Taking Liberties. Diana Norman

gentlemen raised Diana’s languid hand to their face and dropped it, like hasty shoppers with a piece of fish; her female peers pecked at her cheek; inferiors bobbed and hurried away.

      No need to see them to their carriages, that was for Alice and Robert now.

      She was left alone. It was an unquiet, heavy room. On the great mantel, a frieze looted from Greece preserved death in marble as barbarians received the last spear-thrust from helmeted warriors in a riot of plunging horses. The red walls were noisy with the tableaux of battle, Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet. Mounted Stacpoole generals posed, sword aloft, at the head of their troops, cannons fired from ship to ship at Beachy Head and Quiberon Bay.

      And now France again. It had been no platitude to assure North it would be beaten, she was sure it would be, just as America would be; Aymer had always said that was what France was for, to be beaten by the English. ‘One Englishman can lick ten bloody Frenchman. And twenty bloody Americans. And a hundred bloody Irish.’ Though it was taking overlong to force America’s surrender she accepted his precept, just as she’d accepted his right to tyrannize his fiefdom through right of blood even while she abhorred the tyranny itself.

      I’m his creature, she thought.

      She walked to the windows to try and recapture the uplift of freedom she’d felt on leaving the chapel but the horizon beyond the lake marked a future she did not know what to do with.

      As Countess of Stacpoole, Aymer’s hostess, charity-giver, political supporter to his Tory placemen, his loyal behind-the-scenes electioneer and, at the last, his nurse, she had at least known employment. All gone now.

      She took in deep, hopeless breaths. She should be smelling roses, there was a neat mass of them below the terrace, but she couldn’t rid the stink of decay from her nostrils. Since his death they’d burned herbs but, for her, the odour of that jerking, gangrenous body still haunted the house, like his screams.

      His reliance on her had been shameless, demanding her presence twenty-four hours of the day, throwing clocks and piss-pots at doctors, even poor Robert, shrieking that he wanted only her to attend him – as if their marriage had been loving harmony.

      As if it had indeed been loving harmony, she had attended him twenty-four hours a day; expected to do no less. For three months she had never set foot outside the suite of rooms that were his.

      His nose had already been eaten away, now he’d begun to rot, new buboes appearing as if maggots had gathered in one squirming subcutaneous mass to try and get out through the skin. Before his brain went, he’d begged absolution from the very walls. Only the priest could give him that; her place had been to diminish his physical suffering as well as she could, and she and laudanum had done it – as much as it could be done.

      She’d thought she could watch judgementally the revenge inflicted on his body by the life he’d led, but she had been unable to resist pity, longing for him to die, for his own sake. Her thankfulness at his last breath had been more for his release than hers. Then had come the scurry of funeral arrangements.

      And now to find, after years of expectation of freedom, that Diana, Countess of Stacpoole, had died with the husband she loathed. Beloved wife of …

      I’m nothing without him. That was the irony. He’d defined her, not merely as his Countess, but as upholder of his honour, soother of the wounds he inflicted, underminer of his more terrible obsessions. He’d been her purpose, even if that purpose had been amelioration, sometimes sabotage, of his actions. Years of it. She had no other. Thirty-nine next birthday and she was now of no use to a living soul except to vacate the space she’d occupied.

      She heard screams and in her exhaustion turned automatically to go back to the sickroom but, of course, they were Alice’s. In view of the news from France, Robert, like a good courtier, should return to his place by the King immediately and Alice was lamenting as if her husband were off to battle rather than a palace.

      ‘Maman, Maman, come tell him he mustn’t leave or I shall go distraite.’

      Yes, well. Alice liked an audience for her hysterics. Was being an audience a purpose? No, merely a function. She left the room to perform it.

      To humour his wife, Robert said he would not go until tomorrow; the King would understand he had just buried his father.

      Even so, Alice did not see fit to recover until late evening; the advent of France into the war causing her to see danger everywhere. ‘You must ask the King to give you guards. John Paul Jones will try and capture you, like he did the Earl of Selkirk.’

      Alice, thought the Dowager, must be the only young woman who had not found that most recent raid by an American privateer a tiny bit thrilling. The papers had made much of it in apparent horror but the ghost of Robin Hood had been called up and, as always with the English weakness for daring, Mr Paul Jones’s brigandage was taking on a hue of romance.

      Robert said: ‘My dear, the raid was a failure.’

      Alice refused comfort. John Paul Jones, a Scotsman who’d joined the American side, was scouring his native coast to take an earl hostage. Robert was an earl. Ergo, John Paul Jones was out to capture Robert. ‘True, the Earl was absent on this occasion but his Countess was menaced. He took her silver service.’

      ‘I heard he returned it,’ the Dowager joined in. ‘In any case, we may comfort ourselves that Robert will be in London and not in a Scottish castle exposed to the sea. Mr Jones is hardly likely to sail up the Thames to get him.’

      Alice was not so sure; she was enjoying her horrors. It wasn’t until late evening that she remembered the letter and handed it to her mother-in-law.

      ‘You will forgive me for overlooking it, Mama. It carried my title of course … so peculiar, sent on from Paris, not that I read it … the impudence, I wondered to show it to you at all but Robert said … who is Martha Grayle?’

      Martha.

      Salt and sun on her face, bare feet, a shrimping net, terracottacoloured cliffs against blue sky …

      Careful not to show haste, the Dowager turned to the last page to see the signature and was caught by the final, disjointed paragraph. ‘… you are my long hope, dear soul … I am in great fear … as you too have a son … Your respectful servant, Martha Grayle (née Pardoe).’

      She looked up to find Alice and Robert watching her.

      Deliberately, she yawned. ‘I shall retire, I think. Goodnight, my dears.’

      ‘But will you not read the letter?’ Alice could hardly bear it.

      ‘In bed perhaps.’ Alice had waited to give it to her, she could now wait for a reaction to it. The whirligig of time brought in its petty revenges.

      Joan was nodding in a bedroom chair, waiting to undress her, but when the areas that couldn’t be reached by the wearer had been unbuttoned and unhooked, Diana told her to go to bed. ‘I will do the rest myself.’

      ‘Very well, my dear.’

      ‘Joan, do you remember Martha Pardoe?’

      ‘Torbay.’ The old woman’s voice was fond.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Married that Yankee and went off to Americy.’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Happy days they was.’

      She couldn’t wait for reminiscence. ‘Goodnight.’

      With her mourning robes draped around her shoulders, the Dowager picked up the letter that had circumvented the cessation of mail between rebel and mother countries. Somewhere on its long journey from Virginia to France to London to Bedfordshire it had received a slap of salt water so that the bottom left-hand quarter of each page was indecipherable.

      Martha had penned a superscription on its exterior page, presumably with a covering letter, for the unknown person in Paris who’d