Taking Liberties

CHAPTER SIX

John Beasley appeared at the head of the Prince George’s stairs. He’d found a wooden leg and a crutch from somewhere; the first was strapped to his bent left knee inside his breeches, the second tucked under his left armpit. He was defiant. ‘Either of you going to help me down these bloody stairs?’

It was Makepeace who guided him down – Sanders was helpless, holding on to the newel post, almost sobbing.

‘What you do?’ she asked, grimly. ‘Trip up a Chelsea Pensioner?’

‘I ain’t being pressed for you or anybody. The landlord got ’em for me.’

‘Fat lot of help you’ll be,’ she said. But she was touched; she hadn’t realized how frightened of impressment he’d been, probably rightly. He was a good friend. Ridiculous, but a good friend. And his grunts as he hopped across the Halfpenny Bridge to Dock – the man on the tollgate was most concerned – made her laugh for the first time in two weeks.

Dock, however, was not amusing. It was vast. Since the first spades dug the first foundations of William Ill’s Royal Dockyard, it had sprouted wet docks, dry docks and slipways around which had sprung up warehouses for rigging, sails and stores, rope-walks and mast-yards, all in turn giving rise to houses for men to run them. It was now bigger than Plymouth, as if a monstrous oedema had outgrown the body on which it was an accretion.

Their landlord had warned them. ‘Over two hundred inns, they do say, if so be you can name ’em such.’

From the vantage of the bridge they could see spacious, treelined streets but tucked in alleys behind them, like stuffing coming through the back of an otherwise elegant chaise-longue, were lath and plaster tenements spreading in a mazed conglomeration as far as the eye could see.

‘Bugger,’ Beasley said, looking at it.

It was a landscape Makepeace knew. Her dockside tavern in Boston had been a clean, hospitable model of respectability but it had stood, a Canute-like island, against an encroaching sea of gambling hells, gin parlours, brothels, the tideline of filth that marked every port in the world.

She was well acquainted with Dock without setting foot in it. And she knew something else; her daughter was dead.

Whatever the circumstances, Philippa would have escaped from the wasteland of flesh and spirit that was here. However naive, the girl was intelligent; even penniless she’d have found some official, some charity, to send word to her mother on her behalf.

It was something Makepeace had known from the first but it had taken recognition of this view, this seagulled, mast-prickled, rowdy, ragged-roofed agglomeration of chaos and order, vitality and disease, this other Boston, to drive it into her solar plexus with the force of a mallet.

She kept walking forward, but as an automaton in which the clockwork had yet to run down.

There was a quayside with bollards. Beasley sank onto one, complaining of his knee rubbing raw. Makepeace walked stiffly on, past a pleasant, open-windowed inn and into the mouth of an alley behind it.

Yes, here it was. Her old enemy. Unraked muck, runnels of sewage. A door swung open to spill out an unsteady woman smelling of gin. Further along, some girls in an upper window were shrilly encouraging a man who headed for the door below them, already unbuttoning his fly.

Suppose, argued Makepeace’s Puritan upbringing desperately, suppose she’s too ashamed, too ruined, to come home?

Howay to that, answered the older Makepeace, she knows I love her regardless …

Does she know that? What does she know of me these last years except from the letters I’ve sent her? What do I know of her, except from the dutiful replies?

She felt a tug on her skirt. A waif, sitting in the gutter, its sex indistinguishable by its rags, reached out a filthy, fine-boned small hand. ‘Penny for bub and grub, lady, penny for bub and grub.’

It gave a funny little cough, much like Philippa had always done when she was nervous, so that Makepeace cupped its face in her hands and turned it towards her. Perhaps, perhaps …

But, of course, it wasn’t Philippa; she’d known it wasn’t – the child was far too young. She began to say: ‘Have you seen …?’ but the sentence she’d repeated and repeated these last days died in her mouth, as this child would die, as Philippa had already died. Her knees folded suddenly and for a moment she crouched in the alley, the fingers of one hand on its cobbles to steady herself.

Andra, I need you now. Take me home, let me hold my little girls and keep them safe for ever and ever. I’ve lost her, Andra. I’ve lost Philip’s child that I never understood because I never understood her. I can’t bear the pain on my own. Where are you?

The small beggar watched incuriously as Makepeace dragged herself upright and, fumbling for her handkerchief to wipe off the dirt, found some coins, dropped them into the waiting claw and went back the way she had come.

