Taking Liberties (9 page)

Yet she stuck to him; indeed could talk to him as she could to nobody else, and not just because he'd proved a rock in her time of necessity; there was something about him. Andra thought very well of him and, for all his monosyllabic loutishness, he was highly regarded in the coffeehouses where he could count men like Dr Johnson and Joshua Reynolds among his friends.

Best of all, in their present situation, he was in touch with an entire network of those who didn't fit into respectable society, people who lived metaphorically underground and emerged, pale and seedy as Beasley himself, to strike at authority before submerging again. If Philippa had fallen among thieves or into the hands of a sect or rebels or the Irish or any other thorns in the side of the establishment, then Beasley was the man to find her.

But, knowing this, Makepeace's discontent chose to twist it against him. ‘Why don't you mix with
important
people? I need influence.'

His mouth twisted, the nearest approach he could make to a smile. ‘Fell the wrong side o' the bloody hedge this time, then, didn't you?'

Oh God, he can't understand. He doesn't know; he doesn't have children. He thinks this is ordinary horror—he thinks I'm feeling what he would if he was being dragged to gaol or hung over a cliff.

The childless, she thought enviously, had a limited experience of suffering, they saw it merely in terms of torture or famine or illness; they couldn't take the leap outside that circle of Hell to the wasteland stretching beyond it for bereft parents. She was sharing this coach, this arctic, with the emotional equivalent of a Hottentot.

She wanted her mother, she wanted Betty, who'd been better than a mother, that black and mighty fulcrum she'd taken for granted, as she'd taken Susan Brewer and Philippa for granted, until Betty and her son Josh too had joined them on the boat for America.

Impossible to whip up resentment at Betty's desertion because the desertion had been her own and, anyway, Betty was dead. ‘A sudden death,' Susan had written three years ago. ‘She clutched her bosom and fell. We buried her like the Christian she was and surely the trumpets sounded for her on the other side as they did for Mr. Standfast.'

I didn't stand fast by her, I didn't stand fast by any of them . . . young Josh with his talent as a painter . . . and this is my punishment.

‘I'm going to puke,' Beasley said.

‘Do it out the window,' she said, grimly. ‘We ain't stopping.'

Arriving in Plymouth, they had trouble finding accommodation. Owing to the war, the town was stuffed with navy personnel: every house for rent was taken, and so was every room in its inns. In any case, a woman travelling without a female companion and with a man not her husband wasn't a guest welcomed by any respectable hostelry.

It wasn't until Makepeace slammed a purse full of guineas on the table of the Prince George on the corner of Stillman Street and Vauxhall Street that its landlord remembered the naval lieutenant in a back room who hadn't paid his rent for three weeks. The lieutenant was evicted, Makepeace installed, John Beasley was put in an attic with Sanders, while the coach and horses went into the George's stables which were big enough to accommodate them as well as the diligence that made a weekly trip back and forth to Exeter.

Under other circumstances, Makepeace would have liked Plymouth very much. More than any port in Britain, it most closely resembled America's Boston in the quality of light bouncing off its encircling, glittering water onto limestone houses, large windows, slate roofs and the leaves of its elm-lined streets. There was a similar sense of unlimited fresh, salt air, the same smell of sea, fish, tar and sawn wood, even a flavour of Boston's bloody-minded independence—despite a desperate siege, Plymouth had held resolutely for Parliament during the Civil War.

It was from Plymouth that Makepeace's ancestors had set out in the
Mayflower
to the New World and the shuttle of trade between the two had never been lost. Plymouth's merchantmen knew the coast of America from Newfoundland to New York better than she did, their owners sadly regretting that it was now enemy territory.

Many of Plymouth's common people were regretting it too. This was a sailors' town and, while Plymouth-launched ships were inflicting heavy damage on America's fleet, the losses were not one-sided. Mourning bands and veiling were everywhere.

But since it must fight, Plymouth had rolled up its sleeves. By no means the biggest port in England—Liverpool and Bristol were larger, owing to their slave trade, while London outranked them all—it was Plymouth that directly faced the enemy when war broke out with France, Spain or America, and it geared itself up accordingly, as it had when the Armada came billowing up the Channel.

