Diana Norman - Taking Liberties

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.