Taking Liberties. Diana Norman

time, I suppose. But it’s grown so it’s … yes, it’s another town.’

      ‘Then that’s where we’ll go tomorrow.’ Makepeace closed her eyes for a moment. ‘I think I’ll get to bed. I don’t want anything to eat.’

      The two men watched her go.

      ‘She can’t stand much more,’ Sanders said.

      ‘She’ll have to,’ said Beasley. ‘We’re never going to find that girl. Or Susan Brewer. They went down with the bloody boat – if they were ever on it in the first place.’

      ‘I don’t think that’s right, Mr Beasley,’ Sanders said. ‘There was a young girl landed here, we know that. Well, how many children would be on a warship, eh? It’s got to be Miss Philippa. About Miss Susan I don’t know.’

      ‘Yere you are, my dearrs. Mrs Hedley not eatin’ tonight?’ The landlord, John Bignall, had brought their food. An enormously fat man – he was known for his ability to bounce troublemakers out of the door by using his stomach as a battering ram – he ran a good inn and had warmed to these, his newest guests, in the days since they’d been with him.

      Makepeace he’d decided was respectable but strange – for one thing, she allowed her coachman to eat at the same table and at the same time as herself. Curious about those whose provenance mystified him, he’d learned something of Makepeace’s by plying Sanders with after-hours ale. Immediately, his sympathy had been engaged. ‘Poor little maid being chased by they American pirates across the ocean,’ he said. ‘Enough to make any soul lose its wits.’

      ‘I can see from your sad faces as you an’t had no more luck finding that little maid than yesterday,’ he said now.

      ‘No,’ Beasley told him. ‘We’re going to try Dock tomorrow.’

      ‘Iss fay, I was thinking of Dock, plenty of places in Dock,’ Bignall said.

      ‘What sort of places?’

      The landlord tapped his nose. ‘Ah, that’s why I been slow to mention ’un to Mrs Hedley. If so be the maid’s in Dock, ’tis mebbe better she an’t found at all.’

      ‘She knows,’ Beasley said. ‘She still wants her found.’

      ‘Fine woman, that. No side to her.’ The innkeeper finished putting dishes on the table. ‘Good luck to ee then, an’ mind the press gangs. My brother-in-law from Bovey Tracey, he was a tailor. Three year ago he took a dress coat to Dock as a cap’n had ordered. Us bain’t seen ’un since.’

      ‘Jesus,’ Beasley said, watching him go. ‘Missus doesn’t realize. I’ve been looking over my bloody shoulder for a week.’

      ‘Me and all,’ Sanders said.

      Acting on behalf of a seriously undermanned navy, the wartime Impressment Service was ubiquitous throughout the country but its greatest activity was in the ports, its gangs waiting behind corners like lurking octopuses to haul in unwary passers-by into His Majesty’s service.

      Both Beasley and Sanders, neither of whom possessed the exemption certificates carried by men in protected trades, had been at risk merely walking along a Plymouth street, and knew it. Dock was likely to be even more dangerous.

      ‘I got better things to do with my life than get beaten and buggered for the rest of it,’ Beasley said.

      ‘Beggin’ your pardon, Mr Beasley, but I don’t intend to. There’s a lot I’d do for Missus but I got a wife and childer. I ain’t going with her to Dock. I’ll go round some more places here.’

      ‘I suppose I could dress up as a woman,’ Beasley said gloomily.

      Sanders’s gravity flickered. ‘Can’t say you got the bubbies for it.’ Then his face returned to its usual impassivity. ‘Cheer up, sir. We’ll find ’em.’

      Beasley just sighed.

       CHAPTER FIVE

      When the Dowager remarked, and meant it, that Mount Edgcumbe’s prospect was as fine as any she had seen, Admiral Lord Edgcumbe said: ‘Thank you, ma’am. The Duke of Medina Sidonia is supposed to have been good enough to say the same when he sailed past at the head of the Armada. He mentioned that he was resolved to have it for his own when he won England.’ There was a well-rehearsed pause. ‘He was disappointed.’

      A legend worth repeating, and Lord Edgcumbe obviously repeated it often, but Diana believed it; the Spanish fleet had indeed swept past the slope of the wooded deer park in which she stood looking out to sea, while the house commanding it was enviably beautiful.

      She turned to her left and shaded her eyes to stare across the river that separated her from Plymouth. ‘So that is Devon and we are in Cornwall.’

      ‘No, ma’am. This used to be Cornwall, the Hamoaze markin’ the division, but it is now Devon. A fifteenth-century ancestor of mine married an heiress from across the way who brought with her the property of the ferry. It would have been inconvenient to have a county boundary splittin’ the estate so …’

      ‘So he moved it,’ she said, smiling. Again, it wasn’t bombast. She’d asked, he’d answered; the Edgcumbes had no need to embroider history in which their name was already sewn large. Hardly a land or sea battle in which an Edgcumbe hadn’t fought like a tiger – to be suitably rewarded. Yet her host’s father had been the first to recognize Joshua Reynolds’s genius, while the Mozart this battle-scarred sailor had played for her last night had been as pretty a performance as any she’d heard from an amateur.

      Never having penetrated so far into the South-West, she had expected, in her cosmopolitan way, to find its nobility embarrassingly provincial. Yet it appeared she had stepped back to the Renaissance and the venturing days of Elizabeth, when men of action were also dilettantes and vice versa.

      Lady Edgcumbe too was, as ever, a relief, hospitable without being overwhelming, and with a confidence in her pedigree that showed in her choice of dress, which was eccentric but comfortable.

      The Dowager would have forgiven an admiral overseeing the naval movements of one of the busiest ports in the country for being too occupied to pay attention to his guest but, like Aymer, like most aristocratic holders of office that she knew, Lord Edgcumbe saw no reason to curtail in war too many of the activities he had enjoyed in peacetime. His otter- and foxhounds were being kept in readiness for the hunting season, and he entertained.

      Both he and his wife had greeted her as if it were perfectly normal for a widow to go visiting so soon after her husband’s funeral. Admiral Edgcumbe was a distant cousin of the Stacpooles, though his and the Earl’s acquaintance had been based on their professional meetings – Edgcumbe’s as a high-ranking admiral, the Earl’s as a Secretary of State. Their friendship was for his Countess, formed during the times they had stayed at Chantries.

      The visits had not been reciprocated. Despite numerous requests for the Earl and Countess to come to Devon, Aymer had refused them all. ‘Damned if I’m venturing into here-be-dragons country to stay among a lot of canvas-climbers. Ruins the complexion, all that salt. Look at Edgcumbe’s – leathery as a tinker’s arse.’

      Though nothing was said outright, Diana suspected that they had seen enough of her marriage to commiserate politely with her on the Earl’s death but not as if she were expected to be inconsolable. ‘Of course you need a change of air after all you’ve been through,’ Lucy Edgcumbe had said, with what Diana construed as double meaning. ‘We are so very pleased that your first sight of Devon is with us.’

      She was grateful to them, and pleased with this part of Devon, with the marriage of land and sea and the dark moorland that brooded behind it.

      For the first time in years she breathed in the air of outgoingness, of infinite possibility. There was something for her here. Not