The streets were almost impassable for baggage trains bringing supplies to be shipped across the Atlantic to the army. Wounded ships limped into the Sound to be mended and sent out again; new ones were being built on the great slipways. Marines and militia paraded to the roll of drums on the gusty grass of the Hoe, just as they had in the days when Drake played bowls on it.

But to Makepeace it became a jungle where the shrill chatter of posturing apes echoed back from the darkness that hid her child. She watched the mouths of Admiralty clerks, corporation officials and harbourmasters as they made words, and could only gather that they were saying no.

Beasley had to interpret for her as to a bewildered child.

‘He says
Riposte
anchored in the Hamoaze in June. Her prisoners were put ashore and the militia marched them off to prison. He doesn't know which prison, he says he doesn't handle that end of it.'

At the local Sick and Hurt Office: ‘He's got a record of two supercargo, one of them female, like they told you in London. He thinks they were separated from the other prisoners and told to wait on the quay until they could be dealt with but either they ran off or nobody bothered with them. Jesus
Christ
'—this to the clerk—‘no wonder you ain't winning this bloody war.'

It was Sanders who, on Beasley's secret instructions, made enquiries at the local coroner's office. He came back, equally quietly, to say that while there had been several inquests in the last six weeks, two of them on drowned women, none of them had concerned the body of a girl of Philippa's age.

‘Either of 'em Susan Brewer?' Beasley asked quietly.

‘Could've been. They wasn't named. Don't think so, though.'

They asked at the churches, at watchmen's stands, they questioned parish beadles and people in the street. They tried the Society for Distressed Foreigners, which turned out to be an attic in a private house containing a lone Lascar hiding from the press gangs.

To facilitate the search, they decided to divide: Beasley to contact publishers and book-sellers, who kept their fingers on the pulse of the town, as well as less respectable Plymouth inhabitants; Makepeace to visit the institutions.

Accompanied by Sanders, Makepeace knocked on the forbidding door of the local Orphanage for Girls in Stonehouse and was received by an equally forbidding-looking clergyman.

‘Yes,' Reverend Hambledon told her, ‘we took in two girls in June, mother dead and their father lost when the
Buckfast
went down. However, they are younger than the one you describe.'

‘She's young for her age,' Makepeace said, desperately.

She was shown into the dining hall—it was breakfast-time—where forty-two children in identical grey calico uniforms sat on the benches of a long table eating porridge from identical bowls with identical spoons. High windows let in bars of light that shone on heads whose hair was hidden beneath all-covering identical grey calico caps.

The room was undecorated except for some embroidered Bible texts on the bare walls. It smelled of whale-oil soap.

Reverend Hambledon ushered Makepeace in and forty-two spoons clattered down as forty-two girls stood to attention. She was led along the rows. ‘This is Jane, who came to us in June. And this is Joan. Say good morning to Mrs Hedley, girls.'

Two mites chorused: ‘Good morning, Mrs Hedley.'

Reverend Hambledon's voice did not alter pitch as he added: ‘Sometimes they come in with unsuitable names and we rechristen them. Most had not been christened at all.'

Holding back tears, Makepeace smiled at the little girls and shook her head.

When she got outside, Sanders said: ‘Bad, was it, Missus?'

‘I'd like to adopt the lot of 'em,' she said.

There'd been no evidence of unkindness there, but none of kindness either. The porridge they'd been eating did not smell unappetizing but nor did it attack the nose with pleasure. The children did not look unhappy yet they weren't happy.

What had stabbed her was that, as she'd entered the dining room, every head had turned to her before expectation died in the eyes, as it died in her own. Well, there was little she could do about that but she would send money to Reverend Hambledon on the understanding that it was spent on dolls and pretty dresses.

She found herself longing for the two little girls she'd left behind in Northumberland. God spare them from the unloving wilderness in which the children she'd just left had to exist.

‘I tell you this much, Peter,' she said, ‘I'm going to let Andra and Oliver run the business from now on. When we get home I'm going to
stay
home.'

