Taking Liberties (27 page)

The cove was silvered by moonlight and for a moment she thought it deserted. No, it wasn't. A ship rode on the water.
Nicholls.
God damn the man, would he never leave her alone?

Then she saw that it wasn't the Revenue cutter. She knew little about boats, but the one out there was surely larger than the
Wasp
and its hull and masts were totally black so that her eyes had been momentarily fooled into thinking the inlet empty. Floating in the moonlight, apparently deserted, the thing looked sinister. A skeleton ship.

The Dowager chided herself. It was most likely part of Babbs Cove's fishing fleet which had returned; the night-time atmosphere of the house was turning her fanciful.

She crossed the room to the oriel and opened one of its lights, letting in warm night air. The sea was out of sight from here, the sound of it just audible as it drew out and brushed in sand with a regular sigh very different from the murmuring she had heard.

She need not be concerned. A stream echoing in a cave far below, perhaps. But she was suddenly reluctant to face the passages back to her room and settled herself on the oriel seat because the view took in the moonlit village where families were, where outhouses held chickens and where waking babies were suckled back to sleep.

How comforting the ordinary was, she thought. There was a light at the inn. Tomorrow she must go and give her condolences to the relatives of Henry Hobbs; these were her people, after all.

Something was being dragged along on the other side of the room. There was nothing there, the moonlight coming through the wreckers' window showed empty stone, yet something invisible was slithering across it. In fear that it would be attracted in her direction, she blew out her candle.

The slither became a rumble, she felt the window-seat beneath her thighs vibrate, the merest frisson, before returning to solidity.

The house was moving; it was going to fall on her.

Her lips tried to form the prayer of deliverance from terror by night but they were rigid against her teeth.

Then the singing began. A deep sound, the words inextinguishable except for one.

 
There was scrabbling behind the great black chair. The piece of carpet in front of it began to wrinkle. With a scraping sound the chair was moving slowly outwards of its own volition, swinging to one side. In the hole left behind it was a flame and a head. They rose upwards, ascending from Hell until the full demon was revealed.

It stepped forward, holding the flame aloft, stumbled over the wrinkled carpet and said, ‘
Merde
.'

She'd held a breath so long that she had to let it out. A whimper went with it.

The thing straightened. ‘
Mama Green? C'est toi?
'

She was outlined against the window. He came striding across the floor, flambeau held high so that he could peer at her face. After a moment he said: ‘Definitely, you are not Mother Green. Who are you?'

He had a pistol in his belt; a scalp dangled from a ring next to it.

She said, in a high, unnatural voice: ‘I am the owner of this house and in the name of Christ I bid you be gone.' Even in terror, she remembered what it was one said to demons.

There was a snort. ‘Who else is here?'

‘I have men all over the house,' she said.

He took the pistol from his belt and stood still, listening. After a while he grunted. ‘Nice quiet men.' But the pistol stayed in his hand. He leaned forward so that his face and the flambeau were close to hers. She flinched. ‘I am the Devil. Cry out, one move and I eat your head.'

She nodded.

He sidled away from her, heading for the wreckers' window but keeping her in view. ‘One move.'

Another nod.

He looked around, found a sconce and lodged the flambeau in it. Then he opened one of the lights, put his fingers in his mouth and whistled three times.

There was a faint answering whistle from below.

She saw him pick up the flambeau and come back down the hall, heading for the door. On the way he shoved at the big chair with his foot and it swung back into place. The pistol was still aimed at her. ‘Remember. I am not gone.'

If she'd wanted to, she couldn't have moved. Her muscles were in spasm.

A light flickered beyond the door. He was coming back. Jesus be with me in this hour, he's coming back.

He'd left the flambeau behind and now held a candle. The pistol was in his belt once more—next to the scalp. ‘One man,' he said. ‘There is only one man. Some old women.' He paused. ‘And you.'

He had supernatural knowledge; there hadn't been time for him to look in all the rooms.

A thin, faint voice of sanity said: The caretaker told him.

