Taking Liberties (37 page)

It was a punishing regime. For all of them, even those who worked only four days out of seven, the eighty-minute ride home along the twilight clifftops was accomplished in the stupefied silence of exhaustion.

Their labour was made harder by Dr Maltby, a more frequent visitor since the advent of the Dowager had drawn attention to his absences. He regarded the presence of women in his ward as anathema and they were forced to disappear into the loft during his rounds and watch impatiently for him to be gone.

He brought terror with him, mixed with the reek of whisky. A vicious drunk, the sort Makepeace had met once or twice in her tavern-keeping career, able to speak without slurring but with a horrifying unpredictability. Why he hadn't been dismissed by the Sick and Hurt Office, she couldn't understand. The Dowager urged it but Captain Luscombe had admitted himself powerless: the man had friends in the Admiralty.

He'd been known to hit patients who displeased him. Twice he'd ordered an unnecessary amputation for a prisoner. Happily, most amputations had already been performed by the surgeon on whichever Royal Navy vessel had brought its enemy's survivors to Plymouth. Drunk as he was, he would have operated on gangrene patients in the ward but, again, the Dowager had forestalled him. Captain Luscombe, on her recommendation, had instituted a rule that men with gangrene be sent to the excellent Royal Navy hospital in town.

It didn't make Maltby's hatred of the Dowager Countess of Stacpoole any less, but it saved lives.

On Maltby days, the women kept their heads down, listening and wincing as the doctor sent patients who were manifestly unfit back to their barracks. ‘What's he do?' Makepeace whispered to Philippa, ‘get a bonus for every man he discharges?'

The doctor's voice roared out: ‘And what's wrong with you, you damn malingerer? Look healthy enough to me. Get out.'

Latour,
marin simple
of the French navy, limped into their view on a crutch, his yet-unhealed broken leg trailing. ‘
Attendez
outside,' Makepeace hissed down at him. Later, she'd smuggle him back in; the only good thing about Maltby was that he didn't remember his patients from one visit to the next.

‘And who in hell's this coaly bastard?'

Makepeace and Philippa looked at each other in despair. Josh.

But it wasn't Josh. Dr Maltby had glimpsed Tobias.

One of the orderlies muttered something.

‘What the hell's the navy coming to? Well, just see he keeps his black hands off my bloody patients.' That from a man with the longest, dirtiest fingernails Makepeace had ever seen.

She heard Maltby move on to another bed and the voice of one of the new American patients, Captain Sugden, begin a complaint he hadn't stopped making since his arrival. Not now, she thought, not to him.

‘. . . and I must inform you, sir, it is against all rules of warfare that officers be accommodated with enlisted men. I demand . . .'

This was Maltby's meat and drink. ‘Fighting for the equality of Man, ain't you? We're giving you bloody equality. Orderly, get this man back to his barracks.'

When Makepeace helped Latour and Sugden back to their beds after Maltby had gone, Sugden was still complaining. ‘French officers aren't treated in the prison like we are. They have their own quarters.'

‘The French ain't rebels,' she told him.

In an odd reversal of sympathy, the Dowager thought it was awful that American officers were not segregated from their men as were the French. Makepeace did not; in this she agreed with Maltby. What were the new United States fighting for if not equality?

And it wasn't only officers wanting to be divided from their men—since the arrival of the crew of the
Santee
the possibility of a new and more ominous segregation was being bruited.

Santee
's men were mostly young men from South Carolina whose captain had brought them from their river fishing and their rice and indigo fields to go privateering in the cold waters of the English Channel—with considerable success, until
Santee
had been holed beneath the waterline and sunk.

Of the two who'd been delivered to the hospital, one had a throat wound which prevented him talking, an omission more than made up for by his friend, Able Seaman Abell. And Able Seaman Abell also wanted segregation, not between officers and men, but between black and white.

