract sexual assault. But in all this she had refused to exchange confidences or criticism with any. The man himself might be vicious, but his status was irreproachable; if she could distinguish between the two, so must others.

A snuffle from behind the Countess indicated that her daughter-in-law at least was indulging the hypocrisy of tears. Yes, well.

Perhaps she should have acceded to the King’s suggestion and had the service in Westminster Abbey but … ‘They’re not putting me alongside foreigners and poetic bloody penwipers. You see to it, woman.’

The air of the chapel was heavy with incense. Heat from the closely packed bodies of the congregation rose up to stir hanging battle banners emblazoned with the Stacpoole prowess for killing people. The day outside being dull, only candlelight inclined onto walls knobbly with urns and plaques, increasing her impression that she and the others were incarcerated in some underground cave.

They’ll bury me here. Beside him. Beloved wife of …

Even without the veil, the suffocation would not have shown on her face which long training kept as still as the marble countenances of Stacpoole effigies around her.

Nearly over. The priest intoned the plea that their dear brother, Aymer Edmund Fontenay, Earl of Stacpoole, might be raised from the death of sin into the life of righteousness – though not as if he had any hope of it.

A last clash from the censers.

‘Grant this, we beseech thee, O merciful Father, through Jesus Christ our mediator …’

Outside, on the gravel apron, her hand resting on her son’s arm, she paused to take in the air. The gardens of Chantries had never been to her taste: too artificial, more Le Nôtre than Brown – the Earl had seen little use for nature unless he could set his hounds on it – but today her soul sailed along the view of knotted parterre, fountains and lake to the utmost horizon of Bedfordshire. She was free.

Fred North bumbled up to her, bowing and blinking his weak little eyes, apologizing. She hadn’t noticed him in the congregation; it appeared he’d arrived late. ‘My deepest apologies, your ladyship, and my sincerest commiseration.’

‘Thank you, Prime Minister. It was good of you to come.’

So it was; a less amiable man would have pleaded the war with America as his excuse to stay in London. Perhaps, like so many here today, he’d wanted to assure himself that her husband was safely dead. The Earl of Stacpoole had been among the tigers of the poor man’s government, harrying him into standing up to the Americans against his inclination to conciliate. ‘Feeble Fred,’ the Earl had called him. ‘I told him: it’s castration that rabble needs, to Hell with conciliation. And the German agrees with me.’

Always ‘the German’, never ‘His Majesty’.

As they went along the terrace, the mourners were reduced to a train of grey and black Lilliputians against the vast frontage of the house.

She was allowed to go first up the steps but in the hall there was a bustle as her daughter-in-law came forward, taking Robert’s hand and her new precedence to lead the procession into the State Dining Room for the funeral meats.

Of course.

Again, Diana’s face showed nothing but its usual boredom. Her daughter-in-law had the undeniable right to display to the gathering that she was now mistress of Chantries, though a better-bred female might have waited until the corpse of its former master was a little chillier in its grave. Alice, however, was not well bred, merely moneyed.

The new Countess was aged twenty and the Dowager nearly thirty-nine, but their appearance narrowed the difference. Alice Stacpoole was the shorter by a head, muddy complexioned and a slave to fashion that did not suit her. Diana Stacpoole, on the other hand, had skin and hair the colour of flax; she might have worn sacking and it would have hung on her long, thin frame with helpless elegance.

She could also have been beautiful but lack of animation had settled the fine bones of her face into those of a tired thoroughbred. Enthusiasm for any creature – a dog, a servant, her own son – had brought reprisals on them and, for their sake, she had cultivated an ennui, as if she were bored even by those she loved. It had been a matter of survival.

Marriage to Aymer, Earl of Stacpoole, though it was his third, had been represented – and accepted – as an honour to a sheltered, sixteen-year-old girl, the desirable joining of two ancient estates; yes, he was her senior by twenty or so years but charming, wealthy, still in need of an heir; she owed the match to her family.

She never forgave her parents for it. They must have known, certainly suspected; the first wife had been a runaway and subsequently divorced, the second a suicide.

After the first year, she’d seriously considered following one or other of her predecessors’ examples but by then she was pregnant, a condition which, as her husband pointed out, made her totally subservient. Kill herself and she killed the child. ‘Run off and I’ll hunt you down.’ He had the right; the baby would be taken from her to be at his mercy in its turn.

She could have given way and become a cowering ghost in her own home but she found defiance from somewhere. The man waxed on terror; she must deprive him of it. As a defence she appropriated boredom, appearing to find everything tedious, complying with the demands of his marriage bed as if they were wearisome games rather than sexual degradation, earning herself thrashings but withstanding even those with seeming indifference.

It was protection not only against her husband but for him; in the sight of God she’d taken him for better or worse, his escutcheon should not tarnished by any complaint of hers.

Nor her own. Though by no means as long as the Stacpooles’, the Countess’s ancestry was equally proud. After a somewhat dubious foundation by Walter Pomeroy, a ruffian who, like Francis Drake, had charged out from Devonian obscurity to fling himself and a large part of a mysterious fortune at the feet of Elizabeth, thereby gaining a knighthood and the Queen’s favour, the Pomeroys had conducted themselves with honour. Young Paulus Pomeroy had refused to betray the message he carried for Charles I though tortured by Cromwell’s troops. Sir William had gone into exile with Charles II. At Malplaquet, Sir Rupert had saved John Churchill’s life at the cost of his own.

The wives had been equally dutiful; happy or miserable, no breath of scandal attended their marriages. Like them, the Dowager threw back to the Middle Ages. Had the Earl been a Crusader, his absence in the Holy Land would have provided his Countess with blessed relief from abuse yet she would have defended his castle for him like a tigress until his return. In this disgraceful age, other women might abscond with lovers, run up debts, involve themselves in divorce, travel to France to give birth to babies not their husband’s, but Pomeroy wives gritted their teeth and abided by their wedding vows because they had made them.

One’s married name might belong to a ravening beast but the name was greater than the man. For Diana, true aristocracy was a sacrament. One did not abandon Christianity because a particular priest was venal. It was the bloodline that counted and its honour must be upheld, however painfully, with a stoicism worthy of the Spartan boy gnawed by the fox. Better that Society should shrug and say: ‘Well, the Countess seems to tolerate him,’ rather than: ‘Poor, poor lady.’ One held one’s head high and said nothing.

Such public and private dignity had discommoded Aymer, put him off his stroke. Gradually, a spurious superiority was transferred from him to her that he found intimidating – as much as he could be intimidated by anything – and even gained his unwilling respect. After that, like the bully he was, he turned his attentions to more fearful victims so that she was spared infection by the syphilis that caused his final dementia.

By then she’d plastered her hurts so heavily with the appearance of finding things tiresome that its mortar had fused into bone and blood. The naive young girl had become static, a woman who moved and spoke with a lassitude that argued fatigue, her drooping eyes seeming to find all the world’s matters beneath her, thus making people either nervous or resentful at what they interpreted as disdain. If they’d peered into them closely they might have seen that those same eyes had been leeched of interest or warmth or surprise by having looked too early on the opening to Hell. Nobody peered so closely, however.

Under the influence of the 1770 malmsey and the Earl’s absence, his funeral party threatened unseemly cheerfulness. Instead of sitting in her chair to receive condolences, the Dowager Countess circled the great room at her slow, giraffe-like pace to remind the more raucous groups by her presence of the respect due to the departed.

There was a hasty ‘We were remembering, your ladyship …’ and then reminiscences of Aymer’s japes, the time when he’d horsewhipped a Rockingham voter during the ’61 election, when he’d thrown his whisky and cigar at Jane Bonham’s pug because it yapped too much, causing it to burst into flame, the time when … Endearing eccentricities of the old school. ‘We won’t look on his like again.’

There was necessity for only one verbal reproof. Francis Dashwood was being overloud and humorous on the subject of her husband’s last illness – Dashwood of all people – and met her arrival with defiance. ‘I was saying, Diana, the pox is a damn hard way to go.’

The Dowager Countess hooded her eyes. ‘For your sake, my lord, one hopes not.’

She passed on to where Alice was exciting herself over the alterations she proposed for Chantries. ‘… for I have always thought it sadly plain, you know. Robert and I plan something more rococo, more douceur de vivre as the French say, more …’ Her voice trailed away at the sight of her mother-in-law but she rallied with triumph. ‘Of course, dear Maman, none of this until we have altered the Dower House à ton goût.’

The Dower House, the overblown cottage on the estate that Aymer had used as a sexual playroom for his more local liaisons. She had never liked the place. Robert and Alice were expecting her to set up home in it – the conventional dower house for the conventional dowager – no doubt to spend her days embroidering comforts for a troop of little Alices and Roberts. Extend twenty-two years of imprisonment into a lesser cell.

‘Make it nice for you, Mater,’ Robert said.

‘Thank you, my dear boy.’ This was not the time to discuss it, nor did she want to hurt him, so she merely said gently: ‘We shall see.’

He was, and always had been, her agony. It had been a mistake to have the baby in her arms when Aymer strode into the room after the birth; it should have been in its cradle, she should have pretended indifference, complained of the pain of its delivery. Instead, she’d been unguarded, raw with an effusion of love. Immediately, the child had become a hostage.

She had failed her son, could have failed him no more if she had run off; he’d been taken away from her: a wet nurse, a nurse, a tutor, school – all of them chosen to distance her from the boy and put his reliance on the caprice of a father who’d both terrified and fascinated him. Her mind trudged round the old, old circular paths. Should she have stood against Aymer more? But revenge would have been visited on the boy as much as her; warring parents would have split him in two. Yet what had she been to her poor child? A figure drifting mistily on the edge of a world in which women were cattle or concubines.

By the time she’d achieved some definition of her own, it was too late; both son and mother were too distanced from each other for the relationship that might have been. Individuality had been stripped from the boy, not a clever child in any case, and he’d opted for a mediocre amiability that offended no one and proved impossible for his mother to penetrate. She’d tried once to explain, said she’d always loved him, was sorry … He’d shied away. ‘Can’t think what you mean, Mater.’ Now, here he was at twenty years old, a genial, corpulent, middleaged man.

And devoted to his wife. Whatever else, the Dowager Countess could have crawled in gratitude to her daughter-in-law. In this sallow, jealous little woman, Robert had found refuge and clung to her like ivy to a wall, as she did to him.

The couple talked to each other always of things, never ideas, but they talked continually; they were happy in a banality in which Diana would have been pleased to join them if Alice hadn’t kept her out so ferociously that Robert, once again, was taken from her.

Yes, well.

Tobias was at her side. ‘A methenger for Lord North, your ladyship.’

Alice almost elbowed her aside. ‘What is that, Tobias?’

‘Methenger at the door, your ladyship. For Lord North.’

‘I’ll see to it.’ She bustled off.

Tobias hovered. ‘A letter came today, your ladyship,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Addrethed to the Countess. Her ladyship took it.’

Diana said lazily, ‘Lady Alice is the Countess now, Tobias.’

‘I think it wath written before hith lordship died, your ladyship. It wath for you.’

‘Then her ladyship will undoubtedly tell me about it.’

Tobias was the most trusted and longest-serving of the footmen but even he must not imply criticism of Alice.

‘Diana, don’t tell me you’re retainin’ that balbutient blackamoor. Never could see why Aymer kept him on. Niggers look such freaks in white wigs, in my opinion. And the lisp, my dear …’

Diana’s raised eyebrow suggested it was unwise of the Duchess of Aylesbury to include ‘freak’ and ‘wig’ in one sentence, the edifice on her grace’s own head being nearly a yard high and inclined to topple, making her walk as if she had the thing balanced on her nose.

Actually, it was typical of Aymer, on finding that Tobias’s blackness and lisp irritated his guests, to promote him to the position of head footman and thereby confront visitors with his announcements.

It was also typical of Tobias that he had kept the place by sheer efficiency. Poor Tobias. Alice and Robert, not having the assurance with which Aymer had flouted social taste, would undoubtedly get rid of him.

North was coming back. Normally those in the room would not have noticed his entrance but they did now. He had a paper in hand and greyness about the mouth. She didn’t hear what he said but the reaction of those who could told her what it was; the man might have been releasing wasps into the room.

He made his way to her to kiss her hand. ‘Forgive me, your ladyship. I must return to London. The French have finally come in on the side of America and declared war.’

It had been inevitable. She said coolly: ‘We shall beat them, my lord. We always have.’

‘No doubt about it, your ladyship.’ But he looked older than he had a few minutes before.

She heard Dashwood talking unguardedly to Robert in his loud voice. Dashwood was always unguarded. ‘Bad enough shipping supplies to our armies already, now we’ve got the damn French to harry us as we do it. I tell you, Robert, our chances of beating that lawless and furious rabble have grown slimmer this day.’

The Dowager was shocked. Locked away in looking after her husband, she had paid scant attention to the progress of the war, assuming that mopping up a few farmers and lawyers, which was all that the population of the American colony seemed to consist of, would be a fairly simple matter. That the war had already lasted two years must, she’d thought, be due to the vast distances the British army had to cover in order to complete the mopping up. That the rebels could actually win the war had not crossed her mind.

She glanced enquiringly at Lord George Germain who, as colonial secretary, was virtually the minister for war.

‘Y’see, ma’am,’ he said, ‘we were countin’ on Americans loyal to King George bein’ rather more effective against the rebels than they’re provin’ to be.’ He saw her face and said hurriedly: ‘Don’t mistake me, we’ll win in the end, but there’s no doubt the entry of the French puts an extra strain on the Royal Navy.’ He brightened. ‘There’s this to be said for them, though, their entry into the war will give it more popularity with our own giddy multitude. They’ve always gone at the frog-eaters with a will.’

There was also this to be said for the news: it cleared the room. Nearly everybody in it had a duty either to the prosecution of the war or a protection of their investments.

She was enveloped in the smell of funereal clothes, sandalwood from the chests in which they’d been packed away, mothballs, stale sweat, best scent and the peculiarly sour pungency of black veiling. The gentlemen raised Diana’s languid hand to their face and dropped it, like hasty shoppers with a piece of fish; her female peers pecked at her cheek; inferiors bobbed and hurried away.

No need to see them to their carriages, that was for Alice and Robert now.

She was left alone. It was an unquiet, heavy room. On the great mantel, a frieze looted from Greece preserved death in marble as barbarians received the last spear-thrust from helmeted warriors in a riot of plunging horses. The red walls were noisy with the tableaux of battle, Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet. Mounted Stacpoole generals posed, sword aloft, at the head of their troops, cannons fired from ship to ship at Beachy Head and Quiberon Bay.

And now France again. It had been no platitude to assure North it would be beaten, she was sure it would be, just as America would be; Aymer had always said that was what France was for, to be beaten by the English. ‘One Englishman can lick ten bloody Frenchman. And twenty bloody Americans. And a hundred bloody Irish.’ Though it was taking overlong to force America’s surrender she accepted his precept, just as she’d accepted his right to tyrannize his fiefdom through right of blood even while she abhorred the tyranny itself.

I’m his creature, she thought.

She walked to the windows to try and recapture the uplift of freedom she’d felt on leaving the chapel but the horizon beyond the lake marked a future she did not know what to do with.

As Countess of Stacpoole, Aymer’s hostess, charity-giver, political supporter to his Tory placemen, his loyal behind-the-scenes electioneer and, at the last, his nurse, she had at least known employment. All gone now.

She took in deep, hopeless breaths. She should be smelling roses, there was a neat mass of them below the terrace, but she couldn’t rid the stink of decay from her nostrils. Since his death they’d burned herbs but, for her, the odour of that jerking, gangrenous body still haunted the house, like his screams.

His reliance on her had been shameless, demanding her presence twenty-four hours of the day, throwing clocks and piss-pots at doctors, even poor Robert, shrieking that he wanted only her to attend him – as if their marriage had been loving harmony.

As if it had indeed been loving harmony, she had attended him twenty-four hours a day; expected to do no less. For three months she had never set foot outside the suite of rooms that were his.

His nose had already been eaten away, now he’d begun to rot, new buboes appearing as if maggots had gathered in one squirming subcutaneous mass to try and get out through the skin. Before his brain went, he’d begged absolution from the very walls. Only the priest could give him that; her place had been to diminish his physical suffering as well as she could, and she and laudanum had done it – as much as it could be done.

She’d thought she could watch judgementally the revenge inflicted on his body by the life he’d led, but she had been unable to resist pity, longing for him to die, for his own sake. Her thankfulness at his last breath had been more for his release than hers. Then had come the scurry of funeral arrangements.

And now to find, after years of expectation of freedom, that Diana, Countess of Stacpoole, had died with the husband she loathed. Beloved wife of …

I’m nothing without him. That was the irony. He’d defined her, not merely as his Countess, but as upholder of his honour, soother of the wounds he inflicted, underminer of his more terrible obsessions. He’d been her purpose, even if that purpose had been amelioration, sometimes sabotage, of his actions. Years of it. She had no other. Thirty-nine next birthday and she was now of no use to a living soul except to vacate the space she’d occupied.

She heard screams and in her exhaustion turned automatically to go back to the sickroom but, of course, they were Alice’s. In view of the news from France, Robert, like a good courtier, should return to his place by the King immediately and Alice was lamenting as if her husband were off to battle rather than a palace.

‘Maman, Maman, come tell him he mustn’t leave or I shall go distraite.’

Yes, well. Alice liked an audience for her hysterics. Was being an audience a purpose? No, merely a function. She left the room to perform it.

To humour his wife, Robert said he would not go until tomorrow; the King would understand he had just buried his father.

Even so, Alice did not see fit to recover until late evening; the advent of France into the war causing her to see danger everywhere. ‘You must ask the King to give you guards. John Paul Jones will try and capture you, like he did the Earl of Selkirk.’

Alice, thought the Dowager, must be the only young woman who had not found that most recent raid by an American privateer a tiny bit thrilling. The papers had made much of it in apparent horror but the ghost of Robin Hood had been called up and, as always with the English weakness for daring, Mr Paul Jones’s brigandage was taking on a hue of romance.

Robert said: ‘My dear, the raid was a failure.’

Alice refused comfort. John Paul Jones, a Scotsman who’d joined the American side, was scouring his native coast to take an earl hostage. Robert was an earl. Ergo, John Paul Jones was out to capture Robert. ‘True, the Earl was absent on this occasion but his Countess was menaced. He took her silver service.’

‘I heard he returned it,’ the Dowager joined in. ‘In any case, we may comfort ourselves that Robert will be in London and not in a Scottish castle exposed to the sea. Mr Jones is hardly likely to sail up the Thames to get him.’

Alice was not so sure; she was enjoying her horrors. It wasn’t until late evening that she remembered the letter and handed it to her mother-in-law.

‘You will forgive me for overlooking it, Mama. It carried my title of course … so peculiar, sent on from Paris, not that I read it … the impudence, I wondered to show it to you at all but Robert said … who is Martha Grayle?’

Martha.

Salt and sun on her face, bare feet, a shrimping net, terracottacoloured cliffs against blue sky …

Careful not to show haste, the Dowager turned to the last page to see the signature and was caught by the final, disjointed paragraph. ‘… you are my long hope, dear soul … I am in great fear … as you too have a son … Your respectful servant, Martha Grayle (née Pardoe).’

She looked up to find Alice and Robert watching her.

Deliberately, she yawned. ‘I shall retire, I think. Goodnight, my dears.’

‘But will you not read the letter?’ Alice could hardly bear it.

‘In bed perhaps.’ Alice had waited to give it to her, she could now wait for a reaction to it. The whirligig of time brought in its petty revenges.

Joan was nodding in a bedroom chair, waiting to undress her, but when the areas that couldn’t be reached by the wearer had been unbuttoned and unhooked, Diana told her to go to bed. ‘I will do the rest myself.’

‘Very well, my dear.’

