Taking Liberties (26 page)

Halfway down the circular stair that led to the undercroft, Diana decided she'd made a mistake to bring Mrs Clarke with her. Polly had followed, declaring herself too frightened to stay in the kitchen on her own, and drew in hissing breaths at the shadows cast on the walls by Tobias's candle.

The undercroft was low-vaulted and, as far as it was possible to see, ran round the foundations of the house itself. Carved pillars held up the roof. One wall was piled with furniture, bric-a-brac, portraits—a painted face peered from a frame, the candlelight lending it a leering squint. A tattered tapestry of a hunting scene, complete with eviscerated stags, covered another section of wall between two pillars. Such light as there was coming through the barred windows fell on a massive table that dominated the place and on which a mound was covered by a carpet. Tobias moved towards it and reached out his hand to twitch the carpet off.

Immediately, Diana wanted to stop him. The atmosphere of the place was tomblike and affected even her. There could be nothing good under there. It resembled a catafalque.

The carpet slid away and she was horribly right. It was a coffin.

With a corpse in it.

Tobias and the Dowager led a screaming Mrs Clarke and a near-fainting Polly back to the kitchen where Joan, attracted by the noise, revived them with cooks' brandy before escorting them to the bedroom they insisted on sharing together, being too scared to sleep separately.

‘Tobias,' the Dowager said, ‘I want you to go to the village and enquire for the head man, captain, parish councillor, beadle, whatever he calls himself. Tell him I require him here and I require him now.'

‘Yeth, your ladyship.'

Joan was unpacking the hamper good Lady Edgcumbe had provided for dinner and which they had been too busy to broach. It was all the food they would get now.

‘They'll go,' she said.

The Dowager sighed. ‘I know.'

‘Me too.'

‘Oh, I'll wait 'til you got somebody in my place, but I knew I was too old for this afore I came. Got soft, I reckon. An' with Torbay being so close . . . well, reckon it's time I went home. My sister's there. Remember Rosie? Second parlour maid to your aunt, she was.'

Stricken, Diana caught the old woman's hand and held it to her cheek. ‘I can't do without you.'

Joan stroked her forehead. ‘I were never a proper lady's maid, not like all the fancy French pieces served other ladies. Always had to get in M. Alphonse to do your hair, di'n't you?'

‘You were better than a lady's maid, you were a friend.'

‘That's why I stayed,' Joan said, ‘I saw how you was treated . . . There, I won't go on'—the Dowager had stiffened—‘but many's the time I wanted to take a knife to 'un. That's over now, thanks be to God, and you've got life back in your eyes, same as you had when we used to go down the beach when you was a girl.'

‘I'll always thank you for that.'

‘And I've got that annuity he left me in his will and I reckon that's a-due to you, for surely he wouldn't have given me tuppence on his own.'

Diana remained silent. But it was true; it had taken everything she knew to keep Joan as her attendant and have her suitably rewarded.
‘Buck-toothed old hag. Why can't you have a maid like Sophie Buckingham's? Pretty little thing with a bit of go in her.'

That was why.

She clung harder. ‘Don't go.'

‘Won't be far away, will I? No, your ladyship's passed through the Slough o' Despond now and you've a-come to your Delectable Mountain'—here Joan looked around her—‘though 'twouldn't be my choice o' perch, I must say.' She kissed Diana's hair. ‘Time I went home, my dear, I'm tired.'

 
She looked at the man standing before her with disfavour. Massive as he was, the shadow he cast on the wall of the Great Hall in the candlelight was almost frightening. ‘Mr Gurney?'

‘Jan Gurney, your ladyship. Welcome to T'Gallants and Babbs Cove. 'Tis good to have a Pomeroy back.'

‘Is it? One feels, Mr Gurney, that the welcome would have been slightly warmer without the corpse.'

‘Ah, well.' He shuffled his big feet. ‘You'm owed an apology there, but we wasn't expectin' you to move in so soon and what with it bein' hot weather and havin' to send to Newton Ferrers for a parson for the funeral an' Henry Hobbs not gettin' any prettier, we reckoned as how—'

‘One's undercroft is not a mortuary, Mr Gurney.'

