Taking Liberties

‘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.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_106b54d9-2900-54e6-86da-0cb110127996)

Two hundred and fifty miles north of Chantries, Makepeace Hedley was also about to receive a letter from America. Since it had been sent from New York, which was under British control, its voyage across the Atlantic had been more direct, though no quicker, than that of the one delivered to the Countess of Stacpoole the day before.

As with most of Newcastle’s post, it was dropped off at the Queen’s Head by the Thursday mail coach from London and was collected along with many other letters by Makepeace’s stepson, Oliver Hedley, on his way to work.

Further down the hill, Oliver stopped to buy a copy of the Newcastle Journal at Sarah Hodgkinson’s printing works.

‘Frogs have declared war,’ Sarah yelled at him over the clacking machines, but not as if it was of any moment; the news had been so long expected that she’d had a suitable editorial made up for some weeks ready to drop into place in the forme.

Oliver read the editorial quickly; its tone was more anticipatory than fearful. Wars were good for Newcastle’s trade in iron and steel, and mopped up its vagrants and troublemakers into the army. True, the presence of American privateers, now to be joined by French allies, meant that vessels sailing down the east coast to supply London’s coal were having to be convoyed but, since the extra ships were being built on the Tyne and Wear, it was likely that the area’s general prosperity could only increase.

Nevertheless Oliver detected a note of uneasiness in the editorial. It spread itself happily enough on the subject of French perfidy but was careful not to cast similar obloquy on the cause the French were joining. The Frogs were an old enemy and if they wanted war Newcastle was happy to oblige them. America was a different matter – on that subject the town was deeply divided. Indeed, when the proclamation of war with America had been read from the steps of the Mansion House two years before, it had been greeted with silence instead of the usual huzzas.

A strong petition had been sent to the government by the majority of Newcastle’s magistrates offering support in the prosecution of the war but the burgesses, under Sir George Saville, had sent an equally strong counter-petition deprecating it. And Sir George was not only a popular man, he was also an experienced soldier.

‘It’s civil war,’ he’d told Oliver’s father, ‘and no good will come of it. For one thing, we can’t maintain a supply line over three thousand miles for long.’

‘For another, it’s wrong,’ Andra Hedley had said.

At that stage, the majority of Americans would have forgone independence – indeed, still regarded themselves as subjects of King George III – for amelioration of the taxes and oppressive rules of trade which had caused the quarrel in the first place. ‘But they’ll not get it,’ Andra had prophesied. ‘The moment them lads in Boston chucked tea in t’harbour, Parliament saw it as an attack on property and yon’s a mortal sin to them struttin’ clumps. No chance of an olive branch after that.’

And he’d been right.

Oliver put the mail and the newspaper in his pocket as he went down the hill in his usual hopscotch fashion to keep his boots from muck evacuated by mooing, frightened herds on their way to the shambles. Under the influence of the sun, which was beginning to roll up its sleeves, the strong whiff of the country the animals brought with them would soon be overlaid by the greater majesty of lime, smoke, sewage and brewing. Coal- and glassworks were already sending out infinitesimal particles of smitch that, without the usual North Sea breeze – and there was none today – would add another thin layer to the city’s dark coating.

He hurried past new buildings noisily going up and old buildings equally noisily coming down, past clanging smithies and factories, past street-traders and idlers gathered round the pumps, all of them shouting. Weekday conversations in Newcastle-upon-Tyne had to be conducted at a pitch which suggested deafness on the part of those conversing. A lot of them were deaf, especially those (the majority) who spent their working lives in its foundries, metal yards and factories with their eardrums pounded by machinery that roared day and night. Consequently, they shouted.

Clamour reached its climax at the river, Newcastle’s artery. Cranes, coal rattling into the cargo holds of keels, ironworks, shipyards, anchor-makers … But, as he walked along the Quay, the cacophony assaulting Oliver’s ears was overridden by his stepmother’s high, feminine, gull-like squawk twisting through it like a Valkyrie swerving through battling soldiers to reach the dead.

There was always something. Today a careless wherry carrying pottery upriver had knocked into one of Makepeace’s keels and caused damage – luckily above its waterline.

She was staving off the wherryman’s murder at the hands of the keel’s skipper by holding back the keelman with his belt and remonstrating with the offender at the same time.