‘Joan, do you remember Martha Pardoe?’

‘Torbay.’ The old woman’s voice was fond.

‘Yes.’

‘Married that Yankee and went off to Americy.’

‘Yes.’

‘Happy days they was.’

She couldn’t wait for reminiscence. ‘Goodnight.’

With her mourning robes draped around her shoulders, the Dowager picked up the letter that had circumvented the cessation of mail between rebel and mother countries. Somewhere on its long journey from Virginia to France to London to Bedfordshire it had received a slap of salt water so that the bottom left-hand quarter of each page was indecipherable.

Martha had penned a superscription on its exterior page, presumably with a covering letter, for the unknown person in Paris who’d been charged with sending it on to England: ‘To be forwarded to the Countess of Stacpoole in England. Haste. Haste.’ Martha had been lucky; from this moment on there would be an embargo on general mail from France, just as from America; the letter had beaten the declaration of war by a short head.

The fact that Martha had written only on one side of each of her two pages indicated that, however personally distressed, she was in easy circumstances; paper of quality such as this was expensive.

She’d begun formally enough:

Respectful greetings to Your Ladyship, if I am so Fortunate that your eyes should see this letter. Of your Gracious Kindness forgive this Plea from an old acquaintance who would make so Bold as to remind Your Ladyship of glad Times in Torbay when you and she were Children undivided by sea or War. Pray God may resolve the Conflict between our Countries. I shall not Weary you with Remembrance, loving though it is to me, but Proceed to the case of my son, Forrest Grayle, who is but eighteen years old …

Here the water stain obscured the beginnings of several lines and Martha’s writing, which had begun neatly, began to sprawl as agitation seized her so that making sense of it caused the Dowager’s brow to wrinkle. She got up from the dressing-table stool and went to the lamp on the Louis Quinze table to turn up the wick, unconscious that she was doing so. ‘… such a desire that all may have Liberty as has caused Concern to his … nothing would satisfy but that he Volunteer for our navy … John Paul Jones in France to take possession of a new vessel built there …’

Now the relief of a new page, though the penmanship was worse and punctuation virtually non-existent.

O Diana word has it the Sam Adams is Captured and its Men taken to England and imprisoned for rebels while I say Nothing of this for it is War yet there are tales of what is done to men captured by King George’s army here in the South as would break the Heart of any Woman, be she English or American …

Here, again, the interruption of the water stain.

whether my husband would have me write, but he is dead these … I beseech you, in the name of Happier days, as you are a Mother and a … will know him if you remember my Brother whom you met that once at … the Likeness is so Exact that it doth bring Tears every time I … you can do if you can do any Thing for my boy in the name of Our …

Here the writing became enormous: ‘For you are my long hope, dear soul … I am in great fear … as you too have a son … for our old friendship …’ Slowly, the Dowager smoothed the letter flat and put it between the leaves of the bible lying on the table.

Yes, well.

She could do nothing, of course. Would do nothing. As her daughter-in-law said, the letter was an impertinence. Martha had expressed no regret for her adopted country’s rebellion; indeed, supposing her own interpretation to be correct, the woman had actually referred to the American fleet as ‘our navy’.

If the boy Forrest – what like of name was that? – is so enthusiastic to get rid of his rightful King, let him enthuse in prison as he deserves.

Somewhat deliberately, the Dowager yawned, stepped out of her mourning and went to bed.

Seagulls yelping. Petticoats pinned up. Rock pools. Martha’s hair red-gold in the sun. The tide like icy bracelets around their ankles. A near-lunacy of freedom. The stolen summers of 1750 and 1751.

The Dowager got up, wrapped herself in a robe, read the letter again, put it back in the bible, tugged the bell-pull. ‘Fetch Tobias.’

Too much effort, Martha, even if I would. Which I won’t. Too tired.

‘Ah, Tobias. I’ve forgotten, did his lordship buy you in Virginia?’

‘Barbadoth, your ladyship. Thlave market. He liked my lithp.’

Another of Aymer’s japes, this time during his tour of his plantations; he’d sent the man back to England with a label attached to the slave collar: ‘A prethent from the Wetht Indieth.’ It was sheer good fortune that Tobias, bought as a joke, had proved an excellent and intelligent servant.

‘Not near the Virginian plantations, then. Tobacco and such.’ She had no idea of that hemisphere’s geography.

‘Only sugar in Barbadoth, ladyship.’

‘Very well. You may go.’

She was surprised at how very much she’d wished to discuss the letter with Tobias, and with Joan, but even to such trusted people as these she would not do so; one did not air one’s concerns with servants.

Diana went back to bed.

She got up and sat out on the balcony. As if it were trying to make up for her discontent with the day, the night had redoubled the scent of roses and added new-mown grass and cypresses, but these were landlocked smells; the Dowager sniffed in vain for the tang of sea.

She had long ago packed away the summers of ’50 and ’51 as a happiness too unbearable to remember, committed them to dutiful oblivion in a box that had now come floating back to her on an errant tide.

They had been stolen summers in any case; she shouldn’t really have had them but her parents had been on the Grand Tour, there was fear of plague in London, and the Pomeroy great-aunt with whom she’d been sent to stay had been wonderfully old and sleepy, uncaring that her eleven-year-old charge went down to the beach each day with only a parlour maid called Joan as chaperone to play with a twelve-year-old called Martha.

Devon. Her first and only visit to the county from which her family and its wealth had sprung. A Queen Anne house on the top of one of seven hills looking loftily down on the tiny, square harbour of Torquay.

She listened to her own childish voice excitedly piping down years that had bled all excitement from it.

‘Is this the house we Pomeroys come from, Aunt? Sir Walter’s house?’

‘Of course not, child. It is much too modern. Sir Walter’s home was T’Gallants at Babbs Cove, a very old and uncomfortable building, many miles along the coast.’

‘Shall I see it while I am here?’

‘No. It is rented out.’

‘But was Sir Walter a pirate, as they say, Aunt? I should so like him to have been a pirate.’

‘I should not. He is entitled to our gratitude as our progenitor and we must not speak ill of him. Now go and play.’

But if she was disallowed a piratical ancestor, there were pirates a-plenty down on the beach where Joan took her and allowed her to paddle and walk on pebbles the size and shape of swans’ eggs. At least, they looked like pirates in their petticoat-breeches and tarry jackets.

If she’d cut her way through jungle and discovered a lost civilization, it could have been no more exotic to her than that Devon beach. Hermit crabs and fishermen, both equally strange; starfish; soft cliffs pitted with caves and eyries, dolphins larking in the bay: there was nothing to disappoint, everything to amaze.

And Martha, motherless daughter of an indulgent, dissenting Torbay importer. Martha, who was joyful and kind, who knew about menstruation and how babies were made (until then a rather nasty mystery), who could row a boat and dislodge limpets, who wore no stays and, though she was literate, spoke no French and didn’t care that she didn’t. Martha, who had a brother like a young Viking who didn’t notice her but for whom the even younger Diana conceived a delightful, hopeless passion – delightful because it was hopeless – and would have died rather than reveal it but secretly scratched his and her entwined initials in sandstone for the tide to erase.

For the first time in her life she’d encountered people who talked to her, in an accent thick as cream, without watching their words, who knew no servitude except to the tide. She’d been shocked and exhilarated.

But after another summer, as astonishing as the first, the parents had come back, the great-aunt died and the Queen Anne house sold. She and Martha had written to each other for the next few years. Martha had married surprisingly well; a visiting American who traded with her father had taken one look and swept her off to his tobacco plantations in Virginia.

After that their correspondence became increasingly constrained as Diana entered Hell and Martha’s independent spirit conformed to Virginian Anglicanism and slave ownership. Eventually, it had ceased altogether.

The Dowager returned to bed and this time went to sleep.

In one thing at least her son resembled her: they were both early risers. Diana, making her morning circuit in the gardens, saw Robert coming to greet her. They met in the Dark Arbour, a long tunnel of yew the Stuart Stacpooles had planted as a horticultural lament for the execution of Charles I, and fell into step.

The Dowager prepared herself to discuss what, in the course of the night, had gained initial capitals.

But Robert’s subject wasn’t The Letter, it was The Will.

She knew its contents already. Before the Earl’s mind had gone, she had been able to persuade him to have the lawyers redraft the document so that it should read less painfully to some of the legatees. Phrases like ‘My Dutch snuffbox to Horace Walpole that he may apply his nose to some other business than mine … To Lord North, money for the purchase of stays to stiffen his spine …’ were excised and, at Diana’s insistence, Aymer’s more impoverished bastards were included.

Her own entitlement as Dowager was secured by medieval tradition – she was allowed to stay in her dead husband’s house for a period of forty days before being provided with a messuage of her own to live in and a pension at the discretion of the heir.

As he fell into step beside her, she knew by his gabbled bonhomie that Robert was uncomfortable.

‘The Dower House, eh, Mater? It shall be done up in any way you please. We’ll get that young fella Nash in, eh? Alice says he’s a hand at cottages ornés. We want you always with us, you know’ – patting her hand – ‘and, of course, the ambassador’s suite in the Mayfair house is yours whenever you wish a stay in Town.’

‘Thank you, my dear.’

‘As for the pension … Still unsteady weather, ain’t it? Will it rain, d’ye think? The pension, now … been talking to Crawford and the lawyers and such and, well, the finances are in a bit of a pickle.’

The Dowager paused and idly sniffed a rose that had been allowed to ramble through a fault in an otherwise faultless hedge.

Robert was wriggling. ‘The pater, bless him. Somewhat free at the tables, let alone the races, and his notes are comin’ in hand over fist. Set us back a bit, I’m afraid.’

Aymer’s debts had undoubtedly been enormous but his enforced absence from the gaming tables during his illness had provided a financial reprieve, while the income from the Stacpoole estates would, with prudence – and Robert was a prudent man – make up the deficiency in a year or two, she knew.

‘Yes, my dear?’

‘So, we thought … Crawford and the lawyers thought … Your pension, Mama. Not a fixed figure, of course. Be able to raise it when we’ve recouped.’ He grasped the nettle quickly: ‘Comes out at one hundred and fifty per annum.’

One hundred and fifty pounds a year. And the Stacpoole estates harvested yearly rents of £160,000. Her pension was to be only thirty pounds more than the annual amount Aymer had bequeathed to his most recent mistress. After twenty-two years of marriage she was valued on a level with a Drury Lane harlot.

She forced herself to walk on, saying nothing.

One hundred and fifty pounds a year. A fortune, no doubt, to the gardener at this moment wheeling a rumbling barrow on the other side of the hedge. With a large family he survived on ten shillings a week all found and thought himself well paid.

But at five times that figure, she would be brought low. No coach – fortunate indeed if she could afford to keep a carriage team – meagre entertaining, two servants, three at the most, where she had commanded ninety.

Beside her, Robert babbled of the extra benefits to be provided for her: use of one of the coaches when she wanted it, free firing, a ham at salting time, weekly chickens, eggs … ‘Christmas spent with us, of course …’

And she knew.

Alice, she thought. Not Robert. Not Crawford and the lawyers. This is Alice.

Ahead, the end of the tunnel framed a view of the house. The mourning swags beneath its windows gave it a baggy-eyed look as if it had drunk unwisely the night before and was regretting it. Alice would still be asleep upstairs; she rarely rose before midday but, sure as the Creed, it was Alice who had decided the amount of her pension.

And not from niggardliness. The Dowager acquitted her daughter-in-law of that at least. Alice had many faults but meanness was not among them; the object was dependence, her dependence. Alice’s oddity was that she admired her mother-in-law and at the same time was jealous of her, both emotions mixed to an almost ludicrous degree. It had taken a while for Diana to understand why, when she changed her hairstyle, Alice changed hers. A pair of gloves was ordered; similar gloves arrived for Alice who then charged them with qualities that declared them superior.

Diana tended old Mrs Brown in the village; of a sudden Alice was also visiting the Brown cottage in imitation of a charity that seemed admirable to her yet which had to be surpassed: ‘I took her beef tea, Maman – she prefers it to calves’foot jelly.’

Yes, her pension had been stipulated by Alice. She was to be kept close, under supervision, virtually imprisoned in genteel deprivation, required to ask for transport if she needed it, all so that Alice could forever flaunt herself at the mother-in-law she resented and wished to emulate in equal measure. Look how much better I manage my house/marriage/servants than you did, Maman.

Nor would it be conscious cruelty; Alice, who did not suffer from introspection, would sincerely believe she was being kind. Dutifully, the Dowager strove to nurse a fondness for her daughter-in-law but it thrived never so much as when she was away from her.

No. It was not to be tolerated. She had been released from one gaol, she would not be dragooned into another.

The Dowager halted and turned on her son.

He was sweating. His eyes pleaded for her compliance as they had when he was the little boy who, though hating it, was about to be taken to a bearbaiting by his father, begging her not to protest – as indeed, for once, she had been about to. Let it be, his eyes said now, as they had then. Don’t turn the screw.

If it were to be a choice between offending her or Alice or even himself, then Alice must win, as his father had won. He would always side with the strong, even though it hurt him, because the pain of not doing so would, for him, be the greater.

So protest died in her, just as it always had, and its place was taken by despair that these things were not voiced between them. She opened her mouth to tell him she understood but, frightened that she would approach matters he preferred unspoken, Robert cut her off. Unwisely, he said: ‘If you think it too little, Mama, perhaps we can squeeze a bit more from the coffers.’

Good God. Did they think she was standing on a street corner with her hand out? All at once, she was furious. How dare they expect that she might beg.

‘Thank you, Robert,’ she told him with apparent indifference, ‘the pension is adequate.’

He sagged with relief.

Oh no, my dear, she thought. Oh no, Alice may rule my income but she will not rule me. She had a premonition of Alice’s triumphs at future gatherings: ‘Did you enjoy the goose, Maman?’ Then, sotto voce: ‘Dear Maman, we always give her a goose at Michaelmas.’ Unaware that by such bourgeois posturing she reduced herself as well as her mother-in-law.

Oh no. I am owed some liberty and dignity after twenty-odd years. I’ll not be incarcerated again.

So she said, as if by-the-by: ‘Concerning the Dower House, it must be held in abeyance for a while. I am going visiting.’

He hadn’t reckoned on this. ‘Who? When? Where will you go?’

‘Friends,’ she said vaguely, making it up as she went, ‘Lady Margaret, perhaps, the De Veres …’ And then, to punish him a little: ‘I may even make enquiries about Martha Pardoe’s son, Grayle as she now is – I believe you saw the letter she sent me.’

He was horrified. ‘Martha’s …? Mama, you can’t. Involving oneself for an American prisoner? People would think it … well, they’d be appalled.’

‘Would they, my dear?’ He always considered an action in the light of Society’s opinion. ‘Robert, I do not think that to enquire after a young man on behalf of his worried mother is going to lose us the war.’

She was punishing him a little; he should not have been niggardly over her pension but also, she realized, she was resolved to do this for Martha. It would be a little adventure, nothing too strenuous, merely a matter of satisfying herself that the boy was in health.

‘Well, but … when do you intend to do this?’

This was how it would be – she would have to explain her comings and goings. And suddenly she could not bear the constraint they put on her any longer. She shrugged. ‘In a day or two. Perhaps tomorrow.’ To get away from this house, from the last twenty-two years, from everything. She was startled by the imperative of escape; if she stayed in this house one day more it would suffocate her.

‘Tomorrow? Of course not, Mama. You cannot break mourning so soon; it is unheard of. I cannot allow it. People would see it as an insult to the pater’s memory. Have you taken leave of your senses?’

‘No, my dear, merely leave of your father.’

She watched him hurry away to wake Alice with the news. She was sorry she had saddled him with a recalcitrant mother but he could not expect compliance in everything, not when her own survival was at stake. People would think it a damn sight more odd if she strangled Alice – which was the alternative.

I shall go to the Admiralty, she thought. Perhaps I can arrange an exchange for young Master Grayle so that he may return to his mother. Again, it can make no difference to the war one way or the other. We send an American prisoner back to America and some poor Englishman held in America returns home to England.

Odd that the subject of John Paul Jones had arisen only yesterday. Had not Jones’s intention been to hold the Earl of Selkirk hostage in order to procure an exchange of American prisoners? Goodness gracious, I shall be treading in the path of that pirate. The thought gave her unseemly pleasure. She stood at the edge of the yew-scented Dark Arbour, marvelling at how wicked she had become.

When had she taken the decision to act upon Martha’s request? Why had she taken it? To outrage her family in revenge for a niggardly pension? Not really. Because of the picture Martha had tried to draw of her son? If she understood it aright, Lieutenant Grayle had a physical likeness to his maternal uncle.

An image came to her of Martha’s brother, a young man in a rowing boat pulling out to sea with easy strokes, head and shoulders outlined against a setting sun so that he was etched in black except for a fiery outline around his head.

Dead now. He’d joined the navy and one of Martha’s letters had told her he’d been killed aboard the Intrepid during the battle of Minorca in 1756. She’d put the mental image away, as with the other memories of her Devon summers, but its brightness hadn’t faded on being fetched out again.

His nephew had ‘such a desire that all may have Liberty’, did he? Well, she might enjoy some liberty for herself while procuring his. It would give her purpose, at least for a while.

But, no, that even hadn’t been the reason for her decision. It was because she owed Martha. For a happiness. And the debt had been called in: ‘… as you too have a son …’ Because Martha agonized for a son as she, in a different way, had agonized for hers. Perhaps she need not fail Martha’s son as she had failed her own.

Then she stopped rummaging through excuses for what she was going to do and came up, somewhat shamefully, with the one that lay beneath all the others, the one that, she realized in that second, had finally made up her mind.

Because, if she didn’t do it, she’d be bored to death.

She stepped out from the arbour into sunlight and walked across the lawn towards the house to tell Joan to begin packing.

CHAPTER TWO

Two hundred and fifty miles north of Chantries, Makepeace Hedley was also about to receive a letter from America. Since it had been sent from New York, which was under British control, its voyage across the Atlantic had been more direct, though no quicker, than that of the one delivered to the Countess of Stacpoole the day before.

As with most of Newcastle’s post, it was dropped off at the Queen’s Head by the Thursday mail coach from London and was collected along with many other letters by Makepeace’s stepson, Oliver Hedley, on his way to work.

Further down the hill, Oliver stopped to buy a copy of the Newcastle Journal at Sarah Hodgkinson’s printing works.

‘Frogs have declared war,’ Sarah yelled at him over the clacking machines, but not as if it was of any moment; the news had been so long expected that she’d had a suitable editorial made up for some weeks ready to drop into place in the forme.

Oliver read the editorial quickly; its tone was more anticipatory than fearful. Wars were good for Newcastle’s trade in iron and steel, and mopped up its vagrants and troublemakers into the army. True, the presence of American privateers, now to be joined by French allies, meant that vessels sailing down the east coast to supply London’s coal were having to be convoyed but, since the extra ships were being built on the Tyne and Wear, it was likely that the area’s general prosperity could only increase.

Nevertheless Oliver detected a note of uneasiness in the editorial. It spread itself happily enough on the subject of French perfidy but was careful not to cast similar obloquy on the cause the French were joining. The Frogs were an old enemy and if they wanted war Newcastle was happy to oblige them. America was a different matter – on that subject the town was deeply divided. Indeed, when the proclamation of war with America had been read from the steps of the Mansion House two years before, it had been greeted with silence instead of the usual huzzas.

A strong petition had been sent to the government by the majority of Newcastle’s magistrates offering support in the prosecution of the war but the burgesses, under Sir George Saville, had sent an equally strong counter-petition deprecating it. And Sir George was not only a popular man, he was also an experienced soldier.

‘It’s civil war,’ he’d told Oliver’s father, ‘and no good will come of it. For one thing, we can’t maintain a supply line over three thousand miles for long.’

