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Authors: Diana Norman

Taking Liberties (60 page)

BOOK: Taking Liberties
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‘They will be, won't they?'
‘They'll weep in the streets.' Makepeace's tone suggested that she would not.
‘Might it actually help, Missus? If they think I'm hostage, will they improve prisoners' treatment?'
‘Oh, stop it,' Makepeace said, ‘it's nothing to do with you any more. Of course they won't. The rest of us will have to take up the banner, I suppose, me, Andra, Beasley. Now then . . .' She knelt down by Diana's clothes press. ‘You won't want all this black. Are you taking the blue?'
‘Mr Hedley?'
He looked at her squarely. ‘No, pet,' he said, ‘they'll not raise a finger. They'll use the excuse that they can't give in to blackmail. Like the Missus says, it'll be up to us agitators.'
‘I won't ever be able to come back then, will I?' Diana said.
Makepeace paused in her packing but didn't look at her.
‘Do you want to?' Andra asked.
T'Gallants, Babbs Cove, an English spring, Tobias. ‘You'll look after Tobias as well as can be, won't you?' she said.
‘He and Dell are going to run the Pomeroy when he comes out,' Makepeace said, delving into a wardrobe for a valise.
If he comes out, Diana thought. She said: ‘I would have liked grandchildren.'
Still with her back to her friend, Makepeace grimaced at the children the Earl and Countess of Stacpoole would produce between them. ‘You'll just have to borrow some of Gil's,' she said.
Andra was watching Diana's face. ‘Gains and losses, pet,' he said, ‘gains and losses. Always the way.'
‘Yes.'
‘And a big, ugly, attractive gain it is,' Makepeace said, throwing a bulging valise on the bed. ‘And it's going to miss the tide if you don't stir your stumps. I've gone to a lot of trouble for this. So's he. And he's committed now, he's got to take somebody hostage. You want him to sail off with Alice?'
They had to stop laughing before they went down the stairs in case they were heard in the Great Hall.
Andra and Makepeace watched her go in. More Frenchmen had come up the shaft; the room was becoming crowded. One of them came forward to take the valise from her.
‘I'll be off then, pet.' Andra had to take off his disguise and become a chance guest at the Pomeroy Arms.
‘Take care, they might see you going down.'
‘Not them, they'll all be watching her. They won't notice me.'
‘I'd notice you. I always notice you.'
Andra smiled. ‘I know tha would,' he said. ‘And in case you were wondering, you're my life's length and its breadth and its height.'
She watched him go. ‘Now's a fine time to tell me,' she said and went into the Great Hall.
He was right; every eye was on the Dowager Countess as she walked towards her son. Robert's argument trailed away . . . ‘Mama.'
‘It's all right, Robert.' It was dreadful; he was crying.
She wondered what to say to him and realized that in these last days she had come to think of him not so much as her son but as ‘Them', one of the faceless members of the cabal that fought so hard to keep itself in charge of an unchanging nation.
An innocent really, she thought. He believes that ruin comes from change yet, without change, England will be ruined. It was inevitable that he would deny her liberty; he was too entrenched in a class that had gone to war to deny it for others.
‘I'm so sorry, my dear,' she said and when she kissed him, she was kissing the child he had been.
De Vaubon was beside her. ‘Also I need more crew.' He limped along the line of people under guard by the oriel. ‘Too fat,' he told Kempson-Jones. ‘Too old.' That was Tinkler.
He stopped in front of Josh. ‘You.' His men pushed Josh towards the shaft. Just before he stepped onto the platform, the boy looked back. ‘Good-bye, Missus.'
Makepeace sobbed. Hopeless, she said to herself. I told him not to smile.
‘Good-bye, Alice.'
‘Mama, Mama . . .' Diana saw that, oddly, it was Alice who would miss her the most. Her daughter-in-law's face was stricken. She tried to tell her: ‘Don't mind, my dear. Believe me, I am happy to do this.'
True to her breeding, she would have gone along the line of servants to say good-bye but de Vaubon was looking at his timepiece. ‘We waste time,' he said.
‘Allons-y.'
As she went towards the shaft, Nicholls moved towards her feet. Looking down at him, she thought: He knows this is a charade, his instinct is telling him. Or if he doesn't know now, he soon will.
‘What are you going to do with Captain Nicholls?' she asked clearly. Above the gag the man's eyes were promising to kill her when he could.
‘He is coming with us. He is being impressed into the navy of King Louis. It will be good for him.'
How nice for Babbs Cove and free trade. She smiled down at the Revenue man. Not today, I'm choosing life today.
Most of the Frenchmen had gone down the shaft, leaving two to bring Nicholls and cover their captain's retreat.
Makepeace, watching, saw de Vaubon pick up his hostage and sling her over his shoulder before stepping onto the platform. You Frenchmen, she thought. She's a lucky woman. You're both lucky.
As they went down the shaft and with her head hanging against de Vaubon's leather coat, Diana said: ‘This is the equivalent of being carried over the threshold, is it?'
‘It looks well for a kidnapping. Not so good for my leg, you're heavier than you look.'
Bilo was waiting for them in the cavern, already in the rowing boat with oars unshipped.
‘I'm so happy, Bilo,' she told him. ‘Are the others away?'
He grinned at her. ‘Yes, madame.'
For the last time the platform went up and came down with the rearguard and Nicholls. He was put in the bottom of the boat between the thwarts and she couldn't be bothered to look at him anymore. One of the men started hacking at the platform's ropes with a knife.
‘Allons-y,'
de Vaubon said again, and held the netting up so that they could be rowed through.
 
