Taking Liberties (28 page)

She went down on her knees.
There we are
. In front of the chair's back legs, painted black to escape attention, were two stout, knobbed pieces of iron like door-bolts, but vertical, let into the floor. She manoeuvred them sideways and up and felt the chair shift slightly as it was released.

‘Morning, your ladyship.'

She hit her head springing up. ‘Mr Gurney, does nobody around here use the damn door-knocker?'

‘Sorry, your ladyship. Mother Green let me in earlier, when us come to take the corpse away.'

‘I shall miss it,' she said, coldly. ‘It raised the tone. And the other foreign body?'

‘Gil? Well, us weren't sure he were comin' neither. He just turns up, like.'

‘Bringing contraband with him, I assume—you being too busy fishing.'

He sighed. ‘See, us've got customers to supply even in the summer. '

‘Though we're at war with France?'

‘Oh, tha-at,' he said. ‘Us can't take notice o' wars, not us free traders can't. Country's always at war with some bugger.'

She supposed it was philosophy of a sort. She asked, really wanting to know: ‘Have you no patriotism?'

He was indignant. ‘Course we have. Us do risk our lives to bring in England's fish.' He pointed towards the wreckers' window. ‘That's a battlefield out there, every day, not just wartime. Bloody sea don't need cannonballs to kill us, does it by its danged self. And bugger all we'm paid for ut.'

He leaned forward, stooping to look her in the eye. ‘Don't suppose your ladyship do bother yourself with the price of cod, do ee? Miserable,'tis. Don't pay for our widows and orphans and we got plenty o' they. 'Twasn't for free trade, they'd starve.'

She hadn't thought of it; in stepping out of Chantries she had entered a world of which she'd known nothing, as if she'd been living behind a convent wall.

She said: ‘Help me with this chair.'

‘What chair's that?'

‘Oh, for goodness' sake.'

He helped her pull. Essentially, the thing was a door concealing an aperture about five foot high. Gurney put out a hand to stop her as she approached it. ‘You mind. 'Tis a long drop.'

Cautiously, holding onto the jamb, she peered in. It wasn't a cupboard or a room: it was a shaft set in the thickness of the wall. Just beyond her feet was a dark drop. A smell of fresh seawater came up to her. ‘Where does it go?'

There was a cave at the bottom. A natural fissure of rock running from it up to the clifftop, too steep for stairs but wide enough for a shaft, had been exploited for the purpose of transferring goods between the two.

‘Been there long as anyone can remember,' Gurney told her. ‘Useful when 'tis necessary to bring in stuff secret like. In the bad old days, I reckon it weren't just free-trade goods, neither.'

She met his eyes. They were telling her of ancient screams that had echoed in this shaft before being silenced, of wealth hauled up it from battered ships and torn bodies. We've sprung from wreckers, you and I, his gaze said, our ancestors were equal in evil. That's why I trust you; we share an old, old guilt.

She turned back to the shaft. Ropes as thick as hawsers ran between hoops on either side of it. ‘Platform works on pulleys and ratchets, see,' Gurney said, breaking the silence. ‘Haul on one rope down there and up her comes, easy as milkin'. Pull on the other and her ratchets lets her down just as easy. But us keeps them ropes in good condition, I can tell ee. Don't want to drop a hundred and fifty feet too fast.'

‘I see.' So that was how the Frenchman had risen like the Devil from Hell. ‘It must not be used again, Mr Gurney. I shall have it blocked up.'

He was philosophical. ‘Reckoned you might. Pity, though.'

She said: ‘Did you have a purpose in coming to see me?'

He slapped his forehead. ‘Nigh forgot, didn' us? We was hoping as you might like to attend Henry Hobbs's funeral. We know he'd be pleased, and his family. You being a Pomeroy and lord of the manor, like.'

She stared at him. They used her house without permission, coming and going willy-nilly, filling it with contraband, madwomen and Frenchmen, treating her as if she were of no account, yet would she please honour one of their number by attending his funeral?

And, of course, she would have to.
Noblesse oblige
.

‘Very well.'

MAKEPEACE had not yet decided whether she should buy the Pomeroy Arms. Its excellence as a venue for sending Josh to France was undoubted, as was Jan Gurney's ability and probable willingness to get him there, but she wasn't so nostalgic for her days as an innkeeper as to want to be one again.

