Free Taking Liberties by Diana Norman

mother Martha had become. T’Gallants, that was the place. Home of the founding Pomeroy. She had never seen it, but it was on the sea. It had been tenanted for years but its lease was falling due—she had looked it up in the Chantries property book before she came away.
    Diana smiled to herself; had she unconsciously intended to go there from the first? Yes, there were friends in the area. The Edgcumbes would put her up while she investigated. Devon would serve very well for her escape from the dowagerhood Alice and Robert wanted to inflict on her.
    The fact that both the Edgcumbe home and T’Gallants were only a few miles from Plymouth had nothing to do with the matter.

Chapter Four
    BY the time she set off for Plymouth, Makepeace had clutched at the straw of hope that the young girl landed with the American prisoners at Plymouth was her daughter, and was managing to keep herself afloat on it.
    Of course the child was Philippa. The fact that, if it was indeed her daughter, she had therefore been on English soil without word for two months . . . well, that could be due to anything, loss of memory, kidnapping, anything . As for Susan Brewer, perhaps she had been landed somewhere else, had also suffered loss of memory, been kidnapped . . .
    So Makepeace forced herself to recover some equilibrium and thereby lost her temper, as she always did when she was fighting fear.
    She cursed the friends she had expected to turn to for help and who had proved absent, her brother, her doctor, all of them having deserted London for the summer with the rest of Society. She cursed, with tears, her husband for choosing such a time to go to France. And she cursed Oliver for wanting to accompany her to Plymouth.
    â€˜Who’s going to run the damn business if you’re traipsing all over the country with me? You get back to my girls and see nobody kidnaps them .’
    â€˜Missus, you are not going alone.’
    â€˜No, I’m not. I’m taking Beasley. You get back to Newcastle and try to get word to your father—that’s if nobody’s kidnapped him . Call on Rockingham in Yorkshire on the way home and see what he can do.’
    Oliver conceded. There was undoubtedly a need to have other irons in the fire, like the Marquis of Rockingham, and he could heat them better if he were not employed in combing the streets of Plymouth. Also, it would profit nobody if the business went to the wall in the Missus’s absence. John Beasley might be a peculiar choice as a travelling companion but, in this case, his particular peculiarity might prove useful.
    Oliver, however, used as he was to his stepmother’s eccentricity, was still concerned that she would be travelling with a man to whom she was not related and without female accompaniment. ‘Won’t you take a maid with you?’
    â€˜No.’ Her regular lady’s maid was out of commission and there were few other women for whom Makepeace had any use. ‘I ain’t listening to feminine chatter all the way to Devon, drive me lunatic.’
    â€˜It will look improper, that’s all.’
    â€˜Improper?’ Makepeace stared at him as if he was deranged. ‘Philippa’s missing and you think I care about looking improper?’
    She never has, Oliver thought, even when Philippa wasn’t missing. He sighed. ‘All right, Missus.’
    So Makepeace, Peter Sanders, who was her favourite coachman, and John Beasley set off on the Great West Road for Devon in her favourite coach. With Sanders up on the driver’s box, there was only Beasley on whom her all-pervading spleen could be vented for the next two hundred miles.
    â€˜Damn you, I didn’t ask you to come.’
    â€˜Yes you did,’ John Beasley said.
    â€˜You didn’t have to.’
    â€˜I said I was sick. Coaches make me puke. I didn’t say I didn’t want to come, I just said travel was a bugger. And the Plymouth press gangs might get