Taking Liberties. Diana Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ wooded deer park in which she stood looking out to sea, while the house commanding it was enviably beautiful.

      She turned to her left and shaded her eyes to stare across the river that separated her from Plymouth. ‘So that is Devon and we are in Cornwall.’

      ‘No, ma’am. This used to be Cornwall, the Hamoaze markin’ the division, but it is now Devon. A fifteenth-century ancestor of mine married an heiress from across the way who brought with her the property of the ferry. It would have been inconvenient to have a county boundary splittin’ the estate so …’

      ‘So he moved it,’ she said, smiling. Again, it wasn’t bombast. She’d asked, he’d answered; the Edgcumbes had no need to embroider history in which their name was already sewn large. Hardly a land or sea battle in which an Edgcumbe hadn’t fought like a tiger – to be suitably rewarded. Yet her host’s father had been the first to recognize Joshua Reynolds’s genius, while the Mozart this battle-scarred sailor had played for her last night had been as pretty a performance as any she’d heard from an amateur.

      Never having penetrated so far into the South-West, she had expected, in her cosmopolitan way, to find its nobility embarrassingly provincial. Yet it appeared she had stepped back to the Renaissance and the venturing days of Elizabeth, when men of action were also dilettantes and vice versa.

      Lady Edgcumbe too was, as ever, a relief, hospitable without being overwhelming, and with a confidence in her pedigree that showed in her choice of dress, which was eccentric but comfortable.

      The Dowager would have forgiven an admiral overseeing the naval movements of one of the busiest ports in the country for being too occupied to pay attention to his guest but, like Aymer, like most aristocratic holders of office that she knew, Lord Edgcumbe saw no reason to curtail in war too many of the activities he had enjoyed in peacetime. His otter- and foxhounds were being kept in readiness for the hunting season, and he entertained.

      Both he and his wife had greeted her as if it were perfectly normal for a widow to go visiting so soon after her husband’s funeral. Admiral Edgcumbe was a distant cousin of the Stacpooles, though his and the Earl’s acquaintance had been based on their professional meetings – Edgcumbe’s as a high-ranking admiral, the Earl’s as a Secretary of State. Their friendship was for his Countess, formed during the times they had stayed at Chantries.

      The visits had not been reciprocated. Despite numerous requests for the Earl and Countess to come to Devon, Aymer had refused them all. ‘Damned if I’m venturing into here-be-dragons country to stay among a lot of canvas-climbers. Ruins the complexion, all that salt. Look at Edgcumbe’s – leathery as a tinker’s arse.’

      Though nothing was said outright, Diana suspected that they had seen enough of her marriage to commiserate politely with her on the Earl’s death but not as if she were expected to be inconsolable. ‘Of course you need a change of air after all you’ve been through,’ Lucy Edgcumbe had said, with what Diana construed as double meaning. ‘We are so very pleased that your first sight of Devon is with us.’

      She was grateful to them, and pleased with this part of Devon, with the marriage of land and sea and the dark moorland that brooded behind it.

      For the first time in years she breathed in the air of outgoingness, of infinite possibility. There was something for her here. Not on Mount Edgcumbe itself, perhaps, but somewhere about … This was where she belonged, where she came from.

      ‘Over there’s the Eddystone, and that’s the cape Richard Hawkins sailed past on his way to the South Seas, there’s where James Cook set off on his circumnavigation and that’s where the blasted captains who deserted Benbow were shot …’

      Ships were packed so thickly abreast in the Hamoaze that the miniature ferry she could see scuttling between them was almost redundant – you could cross by stepping from deck to deck. She wondered which were the prison hulks.

      The birdsong around her was answered by the tinny sound of officers being piped on and off their ships. From the height of the Citadel opposite came a bugle call and the tramp of marching boots. She had the impression that everyone in Plymouth could see her where she stood, outlined against a Grecian white folly; certainly she felt that she could see everyone in Plymouth. Was Philippa Dapifer one of those ants?

      ‘And that’s Millbay. See the Long Room? Centre of Plymouth social life, the Long Room. There’s to be a civic reception on Saturday. Be an honour for the Mayor if you’d come but no need if you prefer to be quiet. I shall attend, of course. Keeps up the town’s spirits, that sort of thing.’

      If it was a matter of encouraging civic morale, she could do no less, despite her mourning, than to accept.

      He was pleased and turned back to the view. ‘Funny place to put the Long Room, same shore as the prison. However, no accountin’ for what the blasted corporation gets up to … See those blocks? Crammed to the gunwales with Frenchies and Yankees.’

      She saw them. Row upon row of rectangles, like a child’s building bricks scattered in the dust.

      He looked down at her as if she’d flinched, which she hadn’t. ‘Perfectly safe, y’know. We keep ’em well locked up.’

      ‘My goodness,’ she said, lazily.

      No need at this stage to mention Lieutenant Grayle. Caution had been driven deep into the bone by her marriage; for the female to show enthusiasm was to court mockery and disappointment from the male. She might raise the question of a prison visit later, as if it did not matter to her one way or the other.

      Which, she told herself, it did not.

      She took the Admiral’s arm and they walked back to the house.

      

      From the look of it, Plymouth’s Long Room had been an attempt to recreate the Assembly Rooms at Bath. It had a ballroom, card rooms, a tepid bath but, Cotswold stone being unavailable, it had been built of red brick which, in the Dowager’s opinion, meant it fell short of elegance.

      It had a lawn sloping down to the water of Millbay, consequently presenting a distant glimpse of the prison on one side of the bay and a barracks on the other. At work or play, Plymouth society liked to be on the tide’s edge and, with the view it gave them straight ahead of a low sun warming and gilding both sea and grass, the Dowager tended to agree with them. She wondered if Lieutenant Grayle could see it from the window of his cell.

      Supper was very good, the music so-so.

      The various dignitaries and wives introduced to her were what her experience of corporate entertainments had led her to expect: hugely pleased with themselves, overlarge, overdressed, accepting of why she was there – after a bereavement she would naturally wish to be heartened by a visit to fair Devon – and, as far as she could judge, unread except for stock market prices or the Lady’s Magazine.

      Following the neglect of the navy during the uneasy peace after the Seven Years’ War, hostilities with America had stirred things up again and the town was prospering as never before. The building of new barracks, batteries and blockhouses as well as the necessary enlargement of docks for the influx of shipping was putting money in the corporation’s pocket.

      A new dock had begun to be built big enough to take American and French prizes and it was rumoured that the King would be coming to Plymouth to see it under construction.

      Several of the guests were in the later stages of mourning for young men lost in battle СКАЧАТЬ