Sanders nodded without conviction; he knew her.

But she meant it. She was being punished for neglecting her eldest child. Philip Dapifer's accusations haunted her dreams. She would not do the same by Sally and Jenny. And she would take in some of those poor scraps she'd just seen, dress them in colours, let them run free over the Northumberland hills. Oh yes, when she got home . . .

It occurred to her sharply that, if she did not find Philippa and Susan, she could never go home. How could she abandon the place holding the vague promise that they might turn up one day? She would have to stay, like a dog waiting forever by the grave of its lost master . . .

She balled her fists and knocked them together so that the knuckles hurt. Cross that bridge when you get to it, Makepeace Hedley. You may not have to.

She returned to the search.

She scanned rows of uniformed children in another orphanage, shaven-headed children in the hospital and dispensaries, children spinning yarn in the Home for Foundlings, children knitting stockings in the workhouse, picking oakum in the prison, young women chanting their catechism in the Asylum for Deserted Girls, dumb and staring wrecks in the local bedlam.

‘Dear God, Peter,' she said, crying, ‘where d'they all come from?'

‘It's a sailors' town, Missus. Wages of sin.'

She began to break down and at nights Sanders had to assist her, almost too tired to walk, back to the inn.

Beasley had no success either.

They sat in facing settles across a table in a dark corner of the George's large, low-beamed taproom. The windows were open, allowing in the scent of grass and the calls of men on the inn's skittle ground. Further away, someone was playing a fiddle.

‘I reckon we're looking in the wrong place,' Beasley said, when they'd ordered food. ‘The
Riposte
anchored in the Hamoaze, which is over that way.' He jerked his head to the west. ‘So that's where the prisoners were put ashore. Not in Plymouth at all.'

‘Oh God,' said Makepeace, ‘there's another town?'

‘It's called Dock.' He shrugged. ‘Because it was a dock at one time, I suppose. But it's grown so it's . . . yes, it's another town.'

‘Then that's where we'll go tomorrow.' Makepeace closed her eyes for a moment. ‘I think I'll get to bed. I don't want anything to eat.'

The two men watched her go.

‘She can't stand much more,' Sanders said.

‘She'll have to,' said Beasley. ‘We're never going to find that girl. Or Susan Brewer. They went down with the bloody boat—if they were ever on it in the first place.'

‘I don't think that's right, Mr Beasley,' Sanders said. ‘There was a young girl landed here, we know that. Well, how many children
would
be on a warship, eh? It's got to be Miss Philippa. About Miss Susan I don't know.'

‘Yere you are, my dearrs. Mrs Hedley not eatin' tonight?' The landlord, John Bignall, had brought their food. An enormously fat man—he was known for his ability to bounce troublemakers out of the door by using his stomach as a battering ram—he ran a good inn and had warmed to these, his newest guests, in the days since they'd been with him.

Makepeace he'd decided was respectable but strange—for one thing, she allowed her coachman to eat at the same table and at the same time as herself. Curious about those whose provenance mystified him, he'd learned something of Makepeace's by plying Sanders with after-hours ale. Immediately, his sympathy had been engaged. ‘Poor little maid being chased by they American pirates across the ocean,' he said. ‘Enough to make any soul lose its wits.'

‘I can see from your sad faces as you an't had no more luck finding that little maid than yesterday,' he said now.

‘No,' Beasley told him. ‘We're going to try Dock tomorrow.'

‘Iss fay, I was thinking of Dock, plenty of places in Dock,' Bignall said.

‘What sort of places?'

The landlord tapped his nose. ‘Ah, that's why I been slow to mention 'un to Mrs Hedley. If so be the maid's in Dock,'tis mebbe better she an't found at all.'

‘She knows,' Beasley said. ‘She still wants her found.'

‘Fine woman, that. No side to her.' The innkeeper finished putting dishes on the table. ‘Good luck to ee then, an' mind the press gangs. My brother-in-law from Bovey Tracey, he was a tailor. Three year ago he took a dress coat to Dock as a cap'n had ordered. Us bain't seen 'un since.'