Taking Liberties (51 page)

For two days a regular thumping from the upper bedroom shook bits of plaster from the taproom ceiling.

‘What's he
doin'
up there?' Zack asked.

‘He's marching up and down,' Makepeace said. ‘Trying to get the strength back in his leg so's he can go up to T'Gallants and make love to her ladyship.'

‘Don't need his leg for that, do he?'

When he was ready, they saw him off at the door. Dell was in wedding tears and the other women weren't far off. Makepeace had brushed his coat and hat (once Jan Gurney's, the only ones that fitted him). Philippa had polished his boots. One by one they kissed him, Rachel whispering something in his ear that made him tut-tut. Mrs Hallewell tucked a sprig of dried bird's eye in his buttonhole—she used the leaves for tea—for good luck.

Before he left the area of light extended by the Pomeroy's candles, he turned and waved his hat, then stepped into moonlight reflected on snow.

‘Level peggin' so far,' Zack said with pride.

He made it to the bridge where he had to lean against the balustrade and take off his hat to wipe his forehead. After that it was torture to watch him as he staggered and halted and pressed on again. The women at the inn door instinctively extended wavering hands out, like mothers ready to catch a toddler if it fell.

‘Does she know he's coming?'

‘He don't think she does, he wanted to surprise her. But I sent Bilo to tell her. Woman needs to be ready at a time like this.'

They watched him until he reached the courtyard, then Makepeace went to her bedroom and wept for Andra Hedley.

In her bedroom at T'Gallants the Dowager Countess of Stacpoole abandoned mourning and put on a wrapping gown of blue silk, held at the waist by a fringed sash of deeper blue and hitched up on one side to show a flowered petticoat in the manner of a Sultan's favourite.
Turquerie
had been fashionable when she'd bought the dress; she hoped it still was.

I'll be cold in this. Then she thought: But not for long. She wished that Makepeace hadn't sent Bilo to warn her; she would panic,
was
panicking. It was so . . . so deliberate. Like waiting for the dentist.

Why couldn't he have taken me when I sat by his bed?

He wasn't well enough, you fool.

Dear Lord, she'd grown so thin; she had no bosom to speak of. She examined her brushed hair in the looking glass; that was one thing about being fair, you couldn't see the grey.

She piled it on top of her head and pinned it, leaving a lock to trail over one shoulder—oh help, straight as a pea stick. She rushed down to the kitchen, warmed her curling iron and turned the tress into a ringlet.

And so pale. Dell had borrowed her rouge and not brought it back. She pinched her cheeks and wished she were dead.

There were whistles of admiration from the nineteen when she went into the Great Hall.

‘Going to a ball, ladyship?'

‘I'm escortin' her iffen she is.'

She paid them no attention and went to the oriel window. And there he was, oh my darling, limping ferociously into the courtyard. The lamp at the archway shone on a face snarling at pain.

She ran through the screen passage to open the door to him. ‘Sweetheart, you ought to be in bed.'

He hauled himself up the steps, smiling. ‘I agree, madame.'

She helped him up to her room and didn't leave it for two days.

It seemed to her that they nearly drowned in love, wallowing and diving like dolphins in turquoise waters around a palm-fringed, tropical archipelago. Sometimes they pulled themselves up onto golden sand and lay in the sun to rest and talk.

‘I do like love,' she said. ‘It's slippery and warm.' It was as if she'd lived in arid cold all her life until now. And it was funny, love was
funny
; he made her laugh.

‘I cannot go on like this without food, woman,' he told her. ‘You are exhausting my reserves.'

‘Perhaps they've left us some at the door.' She got out of bed and pulled on a wrap—she couldn't get used to being naked standing up.

‘No.'

‘All right,' she said, letting the wrap go. ‘But it's chilly.'

‘Come back to bed, then.'

‘I thought you were hungry.'

‘I am.'

He loved the contrast of her whiteness against his dark, scarred skin. ‘It is a pity you are so ugly,' he'd say, kissing her, ‘I have to hide my repulsion.'

