Taking Liberties

Her thoughts veered away and fractured into illogical fury at the husbands who’d deserted her, the one by dying, the other by travelling.

I was always in second place for you, Andra Hedley, wasn’t I? The lives of miners were your priority, not me. Finding out about fire-damp, why it blows miners up. I don’t care why it blows the buggers up, I want you here, I want Philippa …

Heavy boots on the stairs jerked her to attention. Revellers were coming back from wherever they’d been, talking, breathing alcohol, one or two uttering a tipsy goodnight to her as they went to their rooms. It seemed only a moment since they’d been leaving them …

She looked out at the view and saw that Packer’s bollard was empty, the old man had gone; she’d been asleep.

She trampled Beasley as she scrambled from the window-seat, screaming: ‘I fell asleep, we’ve missed ’em!’

He joined her out on the quay where she was running up and down, hopelessly trying to distinguish the shape of rowing boats against the loom of ships’ sides which were casting a shadow from the low, westerly moon.

To keep her sanity there was nothing to do but assume that the prostitutes were still prostituting. She refused to leave the quay in case she fell asleep again and paced up and down, the click of her heels the only sound apart from ripping snores coming from an open window at the inn and the occasional soft cloop of water against the quay wall.

The sky, which at no point had turned totally black, began to take on a velvety blueness.

‘I think they’re coming,’ Beasley said.

A light like a glow-worm had sprung up and was heading for the quay, showing itself, as it came, to be a lantern on a pole in a rowing boat which led a small flotilla of others. It swayed, sometimes reflecting on water, sometimes on the mushrooms that were the hatted heads of women clustered above the thwarts.

‘Missus, you’re not to pounce on this female,’ Beasley said. ‘We got to keep her sweet.’

‘I don’t pounce.’

‘Yeah, you do. You’re too much for people sometimes, especial other women. You bully ’em. You’re an overwhelmer.’

What was he talking about? Granted, she had to be forceful or she’d have remained the poverty-pinched wreck left by Dapifer’s death. You try coping politely with Newcastle coalers. And other women managed their lives so badly …

‘You do the talking then,’ she snapped.

The leading boat held back, allowing its link-boy to light the quay steps for the others. The sailors who’d done the rowing leaned on their oars, letting their passengers transfer themselves from the rocking boats to the steps.

Beasley positioned himself at the top, holding out his hand to help the women up to the quay. Some took it, some didn’t. As they came the link lit their faces from below, distorting their features into those of weary gargoyles.

Makepeace moved back under the eaves of the inn – and not just to allow Beasley free rein but because the harlots repelled her. How can he touch them? Yet why wasn’t he questioning them? Which one was he waiting for? The old man had said they’d know which she was, but how?

She teetered in the shadows, wanting to interfere, not wanting to interfere, watching one or two of the women limp off into the alleys. Others waited for their sisters, dully, not speaking, presumably needing light to guide them to the deeper rat-holes.

The last boat was debouching its passengers and still Beasley was merely hauling them up. She could see the tip of the link-pole as it lit the last few up the steps.

That’s her. Oh God, that’s her.

The link-boy had joined the women on the quay and was guiding them away into the alleys but, as he left, his lantern had illumined one of the faces before it turned away as if light was anathema to it, or it was anathema to light.

Makepeace had seen the damage done by smallpox before but never with the ferocity it had wreaked here. The woman’s features might have been formed from cement spattered by fierce rain while still soft. In that brief glimpse, it appeared to be not so much a face as a sponge.

Pocky.

Having helped her onto the quay, Beasley was holding on to the woman’s hand. Makepeace heard her say, tiredly: ‘Not tonight, my manny. I ain’t got a fuck left,’ then pause as he shook his head and put his question, politely for him, giving his explanation in a mumble.

The woman’s reply carried. ‘I never knew she had a mother.’ Her voice was surprisingly tuneful, with a lilt to it Makepeace couldn’t place.

Mumble, mumble?

‘I might do. Or I might not.’

It’s going to be money, Makepeace thought. Let her have it, let her have anything, only get me my child back.

It wasn’t so simple; Beasley was obviously making offers, the woman temporizing.

The link-boy emerged from wherever he had taken the others, disturbed that he’d left this one behind. He coughed and called: ‘Are you coming, Dell?’

At that instant Makepeace’s legs urged her to kneel on the stones in gratitude for the moment when God opens his Hand and allows His grace to shower on poor petitioners. Instead they carried her forward, stumbling, so that she could snatch the link-boy to her and rock him back and forth.

