Diana Norman - Taking Liberties

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.

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.