He came over to her, hoisted himself onto the window seat and held the candle so that he could peer at her face, examining it inch by inch, like an aggressive doctor. There was a grunt and he leaned back, putting the candle in the space between them. He blew out his cheeks and said, aggrievedly: ‘You frightened me, you know.'

She managed to say: ‘Did I?' before she vomited onto the candle.

‘Yach!' She heard him move quickly away. She went on being sick until she was merely retching.

A cold cloth was being applied to her face. He lifted her carefully off the sill and stood her in front of him while he wiped her down as if she were a grubby child, talking all the time. ‘I hate a vomiting woman. It is not attractive.' He turned her round so that she faced the moonlight and made a last dab at her face. ‘
Voilà
.' And hoisted her over his shoulder.

He knew his way through the unlit passages, taking long, confident steps that made her hanging head bob like a dead rabbit's. At one point he called out: ‘Which is her room?'

A voice, a whisper, said: ‘At the back. Over the garden.'

He'd felt her stiffen at the mention of bed and gently thwacked her bottom. ‘Not tonight. I am too tired.' Further on, he said: ‘And we have not been introduced.'

Light. They were in her room. He rolled her off his shoulder so that she flopped onto the bed. He stretched, painfully. ‘You set off my back,' he accused her. ‘I have trouble with my back, you know.'

It was then that some vestigial reasoning returned to her. The Devil didn't complain of back trouble and neither, she hoped very much, did rapists.

His appearance was not reassuring. He wasn't young, in his forties perhaps. The candle threw shadows upwards on his face, distorting it. His head was bare and the dark hair had been cropped so short that it bristled like a gooseberry. He could have been a convict ready to be transported except that his shirt, which was open at the powerful neck, was of good linen.

The scalp at his waist was his wig. He was large and ugly but he wasn't the Devil. He was French. Nearly as bad.

She said: ‘I want you out of my house.'

He paid no attention, being busy unscrewing the cap of a hip flask. She pursed her lips and shook her head as he put it to her mouth but with his other hand he wangled a finger between her teeth and made her sip.

It was excellent brandy. She took another sip, then a gulp.

‘
Bien
,' he said.

She clawed for some dignity and sat up, clutching the bedclothes to her chest. ‘Leave at once.'

‘I stay for the funeral,' he said. ‘The man in your cellar. So sad, you know. A friend of mine until he turn to the good.' He settled himself, as if for a chat. ‘You live here now, Madame Pomeroy? You like it?' He put his head on one side, looking at her reflectively. ‘
Pomme de roi
. Yes, but the apple is a bit green, uh? Maybe when your nose runs not so much and the eyes are not so red—'

‘Get out.'

‘Yes.' He gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘I must go.
À nos moutons
.' He took up the candle and went to the door, shambling like a bear. ‘I regret I frighten you,' he said, ‘I think the house was empty. But you were brave. Not bad at all.'

The door closed behind him. The echoes of a great, untuneful voice dwindled down the passage.

 
‘Margot, pour té que j'endure de maux,
Margot, pour té que j'endure!'

 
He was singing.

Then she turned over and cried. Cried and cried, rubbing her forehead against the pillow, seeing the carpet in the Great Hall wrinkle, the chair swing open like the door to Hell.

I want him dead.
Nobody should be made so afraid. She had been unwomanned, the person she had built up so painfully to withstand her fear of her husband ripped apart and reduced to a lone shard of terror. A victim again.

And yet it had been a different fear. And he was a different man. God knew what he was, but Aymer's savagery was missing from him. She forced herself to stop crying and begin thinking, jerking occasionally with a dry sob. She was alive and unravished. He wasn't going to hurt anybody. How did she know that? She did.

But the caretaker, who was his accomplice, would have to go. Mama Green, indeed.

There was some contraption behind that chair. He used it often; he was familiar with the house. In league with the village and the caretaker. He brought in contraband and used a secret way into T'Gallants to stack it. He's a smuggler, she thought drunkenly, in league with rabble and caretakers. A nice taste in brandy. A common criminal; an uncommon, common criminal. French. Enemy . . . Nice taste in brandy . . .