After a moment, Philippa’s arms went round her mother’s neck and she wept. ‘I knew you’d come,’ she said. ‘Oh Ma, I knew you’d find me.’

Beasley looked round the door of Makepeace’s bedroom. ‘Is she all right?’

‘She’s asleep.’ She had Philippa’s grubby little hand in her own. Not once had she let go of it as they’d all hurried away from Dock to the privacy and shelter of the Prince George.

She answered Beasley’s unspoken enquiry. ‘And she is all right.’ She might not be able to understand her daughter as other women understood theirs but she was not mistaken on this; Philippa had suffered greatly but her eyes on meeting her mother’s, her whole demeanour, declared that her virginity was still intact. ‘I reckon we got a lot to thank that woman for.’ It occurred to her that she hadn’t done it. ‘Where is she?’

‘Ordering breakfast. Everything on the menu.’

‘Give her champagne.’

‘She’s already ordered it.’

‘Good.’ Makepeace balled her free hand into a fist. ‘John.’

‘Yes?’

‘Susan’s dead.’

It was the one question that had been asked and answered before Philippa’s eyes had glazed with exhaustion and remembered terror, at which point Makepeace had tucked her child into bed and soothed her to sleep.

There was a long silence before Beasley said: ‘How?’

‘Killed when the Riposte fired on the Pilgrim. It’s all I know – it cost her to say that much. We’ll find out when she wakes up.’

Beasley nodded and went out.

In the days when Makepeace had shared a house with Susan Brewer in London, she’d wondered if there was … well, a something between her two friends. But if there had been, it had come to nothing; Susan was the marrying kind, Beasley was not. Yet Susan had remained unmarried, instead pouring her affection onto her godchild, Philippa.

And Philippa had loved Susan, which was why she’d been allowed to go to America with her.

Everybody loved Susan. Since they’d met on the Lord Percy bringing them both to England nearly thirteen years before, she and Makepeace had been fast, if unlikely, friends – Susan so feminine, earning her living in the world of fashion and caring about clothes, everything Makepeace knew she herself was not.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. You can have Philippa back but I am taking Susan.

And Makepeace wept for the friend who would have been content with the choice.

She lifted the little hand she held in hers to put it against her cheek. Dirty, yes, but the nails were short and perfect. Philippa had always been a neat child and Susan had taught her well.

The male disguise had been effective because of the girl’s thinness; she’d grown a little, not much; the pale, plain face was still the image of her father’s with its almost clownish melancholy, but where Philip’s had been amusing, Philippa’s suggested obstinacy. And suffering.

It irked her that she could not read her child. She did not understand Philippa, never had; her teachers said the girl was gifted in mathematics and the businesswoman in Makepeace had been gratified – until Susan had explained that it wasn’t shopkeeper mathematics Philippa was gifted in but pure numbers, whatever they were. Nor could Makepeace, who believed in airing her problems, often noisily, be of one mind with someone who would not openly admit to a difficulty until she’d solved it, and sometimes not even then.

Gently, she laid her daughter’s hand back on the counterpane. ‘We got to do better, you and I.’

The movement disturbed her daughter’s sleep. She woke up and Makepeace busied herself fetching breakfast and popping morsels of bread charged with butter and honey into her daughter’s mouth, as if she were a baby bird. ‘I can feed myself, you know,’ Philippa said, but she allowed her mother to keep on doing it. They were preparing themselves.

At last … ‘Now then,’ Makepeace said.

There’d been two sea battles. In mid-Atlantic Lord Percy, with Philippa and Susan aboard, had encountered the American corvette, Pilgrim.

‘That wasn’t a very big battle,’ Philippa said, ‘but Captain Strang was killed by the first broadside and Percy was holed below the waterline, so she surrendered quickly.’

An Admiralty report from the lips of an eleven-year-old, thought Makepeace.

‘And I was glad.’

‘Glad?’

‘I wasn’t glad that Captain Strang was dead, he was a nice man. But the Pilgrim was going to take us back to America and I wanted to go back. It was Aunt Susan who said we had to get away from the war. I didn’t want to, I wanted to stay and fight for freedom.’ She darted a look at her mother. ‘England’s a tyrant.’

Makepeace opened her mouth, then shut it again. ‘Go on.’

‘And Josh was on board Pilgrim.’ Philippa took in her mother’s reaction. ‘Didn’t you know?’

‘Josh? In the American navy?’

‘Didn’t you know?’

