Читать книгу Taking Liberties - Diana Norman - Страница 6

As the immediate family and the priest emerged from the crypt in which they had delivered the corpse of the Earl of Stacpoole to its last resting place, his Countess met the gaze of the rest of the mourners in the chapel and saw not one wet eye.

Which made it unanimous.

Perhaps, for decency, she should have paid some of the servants to cry but she doubted if any of them had sufficient acting talent to earn the money. For them, as for her, the scrape of stone when the tomb lid went into place had sounded like a gruff, spontaneous cheer.

Nevertheless, she satisfied herself that every face was suitably grave. The lineage of the man in the crypt was ancient enough to make William the Conqueror’s descendants appear by contrast newly arrived; there must be no disrespect to it.

Despite twenty-two years’ sufferance of many and varied abuses, the Countess had never encouraged a word to be spoken against her husband. Under her aegis, existence had been made as tolerable as possible for those who lived and worked in his house; floggings had been reduced, those who’d received them had been compensated and she had learned to employ only servants too old or too plain to attract sexual assault. But in all this she had refused to exchange confidences or criticism with any. The man himself might be vicious, but his status was irreproachable; if she could distinguish between the two, so must others.

A snuffle from behind the Countess indicated that her daughter-in-law at least was indulging the hypocrisy of tears. Yes, well.

Perhaps she should have acceded to the King’s suggestion and had the service in Westminster Abbey but … ‘They’re not putting me alongside foreigners and poetic bloody penwipers. You see to it, woman.’

The air of the chapel was heavy with incense. Heat from the closely packed bodies of the congregation rose up to stir hanging battle banners emblazoned with the Stacpoole prowess for killing people. The day outside being dull, only candlelight inclined onto walls knobbly with urns and plaques, increasing her impression that she and the others were incarcerated in some underground cave.

They’ll bury me here. Beside him. Beloved wife of …

Even without the veil, the suffocation would not have shown on her face which long training kept as still as the marble countenances of Stacpoole effigies around her.

Nearly over. The priest intoned the plea that their dear brother, Aymer Edmund Fontenay, Earl of Stacpoole, might be raised from the death of sin into the life of righteousness – though not as if he had any hope of it.

A last clash from the censers.

‘Grant this, we beseech thee, O merciful Father, through Jesus Christ our mediator …’

Outside, on the gravel apron, her hand resting on her son’s arm, she paused to take in the air. The gardens of Chantries had never been to her taste: too artificial, more Le Nôtre than Brown – the Earl had seen little use for nature unless he could set his hounds on it – but today her soul sailed along the view of knotted parterre, fountains and lake to the utmost horizon of Bedfordshire. She was free.

Fred North bumbled up to her, bowing and blinking his weak little eyes, apologizing. She hadn’t noticed him in the congregation; it appeared he’d arrived late. ‘My deepest apologies, your ladyship, and my sincerest commiseration.’

‘Thank you, Prime Minister. It was good of you to come.’

So it was; a less amiable man would have pleaded the war with America as his excuse to stay in London. Perhaps, like so many here today, he’d wanted to assure himself that her husband was safely dead. The Earl of Stacpoole had been among the tigers of the poor man’s government, harrying him into standing up to the Americans against his inclination to conciliate. ‘Feeble Fred,’ the Earl had called him. ‘I told him: it’s castration that rabble needs, to Hell with conciliation. And the German agrees with me.’

Always ‘the German’, never ‘His Majesty’.

As they went along the terrace, the mourners were reduced to a train of grey and black Lilliputians against the vast frontage of the house.

She was allowed to go first up the steps but in the hall there was a bustle as her daughter-in-law came forward, taking Robert’s hand and her new precedence to lead the procession into the State Dining Room for the funeral meats.

Of course.

Again, Diana’s face showed nothing but its usual boredom. Her daughter-in-law had the undeniable right to display to the gathering that she was now mistress of Chantries, though a better-bred female might have waited until the corpse of its former master was a little chillier in its grave. Alice, however, was not well bred, merely moneyed.

The new Countess was aged twenty and the Dowager nearly thirty-nine, but their appearance narrowed the difference. Alice Stacpoole was the shorter by a head, muddy complexioned and a slave to fashion that did not suit her. Diana Stacpoole, on the other hand, had skin and hair the colour of flax; she might have worn sacking and it would have hung on her long, thin frame with helpless elegance.

She could also have been beautiful but lack of animation had settled the fine bones of her face into those of a tired thoroughbred. Enthusiasm for any creature – a dog, a servant, her own son – had brought reprisals on them and, for their sake, she had cultivated an ennui, as if she were bored even by those she loved. It had been a matter of survival.

Marriage to Aymer, Earl of Stacpoole, though it was his third, had been represented – and accepted – as an honour to a sheltered, sixteen-year-old girl, the desirable joining of two ancient estates; yes, he was her senior by twenty or so years but charming, wealthy, still in need of an heir; she owed the match to her family.