The first indication of the trouble to come was a kerfuffle from his bay that brought Makepeace running. ‘What's the
matter
?' Tobias was standing by the bed with a medicine bottle in his hands.

‘Ma'am, I ain't takin' no physick from no nigger,' Abell said. He was dribbling blood: a broken rib had punctured one of his lungs.

‘I read him the apothecary'th inthtructionth,' Tobias said, worriedly.

‘ 'Poth'cary instructions!' Abell panted with contempt. ‘How's a nigger git book larnin'?'

Angrily, she snatched the bottle and rammed a dose of medicine into Abell's mouth. This was no time for confrontation—the boy was gasping and would rather die than receive succour from black hands.

Later she lectured him. ‘You're lucky Tobias is a Christian and didn't smash that bottle on your scurvy head.'

Abell smiled at her ignorance. ‘He cain't be Christ'n, ma'am. He's black. He's lucky he bin rescued from savagery by us civilized folk.'

For Abell, as for many of these volunteer sailors, there was no United States, only the backwoods territory of his home. The war had brought him for the first time in his life into contact with men who called themselves Americans but, in their belief that slavery was an evil, were as foreign to him as Indian Buddhists.

Without his bigotry, Makepeace could have liked Abell; he was a personable young man, and endured pain without complaint. Bewilderingly, when he and other survivors had been struggling in the water, he'd held up the
Santee
's black cook, who couldn't swim, until they were rescued. But his conviction that negroes were only fit for slavery was a crusade with him; before long he had one or two of the other patients refusing Tobias's care, which put an extra burden on the women.

When she complained of him to one of her favourite patients, Sam Perkins, he said: ‘The terror of the ignorant. Abell's illiterate, Tobias ain't. Abell's a white Gullah from the swamps, poorest of the poor. Negroes are all he's got to look down on. Take that away and he's nothing.'

Of all the Americans in Millbay, Sam Perkins, being a non-combatant, was the most likely to be exchanged. A little man, a middle-aged Massachusetts lawyer whose once-plump skin now hung on him, he'd been on his way to join Ben Franklin in Paris when, as he said, he'd been forced to make a detour—the sloop he was aboard had gone down to British fire off Finisterre. Makepeace liked him. The only fear of his life that she'd been able to discern was that of losing his spectacles. Thus far, miraculously, he'd been able to keep them intact.

Nevertheless, when she had time, Makepeace tried ramming inalienable truths into Able Seaman Abell. But his mind was a circular palisade. White folk had bestowed a blessing on black folk by taking them from the dark continent of Africa into the Christian light, yet that same light could not shine upon black folk because their skin showed the darkness of their origin.

There was no crack through which he would allow Makepeace's argument to enter. She made sure his bed was kept as far away as possible from those of Josh and the other black men.

Of all the patients, Andrew Abell was the only one she was almost sorry to see get better. On the morning when, with great sweetness, he thanked her for nursing him and was taken away to the prisoners' barracks, she felt as if she were loosing a fox into a hen coop. It made her wonder what sort of people would be populating the land of the free when it was won.

But she was learning. When they were well enough to do it, most of the men liked to show her the letters from home they'd received before they were captured and kept in their jackets. Illiterates wanted her to read their letters to them over and again. And through these worn, sometimes sodden, pieces of paper, Makepeace was given glimpses of the war her people on the other side of the Atlantic were fighting.

She was vouchsafed tableaux of starving men scratching at fleas and chiggers while they cooked firecakes—mixed flour and water—on an open fire, or roasted an old shoe to make a meal, or lay in wait to catch the Brigadier's pet dog and eat it.

Death from heat stroke in summer. Sleeping under snow in winter. Quiet farmyards turned into scenes from Hell as opposing armies descended on them. Men whose uniform was a hunting shirt with a knife in its belt fighting scrappy battles in fields of Indian corn against red-coated soldiers. Militiamen signing on for one campaign and then going home for the harvest, carrying typhoid with them. Boys of fourteen running away to join Washington's army and promoted to officers by the time they were sixteen.