‘You do it very well.'

Neither of them mentioned her marriage, though his extreme gentleness when they'd first made love suggested he thought he would be countering terror. But seeing him struggle up the hill had made him vulnerable and she was ready for him.

He talked about his children and the grandchildren he hoped to have. When he mentioned
La Petite Margot
and her crew, it was with pain. Without them, he said, he would abandon the war—it was doubtful if he was strong enough to captain a vessel, in any case.

‘What will you do?'

‘We will take up politics. We will work for the day when Louis is toppled and the Republic of France is born. Ah, then you will see, there will be liberty for all, enlightenment, the philosophy of Voltaire and votes for women.'

When they weren't politicking and voting, they were to spend their days in his château at Gruchy. That was what he liked to talk about most, their future together.

‘I shall teach you to cook, you barbarian. I will allow you some roast beef—your English beef is not at all bad when cold—perhaps I will concoct a roulade in your honour.
Roulade de boeuf à la Diana
.'

‘No lobscouse?'

‘No.' He had taken against Makepeace's lobscouse, though it had done him well. He'd fattened up a little on it at the inn.

He was her Scheherazade; she listened to him, enchanted by the pictures he painted of the little yacht they would sail together, the smuggling runs back to Babbs Cove when the war was over to keep their hand in and meet old friends. She revelled in him while she had him because it wouldn't be for long.

He's so complete, she thought. He didn't have to ask if his looks and the fact that he was crippled bothered her; for one thing, she showed that they did not; for another, he was too assured. They bothered him because he knew he was probably facing constant pain and would find it difficult to stand on a swaying deck again, but in essence he was the man he'd always been.

‘And I will have you,' he said.

She couldn't bear to tell him that he wouldn't.

When she said that she would have to take up T'Gallants's reins again—‘It isn't fair to leave all the work to Dell and Philippa'—he insisted on joining his fellow prisoners in the discomfort of the Great Hall.

‘Stay in bed,' she begged him. ‘You're not completely well yet.'

‘It is against my honour.'

‘I thought you didn't believe in honour.'

‘Personal honour, woman, you would not understand. I am not a plaything, I cannot continue as your pleasure slave.'

‘Not even tonight?'

‘What time?'

When she returned to the cold, it was to find the Americans somewhat embarrassedly pretending she'd never been away and the French looking on her and de Vaubon with the indulgence of proud parents.

It was magical to see him playing dice with Laclos or scandalizing Captain Totes with his atheism or hauling himself up the staircase to go and talk to Mrs Green. As if he's a real person, she thought; he didn't seem real to her.

She had more patience with the other men now, encouraging them to talk to her about their homes and families. Tobias, she saw, was doing the same thing, listening particularly to the Americans, even Able Seaman Abell.

‘I hope that young man is being polite to you, Toby,' she said. She had warned Abell at the start: ‘Mr Abell, if you so much as forget to say thank you to Tobias when he serves your dinner, you must leave this house and fend for yourself.'

He'd been indignant. ‘I got manners, niggers or no.'

Such a strange young man, she thought him, illiterate and bigoted but he could be trusted to help with the chores and to watch from a window more than the others, his eyes searching for danger as they had once looked out for water snakes when he set gossamer fishing nets in the creeks of his South Carolina home.

He begged her to teach him to read. Being busy and, she thought, cunning, she had suggested he learn from Tobias, but it appeared he could not accept the gift of literacy from a black man, so Lawyer Perkins was teaching him. ‘The more advantages that Gullah has, maybe the less he'll oppress those who ain't got any,' Perkins had said.

It was at Lawyer Perkins's feet that Tobias sat mostly, when he had time, listening to tales of the pepperbox house in Massachusetts where clients were attended to in the parlour while Mrs Perkins cooked corn hash in the kitchen, where grandchildren crawled on the floor and may-apples grew in the yard.