She never forgave her parents for it. They must have known, certainly suspected; the first wife had been a runaway and subsequently divorced, the second a suicide.

After the first year, she’d seriously considered following one or other of her predecessors’ examples but by then she was pregnant, a condition which, as her husband pointed out, made her totally subservient. Kill herself and she killed the child. ‘Run off and I’ll hunt you down.’ He had the right; the baby would be taken from her to be at his mercy in its turn.

She could have given way and become a cowering ghost in her own home but she found defiance from somewhere. The man waxed on terror; she must deprive him of it. As a defence she appropriated boredom, appearing to find everything tedious, complying with the demands of his marriage bed as if they were wearisome games rather than sexual degradation, earning herself thrashings but withstanding even those with seeming indifference.

It was protection not only against her husband but for him; in the sight of God she’d taken him for better or worse, his escutcheon should not tarnished by any complaint of hers.

Nor her own. Though by no means as long as the Stacpooles’, the Countess’s ancestry was equally proud. After a somewhat dubious foundation by Walter Pomeroy, a ruffian who, like Francis Drake, had charged out from Devonian obscurity to fling himself and a large part of a mysterious fortune at the feet of Elizabeth, thereby gaining a knighthood and the Queen’s favour, the Pomeroys had conducted themselves with honour. Young Paulus Pomeroy had refused to betray the message he carried for Charles I though tortured by Cromwell’s troops. Sir William had gone into exile with Charles II. At Malplaquet, Sir Rupert had saved John Churchill’s life at the cost of his own.

The wives had been equally dutiful; happy or miserable, no breath of scandal attended their marriages. Like them, the Dowager threw back to the Middle Ages. Had the Earl been a Crusader, his absence in the Holy Land would have provided his Countess with blessed relief from abuse yet she would have defended his castle for him like a tigress until his return. In this disgraceful age, other women might abscond with lovers, run up debts, involve themselves in divorce, travel to France to give birth to babies not their husband’s, but Pomeroy wives gritted their teeth and abided by their wedding vows because they had made them.

One’s married name might belong to a ravening beast but the name was greater than the man. For Diana, true aristocracy was a sacrament. One did not abandon Christianity because a particular priest was venal. It was the bloodline that counted and its honour must be upheld, however painfully, with a stoicism worthy of the Spartan boy gnawed by the fox. Better that Society should shrug and say: ‘Well, the Countess seems to tolerate him,’ rather than: ‘Poor, poor lady.’ One held one’s head high and said nothing.

Such public and private dignity had discommoded Aymer, put him off his stroke. Gradually, a spurious superiority was transferred from him to her that he found intimidating – as much as he could be intimidated by anything – and even gained his unwilling respect. After that, like the bully he was, he turned his attentions to more fearful victims so that she was spared infection by the syphilis that caused his final dementia.

By then she’d plastered her hurts so heavily with the appearance of finding things tiresome that its mortar had fused into bone and blood. The naive young girl had become static, a woman who moved and spoke with a lassitude that argued fatigue, her drooping eyes seeming to find all the world’s matters beneath her, thus making people either nervous or resentful at what they interpreted as disdain. If they’d peered into them closely they might have seen that those same eyes had been leeched of interest or warmth or surprise by having looked too early on the opening to Hell. Nobody peered so closely, however.

Under the influence of the 1770 malmsey and the Earl’s absence, his funeral party threatened unseemly cheerfulness. Instead of sitting in her chair to receive condolences, the Dowager Countess circled the great room at her slow, giraffe-like pace to remind the more raucous groups by her presence of the respect due to the departed.

There was a hasty ‘We were remembering, your ladyship …’ and then reminiscences of Aymer’s japes, the time when he’d horsewhipped a Rockingham voter during the ’61 election, when he’d thrown his whisky and cigar at Jane Bonham’s pug because it yapped too much, causing it to burst into flame, the time when … Endearing eccentricities of the old school. ‘We won’t look on his like again.’

There was necessity for only one verbal reproof. Francis Dashwood was being overloud and humorous on the subject of her husband’s last illness – Dashwood of all people – and met her arrival with defiance. ‘I was saying, Diana, the pox is a damn hard way to go.’

The Dowager Countess hooded her eyes. ‘For your sake, my lord, one hopes not.’

She passed on to where Alice was exciting herself over the alterations she proposed for Chantries. ‘… for I have always thought it sadly plain, you know. Robert and I plan something more rococo, more douceur de vivre as the French say, more …’ Her voice trailed away at the sight of her mother-in-law but she rallied with triumph. ‘Of course, dear Maman, none of this until we have altered the Dower House à ton goût.’

The Dower House, the overblown cottage on the estate that Aymer had used as a sexual playroom for his more local liaisons. She had never liked the place. Robert and Alice were expecting her to set up home in it – the conventional dower house for the conventional dowager – no doubt to spend her days embroidering comforts for a troop of little Alices and Roberts. Extend twenty-two years of imprisonment into a lesser cell.

