Taking Liberties. Diana Norman

CHAPTER SIX

      John Beasley appeared at the head of the Prince George’s stairs. He’d found a wooden leg and a crutch from somewhere; the first was strapped to his bent left knee inside his breeches, the second tucked under his left armpit. He was defiant. ‘Either of you going to help me down these bloody stairs?’

      It was Makepeace who guided him down – Sanders was helpless, holding on to the newel post, almost sobbing.

      ‘What you do?’ she asked, grimly. ‘Trip up a Chelsea Pensioner?’

      ‘I ain’t being pressed for you or anybody. The landlord got ’em for me.’

      ‘Fat lot of help you’ll be,’ she said. But she was touched; she hadn’t realized how frightened of impressment he’d been, probably rightly. He was a good friend. Ridiculous, but a good friend. And his grunts as he hopped across the Halfpenny Bridge to Dock – the man on the tollgate was most concerned – made her laugh for the first time in two weeks.

      Dock, however, was not amusing. It was vast. Since the first spades dug the first foundations of William Ill’s Royal Dockyard, it had sprouted wet docks, dry docks and slipways around which had sprung up warehouses for rigging, sails and stores, rope-walks and mast-yards, all in turn giving rise to houses for men to run them. It was now bigger than Plymouth, as if a monstrous oedema had outgrown the body on which it was an accretion.

      Their landlord had warned them. ‘Over two hundred inns, they do say, if so be you can name ’em such.’

      From the vantage of the bridge they could see spacious, treelined streets but tucked in alleys behind them, like stuffing coming through the back of an otherwise elegant chaise-longue, were lath and plaster tenements spreading in a mazed conglomeration as far as the eye could see.

      ‘Bugger,’ Beasley said, looking at it.

      It was a landscape Makepeace knew. Her dockside tavern in Boston had been a clean, hospitable model of respectability but it had stood, a Canute-like island, against an encroaching sea of gambling hells, gin parlours, brothels, the tideline of filth that marked every port in the world.

      She was well acquainted with Dock without setting foot in it. And she knew something else; her daughter was dead.

      Whatever the circumstances, Philippa would have escaped from the wasteland of flesh and spirit that was here. However naive, the girl was intelligent; even penniless she’d have found some official, some charity, to send word to her mother on her behalf.

      It was something Makepeace had known from the first but it had taken recognition of this view, this seagulled, mast-prickled, rowdy, ragged-roofed agglomeration of chaos and order, vitality and disease, this other Boston, to drive it into her solar plexus with the force of a mallet.

      She kept walking forward, but as an automaton in which the clockwork had yet to run down.

      There was a quayside with bollards. Beasley sank onto one, complaining of his knee rubbing raw. Makepeace walked stiffly on, past a pleasant, open-windowed inn and into the mouth of an alley behind it.

      Yes, here it was. Her old enemy. Unraked muck, runnels of sewage. A door swung open to spill out an unsteady woman smelling of gin. Further along, some girls in an upper window were shrilly encouraging a man who headed for the door below them, already unbuttoning his fly.

      Suppose, argued Makepeace’s Puritan upbringing desperately, suppose she’s too ashamed, too ruined, to come home?

      Howay to that, answered the older Makepeace, she knows I love her regardless …

      Does she know that? What does she know of me these last years except from the letters I’ve sent her? What do I know of her, except from the dutiful replies?

      She felt a tug on her skirt. A waif, sitting in the gutter, its sex indistinguishable by its rags, reached out a filthy, fine-boned small hand. ‘Penny for bub and grub, lady, penny for bub and grub.’

      It gave a funny little cough, much like Philippa had always done when she was nervous, so that Makepeace cupped its face in her hands and turned it towards her. Perhaps, perhaps …

      But, of course, it wasn’t Philippa; she’d known it wasn’t – the child was far too young. She began to say: ‘Have you seen …?’ but the sentence she’d repeated and repeated these last days died in her mouth, as this child would die, as Philippa had already died. Her knees folded suddenly and for a moment she crouched in the alley, the fingers of one hand on its cobbles to steady herself.

      Andra, I need you now. Take me home, let me hold my little girls and keep them safe for ever and ever. I’ve lost her, Andra. I’ve lost Philip’s child that I never understood because I never understood her. I can’t bear the pain on my own. Where are you?

      The small beggar watched incuriously as Makepeace dragged herself upright and, fumbling for her handkerchief to wipe off the dirt, found some coins, dropped them into the waiting claw and went back the way she had come.

      John Beasley was twisting frantically round on his bollard. Catching sight of her he raised the crutch, pointing with it to an old man sitting on a neighbouring bollard. ‘He’s seen her. He saw her.’

      For a moment she didn’t believe him. Don’t let me hope again. Then she ran forward.

      ‘Tell her,’ Beasley said. ‘He saw the Riposte come in, didn’t you? Tell her.’

      ‘That I did,’ the old man said.

      Boston had these, too: palsied old mariners, more sea water than blood in their veins and nothing to do but watch, with the superciliousness of experts, the comings and goings of other sailors, other ships.

      ‘Saw the prisoners brought ashore, didn’t you? June it was. Stood on this very quay, they did. Tell her.’ Beasley looked round the stone setts as if Christ’s sandalled foot had touched them. ‘Same bloody quay.’

      ‘Very same quay,’ the old man agreed.

      ‘A girl round about ten or eleven, he says. And a boy.’

      ‘Powder monkey, I reckon. Always tell a powder monkey. Black hands.’

      Beasley couldn’t wait. He’d heard it already, in slow Devonian. ‘They were put to one side while the militia came for the prisoners. An officer told them to wait where they were ’til he’d finished seeing to the men. Nobody paid them attention, did they? And the boy slipped off.’

      The old man nodded. ‘Diddun want no more o’ the navy, I reckon.’

      ‘But what did the girl do? Tell her what the girl did.’ In an aside to Makepeace, he said: ‘His name’s Packer. Able Seaman Packer.’

      The old man snickered. ‘Like I said, she were wunnerful fond of one of the prisoners. Blackie, he was. Black as the Earl of Hell’s weskit. Kept hollerin’ to ’un she did and he were hollerin’ back.’

      ‘But what did she do?’ insisted Beasley. ‘Tell her what she did.’

      ‘Prisoners was lined up,’ Able Seaman Packer said, slowly. ‘Job lot, Yankees mostly. Hunnerd or more. Militia got ’em into longboats and made ’em pull down the Narrows, round Stonehouse towards Millbay. And the liddle maid, she ran along the bank after they, far as she could ’til she come to the watter, so then she makes for the bridge, still hollerin’ to the nigger, tryin’ to follow him, like.’

      ‘But she came back, didn’t she?’

      A nod. ‘She come back. Liddle while later, that was. Girnin’ fit to bust.’

      ‘Crying,’ translated Beasley. ‘She was crying.’

      ‘Wouldn’t let her over the bridge, see. Hadn’t got a ha’penny, see.’ Satisfaction bared teeth like lichened tombstones. ‘Right and proper, too. Comin’ over here, usin’