Taking Liberties

‘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.’