Taking Liberties

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