Carla Kelly - Marriage of Mercy

‘Indeed you do not,’ Mr Selway replied. ‘You may be right, too.’ He leaned towards her. ‘Think about this, Gracie: it is 1814. This war with America cannot last for ever. Dartmoor is a fearsomely terrible place. You would be doing a great favour to our Lord Thomson to succor his only child, no matter how boisterously he was conceived.’

‘I suppose I would,’ she said, feeling that the words were pulled from her mouth by tweezers. ‘Could I discuss this with the Wilsons? If I have to live in the dower house with a paroled prisoner, I’d like to keep working at the bakery.’

‘I see no harm in that, as long as the parolee is with you.’

Grace stood up, relieved. ‘Then I will ask them directly and send you a note.’

‘I ask no more of you, my dear,’ Mr Selway said.

The Wilsons had no objections to any of the details of Lord Thomson’s will, so amazed were they that a marquis would consider doing so much for their Gracie, a woman others of her class seemed content to ignore in perpetuity.

‘What’s a year or less?’ Mr Wilson asked. ‘You can live in a nice place, take care of a paroled prisoner, then return to us and all’s well. Or keep working here, if you wish. Maybe he’d be useful to us.’

‘Maybe he would be.’ She hesitated. ‘And… and might I some day buy your bakery?’ Grace asked timidly. ‘I’d like nothing better.’

Both Wilsons nodded. ‘The war will end soon, Gracie,’ Mr Wilson assured her. ‘You’ll be doing a favour for old Lord Thomson. How hard can this be?’

Grace had sent a note to Mr Selway and was greeted by him the next morning as she opened the shop.

‘We’ll go at once,’ Mr Selway told her. ‘I’ve heard tales of Dartmoor and how fearsomely bad it is. Let’s spring the man while we can.’

‘Must I be there, too?’

He nodded. ‘I fear so. Lord Thomson stipulated there would be three signatures on the parole document. Yours and mine, signed and notarised in the presence of the prison’s governor—a man called Captain Shortland, I believe.’

‘Three?’

Wordlessly, he took the parole document from a folder and opened it to show her the first signature. Grace gasped. ‘The Duke of Clarence?’

‘Sailor Billy, himself.’ Mr Selway put away the parole. ‘Let’s go get a man out of prison, Gracie.’

And they would have, the very next day, if news had not circulated through all of England—glorious news, news so spectacular that all of Quimby, at any rate, had trouble absorbing it. After nearly a generation of war, it was suddenly over. Cornered, trapped, his army slipping away, the allies moving ever closer, Napoleon had been forced to abdicate.

Mr Selway told Grace he must return to London, muttering something about ‘details’ that he did not explain.

‘If the war is over, will the American return home?’ she asked, as he came by the bakery in mid-March. She didn’t want to sound too hopeful, but as each day had passed, Grace realised how little she wanted to honour Lord Thomson’s will, not if it meant the continuing animosity of the new marquis, who still remained in residence.

‘Alas, no. That is a separate conflict. We still have a parolee on our hands, or at least, I think we do,’ he told her. He nodded his thanks as she put a generous handful of Quimby Crèmes in a paper for him. ‘Our recent peace could be worse for the Americans, if better for us.’

‘How?’ she asked, embarrassed at her ignorance of war.

‘Now we can focus all our British might on the pesky American war.’ He nodded to her. ‘I expect I will be back soon, though. War seems to grind on.’

He was back in less than a week, knocking on the bakery door after they had closed for the night and she was sweeping up. She let him in and he gave her a tired smile.

‘I am weary of post-chaises!’ he told her, shaking his head when she tried to help him off with his overcoat. ‘I just dropped by to tell you that we are going to Dartmoor tomorrow.’ He sighed. ‘Captain Daniel Duncan is still ours.’

She could not say she was pleased, and she knew her discomfort showed on her face. Mr Selway put his arm around her. ‘Buck up, my dear. At least we needn’t stay in Dartmoor.’ He gave her shoulder a squeeze. ‘Let’s make old Lord Thomson proud of us Englishmen.’

Grace knew she had a fertile imagination. After only a brief hour in Dartmoor, she knew not even the cleverest person on earth could imagine such a place.

Her mood had not been sanguine, but she credited their first stop of the morning to the lowering of her spirits. Mr Selway had had the key to the dower house and said they would visit her new home first, as he handed her into the post-chaise.

When they had arrived, the solicitor had unlocked the door and they found themselves in an empty house.

‘I thought the will mentioned house and contents,’ Grace said, as she looked around the bare sitting room, where even the curtains had been removed.

A muscle began to work in Mr Selway’s jaw. ‘Wait here,’ he said. He turned on his heel and left the dower house.

Grace wandered from room to room, admiring the pleasant view from uncurtained windows, even as she shook her head over Lord Thomson’s petty nature.

Mr Selway had returned in no better humour. He walked in the door and threw up his hands. ‘Such drama! Such wounded pride! Lord Thomson can’t imagine what happened to the furniture in the dower house and heartily resents my accusation that he emptied it out like a fishmonger’s offal basket.’ He shook his head. ‘He says all will be restored to its proper place.’

‘I won’t hold my breath,’ Grace said.

‘Wise of you. There might be furniture here, but I think Lord Thomson will send his minions to the attics to find the dregs.’

‘We don’t need much.’

‘What a relief. I doubt you’ll get much!’

It’s good you did not ask me if I am afraid , Grace thought, as they left Quimby by mid-morning and began a steady climb onto the moors. This spares me a lie of monumental proportions .

The higher they climbed, the colder the air blew, until she had wrapped herself tight in an all-too-inadequate shawl. Shivering, she looked on the granite outcroppings and the few trees. ‘Is it April here, or only April in the rest of England?’ she asked.

‘Many have remarked that even nature conspires against this place,’ Mr Selway commented. ‘I have heard complaints about the change in atmospherics around Dartmoor.’ He glanced out the window. ‘Could England have chosen a more unaccommodating place for a prison? I doubt it, perhaps that is the point.’

They were both silent as the post-chaise wound its way along a dirt track of considerable width, as though armies had marched abreast. Or prisoners , Grace thought. Poor men .

When she thought they would wind no higher, the fog yielded to cold rain. She peered out of the window as the chaise entered a bowl-shaped valley. And there was Dartmoor Prison, an isolated pile of granite with walls surrounding it like a cartwheel. She looked at Mr Selway. ‘Perhaps it’s a good thing old Lord Thomson never got here,’ she said. ‘It would have broken his heart.’ It’s breaking mine , Grace told herself.

‘There must be thousands of prisoners inside,’ she said, touching the small carton of biscuits she had brought along as a gift, suddenly wishing it were loaves and fishes and greatly magnified.

‘The prison’s first inmates were Frenchmen, acquired during the war,’ Mr Selway told her, his eyes on the tall grey walls as the carriage drew nearer. ‘I don’t know when Americans started arriving, but I can surmise it was after 1812.’