‘For another, it’s wrong,’ Andra Hedley had said.

At that stage, the majority of Americans would have forgone independence – indeed, still regarded themselves as subjects of King George III – for amelioration of the taxes and oppressive rules of trade which had caused the quarrel in the first place. ‘But they’ll not get it,’ Andra had prophesied. ‘The moment them lads in Boston chucked tea in t’harbour, Parliament saw it as an attack on property and yon’s a mortal sin to them struttin’ clumps. No chance of an olive branch after that.’

And he’d been right.

Oliver put the mail and the newspaper in his pocket as he went down the hill in his usual hopscotch fashion to keep his boots from muck evacuated by mooing, frightened herds on their way to the shambles. Under the influence of the sun, which was beginning to roll up its sleeves, the strong whiff of the country the animals brought with them would soon be overlaid by the greater majesty of lime, smoke, sewage and brewing. Coal- and glassworks were already sending out infinitesimal particles of smitch that, without the usual North Sea breeze – and there was none today – would add another thin layer to the city’s dark coating.

He hurried past new buildings noisily going up and old buildings equally noisily coming down, past clanging smithies and factories, past street-traders and idlers gathered round the pumps, all of them shouting. Weekday conversations in Newcastle-upon-Tyne had to be conducted at a pitch which suggested deafness on the part of those conversing. A lot of them were deaf, especially those (the majority) who spent their working lives in its foundries, metal yards and factories with their eardrums pounded by machinery that roared day and night. Consequently, they shouted.

Clamour reached its climax at the river, Newcastle’s artery. Cranes, coal rattling into the cargo holds of keels, ironworks, shipyards, anchor-makers … But, as he walked along the Quay, the cacophony assaulting Oliver’s ears was overridden by his stepmother’s high, feminine, gull-like squawk twisting through it like a Valkyrie swerving through battling soldiers to reach the dead.

There was always something. Today a careless wherry carrying pottery upriver had knocked into one of Makepeace’s keels and caused damage – luckily above its waterline.

She was staving off the wherryman’s murder at the hands of the keel’s skipper by holding back the keelman with his belt and remonstrating with the offender at the same time.

‘Whaat d’ye think ye’re playin’ at, ye beggor, tig ’n’ chasey? Ah’ll have ye bornt alive, so ah wull. Howay ta gaffor an’ explain yeself, ye bluddy gobmek. Hold still, ye buggor’ – this was to the keelman – ‘divvn’t Master Reed telt ye ‘bout tuen the kittle?’

Oliver shook his head in wonder. Tyne watermen were renowned for their ferocity; this skinny little woman was dealing with savages in their own language and subduing them. While a new spirit of philanthropy was bringing charity, education and Sunday schools to Newcastle it had seemed impossible that such enlightenment could touch the dark souls of those who worked on its river. His stepmother, however, had forced the men who shipped her coal to join a benefit society, the Good Intent, where godliness, rules and, in the last resort, fines were having a favourable effect on their swearing, drinking and fighting. The popular Newcastle maxim that keelmen feared nothing except a lee shore had been altered to: ‘Nowt but a lee shore – and Makepeace Hedley.’

The wherryman having been dispatched to the Quay to report to her rivermaster, and the keelman, sulkily, to his repairs, Makepeace waved to her stepson and came ashore to kiss him.

Possibly the richest woman in Northumberland, she resembled what her mine manager called ‘an ambulatin’ sceercraa’. Her long black coat was old and the tricorn into which she bundled her red hair even older. She’d told Oliver once that femininity was a handicap in a masculine world; to be accepted by other coal-owners as well as by her subordinates she had to play a character. Men liked to make a mystery of business, she said, and the fact that any woman of intelligence could master it maddened them. But as long as she seemed an oddity, she said, men didn’t resent her intrusion, or no more than they would resent a male competitor; she was merely a quirk of nature, an act of God, to be accepted with a resigned shrug. Eccentricity, she said, was sexless.

He supposed she was right. Newcastle had a surprising number of successful female entrepreneurs – the printer from whom he’d just bought his newspaper among them – and he wouldn’t want to bed any of them.

Nevertheless, Oliver appreciated beauty and was offended by his stepmother’s aesthetic crime. Not that Makepeace was beautiful; she was approaching forty and her red hair was beginning to sprout the occasional strand of grey, but, dressed up and with a prevailing wind, she could look extremely presentable. Her smile, when she used it – and she was using it now as she came towards him – was better than beautiful, it was astounding.

He owed a great deal to this woman, not just his father’s happiness in marriage but the wealth brought to them all by her accidental ownership of the land on which coal was now being mined on a vast scale.

For Makepeace and Andra Hedley, their unsought meeting was the stuff of legend, to be recalled again and again: she, a benighted American-born widow with only a title deed won at the gaming tables to her name, asking for shelter at the moorland house of Andra Hedley, a widower, equally impoverished but with the knowledge to capitalize on her one asset.

Together they’d exploited the rich seam of coal that lay beneath her land. Thanks to her, Andra, a former miner himself, had been able to build a village for miners that was a model of decent living.

Thanks also to her, the Hedley shipping office here on the Quay was a new and graceful building, employing clerks who worked in the light of a great oriel window that ran three storeys from roof to ground. And thanks to her, he, Oliver, had been raised from the position of a young lawyer with few clients to the directorship of one of the biggest mining companies in Newcastle, able to own a fine house and fill it with fine things.

More than that, this stepmother had been prepared to love him from the first, and he’d come to love her.

Lately, though, he’d begun to fear that her means were becoming her ends. The difficulties and setbacks she’d faced in a crowded life had given Makepeace the right to admire herself for overcoming them but now the determination that had enabled her to do so was becoming overbearing. Her boast that she spoke her mind was more often than not a euphemism for rudeness. She expressed an opinion on everything and showed little respect for anyone else’s. She was in danger of becoming an autocratic besom.

Missing Dada, Oliver thought. The harshness he’d noticed in Makepeace had become prevalent in the three months since Andra Hedley had taken himself off to France to work with the chemist Lavoisier on investigating the properties of air.

Oliver knew himself to be more than capable of running the shipping end of the Hedley enterprise – very much wanted to – and his uncle Jamie, Andra’s brother, was equally capable of overseeing the mining operation up at Raby. Makepeace, however, refused to give up control of either and was exhausting herself and everybody else in the process.

His father and only his father, as Oliver knew, could have made her take a holiday – nobody else would dare – but since Andra was not there and she missed him badly, his absence merely added to her self-imposed burdens and her tendency towards despotism was compounded.

Her smile faded as she closed in. ‘What?’

‘It’s war, Missus. The French have declared.’ He took her hands and she clutched them for support.

‘And no word from your dada, I suppose.’

‘No. At least, I don’t think so …’ He was, he realized, holding an unexplored bundle of the day’s mail under his arm and together they hurried into the office and up to her room to riffle through it.

There was no letter from France. And now there wouldn’t be; the ports were closed for the duration of the war.

Makepeace began striding up and down the room. ‘I told him. Didn’t I write that mule-headed goober? Come home, I said. There’ll be war, I said. You’ll get fixed like a bug in molasses. You wait ’til he gets back, I’ll larrup that damn man ’til he squawks …’

When she wasn’t scolding her employees in broad Northumbrian, Makepeace could speak English without an accent but in times of distress she reverted to pure American.

Oliver sat down while she tried, through rage, to dissipate a worry he considered needless; it was inconvenient that Andra Hedley should be in Paris at such a time but he was in no danger. The position held by the people he was with would ensure nothing happened to him.

Sun coming in through the great window provided the rare luxury of warmth to a spartan office, its new oak panelling still undarkened by the Newcastle air. Apart from an escritoire with its pigeon-holes neatly docketed, there was a table, only one chair – it was to his stepmother’s advantage to make her visitors stand while she sat – and a good, but worn, Isfahan rug on the floor.

Oliver started sorting through the letters while Makepeace raved on: ‘I’ll go fetch him myself, that’s for sure. I’ll get one of the colliers to take me over to … to … where’s somewhere neutral? Flushing, I’ll go to Flushing and get a coach to Paris and drag him home. I’ll give that goddam Frenchman … what’s the name of the bugger? Lavabo?’

‘Lavoisier.’

‘I’ll give him gip, him and his experiments.’

‘Missus.’ Oliver’s voice was gentle.

‘What?’

‘I doubt the pair of them are even aware war’s been declared. They’re scientificals, they’d not notice a thunderbolt. Even if Dada does know, he won’t think it’s important compared to what he’s doing. If he can find a way to stop explosions from fire-damp …’

She quietened. ‘I want him home, Oliver.’

Did she think he didn’t? His father was one of those rare people whose very presence made one feel safe, possibly because Andra Hedley wanted everybody to be safer, especially those who worked in coal mines. As a child, Oliver had learned that he had to share his father’s attention with his father’s obsession to find a way to neutralize the gases that caused underground explosions.

Now Makepeace was having to do the same. Correspondence with the French chemist who’d discovered oxygen had drawn Andra to France, convinced that the disastrous coming-together of gas and flame might be overcome if he could understand the properties of the air that carried them.

‘We all miss him, Missus,’ Oliver said, ‘but he’d be worse off crossing the Channel than staying where he is. So would you – a collier’d be taken by the privateers quicker than spit. Then there’s the borders, they’ll close those. And the Dutch and the Flemings ain’t any too fond of us just now, what with the navy stopping their ships …’

‘What’s to do then?’ She was irritable.

‘Howay, lass,’ he said, imitating his father. He got up to put his arm round her. ‘The war can’t last much longer.’

‘Be over by Christmas, will it? Another Christmas? We’ve damn well had two already.’

He’d never quite known where she stood on the war; his father was all for granting America her independence, and so was he, but Makepeace never joined their discussions. Perhaps she agreed so strongly that it didn’t need saying, perhaps she had reservations – it was American patriots who had driven her out of Boston. But on one thing she never wavered: America couldn’t be beaten. ‘King George ain’t going to hold that country if it don’t want to be held.’

Oliver wasn’t so sure; viewed from the industrial ramparts of Newcastle the ill-equipped farmers who made up General Washington’s army appeared as men fighting for a medieval inheritance. This, however, was not the time to say so. He sought inspiration, and found it.

‘Ben Franklin,’ he said.

Andra Hedley and Benjamin Franklin had become mutual admirers when they’d met in London before the war began and hostilities between their two countries had not lessened their regard, nor had their correspondence ceased when Franklin moved to Paris to become America’s agent in France. It was Franklin, indeed, who’d put Andra in touch with Lavoisier.

‘Oliver, you ain’t the cabbage-head you look.’ He’d won his stepmother’s approval. ‘Diplomatic channels, that’s the ticket. They won’t stop those. I’ll get young Ffoulkes to contact Ben and set up a lazy … what is it?’

‘Laissez-passer.’

‘One of them. Get him back under a flag of truce. We’ll have him home quicker’n Hell scorches feathers.’

While she elaborated on the matter, he turned back to the mail and saw that in their haste they’d overlooked the letter from New York.

Wordlessly, he held it out and she snatched it from him.

Of the many surprising facets to Makepeace Hedley, the one Oliver found most incomprehensible, was her relationship with Philippa, her daughter by her first marriage. Early on, when the child was seven years old, Makepeace had allowed Philippa’s American godmother, Susan Brewer, to take the girl home with her to Boston. Philippa hadn’t come back; it seemed she didn’t want to.

The opening of hostilities between America and Britain had caused a hiatus in news of both Susan and Philippa and this, alongside the fact that most of the fighting was in Massachusetts, had – somewhat late in the day – awakened Makepeace to her daughter’s danger.

She’d had to be restrained from sailing off across the Atlantic in one of her coaling fleet’s vessels in order to see what was happening for herself. Undoubtedly she would have done, except that word came in time to say that Susan and Philippa had left Boston and were safely settled in British-held New York.

Oliver watched his stepmother flop onto the oriel sill to read a letter that had, from the look of it, undergone a rough passage. She’d taken off the dreadful tricorn and her hair had escaped from the cap beneath so that the sun turned it into a hazy, auburn frame around her head. He felt a second’s jealousy on behalf of the mother who’d died giving birth to him. Could she have competed in such variety with this woman?

‘Oh, Oliver,’ she said, looking up, ‘they’re coming home. Susan don’t reckon New York to be safe any longer. They’ll be here. Susan sent this by the mail packet but they were going to sail for England right after she wrote, almost immediate.’

Her pleasure demanded his, yet Oliver thought of the Atlantic, the thousands of miles of sea that had become the battleground of two navies, now to be joined by a third.

‘Um,’ he said.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No, it’s all right. Listen … “You will remember Captain Strang and the Lord Percy … ” She looked up: ‘That’s the frigate brought Susan and me and my first husband to England, a sound craft she is, and Strang’s a fine captain.

“He sails for London on Friday and Philippa and I with her. The Percy, you will remember, is a dispatch carrier and Captain Strang assures me he has no orders to give battle but will make for England as speedily as may be so that, with God’s mercy, I shall deliver your daughter safely to you in six weeks.”’

Makepeace blew out her cheeks. ‘Phew. That’s a relief.’

Her stepson saw that happy memories of the Lord Percy made the vessel invulnerable as far as she was concerned. ‘Good news, Missus,’ he said. ‘When’s she due?’

‘Most any day.’ Makepeace scanned the last page. ‘Strang’ll drop anchor in the Pool like he did before. Maybe I can go meet …’

She whimpered. Her face bleached so that her freckles looked suddenly green. Oliver took the letter from her hand before it could drop. Beneath a bold, curly signature, ‘Your devoted friend, Susan Brewer’, was a date. ‘March 2, 1778.’

He met his stepmother’s appalled eyes, went to his knees and held her against him. ‘It don’t mean … very well, the letter’s been delayed but in that case perhaps so’s the Percy. There’s maybe another letter floundering around the seas somewhere telling us she’d changed her mind, maybe Strang couldn’t take the two of them after all, maybe Susan decided to wait for better weather.’

But … four months, he thought; Susan should have written again, there should’ve been news one way or another in four months.

Makepeace didn’t hear him. She was being assailed by certainty. God had drowned her daughter. Philippa and Susan had set off from New York and not arrived. Somewhere on the voyage, the Lord Percy had gone down.

It seemed inevitable now, as if she had known it in advance and allowed it to happen. Because of all the years she had let pass without seeing Philippa or summoning her home from America, God had chosen the ultimate punishment.

I didn’t go to her. I didn’t fetch her back. Andra wanted me to, but I didn’t.

It was as if her daughter had been calling to her across the Atlantic in a voice that she’d been too busy to hear, allowing it to be subsumed in work, her marriage, the birth of other daughters.

Guilt snatched at a rag to cover itself. She didn’t want to come back; she wrote she’d rather stay with Susan in America.

The small figure of her daughter at their last interview in London stood in front of her now, as clear as clear, listening to her explain that Aunt Susan wanted to return to America and that Betty, who had been Makepeace’s nurse as well as Philippa’s, would be going too. They wanted to take Philippa with them – the child was the apple of their eye, they had looked after her while Makepeace was busy – and Makepeace was giving the child the choice.

A plain, grave little girl with Philip Dapifer’s long face, his sallow skin and hair, but without the humour that had made her late father so attractive. As she’d considered, she’d looked like a small, studious camel.

‘Would you be coming too, Mama?’

‘No. I have things to do in England. I must go up North again soon.’

So much to do. Well, there had been. She’d still been struggling to adapt to the loss of Philip and gain wealth from the coalfield she’d won so that she could beggar the two people, one of them Philip’s divorced first wife, whose chicanery had robbed her and Philippa of his estates when he died.

Andra had been merely her business partner in those days, someone in the background. She’d been alone, obsessed with taking revenge on the first Lady Dapifer, which eventually she had, oh, she had, and never regretted it.

She remembered, agonizingly now, how she had defined the matter for herself then: did she love her daughter enough to abandon the struggle and go back to America – possibly a better mother but undoubtedly a beaten woman? And the answer had been no, she didn’t.

Now, again, she heard Philippa make her decision.

‘I think I should like to go. Just for a visit.’

Don’t go. Stay here. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

It had been punishing at that moment to experience what the child must have felt every time Makepeace had left her. How much greater the punishment now.

So she had let her go. She’d watched Susan and Betty, her best and only women friends, take Philippa’s hands and lead her up the gangplank of the America-bound boat, all three of them alienated from the woman to whom they’d been devoted because she hadn’t had time for them. And with them had gone another beloved child, Betty’s son Josh.

At the last, Makepeace had reached for her daughter.

‘I’ll come and fetch you back, you know. If you like America, we might even stay there together.’

The small body resisted. It had been the worst moment then; it was the worst moment now. Philippa hadn’t believed her.

The wave that had gathered speed and weight somewhere out in the Atlantic to come rushing at her crashed over Makepeace. She couldn’t see; she was thrashing about in a roaring darkness.

Oliver tried to reach her. ‘Don’t, Missus, don’t. We don’t know yet. There’s a thousand explanations …’ She wasn’t hearing him. He could only hold her close and wait for the initial agony to subside.

Unmarried and childless, Oliver could only guess at her pain but he suspected guilt was part of it. He’d once asked his father why Philippa had gone away. Andra had said: ‘Weren’t my choice, lad. We weren’t wed then. I’d have kept the lass, we got on well, her and me, the time she lived at Raby before she went. I’d’ve loved her like my own.’

And he would have done, Oliver knew; Andra Hedley’s reverence for all living creatures was especially for children. Reluctant that his son should think less of Makepeace, he’d added: ‘Weren’t her fault, neither. The bairn’s birth were a time o’ despair for her. Husband just dead, filched of home and fortune that very day by as brazen a pair o’ schemers as ever graced a gibbet. Beat dizzy, she was. Took years to get back and by then there’d opened a breach twixt her and little lass they could neither of ’em bridge. Philippa’d become closer to others than to her ma and when they upped sticks for America, she went an’ all. Nobody’s fault, lad, nobody’s fault.’

Oliver neither understood nor approved of those parents, the very rich and the very poor, who sent their children to be brought up in other households; he didn’t come of either class. Neither, he thought, does the Missus. Her first marriage to the aristocrat, Sir Philip Dapifer, had been only a temporary elevation; by birth and breeding she was as bourgeois as himself, the daughter of a Boston innkeeper.

Yet he considered that even now, secure and happily married once more, the Missus was not sufficiently attentive to the two daughters she’d had by Andra. Too often, in Oliver’s opinion, she stayed overnight in Newcastle through press of work, rather than returning to Raby.

True, the little girls were happy and vigorous children, well looked after by his and their mutual Aunt Ginny, apparently not aware – as Philippa must have been – that they weren’t receiving full value from their mother.

Scenting disapproval, his father had emphasized: ‘Oliver, tha marries who tha marries. I wed a businesswoman and knew it afore I wed her. I’d not change her.’

He’d not received full value himself, which is why the matter weighed on him; he’d been motherless with a father working long hours in the mines to keep them both – and, this was the rub, that same father often abstracted during their precious hours together. For if Andra had married a businesswoman, Makepeace had married an engineer, self taught but boiling with invention, his mind bent on lessening the dangers miners faced every day underground. But that was nature; Andra Hedley was a proper man. To be a proper woman, Makepeace Hedley had also to be a proper mother. And she was not. And now suffered because she was not.

Censorious he might be, but it was impossible for Oliver to watch, unmoved, the crucifixion of a woman who’d always been kind to him.

‘I drowned my baby,’ she kept saying, ‘I drowned her and Susan.’

‘We don’t know,’ he kept saying in return, ‘we don’t know, Missus. Let’s find out afore we give way.’

In the end, he managed to reach her. His words began to penetrate the deluge of despair she was lost in and she grabbed at them as if he’d thrown her a rope.

