Read Online Taking Liberties by Diana Norman - Free Book Online Page B

together: riot, demands, attempts to escape, oh dear, dear . . . but my hands are tied, do you see?’ Mr Commissioner Powell closed his books. ‘My advice is to send the lieutenant a nice parcel of comforts, I’m sure the governor . . .’
    The Dowager left the Sick and Hurt Office dissatisfied on her own account and oddly saddened on little Philippa Dapifer’s. There lay the trouble with chance encounters; one remained ignorant of an outcome. Her interest had been aroused, and with it her sympathy—less for the awful mother than for Sir Philip’s child, if it was the child, who had been set adrift in a city like Plymouth, full of sailors, to meet the fate of all lost young girls.
    Would the Hedley woman find her? And, if so, in what condition?
    Qualified as she was to know the damage done to mind as well as body by sexual violence, the fact that it might be being inflicted on a child even younger than she had been when it was inflicted on her was disturbing—she was surprised how much it disturbed her. It happened on the streets every day, possibly to thousands. Yet this was a case she knew about, it had been given a name, she had overheard its history. If the girl had survived that terrible voyage across the Atlantic, she’d already suffered enough.
    â€˜Be not curious in unnecessary matters,’ Ecclesiasticus said. The Dowager reminded herself that it was not her concern. She had her own problem; she could report only failure to Martha Grayle— always supposing it would be possible to report at all. Your son is in a Plymouth prison, Martha. It is better than the hulks .
    Yes, well.
    She stood for a while on the Admiralty steps, looking for her coach in the heavy Whitehall traffic. Tobias must have had trouble finding a place for it in which to wait for her.
    In view of her insistence, both Robert and Alice had eventually reconciled themselves to her departure on what Alice called ‘Mama’s visiting spree’. They had given her Tobias and Joan to take with her and allowed her the third best coach but no coachman, so Tobias had been transformed into a driver—a job he performed excellently, as he did everything.
    It had amused the Dowager that her son and daughter-in-law had stipulated—without actually using the word—that she return to Chantries for Christmas and settle down. It made her feel like Cinderella commanded to leave the ball by midnight or else . . . to quiet them, she had agreed to spend the Twelve Nights with them. As for settling down, well, she would see.
    Expecting London to be comparatively quiet with Society having retired to the country for the summer, she found it actually busier than ever, full of soldiers and baggage trains on their way to the ports for embarkation.
    A column of footguards marched past her, sending up dust, their Brown Bess flintlocks gleaming. A useless weapon, Aymer had called it, unreliable in bad weather and at anything over eighty yards’ range. Women and children ran beside them, some cheering, others weeping.
    She was suddenly oppressed by dull heat, crowds, dust and the doom to which all these men were going. The war was undoubtedly necessary—colonies could not be allowed to secede as and when they pleased or they would not be colonies—but how many of these soldiers would return from it? How many young men on both sides, how many children, would be parted forever from their mothers?
    I will not think of it. There is nothing I can do for any of them. After twenty-two years, I am allowed some liberty of my own, a little healing.
    The sea, she thought. I need to be near the sea and breathe clean, free air.
    She would go to Devon, the county of her ancestors which, unaccountably, her family had deserted for London and its environs. Not Torbay—there was no suitable house there and, in any case, she did not want to face the memory of the young Martha now that there was only failure to report to the