Free Taking Liberties by Diana Norman Page B

were chary of losing even more popularity by swatting them.
    He even insisted that Makepeace was exploiting her miners. She’d pointed to the village she and Hedley had built for them at Raby, a model of its kind. It didn’t satisfy him. ‘You bloody rich only keep poor people alive so they can fight your wars or make you richer.’
    Yet she stuck to him; indeed could talk to him as she could to nobody else, and not just because he’d proved a rock in her time of necessity; there was something about him. Andra thought very well of him and, for all his monosyllabic loutishness, he was highly regarded in the coffeehouses where he could count men like Dr Johnson and Joshua Reynolds among his friends.
    Best of all, in their present situation, he was in touch with an entire network of those who didn’t fit into respectable society, people who lived metaphorically underground and emerged, pale and seedy as Beasley himself, to strike at authority before submerging again. If Philippa had fallen among thieves or into the hands of a sect or rebels or the Irish or any other thorns in the side of the establishment, then Beasley was the man to find her.
    But, knowing this, Makepeace’s discontent chose to twist it against him. ‘Why don’t you mix with important people? I need influence.’
    His mouth twisted, the nearest approach he could make to a smile. ‘Fell the wrong side o’ the bloody hedge this time, then, didn’t you?’
    Oh God, he can’t understand. He doesn’t know; he doesn’t have children. He thinks this is ordinary horror—he thinks I’m feeling what he would if he was being dragged to gaol or hung over a cliff.
    The childless, she thought enviously, had a limited experience of suffering, they saw it merely in terms of torture or famine or illness; they couldn’t take the leap outside that circle of Hell to the wasteland stretching beyond it for bereft parents. She was sharing this coach, this arctic, with the emotional equivalent of a Hottentot.
    She wanted her mother, she wanted Betty, who’d been better than a mother, that black and mighty fulcrum she’d taken for granted, as she’d taken Susan Brewer and Philippa for granted, until Betty and her son Josh too had joined them on the boat for America.
    Impossible to whip up resentment at Betty’s desertion because the desertion had been her own and, anyway, Betty was dead. ‘A sudden death,’ Susan had written three years ago. ‘She clutched her bosom and fell. We buried her like the Christian she was and surely the trumpets sounded for her on the other side as they did for Mr. Standfast.’
    I didn’t stand fast by her, I didn’t stand fast by any of them . . . young Josh with his talent as a painter . . . and this is my punishment.
    â€˜I’m going to puke,’ Beasley said.
    â€˜Do it out the window,’ she said, grimly. ‘We ain’t stopping.’
    Arriving in Plymouth, they had trouble finding accommodation. Owing to the war, the town was stuffed with navy personnel: every house for rent was taken, and so was every room in its inns. In any case, a woman travelling without a female companion and with a man not her husband wasn’t a guest welcomed by any respectable hostelry.
    It wasn’t until Makepeace slammed a purse full of guineas on the table of the Prince George on the corner of Stillman Street and Vauxhall Street that its landlord remembered the naval lieutenant in a back room who hadn’t paid his rent for three weeks. The lieutenant was evicted, Makepeace installed, John Beasley was put in an attic with Sanders, while the coach and horses went into the George’s stables which were big enough to accommodate them as well as the diligence that made a weekly trip back and forth to Exeter.
    Under other circumstances, Makepeace would have liked Plymouth very much. More than any port in Britain, it most closely