‘Might not be that, might it?’ she begged. ‘Might be something else. Could’ve been blown off course, couldn’t they? Landed in the West Indies, maybe?’

‘Certainly they could.’

‘Who’d know?’

‘The Admiralty,’ he said, firmly. ‘Lord Percy’s a naval vessel, ain’t she? The Admiralty’ll know what’s happened to her. I’ll write this very day –’

‘No,’ she said. Somehow she’d got herself in hand, even if that hand was trembling, and Oliver saw not just the acumen but the courage that had made his stepmother the woman she was. ‘No more damn letters. We’ll go to the Admiralty and we’ll go today. I’ll get some answers out of their damn lordships or I’ll know the reason why. When’s the next coach to London?’

CHAPTER THREE

The Commission for Sick and Hurt Seamen and the Exchange of Prisoners of War, more generally known as the Sick and Hurt Office, was under the direction of the Lords of the Admiralty in London and, as such, reflected their lordships’ demand for spit and polish.

The sailor who stamped along its immaculate corridors beside Diana wore dress uniform so stiff with starch and wax she decided he’d been lifted into it by traction. The waiting room he ushered her into had Caroline elegance; even the restrained sun of a muggy day coming through the windows was reflected in an oak floor lethal with over-buffing and the scent of unexpected roses, standing to attention in a centrepiece on the great walnut table, was overpowered by a smell of beeswax and turpentine.

She was asked to wait. ‘Mr Commissioner Powell has been delayed a minute, ma’am.’

She frowned; she was not used to being kept waiting by underlings. However, she was on an adventure and she had nothing more important to do. ‘Very well.’

There were two other occupants of the room, a woman of about her own age and a young man, sitting silently on adjoining chairs at the table. The Dowager lowered her head as she passed them on her way to look out of the window. The young man acknowledged her politely, rising for a slight bow; the woman ignored her.

In one look, Diana had automatically assessed to what social order they belonged. Decent enough young man, neat, well dressed but not quite the ton: a professional person from the provinces. The woman was less easy to place. Good clothes, really very good, nice silk, but worn without care, distressing red hair escaping from a hat that didn’t match the gloves. In misery, from the look of her. A wife of the mercantile class in some distress.

Below the window, in Horse Guards, a Grenadier company was parading in full battle gear to the accompaniment of drummers and fifers. From the Dowager’s high viewpoint they looked like pretty squares of tin soldiers. Having attended reviews of the Earl of Stacpoole’s Own Grenadiers, she could guess that under their fur mitres and carrying a weight of sixty pounds in knapsack, blanket, water flask, ammunition and weapons, they were not feeling pretty. As she watched, one of the toy soldiers fell flat, fainting, as if flicked over by an invisible child. The roar of the drill sergeant’s disapproval coincided with the entry of Mr Commissioner Powell behind her.

‘My goodness, so sorry to keep you waiting, your ladyship. Dear, yes, I hope they made you comfortable.’

She’d expected a naval officer but Mr Commissioner Powell was a lawyer and his neat subfusc looked dowdy and civilian amidst such shiny naval order. He was flurried by her importance – in her note she hadn’t scrupled to emphasize her title, the late Earl’s eminence and her son’s position at Court.

‘There’s sorry I am for your bereavement, your ladyship. A loss to us all, indeed. Such a great man. Please come this way, your ladyship. My office …’ He bowed her towards the door.

‘We were here first.’

The Dowager looked round. The woman at the table had raised her head. Mr Powell stopped, amazed. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said,’ the woman said, ‘we were here first. We been waiting and I want for you to deal with us now.’ The voice was toneless but the American accent was strong.

Colonial mercantile, thought the Dowager.

Mr Powell wasn’t impressed either. ‘But, madam, you can understand …’ His hand indicated not only the Dowager’s position but her widow’s weeds.

‘Sorry for your loss, ma’am.’ The woman didn’t look at Diana; her eyes were on Powell. ‘But, see, my daughter’s missing and that man there knows where she is.’

It had been a terrible day, a terrible week for Makepeace and Oliver Hedley. After a breakneck journey from Newcastle to London, it had transpired that Andrew Ffoulkes, the rising young luminary of the diplomatic corps on whose help Makepeace had counted, was absent, sent abroad on a secret mission. At the house of the Marquis of Rockingham, another influential friend, they’d learned that the master was in Yorkshire.

Though they’d scattered money like rose petals around the Admiralty, its clerks had been too harassed by the developing situation at sea to search for the information needed by an increasingly distraught woman. When, finally, they’d managed to trace the fate of the Lord Percy, the news had been awful.

Nor had it been final; that was the thing. Apart from the fact that they had been involved in dreadful events, whether Philippa and Susan were alive or not was still uncertain; they had been supercargo, civilian passengers, and, as such, no department had been willing to assume responsibility for them.

At last, one clerk had been helpful. ‘You want the Sick and Hurt Office, ma’am. They got them sort of records.’

‘I know where she is?’ Mr Powell asked now.

‘That’s what they told me.’ Makepeace was keeping her voice steady, but when she tried to get up from her chair she sagged. She hadn’t eaten and had barely slept for seventy-two hours.

Oliver began to fan her with his hat. Idly, the Dowager handed him her fan. ‘Use that, young man.’ She recognized desperation when she saw it and was touched. She turned to the commissioner. ‘Perhaps you had better deal with this person, Mr Powell. Now, I think, and here.’

‘Oah, but all records are in my office.’

‘They can be fetched,’ the Dowager told him with finality. The woman was obviously exhausted. In any case, she found herself intrigued and had no intention of missing the story about to unfold. ‘I am prepared to wait.’

‘Very well, if your ladyship is sure.’

She was sure. She took a chair at the back of the room out of everyone’s eyeline. ‘Please proceed.’

Obediently but somewhat put out, Mr Powell seated himself at the head of the table opposite Makepeace and Oliver. ‘Name?’

‘This is Mrs Hedley. I am Oliver Hedley, her stepson.’ Oliver took up the running. He produced a notebook. Having won her point and the necessary attention, Makepeace had slumped.

‘March the sixth this year,’ Oliver said, ‘a Royal Navy dispatch carrier, the Lord Percy, left New York bound for London. My stepsister and a friend, Miss Susan Brewer, were on board. Halfway across the Atlantic, the Percy was engaged by the American navy corvette Pilgrim. Percy’s captain was killed.’ Without looking up from his notes, Oliver put a hand on Makepeace’s shoulder for a moment; she’d been fond of Captain Strang. ‘Lord Percy was forced to strike her colours and the remaining crew and passengers were taken aboard Pilgrim. That is what the Admiralty told us.’

Mr Powell rose from his chair. Makepeace looked up, quickly. ‘Are you listening?’

‘I’m sending for the records, madam,’ Mr Powell told her. He went out into the corridor to speak to someone and came back to Oliver. ‘Yes, yes, continue. Your sister and friend, now aboard the Pilgrim. American vessel.’

‘They were. But on May the fourth Pilgrim encountered a British man-of-war, the Riposte and’ – again Oliver’s hand reached for Makepeace’s shoulder – ‘the Riposte sank the Pilgrim.’

There was silence. The Dowager averted her eyes and stared instead at a portrait of Commissioner Samuel Pepys.

Mr Commissioner Powell said, quite gently: ‘So the American vessel went down …’

Oliver nodded. ‘So the American went down but … but some of her people were picked up. The Admiralty says the Riposte took on survivors and headed for England. Home port Plymouth. She arrived there in June, we’ve learned that much. The Admiralty told us American prisoners were on board and they were put in gaol. They don’t know how many or their names or where they are …’

‘Excuse me again.’ Once again, the commissioner went to the door and gave more orders.

Makepeace said, her voice rising: ‘So where is she? Where’s my Philippa? Where’s Susan Brewer? If they’re in gaol … if you’ve put them in gaol …’

Mr Powell tutted. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘we don’t put females in prison. Boys under twelve and females are set at liberty, see, but I’m not sure we keep the names.’

The starched and waxed sailor who’d accompanied the Dowager to the room came into it with a pile of ledgers.

‘Now then.’ Mr Powell peered at the books. ‘Plymouth, Plymouth …’ He selected one and licked his fingers. ‘June, June. Busy month, June and, o’ course, Plymouth is a busy port. But yes, yere we are, HMS Riposte. Docked June the seventh to unload prisoners. Look at this now, there’s near a hundred of ’em, French as well – she must have sunk a Frenchy on her way home. Prize money there then, I expect. Name again? Hedley, is it?’

‘Dapifer,’ said Makepeace, her voice suddenly strong, like a tolling bell. ‘Her name is Philippa Dapifer.’ It began to break as she added: ‘She’s eleven years old. Twelve in September. Travelling with her godmother, Miss Susan Brewer.’

‘Sir Philip Dapifer was my stepsister’s father,’ Oliver added, knowing it would help.

It did. Mr Commissioner Powell looked up. ‘Not Sir Philip Dapifer? There now. Sir Philip. A good friend to the Admiralty, Sir Philip. Not that I knew him well, mind, but …’

‘Just get on,’ Makepeace said, wearily.

Encouraged that he was not dealing with hoi polloi any more, Mr Powell got on, his spectacles glinting in the turn from side to side as his eyes searched the page of a closely written list.

At the back of the room, the Dowager’s interest increased. Sir Philip Dapifer, well, well. She had met him rarely and only then by chance – being a liberal Whig and an influential supporter of the Marquis of Rockingham, he had been anathema to Aymer who’d refused to meet him socially – but she had liked what she’d seen of him. Charm and excellent breeding.

The same could not be said of Sir Philip’s first wife. Well born and exquisitely pretty but a voracious trollop. Aymer had not been so particular about her, the Dowager recalled. There had been a rumour that they’d had an affair, one in a long line of various affairs for them both; the woman had been shameless. Hadn’t there been something about her and Dapifer’s best friend?

Yes, there had been, and Dapifer had gone to America to divorce her quietly, trying to protect her name and his. And returned … yes, it was all coming back now … and returned with a totally unsuitable new wife, an American, a serving girl from a Boston inn – something like that. So that poor female there had been the second Lady Dapifer, had she?

But Dapifer had died, suddenly and much too young. The Dowager remembered the surprisingly sharp pang with which she’d heard the news, as if something valuable had been taken out of the world …

Mr Powell was muttering to himself. ‘Dapifer and Brewer we’re looking for. I’ve got a D’Argent here, no, no, that’s a Frenchman …’

He’s not going to find them, Makepeace thought. They’re not there. It’s coming and I won’t be able to bear it. This is like it was when Philip died. It was a return to affliction, an old terror come again so that she felt she did not belong where she sat but should be somewhere else.

Behind her, the Dowager continued to squeeze her memory. Yes. The first wife had claimed the Dapifer estates back after Sir Philip died on the grounds that the divorce had not been legal. The scandal sheets were full of it at the time. And then she and her lover had frittered the lands away and somehow – the details were hazy – this second wife had got them back. Now, poor thing, she’d lost her daughter.

The commissioner’s finger was approaching the end of the list.

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry …’ He turned a page. ‘Wait now, here’s something. Supercargo.’

Yes, Makepeace thought, please. Please.

Mr Commissioner Powell tilted his book to see the page better. ‘“Supercargo, American. Two …”’ he read, ‘“one female, one ship’s boy. Released June the seventh.’ He looked up, smiling as if he had not just turned the screw to the rack’s limit. ‘There we are then.’

The Dowager took a hand. ‘Names?’ she suggested. ‘Ages? Location? Are such people let go to wander as they may when they arrive on these shores? A child? In this case, possibly two children?’

‘Well.’ Mr Powell blew out his lips; some people refused to be satisfied. ‘It just says “supercargo” yere. I agree with your ladyship, the names should be on the list but when a captain’s engaged with the enemy … And by rights, supercargo’s not our concern, there’s charities to deal with them, we got enough with prisoners. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more, Mrs Hedley. Perhaps there’s some record in Plymouth.’

She felt helpless before the world’s oppression, but while there was a crack of hope in it, she had to go on. ‘Plymouth then, Oliver,’ she said.

He nodded and took her arm.

As Mr Powell opened the door for them, the Dowager was moved to say: ‘Have you a conveyance, Mrs Hedley …?’ It was kindly meant; the Dowager was a kind woman and, had the answer been no, would have gone on to offer the coach in which she had travelled from Chantries. However, her accustomed languid tone fell on Makepeace’s ears as condescension.

For the first time Makepeace became fully aware of the woman who’d been sitting behind her, listening to her misery. She was tall, elegant and, from what could be distinguished beneath the veil, beautiful. But she also looked disdainful and belonged to a class that, with one or two exceptions, had always treated her, Makepeace, like a squaw wandered into its midst with a tomahawk. She represented a female set which, during her first marriage, had patronized her, belittled her and, when she’d been brought low after Philip’s death, had not lifted one of its beringed fingers to help her.

She stiffened. She said: ‘I got my own coach, thank you.’ There was no gratitude in her voice. She went out.

Yes, well.

The Dowager crossed to the table, sat down and picked up the fan that Oliver had left on the table, also without thanks. What else could one expect of the low-born?

Mr Powell tutted in sympathy. ‘Now then, your ladyship, we can attend to your request. A Lieutenant Gale, was it? One of our prisoners?’

‘Grayle.’

‘Grayle, of course. American. May I ask your interest in this person, your ladyship?’

The Dowager appeared to consider. ‘I don’t think so, no.’

‘Oah.’ Some pink appeared in Commissioner Powell’s cheeks but the rebuff merely emphasized the blueness of her ladyship’s blood and, therefore, her right to administer it. ‘Well there, I found him at least. The Sam Adams, you said in your note. And here she is.’ Mr Powell inserted a finger behind a bookmark and opened one of the ledgers. ‘American sloop, three hundred and eighty-five tons, eighteen guns, taken at Cap La Hague, December the third last year, surviving crew forty-one.’ Mr Powell ran his finger down a list. ‘And here he is, Forrest Grayle, Lieutenant.’ He looked up, a terrier dropping a bone in her ladyship’s lap.

‘Where?’

‘What? Oh.’ Mr Powell found more bookmarks. ‘Where’s that report of the action, now? Yere ’tis … nyum, “Exchange of fire …” nyum, nyum, “several hours …” Oh, a real battle, this one. “Badly holed but seaworthy … taken under tow.” Ah yes.’ Again Mr Powell was triumphant. ‘Plymouth. There’s a coincidence, isn’t it? Plymouth all over the place today. Yes, she was taken to Plymouth and the crew incarcerated in Millbay Prison. There’s lucky for them.’

‘Really.’

‘Indeed.’ He leaned forward. ‘It would be the hulks else and I won’t hide from your ladyship, whilst we do our best for these souls, what with French and Americans, let alone the occasional Spaniard, every prison in the country at our disposal is crowded out and hulks have to take the overflow. Believe you me, Millbay is better. It’s on dry land for a start.’

He’s probably quite a nice little man, Diana thought, if undoubtedly Welsh.

She said: ‘Obviously you have your problems, sir, and I am here to relieve you of one of them. I wish to arrange for Lieutenant Grayle to be exchanged.’ She added lazily: ‘One would be happy to pay for such an arrangement.’ For a while, she could still draw upon the Stacpoole bank account.

‘Oah.’ Mr Powell sat up with surprise. ‘Exchange, is it? No, no. There can be no question of an exchange for American prisoners. Absolutely not. Nothing I can do for your ladyship in that quarter, do you see.’

‘I do not see, I’m afraid,’ she drawled. ‘One was led to believe you gentlemen incorporated the exchange of prisoners of war in’ – she waved a hand – ‘whatever it is you do.’

‘Prisoners of war, yes, prisoners of war, that’s right enough. But Americans aren’t prisoners of war, your ladyship, not like the French. We’ll be able to send French prisoners back in return for some of ours but strictly speaking Americans are rebels against their lawful king. Captured in British waters attacking English shipping, they are. Traitors, in fact. Felons, pirates.’

‘Why not hang them, then, and be done?’ She was nettled by disappointment. It would have been nice to send Martha back her son.

‘Oah, we can’t hang ’em.’ Mr Powell smiled. ‘No, no. Legally we could, mind, but I doubt there’s gallows enough in the country to take them all. Coming in by shiploads, they are. Might set a bit of a precedent, do you see? We wouldn’t want our brave lads captured by the Americans in America strung up in response, now would we?’

The Dowager sighed. ‘Mr Commissioner, one is not concerned with causing an international incident, merely the fate of one miserable young man.’

‘There’s sorry I am to disoblige, your ladyship, very, very sorry. I’m not saying we commissioners wouldn’t be happy, happy, to exchange the Americans – indeed, more than once we’ve lobbied their lordships to that effect. Difficult … dear, dear, you wouldn’t believe how difficult they are. More trouble with them, there is, than all the rest put together: riot, demands, attempts to escape, oh dear, dear … but my hands are tied, do you see?’ Mr Commissioner Powell closed his books. ‘My advice is to send the lieutenant a nice parcel of comforts, I’m sure the governor …’

The Dowager left the Sick and Hurt Office dissatisfied on her own account and oddly saddened on little Philippa Dapifer’s. There lay the trouble with chance encounters; one remained ignorant of an outcome. Her interest had been aroused, and with it her sympathy – less for the awful mother than for Sir Philip’s child, if it was the child, who had been set adrift in a city like Plymouth, full of sailors, to meet the fate of all lost young girls.

Would the Hedley woman find her? And, if so, in what condition?

Qualified as she was to know the damage done to mind as well as body by sexual violence, the fact that it might be being inflicted on a child even younger than she had been when it was inflicted on her was disturbing – she was surprised how much it disturbed her. It happened on the streets every day, possibly to thousands. Yet this was a case she knew about, it had been given a name, she had overheard its history. If the girl had survived that terrible voyage across the Atlantic, she’d already suffered enough.

‘Be not curious in unnecessary matters,’ Ecclesiasticus said. The Dowager reminded herself that it was not her concern. She had her own problem; she could report only failure to Martha Grayle – always supposing it would be possible to report at all. Your son is in a Plymouth prison, Martha. It is better than the hulks.

Yes, well.

She stood for a while on the Admiralty steps, looking for her coach in the heavy Whitehall traffic. Tobias must have had trouble finding a place for it in which to wait for her.

In view of her insistence, both Robert and Alice had eventually reconciled themselves to her departure on what Alice called ‘Mama’s visiting spree’. They had given her Tobias and Joan to take with her and allowed her the third best coach but no coachman, so Tobias had been transformed into a driver – a job he performed excellently, as he did everything.

It had amused the Dowager that her son and daughter-in-law had stipulated – without actually using the word – that she return to Chantries for Christmas and settle down. It made her feel like Cinderella commanded to leave the ball by midnight or else … to quiet them, she had agreed to spend the Twelve Nights with them. As for settling down, well, she would see.

Expecting London to be comparatively quiet with Society having retired to the country for the summer, she found it actually busier than ever, full of soldiers and baggage trains on their way to the ports for embarkation.

A column of footguards marched past her, sending up dust, their Brown Bess flintlocks gleaming. A useless weapon, Aymer had called it, unreliable in bad weather and at anything over eighty yards’ range. Women and children ran beside them, some cheering, others weeping.

She was suddenly oppressed by dull heat, crowds, dust and the doom to which all these men were going. The war was undoubtedly necessary – colonies could not be allowed to secede as and when they pleased or they would not be colonies – but how many of these soldiers would return from it? How many young men on both sides, how many children, would be parted for ever from their mothers?

I will not think of it. There is nothing I can do for any of them. After twenty-two years, I am allowed some liberty of my own, a little healing.

The sea, she thought. I need to be near the sea and breathe clean, free air.