‘Make it nice for you, Mater,’ Robert said.

‘Thank you, my dear boy.’ This was not the time to discuss it, nor did she want to hurt him, so she merely said gently: ‘We shall see.’

He was, and always had been, her agony. It had been a mistake to have the baby in her arms when Aymer strode into the room after the birth; it should have been in its cradle, she should have pretended indifference, complained of the pain of its delivery. Instead, she’d been unguarded, raw with an effusion of love. Immediately, the child had become a hostage.

She had failed her son, could have failed him no more if she had run off; he’d been taken away from her: a wet nurse, a nurse, a tutor, school – all of them chosen to distance her from the boy and put his reliance on the caprice of a father who’d both terrified and fascinated him. Her mind trudged round the old, old circular paths. Should she have stood against Aymer more? But revenge would have been visited on the boy as much as her; warring parents would have split him in two. Yet what had she been to her poor child? A figure drifting mistily on the edge of a world in which women were cattle or concubines.

By the time she’d achieved some definition of her own, it was too late; both son and mother were too distanced from each other for the relationship that might have been. Individuality had been stripped from the boy, not a clever child in any case, and he’d opted for a mediocre amiability that offended no one and proved impossible for his mother to penetrate. She’d tried once to explain, said she’d always loved him, was sorry … He’d shied away. ‘Can’t think what you mean, Mater.’ Now, here he was at twenty years old, a genial, corpulent, middleaged man.

And devoted to his wife. Whatever else, the Dowager Countess could have crawled in gratitude to her daughter-in-law. In this sallow, jealous little woman, Robert had found refuge and clung to her like ivy to a wall, as she did to him.

The couple talked to each other always of things, never ideas, but they talked continually; they were happy in a banality in which Diana would have been pleased to join them if Alice hadn’t kept her out so ferociously that Robert, once again, was taken from her.

Yes, well.

Tobias was at her side. ‘A methenger for Lord North, your ladyship.’

Alice almost elbowed her aside. ‘What is that, Tobias?’

‘Methenger at the door, your ladyship. For Lord North.’

‘I’ll see to it.’ She bustled off.

Tobias hovered. ‘A letter came today, your ladyship,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Addrethed to the Countess. Her ladyship took it.’

Diana said lazily, ‘Lady Alice is the Countess now, Tobias.’

‘I think it wath written before hith lordship died, your ladyship. It wath for you.’

‘Then her ladyship will undoubtedly tell me about it.’

Tobias was the most trusted and longest-serving of the footmen but even he must not imply criticism of Alice.

‘Diana, don’t tell me you’re retainin’ that balbutient blackamoor. Never could see why Aymer kept him on. Niggers look such freaks in white wigs, in my opinion. And the lisp, my dear …’

Diana’s raised eyebrow suggested it was unwise of the Duchess of Aylesbury to include ‘freak’ and ‘wig’ in one sentence, the edifice on her grace’s own head being nearly a yard high and inclined to topple, making her walk as if she had the thing balanced on her nose.

Actually, it was typical of Aymer, on finding that Tobias’s blackness and lisp irritated his guests, to promote him to the position of head footman and thereby confront visitors with his announcements.

It was also typical of Tobias that he had kept the place by sheer efficiency. Poor Tobias. Alice and Robert, not having the assurance with which Aymer had flouted social taste, would undoubtedly get rid of him.

North was coming back. Normally those in the room would not have noticed his entrance but they did now. He had a paper in hand and greyness about the mouth. She didn’t hear what he said but the reaction of those who could told her what it was; the man might have been releasing wasps into the room.

He made his way to her to kiss her hand. ‘Forgive me, your ladyship. I must return to London. The French have finally come in on the side of America and declared war.’

It had been inevitable. She said coolly: ‘We shall beat them, my lord. We always have.’

‘No doubt about it, your ladyship.’ But he looked older than he had a few minutes before.

She heard Dashwood talking unguardedly to Robert in his loud voice. Dashwood was always unguarded. ‘Bad enough shipping supplies to our armies already, now we’ve got the damn French to harry us as we do it. I tell you, Robert, our chances of beating that lawless and furious rabble have grown slimmer this day.’

The Dowager was shocked. Locked away in looking after her husband, she had paid scant attention to the progress of the war, assuming that mopping up a few farmers and lawyers, which was all that the population of the American colony seemed to consist of, would be a fairly simple matter. That the war had already lasted two years must, she’d thought, be due to the vast distances the British army had to cover in order to complete the mopping up. That the rebels could actually win the war had not crossed her mind.

She glanced enquiringly at Lord George Germain who, as colonial secretary, was virtually the minister for war.

‘Y’see, ma’am,’ he said, ‘we were countin’ on Americans loyal to King George bein’ rather more effective against the rebels than they’re provin’ to be.’ He saw her face and said hurriedly: ‘Don’t mistake me, we’ll win in the end, but there’s no doubt the entry of the French puts an extra strain on the Royal Navy.’ He brightened. ‘There’s this to be said for them, though, their entry into the war will give it more popularity with our own giddy multitude. They’ve always gone at the frog-eaters with a will.’