John Beasley was twisting frantically round on his bollard. Catching sight of her he raised the crutch, pointing with it to an old man sitting on a neighbouring bollard. ‘He’s seen her. He saw her.’

For a moment she didn’t believe him. Don’t let me hope again. Then she ran forward.

‘Tell her,’ Beasley said. ‘He saw the Riposte come in, didn’t you? Tell her.’

‘That I did,’ the old man said.

Boston had these, too: palsied old mariners, more sea water than blood in their veins and nothing to do but watch, with the superciliousness of experts, the comings and goings of other sailors, other ships.

‘Saw the prisoners brought ashore, didn’t you? June it was. Stood on this very quay, they did. Tell her.’ Beasley looked round the stone setts as if Christ’s sandalled foot had touched them. ‘Same bloody quay.’

‘Very same quay,’ the old man agreed.

‘A girl round about ten or eleven, he says. And a boy.’

‘Powder monkey, I reckon. Always tell a powder monkey. Black hands.’

Beasley couldn’t wait. He’d heard it already, in slow Devonian. ‘They were put to one side while the militia came for the prisoners. An officer told them to wait where they were ’til he’d finished seeing to the men. Nobody paid them attention, did they? And the boy slipped off.’

The old man nodded. ‘Diddun want no more o’ the navy, I reckon.’

‘But what did the girl do? Tell her what the girl did.’ In an aside to Makepeace, he said: ‘His name’s Packer. Able Seaman Packer.’

The old man snickered. ‘Like I said, she were wunnerful fond of one of the prisoners. Blackie, he was. Black as the Earl of Hell’s weskit. Kept hollerin’ to ’un she did and he were hollerin’ back.’

‘But what did she do?’ insisted Beasley. ‘Tell her what she did.’

‘Prisoners was lined up,’ Able Seaman Packer said, slowly. ‘Job lot, Yankees mostly. Hunnerd or more. Militia got ’em into longboats and made ’em pull down the Narrows, round Stonehouse towards Millbay. And the liddle maid, she ran along the bank after they, far as she could ’til she come to the watter, so then she makes for the bridge, still hollerin’ to the nigger, tryin’ to follow him, like.’

‘But she came back, didn’t she?’

A nod. ‘She come back. Liddle while later, that was. Girnin’ fit to bust.’

‘Crying,’ translated Beasley. ‘She was crying.’

‘Wouldn’t let her over the bridge, see. Hadn’t got a ha’penny, see.’ Satisfaction bared teeth like lichened tombstones. ‘Right and proper, too. Comin’ over here, usin’ our bridges for free when a honest man as served his country has to pay.’

‘She couldn’t pay the halfpenny toll,’ Beasley said. ‘She was trapped in Dock. She couldn’t get in to Plymouth proper. She’s here somewhere, don’t you see?’

She was seeing it. Philippa. No Susan, just Philippa. Who was the black man? Someone who’d been kind to her, perhaps, now being taken away from her. She was running along this very quay, desperate not to lose, among terrifying officialdom, one person who’d shown her humanity.

‘What did she do then? Where did she go? Have you seen her since?’ begged Makepeace.

Faded little crocodile eyes looked at her briefly but the answer was made to Beasley. ‘Didn’t see her after that day.’

She fell on her knees to the old man. ‘Where would you look? If you were me, where’d you look for her?’

‘Been near two month,’ he said. Again it was Beasley whom Packer addressed. Makepeace realized that he thought he was talking to a fellow war veteran. If it had been her sitting on the bollard, she’d still be in ignorance. ‘If so be she were a maid then, she bain’t now.’

She wanted to kill him. Mind your own business, you old devil. But if he minded his business, she wouldn’t find Philippa. She got out her purse and extracted a guinea from it, waving it like a titbit to a dog.

He took off his cap and laid it casually across his knees. She dropped the guinea into it. ‘Please.’

‘You come back yere four bells this evening,’ he told Beasley, ‘you might …’ He paused, searching for the phrase, and found it triumphantly. ‘… might see something as is to your advantage.’

‘If you know something, tell us,’ Makepeace pleaded. ‘I’ll pay whatever you want.’

‘Pay us at four bells.’ Further than that, he refused to budge. Here was drama to enliven his old age, better than gold; they were to return, the second act must be played out.

Beasley reverted to his accustomed gloom, as if ashamed that he’d shown excitement. Hopping back over the bridge, he said: ‘Four bells?’

