Taking Liberties

‘Damn you, I didn’t ask you to come.’

‘Yes you did,’ John Beasley said.

‘You didn’t have to.’

‘I said I was sick. Coaches make me puke. I didn’t say I didn’t want to come, I just said travel was a bugger. And the Plymouth press gangs might get me.’

‘They wouldn’t want you,’ she said. ‘Job’s blasted comforter, you are.’

It was unreasonable, she knew. She would have been sent mad by reassurance when there was so little reassurance to be had. But anybody was her kicking boy at that point so she berated Beasley for providing no comfort at all. He was morose – he was always morose – and refused to pretend to be sanguine about the journey’s outcome. He slouched in his corner, allowing his body to flop with every bounce of the coach, looking ill – he always looked ill – and watched her fidget.

‘You’ll ruin that satin,’ he said.

She kept rubbing her hands over her thighs and knees, up, down, up, down, stretching the delicate material and leaving a mark on it from the sweat of her palms. ‘It’s silk.’

‘Why di’n’t you bring your maid?’

‘Hildy’s mother’s dying. I couldn’t bring her.’ She scored her hands over her knees again and added nastily: ‘You’re all there was.’

She couldn’t rile him – his own manners were too surly to mind surliness in others – and she was forced to give up. The moment she stopped talking, she heard Philippa calling for her. Desperately she started again: ‘What you done with all your money, anyway?’

As with all the friends who’d supported her through distress and penury after Philip Dapifer’s death, she’d subsequently tried to make him rich by giving him shares in the mine, but money flew away from him: some into the hands of needy acquaintances; some down the drain that was his publishing business. Last night, to free him for this journey, she’d had to pay off the bailiffs occupying his rooms in Grub Street.

He shrugged. ‘Government keeps smashing my presses.’

She said, ‘I don’t blame it,’ not because that’s what she thought but because it was there to be said. Nevertheless, that the government’s antipathy to John Beasley ran as deep as his to the Tories was no surprise. He was against government on principle; he was against any authority.

Even Makepeace, a natural rebel herself, became impatient at the number and diversity of evils he attacked in his various publications: the King, Parliament – he’d written an article calling it ‘the most listless, loitering, lounging, corrupt assembly in Europe’ – the Church, judges, rotten boroughs, pocket boroughs, enclosures, high prices, press gangs, crimp houses, public executions and whippings, the oppression of the Irish and all Roman Catholics (though he loathed popery), the Excise, sweat-shops and workhouses.

On the American war, he had spread himself, calling for Lord North to recall his ‘butchers’ from their ‘slaughterhouse’, publicizing the fact that the British army didn’t scruple to let its Red Indians scalp the colonists and that ‘Americans have all rights to independence from the dunghill its oppressors have made of their own country’.

But, despite his calls for revolution, it was impossible, he said, to goad an England that had no revolutionaries of its own into revolution. Despite widespread poverty, despite the fact that the war was not going well, the English refused to rise to his call to overthrow their government. Its middle class infuriated him by indifference and its deprived masses seemed, he said, lulled by the opiate of the Poor Law that kept them alive. Occasionally they might riot but they would not rise.

His publications were constantly being suppressed and their printing presses destroyed. He’d been in prison four times for debt – she’d had to rescue him – twice for libel and once for sedition.

He was at liberty now only because John Wilkes, that equally libertarian but outrageously effective hornet, had stung the authorities so effectively on behalf of gadflies like Beasley that they were chary of losing even more popularity by swatting them.

He even insisted that Makepeace was exploiting her miners. She’d pointed to the village she and Hedley had built for them at Raby, a model of its kind. It didn’t satisfy him. ‘You bloody rich only keep poor people alive so they can fight your wars or make you richer.’

Yet she stuck to him; indeed could talk to him as she could to nobody else, and not just because he’d proved a rock in her time of necessity; there was something about him. Andra thought very well of him and, for all his monosyllabic loutishness, he was highly regarded in the coffee houses where he could count men like Dr Johnson and Joshua Reynolds among his friends.

Best of all, in their present situation, he was in touch with an entire network of those who didn’t fit into respectable society, people who lived metaphorically underground and emerged, pale and seedy as Beasley himself, to strike at authority before submerging again. If Philippa had fallen among thieves or into the hands of a sect or rebels or the Irish or any other thorns in the side of the establishment, then Beasley was the man to find her.

But, knowing this, Makepeace’s discontent chose to twist it against him. ‘Why don’t you mix with important people? I need influence.’

His mouth twisted, the nearest approach he could make to a smile. ‘Fell the wrong side o’ the bloody hedge this time, then, didn’t you?’

Oh God, he can’t understand. He doesn’t know; he doesn’t have children. He thinks this is ordinary horror – he thinks I’m feeling what he would if he was being dragged to gaol or hung over a cliff.

The childless, she thought enviously, had a limited experience of suffering, they saw it merely in terms of torture or famine or illness; they couldn’t take the leap outside that circle of Hell to the wasteland stretching beyond it for bereft parents. She was sharing this coach, this arctic, with the emotional equivalent of a Hottentot.