However, Mr Spettigue was eager that she should. ‘Buy it oneself, ' he said, ‘but the Revenue looks at public-house licences an' it might seem somewhat rum. Don't want to attract attention. Better to stay a sleepin' partner.'

‘A sleeping smuggler,' Makepeace accused him on the way to Henry Hobbs's funeral. ‘Babbs Cove is a smuggling village, I found that out.'

‘All are, dear lady. Fire cannon at any inlet on this coast and hit a free trader. Not saying one's not involved in the trade—don't know anyone who ain't—but this other matter, been keepin' Babbs Cove up one's sleeve.'

‘This other matter being escapers?'

‘Exactly.' He dabbed carefully at his cheeks with a heavily scented handkerchief. It was hot in her coach and his rouge was beginning to streak.

He was in funeral black, as she was, but where hers was staid, he was sporting a very short, very tight-fitting frock coat that would have pursued its intended slim line with more success had it been on a slimmer body. His silk breeches were of black and white stripes, black stockings curved luxuriously over his calves and ended in flat dancing pumps with black flowered buckles. The tiny hat balanced precariously on top of his wig looked as if someone had skimmed a small plate at his head and it had stuck.

In the fashionable parts of London, he might have gone unnoticed. In Plymouth, merely mincing across the street to get into her coach he occasioned ribaldry from small boys. Yet, deliberate or not, she thought, his foppery was an excellent disguise. In so outrageously attracting the eye, he was immediately counted as a fool and guilty of nothing other than vanity. But there was a great deal more to young Mr Spettigue than that; clothing his body as he pleased was an outward extension of a belief in the freedom of the individual that went to the bone.

Makepeace had already taxed him with the mistake he'd made over T'Gallants but he'd protested that, in principle, he'd been right. ‘Nobody'd told me T'Gallants ain't on the market. Think we'll still keep your offer on the table.'

‘I wouldn't live there if it was lined with diamonds.'

‘Wouldn't have to for long. Matter of keepin' it in safe hands.'

‘You buy it then.'

He shook his head. ‘Told you, ma'am. Too dangerous to flaunt me connection. Need to have a new name on the deed but one that's on our side.'

He wouldn't be moved and made no apology for using her. If he was going to smuggle out Josh and future American escapers from Babbs Cove, she must help him by providing a refuge from which to do it.

She had considered Beasley and all the other Englishmen who were publishing their support for America's liberty to be brave enough; this ridiculous, plump young man and his friends were going considerably further than that. She, who was American, could do no less.

Which was why, on this hot Sunday, she and Mr Spettigue were on their way to the funeral of a man she had never met.

Being Sunday, it distressed her that she was not at the Millbay market, but on the last occasion she'd had an encounter with the same militiaman with whom she'd quarrelled over Josh's painting. He had spotted her trying to pass Josh some food that she'd smuggled in under her apron.

‘What's this? What's this?'

‘It's a cheese,' she'd said.

‘Why you giving it to this black bugger, 'stead of a handsome chap like me? By rights, I should report you. Precious fond of this nigger, ain't you, lady? After a bit of black pork, are we?'

She'd wanted to kill. Instead she'd said, as composedly as she could: ‘It's called charity, officer. These men look famished.'

‘Don't stop the bastards ecapin'. I'll overlook it this time an' I'll just confiscate the cheese but I see you in this market again you'll be up afore the commandant.'

Even so, she would have risked a return but Beasley had pointed that she was merely bringing attention to herself and Josh, a dangerous combination if an escape were to be successful. Instead, he and Philippa would go. ‘She and I keep out of trouble,' he'd said, pointedly.

Thus, when calling on Mr Spettigue to berate him for exposing her to humiliation from ‘a high-nosed bitch calling herself Lady Stacroy or something' at T'Gallants, Makepeace had been free to accept his suggestion that she should ingratiate herself to the people of Babbs Cove by attending the obsequies of the late Mr Henry Hobbs—and cast her eye over the inn while she was about it.

She looked out of the coach window. They were descending a familiar hill. ‘Last time I came this way, the farmer stopped us. John Beasley said he was a sort of sentry.'