‘Six o’clock,’ Makepeace said. ‘Second dog watch.’ She hadn’t run an inn on the edge of the Atlantic for nothing.

Back at the inn, Makepeace forced herself to eat – a matter of fuelling for whatever lay ahead. Beasley urged her to get some sleep and she tried that, too, but kept getting up. She ordered a basket of food in case Philippa should be hungry when they found her.

She knew they wouldn’t find her, the old man was playing games with them for the excitement. Then she added a cloak to the basket because Philippa’s own clothes would be rags by now.

She buried her child again – what possible advantage could the old bugger on the bollard promise her? Then she put her medicine case into the basket … She was worn out by the time they crossed the Halfpenny Bridge again.

The clang for four bells sounding on the anchored ships skipped across the Hamoaze like uncoordinated bouncing pebbles, none quite simultaneous with the others, summoning new watches and releasing the old. The flurry on the river increased as off-duty officers were rowed ashore, hailing their replacements in passing.

It was nearly as hot as it had been at noon; the setts of the quay threw back the heat they had absorbed all day. John Beasley, lowering himself gratefully onto his bollard, rose again sharply as its iron threatened to scorch his backside.

Able Seaman Packer was still on his. Fused to it, Makepeace thought feverishly, like a desiccated mushroom. ‘Well?’ she demanded.

‘Missed ’em,’ he said. ‘Should’ve been here earlier.’

‘Missed who?’

‘The whores.’ He nodded to a flotilla of rowing boats with wakes that were diverging outwards as they approached the fleet anchored in the middle of the river. At this distance, they seemed full of gaudy flowers.

‘Don’t hit him!’ John Beasley caught Makepeace’s arm before it connected with the old man’s head in a haymaker that would have toppled him onto the quay. Balancing awkwardly, he pushed her behind him. ‘Tell us, will you, or I’ll let her at you. Is our girl on one of those boats?’

‘Ain’t sayin’ now.’ Packer’s lower lip protruded in a sulk that lasted until Makepeace, still wanting to punch him, was forced to move away.

She watched Beasley pour more of her money into Packer’s cap and the old man’s need to stay the centre of attention gradually reassert itself.

Beasley hopped over to her. ‘She’s not in those boats. He says her friend is.’

‘What friend?’

‘A woman who talked to her the day she landed.’

‘He didn’t tell us that. He said he hadn’t seen her since.’

‘No more I haven’t,’ the old man called; Makepeace’s wail had carried.

‘He’s eking out what he knows, he don’t get much of interest,’ Beasley said. ‘He’s lonely. His daughter doesn’t let him back in her house until night.’

‘I wouldn’t let him back in at all.’

‘Apologize to him, for Christ’s sake, or we won’t get anything either.’

Makepeace took a few steps forward and grated out: ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Should be an’ all. I fought for my country.’

‘Very noble. Who’s this friend?’

‘Whore.’ The word gave him satisfaction.’ Whaw-wer. That’s what her’s a-doin’ out there along o’ the others, whorin’. Spreadin’ her legs for sailors.’

‘And where’s my daughter?’

Packer shrugged his shoulders. ‘Dunno, do I? She knows …’ A nod towards the ships, a huge and vicious grin. ‘Have to wait here for ’un to come back, won’t ee?’ A pause. ‘That’s if I decides to tell ee which one she be.’

She couldn’t stay near him; it was like being in the power of a beetle, a petty, insignificant thing that, ordinarily, she could have stamped on with all the force of her wealth. And I will, you old bastard, you wait and see. She strode up and down the quay, letting Beasley try to tease out of the man what information was left in him.

It was the time of evening for gathering in taverns before going on to entertainment elsewhere. The inn that faced the quay was full; young officers and midshipmen overflowed its doors, drinking and talking, occasionally commenting on the red-haired woman who passed and repassed them without coquetry. ‘A drink, madam?’ one of them asked.

She didn’t hear.

Beasley pantomimed a request for ale and two tankards were brought out to him and Packer.

Eventually, he hopped over to her. ‘There was just this woman. She saw Philippa crying, they talked and went off together. He ain’t seen Philippa since but the woman’s one of them that goes out to the ships every night. Comes back in the early hours, he says.’

‘How’ll we know which one?’

‘He says we’ll know her when we see her.’ He added abruptly, because he didn’t want to say it: ‘He calls her Pocky.’

‘The pox,’ Makepeace said, dully. ‘She’s got the pox.’