‘I been explainin' to Tobias here about the drafting of the Declaration of Independence,' he said, when she went and sat with them one evening. ‘I was telling him we New Englanders tried mighty hard on the slavery question. “All men as they are sons of Adam have equal right unto liberty,” as John Adams told 'em. The Missus says we should've tried harder and maybe we should. We voted for the achievable. But abolition'll come soon. Sure as God made little apples, it'll come.'

She glanced towards de Vaubon: ‘Did you never think of including women among those with the right to vote?'

Perkins smiled. ‘John Adams's wife, Abigail, a real nice woman, she wrote John some such thing. But when you ladies rule our hearts, why'd you need a vote? No, ma'am, can't say we gave it a thought.'

When she and Tobias were washing up in the kitchen later on, he said: ‘Mr Perkinth and Mr Abell: a funny country that'th got the two of them in it.'

‘It's not a country yet,' she said, absently. She was thinking about the coming, delicious night.

‘Will be, though, won't it? And all new. An old country would have thent thomeone like the mathter to Philadelphia, wouldn't it?'

The thought of Aymer framing a Declaration of Independence made her smile. ‘What do you mean?'

It was the newness of America that had impressed him, that it should send a homely man like Perkins to one of its greatest meetings. ‘New,' he said. ‘It can thtill be shaped.'

‘I suppose it can.'

‘It nearly abolished thlavery in Philadelphia, Mr Perkinth thaid tho. Might do it yet.'

He had her attention now. She said: ‘Just think if there was nowhere to sell slaves to. The trade would stop.'

‘It will need all the help it can get,' he said.

‘What is it?' she said. He was suddenly so strange. ‘What is it?'

And Tobias made his horrifying proposition.

‘No,' she said, ‘I won't allow it.' ‘You gave me freedom, your ladyship.'

‘Not in order for you to give it away again.'

‘It'th my freedom,' he said, ‘I can do what I want with it.'

He was so stupid, he had no idea of what it would entail and she did. She wanted to scream that she knew what was best for him; instead she used dirty tactics: ‘It will be dangerous for me, too, have you thought of that? We could both end up in prison.'

Yes, he'd thought of that but he didn't think so.

‘You think they won't notice?'

‘No, they won't. They won't look. You thee'—he smiled at forty-five years of servile anonymity—‘all niggerth look alike.'

Oh my God. She knew he'd won but she made one last try. ‘You could speak for abolition,' she said. ‘It needn't be Joshua.'

He was almost cross. ‘Are you lithening to me, your ladyship? Are you hearing how thilly I thound? How can I thpeak for my people? I'd have them in thtitcheth. But they won't laugh at young Joshua.'

He rummaged in his pocket and drew out a piece of paper. ‘He drew that for me. He thaw it done in a thlave market.'

It was a sketch, hastily done by the hand that had drawn Lieutenant Grayle. It showed a black man sitting in a chair while a white man fitted an iron mask over his face. The white man's face was expressionless, the negro's obscured, but brutality leaped out at the viewer.

‘Do you thee?' Tobias was impatient. ‘The thlave can't thpeak. I can't thpeak. But a picture like that thpeakth for all.'

‘Yes,' she said, painfully, ‘I see.'

That night, in bed, just before they went to sleep, Diana said: ‘I must go into Plymouth tomorrow, we need more laudanum for poor Mrs Green.'

‘Don't be long,' de Vaubon said.

Nobody was to know what they were going to do—except Dell. The next morning, in the kitchen, they told her. She wept, quietly, deeply, as if her heart were breaking. Diana saw that it was. So, very nearly, was her own.

Just before she left them to themselves, she saw Tobias set his black cheek against the pockmarked white skin of the Irishwoman's.

At the Pomeroy Arms, she asked Makepeace if she could borrow the coach for the day. ‘Mrs Green needs more laudanum. Tobias will drive me.'

‘That's good.' Makepeace was concerned with something else. ‘Zack and I are going pony-back along the cliffs to Thurlestone. He's going to speak to one of the free traders there about buying or hiring a boat. We can't wait any longer, we've got to get those men to France.'

It took a minute before Diana realized what she was saying: Makepeace had lost hope for the
Lark
and
Three Cousins
.