Taking Liberties

‘It’s war, Missus. The French have declared.’ He took her hands and she clutched them for support.

‘And no word from your dada, I suppose.’

‘No. At least, I don’t think so …’ He was, he realized, holding an unexplored bundle of the day’s mail under his arm and together they hurried into the office and up to her room to riffle through it.

There was no letter from France. And now there wouldn’t be; the ports were closed for the duration of the war.

Makepeace began striding up and down the room. ‘I told him. Didn’t I write that mule-headed goober? Come home, I said. There’ll be war, I said. You’ll get fixed like a bug in molasses. You wait ’til he gets back, I’ll larrup that damn man ’til he squawks …’

When she wasn’t scolding her employees in broad Northumbrian, Makepeace could speak English without an accent but in times of distress she reverted to pure American.

Oliver sat down while she tried, through rage, to dissipate a worry he considered needless; it was inconvenient that Andra Hedley should be in Paris at such a time but he was in no danger. The position held by the people he was with would ensure nothing happened to him.

Sun coming in through the great window provided the rare luxury of warmth to a spartan office, its new oak panelling still undarkened by the Newcastle air. Apart from an escritoire with its pigeon-holes neatly docketed, there was a table, only one chair – it was to his stepmother’s advantage to make her visitors stand while she sat – and a good, but worn, Isfahan rug on the floor.

Oliver started sorting through the letters while Makepeace raved on: ‘I’ll go fetch him myself, that’s for sure. I’ll get one of the colliers to take me over to … to … where’s somewhere neutral? Flushing, I’ll go to Flushing and get a coach to Paris and drag him home. I’ll give that goddam Frenchman … what’s the name of the bugger? Lavabo?’

‘Lavoisier.’

‘I’ll give him gip, him and his experiments.’

‘Missus.’ Oliver’s voice was gentle.

‘What?’

‘I doubt the pair of them are even aware war’s been declared. They’re scientificals, they’d not notice a thunderbolt. Even if Dada does know, he won’t think it’s important compared to what he’s doing. If he can find a way to stop explosions from fire-damp …’

She quietened. ‘I want him home, Oliver.’

Did she think he didn’t? His father was one of those rare people whose very presence made one feel safe, possibly because Andra Hedley wanted everybody to be safer, especially those who worked in coal mines. As a child, Oliver had learned that he had to share his father’s attention with his father’s obsession to find a way to neutralize the gases that caused underground explosions.

Now Makepeace was having to do the same. Correspondence with the French chemist who’d discovered oxygen had drawn Andra to France, convinced that the disastrous coming-together of gas and flame might be overcome if he could understand the properties of the air that carried them.

‘We all miss him, Missus,’ Oliver said, ‘but he’d be worse off crossing the Channel than staying where he is. So would you – a collier’d be taken by the privateers quicker than spit. Then there’s the borders, they’ll close those. And the Dutch and the Flemings ain’t any too fond of us just now, what with the navy stopping their ships …’

‘What’s to do then?’ She was irritable.

‘Howay, lass,’ he said, imitating his father. He got up to put his arm round her. ‘The war can’t last much longer.’

‘Be over by Christmas, will it? Another Christmas? We’ve damn well had two already.’

He’d never quite known where she stood on the war; his father was all for granting America her independence, and so was he, but Makepeace never joined their discussions. Perhaps she agreed so strongly that it didn’t need saying, perhaps she had reservations – it was American patriots who had driven her out of Boston. But on one thing she never wavered: America couldn’t be beaten. ‘King George ain’t going to hold that country if it don’t want to be held.’

Oliver wasn’t so sure; viewed from the industrial ramparts of Newcastle the ill-equipped farmers who made up General Washington’s army appeared as men fighting for a medieval inheritance. This, however, was not the time to say so. He sought inspiration, and found it.

‘Ben Franklin,’ he said.

Andra Hedley and Benjamin Franklin had become mutual admirers when they’d met in London before the war began and hostilities between their two countries had not lessened their regard, nor had their correspondence ceased when Franklin moved to Paris to become America’s agent in France. It was Franklin, indeed, who’d put Andra in touch with Lavoisier.

‘Oliver, you ain’t the cabbage-head you look.’ He’d won his stepmother’s approval. ‘Diplomatic channels, that’s the ticket. They won’t stop those. I’ll get young Ffoulkes to contact Ben and set up a lazy … what is it?’