‘Whaat d’ye think ye’re playin’ at, ye beggor, tig ’n’ chasey? Ah’ll have ye bornt alive, so ah wull. Howay ta gaffor an’ explain yeself, ye bluddy gobmek. Hold still, ye buggor’ – this was to the keelman – ‘divvn’t Master Reed telt ye ‘bout tuen the kittle?’

Oliver shook his head in wonder. Tyne watermen were renowned for their ferocity; this skinny little woman was dealing with savages in their own language and subduing them. While a new spirit of philanthropy was bringing charity, education and Sunday schools to Newcastle it had seemed impossible that such enlightenment could touch the dark souls of those who worked on its river. His stepmother, however, had forced the men who shipped her coal to join a benefit society, the Good Intent, where godliness, rules and, in the last resort, fines were having a favourable effect on their swearing, drinking and fighting. The popular Newcastle maxim that keelmen feared nothing except a lee shore had been altered to: ‘Nowt but a lee shore – and Makepeace Hedley.’

The wherryman having been dispatched to the Quay to report to her rivermaster, and the keelman, sulkily, to his repairs, Makepeace waved to her stepson and came ashore to kiss him.

Possibly the richest woman in Northumberland, she resembled what her mine manager called ‘an ambulatin’ sceercraa’. Her long black coat was old and the tricorn into which she bundled her red hair even older. She’d told Oliver once that femininity was a handicap in a masculine world; to be accepted by other coal-owners as well as by her subordinates she had to play a character. Men liked to make a mystery of business, she said, and the fact that any woman of intelligence could master it maddened them. But as long as she seemed an oddity, she said, men didn’t resent her intrusion, or no more than they would resent a male competitor; she was merely a quirk of nature, an act of God, to be accepted with a resigned shrug. Eccentricity, she said, was sexless.

He supposed she was right. Newcastle had a surprising number of successful female entrepreneurs – the printer from whom he’d just bought his newspaper among them – and he wouldn’t want to bed any of them.

Nevertheless, Oliver appreciated beauty and was offended by his stepmother’s aesthetic crime. Not that Makepeace was beautiful; she was approaching forty and her red hair was beginning to sprout the occasional strand of grey, but, dressed up and with a prevailing wind, she could look extremely presentable. Her smile, when she used it – and she was using it now as she came towards him – was better than beautiful, it was astounding.

He owed a great deal to this woman, not just his father’s happiness in marriage but the wealth brought to them all by her accidental ownership of the land on which coal was now being mined on a vast scale.

For Makepeace and Andra Hedley, their unsought meeting was the stuff of legend, to be recalled again and again: she, a benighted American-born widow with only a title deed won at the gaming tables to her name, asking for shelter at the moorland house of Andra Hedley, a widower, equally impoverished but with the knowledge to capitalize on her one asset.

Together they’d exploited the rich seam of coal that lay beneath her land. Thanks to her, Andra, a former miner himself, had been able to build a village for miners that was a model of decent living.

Thanks also to her, the Hedley shipping office here on the Quay was a new and graceful building, employing clerks who worked in the light of a great oriel window that ran three storeys from roof to ground. And thanks to her, he, Oliver, had been raised from the position of a young lawyer with few clients to the directorship of one of the biggest mining companies in Newcastle, able to own a fine house and fill it with fine things.

More than that, this stepmother had been prepared to love him from the first, and he’d come to love her.

Lately, though, he’d begun to fear that her means were becoming her ends. The difficulties and setbacks she’d faced in a crowded life had given Makepeace the right to admire herself for overcoming them but now the determination that had enabled her to do so was becoming overbearing. Her boast that she spoke her mind was more often than not a euphemism for rudeness. She expressed an opinion on everything and showed little respect for anyone else’s. She was in danger of becoming an autocratic besom.

Missing Dada, Oliver thought. The harshness he’d noticed in Makepeace had become prevalent in the three months since Andra Hedley had taken himself off to France to work with the chemist Lavoisier on investigating the properties of air.

Oliver knew himself to be more than capable of running the shipping end of the Hedley enterprise – very much wanted to – and his uncle Jamie, Andra’s brother, was equally capable of overseeing the mining operation up at Raby. Makepeace, however, refused to give up control of either and was exhausting herself and everybody else in the process.

His father and only his father, as Oliver knew, could have made her take a holiday – nobody else would dare – but since Andra was not there and she missed him badly, his absence merely added to her self-imposed burdens and her tendency towards despotism was compounded.

Her smile faded as she closed in. ‘What?’