‘Be Ralph Gurney,' Spettigue said. ‘Three Gurney cousins. Run the trade here. Ralph—farmer, supplies the ponies. Hard fellow, Ralph. Jan and Eddie—two free-trade boats. Jan, the
Lark
and Eddie, appropriately enough, the
Three Cousins
.'

‘D'you think,' she said—and this was the other reason why she had agreed to come today, ‘if they take Josh to France . . . do you think they would fetch my husband back?'

Oliver's latest letter had said there was still no word from Andra. Well, there wouldn't be, but she had hoped.

‘Likely, ma'am. Likely. Have to ask 'em, of course. Whereabouts in France is he?'

‘Paris, the last I heard.'

‘Ah, Paris!' Mr Spettigue fluttered his handkerchief. ‘Wonderful
parfum
, vile drains, viler monarchy.'

‘
Would
they?'

‘Don't think King Louis'd take kindly to English boats sailin' up the Seine in wartime, not even free traders. Have to get your husband up to the coast where he can be picked up.'

‘How?'

‘Send someone to fetch him. Mr Josh might oblige, when he gets there.'

‘Yes.' Two birds with one stone. Some of the sense of oppression lifted slightly. She was a woman who needed to be doing something . . . well, she
was
doing something. If she had to buy this entire damn county, she'd get both her men to safety, one to France, one to England.

Cheered, she looked out of the window. ‘Still harvesting, even on a Sunday?' she said.

‘Vital, ma'am. No harvest, no food. Stop for the funeral, perhaps, but guaranteed back in the fields by evenin'. Bad harvest last year, year before. Starvation, high prices. Nasty.'

Indeed, when they got out of the coach onto the inn forecourt, the village appeared deserted. The fishing fleet had returned, boats with their sails furled had been anchored into the sand of the beach. But even their crews, apparently, had gone to help with the harvest. The only activity was in the Pomeroy Arms itself where a woman in its kitchen was trying to make pastry, both helped and hindered by a gaggle of children.

An old man, doing nothing at all, was sat on a stool.

On seeing Mr Spettigue, the woman burst into tears and wept on his shoulder, leaving flour on his jacket. ‘ 'Tis so good of ee to come, Mr Spettigue. Do ee want to see Dad? We've had to put 'un in the coach-house because he's aginning to smell, but we ab'n put the lid down on 'un yet. He's covered with gauze agin the flies.'

To his credit, Mr Spettigue allowed tears and flour to be pressed on his coat for a full minute before he dried the woman's eyes with his beautiful handkerchief and made the introductions. ‘Mrs Hedley, Mrs Hallewell, late landlord's daughter. Splendid daughter in his illness, weren't ee, Mrs Hallewell?'

‘He had a hard going of it, Mr Spettigue. I were up with 'un all hours.'

The old man was introduced as Mrs Hallewell's Uncle Zack.

Mrs Hallewell, so tired out from nursing her father that she looked ready to join him, bobbed a curtsey to Makepeace and began crying again. ‘Mortal sorry I can't attend on ee, Mrs Hedley, but I don't know how I'm a-goin' to get all ready for arter the service. They'll be in from the harvest and needin' a pasty at the least and how that's to be done . . . An' look what the Revenue done to the place last night.'

The inn was a wreck. The door to a cupboard had been torn off, bayonets had prodded holes in the plaster of walls and ceiling, barrels had been tipped over or smashed open.

Makepeace took off her hat and rolled up her sleeves.

 
Babbs Cove chapel was small and plain with a barrel roof and a smell that mingled mouldy stone and fish, a result of its age and the fact that ships' nets waiting to be mended were stored in its tiny vestry.

It had no pews and no priest of its own; the minister responsible for its parishioners' souls was peripatetic and difficult to contact, which is why Henry Hobbs had waited so long for burial. He had longer to wait yet, for the chapel didn't have its own graveyard either. After the service, he'd be taken to his rest in the cemetery at Newton Ferrers by wagon.

Mrs Hallewell had been in agony over the funeral. As she'd told Makepeace when they were getting ready together, Dad had been a Methodist, and ought by rights to be buried as one. She didn't hold with it herself; Methodism wasn't a proper religion, seeing as how the Church of England wasn't reconciled to it.