There was a general rush to the wreckers' window as if, somehow, by watching her go, the poor hostage might still be saved. Makepeace found herself next to Alice.
The breeze had blown away the fog to reveal a smart white-sailed cutter just outside the groyne of the cove. Men clambered in her rigging, unfurling sails.
Robert was raving, calling on a navy that wasn't there.
‘I fear for her.' Alice's tears plopped onto the windowsill in correspondence with the last drops from the thawing icicles outside it. ‘I fear that dreadful man may ravish her.'
‘Yes,' Makepeace said, watching the Dowager Countess of Stacpoole raise an arm, and waving back to it. ‘Yes, I'm afraid he will.'
 
Diana looked one more time behind her, at the red dot that was her friend's head. Losses and gains, gains and losses. But one of these days, Makepeace and that nice man she'd married would arrive at Gruchy in Jan Gurney's boat. In the meantime, she must just trust England to the Missus's care.
God help it, she thought, lovingly.
And now I can write to Martha.
De Vaubon pointed to the cutter they were nearing. ‘My new boat,' he said.
‘She's lovely. What is she called?'
‘In view of everything,' he said, ‘I thought perhaps . . .
La Liberté?
'
‘A good name,' she said.
Author's
Note
THOUGH the conditions in which captured Americans were kept in Britain during the War of Independence were undoubtedly bad, the report by John Howard (of the later Penal Reform League) of his visit to Millbay in 1778 seems to indicate that—the hospital apart—they were not much worse than in ordinary prisons of the time. That was bad enough, of course, and my fictional Dowager Countess represents those among the British public who were shamed into protesting and raising money to alleviate the suffering.
Such aid, along with the political sympathy for the American cause expressed by men like the Marquis of Rockingham and Edmund Burke, was taken further by some and there is evidence from diaries kept by American escapers who made a ‘home run' that they received help from ordinary English men and women.
The captive ‘rebels' were at last given recognition as prisoners of war in 1782, thereby becoming eligible for exchange, after the British defeat at Yorktown the previous year decided American independence—although the war itself was not concluded until the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
The mass escape from Millbay took place, as in the book, in December 1778. One hundred and nine men broke out of whom seventy-seven were eventually recaptured. John Paul Jones's attempt to kidnap the Earl of Selkirk took place in the same year. Sadly, the segregation of black prisoners by the white is also a fact.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the extent of smuggling in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Despite desperate attempts by the Revenue Service, ‘free trade' thrived with the connivance of the general public as well as many magistrates. For instance, in 1817 two Revenue men were arrested by the Mayor of Deal for having tried to stop a band of smugglers from bringing brandy kegs ashore. At their trial they were sentenced to gaol for having wounded some of the gang during the struggle. They were later released by the intervention of a higher court but the case was not untypical.
Coastguards weren't given the name until 1822—until then they were members of the Waterguard—but since they performed much the same service, I have used the more familiar and modern word.
READERS GUIDE TO
Taking Libertie
s
Taking Liberties
is a novel about two women who help to bring liberty to others. Discuss the ways in which Makepeace Hedley and Diana Stacpoole are opposites. How do they complement each other? Are there qualities that they share?
 
In the course of this novel, Diana is transformed from a prisoner of propriety to a liberated women of spirit. It could be said that the same sense of honor that kept her in an unhappy marriage is ultimately the source of her liberation. Discuss this.
 
 
While Diana is enslaved by British aristocratic traditions, Makepeace Hedley is an enormously successful businesswomen and outspoken American with a passion for all. How does the author use her two main characters to illustrate the differences between the rising new world and the old empire?
 
 
Diana and Makepeace reach a turning point in their relationship when Diana treats Josh just as she would a white man. What is Makepeace able to gather about Diana that wasn't apparent to her previously? And how does Makepeace's lease of the house to Diana shatter Diana's misconceptions about her?
 
 
How are each of the characters in this novel motivated to become political because of the personal? Do you think that this is often the case in real life?
 
 
In this novel, Diana and Makepeace—though normally upright citizens—have a great disregard for the law. Is this pardonable? Why? Is the lawlessness of Babb's Cove justified by its long tradition?
Nicholls and deVaubon are virtually polar opposites. Discuss the differences in their characters. Why do you think the author intends us to cheer on deVaubon and deride Nicholls?
 
 
Makepeace has to overcome her own inner snobbery toward Dell, despite the fact that she probably saved Philippa's life. Why is this and what lesson does she learn in overcoming her antipathy? How has she changed by the novel's end and what has most influenced her attitudes?
 
 
A free man at last, Tobias makes an extraordinary sacrifice in taking the place of Josh. Why is he willing to do this, after so many years of forced servitude? What kind of burden does this place on Josh's shoulders?
 
 
Even at the end, as much as Diana loves deVaubon, she cannot imagine going with him because of the disgrace it would bring on her family and her feeling that running away with him would be used to discredit all the good she had accomplished. How does deVaubon demonstrate the depth of his understanding of Diana and liberate her completely?
BOOK: Taking Liberties
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