There was also this to be said for the news: it cleared the room. Nearly everybody in it had a duty either to the prosecution of the war or a protection of their investments.

She was enveloped in the smell of funereal clothes, sandalwood from the chests in which they’d been packed away, mothballs, stale sweat, best scent and the peculiarly sour pungency of black veiling. The gentlemen raised Diana’s languid hand to their face and dropped it, like hasty shoppers with a piece of fish; her female peers pecked at her cheek; inferiors bobbed and hurried away.

No need to see them to their carriages, that was for Alice and Robert now.

She was left alone. It was an unquiet, heavy room. On the great mantel, a frieze looted from Greece preserved death in marble as barbarians received the last spear-thrust from helmeted warriors in a riot of plunging horses. The red walls were noisy with the tableaux of battle, Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet. Mounted Stacpoole generals posed, sword aloft, at the head of their troops, cannons fired from ship to ship at Beachy Head and Quiberon Bay.

And now France again. It had been no platitude to assure North it would be beaten, she was sure it would be, just as America would be; Aymer had always said that was what France was for, to be beaten by the English. ‘One Englishman can lick ten bloody Frenchman. And twenty bloody Americans. And a hundred bloody Irish.’ Though it was taking overlong to force America’s surrender she accepted his precept, just as she’d accepted his right to tyrannize his fiefdom through right of blood even while she abhorred the tyranny itself.

I’m his creature, she thought.

She walked to the windows to try and recapture the uplift of freedom she’d felt on leaving the chapel but the horizon beyond the lake marked a future she did not know what to do with.

As Countess of Stacpoole, Aymer’s hostess, charity-giver, political supporter to his Tory placemen, his loyal behind-the-scenes electioneer and, at the last, his nurse, she had at least known employment. All gone now.

She took in deep, hopeless breaths. She should be smelling roses, there was a neat mass of them below the terrace, but she couldn’t rid the stink of decay from her nostrils. Since his death they’d burned herbs but, for her, the odour of that jerking, gangrenous body still haunted the house, like his screams.

His reliance on her had been shameless, demanding her presence twenty-four hours of the day, throwing clocks and piss-pots at doctors, even poor Robert, shrieking that he wanted only her to attend him – as if their marriage had been loving harmony.

As if it had indeed been loving harmony, she had attended him twenty-four hours a day; expected to do no less. For three months she had never set foot outside the suite of rooms that were his.

His nose had already been eaten away, now he’d begun to rot, new buboes appearing as if maggots had gathered in one squirming subcutaneous mass to try and get out through the skin. Before his brain went, he’d begged absolution from the very walls. Only the priest could give him that; her place had been to diminish his physical suffering as well as she could, and she and laudanum had done it – as much as it could be done.

She’d thought she could watch judgementally the revenge inflicted on his body by the life he’d led, but she had been unable to resist pity, longing for him to die, for his own sake. Her thankfulness at his last breath had been more for his release than hers. Then had come the scurry of funeral arrangements.

And now to find, after years of expectation of freedom, that Diana, Countess of Stacpoole, had died with the husband she loathed. Beloved wife of …

I’m nothing without him. That was the irony. He’d defined her, not merely as his Countess, but as upholder of his honour, soother of the wounds he inflicted, underminer of his more terrible obsessions. He’d been her purpose, even if that purpose had been amelioration, sometimes sabotage, of his actions. Years of it. She had no other. Thirty-nine next birthday and she was now of no use to a living soul except to vacate the space she’d occupied.

She heard screams and in her exhaustion turned automatically to go back to the sickroom but, of course, they were Alice’s. In view of the news from France, Robert, like a good courtier, should return to his place by the King immediately and Alice was lamenting as if her husband were off to battle rather than a palace.

‘Maman, Maman, come tell him he mustn’t leave or I shall go distraite.’

Yes, well. Alice liked an audience for her hysterics. Was being an audience a purpose? No, merely a function. She left the room to perform it.

To humour his wife, Robert said he would not go until tomorrow; the King would understand he had just buried his father.

Even so, Alice did not see fit to recover until late evening; the advent of France into the war causing her to see danger everywhere. ‘You must ask the King to give you guards. John Paul Jones will try and capture you, like he did the Earl of Selkirk.’

Alice, thought the Dowager, must be the only young woman who had not found that most recent raid by an American privateer a tiny bit thrilling. The papers had made much of it in apparent horror but the ghost of Robin Hood had been called up and, as always with the English weakness for daring, Mr Paul Jones’s brigandage was taking on a hue of romance.

Robert said: ‘My dear, the raid was a failure.’

Alice refused comfort. John Paul Jones, a Scotsman who’d joined the American side, was scouring his native coast to take an earl hostage. Robert was an earl. Ergo, John Paul Jones was out to capture Robert. ‘True, the Earl was absent on this occasion but his Countess was menaced. He took her silver service.’