‘No,’ Makepeace said clearly, ‘I didn’t. How could I? I didn’t even know you and Susan had set out for England ’til two weeks ago. The mail’s interrupted. Small matter of a war, I guess.’

‘Is that why you didn’t come for me sooner?’

‘Of course it was. Did you think I …’ Makepeace bit her lip, this was no way to resume their relationship. ‘So Josh was a sailor on the Pilgrim.’

‘Able seaman, bless him. He joined to fight England’s tyranny.’

‘Go on.’

And then, Philippa said – she was trembling – a British ship of the line, the massive Riposte, caught up with Pilgrim and opened fire with broadsides of fifty-one guns.

Makepeace held the child’s hands tight while she relived it, saw the mouth twist to try and find words to express the inexpressible – ‘noise’, ‘explosions’ – and find them inadequate for the horror of being bombarded, of panic’s indignity.

‘You can’t get away, Mama. We’d been put below deck but … we stuffed our cloaks in our ears … I was scuttling. Like a rat.’ She looked at her mother with her teeth bared. ‘Like a rat. Screaming and piddling …’

Thank God she’s telling me, Makepeace thought, and said: ‘Anybody would.’

Philippa shook her head. Anybody hadn’t – she had. ‘And then, things were breaking. Aunt Susan flung herself on top of me. Everything went dark. Then there were flames and I saw Aunt Susan …’

The broken sentences flickered like gunfire on a broken ship, a broken body. Susan staked, like a witch at a crossroads, by a giant splinter through her spine. Susan of the pretty fingernails, Susan … ‘Green curdles my complexion and I shun it like the plague.’

Makepeace let go of her daughter’s hands and covered her face with her own. What had Susan to do with their filthy war? How could men look at her body, at the child beside it, and not see the obscenity of what they did?

Her voice going high as she tried to control it, Philippa went on. ‘Josh found me and got me into a boat. He swam beside it until a crew from the Riposte picked us up. They took Josh away then and locked him up with the rest of Pilgrim’s survivors. They put me in the care of the ship’s doctor.’

Makepeace dried her eyes. ‘Were they kind to you?’

‘I suppose so. I hated them. They lined the ship’s rail and cheered as Pilgrim went down and Aunt Susan with her.’

Makepeace said: ‘I never had a friend of my own age. When I met her coming over, she was … well bred, not well off but well bred. I was a tavern-keeper, I’d lost everything, or thought I had. Susan dressed me in her own clothes, taught me to walk so your father would notice me. God rest her soul, she was the most generous person I ever knew.’

‘She was.’

The noise from the taproom came up through the floorboards into the quiet of the room in waves of increasingly enjoyed hospitality and Makepeace realized that, though she and Philippa had been eating breakfast, it was approaching evening.

She tensed herself for the next round. ‘What happened when you landed?’

Philippa, too, gritted her teeth. ‘They lined Josh and the other men up on the quay. There was me and a little boy from the Riposte, a ship’s boy. He didn’t like it in the navy. Mr Varney, he was one of Riposte’s lieutenants, he told us to stay where we were, somebody would come to dispose of us. I was afraid they’d put me in an orphanage or some terrible place. Jimmy, that’s the boy, he didn’t like it either. As soon as Mr Varney’s back was turned, he ran away, I don’t know where.’

For the first time, Philippa started to cry. ‘Then … then they put Josh and the others in a boat to take them to prison. He’d been shouting, telling me to go to a church and tell them who I was so they’d send for you. He was frightened for me. And I was so frightened for him. The British treat prisoners of war like vermin. They shut them up in prison ships so they die of hunger and smallpox. Everybody in New York knows about the prison ships. I tried to follow him but I didn’t have any money and it was … horrible. I didn’t know what to do, Ma. I just stood and cried.’

Makepeace kissed her. ‘I wouldn’t have known what to do either.’

‘Wouldn’t you?’ Philippa dried her eyes. ‘And then Dell came up and said that once upon a time she’d stood on a quay and cried and nobody had helped her but she wanted to help me. She took me home.’

‘What sort of home?’ Makepeace asked sharply.

‘It’s a room above a pawn shop in Splice Alley. She doesn’t keep it very clean …’ Philippa’s voice became prim. ‘I had to clean it.’ She became aware of her mother’s tension. ‘You needn’t look like that, Mama. I know what she does.’

‘What?’

‘She sells her body to men. She says when you’ve got nothing else to sell, that’s what you have to do.’

‘Does she.’

