by Diana Norman
‘Liberty,’ said Makepeace, clearly, and threw. Eight.
She lost count of the throws after that. Dapifer told her later there were twenty-three. It seemed to her there were a hundred, God keeping her on the griddle for her wickedness; a winning score refused to come up for either of them.
Tension and temperature rose, so did the cheers—and bets. The Countess of Orme led an impromptu choir into ‘Rule Britannia’. Somebody at the back of the crowd had found a hunting horn and was blowing the tantivy. Spots came and went on the baize like an errant disease.
The dice rolled and stopped. One of the little squares on the table showed a four, the other a one. Confused, Makepeace stared at them; she’d lost count. That had been her throw; had that been her throw? She looked over to Headington and saw the ravaged face assume peace. Had he won? But the noise had ceased. People were turning away from the table. Catty had gone.
Headington moved towards her. ‘It seems America’s not to be beaten. My congratulations, Lady Dapifer.’ He held out the deed and its transference.
She was reluctant to take them. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘For this relief, much thanks.’ His voice was kinder than any she’d heard that night. He took her hand and closed it over the papers. ‘You must promise me not to be sorry.’
They heard next morning that he went back to the Mayfair house he’d gambled away earlier the previous day, thanked its servants, walked into his study, closed the door and shot himself.
With a blotched, desperate note, Makepeace sent the Northumberland deed back to his lawyer, begging him to return it to whomsoever inherited his estate.
A letter from Lord Braybourne, Headington’s next of kin, returned it to her.
Madam, you are distinguished in being the only creditor of my unfortunate young cousin to cancel one of his debts. I cannot allow that this, the last and least of the properties he gambled away—one, moreover, that was fairly won—should place me under the burden of so rare a generosity. Luckily, I have no need of it. Here it is back again.
From that day on she kept the deed in her pocket wherever she went, in the way that a medieval sinner wore a hair shirt to remind himself of his need for salvation.
As things turned out, it was to be hers.
Chapter Twelve
IN July the Marquis of Rockingham lost office and was replaced as Prime Minister by the Duke of Grafton who, in turn, appointed as his Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend, a man whose solution to the American problem was the reassertion of British authority by the imposition of more customs duties.
It was a relief to leave London. Makepeace and Dapifer spent two weeks with young Andrew Ffoulkes on his estate in Kent and then repaired with him to Hertfordshire for the rest of the summer.
The weather was not good. There was trouble getting in the hay.
It can’t be said that Makepeace laid Headington’s ghost to rest. For this relief, much thanks; the words haunted her. On her knees in the little church at Dapifers she prayed that in death he’d maintained the peace which had settled on his poor, living face at the last; she begged forgiveness for giving way to Catty’s goading and her own lust to gamble. ‘Never again, Lord.’
Penance, however, took time and there was much to do: accompanying the villagers to St Alban’s Fair and having to stop time and again for flocks of sheep on their way to provide roast lamb for Londoners; St John’s Day, dressing the apple-trees with ribbons; cricket: Dapifers v. Tewinge, young Josh the highest scoring batsman; Lammas and well-dressing.
On St Swithin’s Day it rained and therefore, they told her, would continue to do so for the next forty days. She wasn’t to remember whether it did or didn’t, only that the month passed in a sort of languorous busyness, a self-imposed, pleasing bustle of cleaning and tidying that Betty called ‘gettin’ the nest ready for the egg’.
She was becoming big now, adopting a waddle that made Dapifer laugh. The village women patted her belly for luck and Sam the pigman said she were ‘good breeding stock from the look of ye’, which he meant as a compliment and which she accepted as such.
She took gentle rides with Tantaquidgeon in the trap to pay courtesy calls through a landscape suddenly teeming with men mowing and women gathering sheaves for tying. Dapifer took off his coat and drove a wagon back and forth between the field and the yard where young Andrew and Josh were being taught the art of rick-building. Everybody but her was called in to help with the harvest. She was her own harvest.
Despite the weather, all corn was in by the beginning of September.
The letter came two days later.
Robert brought it to them at breakfast, fanning his nose with it and sniffing. ‘That nice Mr Little brought it up. He called in at Mrs Yates’s this morning.’ Mrs Yates kept the shop on the Great North Road a mile and a half away where local letters and parcels were deposited by the passing Royal Mail coach to await collection. ‘And we know who it’s from, don’t we?’