‘I heard he returned it,’ the Dowager joined in. ‘In any case, we may comfort ourselves that Robert will be in London and not in a Scottish castle exposed to the sea. Mr Jones is hardly likely to sail up the Thames to get him.’

Alice was not so sure; she was enjoying her horrors. It wasn’t until late evening that she remembered the letter and handed it to her mother-in-law.

‘You will forgive me for overlooking it, Mama. It carried my title of course … so peculiar, sent on from Paris, not that I read it … the impudence, I wondered to show it to you at all but Robert said … who is Martha Grayle?’

Martha.

Salt and sun on her face, bare feet, a shrimping net, terracottacoloured cliffs against blue sky …

Careful not to show haste, the Dowager turned to the last page to see the signature and was caught by the final, disjointed paragraph. ‘… you are my long hope, dear soul … I am in great fear … as you too have a son … Your respectful servant, Martha Grayle (née Pardoe).’

She looked up to find Alice and Robert watching her.

Deliberately, she yawned. ‘I shall retire, I think. Goodnight, my dears.’

‘But will you not read the letter?’ Alice could hardly bear it.

‘In bed perhaps.’ Alice had waited to give it to her, she could now wait for a reaction to it. The whirligig of time brought in its petty revenges.

Joan was nodding in a bedroom chair, waiting to undress her, but when the areas that couldn’t be reached by the wearer had been unbuttoned and unhooked, Diana told her to go to bed. ‘I will do the rest myself.’

‘Very well, my dear.’

‘Joan, do you remember Martha Pardoe?’

‘Torbay.’ The old woman’s voice was fond.

‘Yes.’

‘Married that Yankee and went off to Americy.’

‘Yes.’

‘Happy days they was.’

She couldn’t wait for reminiscence. ‘Goodnight.’

With her mourning robes draped around her shoulders, the Dowager picked up the letter that had circumvented the cessation of mail between rebel and mother countries. Somewhere on its long journey from Virginia to France to London to Bedfordshire it had received a slap of salt water so that the bottom left-hand quarter of each page was indecipherable.

Martha had penned a superscription on its exterior page, presumably with a covering letter, for the unknown person in Paris who’d been charged with sending it on to England: ‘To be forwarded to the Countess of Stacpoole in England. Haste. Haste.’ Martha had been lucky; from this moment on there would be an embargo on general mail from France, just as from America; the letter had beaten the declaration of war by a short head.

The fact that Martha had written only on one side of each of her two pages indicated that, however personally distressed, she was in easy circumstances; paper of quality such as this was expensive.

She’d begun formally enough:

Respectful greetings to Your Ladyship, if I am so Fortunate that your eyes should see this letter. Of your Gracious Kindness forgive this Plea from an old acquaintance who would make so Bold as to remind Your Ladyship of glad Times in Torbay when you and she were Children undivided by sea or War. Pray God may resolve the Conflict between our Countries. I shall not Weary you with Remembrance, loving though it is to me, but Proceed to the case of my son, Forrest Grayle, who is but eighteen years old …

Here the water stain obscured the beginnings of several lines and Martha’s writing, which had begun neatly, began to sprawl as agitation seized her so that making sense of it caused the Dowager’s brow to wrinkle. She got up from the dressing-table stool and went to the lamp on the Louis Quinze table to turn up the wick, unconscious that she was doing so. ‘… such a desire that all may have Liberty as has caused Concern to his … nothing would satisfy but that he Volunteer for our navy … John Paul Jones in France to take possession of a new vessel built there …’

Now the relief of a new page, though the penmanship was worse and punctuation virtually non-existent.

O Diana word has it the Sam Adams is Captured and its Men taken to England and imprisoned for rebels while I say Nothing of this for it is War yet there are tales of what is done to men captured by King George’s army here in the South as would break the Heart of any Woman, be she English or American …

Here, again, the interruption of the water stain.

whether my husband would have me write, but he is dead these … I beseech you, in the name of Happier days, as you are a Mother and a … will know him if you remember my Brother whom you met that once at … the Likeness is so Exact that it doth bring Tears every time I … you can do if you can do any Thing for my boy in the name of Our …

Here the writing became enormous: ‘For you are my long hope, dear soul … I am in great fear … as you too have a son … for our old friendship …’ Slowly, the Dowager smoothed the letter flat and put it between the leaves of the bible lying on the table.

Yes, well.

She could do nothing, of course. Would do nothing. As her daughter-in-law said, the letter was an impertinence. Martha had expressed no regret for her adopted country’s rebellion; indeed, supposing her own interpretation to be correct, the woman had actually referred to the American fleet as ‘our navy’.

If the boy Forrest – what like of name was that? – is so enthusiastic to get rid of his rightful King, let him enthuse in prison as he deserves.

Somewhat deliberately, the Dowager yawned, stepped out of her mourning and went to bed.

