Taking Liberties. Diana Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