Taking Liberties

CHAPTER TWO

Two hundred and fifty miles north of Chantries, Makepeace Hedley was also about to receive a letter from America. Since it had been sent from New York, which was under British control, its voyage across the Atlantic had been more direct, though no quicker, than that of the one delivered to the Countess of Stacpoole the day before.

As with most of Newcastle’s post, it was dropped off at the Queen’s Head by the Thursday mail coach from London and was collected along with many other letters by Makepeace’s stepson, Oliver Hedley, on his way to work.

Further down the hill, Oliver stopped to buy a copy of the Newcastle Journal at Sarah Hodgkinson’s printing works.

‘Frogs have declared war,’ Sarah yelled at him over the clacking machines, but not as if it was of any moment; the news had been so long expected that she’d had a suitable editorial made up for some weeks ready to drop into place in the forme.

Oliver read the editorial quickly; its tone was more anticipatory than fearful. Wars were good for Newcastle’s trade in iron and steel, and mopped up its vagrants and troublemakers into the army. True, the presence of American privateers, now to be joined by French allies, meant that vessels sailing down the east coast to supply London’s coal were having to be convoyed but, since the extra ships were being built on the Tyne and Wear, it was likely that the area’s general prosperity could only increase.

Nevertheless Oliver detected a note of uneasiness in the editorial. It spread itself happily enough on the subject of French perfidy but was careful not to cast similar obloquy on the cause the French were joining. The Frogs were an old enemy and if they wanted war Newcastle was happy to oblige them. America was a different matter – on that subject the town was deeply divided. Indeed, when the proclamation of war with America had been read from the steps of the Mansion House two years before, it had been greeted with silence instead of the usual huzzas.

A strong petition had been sent to the government by the majority of Newcastle’s magistrates offering support in the prosecution of the war but the burgesses, under Sir George Saville, had sent an equally strong counter-petition deprecating it. And Sir George was not only a popular man, he was also an experienced soldier.

‘It’s civil war,’ he’d told Oliver’s father, ‘and no good will come of it. For one thing, we can’t maintain a supply line over three thousand miles for long.’

‘For another, it’s wrong,’ Andra Hedley had said.

At that stage, the majority of Americans would have forgone independence – indeed, still regarded themselves as subjects of King George III – for amelioration of the taxes and oppressive rules of trade which had caused the quarrel in the first place. ‘But they’ll not get it,’ Andra had prophesied. ‘The moment them lads in Boston chucked tea in t’harbour, Parliament saw it as an attack on property and yon’s a mortal sin to them struttin’ clumps. No chance of an olive branch after that.’

And he’d been right.

Oliver put the mail and the newspaper in his pocket as he went down the hill in his usual hopscotch fashion to keep his boots from muck evacuated by mooing, frightened herds on their way to the shambles. Under the influence of the sun, which was beginning to roll up its sleeves, the strong whiff of the country the animals brought with them would soon be overlaid by the greater majesty of lime, smoke, sewage and brewing. Coal- and glassworks were already sending out infinitesimal particles of smitch that, without the usual North Sea breeze – and there was none today – would add another thin layer to the city’s dark coating.

He hurried past new buildings noisily going up and old buildings equally noisily coming down, past clanging smithies and factories, past street-traders and idlers gathered round the pumps, all of them shouting. Weekday conversations in Newcastle-upon-Tyne had to be conducted at a pitch which suggested deafness on the part of those conversing. A lot of them were deaf, especially those (the majority) who spent their working lives in its foundries, metal yards and factories with their eardrums pounded by machinery that roared day and night. Consequently, they shouted.

Clamour reached its climax at the river, Newcastle’s artery. Cranes, coal rattling into the cargo holds of keels, ironworks, shipyards, anchor-makers … But, as he walked along the Quay, the cacophony assaulting Oliver’s ears was overridden by his stepmother’s high, feminine, gull-like squawk twisting through it like a Valkyrie swerving through battling soldiers to reach the dead.

There was always something. Today a careless wherry carrying pottery upriver had knocked into one of Makepeace’s keels and caused damage – luckily above its waterline.

She was staving off the wherryman’s murder at the hands of the keel’s skipper by holding back the keelman with his belt and remonstrating with the offender at the same time.

‘Whaat d’ye think ye’re playin’ at, ye beggor, tig ’n’ chasey? Ah’ll have ye bornt alive, so ah wull. Howay ta gaffor an’ explain yeself, ye bluddy gobmek. Hold still, ye buggor’ – this was to the keelman – ‘divvn’t Master Reed telt ye ‘bout tuen the kittle?’

