Taking Liberties

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?’