 
She woke up to a sea change. Something had happened. For a moment she was hard put to it to remember what it was, except that it had been massive. When she did remember she discovered that the change was personal, as if the events of yesterday and the terror of its night had lodged something different within her. Good or bad, it was difficult to say, but birdsong, sun and the air of a lovely summer morning coming through her bedroom window carried a new expectancy.

Fresh clothes had been draped over the bed end and on the table were a basin and ewer which hadn't been there the night before.

As she dressed, she could see out to an overgrown garden where goldfinches fluttered to balance on seedheads.

The house still held a murmur, but now it gave the impression of being companionable and contributed to by different voices. It drew her to the kitchen.

Nobody noticed her. The large Frenchman was at the table stuffing down porridge and talking loudly at the same time. Tobias and Joan sat next to him, listening and relaxed, pecking at slices of bread and butter. Another woman, who had grey hair flowing down her back, stirred a pot hung over a fire in one of the hearths, muttering with dubious sanity.

‘Tobias,' the Dowager commanded, and retired.

Buttoning his jacket, Tobias followed her into the Great Hall. ‘Shall I therve breakfatht, your ladyship?' He seemed perfectly normal, in fact the apparent normality of everything was making her head feel loose on her shoulders, as if, like Gulliver, she had emerged onto a land where freakishness was the standard.

She went to the wreckers' window to peer down at the cove. The inlet was empty; the black ship had gone. ‘Well?'

‘Mithith Clarke and Polly have already left, your ladyship. They are at the inn and I promithed to drive them to Plymouth later, with your permission. The gentleman, that'th Guillaume de Vaubon—' Tobias had the pronunciation correct—‘he'th jutht going. He'th the Frenchman who landed latht night.'

‘We met,' the Dowager said, grimly.

‘He told me. He giveth hith apologieth for the alarm. He thought the houthe unoccupied.' Tobias allowed his gravity to slip a little. ‘They all theem to know him round here. No harm to him, your ladyship, for all he'th French. I hope I did right to give him breakfatht. A very entertaining gentleman.'

‘Highly entertaining.' We have undoubtedly landed on the moon, she thought. Even Tobias accepts the arrival of an enemy with his ship as part of the everyday round. ‘Has his boat left without him?'

‘It'th round the headland, your ladyship, in the other cove, more out of the way. I think he'th a thmuggler, your ladyship, but, like I thay, no harm to him.'

‘Go on.'

‘The grey-haired lady, that'th the caretaker. They call her Mother Green. She talkth to herthelf a lot.'

‘She must go.'

He looked worried. ‘Perhapth your ladyship should not be hathty. I've been down to the inn to thee about hiring more thervants.'

‘And?'

‘Not until after the harvetht, your ladyship. Even then they are unlikely to live in. I shall try further afield, of courthe, but . . .'

‘I see.' It would be a hard enough struggle to run the house as it was; without someone to do the cleaning it would be impossible. She shrugged. ‘Very well. What is one more madwoman in this Bedlam? But I shall talk to her. You may serve breakfast now.' She was raveningly hungry. ‘I'll take it in here.'

‘Oh, and the French gentleman wanted me to hand you thith.'

It was a gilt-edged visiting card printed with the legend: ‘
Guillaume de Vaubon vous fait ses compliments
.' Underneath a bold hand had written: ‘Also his apologies and pleads you will dine with him tonight.'

She threw it on the floor. ‘There is no reply, Tobias.'

‘Very well, your ladyship.' He bent to pick it up. ‘He thaid he'll call for you at eight.'

When he'd gone, she made for the chair and tried to pull it outwards. It didn't budge. The back was flush with the wall, admitting no leverage.

She kicked away the piece of carpet. Ah-
ha
. So she hadn't dreamed that particular nightmare; the throne was made to move. The carpet concealed two arcs scraped into the stone floor where the feet had scratched it in swinging out from the wall.