Taking Liberties. Diana Norman

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       ‘I think I should like to go. Just for a visit.’

      Don’t go. Stay here. ‘Are you sure?’

       ‘Yes.’

      It had been punishing at that moment to experience what the child must have felt every time Makepeace had left her. How much greater the punishment now.

      So she had let her go. She’d watched Susan and Betty, her best and only women friends, take Philippa’s hands and lead her up the gangplank of the America-bound boat, all three of them alienated from the woman to whom they’d been devoted because she hadn’t had time for them. And with them had gone another beloved child, Betty’s son Josh.

      At the last, Makepeace had reached for her daughter.

       ‘I’ll come and fetch you back, you know. If you like America, we might even stay there together.’

      The small body resisted. It had been the worst moment then; it was the worst moment now. Philippa hadn’t believed her.

      The wave that had gathered speed and weight somewhere out in the Atlantic to come rushing at her crashed over Makepeace. She couldn’t see; she was thrashing about in a roaring darkness.

      Oliver tried to reach her. ‘Don’t, Missus, don’t. We don’t know yet. There’s a thousand explanations …’ She wasn’t hearing him. He could only hold her close and wait for the initial agony to subside.

      Unmarried and childless, Oliver could only guess at her pain but he suspected guilt was part of it. He’d once asked his father why Philippa had gone away. Andra had said: ‘Weren’t my choice, lad. We weren’t wed then. I’d have kept the lass, we got on well, her and me, the time she lived at Raby before she went. I’d’ve loved her like my own.’

      And he would have done, Oliver knew; Andra Hedley’s reverence for all living creatures was especially for children. Reluctant that his son should think less of Makepeace, he’d added: ‘Weren’t her fault, neither. The bairn’s birth were a time o’ despair for her. Husband just dead, filched of home and fortune that very day by as brazen a pair o’ schemers as ever graced a gibbet. Beat dizzy, she was. Took years to get back and by then there’d opened a breach twixt her and little lass they could neither of ’em bridge. Philippa’d become closer to others than to her ma and when they upped sticks for America, she went an’ all. Nobody’s fault, lad, nobody’s fault.’

      Oliver neither understood nor approved of those parents, the very rich and the very poor, who sent their children to be brought up in other households; he didn’t come of either class. Neither, he thought, does the Missus. Her first marriage to the aristocrat, Sir Philip Dapifer, had been only a temporary elevation; by birth and breeding she was as bourgeois as himself, the daughter of a Boston innkeeper.

      Yet he considered that even now, secure and happily married once more, the Missus was not sufficiently attentive to the two daughters she’d had by Andra. Too often, in Oliver’s opinion, she stayed overnight in Newcastle through press of work, rather than returning to Raby.

      True, the little girls were happy and vigorous children, well looked after by his and their mutual Aunt Ginny, apparently not aware – as Philippa must have been – that they weren’t receiving full value from their mother.

      Scenting disapproval, his father had emphasized: ‘Oliver, tha marries who tha marries. I wed a businesswoman and knew it afore I wed her. I’d not change her.’

      He’d not received full value himself, which is why the matter weighed on him; he’d been motherless with a father working long hours in the mines to keep them both – and, this was the rub, that same father often abstracted during their precious hours together. For if Andra had married a businesswoman, Makepeace had married an engineer, self taught but boiling with invention, his mind bent on lessening the dangers miners faced every day underground. But that was nature; Andra Hedley was a proper man. To be a proper woman, Makepeace Hedley had also to be a proper mother. And she was not. And now suffered because she was not.

      Censorious he might be, but it was impossible for Oliver to watch, unmoved, the crucifixion of a woman who’d always been kind to him.

      ‘I drowned my baby,’ she kept saying, ‘I drowned her and Susan.’

      ‘We don’t know,’ he kept saying in return, ‘we don’t know, Missus. Let’s find out afore we give way.’

      In the end, he managed to reach her. His words began to penetrate the deluge of despair she was lost in and she grabbed at them as if he’d thrown her a rope.

      ‘Might not be that, might it?’ she begged. ‘Might be something else. Could’ve been blown off course, couldn’t they? Landed in the West Indies, maybe?’

      ‘Certainly they could.’

      ‘Who’d know?’

      ‘The Admiralty,’ he said, firmly. ‘Lord Percy’s a naval vessel, ain’t she? The Admiralty’ll know what’s happened to her. I’ll write this very day –’

      ‘No,’ she said. Somehow she’d got herself in hand, even if that hand was trembling, and Oliver saw not just the acumen but the courage that had made his stepmother the woman she was. ‘No more damn letters. We’ll go to the Admiralty and we’ll go today. I’ll get some answers out of their damn lordships or I’ll know the reason why. When’s the next coach to London?’

       CHAPTER THREE

      The Commission for Sick and Hurt Seamen and the Exchange of Prisoners of War, more generally known as the Sick and Hurt Office, was under the direction of the Lords of the Admiralty in London and, as such, reflected their lordships’ demand for spit and polish.

      The sailor who stamped along its immaculate corridors beside Diana wore dress uniform so stiff with starch and wax she decided he’d been lifted into it by traction. The waiting room he ushered her into had Caroline elegance; even the restrained sun of a muggy day coming through the windows was reflected in an oak floor lethal with over-buffing and the scent of unexpected roses, standing to attention in a centrepiece on the great walnut table, was overpowered by a smell of beeswax and turpentine.

      She was asked to wait. ‘Mr Commissioner Powell has been delayed a minute, ma’am.’

      She frowned; she was not used to being kept waiting by underlings. However, she was on an adventure and she had nothing more important to do. ‘Very well.’

      There were two other occupants of the room, a woman of about her own age and a young man, sitting silently on adjoining chairs at the table. The Dowager lowered her head as she passed them on her way to look out of the window. The young man acknowledged her politely, rising for a slight bow; the woman ignored her.

      In one look, Diana had automatically assessed to what social order they belonged. Decent enough young man, neat, well dressed but not quite the ton: a professional person from the provinces. The woman was less easy to place. Good clothes, really very good, nice silk, but worn without care, distressing red hair escaping from a hat that didn’t match the gloves. In misery, from the look of her. A wife of the mercantile class in some distress.

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