Seagulls yelping. Petticoats pinned up. Rock pools. Martha’s hair red-gold in the sun. The tide like icy bracelets around their ankles. A near-lunacy of freedom. The stolen summers of 1750 and 1751.

The Dowager got up, wrapped herself in a robe, read the letter again, put it back in the bible, tugged the bell-pull. ‘Fetch Tobias.’

Too much effort, Martha, even if I would. Which I won’t. Too tired.

‘Ah, Tobias. I’ve forgotten, did his lordship buy you in Virginia?’

‘Barbadoth, your ladyship. Thlave market. He liked my lithp.’

Another of Aymer’s japes, this time during his tour of his plantations; he’d sent the man back to England with a label attached to the slave collar: ‘A prethent from the Wetht Indieth.’ It was sheer good fortune that Tobias, bought as a joke, had proved an excellent and intelligent servant.

‘Not near the Virginian plantations, then. Tobacco and such.’ She had no idea of that hemisphere’s geography.

‘Only sugar in Barbadoth, ladyship.’

‘Very well. You may go.’

She was surprised at how very much she’d wished to discuss the letter with Tobias, and with Joan, but even to such trusted people as these she would not do so; one did not air one’s concerns with servants.

Diana went back to bed.

She got up and sat out on the balcony. As if it were trying to make up for her discontent with the day, the night had redoubled the scent of roses and added new-mown grass and cypresses, but these were landlocked smells; the Dowager sniffed in vain for the tang of sea.

She had long ago packed away the summers of ’50 and ’51 as a happiness too unbearable to remember, committed them to dutiful oblivion in a box that had now come floating back to her on an errant tide.

They had been stolen summers in any case; she shouldn’t really have had them but her parents had been on the Grand Tour, there was fear of plague in London, and the Pomeroy great-aunt with whom she’d been sent to stay had been wonderfully old and sleepy, uncaring that her eleven-year-old charge went down to the beach each day with only a parlour maid called Joan as chaperone to play with a twelve-year-old called Martha.

Devon. Her first and only visit to the county from which her family and its wealth had sprung. A Queen Anne house on the top of one of seven hills looking loftily down on the tiny, square harbour of Torquay.

She listened to her own childish voice excitedly piping down years that had bled all excitement from it.

‘Is this the house we Pomeroys come from, Aunt? Sir Walter’s house?’

‘Of course not, child. It is much too modern. Sir Walter’s home was T’Gallants at Babbs Cove, a very old and uncomfortable building, many miles along the coast.’

‘Shall I see it while I am here?’

‘No. It is rented out.’

‘But was Sir Walter a pirate, as they say, Aunt? I should so like him to have been a pirate.’

‘I should not. He is entitled to our gratitude as our progenitor and we must not speak ill of him. Now go and play.’

But if she was disallowed a piratical ancestor, there were pirates a-plenty down on the beach where Joan took her and allowed her to paddle and walk on pebbles the size and shape of swans’ eggs. At least, they looked like pirates in their petticoat-breeches and tarry jackets.

If she’d cut her way through jungle and discovered a lost civilization, it could have been no more exotic to her than that Devon beach. Hermit crabs and fishermen, both equally strange; starfish; soft cliffs pitted with caves and eyries, dolphins larking in the bay: there was nothing to disappoint, everything to amaze.

And Martha, motherless daughter of an indulgent, dissenting Torbay importer. Martha, who was joyful and kind, who knew about menstruation and how babies were made (until then a rather nasty mystery), who could row a boat and dislodge limpets, who wore no stays and, though she was literate, spoke no French and didn’t care that she didn’t. Martha, who had a brother like a young Viking who didn’t notice her but for whom the even younger Diana conceived a delightful, hopeless passion – delightful because it was hopeless – and would have died rather than reveal it but secretly scratched his and her entwined initials in sandstone for the tide to erase.

For the first time in her life she’d encountered people who talked to her, in an accent thick as cream, without watching their words, who knew no servitude except to the tide. She’d been shocked and exhilarated.

But after another summer, as astonishing as the first, the parents had come back, the great-aunt died and the Queen Anne house sold. She and Martha had written to each other for the next few years. Martha had married surprisingly well; a visiting American who traded with her father had taken one look and swept her off to his tobacco plantations in Virginia.

After that their correspondence became increasingly constrained as Diana entered Hell and Martha’s independent spirit conformed to Virginian Anglicanism and slave ownership. Eventually, it had ceased altogether.

The Dowager returned to bed and this time went to sleep.

In one thing at least her son resembled her: they were both early risers. Diana, making her morning circuit in the gardens, saw Robert coming to greet her. They met in the Dark Arbour, a long tunnel of yew the Stuart Stacpooles had planted as a horticultural lament for the execution of Charles I, and fell into step.

The Dowager prepared herself to discuss what, in the course of the night, had gained initial capitals.

But Robert’s subject wasn’t The Letter, it was The Will.