She would go to Devon, the county of her ancestors which, unaccountably, her family had deserted for London and its environs. Not Torbay – there was no suitable house there and, in any case, she did not want to face the memory of the young Martha now that there was only failure to report to the mother Martha had become. T’Gallants, that was the place. Home of the founding Pomeroy. She had never seen it, but it was on the sea. It had been tenanted for years but its lease was falling due – she had looked it up in the Chantries property book before she came away.

Diana smiled to herself; had she unconsciously intended to go there from the first? Yes, there were friends in the area. The Edgcumbes would put her up while she investigated. Devon would serve very well for her escape from the dowagerhood Alice and Robert wanted to inflict on her.

The fact that both the Edgcumbe home and T’Gallants were only a few miles from Plymouth had nothing to do with the matter.

CHAPTER FOUR

By the time she set off for Plymouth, Makepeace had clutched at the straw of hope that the young girl landed with the American prisoners at Plymouth was her daughter, and was managing to keep herself afloat on it.

Of course the child was Philippa. The fact that, if it was indeed her daughter, she had therefore been on English soil without word for two months … well, that could be due to anything, loss of memory, kidnapping, anything. As for Susan Brewer, perhaps she had been landed somewhere else, had also suffered loss of memory, been kidnapped …

So Makepeace forced herself to recover some equilibrium and thereby lost her temper, as she always did when she was fighting fear.

She cursed the friends she had expected to turn to for help and who had proved absent, her brother, her doctor, all of them having deserted London for the summer with the rest of Society. She cursed, with tears, her husband for choosing such a time to go to France. And she cursed Oliver for wanting to accompany her to Plymouth.

‘Who’s going to run the damn business if you’re traipsing all over the country with me? You get back to my girls and see nobody kidnaps them.’

‘Missus, you are not going alone.’

‘No, I’m not. I’m taking Beasley. You get back to Newcastle and try to get word to your father – that’s if nobody’s kidnapped him. Call on Rockingham in Yorkshire on the way home and see what he can do.’

Oliver conceded. There was undoubtedly a need to have other irons in the fire, like the Marquis of Rockingham, and he could heat them better if he were not employed in combing the streets of Plymouth. Also, it would profit nobody if the business went to the wall in the Missus’s absence. John Beasley might be a peculiar choice as a travelling companion but, in this case, his particular peculiarity might prove useful.

Oliver, however, used as he was to his stepmother’s eccentricity, was still concerned that she would be travelling with a man to whom she was not related and without female accompaniment. ‘Won’t you take a maid with you?’

‘No.’ Her regular lady’s maid was out of commission and there were few other women for whom Makepeace had any use. ‘I ain’t listening to feminine chatter all the way to Devon, drive me lunatic.’

‘It will look improper, that’s all.’

‘Improper?’ Makepeace stared at him as if he was deranged. ‘Philippa’s missing and you think I care about looking improper?’

She never has, Oliver thought, even when Philippa wasn’t missing. He sighed. ‘All right, Missus.’

So Makepeace, Peter Sanders, who was her favourite coachman, and John Beasley set off on the Great West Road for Devon in her favourite coach. With Sanders up on the driver’s box, there was only Beasley on whom her all-pervading spleen could be vented for the next two hundred miles.

‘Damn you, I didn’t ask you to come.’

‘Yes you did,’ John Beasley said.

‘You didn’t have to.’

‘I said I was sick. Coaches make me puke. I didn’t say I didn’t want to come, I just said travel was a bugger. And the Plymouth press gangs might get me.’

‘They wouldn’t want you,’ she said. ‘Job’s blasted comforter, you are.’

It was unreasonable, she knew. She would have been sent mad by reassurance when there was so little reassurance to be had. But anybody was her kicking boy at that point so she berated Beasley for providing no comfort at all. He was morose – he was always morose – and refused to pretend to be sanguine about the journey’s outcome. He slouched in his corner, allowing his body to flop with every bounce of the coach, looking ill – he always looked ill – and watched her fidget.

‘You’ll ruin that satin,’ he said.

She kept rubbing her hands over her thighs and knees, up, down, up, down, stretching the delicate material and leaving a mark on it from the sweat of her palms. ‘It’s silk.’

‘Why di’n’t you bring your maid?’

‘Hildy’s mother’s dying. I couldn’t bring her.’ She scored her hands over her knees again and added nastily: ‘You’re all there was.’

She couldn’t rile him – his own manners were too surly to mind surliness in others – and she was forced to give up. The moment she stopped talking, she heard Philippa calling for her. Desperately she started again: ‘What you done with all your money, anyway?’

As with all the friends who’d supported her through distress and penury after Philip Dapifer’s death, she’d subsequently tried to make him rich by giving him shares in the mine, but money flew away from him: some into the hands of needy acquaintances; some down the drain that was his publishing business. Last night, to free him for this journey, she’d had to pay off the bailiffs occupying his rooms in Grub Street.

He shrugged. ‘Government keeps smashing my presses.’

She said, ‘I don’t blame it,’ not because that’s what she thought but because it was there to be said. Nevertheless, that the government’s antipathy to John Beasley ran as deep as his to the Tories was no surprise. He was against government on principle; he was against any authority.

Even Makepeace, a natural rebel herself, became impatient at the number and diversity of evils he attacked in his various publications: the King, Parliament – he’d written an article calling it ‘the most listless, loitering, lounging, corrupt assembly in Europe’ – the Church, judges, rotten boroughs, pocket boroughs, enclosures, high prices, press gangs, crimp houses, public executions and whippings, the oppression of the Irish and all Roman Catholics (though he loathed popery), the Excise, sweat-shops and workhouses.

On the American war, he had spread himself, calling for Lord North to recall his ‘butchers’ from their ‘slaughterhouse’, publicizing the fact that the British army didn’t scruple to let its Red Indians scalp the colonists and that ‘Americans have all rights to independence from the dunghill its oppressors have made of their own country’.

But, despite his calls for revolution, it was impossible, he said, to goad an England that had no revolutionaries of its own into revolution. Despite widespread poverty, despite the fact that the war was not going well, the English refused to rise to his call to overthrow their government. Its middle class infuriated him by indifference and its deprived masses seemed, he said, lulled by the opiate of the Poor Law that kept them alive. Occasionally they might riot but they would not rise.

His publications were constantly being suppressed and their printing presses destroyed. He’d been in prison four times for debt – she’d had to rescue him – twice for libel and once for sedition.

He was at liberty now only because John Wilkes, that equally libertarian but outrageously effective hornet, had stung the authorities so effectively on behalf of gadflies like Beasley that they were chary of losing even more popularity by swatting them.

He even insisted that Makepeace was exploiting her miners. She’d pointed to the village she and Hedley had built for them at Raby, a model of its kind. It didn’t satisfy him. ‘You bloody rich only keep poor people alive so they can fight your wars or make you richer.’

Yet she stuck to him; indeed could talk to him as she could to nobody else, and not just because he’d proved a rock in her time of necessity; there was something about him. Andra thought very well of him and, for all his monosyllabic loutishness, he was highly regarded in the coffee houses where he could count men like Dr Johnson and Joshua Reynolds among his friends.

Best of all, in their present situation, he was in touch with an entire network of those who didn’t fit into respectable society, people who lived metaphorically underground and emerged, pale and seedy as Beasley himself, to strike at authority before submerging again. If Philippa had fallen among thieves or into the hands of a sect or rebels or the Irish or any other thorns in the side of the establishment, then Beasley was the man to find her.

But, knowing this, Makepeace’s discontent chose to twist it against him. ‘Why don’t you mix with important people? I need influence.’

His mouth twisted, the nearest approach he could make to a smile. ‘Fell the wrong side o’ the bloody hedge this time, then, didn’t you?’

Oh God, he can’t understand. He doesn’t know; he doesn’t have children. He thinks this is ordinary horror – he thinks I’m feeling what he would if he was being dragged to gaol or hung over a cliff.

The childless, she thought enviously, had a limited experience of suffering, they saw it merely in terms of torture or famine or illness; they couldn’t take the leap outside that circle of Hell to the wasteland stretching beyond it for bereft parents. She was sharing this coach, this arctic, with the emotional equivalent of a Hottentot.

She wanted her mother, she wanted Betty, who’d been better than a mother, that black and mighty fulcrum she’d taken for granted, as she’d taken Susan Brewer and Philippa for granted, until Betty and her son Josh too had joined them on the boat for America.

Impossible to whip up resentment at Betty’s desertion because the desertion had been her own and, anyway, Betty was dead. ‘A sudden death,’ Susan had written three years ago. ‘She clutched her bosom and fell. We buried her like the Christian she was and surely the trumpets sounded for her on the other side as they did for Mr Standfast.’

I didn’t stand fast by her, I didn’t stand fast by any of them … young Josh with his talent as a painter … and this is my punishment.

‘I’m going to puke,’ Beasley said.

‘Do it out the window,’ she said, grimly. ‘We ain’t stopping.’

Arriving in Plymouth, they had trouble finding accommodation. Owing to the war, the town was stuffed with navy personnel: every house for rent was taken, and so was every room in its inns. In any case, a woman travelling without a female companion and with a man not her husband wasn’t a guest welcomed by any respectable hostelry.

It wasn’t until Makepeace slammed a purse full of guineas on the table of the Prince George on the corner of Stillman Street and Vauxhall Street that its landlord remembered the naval lieutenant in a back room who hadn’t paid his rent for three weeks. The lieutenant was evicted, Makepeace installed, John Beasley was put in an attic with Sanders, while the coach and horses went into the George’s stables which were big enough to accommodate them as well as the diligence that made a weekly trip back and forth to Exeter.

Under other circumstances, Makepeace would have liked Plymouth very much. More than any port in Britain, it most closely resembled America’s Boston in the quality of light bouncing off its encircling, glittering water onto limestone houses, large windows, slate roofs and the leaves of its elm-lined streets. There was a similar sense of unlimited fresh, salt air, the same smell of sea, fish, tar and sawn wood, even a flavour of Boston’s bloody-minded independence – despite a desperate siege, Plymouth had held resolutely for Parliament during the Civil War.

It was from Plymouth that Makepeace’s ancestors had set out in the Mayflower to the New World and the shuttle of trade between the two had never been lost. Plymouth’s merchantmen knew the coast of America from Newfoundland to New York better than she did, their owners sadly regretting that it was now enemy territory.

Many of Plymouth’s common people were regretting it too. This was a sailors’ town and, while Plymouth-launched ships were inflicting heavy damage on America’s fleet, the losses were not one-sided. Mourning bands and veiling were everywhere.

But since it must fight, Plymouth had rolled up its sleeves. By no means the biggest port in England – Liverpool and Bristol were larger, owing to their slave trade, while London outranked them all – it was Plymouth that directly faced the enemy when war broke out with France, Spain or America, and it geared itself up accordingly, as it had when the Armada came billowing up the Channel.

The streets were almost impassable for baggage trains bringing supplies to be shipped across the Atlantic to the army. Wounded ships limped into the Sound to be mended and sent out again; new ones were being built on the great slipways. Marines and militia paraded to the roll of drums on the gusty grass of the Hoe, just as they had in the days when Drake played bowls on it.

But to Makepeace it became a jungle where the shrill chatter of posturing apes echoed back from the darkness that hid her child. She watched the mouths of Admiralty clerks, corporation officials and harbourmasters as they made words, and could only gather that they were saying no.

Beasley had to interpret for her as to a bewildered child.

‘He says Riposte anchored in the Hamoaze in June. Her prisoners were put ashore and the militia marched them off to prison. He doesn’t know which prison, he says he doesn’t handle that end of it.’

At the local Sick and Hurt Office: ‘He’s got a record of two supercargo, one of them female, like they told you in London. He thinks they were separated from the other prisoners and told to wait on the quay until they could be dealt with but either they ran off or nobody bothered with them. Jesus Christ’ – this to the clerk – ‘no wonder you ain’t winning this bloody war.’

It was Sanders who, on Beasley’s secret instructions, made enquiries at the local coroner’s office. He came back, equally quietly, to say that while there had been several inquests in the last six weeks, two of them on drowned women, none of them had concerned the body of a girl of Philippa’s age.

‘Either of ’em Susan Brewer?’ Beasley asked quietly.

‘Could’ve been. They wasn’t named. Don’t think so, though.’

They asked at the churches, at watchmen’s stands, they questioned parish beadles and people in the street. They tried the Society for Distressed Foreigners, which turned out to be an attic in a private house containing a lone Lascar hiding from the press gangs.

To facilitate the search, they decided to divide: Beasley to contact publishers and book-sellers, who kept their fingers on the pulse of the town, as well as less respectable Plymouth inhabitants; Makepeace to visit the institutions.

Accompanied by Sanders, Makepeace knocked on the forbidding door of the local Orphanage for Girls in Stonehouse and was received by an equally forbidding-looking clergyman.

‘Yes,’ Reverend Hambledon told her, ‘we took in two girls in June, mother dead and their father lost when the Buckfast went down. However, they are younger than the one you describe.’

‘She’s young for her age,’ Makepeace said, desperately.

She was shown into the dining hall – it was breakfast-time – where forty-two children in identical grey calico uniforms sat on the benches of a long table eating porridge from identical bowls with identical spoons. High windows let in bars of light that shone on heads whose hair was hidden beneath all-covering identical grey calico caps.

The room was undecorated except for some embroidered Bible texts on the bare walls. It smelled of whale-oil soap.

Reverend Hambledon ushered Makepeace in and forty-two spoons clattered down as forty-two girls stood to attention. She was led along the rows. ‘This is Jane, who came to us in June. And this is Joan. Say good morning to Mrs Hedley, girls.’

Two mites chorused: ‘Good morning, Mrs Hedley.’

Reverend Hambledon’s voice did not alter pitch as he added: ‘Sometimes they come in with unsuitable names and we rechristen them. Most had not been christened at all.’

Holding back tears, Makepeace smiled at the little girls and shook her head.

When she got outside, Sanders said: ‘Bad, was it, Missus?’

‘I’d like to adopt the lot of ’em,’ she said.

There’d been no evidence of unkindness there, but none of kindness either. The porridge they’d been eating did not smell unappetizing but nor did it attack the nose with pleasure. The children did not look unhappy yet they weren’t happy.

What had stabbed her was that, as she’d entered the dining room, every head had turned to her before expectation died in the eyes, as it died in her own. Well, there was little she could do about that but she would send money to Reverend Hambledon on the understanding that it was spent on dolls and pretty dresses.

She found herself longing for the two little girls she’d left behind in Northumberland. God spare them from the unloving wilderness in which the children she’d just left had to exist.

‘I tell you this much, Peter,’ she said, ‘I’m going to let Andra and Oliver run the business from now on. When we get home I’m going to stay home.’

Sanders nodded without conviction; he knew her.

But she meant it. She was being punished for neglecting her eldest child. Philip Dapifer’s accusations haunted her dreams. She would not do the same by Sally and Jenny. And she would take in some of those poor scraps she’d just seen, dress them in colours, let them run free over the Northumberland hills. Oh yes, when she got home …

It occurred to her sharply that, if she did not find Philippa and Susan, she could never go home. How could she abandon the place holding the vague promise that they might turn up one day? She would have to stay, like a dog waiting for ever by the grave of its lost master …

She balled her fists and knocked them together so that the knuckles hurt. Cross that bridge when you get to it, Makepeace Hedley. You may not have to.

She returned to the search.

She scanned rows of uniformed children in another orphanage, shaven-headed children in the hospital and dispensaries, children spinning yarn in the Home for Foundlings, children knitting stockings in the workhouse, picking oakum in the prison, young women chanting their catechism in the Asylum for Deserted Girls, dumb and staring wrecks in the local bedlam.

‘Dear God, Peter,’ she said, crying, ‘where d’they all come from?’

‘It’s a sailors’ town, Missus. Wages of sin.’

She began to break down and at nights Sanders had to assist her, almost too tired to walk, back to the inn.

Beasley had no success either.

They sat in facing settles across a table in a dark corner of the George’s large, low-beamed taproom. The windows were open, allowing in the scent of grass and the calls of men on the inn’s skittle ground. Further away, someone was playing a fiddle.

‘I reckon we’re looking in the wrong place,’ Beasley said, when they’d ordered food. ‘The Riposte anchored in the Hamoaze, which is over that way.’ He jerked his head to the west. ‘So that’s where the prisoners were put ashore. Not in Plymouth at all.’

‘Oh God,’ said Makepeace, ‘there’s another town?’

‘It’s called Dock.’ He shrugged. ‘Because it was a dock at one time, I suppose. But it’s grown so it’s … yes, it’s another town.’

‘Then that’s where we’ll go tomorrow.’ Makepeace closed her eyes for a moment. ‘I think I’ll get to bed. I don’t want anything to eat.’

The two men watched her go.

‘She can’t stand much more,’ Sanders said.

‘She’ll have to,’ said Beasley. ‘We’re never going to find that girl. Or Susan Brewer. They went down with the bloody boat – if they were ever on it in the first place.’

‘I don’t think that’s right, Mr Beasley,’ Sanders said. ‘There was a young girl landed here, we know that. Well, how many children would be on a warship, eh? It’s got to be Miss Philippa. About Miss Susan I don’t know.’

‘Yere you are, my dearrs. Mrs Hedley not eatin’ tonight?’ The landlord, John Bignall, had brought their food. An enormously fat man – he was known for his ability to bounce troublemakers out of the door by using his stomach as a battering ram – he ran a good inn and had warmed to these, his newest guests, in the days since they’d been with him.

Makepeace he’d decided was respectable but strange – for one thing, she allowed her coachman to eat at the same table and at the same time as herself. Curious about those whose provenance mystified him, he’d learned something of Makepeace’s by plying Sanders with after-hours ale. Immediately, his sympathy had been engaged. ‘Poor little maid being chased by they American pirates across the ocean,’ he said. ‘Enough to make any soul lose its wits.’

‘I can see from your sad faces as you an’t had no more luck finding that little maid than yesterday,’ he said now.

‘No,’ Beasley told him. ‘We’re going to try Dock tomorrow.’

‘Iss fay, I was thinking of Dock, plenty of places in Dock,’ Bignall said.

‘What sort of places?’

The landlord tapped his nose. ‘Ah, that’s why I been slow to mention ’un to Mrs Hedley. If so be the maid’s in Dock, ’tis mebbe better she an’t found at all.’

‘She knows,’ Beasley said. ‘She still wants her found.’

‘Fine woman, that. No side to her.’ The innkeeper finished putting dishes on the table. ‘Good luck to ee then, an’ mind the press gangs. My brother-in-law from Bovey Tracey, he was a tailor. Three year ago he took a dress coat to Dock as a cap’n had ordered. Us bain’t seen ’un since.’

‘Jesus,’ Beasley said, watching him go. ‘Missus doesn’t realize. I’ve been looking over my bloody shoulder for a week.’

‘Me and all,’ Sanders said.

Acting on behalf of a seriously undermanned navy, the wartime Impressment Service was ubiquitous throughout the country but its greatest activity was in the ports, its gangs waiting behind corners like lurking octopuses to haul in unwary passers-by into His Majesty’s service.

Both Beasley and Sanders, neither of whom possessed the exemption certificates carried by men in protected trades, had been at risk merely walking along a Plymouth street, and knew it. Dock was likely to be even more dangerous.

‘I got better things to do with my life than get beaten and buggered for the rest of it,’ Beasley said.

‘Beggin’ your pardon, Mr Beasley, but I don’t intend to. There’s a lot I’d do for Missus but I got a wife and childer. I ain’t going with her to Dock. I’ll go round some more places here.’

‘I suppose I could dress up as a woman,’ Beasley said gloomily.

Sanders’s gravity flickered. ‘Can’t say you got the bubbies for it.’ Then his face returned to its usual impassivity. ‘Cheer up, sir. We’ll find ’em.’

Beasley just sighed.