Oliver shook his head in wonder. Tyne watermen were renowned for their ferocity; this skinny little woman was dealing with savages in their own language and subduing them. While a new spirit of philanthropy was bringing charity, education and Sunday schools to Newcastle it had seemed impossible that such enlightenment could touch the dark souls of those who worked on its river. His stepmother, however, had forced the men who shipped her coal to join a benefit society, the Good Intent, where godliness, rules and, in the last resort, fines were having a favourable effect on their swearing, drinking and fighting. The popular Newcastle maxim that keelmen feared nothing except a lee shore had been altered to: ‘Nowt but a lee shore – and Makepeace Hedley.’

The wherryman having been dispatched to the Quay to report to her rivermaster, and the keelman, sulkily, to his repairs, Makepeace waved to her stepson and came ashore to kiss him.

Possibly the richest woman in Northumberland, she resembled what her mine manager called ‘an ambulatin’ sceercraa’. Her long black coat was old and the tricorn into which she bundled her red hair even older. She’d told Oliver once that femininity was a handicap in a masculine world; to be accepted by other coal-owners as well as by her subordinates she had to play a character. Men liked to make a mystery of business, she said, and the fact that any woman of intelligence could master it maddened them. But as long as she seemed an oddity, she said, men didn’t resent her intrusion, or no more than they would resent a male competitor; she was merely a quirk of nature, an act of God, to be accepted with a resigned shrug. Eccentricity, she said, was sexless.

He supposed she was right. Newcastle had a surprising number of successful female entrepreneurs – the printer from whom he’d just bought his newspaper among them – and he wouldn’t want to bed any of them.

Nevertheless, Oliver appreciated beauty and was offended by his stepmother’s aesthetic crime. Not that Makepeace was beautiful; she was approaching forty and her red hair was beginning to sprout the occasional strand of grey, but, dressed up and with a prevailing wind, she could look extremely presentable. Her smile, when she used it – and she was using it now as she came towards him – was better than beautiful, it was astounding.

He owed a great deal to this woman, not just his father’s happiness in marriage but the wealth brought to them all by her accidental ownership of the land on which coal was now being mined on a vast scale.

For Makepeace and Andra Hedley, their unsought meeting was the stuff of legend, to be recalled again and again: she, a benighted American-born widow with only a title deed won at the gaming tables to her name, asking for shelter at the moorland house of Andra Hedley, a widower, equally impoverished but with the knowledge to capitalize on her one asset.

Together they’d exploited the rich seam of coal that lay beneath her land. Thanks to her, Andra, a former miner himself, had been able to build a village for miners that was a model of decent living.

Thanks also to her, the Hedley shipping office here on the Quay was a new and graceful building, employing clerks who worked in the light of a great oriel window that ran three storeys from roof to ground. And thanks to her, he, Oliver, had been raised from the position of a young lawyer with few clients to the directorship of one of the biggest mining companies in Newcastle, able to own a fine house and fill it with fine things.

More than that, this stepmother had been prepared to love him from the first, and he’d come to love her.

Lately, though, he’d begun to fear that her means were becoming her ends. The difficulties and setbacks she’d faced in a crowded life had given Makepeace the right to admire herself for overcoming them but now the determination that had enabled her to do so was becoming overbearing. Her boast that she spoke her mind was more often than not a euphemism for rudeness. She expressed an opinion on everything and showed little respect for anyone else’s. She was in danger of becoming an autocratic besom.

Missing Dada, Oliver thought. The harshness he’d noticed in Makepeace had become prevalent in the three months since Andra Hedley had taken himself off to France to work with the chemist Lavoisier on investigating the properties of air.

Oliver knew himself to be more than capable of running the shipping end of the Hedley enterprise – very much wanted to – and his uncle Jamie, Andra’s brother, was equally capable of overseeing the mining operation up at Raby. Makepeace, however, refused to give up control of either and was exhausting herself and everybody else in the process.

His father and only his father, as Oliver knew, could have made her take a holiday – nobody else would dare – but since Andra was not there and she missed him badly, his absence merely added to her self-imposed burdens and her tendency towards despotism was compounded.

Her smile faded as she closed in. ‘What?’

‘It’s war, Missus. The French have declared.’ He took her hands and she clutched them for support.

‘And no word from your dada, I suppose.’

‘No. At least, I don’t think so …’ He was, he realized, holding an unexplored bundle of the day’s mail under his arm and together they hurried into the office and up to her room to riffle through it.

There was no letter from France. And now there wouldn’t be; the ports were closed for the duration of the war.

