Taking Liberties Read online

  And devoted to his wife. Whatever else, the Dowager Countess could have crawled in gratitude to her daughter-in-law. In this sallow, jealous little woman, Robert had found refuge and clung to her like ivy to a wall, as she did to him.

  The couple talked to each other always of things, never ideas, but they talked continually; they were happy in a banality in which Diana would have been pleased to join them if Alice hadn’t kept her out so ferociously that Robert, once again, was taken from her.

  Yes, well.

  Tobias was at her side. ‘A methenger for Lord North, your ladyship. ’

  Alice almost elbowed her aside. ‘What is that, Tobias?’

  ‘Methenger at the door, your ladyship. For Lord North.’

  ‘I’ll see to it.’ She bustled off.

  Tobias hovered. ‘A letter came today, your ladyship,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Addrethed to the Countess. Her ladyship took it.’

  Diana said lazily, ‘Lady Alice is the Countess now, Tobias.’

  ‘I think it wath written before hith lordship died, your ladyship. It wath for you.’

  ‘Then her ladyship will undoubtedly tell me about it.’

  Tobias was the most trusted and longest-serving of the footmen but even he must not imply criticism of Alice.

  ‘Diana, don’t tell me you’re retainin’ that balbutient blackamoor. Never could see why Aymer kept him on. Niggers look such freaks in white wigs, in my opinion. And the lisp, my dear . . .’

  Diana’s raised eyebrow suggested it was unwise of the Duchess of Aylesbury to include ‘freak’ and ‘wig’ in one sentence, the edifice on her grace’s own head being nearly a yard high and inclined to topple, making her walk as if she had the thing balanced on her nose.

  Actually, it was typical of Aymer, on finding that Tobias’s blackness and lisp irritated his guests, to promote him to the position of head footman and thereby confront visitors with his announcements.

  It was also typical of Tobias that he had kept the place by sheer efficiency. Poor Tobias. Alice and Robert, not having the assurance with which Aymer had flouted social taste, would undoubtedly get rid of him.

  North was coming back. Normally those in the room would not have noticed his entrance but they did now. He had a paper in hand and greyness about the mouth. She didn’t hear what he said but the reaction of those who could told her what it was; the man might have been releasing wasps into the room.

  He made his way to her to kiss her hand. ‘Forgive me, your ladyship. I must return to London. The French have finally come in on the side of America and declared war.’

  It had been inevitable. She said coolly: ‘We shall beat them, my lord. We always have.’

  ‘No doubt about it, your ladyship.’ But he looked older than he had a few minutes before.

  She heard Dashwood talking unguardedly to Robert in his loud voice. Dashwood was always unguarded. ‘Bad enough shipping supplies to our armies already, now we’ve got the damn French to harry us as we do it. I tell you, Robert, our chances of beating that lawless and furious rabble have grown slimmer this day.’

  The Dowager was shocked. Locked away in looking after her husband, she had paid scant attention to the progress of the war, assuming that mopping up a few farmers and lawyers, which was all that the population of the American colony seemed to consist of, would be a fairly simple matter. That the war had already lasted two years must, she’d thought, be due to the vast distances the British army had to cover in order to complete the mopping up. That the rebels could actually win the war had not crossed her mind.

  She glanced enquiringly at Lord George Germain who, as colonial secretary, was virtually the minister for war.

  ‘Y’see, ma’am,’ he said, ‘we were countin’ on Americans loyal to King George bein’ rather more effective against the rebels than they’re provin’ to be.’ He saw her face and said hurriedly: ‘Don’t mistake me, we’ll win in the end, but there’s no doubt the entry of the French puts an extra strain on the Royal Navy.’ He brightened. ‘There’s this to be said for them, though, their entry into the war will give it more popularity with our own giddy multitude. They’ve always gone at the frog-eaters with a will.’

  There was also this to be said for the news: it cleared the room. Nearly everybody in it had a duty either to the prosecution of the war or a protection of their investments.

  She was enveloped in the smell of funereal clothes, sandalwood from the chests in which they’d been packed away, mothballs, stale sweat, best scent and the peculiarly sour pungency of black veiling. The gentlemen raised Diana’s languid hand to their faces and dropped it, like hasty shoppers with a piece of fish; her female peers pecked at her cheek; inferiors bobbed and hurried away.

  No need to see them to their carriages, that was for Alice and Robert now.

  She was left alone. It was an unquiet, heavy room. On the great mantel, a frieze looted from Greece preserved death in marble as barbarians received the last spear-thrust from helmeted warriors in a riot of plunging horses. The red walls were noisy with the tableaux of battle, Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet. Mounted Stacpoole generals posed, sword aloft, at the head of their troops, cannons fired from ship to ship at Beachy Head and Quiberon Bay.