CHAPTER FIVE

When the Dowager remarked, and meant it, that Mount Edgcumbe’s prospect was as fine as any she had seen, Admiral Lord Edgcumbe said: ‘Thank you, ma’am. The Duke of Medina Sidonia is supposed to have been good enough to say the same when he sailed past at the head of the Armada. He mentioned that he was resolved to have it for his own when he won England.’ There was a well-rehearsed pause. ‘He was disappointed.’

A legend worth repeating, and Lord Edgcumbe obviously repeated it often, but Diana believed it; the Spanish fleet had indeed swept past the slope of the wooded deer park in which she stood looking out to sea, while the house commanding it was enviably beautiful.

She turned to her left and shaded her eyes to stare across the river that separated her from Plymouth. ‘So that is Devon and we are in Cornwall.’

‘No, ma’am. This used to be Cornwall, the Hamoaze markin’ the division, but it is now Devon. A fifteenth-century ancestor of mine married an heiress from across the way who brought with her the property of the ferry. It would have been inconvenient to have a county boundary splittin’ the estate so …’

‘So he moved it,’ she said, smiling. Again, it wasn’t bombast. She’d asked, he’d answered; the Edgcumbes had no need to embroider history in which their name was already sewn large. Hardly a land or sea battle in which an Edgcumbe hadn’t fought like a tiger – to be suitably rewarded. Yet her host’s father had been the first to recognize Joshua Reynolds’s genius, while the Mozart this battle-scarred sailor had played for her last night had been as pretty a performance as any she’d heard from an amateur.

Never having penetrated so far into the South-West, she had expected, in her cosmopolitan way, to find its nobility embarrassingly provincial. Yet it appeared she had stepped back to the Renaissance and the venturing days of Elizabeth, when men of action were also dilettantes and vice versa.

Lady Edgcumbe too was, as ever, a relief, hospitable without being overwhelming, and with a confidence in her pedigree that showed in her choice of dress, which was eccentric but comfortable.

The Dowager would have forgiven an admiral overseeing the naval movements of one of the busiest ports in the country for being too occupied to pay attention to his guest but, like Aymer, like most aristocratic holders of office that she knew, Lord Edgcumbe saw no reason to curtail in war too many of the activities he had enjoyed in peacetime. His otter- and foxhounds were being kept in readiness for the hunting season, and he entertained.

Both he and his wife had greeted her as if it were perfectly normal for a widow to go visiting so soon after her husband’s funeral. Admiral Edgcumbe was a distant cousin of the Stacpooles, though his and the Earl’s acquaintance had been based on their professional meetings – Edgcumbe’s as a high-ranking admiral, the Earl’s as a Secretary of State. Their friendship was for his Countess, formed during the times they had stayed at Chantries.

The visits had not been reciprocated. Despite numerous requests for the Earl and Countess to come to Devon, Aymer had refused them all. ‘Damned if I’m venturing into here-be-dragons country to stay among a lot of canvas-climbers. Ruins the complexion, all that salt. Look at Edgcumbe’s – leathery as a tinker’s arse.’

Though nothing was said outright, Diana suspected that they had seen enough of her marriage to commiserate politely with her on the Earl’s death but not as if she were expected to be inconsolable. ‘Of course you need a change of air after all you’ve been through,’ Lucy Edgcumbe had said, with what Diana construed as double meaning. ‘We are so very pleased that your first sight of Devon is with us.’

She was grateful to them, and pleased with this part of Devon, with the marriage of land and sea and the dark moorland that brooded behind it.

For the first time in years she breathed in the air of outgoingness, of infinite possibility. There was something for her here. Not on Mount Edgcumbe itself, perhaps, but somewhere about … This was where she belonged, where she came from.

‘Over there’s the Eddystone, and that’s the cape Richard Hawkins sailed past on his way to the South Seas, there’s where James Cook set off on his circumnavigation and that’s where the blasted captains who deserted Benbow were shot …’

Ships were packed so thickly abreast in the Hamoaze that the miniature ferry she could see scuttling between them was almost redundant – you could cross by stepping from deck to deck. She wondered which were the prison hulks.

The birdsong around her was answered by the tinny sound of officers being piped on and off their ships. From the height of the Citadel opposite came a bugle call and the tramp of marching boots. She had the impression that everyone in Plymouth could see her where she stood, outlined against a Grecian white folly; certainly she felt that she could see everyone in Plymouth. Was Philippa Dapifer one of those ants?

‘And that’s Millbay. See the Long Room? Centre of Plymouth social life, the Long Room. There’s to be a civic reception on Saturday. Be an honour for the Mayor if you’d come but no need if you prefer to be quiet. I shall attend, of course. Keeps up the town’s spirits, that sort of thing.’

If it was a matter of encouraging civic morale, she could do no less, despite her mourning, than to accept.

He was pleased and turned back to the view. ‘Funny place to put the Long Room, same shore as the prison. However, no accountin’ for what the blasted corporation gets up to … See those blocks? Crammed to the gunwales with Frenchies and Yankees.’

She saw them. Row upon row of rectangles, like a child’s building bricks scattered in the dust.

He looked down at her as if she’d flinched, which she hadn’t. ‘Perfectly safe, y’know. We keep ’em well locked up.’

‘My goodness,’ she said, lazily.

No need at this stage to mention Lieutenant Grayle. Caution had been driven deep into the bone by her marriage; for the female to show enthusiasm was to court mockery and disappointment from the male. She might raise the question of a prison visit later, as if it did not matter to her one way or the other.

Which, she told herself, it did not.

She took the Admiral’s arm and they walked back to the house.

From the look of it, Plymouth’s Long Room had been an attempt to recreate the Assembly Rooms at Bath. It had a ballroom, card rooms, a tepid bath but, Cotswold stone being unavailable, it had been built of red brick which, in the Dowager’s opinion, meant it fell short of elegance.

It had a lawn sloping down to the water of Millbay, consequently presenting a distant glimpse of the prison on one side of the bay and a barracks on the other. At work or play, Plymouth society liked to be on the tide’s edge and, with the view it gave them straight ahead of a low sun warming and gilding both sea and grass, the Dowager tended to agree with them. She wondered if Lieutenant Grayle could see it from the window of his cell.

Supper was very good, the music so-so.

The various dignitaries and wives introduced to her were what her experience of corporate entertainments had led her to expect: hugely pleased with themselves, overlarge, overdressed, accepting of why she was there – after a bereavement she would naturally wish to be heartened by a visit to fair Devon – and, as far as she could judge, unread except for stock market prices or the Lady’s Magazine.

Following the neglect of the navy during the uneasy peace after the Seven Years’ War, hostilities with America had stirred things up again and the town was prospering as never before. The building of new barracks, batteries and blockhouses as well as the necessary enlargement of docks for the influx of shipping was putting money in the corporation’s pocket.

A new dock had begun to be built big enough to take American and French prizes and it was rumoured that the King would be coming to Plymouth to see it under construction.

Several of the guests were in the later stages of mourning for young men lost in battle but the Dowager was credited with being as brave as they were in showing those damn Yankees that Plymouth could hold up its head under fire.

She was complimented on it. ‘Good of ee to come,’ the Mayor said. ‘It do encourage us all to see a Pomeroy back in Deb’n.’

‘Will you be thinking of settling down yere, your ladyship?’ said the Mayor’s wife, a lady who made up for shortness of stature by a towering wig.

‘Possibly.’

‘Where? T’Gallants? I heard the lease was up but they reckoned as it was to be sold.’

‘Really?’

‘So I heard. Course, ’tis your family home, I know …’

They were not put off by her unwillingness to be pinned down; property was interesting. ‘Ah reckon as ee’d be better off in something modern – my brother-in-law do know of a place in Newton Ferrers, very nice that is. Hear that, chaps? Her ladyship’s a-thinkin’ of taking over T’Gallants at Babbs Cove. Fallin’ down I reckon it is by now. I’ve said to her as my brother-in-law …’

‘We shall see,’ she said and turned away.

The music began again and, as her semi-mourning excused her at least from dancing, she was able to retire to an empty table at the far end of the room. It was the first time in many months that she had attended a social event and now she was wishing she had not; she found burdensome the noise, the heat from bouncing bodies, the requirement of constant conversation.

She had intended to slip quietly into this countryside for relief from the last twenty-two years in quiet and solitude. It had been unexpected and somewhat distressing to discover that the arrival of a Pomeroy would cause such interest.

‘Countess? Lady Stacpoole? Oh, let me sit with you, Ah’m overcome that you’m gracing our poor liddle Long Room.’ It was a woman with a headdress of feathers and a large bosom, all quivering.

Without warmth, the Dowager indicated a chair and the woman fell onto it. ‘You don’t know who I am, do ee?’ she said, roguishly. ‘I’m Mrs Nicholls, Fanny Nicholls.’ She paused, as if waiting for the surprise to sink in.

‘How do you do.’ A minor official’s wife. To be discouraged as soon as possible. Feathers and bosom displayed on public occasions. The lace on the purple dress slightly careworn and with a suspicion of grubbiness. She had the most peculiar eyes, very still, their gaze attaching onto one’s own like grappling irons. Above a constantly moving mouth, the effect was disturbing.

‘We’m related, you know,’ Mrs Nicholls said. ‘My maiden name was Pomeroy.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Oh ye-es. Your ladyship’s great-grandaddy and mine were brothers. Jerome Pomeroy was my great-grandaddy.’

‘Indeed.’ The Dowager appeared unmoved but she was caught. Great-great-uncle Pomeroy, well, well. One of those unfortunate scandals occurring in even the best-regulated families.

‘Your great-grandad’s elder brother, he was. You’ve heard of him, surely.’

Diana was spared a reply because Mrs Nicholls, in manic chatter, expanded on the story at length while the Dowager dwelt on a more edited version among her own mental archives.

Jerome Pomeroy. The only one of her ancestors for whom Aymer had shown any admiration, one of the rakes whose debauchery had flourished with the encouragement of Charles II, libertine and poet, a member of the Earl of Rochester’s set until, like Rochester’s – and Aymer, come to think of it – venereal disease had sent him frantic for his soul’s salvation, to which end he had joined a sect of self-professed monks in East Anglia and died, raving.

At that point a certain Polly James, actress, had entered the scene, claiming the Pomeroy barony for her infant son on the grounds that Jerome had married her three years before. The hearing in the Court of Arches had proved that, if there had indeed been a marriage, it was of the jump-over-broomstick type of ceremony and, in any case, could not be proved.

Polly and her son were subsequently provided for, sent into oblivion and the title had passed to Jerome’s younger brother, Diana’s great-grandfather.

‘… there, ’tis wunnerful strange, your ladyship. You and me sitting here so friendly. Both of us Pomeroys. Just think, now, if it had gone the other way, I’d be the ladyship, wouldn’t I? And my son over there, he’d be Baron Pomeroy.’ She waved a waggish finger. ‘I do hope as we’re not going to fall out over it.’

‘I doubt it.’

The woman’s account of their kinship might or might not be true – it very well could be. In either case, it hardly mattered now; since she herself had been an only child, the title had passed to a distant cousin in Surrey and a claim to it could not be resurrected at this late stage.

‘Very interesting, Mrs Nicholls. Now, if you will excuse me …’ She rose to get away from the eyes that were so at odds with the woman’s over-jovial manner.

‘Oh, but you got to meet my son.’ Mrs Nicholls gestured frantically at a man over the other side of the room, watching the dancing.

Diana had already noticed him. Amidst all the gaudiness and glitter, the plainness of his uniform stood out, though it was undoubtedly a uniform – like a naval officer’s dress coat but lacking its ornamentation. Without the epaulettes, braiding and the silver binding to the buttonholes, its dark blue cloth seemed to take in light and give none back.

So did the man, which was why the Dowager had noticed him. He was thirtyish, regular-featured, not unhandsome, yet there was an extraordinary non-reflectiveness to him, as if the chatter of the people around him and the music were being sucked into a well. He was alone, even in a crowd.

At his mother’s signal, he came towards them without changing his expression.

‘Yere, ma dear,’ Mrs Nicholls said. ‘This is the Countess of Stacpoole – you know who she is, don’t ee? Your ladyship, this yere’s my son, Captain Walter Nicholls. We gave ’un Walter in memory of Sir Walter Pomeroy, him bein’ a descendant.’

Captain Nicholls’s response to knowledge of who she was puzzled the Dowager. It might have been that of a hunter who had waited all his life for the sight of one particular quarry – yet there was no excitement in it, merely an added, almost relaxing, quietness. Had he been a master of hounds, his so-ho would have been uttered in a whisper, but both dogs and fox would have known it was doomed.

Most disturbing. Did he resent her? No, it wasn’t resentment, it was … she didn’t know what it was and would spend no further time on it.

‘Your ladyship.’

‘Captain Nicholls.’

The mother prattled on regardless. ‘And a fine son, tew, your ladyship, though it’s me as says it as shouldn’t. Educated and on his way up, aren’t ee, Walter? Board of Customs Comptroller for this area, goin’ to root out all the dirty smugglers along the coast. And if he dew, the Lord Lieutenant’s promised as King George’ll give him a knighthood, idden that right, Walter? So us’ll soon be back to greatness, won’t us, Walter?’

‘Mother,’ Captain Nicholls said, flatly.

Mrs Nicholls clapped her hands over her mouth, but over them her eyes remained fixed on Diana’s. ‘An’ you’ll never guess, Walter, but what her ladyship’s thinkin’ of returning to T’Gallants, our mootual ancestor’s home. Ah, ’twill be like Sir Walter Pomeroy come back, like Good Queen Bess’s olden times.’

Yes, well. The Dowager bowed and made another move to leave but now it was Captain Nicholls who barred her path.

‘T’Gallants?’ he asked abruptly. ‘You’re going to live at Babbs Cove?’

The Inquisition would have had better manners. ‘I don’t know, Captain Nicholls. Whether I do or not is a matter of concern only to myself.’

‘No, it isn’t.’ He darted his sentences, each as unornamented as his dress, and stared after them into her face, as if to make sure they arrived at their destination before he began another. Somewhere along the line he had discarded the Devonshire accent but his eyes were his mother’s. ‘I must have your permission to search the house before you take possession.’

‘Indeed?’ He was mad; they were both mad.

‘Yes. I’ve tried before. The caretaker refuses to let my men in.’

Was this lunacy or total lack of social grace? Either would hamper his rise in his profession, yet, if his mother were telling the truth, the title of comptroller suggested fairly high authority. She suspected obsessive efficiency.

Then she thought: Caretaker?

He jerked out the next sentence. ‘And the local magistrate refuses me a warrant.’

There was something childlike in his confession to being thwarted; in anyone else it might have been endearing but nobody, ever, would find this man endearing.

She did not like him; she did not like his mother. Most certainly, she did not want him rootling in her house, whether she occupied it or not. ‘If a magistrate refuses his warrant, I fear I must withhold mine,’ she said and moved away.

Again he blocked her, presumably to argue, but she was rescued by Admiral Edgcumbe. ‘What’s this? What’s this? We leave business at the door, Nicholls, along with our swords.’

‘That gentleman appears to want to search my house,’ she said as they walked off.

‘He would. Recently been made comptroller for the area. New broom sweepin’ clean. Typical blasted Customs. Hard worker, though, always looking for hidden contraband.’

‘Really? Does he think there is some at T’Gallants?’

‘There probably is,’ the Admiral told her.

‘Really?’ She was shocked.

‘Oh yes,’ the Admiral said, without concern. ‘Smuggling’s the local industry round here. Fishing and smuggling, the two are synonymous.’ He patted her hand. ‘No need to worry, Diana, your Devonshire smuggler’s a rogue but not a dangerous rogue. And he’ll be facing a hard time now that Nicholls has been appointed to catch him. A regular ferret, our Nicholls. And out for glory. If he can sweep the coast of smuggling, he’ll be well rewarded.’

He sounded regretful. Diana thought he showed extraordinary laxity to a trade she knew by hearsay to be ugly; the Fortescues in Kent, with whom she’d stayed occasionally, gave blood-chilling accounts of smuggling gangs torturing and killing Revenue men sent to round them up. Not, she remembered, that such murders had prevented Lady Fortescue serving tea on which no duty had been paid.

‘That’s Kent,’ Admiral Edgcumbe said dismissively when she mentioned it. ‘East of England villains. Ugly. Different again from your Devonian or even your Cornish lads. Your West of England smuggler’s a fine seaman, d’ye see? Has to sail further to fetch his goods from France.’

The Dowager failed to see how good seamanship necessarily denoted good character, nor how an admiral presently engaged in a war with France could tolerate with such apparent charity fellow-countrymen who traded with the enemy. But Lord Edgcumbe appeared to regard the supply of cheap brandy, Hollands and tobacco as necessary to the country’s morale.

That used to be Aymer’s attitude, the Dowager remembered – until he’d became a minister in His Majesty’s Government and discovered by how much the Treasury was being welched.

His Majesty’s Exchequer had estimated that duty, standing at four shillings per pound, was collected annually on 650,000 pounds of tea. Less happily, it also estimated that the nation’s annual consumption of tea was at least 1,500,000 pounds and therefore it was losing nearly three million pounds in uncollected revenue. As for brandy, smugglers could provide it at five shillings a gallon (and make a handsome profit for themselves while doing so) which left honest wine merchants and publicans with the choice of staying honest and paying for legal brandy at eight shillings a gallon or going out of business.

From then on Aymer had advocated drawing and quartering for offenders against the Revenue.

At supper – the second of the night; how these people ate – she found herself surrounded by a blue and gold coronal of naval officers who, spurred by the story of Nicholls’s attempt to search her house, were a-brim with tales of smugglers and smuggling.

She looked covertly towards their wives, who had formed a separate nosegay of their own, to see if they minded. She must be careful; if she was to settle in this area, she must not outrage its female society. Already she had refused all invitations to dance and was emitting no signals saying she wished to flirt, which she did not. Aymer had knocked such playfulness out of her very early on.

Admiral Edgcumbe, she knew, was merely paying her the attention due to an esteemed guest by a kindly host. The others? Well, she was new on stage and, despite her listlessness and the grey dreariness of her dress, still not totally repulsive.

Her main concern was Captain Luscombe who’d proved most eager to bring her an ice from the supper table, which, since he had been introduced to her as the officer in charge of Millbay Prison, she had graciously allowed him to do. But as the good captain was a fat fiftyish bachelor, susceptible, as she’d learned from Lady Edgcumbe, to anything in petticoats, she didn’t think the ladies of Plymouth would begrudge her this minor conquest.

The glance reassured her; the women were serene, they saw her as no threat. Perhaps jealousy was an emotion naval wives could not afford, or was reserved for the unknown women their husbands encountered in other ports. The Admiral and his cronies were being allowed to entertain a newcomer with tales the ladies had heard many times before, while Lady Edgcumbe and her cronies indulged in more interesting local gossip. Satisfied, the Dowager inclined her ear to stories related with affectionate shakes of the head more usually awarded to naughty children.

It was a relief that Babbs Cove was not the centre of them.

Babbs Cove? Probably did its share but no more than any other village nearby – that privilege was reserved for Cawsand along the coast in Cornwall, what a smugglin’ nest, its fishermen more familiar with brandy and lace than fish, bold, cunnin’ ruffians that they were. Courageous, though; bitter work to sail to and fro from Roscoff and Cherbourg in winter, got to hand it to ’em. And its women just as audacious …

‘Remember old Granny Gymmer? Crossed the sands regularly carrying bottles of Hollands wrapped in a child’s shawl and when the Revenue complimented her on such a nice quiet baby, had the nerve to say: “Ah, but I reckon her do have plenty of spirit in her.”’

Amused, Diana asked: ‘Why then does Captain Nicholls not devote all his searches to Cawsand if it is so notorious, rather than Babbs Cove?’