Sometimes, in their letters, they swaggered. ‘I had to snuff a little gunpowder for Liberty's sake.'

Sometimes they didn't. ‘I confess to you, brother, I weren't thinking of Liberty when I fired, merely trying to stop the man opposite killing me.'

Some of the officers' letters reflected General Washington's irritation with the camp followers who slowed down the baggage trains, while in the next sentence described the women in them as washing or cooking or nursing or foraging for the men.

One letter said:

 
But in their way, the letters from wives who stayed home were just as heroic. ‘I ploud and hoed the corn, Tom, so's to raze bread for our childer. The chickens is doin well. Made chees, sat and spun 53 knots til dark then done the milkin by rushlight.'

This was not the glorious heroics lauded by its sympathizers, this was a common war fought, on the American side, mostly by the very young. Nor, again on the American side, was it homogeneous. There was as much mention of killing between patriot and loyalist, red and white, black and white, red and black, as there was of battling against the British enemy.

Yet Makepeace found that a new word cropped up again and again. Nationly. ‘I felt nationly as I joined the sewing bee,' one mother had written. A young wife who'd raised money for army blankets congratulated herself on being ‘nationly'. Men and women signing the patriotic Covenant did it in a spirit of ‘nationlyness'.

‘But what sort of nation's it going to be when we win, Sam?' she asked Lawyer Perkins. ‘That's what I want to know. What sort of nation?'

‘Reckon it'll be one that asks questions, ma'am,' he said, polishing his spectacles and smiling at her. ‘They say a British officer gives a command to his men, it's obeyed. An American officer gives a command to his men, he has to tell 'em why.'

Makepeace wiped the sudden tears from her eyes. ‘Oh,
that
sort of nation.'

Josh began to get better slowly—and then very quickly. Makepeace tried to persuade him to feign weakness so that he could fatten up on the food she smuggled in to him. He wouldn't. ‘Can't do that, Missus. Ain't fair to the other
Pilgrim
lads as are starving in the barracks.'

‘It helps if you starve along with 'em, does it?' she said.

She comforted herself with the thought that at least going back would get him away from discrimination. The campaign for segregation that Abell had started before he was discharged was being carried on by other Americans from the South and having its effect. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, she noticed, were beginning to allocate one section of beds, the favoured ones nearest the loft stairs, to white men only.

‘And escaping from in here ain't easy,' Josh added.

She was instantly terrified. ‘Not again. Josh, don't try again.'

‘Be all right this time,' he said and crooked his finger so that she'd come closer. ‘Word is there's to be a tunnel.'

Oh God.

She began to dread the next round by Maltby when, inevitably, Josh would be discharged.

The guards came first. ‘Which is Joshua Burke?'

‘That one,' Payne told him. ‘Chimney-chops, second bay.'

The Dowager descended hurriedly from the loft. ‘What do you want with him, gentlemen?'

‘Punishment block, ma'am. He's got a stint in the Black Hole.'

Makepeace came running. The Dowager put out a hand and caught her tightly by the wrist. ‘This man has been very ill,' she told the guards. ‘He needs to recuperate. To put him in the Black Hole is out of the question.'

One of them shrugged. ‘Orders, ma'am. He's an escaper. Ain't done his forty days.' He was a corporal of the 13th Regulars, neither liking nor disliking the job he was doing.

‘He's been too sick, you meathead,' Makepeace shrieked at him. ‘It'll kill him.'

At a sign from the Dowager, Tobias pulled her out of the ward.

‘I shall protest to Captain Luscombe,' Diana said.

‘Your privilege, ma'am,' the corporal said.

She went with them and Josh to the cubed blockhouse and inspected it before he was put inside. It had three inmates already. There was the same stink, the same stripes of sunlight falling on men who didn't move or look up as she went in. Covered buckets that she'd insisted be installed meant that there were fewer flies than the last time she'd seen the Hole.