She wanted her mother, she wanted Betty, who’d been better than a mother, that black and mighty fulcrum she’d taken for granted, as she’d taken Susan Brewer and Philippa for granted, until Betty and her son Josh too had joined them on the boat for America.

Impossible to whip up resentment at Betty’s desertion because the desertion had been her own and, anyway, Betty was dead. ‘A sudden death,’ Susan had written three years ago. ‘She clutched her bosom and fell. We buried her like the Christian she was and surely the trumpets sounded for her on the other side as they did for Mr Standfast.’

I didn’t stand fast by her, I didn’t stand fast by any of them … young Josh with his talent as a painter … and this is my punishment.

‘I’m going to puke,’ Beasley said.

‘Do it out the window,’ she said, grimly. ‘We ain’t stopping.’

Arriving in Plymouth, they had trouble finding accommodation. Owing to the war, the town was stuffed with navy personnel: every house for rent was taken, and so was every room in its inns. In any case, a woman travelling without a female companion and with a man not her husband wasn’t a guest welcomed by any respectable hostelry.

It wasn’t until Makepeace slammed a purse full of guineas on the table of the Prince George on the corner of Stillman Street and Vauxhall Street that its landlord remembered the naval lieutenant in a back room who hadn’t paid his rent for three weeks. The lieutenant was evicted, Makepeace installed, John Beasley was put in an attic with Sanders, while the coach and horses went into the George’s stables which were big enough to accommodate them as well as the diligence that made a weekly trip back and forth to Exeter.

Under other circumstances, Makepeace would have liked Plymouth very much. More than any port in Britain, it most closely resembled America’s Boston in the quality of light bouncing off its encircling, glittering water onto limestone houses, large windows, slate roofs and the leaves of its elm-lined streets. There was a similar sense of unlimited fresh, salt air, the same smell of sea, fish, tar and sawn wood, even a flavour of Boston’s bloody-minded independence – despite a desperate siege, Plymouth had held resolutely for Parliament during the Civil War.

It was from Plymouth that Makepeace’s ancestors had set out in the Mayflower to the New World and the shuttle of trade between the two had never been lost. Plymouth’s merchantmen knew the coast of America from Newfoundland to New York better than she did, their owners sadly regretting that it was now enemy territory.

Many of Plymouth’s common people were regretting it too. This was a sailors’ town and, while Plymouth-launched ships were inflicting heavy damage on America’s fleet, the losses were not one-sided. Mourning bands and veiling were everywhere.

But since it must fight, Plymouth had rolled up its sleeves. By no means the biggest port in England – Liverpool and Bristol were larger, owing to their slave trade, while London outranked them all – it was Plymouth that directly faced the enemy when war broke out with France, Spain or America, and it geared itself up accordingly, as it had when the Armada came billowing up the Channel.

The streets were almost impassable for baggage trains bringing supplies to be shipped across the Atlantic to the army. Wounded ships limped into the Sound to be mended and sent out again; new ones were being built on the great slipways. Marines and militia paraded to the roll of drums on the gusty grass of the Hoe, just as they had in the days when Drake played bowls on it.

But to Makepeace it became a jungle where the shrill chatter of posturing apes echoed back from the darkness that hid her child. She watched the mouths of Admiralty clerks, corporation officials and harbourmasters as they made words, and could only gather that they were saying no.

Beasley had to interpret for her as to a bewildered child.

‘He says Riposte anchored in the Hamoaze in June. Her prisoners were put ashore and the militia marched them off to prison. He doesn’t know which prison, he says he doesn’t handle that end of it.’

At the local Sick and Hurt Office: ‘He’s got a record of two supercargo, one of them female, like they told you in London. He thinks they were separated from the other prisoners and told to wait on the quay until they could be dealt with but either they ran off or nobody bothered with them. Jesus Christ’ – this to the clerk – ‘no wonder you ain’t winning this bloody war.’

It was Sanders who, on Beasley’s secret instructions, made enquiries at the local coroner’s office. He came back, equally quietly, to say that while there had been several inquests in the last six weeks, two of them on drowned women, none of them had concerned the body of a girl of Philippa’s age.

‘Either of ’em Susan Brewer?’ Beasley asked quietly.

‘Could’ve been. They wasn’t named. Don’t think so, though.’

They asked at the churches, at watchmen’s stands, they questioned parish beadles and people in the street. They tried the Society for Distressed Foreigners, which turned out to be an attic in a private house containing a lone Lascar hiding from the press gangs.

To facilitate the search, they decided to divide: Beasley to contact publishers and book-sellers, who kept their fingers on the pulse of the town, as well as less respectable Plymouth inhabitants; Makepeace to visit the institutions.

Accompanied by Sanders, Makepeace knocked on the forbidding door of the local Orphanage for Girls in Stonehouse and was received by an equally forbidding-looking clergyman.

‘Yes,’ Reverend Hambledon told her, ‘we took in two girls in June, mother dead and their father lost when the Buckfast went down. However, they are younger than the one you describe.’

‘She’s young for her age,’ Makepeace said, desperately.