Makepeace began striding up and down the room. ‘I told him. Didn’t I write that mule-headed goober? Come home, I said. There’ll be war, I said. You’ll get fixed like a bug in molasses. You wait ’til he gets back, I’ll larrup that damn man ’til he squawks …’

When she wasn’t scolding her employees in broad Northumbrian, Makepeace could speak English without an accent but in times of distress she reverted to pure American.

Oliver sat down while she tried, through rage, to dissipate a worry he considered needless; it was inconvenient that Andra Hedley should be in Paris at such a time but he was in no danger. The position held by the people he was with would ensure nothing happened to him.

Sun coming in through the great window provided the rare luxury of warmth to a spartan office, its new oak panelling still undarkened by the Newcastle air. Apart from an escritoire with its pigeon-holes neatly docketed, there was a table, only one chair – it was to his stepmother’s advantage to make her visitors stand while she sat – and a good, but worn, Isfahan rug on the floor.

Oliver started sorting through the letters while Makepeace raved on: ‘I’ll go fetch him myself, that’s for sure. I’ll get one of the colliers to take me over to … to … where’s somewhere neutral? Flushing, I’ll go to Flushing and get a coach to Paris and drag him home. I’ll give that goddam Frenchman … what’s the name of the bugger? Lavabo?’

‘Lavoisier.’

‘I’ll give him gip, him and his experiments.’

‘Missus.’ Oliver’s voice was gentle.

‘What?’

‘I doubt the pair of them are even aware war’s been declared. They’re scientificals, they’d not notice a thunderbolt. Even if Dada does know, he won’t think it’s important compared to what he’s doing. If he can find a way to stop explosions from fire-damp …’

She quietened. ‘I want him home, Oliver.’

Did she think he didn’t? His father was one of those rare people whose very presence made one feel safe, possibly because Andra Hedley wanted everybody to be safer, especially those who worked in coal mines. As a child, Oliver had learned that he had to share his father’s attention with his father’s obsession to find a way to neutralize the gases that caused underground explosions.

Now Makepeace was having to do the same. Correspondence with the French chemist who’d discovered oxygen had drawn Andra to France, convinced that the disastrous coming-together of gas and flame might be overcome if he could understand the properties of the air that carried them.

‘We all miss him, Missus,’ Oliver said, ‘but he’d be worse off crossing the Channel than staying where he is. So would you – a collier’d be taken by the privateers quicker than spit. Then there’s the borders, they’ll close those. And the Dutch and the Flemings ain’t any too fond of us just now, what with the navy stopping their ships …’

‘What’s to do then?’ She was irritable.

‘Howay, lass,’ he said, imitating his father. He got up to put his arm round her. ‘The war can’t last much longer.’

‘Be over by Christmas, will it? Another Christmas? We’ve damn well had two already.’

He’d never quite known where she stood on the war; his father was all for granting America her independence, and so was he, but Makepeace never joined their discussions. Perhaps she agreed so strongly that it didn’t need saying, perhaps she had reservations – it was American patriots who had driven her out of Boston. But on one thing she never wavered: America couldn’t be beaten. ‘King George ain’t going to hold that country if it don’t want to be held.’

Oliver wasn’t so sure; viewed from the industrial ramparts of Newcastle the ill-equipped farmers who made up General Washington’s army appeared as men fighting for a medieval inheritance. This, however, was not the time to say so. He sought inspiration, and found it.

‘Ben Franklin,’ he said.

Andra Hedley and Benjamin Franklin had become mutual admirers when they’d met in London before the war began and hostilities between their two countries had not lessened their regard, nor had their correspondence ceased when Franklin moved to Paris to become America’s agent in France. It was Franklin, indeed, who’d put Andra in touch with Lavoisier.

‘Oliver, you ain’t the cabbage-head you look.’ He’d won his stepmother’s approval. ‘Diplomatic channels, that’s the ticket. They won’t stop those. I’ll get young Ffoulkes to contact Ben and set up a lazy … what is it?’

‘Laissez-passer.’

‘One of them. Get him back under a flag of truce. We’ll have him home quicker’n Hell scorches feathers.’

While she elaborated on the matter, he turned back to the mail and saw that in their haste they’d overlooked the letter from New York.

Wordlessly, he held it out and she snatched it from him.

Of the many surprising facets to Makepeace Hedley, the one Oliver found most incomprehensible, was her relationship with Philippa, her daughter by her first marriage. Early on, when the child was seven years old, Makepeace had allowed Philippa’s American godmother, Susan Brewer, to take the girl home with her to Boston. Philippa hadn’t come back; it seemed she didn’t want to.

The opening of hostilities between America and Britain had caused a hiatus in news of both Susan and Philippa and this, alongside the fact that most of the fighting was in Massachusetts, had – somewhat late in the day – awakened Makepeace to her daughter’s danger.