‘ 'Tis cool, though.'

He puzzled her. She was at her loftiest, a stance which usually reduced peasants to slithering subservience. She'd encountered this man's assumption of equality once or twice from the nouveau riche; men of the manufacturing class, waving their democracy in her face in an attempt to show that Jack was as good as his master. But where they had merely been brash this enormous tatterdemalion was assured.

The two of them studied each other while Diana mentally examined her family's records. Gurney, Gurney. We hanged one of them for poaching in the 1590s. And there'd been a female Gurney in 1666 to whom Sir Peter Pomeroy left a suspiciously large amount in his will. In its way, this man's lineage was as long as her own . . .

‘How did you get in?' she asked.

‘Always had a key. Village uses the place for storin' goods, like—nobody 'abn't minded before.'

He was being surprisingly honest. She said: ‘Do I gather these goods have not been subjected to duty—?'

‘Free trade, we call 'un,' he interrupted.

‘—and are therefore the reason why Captain Nicholls has been so insistent in wanting to search my house?'

‘Stood up to 'un for us, didn't ee?'

Oh Lord, they thought she had done it for them; that she had some sort of knowledge of their activity and had believed there to be contraband in her house. ‘Are there any goods here at the moment?'

‘No. You forgot, seemingly. 'Tis summer. 'Tis fishin' with us in summer. I'd'a been at sea along o' the others if
Lark
hadn't needed her old bottom scraped. Winter's the time for free tradin'.' He added disgustedly: ‘I'd'a thought Nicholls would've known tha-at.' He smiled at her. ‘Only spirit in this house be Henry Hobbs's.'

She refused to be charmed. ‘Very well. But I must make it clear to you that henceforth T'Gallants will store nothing. No bodies and especially no contraband. Is that clear?'

‘Pity,' he said. Obviously, in his view she was making a mistake on her own account.

‘Is that
clear
, Mr Gurney?'

‘It is.'

‘Then you may sit down.'

He dragged up a chair and dwarfed it.

‘Mr Gurney,' she said. ‘Twice now I have heard the evil of wrecking attributed to T'Gallants and the Pomeroy name . . .' She was going to go on and say she wanted the suggestion stamped on, her family was an honourable one, but she was stopped by the look in his eye, which was alarmingly regretful.

‘Wicked old days, they was,' he said.

‘You are not suggesting it was true?'

‘So they say. Them forebears of ours ain't much to be proud of.'

Again the sense of shared experience; they were complicit in long-dead wickedness.

‘I refuse to believe it,' she said. Birthright delineated her honour. The role the Pomeroys had played in England's pageant had given her integration with its history, the right to be proud, the recognition of the justice by which her family and fellow-nobility ruled its acres and directed its government. If it was not God-given, if her ancestors and this man's ancestors had waded through bloodstained water, feasting like sharks on the helpless, she was less than she had thought herself to be.

Gurney shrugged and pointed behind her, to where the sound of the sea's gentle shushing came with moonlight through an open casement. ‘That's been called wreckers' window so long as I can remember.' He leaned forward as if to pat her knee, then thought better of it. ‘Reckon we've all lived more decent since then,' he said. ‘Washed the guilt away, like, though I do still send up a prayer for forgiveness when I think of ut.'

How odd, she thought. This man too, this common smuggler, feels the weight of his ancestry. He is giving us both absolution.

‘Ye-es,' he said, reminiscing, ‘they turned to free tradin' after that. My great-great-great-grandaddy sailed back and forth to Roscoff free tradin' for Sir Peter—proper Pomeroy, he was—oh, many and many a time. Course,'twas easier in them days. Revenue weren't so sharp.'

‘Sir Peter Pomeroy died fighting the Dutch off North Foreland,' she said, sharply.

‘And Great-great-great-grandaddy Gurney died with 'un.' He got up, rearing over her like a freak wave. ‘Better be gettin' back, your ladyship. I'll see to the corpse come mornin'. I'll be a-mendin' 'til then—them whoreson Revenue went through my cottage a-breakin' everything, even the baby's cradle, dang 'un.' He grinned at her, winking. ‘Us won't forget you stood up to 'un, though. Proper Pomeroy, you are. Welcome home.'