‘She didn’t bring any men to the room, if that’s what you’re worrying about. She works the ships.’

Makepeace looked around the inn’s bedroom with its lumpy walls and furniture. I am hearing these things from my daughter’s lips, she thought. We are having this conversation.

Yet, at least, her diagnosis was being confirmed; her daughter had been kept at one remove from the wretched woman’s occupation or she wouldn’t be talking about it with this judicial remoteness.

‘She’s a kind person,’ Philippa said, wagging her head at her mother’s expression. ‘She protected me. She wanted to because I was in danger. I was her good deed. She said I was the brand she plucked from the burning. “Sure, I’ll be brandishing you to St Peter at the Gates, and maybe he’ll unlock them and let me into Heaven, after all.”’

The imitation was startling not just for its exact Irishness nor the affection with which it was done but because gaiety was inherent in the mimicker as well as in the mimicry. Makepeace hadn’t, she realized, heard such lightheartedness from her daughter since a brief period at Raby when she and Andra, still only business partners, had been getting ready to dig for coal and Philippa had played with the miners’ children.

She was happy then, before I took her away. I thought she deserved better as Sir Philip’s daughter. Better…Dear God, look what better brought her.

‘Dell’s a child, really,’ eleven-year-old Philippa said.

Makepeace couldn’t resist saying: ‘She’s a child who left you waiting all night in a boat while she cavorted with sailors.’

‘That was only for the last few nights,’ Philippa said, calmly. ‘She had to take me with her. Her pimp had just been released from prison and she was afraid to leave me behind in case he put me on the game.’

Makepeace lowered her head into her hands.

‘I was gainfully employed most of the time, Mama, truly. I worked for Mrs Pratt in the pawn shop downstairs, calculating the interest charges. She ran a small gaming room at the back as well, and I’d work out odds for her.’

A gambling hell. Was the girl doing this deliberately? Makepeace searched her daughter’s face for some sign of provocation but saw only a small, intent camel looking back at her.

‘So you earned money,’ she said.

‘A little. Not much. Mrs Pratt isn’t very generous.’

Makepeace gathered herself. Now they came to it. ‘Then why didn’t you send for me?’

She might as well have taken an axe and cut the bridge between them. The girl’s face became dull and sullen.

Makepeace said: ‘You were landed here on the seventh of June. I found that out from the Admiralty. I had to find it out.’ She tried to get her voice back to level pitch. ‘That was seven weeks ago. Why didn’t you send me a message?’

There was a mumble.

‘What?’

‘I knew you’d find me eventually.’

‘That was luck, not judgement. If it hadn’t been for John Beasley I wouldn’t have found you at all. Do you know what I went through?’

Tears trickled down Philippa’s cheeks but she remained silent – and Makepeace, not usually percipient about her daughter, was vouchsafed a revelation. ‘It was a test,’ she said, wonderingly. ‘You were testing me. Making sure I’d come.’

‘You didn’t come over to Boston when Betty died.’ It was an accusation.

No, she hadn’t. The removal of that old woman, the only constant in Philippa’s disrupted life, just as she’d been the only constant in Makepeace’s, had left a chasm which she should have acknowledged by her presence.

But suddenly she was tired of flagellating herself. ‘I was eight months pregnant,’ she said. And if it was the wrong thing to say, it was the truth and Philippa could put that in her pipe and smoke it. ‘What?’

Still mumbling, her daughter said: ‘And you might have taken me away.’

‘Of course I’d have taken you away!’ Makepeace shrieked. ‘I’m picky. I don’t like my daughter consorting in back alleys with trollops, kind as they may be.’

‘You’re forgetting Josh,’ the girl shouted back. ‘I’m not leaving him.’

Oh, dear Lord. She hadn’t forgotten Josh but this talk with her daughter had been like a stoning – rocks thrown at her from all directions; she’d had to dodge them. There’d been so many.

‘I smuggle money to him,’ Philippa went on. ‘In the prison. We go there on Sundays, Dell and I, and we see him sometimes. We’re going to help him escape. You can escape from Millbay. Some men have done it.’

‘You think I’d leave that boy in prison?’ She’d got up now and was walking the room. ‘Leave Joshua to rot? Betty’d turn in her grave. Lord, Philippa, what do you …?’ She stopped in front of her daughter and leaned down to peer into her eyes. ‘Damn me,’ she said slowly. ‘You think I’m one of the tyrants.’

It came rushing out. ‘You’re American but you’ve never been back or sent any money to help the cause of freedom or said anything or, or anything

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