‘Well, you know these fellows who come from the wrong side of some noble blanket …’

Mrs Nicholls, it appeared, had made public property of her son’s connection to the Pomeroy name.

‘… probably thinks the house would have been his had his great-granny been given her rights. Jealous, like all bastards.’

Obviously, Captain Nicholls was not liked. Her informants’ antipathy was compounded by his profession. Diana was surprised by their animosity towards an upholder of the law that they had not displayed to the breakers of it. His Majesty’s Royal Navy, it seemed, loathed His Majesty’s Board of Customs. Excisemen could get prize money and bonuses for a successful capture without leaving the comparative safety of home waters. They were the night-soil collectors of maritime society – necessary but not to be fraternized with. There were other sins …

‘Limpin’ home in Lancaster after Quiberon Bay, we were,’ the Admiral said, spraying vol-au-vent and resentment, ‘just about to enter harbour when up sails a blasted Revenue cutter, flyin’ the pennant if you please, and you know and I know that’s not allowed ’less they’re in pursuit. “Comin’ aboard to search for contraband,” the ’ciseman says. “You’re damn well not,” I said. I admit we had a few ankers of brandy in the mess, some trinkets for the ladies and God knows what the crew had stowed away, but fightin’ for our country we damn well deserved it. Wasn’t going to let some ribbon-flutterin’ shore-hugger take it for nothin’. “You sheer off,” I told him, “or I’ll turn my guns on ye. An’ haul that damn pennant down.”’

The anecdote and the applause that greeted it provoked a certain sympathy in the Dowager for that particular exciseman and, had he been more likeable, even for Captain Nicholls himself. Both were pursuing their rightful office, after all. Nevertheless, when she looked around to see if the man had overheard, she was unaccountably relieved to find that he and his mother had gone.

It took some doing on her part, but at long last she was able to steer the conversation so that someone, not her, mentioned the prisoners of war. As she’d hoped, the Admiral’s memory was pricked.

‘By the by, Luscombe, I hear that Howard fella’s inspectin’ prisons in the area. You lettin’ him have a look at Millbay?’

‘Thought I might, thought I might,’ Captain Luscombe said. ‘Fearfully overcrowded at the moment, of course, but their lordships seem keen on it; show the fella how the navy runs things, eh?’

The Dowager was relieved. The name of John Howard had previously been unknown to her, the fame attached to it having sprung up during her incarceration in her husband’s sickroom. Only since being with the Edgcumbes had she learned of the man’s marvels in uncovering the filth, disease and corruption of common prisons and exposing them to the light of publicity. ‘Summoned to the bar of the House, my dear,’ Lady Edgcumbe had told her. ‘Thanked for his contribution to humanity, written a book and I don’t know what-all.’

She’d been amused to see that the Edgcumbes and their set were no less susceptible to Howard’s celebrity and the general excitement that he was in the area than anyone else. Let the incarcerators of thieves, murderers and debtors tremble at his name; the Admiralty was assured he’d find nothing wrong with its treatment of prisoners of war.

‘Rather be in Millbay than Newgate any day,’ said Lord Edgcumbe, voicing the general opinion. ‘Practically wake ’em up with breakfast in bed, don’t ee, Luscombe?’

Captain Luscombe was not prepared to go as far as that. ‘Haven’t the funds I’d like, my lord, and the overcrowding’s –’

Lord Edgcumbe overrode him: ‘By the by, Lady Edgcumbe was wonderin’ if she should bring in some goodies for the prisoners when Howard comes, like she did last year. Show the fella we ain’t heartless. Only this mornin’ Lady Stacpoole expressed a wish to accompany her, didn’t you, your ladyship? Thinks the son of one of her old servants is among the Yankees.’

It had taken considerable and subtle manoeuvring to allow both Lord and Lady Edgcumbe to adopt the idea of a prison visit as their own. At no stage had Diana actually said Martha Grayle was once a servant, she’d merely allowed the Admiral to infer it; her set understood noblesse oblige better than some more intimate interest. She rebuked herself; she was acting from noblesse oblige.

‘Servant emigrated to America,’ the Admiral went on. ‘Wrote to her ladyship – was her boy bein’ treated properly by the naughty British? I said you’d produce the lad for her ladyship’s inspection. That’s all right, ain’t it?’

The Dowager shrugged deprecatingly; such a lot of trouble, but if Captain Luscombe would not mind …

‘Dear lady, of course.’ Luscombe was delighted; she should see the prison along with the fella Howard and they’d produce the young man for her. What was the name? Grayle, as in Holy, yes, he’d remember that.

There was a little teasing: nice for Luscombe to have someone wanting to get into his prison rather than get out. The ladies joined in with mild anxiety on her behalf – was she strong enough? Very well, then soak her handkerchief in vinegar against infection like Lady Edgcumbe had only last Christmas when she’d delivered warm clothing to Millbay’s inmates.

It was done, accepted without amazement. So easy. There had hardly been need for guile. Diana felt warmly for the normality of these people, their openness, and at the same time regret that the years of her marriage had warped her own character away from the straightforward.

I have lived too long with duplicity, she thought.

Then, once more, she thought: Caretaker?

CHAPTER SIX

John Beasley appeared at the head of the Prince George’s stairs. He’d found a wooden leg and a crutch from somewhere; the first was strapped to his bent left knee inside his breeches, the second tucked under his left armpit. He was defiant. ‘Either of you going to help me down these bloody stairs?’

It was Makepeace who guided him down – Sanders was helpless, holding on to the newel post, almost sobbing.

‘What you do?’ she asked, grimly. ‘Trip up a Chelsea Pensioner?’

‘I ain’t being pressed for you or anybody. The landlord got ’em for me.’

‘Fat lot of help you’ll be,’ she said. But she was touched; she hadn’t realized how frightened of impressment he’d been, probably rightly. He was a good friend. Ridiculous, but a good friend. And his grunts as he hopped across the Halfpenny Bridge to Dock – the man on the tollgate was most concerned – made her laugh for the first time in two weeks.

Dock, however, was not amusing. It was vast. Since the first spades dug the first foundations of William Ill’s Royal Dockyard, it had sprouted wet docks, dry docks and slipways around which had sprung up warehouses for rigging, sails and stores, rope-walks and mast-yards, all in turn giving rise to houses for men to run them. It was now bigger than Plymouth, as if a monstrous oedema had outgrown the body on which it was an accretion.

Their landlord had warned them. ‘Over two hundred inns, they do say, if so be you can name ’em such.’

From the vantage of the bridge they could see spacious, treelined streets but tucked in alleys behind them, like stuffing coming through the back of an otherwise elegant chaise-longue, were lath and plaster tenements spreading in a mazed conglomeration as far as the eye could see.

‘Bugger,’ Beasley said, looking at it.

It was a landscape Makepeace knew. Her dockside tavern in Boston had been a clean, hospitable model of respectability but it had stood, a Canute-like island, against an encroaching sea of gambling hells, gin parlours, brothels, the tideline of filth that marked every port in the world.

She was well acquainted with Dock without setting foot in it. And she knew something else; her daughter was dead.

Whatever the circumstances, Philippa would have escaped from the wasteland of flesh and spirit that was here. However naive, the girl was intelligent; even penniless she’d have found some official, some charity, to send word to her mother on her behalf.

It was something Makepeace had known from the first but it had taken recognition of this view, this seagulled, mast-prickled, rowdy, ragged-roofed agglomeration of chaos and order, vitality and disease, this other Boston, to drive it into her solar plexus with the force of a mallet.

She kept walking forward, but as an automaton in which the clockwork had yet to run down.

There was a quayside with bollards. Beasley sank onto one, complaining of his knee rubbing raw. Makepeace walked stiffly on, past a pleasant, open-windowed inn and into the mouth of an alley behind it.

Yes, here it was. Her old enemy. Unraked muck, runnels of sewage. A door swung open to spill out an unsteady woman smelling of gin. Further along, some girls in an upper window were shrilly encouraging a man who headed for the door below them, already unbuttoning his fly.

Suppose, argued Makepeace’s Puritan upbringing desperately, suppose she’s too ashamed, too ruined, to come home?

Howay to that, answered the older Makepeace, she knows I love her regardless …

Does she know that? What does she know of me these last years except from the letters I’ve sent her? What do I know of her, except from the dutiful replies?

She felt a tug on her skirt. A waif, sitting in the gutter, its sex indistinguishable by its rags, reached out a filthy, fine-boned small hand. ‘Penny for bub and grub, lady, penny for bub and grub.’

It gave a funny little cough, much like Philippa had always done when she was nervous, so that Makepeace cupped its face in her hands and turned it towards her. Perhaps, perhaps …

But, of course, it wasn’t Philippa; she’d known it wasn’t – the child was far too young. She began to say: ‘Have you seen …?’ but the sentence she’d repeated and repeated these last days died in her mouth, as this child would die, as Philippa had already died. Her knees folded suddenly and for a moment she crouched in the alley, the fingers of one hand on its cobbles to steady herself.

Andra, I need you now. Take me home, let me hold my little girls and keep them safe for ever and ever. I’ve lost her, Andra. I’ve lost Philip’s child that I never understood because I never understood her. I can’t bear the pain on my own. Where are you?

The small beggar watched incuriously as Makepeace dragged herself upright and, fumbling for her handkerchief to wipe off the dirt, found some coins, dropped them into the waiting claw and went back the way she had come.

John Beasley was twisting frantically round on his bollard. Catching sight of her he raised the crutch, pointing with it to an old man sitting on a neighbouring bollard. ‘He’s seen her. He saw her.’

For a moment she didn’t believe him. Don’t let me hope again. Then she ran forward.

‘Tell her,’ Beasley said. ‘He saw the Riposte come in, didn’t you? Tell her.’

‘That I did,’ the old man said.

Boston had these, too: palsied old mariners, more sea water than blood in their veins and nothing to do but watch, with the superciliousness of experts, the comings and goings of other sailors, other ships.

‘Saw the prisoners brought ashore, didn’t you? June it was. Stood on this very quay, they did. Tell her.’ Beasley looked round the stone setts as if Christ’s sandalled foot had touched them. ‘Same bloody quay.’

‘Very same quay,’ the old man agreed.

‘A girl round about ten or eleven, he says. And a boy.’

‘Powder monkey, I reckon. Always tell a powder monkey. Black hands.’

Beasley couldn’t wait. He’d heard it already, in slow Devonian. ‘They were put to one side while the militia came for the prisoners. An officer told them to wait where they were ’til he’d finished seeing to the men. Nobody paid them attention, did they? And the boy slipped off.’

The old man nodded. ‘Diddun want no more o’ the navy, I reckon.’

‘But what did the girl do? Tell her what the girl did.’ In an aside to Makepeace, he said: ‘His name’s Packer. Able Seaman Packer.’

The old man snickered. ‘Like I said, she were wunnerful fond of one of the prisoners. Blackie, he was. Black as the Earl of Hell’s weskit. Kept hollerin’ to ’un she did and he were hollerin’ back.’

‘But what did she do?’ insisted Beasley. ‘Tell her what she did.’

‘Prisoners was lined up,’ Able Seaman Packer said, slowly. ‘Job lot, Yankees mostly. Hunnerd or more. Militia got ’em into longboats and made ’em pull down the Narrows, round Stonehouse towards Millbay. And the liddle maid, she ran along the bank after they, far as she could ’til she come to the watter, so then she makes for the bridge, still hollerin’ to the nigger, tryin’ to follow him, like.’

‘But she came back, didn’t she?’

A nod. ‘She come back. Liddle while later, that was. Girnin’ fit to bust.’

‘Crying,’ translated Beasley. ‘She was crying.’

‘Wouldn’t let her over the bridge, see. Hadn’t got a ha’penny, see.’ Satisfaction bared teeth like lichened tombstones. ‘Right and proper, too. Comin’ over here, usin’ our bridges for free when a honest man as served his country has to pay.’

‘She couldn’t pay the halfpenny toll,’ Beasley said. ‘She was trapped in Dock. She couldn’t get in to Plymouth proper. She’s here somewhere, don’t you see?’

She was seeing it. Philippa. No Susan, just Philippa. Who was the black man? Someone who’d been kind to her, perhaps, now being taken away from her. She was running along this very quay, desperate not to lose, among terrifying officialdom, one person who’d shown her humanity.

‘What did she do then? Where did she go? Have you seen her since?’ begged Makepeace.

Faded little crocodile eyes looked at her briefly but the answer was made to Beasley. ‘Didn’t see her after that day.’

She fell on her knees to the old man. ‘Where would you look? If you were me, where’d you look for her?’

‘Been near two month,’ he said. Again it was Beasley whom Packer addressed. Makepeace realized that he thought he was talking to a fellow war veteran. If it had been her sitting on the bollard, she’d still be in ignorance. ‘If so be she were a maid then, she bain’t now.’

She wanted to kill him. Mind your own business, you old devil. But if he minded his business, she wouldn’t find Philippa. She got out her purse and extracted a guinea from it, waving it like a titbit to a dog.

He took off his cap and laid it casually across his knees. She dropped the guinea into it. ‘Please.’

‘You come back yere four bells this evening,’ he told Beasley, ‘you might …’ He paused, searching for the phrase, and found it triumphantly. ‘… might see something as is to your advantage.’

‘If you know something, tell us,’ Makepeace pleaded. ‘I’ll pay whatever you want.’

‘Pay us at four bells.’ Further than that, he refused to budge. Here was drama to enliven his old age, better than gold; they were to return, the second act must be played out.

Beasley reverted to his accustomed gloom, as if ashamed that he’d shown excitement. Hopping back over the bridge, he said: ‘Four bells?’

‘Six o’clock,’ Makepeace said. ‘Second dog watch.’ She hadn’t run an inn on the edge of the Atlantic for nothing.

Back at the inn, Makepeace forced herself to eat – a matter of fuelling for whatever lay ahead. Beasley urged her to get some sleep and she tried that, too, but kept getting up. She ordered a basket of food in case Philippa should be hungry when they found her.

She knew they wouldn’t find her, the old man was playing games with them for the excitement. Then she added a cloak to the basket because Philippa’s own clothes would be rags by now.

She buried her child again – what possible advantage could the old bugger on the bollard promise her? Then she put her medicine case into the basket … She was worn out by the time they crossed the Halfpenny Bridge again.

The clang for four bells sounding on the anchored ships skipped across the Hamoaze like uncoordinated bouncing pebbles, none quite simultaneous with the others, summoning new watches and releasing the old. The flurry on the river increased as off-duty officers were rowed ashore, hailing their replacements in passing.

It was nearly as hot as it had been at noon; the setts of the quay threw back the heat they had absorbed all day. John Beasley, lowering himself gratefully onto his bollard, rose again sharply as its iron threatened to scorch his backside.

Able Seaman Packer was still on his. Fused to it, Makepeace thought feverishly, like a desiccated mushroom. ‘Well?’ she demanded.

‘Missed ’em,’ he said. ‘Should’ve been here earlier.’

‘Missed who?’

‘The whores.’ He nodded to a flotilla of rowing boats with wakes that were diverging outwards as they approached the fleet anchored in the middle of the river. At this distance, they seemed full of gaudy flowers.

‘Don’t hit him!’ John Beasley caught Makepeace’s arm before it connected with the old man’s head in a haymaker that would have toppled him onto the quay. Balancing awkwardly, he pushed her behind him. ‘Tell us, will you, or I’ll let her at you. Is our girl on one of those boats?’

‘Ain’t sayin’ now.’ Packer’s lower lip protruded in a sulk that lasted until Makepeace, still wanting to punch him, was forced to move away.

She watched Beasley pour more of her money into Packer’s cap and the old man’s need to stay the centre of attention gradually reassert itself.

Beasley hopped over to her. ‘She’s not in those boats. He says her friend is.’

‘What friend?’

‘A woman who talked to her the day she landed.’

‘He didn’t tell us that. He said he hadn’t seen her since.’

‘No more I haven’t,’ the old man called; Makepeace’s wail had carried.

‘He’s eking out what he knows, he don’t get much of interest,’ Beasley said. ‘He’s lonely. His daughter doesn’t let him back in her house until night.’

‘I wouldn’t let him back in at all.’

‘Apologize to him, for Christ’s sake, or we won’t get anything either.’

Makepeace took a few steps forward and grated out: ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Should be an’ all. I fought for my country.’

‘Very noble. Who’s this friend?’

‘Whore.’ The word gave him satisfaction.’ Whaw-wer. That’s what her’s a-doin’ out there along o’ the others, whorin’. Spreadin’ her legs for sailors.’

‘And where’s my daughter?’

Packer shrugged his shoulders. ‘Dunno, do I? She knows …’ A nod towards the ships, a huge and vicious grin. ‘Have to wait here for ’un to come back, won’t ee?’ A pause. ‘That’s if I decides to tell ee which one she be.’

She couldn’t stay near him; it was like being in the power of a beetle, a petty, insignificant thing that, ordinarily, she could have stamped on with all the force of her wealth. And I will, you old bastard, you wait and see. She strode up and down the quay, letting Beasley try to tease out of the man what information was left in him.

It was the time of evening for gathering in taverns before going on to entertainment elsewhere. The inn that faced the quay was full; young officers and midshipmen overflowed its doors, drinking and talking, occasionally commenting on the red-haired woman who passed and repassed them without coquetry. ‘A drink, madam?’ one of them asked.

She didn’t hear.

Beasley pantomimed a request for ale and two tankards were brought out to him and Packer.

Eventually, he hopped over to her. ‘There was just this woman. She saw Philippa crying, they talked and went off together. He ain’t seen Philippa since but the woman’s one of them that goes out to the ships every night. Comes back in the early hours, he says.’

‘How’ll we know which one?’

‘He says we’ll know her when we see her.’ He added abruptly, because he didn’t want to say it: ‘He calls her Pocky.’

‘The pox,’ Makepeace said, dully. ‘She’s got the pox.’

Beasley shrugged and went off to see if they could hire a room overlooking the quay in which to wait. There wasn’t one; Dock was as crowded as Plymouth. ‘But he’s got a settle on the landing upstairs,’ he said, coming back. ‘We can wait there for a couple of shillings.’

She put out her hand. ‘What’d I do without you?’

He became surly. ‘It’s my bloody knee I’m thinking about. Rubbed raw.’

A window on the inn’s first floor faced south-west and threw light onto a breakneck stair down to the taproom and a corridor with doors leading to bedrooms. It had a wide sill and, below it, a settle that Beasley threw himself onto with a groan.

Makepeace climbed onto the sill, shading her eyes against the lowering sun. Below was the quay, the old man on his bollard, and a view across the Hamoaze to the green hill that was Mount Edgcumbe. The tide was turning and three of the warships were getting ready to make for the open sea; with no wind penetrating the protection afforded by the river’s bend, they were having sweeps attached to pull them out.

Usually ships and their manoeuvres were beautiful to her; this evening she saw them as the lethal artefacts they were, off to blow into pieces other ships and men. French? Americans she’d grown up with?

England had been good to her; it had allowed her that magical man, Philip Dapifer, before taking him away again. At the last it had given her happiness with Andra and wealth and employment she loved. Yet it had done so with reluctance; if she hadn’t had astounding luck and the ability to fight like a tiger she, too, could have been reduced to somewhere like Dock, struggling not to drown in its filth.

And who would have cared? God knew, this was an uncaring country. With Philip she’d sat at tables loaded with plate worth a king’s ransom and listened to conversations in which the poor were derided for being poor, where landowners had boasted of the poachers they’d hung, where magistrates lobbied to have more capital offences added to statute books that already carried over one hundred.

It hadn’t occurred to them that they were the culprits, that what they called criminals were ordinary people made desperate by enclosure of what had been common land, by their fences being thrown over, by costly turnpikes on roads they had once used for free.