  And now France again. It had been no platitude to assure North it would be beaten, she was sure it would be, just as America would be; Aymer had always said that was what France was for, to be beaten by the English. ‘One Englishman can lick ten bloody Frenchman. And twenty bloody Americans. And a hundred bloody Irish.’ Though it was taking overlong to force America’s surrender she accepted his precept, just as she’d accepted his right to tyrannize his fiefdom through right of blood even while she abhorred the tyranny itself.

  I’m his creature, she thought.

  She walked to the windows to try and recapture the uplift of freedom she’d felt on leaving the chapel but the horizon beyond the lake marked a future she did not know what to do with.

  As Countess of Stacpoole, Aymer’s hostess, charity-giver, political supporter to his Tory placemen, his loyal behind-the-scenes electioneer and, at the last, his nurse, she had at least known employment. All gone now.

  She took in deep, hopeless breaths. She should be smelling roses, there was a neat mass of them below the terrace, but she couldn’t rid the stink of decay from her nostrils. Since his death they’d burned herbs but, for her, the odour of that jerking, gangrenous body still haunted the house, like his screams.

  His reliance on her had been shameless, demanding her presence twenty-four hours of the day, throwing clocks and piss-pots at doctors, even poor Robert, shrieking that he wanted only her to attend him—as if their marriage had been loving harmony.

  As if it had indeed been loving harmony, she had attended him twenty-four hours a day; expected to do no less. For three months she had never set foot outside the suite of rooms that were his.

  His nose had already been eaten away, now he’d begun to rot, new buboes appearing as if maggots had gathered in one squirming subcutaneous mass to try and get out through the skin. Before his brain went, he’d begged absolution from the very walls. Only the priest could give him that; her place had been to diminish his physical suffering as well as she could, and she and laudanum had done it—as much as it could be done.

  She’d thought she could watch judgementally the revenge inflicted on his body by the life he’d led, but she had been unable to resist pity, longing for him to die, for his own sake. Her thankfulness at his last breath had been more for his release than hers. Then had come the scurry of funeral arrangements.

  And now to find, after years of expectation of freedom, that Diana, Countess of Stacpoole, had died with the husband she loathed. Beloved wife of . . .

  I’m nothing without him. That was the irony. He’d defined her, not merely as his Countess, but as upholder of his honour, soother of the wounds he inflicted, underminer of his more terrible obsessions. He’d been her purpose, even if that purpose had been amelioration, sometimes sabotage, of his actions. Years of it. She had no other. Thirty-nine next birthday and she was now of no use to a living soul except to vacate the space she’d occupied.

  She heard screams and in her exhaustion turned automatically to go back to the sickroom but, of course, they were Alice’s. In view of the news from France, Robert, like a good courtier, should return to his place by the King immediately and Alice was lamenting as if her husband were off to battle rather than a palace.

  ‘Maman, Maman, come tell him he mustn’t leave or I shall go distraite.’

  Yes, well. Alice liked an audience for her hysterics. Was being an audience a purpose? No, merely a function. She left the room to perform it.

  To humour his wife, Robert said he would not go until tomorrow; the King would understand he had just buried his father.

  Even so, Alice did not see fit to recover until late evening; the advent of France into the war causing her to see danger everywhere. ‘You must ask the King to give you guards. John Paul Jones will try and capture you, like he did the Earl of Selkirk.’

  Alice, thought the Dowager, must be the only young woman who had not found that most recent raid by an American privateer a tiny bit thrilling. The papers had made much of it in apparent horror but the ghost of Robin Hood had been called up and, as always with the English weakness for daring, Mr Paul Jones’s brigandage was taking on a hue of romance.

  Robert said: ‘My dear, the raid was a failure.’

  Alice refused comfort. John Paul Jones, a Scotsman who’d joined the American side, was scouring his native coast to take an earl hostage. Robert was an earl. Ergo, John Paul Jones was out to capture Robert. ‘True, the Earl was absent on this occasion but his Countess was menaced. He took her silver service.’

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; ‘I heard he returned it,’ the Dowager joined in. ‘In any case, we may comfort ourselves that Robert will be in London and not in a Scottish castle exposed to the sea. Mr Jones is hardly likely to sail up the Thames to get him.’

  Alice was not so sure; she was enjoying her horrors. It wasn’t until late evening that she remembered the letter and handed it to her mother-in-law.

