Читать книгу Taking Liberties - Diana Norman - Страница 11

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 …

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