She had supped with those who made their own grand theft into law and she had walked in the dust thrown up by their carriage wheels with those they used that law against.

Oh no, there’d be no cheers from her as England’s ships sailed off to impose the same inequality on her native country. America deserved its freedom, had to have it, would eventually gain it.

She knew that, in the two years since the war began, she had puzzled Andra and Oliver, both of them supporters of the American cause, by her refusal to pin her flag to the mast of her native country.

Yet what freedom had America allowed her, an insignificant tavern-keeper, for rescuing Philip Dapifer from Bostonian patriots trying to kill him merely for being English? For that act of humanity, they’d tarred and feathered her brother and burned her home. Even now she could only hope that it did not cherry-pick which of its citizens were to be free. Would it include Indians, like her old friend, Tantaquidgeon? Negroes like Betty and her son? Are you fighting somewhere across that ocean, Josh, my dear, dear boy? For which side?

It wasn’t only business that had stopped her from visiting Philippa in America or fetching her back. It was reluctance to return to a country that talked of liberty but had punished her for not falling into line. Oh God, to have patriotism again, certainty of country, right or wrong, like that old bugger on his bollard.

The sun lowered, lighting the underside of sea-going gulls and seeming for a moment to preserve the Hamoaze in amber. The noise in the taproom started on a crescendo to the slam of doors in the corridor as guests departed to their various night activities.

Riding lights began to make reflective twinkles in the water.

Further along the quay, out of her sight, there was a sudden commotion, scuffling, male shouts, female screams. A longboat emerged into view, heading for the fleet; it was difficult to make out in the twilight but it looked as if a sack in the thwarts was putting up a fight.

‘What’s that?’ Beasley asked.

‘Press gang, I think,’ she told him. ‘Your disguise ain’t in vain.’

He grunted. After a while he said: ‘See, Missus, they don’t let most of the crews come ashore. Afraid they’ll abscond.’

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Giving ’em women stops ’em getting restive.’

‘I know.’

She heard him struggling with straps to ease his cramped knee. ‘Think anybody’d notice if I swopped peg-legs?’

Beasley, she knew, was telling her to be sorry for whores, perhaps preparing her for Philippa being one of them. To him they were victims of a vicious society. She had never seen them like that; her Boston Puritanism had left her with a loathing for the trade; she could pity all those forced into criminality by poverty, except those who sold their bodies. Over there, below those sweating decks, women were allowing themselves to be used as sewers, disposing of effluent so that His Majesty’s Navy could function more efficiently. If Philippa …

Her thoughts veered away and fractured into illogical fury at the husbands who’d deserted her, the one by dying, the other by travelling.

I was always in second place for you, Andra Hedley, wasn’t I? The lives of miners were your priority, not me. Finding out about fire-damp, why it blows miners up. I don’t care why it blows the buggers up, I want you here, I want Philippa …

Heavy boots on the stairs jerked her to attention. Revellers were coming back from wherever they’d been, talking, breathing alcohol, one or two uttering a tipsy goodnight to her as they went to their rooms. It seemed only a moment since they’d been leaving them …

She looked out at the view and saw that Packer’s bollard was empty, the old man had gone; she’d been asleep.

She trampled Beasley as she scrambled from the window-seat, screaming: ‘I fell asleep, we’ve missed ’em!’

He joined her out on the quay where she was running up and down, hopelessly trying to distinguish the shape of rowing boats against the loom of ships’ sides which were casting a shadow from the low, westerly moon.

To keep her sanity there was nothing to do but assume that the prostitutes were still prostituting. She refused to leave the quay in case she fell asleep again and paced up and down, the click of her heels the only sound apart from ripping snores coming from an open window at the inn and the occasional soft cloop of water against the quay wall.

The sky, which at no point had turned totally black, began to take on a velvety blueness.

‘I think they’re coming,’ Beasley said.

A light like a glow-worm had sprung up and was heading for the quay, showing itself, as it came, to be a lantern on a pole in a rowing boat which led a small flotilla of others. It swayed, sometimes reflecting on water, sometimes on the mushrooms that were the hatted heads of women clustered above the thwarts.

‘Missus, you’re not to pounce on this female,’ Beasley said. ‘We got to keep her sweet.’

‘I don’t pounce.’

‘Yeah, you do. You’re too much for people sometimes, especial other women. You bully ’em. You’re an overwhelmer.’

What was he talking about? Granted, she had to be forceful or she’d have remained the poverty-pinched wreck left by Dapifer’s death. You try coping politely with Newcastle coalers. And other women managed their lives so badly …

‘You do the talking then,’ she snapped.

The leading boat held back, allowing its link-boy to light the quay steps for the others. The sailors who’d done the rowing leaned on their oars, letting their passengers transfer themselves from the rocking boats to the steps.

Beasley positioned himself at the top, holding out his hand to help the women up to the quay. Some took it, some didn’t. As they came the link lit their faces from below, distorting their features into those of weary gargoyles.

Makepeace moved back under the eaves of the inn – and not just to allow Beasley free rein but because the harlots repelled her. How can he touch them? Yet why wasn’t he questioning them? Which one was he waiting for? The old man had said they’d know which she was, but how?

She teetered in the shadows, wanting to interfere, not wanting to interfere, watching one or two of the women limp off into the alleys. Others waited for their sisters, dully, not speaking, presumably needing light to guide them to the deeper rat-holes.

The last boat was debouching its passengers and still Beasley was merely hauling them up. She could see the tip of the link-pole as it lit the last few up the steps.

That’s her. Oh God, that’s her.

The link-boy had joined the women on the quay and was guiding them away into the alleys but, as he left, his lantern had illumined one of the faces before it turned away as if light was anathema to it, or it was anathema to light.

Makepeace had seen the damage done by smallpox before but never with the ferocity it had wreaked here. The woman’s features might have been formed from cement spattered by fierce rain while still soft. In that brief glimpse, it appeared to be not so much a face as a sponge.

Pocky.

Having helped her onto the quay, Beasley was holding on to the woman’s hand. Makepeace heard her say, tiredly: ‘Not tonight, my manny. I ain’t got a fuck left,’ then pause as he shook his head and put his question, politely for him, giving his explanation in a mumble.

The woman’s reply carried. ‘I never knew she had a mother.’ Her voice was surprisingly tuneful, with a lilt to it Makepeace couldn’t place.

Mumble, mumble?

‘I might do. Or I might not.’

It’s going to be money, Makepeace thought. Let her have it, let her have anything, only get me my child back.

It wasn’t so simple; Beasley was obviously making offers, the woman temporizing.

The link-boy emerged from wherever he had taken the others, disturbed that he’d left this one behind. He coughed and called: ‘Are you coming, Dell?’

At that instant Makepeace’s legs urged her to kneel on the stones in gratitude for the moment when God opens his Hand and allows His grace to shower on poor petitioners. Instead they carried her forward, stumbling, so that she could snatch the link-boy to her and rock him back and forth.

After a moment, Philippa’s arms went round her mother’s neck and she wept. ‘I knew you’d come,’ she said. ‘Oh Ma, I knew you’d find me.’

Beasley looked round the door of Makepeace’s bedroom. ‘Is she all right?’

‘She’s asleep.’ She had Philippa’s grubby little hand in her own. Not once had she let go of it as they’d all hurried away from Dock to the privacy and shelter of the Prince George.

She answered Beasley’s unspoken enquiry. ‘And she is all right.’ She might not be able to understand her daughter as other women understood theirs but she was not mistaken on this; Philippa had suffered greatly but her eyes on meeting her mother’s, her whole demeanour, declared that her virginity was still intact. ‘I reckon we got a lot to thank that woman for.’ It occurred to her that she hadn’t done it. ‘Where is she?’

‘Ordering breakfast. Everything on the menu.’

‘Give her champagne.’

‘She’s already ordered it.’

‘Good.’ Makepeace balled her free hand into a fist. ‘John.’

‘Yes?’

‘Susan’s dead.’

It was the one question that had been asked and answered before Philippa’s eyes had glazed with exhaustion and remembered terror, at which point Makepeace had tucked her child into bed and soothed her to sleep.

There was a long silence before Beasley said: ‘How?’

‘Killed when the Riposte fired on the Pilgrim. It’s all I know – it cost her to say that much. We’ll find out when she wakes up.’

Beasley nodded and went out.

In the days when Makepeace had shared a house with Susan Brewer in London, she’d wondered if there was … well, a something between her two friends. But if there had been, it had come to nothing; Susan was the marrying kind, Beasley was not. Yet Susan had remained unmarried, instead pouring her affection onto her godchild, Philippa.

And Philippa had loved Susan, which was why she’d been allowed to go to America with her.

Everybody loved Susan. Since they’d met on the Lord Percy bringing them both to England nearly thirteen years before, she and Makepeace had been fast, if unlikely, friends – Susan so feminine, earning her living in the world of fashion and caring about clothes, everything Makepeace knew she herself was not.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. You can have Philippa back but I am taking Susan.

And Makepeace wept for the friend who would have been content with the choice.

She lifted the little hand she held in hers to put it against her cheek. Dirty, yes, but the nails were short and perfect. Philippa had always been a neat child and Susan had taught her well.

The male disguise had been effective because of the girl’s thinness; she’d grown a little, not much; the pale, plain face was still the image of her father’s with its almost clownish melancholy, but where Philip’s had been amusing, Philippa’s suggested obstinacy. And suffering.

It irked her that she could not read her child. She did not understand Philippa, never had; her teachers said the girl was gifted in mathematics and the businesswoman in Makepeace had been gratified – until Susan had explained that it wasn’t shopkeeper mathematics Philippa was gifted in but pure numbers, whatever they were. Nor could Makepeace, who believed in airing her problems, often noisily, be of one mind with someone who would not openly admit to a difficulty until she’d solved it, and sometimes not even then.

Gently, she laid her daughter’s hand back on the counterpane. ‘We got to do better, you and I.’

The movement disturbed her daughter’s sleep. She woke up and Makepeace busied herself fetching breakfast and popping morsels of bread charged with butter and honey into her daughter’s mouth, as if she were a baby bird. ‘I can feed myself, you know,’ Philippa said, but she allowed her mother to keep on doing it. They were preparing themselves.

At last … ‘Now then,’ Makepeace said.

There’d been two sea battles. In mid-Atlantic Lord Percy, with Philippa and Susan aboard, had encountered the American corvette, Pilgrim.

‘That wasn’t a very big battle,’ Philippa said, ‘but Captain Strang was killed by the first broadside and Percy was holed below the waterline, so she surrendered quickly.’

An Admiralty report from the lips of an eleven-year-old, thought Makepeace.

‘And I was glad.’

‘Glad?’

‘I wasn’t glad that Captain Strang was dead, he was a nice man. But the Pilgrim was going to take us back to America and I wanted to go back. It was Aunt Susan who said we had to get away from the war. I didn’t want to, I wanted to stay and fight for freedom.’ She darted a look at her mother. ‘England’s a tyrant.’

Makepeace opened her mouth, then shut it again. ‘Go on.’

‘And Josh was on board Pilgrim.’ Philippa took in her mother’s reaction. ‘Didn’t you know?’

‘Josh? In the American navy?’

‘Didn’t you know?’

‘No,’ Makepeace said clearly, ‘I didn’t. How could I? I didn’t even know you and Susan had set out for England ’til two weeks ago. The mail’s interrupted. Small matter of a war, I guess.’

‘Is that why you didn’t come for me sooner?’

‘Of course it was. Did you think I …’ Makepeace bit her lip, this was no way to resume their relationship. ‘So Josh was a sailor on the Pilgrim.’

‘Able seaman, bless him. He joined to fight England’s tyranny.’

‘Go on.’

And then, Philippa said – she was trembling – a British ship of the line, the massive Riposte, caught up with Pilgrim and opened fire with broadsides of fifty-one guns.

Makepeace held the child’s hands tight while she relived it, saw the mouth twist to try and find words to express the inexpressible – ‘noise’, ‘explosions’ – and find them inadequate for the horror of being bombarded, of panic’s indignity.

‘You can’t get away, Mama. We’d been put below deck but … we stuffed our cloaks in our ears … I was scuttling. Like a rat.’ She looked at her mother with her teeth bared. ‘Like a rat. Screaming and piddling …’

Thank God she’s telling me, Makepeace thought, and said: ‘Anybody would.’

Philippa shook her head. Anybody hadn’t – she had. ‘And then, things were breaking. Aunt Susan flung herself on top of me. Everything went dark. Then there were flames and I saw Aunt Susan …’

The broken sentences flickered like gunfire on a broken ship, a broken body. Susan staked, like a witch at a crossroads, by a giant splinter through her spine. Susan of the pretty fingernails, Susan … ‘Green curdles my complexion and I shun it like the plague.’

Makepeace let go of her daughter’s hands and covered her face with her own. What had Susan to do with their filthy war? How could men look at her body, at the child beside it, and not see the obscenity of what they did?

Her voice going high as she tried to control it, Philippa went on. ‘Josh found me and got me into a boat. He swam beside it until a crew from the Riposte picked us up. They took Josh away then and locked him up with the rest of Pilgrim’s survivors. They put me in the care of the ship’s doctor.’

Makepeace dried her eyes. ‘Were they kind to you?’

‘I suppose so. I hated them. They lined the ship’s rail and cheered as Pilgrim went down and Aunt Susan with her.’

Makepeace said: ‘I never had a friend of my own age. When I met her coming over, she was … well bred, not well off but well bred. I was a tavern-keeper, I’d lost everything, or thought I had. Susan dressed me in her own clothes, taught me to walk so your father would notice me. God rest her soul, she was the most generous person I ever knew.’

‘She was.’

The noise from the taproom came up through the floorboards into the quiet of the room in waves of increasingly enjoyed hospitality and Makepeace realized that, though she and Philippa had been eating breakfast, it was approaching evening.

She tensed herself for the next round. ‘What happened when you landed?’

Philippa, too, gritted her teeth. ‘They lined Josh and the other men up on the quay. There was me and a little boy from the Riposte, a ship’s boy. He didn’t like it in the navy. Mr Varney, he was one of Riposte’s lieutenants, he told us to stay where we were, somebody would come to dispose of us. I was afraid they’d put me in an orphanage or some terrible place. Jimmy, that’s the boy, he didn’t like it either. As soon as Mr Varney’s back was turned, he ran away, I don’t know where.’

For the first time, Philippa started to cry. ‘Then … then they put Josh and the others in a boat to take them to prison. He’d been shouting, telling me to go to a church and tell them who I was so they’d send for you. He was frightened for me. And I was so frightened for him. The British treat prisoners of war like vermin. They shut them up in prison ships so they die of hunger and smallpox. Everybody in New York knows about the prison ships. I tried to follow him but I didn’t have any money and it was … horrible. I didn’t know what to do, Ma. I just stood and cried.’

Makepeace kissed her. ‘I wouldn’t have known what to do either.’

‘Wouldn’t you?’ Philippa dried her eyes. ‘And then Dell came up and said that once upon a time she’d stood on a quay and cried and nobody had helped her but she wanted to help me. She took me home.’

‘What sort of home?’ Makepeace asked sharply.

‘It’s a room above a pawn shop in Splice Alley. She doesn’t keep it very clean …’ Philippa’s voice became prim. ‘I had to clean it.’ She became aware of her mother’s tension. ‘You needn’t look like that, Mama. I know what she does.’

‘What?’

‘She sells her body to men. She says when you’ve got nothing else to sell, that’s what you have to do.’

‘Does she.’

‘She didn’t bring any men to the room, if that’s what you’re worrying about. She works the ships.’

Makepeace looked around the inn’s bedroom with its lumpy walls and furniture. I am hearing these things from my daughter’s lips, she thought. We are having this conversation.

Yet, at least, her diagnosis was being confirmed; her daughter had been kept at one remove from the wretched woman’s occupation or she wouldn’t be talking about it with this judicial remoteness.

‘She’s a kind person,’ Philippa said, wagging her head at her mother’s expression. ‘She protected me. She wanted to because I was in danger. I was her good deed. She said I was the brand she plucked from the burning. “Sure, I’ll be brandishing you to St Peter at the Gates, and maybe he’ll unlock them and let me into Heaven, after all.”’

The imitation was startling not just for its exact Irishness nor the affection with which it was done but because gaiety was inherent in the mimicker as well as in the mimicry. Makepeace hadn’t, she realized, heard such lightheartedness from her daughter since a brief period at Raby when she and Andra, still only business partners, had been getting ready to dig for coal and Philippa had played with the miners’ children.

She was happy then, before I took her away. I thought she deserved better as Sir Philip’s daughter. Better…Dear God, look what better brought her.

‘Dell’s a child, really,’ eleven-year-old Philippa said.

Makepeace couldn’t resist saying: ‘She’s a child who left you waiting all night in a boat while she cavorted with sailors.’

‘That was only for the last few nights,’ Philippa said, calmly. ‘She had to take me with her. Her pimp had just been released from prison and she was afraid to leave me behind in case he put me on the game.’

Makepeace lowered her head into her hands.

‘I was gainfully employed most of the time, Mama, truly. I worked for Mrs Pratt in the pawn shop downstairs, calculating the interest charges. She ran a small gaming room at the back as well, and I’d work out odds for her.’

A gambling hell. Was the girl doing this deliberately? Makepeace searched her daughter’s face for some sign of provocation but saw only a small, intent camel looking back at her.

‘So you earned money,’ she said.

‘A little. Not much. Mrs Pratt isn’t very generous.’

Makepeace gathered herself. Now they came to it. ‘Then why didn’t you send for me?’

She might as well have taken an axe and cut the bridge between them. The girl’s face became dull and sullen.

Makepeace said: ‘You were landed here on the seventh of June. I found that out from the Admiralty. I had to find it out.’ She tried to get her voice back to level pitch. ‘That was seven weeks ago. Why didn’t you send me a message?’

There was a mumble.

‘What?’

‘I knew you’d find me eventually.’

‘That was luck, not judgement. If it hadn’t been for John Beasley I wouldn’t have found you at all. Do you know what I went through?’

Tears trickled down Philippa’s cheeks but she remained silent – and Makepeace, not usually percipient about her daughter, was vouchsafed a revelation. ‘It was a test,’ she said, wonderingly. ‘You were testing me. Making sure I’d come.’

‘You didn’t come over to Boston when Betty died.’ It was an accusation.

No, she hadn’t. The removal of that old woman, the only constant in Philippa’s disrupted life, just as she’d been the only constant in Makepeace’s, had left a chasm which she should have acknowledged by her presence.

But suddenly she was tired of flagellating herself. ‘I was eight months pregnant,’ she said. And if it was the wrong thing to say, it was the truth and Philippa could put that in her pipe and smoke it. ‘What?’

Still mumbling, her daughter said: ‘And you might have taken me away.’

‘Of course I’d have taken you away!’ Makepeace shrieked. ‘I’m picky. I don’t like my daughter consorting in back alleys with trollops, kind as they may be.’

‘You’re forgetting Josh,’ the girl shouted back. ‘I’m not leaving him.’

Oh, dear Lord. She hadn’t forgotten Josh but this talk with her daughter had been like a stoning – rocks thrown at her from all directions; she’d had to dodge them. There’d been so many.

‘I smuggle money to him,’ Philippa went on. ‘In the prison. We go there on Sundays, Dell and I, and we see him sometimes. We’re going to help him escape. You can escape from Millbay. Some men have done it.’

‘You think I’d leave that boy in prison?’ She’d got up now and was walking the room. ‘Leave Joshua to rot? Betty’d turn in her grave. Lord, Philippa, what do you …?’ She stopped in front of her daughter and leaned down to peer into her eyes. ‘Damn me,’ she said slowly. ‘You think I’m one of the tyrants.’

It came rushing out. ‘You’re American but you’ve never been back or sent any money to help the cause of freedom or said anything or, or anything