  ‘You will forgive me for overlooking it, Mama. It carried my title of course . . . so peculiar, sent on from Paris, not that I read it . . . the impudence, I wondered to show it to you at all but Robert said . . . who is Martha Grayle?’

  Martha.

  Salt and sun on her face, bare feet, a shrimping net, terracotta-coloured cliffs against blue sky . . .

  Careful not to show haste, the Dowager turned to the last page to see the signature and was caught by the final, disjointed paragraph. ‘. . . you are my long hope, dear soul . . . I am in great fear . . . as you too have a son . . . Your respectful servant, Martha Grayle (née Pardoe).’

  She looked up to find Alice and Robert watching her.

  Deliberately, she yawned. ‘I shall retire, I think. Good night, my dears.’

  ‘But will you not read the letter?’ Alice could hardly bear it.

  ‘In bed perhaps.’ Alice had waited to give it to her, she could now wait for a reaction to it. The whirligig of time brought in its petty revenges.

  Joan was nodding in a bedroom chair, waiting to undress her, but when the areas that couldn’t be reached by the wearer had been unbuttoned and unhooked, Diana told her to go to bed. ‘I will do the rest myself.’

  ‘Very well, my dear.’

  ‘Joan, do you remember Martha Pardoe?’

  ‘Torbay.’ The old woman’s voice was fond.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Married that Yankee and went off to Americy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Happy days they was.’

  She couldn’t wait for reminiscence. ‘Good night.’

  With her mourning robes draped around her shoulders, the Dowager picked up the letter that had circumvented the cessation of mail between rebel and mother countries. Somewhere on its long journey from Virginia to France to London to Bedfordshire it had received a slap of salt water so that the bottom left-hand quarter of each page was indecipherable.

  Martha had penned a superscription on its exterior page, presumably with a covering letter, for the unknown person in Paris who’d been charged with sending it on to England: ‘To be forwarded to the Countess of Stacpoole in England. Haste. Haste.’ Martha had been lucky; from this moment on there would be an embargo on general mail from France, just as from America; the letter had beaten the declaration of war by a short head.

  The fact that Martha had written only on one side of each of her two pages indicated that, however personally distressed, she was in easy circumstances; paper of quality such as this was expensive.

  She’d begun formally enough:

  Respectful greetings to Your Ladyship, if I am so Fortunate that your eyes should see this letter. Of your Gracious Kindness forgive this Plea from an old acquaintance who would make so Bold as to remind Your Ladyship of glad Times in Torbay when you and she were Children undivided by sea or War. Pray God may resolve the Conflict between our Countries. I shall not Weary you with Remembrance, loving though it is to me, but Proceed to the case of my son, Forrest Grayle, who is but eighteen years old . . .

  Here the water stain obscured the beginnings of several lines and Martha’s writing, which had begun neatly, began to sprawl as agitation seized her so that making sense of it caused the Dowager’s brow to wrinkle. She got up from the dressing-table stool and went to the lamp on the Louis Quinze table to turn up the wick, unconscious that she was doing so. ‘. . . such a desire that all may have Liberty as has caused Concern to his . . . nothing would satisfy but that he Volunteer for our navy . . . John Paul Jones in France to take possession of a new vessel built there . . .’

  Now the relief of a new page, though the penmanship was worse and punctuation virtually nonexistent.

  O Diana word has it the Sam Adams is Captured and its Men taken to England and imprisoned for rebels while I say Nothing of this for it is War yet there are tales of what is done to men captured by King George’s army here in the South as would break the Heart of any Woman, be she English or American . . .

  Here, again, the interruption of the water stain.

  whether my husband would have me write, but he is dead these . . . I beseech you, in the name of Happier days, as you are a Mother and a . . . will know him if you remember my Brother whom you met that once at . . . the Likeness is so Exact that it doth bring Tears every time I . . . you can do if you can do any Thing for my boy in the name of Our . . .

  Here the writing became enormous: ‘For you are my long hope, dear soul . . . I am in great fear . . . as you too have a son . . . for our old friendship . . .’ Slowly, the Dowager smoothed the letter flat and put it between the leaves of the bible lying on the table.

  Yes, well.

  She could do nothing, of course. Would do nothing. As her daughter-in-law said, the letter was an impertinence. Martha had expressed no regret for her adopted country’s rebellion; indeed, supposing her own interpretation to be correct, the woman had actually referred to the American fleet as ‘our navy’.

  If the boy Forrest—what like of name was that?—is so enthusiastic to get rid of his rightful King, let him enthuse in prison as he deserves.

  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 the 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.’