Taking Liberties. Diana Norman

windows, slate roofs and the leaves of its elm-lined streets. There was a similar sense of unlimited fresh, salt air, the same smell of sea, fish, tar and sawn wood, even a flavour of Boston’s bloody-minded independence – despite a desperate siege, Plymouth had held resolutely for Parliament during the Civil War.

      It was from Plymouth that Makepeace’s ancestors had set out in the Mayflower to the New World and the shuttle of trade between the two had never been lost. Plymouth’s merchantmen knew the coast of America from Newfoundland to New York better than she did, their owners sadly regretting that it was now enemy territory.

      Many of Plymouth’s common people were regretting it too. This was a sailors’ town and, while Plymouth-launched ships were inflicting heavy damage on America’s fleet, the losses were not one-sided. Mourning bands and veiling were everywhere.

      But since it must fight, Plymouth had rolled up its sleeves. By no means the biggest port in England – Liverpool and Bristol were larger, owing to their slave trade, while London outranked them all – it was Plymouth that directly faced the enemy when war broke out with France, Spain or America, and it geared itself up accordingly, as it had when the Armada came billowing up the Channel.

      The streets were almost impassable for baggage trains bringing supplies to be shipped across the Atlantic to the army. Wounded ships limped into the Sound to be mended and sent out again; new ones were being built on the great slipways. Marines and militia paraded to the roll of drums on the gusty grass of the Hoe, just as they had in the days when Drake played bowls on it.

      But to Makepeace it became a jungle where the shrill chatter of posturing apes echoed back from the darkness that hid her child. She watched the mouths of Admiralty clerks, corporation officials and harbourmasters as they made words, and could only gather that they were saying no.

      Beasley had to interpret for her as to a bewildered child.

      ‘He says Riposte anchored in the Hamoaze in June. Her prisoners were put ashore and the militia marched them off to prison. He doesn’t know which prison, he says he doesn’t handle that end of it.’

      At the local Sick and Hurt Office: ‘He’s got a record of two supercargo, one of them female, like they told you in London. He thinks they were separated from the other prisoners and told to wait on the quay until they could be dealt with but either they ran off or nobody bothered with them. Jesus Christ’ – this to the clerk – ‘no wonder you ain’t winning this bloody war.’

      It was Sanders who, on Beasley’s secret instructions, made enquiries at the local coroner’s office. He came back, equally quietly, to say that while there had been several inquests in the last six weeks, two of them on drowned women, none of them had concerned the body of a girl of Philippa’s age.

      ‘Either of ’em Susan Brewer?’ Beasley asked quietly.

      ‘Could’ve been. They wasn’t named. Don’t think so, though.’

      They asked at the churches, at watchmen’s stands, they questioned parish beadles and people in the street. They tried the Society for Distressed Foreigners, which turned out to be an attic in a private house containing a lone Lascar hiding from the press gangs.

      To facilitate the search, they decided to divide: Beasley to contact publishers and book-sellers, who kept their fingers on the pulse of the town, as well as less respectable Plymouth inhabitants; Makepeace to visit the institutions.

      Accompanied by Sanders, Makepeace knocked on the forbidding door of the local Orphanage for Girls in Stonehouse and was received by an equally forbidding-looking clergyman.

      ‘Yes,’ Reverend Hambledon told her, ‘we took in two girls in June, mother dead and their father lost when the Buckfast went down. However, they are younger than the one you describe.’

      ‘She’s young for her age,’ Makepeace said, desperately.

      She was shown into the dining hall – it was breakfast-time – where forty-two children in identical grey calico uniforms sat on the benches of a long table eating porridge from identical bowls with identical spoons. High windows let in bars of light that shone on heads whose hair was hidden beneath all-covering identical grey calico caps.

      The room was undecorated except for some embroidered Bible texts on the bare walls. It smelled of whale-oil soap.

      Reverend Hambledon ushered Makepeace in and forty-two spoons clattered down as forty-two girls stood to attention. She was led along the rows. ‘This is Jane, who came to us in June. And this is Joan. Say good morning to Mrs Hedley, girls.’

      Two mites chorused: ‘Good morning, Mrs Hedley.’

      Reverend Hambledon’s voice did not alter pitch as he added: ‘Sometimes they come in with unsuitable names and we rechristen them. Most had not been christened at all.’

      Holding back tears, Makepeace smiled at the little girls and shook her head.

      When she got outside, Sanders said: ‘Bad, was it, Missus?’

      ‘I’d like to adopt the lot of ’em,’ she said.

      There’d been no evidence of unkindness there, but none of kindness either. The porridge they’d been eating did not smell unappetizing but nor did it attack the nose with pleasure. The children did not look unhappy yet they weren’t happy.

      What had stabbed her was that, as she’d entered the dining room, every head had turned to her before expectation died in the eyes, as it died in her own. Well, there was little she could do about that but she would send money to Reverend Hambledon on the understanding that it was spent on dolls and pretty dresses.

      She found herself longing for the two little girls she’d left behind in Northumberland. God spare them from the unloving wilderness in which the children she’d just left had to exist.

      ‘I tell you this much, Peter,’ she said, ‘I’m going to let Andra and Oliver run the business from now on. When we get home I’m going to stay home.’

      Sanders nodded without conviction; he knew her.

      But she meant it. She was being punished for neglecting her eldest child. Philip Dapifer’s accusations haunted her dreams. She would not do the same by Sally and Jenny. And she would take in some of those poor scraps she’d just seen, dress them in colours, let them run free over the Northumberland hills. Oh yes, when she got home …

      It occurred to her sharply that, if she did not find Philippa and Susan, she could never go home. How could she abandon the place holding the vague promise that they might turn up one day? She would have to stay, like a dog waiting for ever by the grave of its lost master …

      She balled her fists and knocked them together so that the knuckles hurt. Cross that bridge when you get to it, Makepeace Hedley. You may not have to.

      She returned to the search.

      She scanned rows of uniformed children in another orphanage, shaven-headed children in the hospital and dispensaries, children spinning yarn in the Home for Foundlings, children knitting stockings in the workhouse, picking oakum in the prison, young women chanting their catechism in the Asylum for Deserted Girls, dumb and staring wrecks in the local bedlam.

      ‘Dear God, Peter,’ she said, crying, ‘where d’they all come from?’

      ‘It’s a sailors’ town, Missus. Wages of sin.’

      She began to break down and at nights Sanders had to assist her, almost too tired to walk, back to the inn.

      Beasley had no success either.

      They sat in facing settles across a table in a dark corner of the George’s large, low-beamed taproom. The windows were open, allowing in the scent of grass and the calls of men on the inn’s skittle ground. Further away, someone was playing a fiddle.

      ‘I reckon we’re looking in the wrong place,’ Beasley said, when they’d ordered food. ‘The Riposte anchored in the Hamoaze, which is over that way.’ He jerked his head