She’d had to be restrained from sailing off across the Atlantic in one of her coaling fleet’s vessels in order to see what was happening for herself. Undoubtedly she would have done, except that word came in time to say that Susan and Philippa had left Boston and were safely settled in British-held New York.

Oliver watched his stepmother flop onto the oriel sill to read a letter that had, from the look of it, undergone a rough passage. She’d taken off the dreadful tricorn and her hair had escaped from the cap beneath so that the sun turned it into a hazy, auburn frame around her head. He felt a second’s jealousy on behalf of the mother who’d died giving birth to him. Could she have competed in such variety with this woman?

‘Oh, Oliver,’ she said, looking up, ‘they’re coming home. Susan don’t reckon New York to be safe any longer. They’ll be here. Susan sent this by the mail packet but they were going to sail for England right after she wrote, almost immediate.’

Her pleasure demanded his, yet Oliver thought of the Atlantic, the thousands of miles of sea that had become the battleground of two navies, now to be joined by a third.

‘Um,’ he said.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No, it’s all right. Listen … “You will remember Captain Strang and the Lord Percy … ” She looked up: ‘That’s the frigate brought Susan and me and my first husband to England, a sound craft she is, and Strang’s a fine captain.

“He sails for London on Friday and Philippa and I with her. The Percy, you will remember, is a dispatch carrier and Captain Strang assures me he has no orders to give battle but will make for England as speedily as may be so that, with God’s mercy, I shall deliver your daughter safely to you in six weeks.”’

Makepeace blew out her cheeks. ‘Phew. That’s a relief.’

Her stepson saw that happy memories of the Lord Percy made the vessel invulnerable as far as she was concerned. ‘Good news, Missus,’ he said. ‘When’s she due?’

‘Most any day.’ Makepeace scanned the last page. ‘Strang’ll drop anchor in the Pool like he did before. Maybe I can go meet …’

She whimpered. Her face bleached so that her freckles looked suddenly green. Oliver took the letter from her hand before it could drop. Beneath a bold, curly signature, ‘Your devoted friend, Susan Brewer’, was a date. ‘March 2, 1778.’

He met his stepmother’s appalled eyes, went to his knees and held her against him. ‘It don’t mean … very well, the letter’s been delayed but in that case perhaps so’s the Percy. There’s maybe another letter floundering around the seas somewhere telling us she’d changed her mind, maybe Strang couldn’t take the two of them after all, maybe Susan decided to wait for better weather.’

But … four months, he thought; Susan should have written again, there should’ve been news one way or another in four months.

Makepeace didn’t hear him. She was being assailed by certainty. God had drowned her daughter. Philippa and Susan had set off from New York and not arrived. Somewhere on the voyage, the Lord Percy had gone down.

It seemed inevitable now, as if she had known it in advance and allowed it to happen. Because of all the years she had let pass without seeing Philippa or summoning her home from America, God had chosen the ultimate punishment.

I didn’t go to her. I didn’t fetch her back. Andra wanted me to, but I didn’t.

It was as if her daughter had been calling to her across the Atlantic in a voice that she’d been too busy to hear, allowing it to be subsumed in work, her marriage, the birth of other daughters.

Guilt snatched at a rag to cover itself. She didn’t want to come back; she wrote she’d rather stay with Susan in America.

The small figure of her daughter at their last interview in London stood in front of her now, as clear as clear, listening to her explain that Aunt Susan wanted to return to America and that Betty, who had been Makepeace’s nurse as well as Philippa’s, would be going too. They wanted to take Philippa with them – the child was the apple of their eye, they had looked after her while Makepeace was busy – and Makepeace was giving the child the choice.

A plain, grave little girl with Philip Dapifer’s long face, his sallow skin and hair, but without the humour that had made her late father so attractive. As she’d considered, she’d looked like a small, studious camel.

‘Would you be coming too, Mama?’

‘No. I have things to do in England. I must go up North again soon.’

So much to do. Well, there had been. She’d still been struggling to adapt to the loss of Philip and gain wealth from the coalfield she’d won so that she could beggar the two people, one of them Philip’s divorced first wife, whose chicanery had robbed her and Philippa of his estates when he died.

Andra had been merely her business partner in those days, someone in the background. She’d been alone, obsessed with taking revenge on the first Lady Dapifer, which eventually she had, oh, she had, and never regretted it.

She remembered, agonizingly now, how she had defined the matter for herself then: did she love her daughter enough to abandon the struggle and go back to America – possibly a better mother but undoubtedly a beaten woman? And the answer had been no, she didn’t.

Now, again, she heard Philippa make her decision.

‘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.