Home, she thought, when he'd gone. I have come home. To what? To some sort of criminal democracy?

Yet she was warmed by his assumption that she had returned to where she belonged. The odd thing was that, despite everything, she felt that she had.

Joan had gone to bed. The Dowager took her supper alone in the Great Hall; the dining room still lacked chairs and, anyway, had a deadening atmosphere which the hall, for all its severity, lacked. Although the food was from a hamper and she was prepared to make allowances tonight, Tobias's sense of what was proper demanded she eat in style.

She watched him as he laid a little table by her chair at the oriel window, seeing how his black face disappeared when he turned away from the candelabra so that he was a headless body with white gloves.

‘I fear Joan is leaving us, Tobias.' It was only now, in losing her, that what existed between her and the woman who had shared the last twenty-odd years with her she knew to be love, something she had not imagined between mistress and servant. Affection, yes, but not love. Joan, she realized, had been more of a mother to her than the beautiful, unapproachable, generally absent woman who had given her birth.

‘We'll mith her, your ladyship.'

‘Yes.' Very much,
very
much.

‘I fear the cook and the girl may be going ath well, your ladyship.'

‘How will we manage, Tobias?'

He was undisturbed. ‘I can athk in the village, I dare thay.'

‘In the morning.' She could imagine his effect on some fisherman's wife as she opened the door to him at this time of night. ‘When you've finished here, go to bed. It has been a long day.'

‘Yeth, your ladyship. And I can turn my hand to motht thingth, your ladyship.'

So he could. It struck her that if he left her she would be virtually helpless, yet she had uprooted him from Chantries as casually as breaking off a leaf to transplant it somewhere else. He was a comfort. Although it was a given that negroes were eye-rollingly superstitious and afraid of the dark, like children, when he'd uncovered the dead man he'd merely blinked.

‘Will you be happy here, Tobias?'

‘Oh yeth. I like the thea, your ladyship. I wath born near it.'

Was he? How little one knew about people one was surrounded by.

A white cloth was put across his arm as he carved some chicken and poured her wine.

‘And there's the caretaker,' she said. ‘He seems to have kept things clean at least. Have you found him yet?'

‘No, your ladyship. I've heard thomeone murmuring.'

‘So have I. I thought it was the sea.' With the advent of night, the house had developed echoes that had not been apparent by day. Tobias's lisping voice domesticated a space around her that was becoming alien.

A napkin was laid across her lap and she could keep him no longer.

‘Good night, Tobias.'

‘Good night, your ladyship.'

In her room, a decent enough chamber at the back of the house, the Dowager found it ridiculously difficult to retire. She had a struggle to get out of her clothes and trouble finding her nightgown in the chest Joan had been too tired to unpack. She cleaned her teeth and washed her face. Brushing her own hair was an unusual experience but she persisted. Really, preparing for bed was exhausting.

Sleep, however, eluded her. The events of the day seemed to have altered her. The conversation with Gurney had reduced her yet introduced a new factor into her outlook on things.

Then, Joan. She thought of Joan as she had first seen her, the plain, friendly servant in Great-aunt Pomeroy's house in Torbay who, even then, must have seemed so important to her that she had begged her mother to take her as a maid. Memories of Joan led to memories of Martha and to an image of her as she would be, grieving, waiting . . .

I must get word to her. I need not tell her of her boy's affliction, merely that he is alive. I shall write to Fred North. Surely there is some diplomatic contact with the Americans.

Then it was the hospital, all her plans . . .

Eventually she got up, threw on a shawl and went downstairs.

The house seemed more alive now than in daytime, full of rustling and unexplained movement. Bats and owls, she told herself, but the faraway murmur she and Tobias noticed earlier persisted, as if somewhere in its depths the house was talking to itself.

In the Great Hall, she went to the wreckers' window. I will not call it that; we Pomeroys could not have had our start in such a way. There is no evidence for it.