She knew its contents already. Before the Earl’s mind had gone, she had been able to persuade him to have the lawyers redraft the document so that it should read less painfully to some of the legatees. Phrases like ‘My Dutch snuffbox to Horace Walpole that he may apply his nose to some other business than mine … To Lord North, money for the purchase of stays to stiffen his spine …’ were excised and, at Diana’s insistence, Aymer’s more impoverished bastards were included.

Her own entitlement as Dowager was secured by medieval tradition – she was allowed to stay in her dead husband’s house for a period of forty days before being provided with a messuage of her own to live in and a pension at the discretion of the heir.

As he fell into step beside her, she knew by his gabbled bonhomie that Robert was uncomfortable.

‘The Dower House, eh, Mater? It shall be done up in any way you please. We’ll get that young fella Nash in, eh? Alice says he’s a hand at cottages ornés. We want you always with us, you know’ – patting her hand – ‘and, of course, the ambassador’s suite in the Mayfair house is yours whenever you wish a stay in Town.’

‘Thank you, my dear.’

‘As for the pension … Still unsteady weather, ain’t it? Will it rain, d’ye think? The pension, now … been talking to Crawford and the lawyers and such and, well, the finances are in a bit of a pickle.’

The Dowager paused and idly sniffed a rose that had been allowed to ramble through a fault in an otherwise faultless hedge.

Robert was wriggling. ‘The pater, bless him. Somewhat free at the tables, let alone the races, and his notes are comin’ in hand over fist. Set us back a bit, I’m afraid.’

Aymer’s debts had undoubtedly been enormous but his enforced absence from the gaming tables during his illness had provided a financial reprieve, while the income from the Stacpoole estates would, with prudence – and Robert was a prudent man – make up the deficiency in a year or two, she knew.

‘Yes, my dear?’

‘So, we thought … Crawford and the lawyers thought … Your pension, Mama. Not a fixed figure, of course. Be able to raise it when we’ve recouped.’ He grasped the nettle quickly: ‘Comes out at one hundred and fifty per annum.’

One hundred and fifty pounds a year. And the Stacpoole estates harvested yearly rents of £160,000. Her pension was to be only thirty pounds more than the annual amount Aymer had bequeathed to his most recent mistress. After twenty-two years of marriage she was valued on a level with a Drury Lane harlot.

She forced herself to walk on, saying nothing.

One hundred and fifty pounds a year. A fortune, no doubt, to the gardener at this moment wheeling a rumbling barrow on the other side of the hedge. With a large family he survived on ten shillings a week all found and thought himself well paid.

But at five times that figure, she would be brought low. No coach – fortunate indeed if she could afford to keep a carriage team – meagre entertaining, two servants, three at the most, where she had commanded ninety.

Beside her, Robert babbled of the extra benefits to be provided for her: use of one of the coaches when she wanted it, free firing, a ham at salting time, weekly chickens, eggs … ‘Christmas spent with us, of course …’

And she knew.

Alice, she thought. Not Robert. Not Crawford and the lawyers. This is Alice.

Ahead, the end of the tunnel framed a view of the house. The mourning swags beneath its windows gave it a baggy-eyed look as if it had drunk unwisely the night before and was regretting it. Alice would still be asleep upstairs; she rarely rose before midday but, sure as the Creed, it was Alice who had decided the amount of her pension.

And not from niggardliness. The Dowager acquitted her daughter-in-law of that at least. Alice had many faults but meanness was not among them; the object was dependence, her dependence. Alice’s oddity was that she admired her mother-in-law and at the same time was jealous of her, both emotions mixed to an almost ludicrous degree. It had taken a while for Diana to understand why, when she changed her hairstyle, Alice changed hers. A pair of gloves was ordered; similar gloves arrived for Alice who then charged them with qualities that declared them superior.

Diana tended old Mrs Brown in the village; of a sudden Alice was also visiting the Brown cottage in imitation of a charity that seemed admirable to her yet which had to be surpassed: ‘I took her beef tea, Maman – she prefers it to calves’foot jelly.’

Yes, her pension had been stipulated by Alice. She was to be kept close, under supervision, virtually imprisoned in genteel deprivation, required to ask for transport if she needed it, all so that Alice could forever flaunt herself at the mother-in-law she resented and wished to emulate in equal measure. Look how much better I manage my house/marriage/servants than you did, Maman.

Nor would it be conscious cruelty; Alice, who did not suffer from introspection, would sincerely believe she was being kind. Dutifully, the Dowager strove to nurse a fondness for her daughter-in-law but it thrived never so much as when she was away from her.

No. It was not to be tolerated. She had been released from one gaol, she would not be dragooned into another.

The Dowager halted and turned on her son.

He was sweating. His eyes pleaded for her compliance as they had when he was the little boy who, though hating it, was about to be taken to a bearbaiting by his father, begging her not to protest – as indeed, for once, she had been about to. Let it be, his eyes said now, as they had then. Don’t turn the screw.