Beasley shrugged and went off to see if they could hire a room overlooking the quay in which to wait. There wasn’t one; Dock was as crowded as Plymouth. ‘But he’s got a settle on the landing upstairs,’ he said, coming back. ‘We can wait there for a couple of shillings.’

She put out her hand. ‘What’d I do without you?’

He became surly. ‘It’s my bloody knee I’m thinking about. Rubbed raw.’

A window on the inn’s first floor faced south-west and threw light onto a breakneck stair down to the taproom and a corridor with doors leading to bedrooms. It had a wide sill and, below it, a settle that Beasley threw himself onto with a groan.

Makepeace climbed onto the sill, shading her eyes against the lowering sun. Below was the quay, the old man on his bollard, and a view across the Hamoaze to the green hill that was Mount Edgcumbe. The tide was turning and three of the warships were getting ready to make for the open sea; with no wind penetrating the protection afforded by the river’s bend, they were having sweeps attached to pull them out.

Usually ships and their manoeuvres were beautiful to her; this evening she saw them as the lethal artefacts they were, off to blow into pieces other ships and men. French? Americans she’d grown up with?

England had been good to her; it had allowed her that magical man, Philip Dapifer, before taking him away again. At the last it had given her happiness with Andra and wealth and employment she loved. Yet it had done so with reluctance; if she hadn’t had astounding luck and the ability to fight like a tiger she, too, could have been reduced to somewhere like Dock, struggling not to drown in its filth.

And who would have cared? God knew, this was an uncaring country. With Philip she’d sat at tables loaded with plate worth a king’s ransom and listened to conversations in which the poor were derided for being poor, where landowners had boasted of the poachers they’d hung, where magistrates lobbied to have more capital offences added to statute books that already carried over one hundred.

It hadn’t occurred to them that they were the culprits, that what they called criminals were ordinary people made desperate by enclosure of what had been common land, by their fences being thrown over, by costly turnpikes on roads they had once used for free.

She had supped with those who made their own grand theft into law and she had walked in the dust thrown up by their carriage wheels with those they used that law against.

Oh no, there’d be no cheers from her as England’s ships sailed off to impose the same inequality on her native country. America deserved its freedom, had to have it, would eventually gain it.

She knew that, in the two years since the war began, she had puzzled Andra and Oliver, both of them supporters of the American cause, by her refusal to pin her flag to the mast of her native country.

Yet what freedom had America allowed her, an insignificant tavern-keeper, for rescuing Philip Dapifer from Bostonian patriots trying to kill him merely for being English? For that act of humanity, they’d tarred and feathered her brother and burned her home. Even now she could only hope that it did not cherry-pick which of its citizens were to be free. Would it include Indians, like her old friend, Tantaquidgeon? Negroes like Betty and her son? Are you fighting somewhere across that ocean, Josh, my dear, dear boy? For which side?

It wasn’t only business that had stopped her from visiting Philippa in America or fetching her back. It was reluctance to return to a country that talked of liberty but had punished her for not falling into line. Oh God, to have patriotism again, certainty of country, right or wrong, like that old bugger on his bollard.

The sun lowered, lighting the underside of sea-going gulls and seeming for a moment to preserve the Hamoaze in amber. The noise in the taproom started on a crescendo to the slam of doors in the corridor as guests departed to their various night activities.

Riding lights began to make reflective twinkles in the water.

Further along the quay, out of her sight, there was a sudden commotion, scuffling, male shouts, female screams. A longboat emerged into view, heading for the fleet; it was difficult to make out in the twilight but it looked as if a sack in the thwarts was putting up a fight.

‘What’s that?’ Beasley asked.

‘Press gang, I think,’ she told him. ‘Your disguise ain’t in vain.’

He grunted. After a while he said: ‘See, Missus, they don’t let most of the crews come ashore. Afraid they’ll abscond.’

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Giving ’em women stops ’em getting restive.’

‘I know.’

She heard him struggling with straps to ease his cramped knee. ‘Think anybody’d notice if I swopped peg-legs?’

Beasley, she knew, was telling her to be sorry for whores, perhaps preparing her for Philippa being one of them. To him they were victims of a vicious society. She had never seen them like that; her Boston Puritanism had left her with a loathing for the trade; she could pity all those forced into criminality by poverty, except those who sold their bodies. Over there, below those sweating decks, women were allowing themselves to be used as sewers, disposing of effluent so that His Majesty’s Navy could function more efficiently. If Philippa …