‘Laissez-passer.’

‘One of them. Get him back under a flag of truce. We’ll have him home quicker’n Hell scorches feathers.’

While she elaborated on the matter, he turned back to the mail and saw that in their haste they’d overlooked the letter from New York.

Wordlessly, he held it out and she snatched it from him.

Of the many surprising facets to Makepeace Hedley, the one Oliver found most incomprehensible, was her relationship with Philippa, her daughter by her first marriage. Early on, when the child was seven years old, Makepeace had allowed Philippa’s American godmother, Susan Brewer, to take the girl home with her to Boston. Philippa hadn’t come back; it seemed she didn’t want to.

The opening of hostilities between America and Britain had caused a hiatus in news of both Susan and Philippa and this, alongside the fact that most of the fighting was in Massachusetts, had – somewhat late in the day – awakened Makepeace to her daughter’s danger.

She’d had to be restrained from sailing off across the Atlantic in one of her coaling fleet’s vessels in order to see what was happening for herself. Undoubtedly she would have done, except that word came in time to say that Susan and Philippa had left Boston and were safely settled in British-held New York.

Oliver watched his stepmother flop onto the oriel sill to read a letter that had, from the look of it, undergone a rough passage. She’d taken off the dreadful tricorn and her hair had escaped from the cap beneath so that the sun turned it into a hazy, auburn frame around her head. He felt a second’s jealousy on behalf of the mother who’d died giving birth to him. Could she have competed in such variety with this woman?

‘Oh, Oliver,’ she said, looking up, ‘they’re coming home. Susan don’t reckon New York to be safe any longer. They’ll be here. Susan sent this by the mail packet but they were going to sail for England right after she wrote, almost immediate.’

Her pleasure demanded his, yet Oliver thought of the Atlantic, the thousands of miles of sea that had become the battleground of two navies, now to be joined by a third.

‘Um,’ he said.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No, it’s all right. Listen … “You will remember Captain Strang and the Lord Percy … ” She looked up: ‘That’s the frigate brought Susan and me and my first husband to England, a sound craft she is, and Strang’s a fine captain.

“He sails for London on Friday and Philippa and I with her. The Percy, you will remember, is a dispatch carrier and Captain Strang assures me he has no orders to give battle but will make for England as speedily as may be so that, with God’s mercy, I shall deliver your daughter safely to you in six weeks.”’

Makepeace blew out her cheeks. ‘Phew. That’s a relief.’

Her stepson saw that happy memories of the Lord Percy made the vessel invulnerable as far as she was concerned. ‘Good news, Missus,’ he said. ‘When’s she due?’

‘Most any day.’ Makepeace scanned the last page. ‘Strang’ll drop anchor in the Pool like he did before. Maybe I can go meet …’

She whimpered. Her face bleached so that her freckles looked suddenly green. Oliver took the letter from her hand before it could drop. Beneath a bold, curly signature, ‘Your devoted friend, Susan Brewer’, was a date. ‘March 2, 1778.’

He met his stepmother’s appalled eyes, went to his knees and held her against him. ‘It don’t mean … very well, the letter’s been delayed but in that case perhaps so’s the Percy. There’s maybe another letter floundering around the seas somewhere telling us she’d changed her mind, maybe Strang couldn’t take the two of them after all, maybe Susan decided to wait for better weather.’

But … four months, he thought; Susan should have written again, there should’ve been news one way or another in four months.

Makepeace didn’t hear him. She was being assailed by certainty. God had drowned her daughter. Philippa and Susan had set off from New York and not arrived. Somewhere on the voyage, the Lord Percy had gone down.

It seemed inevitable now, as if she had known it in advance and allowed it to happen. Because of all the years she had let pass without seeing Philippa or summoning her home from America, God had chosen the ultimate punishment.

I didn’t go to her. I didn’t fetch her back. Andra wanted me to, but I didn’t.

It was as if her daughter had been calling to her across the Atlantic in a voice that she’d been too busy to hear, allowing it to be subsumed in work, her marriage, the birth of other daughters.

Guilt snatched at a rag to cover itself. She didn’t want to come back; she wrote she’d rather stay with Susan in America.