If it were to be a choice between offending her or Alice or even himself, then Alice must win, as his father had won. He would always side with the strong, even though it hurt him, because the pain of not doing so would, for him, be the greater.

So protest died in her, just as it always had, and its place was taken by despair that these things were not voiced between them. She opened her mouth to tell him she understood but, frightened that she would approach matters he preferred unspoken, Robert cut her off. Unwisely, he said: ‘If you think it too little, Mama, perhaps we can squeeze a bit more from the coffers.’

Good God. Did they think she was standing on a street corner with her hand out? All at once, she was furious. How dare they expect that she might beg.

‘Thank you, Robert,’ she told him with apparent indifference, ‘the pension is adequate.’

He sagged with relief.

Oh no, my dear, she thought. Oh no, Alice may rule my income but she will not rule me. She had a premonition of Alice’s triumphs at future gatherings: ‘Did you enjoy the goose, Maman?’ Then, sotto voce: ‘Dear Maman, we always give her a goose at Michaelmas.’ Unaware that by such bourgeois posturing she reduced herself as well as her mother-in-law.

Oh no. I am owed some liberty and dignity after twenty-odd years. I’ll not be incarcerated again.

So she said, as if by-the-by: ‘Concerning the Dower House, it must be held in abeyance for a while. I am going visiting.’

He hadn’t reckoned on this. ‘Who? When? Where will you go?’

‘Friends,’ she said vaguely, making it up as she went, ‘Lady Margaret, perhaps, the De Veres …’ And then, to punish him a little: ‘I may even make enquiries about Martha Pardoe’s son, Grayle as she now is – I believe you saw the letter she sent me.’

He was horrified. ‘Martha’s …? Mama, you can’t. Involving oneself for an American prisoner? People would think it … well, they’d be appalled.’

‘Would they, my dear?’ He always considered an action in the light of Society’s opinion. ‘Robert, I do not think that to enquire after a young man on behalf of his worried mother is going to lose us the war.’

She was punishing him a little; he should not have been niggardly over her pension but also, she realized, she was resolved to do this for Martha. It would be a little adventure, nothing too strenuous, merely a matter of satisfying herself that the boy was in health.

‘Well, but … when do you intend to do this?’

This was how it would be – she would have to explain her comings and goings. And suddenly she could not bear the constraint they put on her any longer. She shrugged. ‘In a day or two. Perhaps tomorrow.’ To get away from this house, from the last twenty-two years, from everything. She was startled by the imperative of escape; if she stayed in this house one day more it would suffocate her.

‘Tomorrow? Of course not, Mama. You cannot break mourning so soon; it is unheard of. I cannot allow it. People would see it as an insult to the pater’s memory. Have you taken leave of your senses?’

‘No, my dear, merely leave of your father.’

She watched him hurry away to wake Alice with the news. She was sorry she had saddled him with a recalcitrant mother but he could not expect compliance in everything, not when her own survival was at stake. People would think it a damn sight more odd if she strangled Alice – which was the alternative.

I shall go to the Admiralty, she thought. Perhaps I can arrange an exchange for young Master Grayle so that he may return to his mother. Again, it can make no difference to the war one way or the other. We send an American prisoner back to America and some poor Englishman held in America returns home to England.

Odd that the subject of John Paul Jones had arisen only yesterday. Had not Jones’s intention been to hold the Earl of Selkirk hostage in order to procure an exchange of American prisoners? Goodness gracious, I shall be treading in the path of that pirate. The thought gave her unseemly pleasure. She stood at the edge of the yew-scented Dark Arbour, marvelling at how wicked she had become.

When had she taken the decision to act upon Martha’s request? Why had she taken it? To outrage her family in revenge for a niggardly pension? Not really. Because of the picture Martha had tried to draw of her son? If she understood it aright, Lieutenant Grayle had a physical likeness to his maternal uncle.

An image came to her of Martha’s brother, a young man in a rowing boat pulling out to sea with easy strokes, head and shoulders outlined against a setting sun so that he was etched in black except for a fiery outline around his head.

Dead now. He’d joined the navy and one of Martha’s letters had told her he’d been killed aboard the Intrepid during the battle of Minorca in 1756. She’d put the mental image away, as with the other memories of her Devon summers, but its brightness hadn’t faded on being fetched out again.

His nephew had ‘such a desire that all may have Liberty’, did he? Well, she might enjoy some liberty for herself while procuring his. It would give her purpose, at least for a while.

But, no, that even hadn’t been the reason for her decision. It was because she owed Martha. For a happiness. And the debt had been called in: ‘… as you too have a son …’ Because Martha agonized for a son as she, in a different way, had agonized for hers. Perhaps she need not fail Martha’s son as she had failed her own.

Then she stopped rummaging through excuses for what she was going to do and came up, somewhat shamefully, with the one that lay beneath all the others, the one that, she realized in that second, had finally made up her mind.

Because, if she didn’t do it, she’d be bored to death.

She stepped out from the arbour into sunlight and walked across the lawn towards the house to tell Joan to begin packing.