Dapifer slit the seal. ‘Thank you, Robert.’
‘Oh, don’t think I’m interested.’ The valet flounced out.
‘What is it?’ Makepeace asked.
‘A white flag, I think.’ Dapifer handed it to Makepeace.
The letter smelled of bluebells, was unsigned and very short, Pip, dear hart, I am in Town this month. Please recieve me that we may discuss matters.
‘She wants you to go to London?’
‘I may as well. It’s time to return Andrew to school in any case.’ There was a groan from behind a platter piled with kidneys and kedgeree. ‘And I can bring Baines back with me.’
Makepeace had been content to let Betty be the attendant at baby Procrustes’s birth but Dapifer wouldn’t rest easy unless Dr Baines was standing by.
‘What’s she want, d’you think?’
‘Terms, I imagine.’
‘Don’t give her any. She’s had one settlement, that’s enough.’ Makepeace feared for her husband’s generosity; she could imagine how pitiful in defeat Catty would make herself. They would be alone together.
‘Take Peter with you,’ she said.
‘Thank you, I am perfectly capable of conducting negotiations without Peter Little.’
‘You’ll be back for Harvest Home?’ she asked, anxiously. It was the biggest festival of the year. Next Monday the household of Dapifers, the village and people from outlying farms would attend church and then a feast in the Great Barn afterwards. Preparations were already under way.
‘What’s today? Tuesday? If we set off now I can be back on Saturday. Pack your traps, Andrew.’
After Dapifer had gone to order Thompson the driver to ready the coach, Andrew said: ‘Can’t I stay for the feast?’
‘I wish you could.’ The two of them had become very close. ‘But you’ll be back in a month. Remind Pip to ask your headmaster for leave of absence for the christening.’ The boy was to be godfather to baby Procrustes, along with the Marquis of Rockingham.
She and Betty filled the Ffoulkes’ tuck box with cakes, apples, a ham and stone bottles of cider.
‘I’ll take Robert with me,’ Dapifer said. ‘Tantaquidgeon can stay with you, in case of emergency.’ He set great store by the Indian.
‘There ain’t going to be an emergency,’ Makepeace said, ‘Betty says another three weeks.’
‘Let’s hope she’s right.’ Dapifer addressed his wife’s stomach: ‘Stay in there until I get back, my son.’
She kissed him and Andrew, told Robert to look after them, and stood at the manor door, waving, as the coach rocked down the yellowing chestnut avenue. The moist air was punctuated with the sound of popping from the cornfields where men were shooting rabbits.
That was Tuesday. Dapifer had hoped to return on Saturday night but Makepeace was not worried when he didn’t. He had a lot to do in the time: take young Andrew to Eton; attend to various business matters; conduct the negotiation with Catty. Quite possibly, the coach hadn’t been able to reach London in one day, the roads
were still muddy . . .
She had a great deal to do herself. The church must be decorated with fruit, sheaves and berries for the service, so must the Great Barn for the supper. Chutneys had to be made, fruit preserved, apples stored . . .
She was more concerned when he hadn’t arrived by Sunday night but allowed herself to be reassured. Bad day for travelling, Sunday; there’d be difficulty getting fresh horses—he’d have stayed the night at Barnet, probably. He’d be here tomorrow, he’d be back for Harvest Home.
On Monday afternoon, she decided to take a stroll and meet the coach returning as it surely must; he’d said he’d be back for Harvest Home. Betty wanted her to go by trap if she had to go out at all. ‘Suppose he don’t come ’til tonight, you got too much babby in you to climb back up that hill.’
‘I need to walk.’ She was restless; she was fixed on the moment when Dapifer’s coach came along the road; she could get in, hear the news of Catty, have a few moments alone with him before they were embroiled in harvest celebrations.
As she set off down the avenue, she heard the pad of moccasined feet behind her. Betty wasn’t letting her go alone; she’d sent Tantaquidgeon.
Well, he could sit on the coach roof. Robert too.
The village street was quiet. Dust and the sound of flails came from the threshing floors, the smell of cooking apples and spice from the open doors of the cottages.
Old Mrs Nash sat on her threshold making corn dollies. ‘Don’t you go far now, missus. That looks like rain.’
Wisps of straw garnished lanes where, only a few days before, harvest carts had gone frantically back and forth. Children were blackberrying along the hedgerows.
Any minute she’d see the coach roof in the distance . . . round the next bend . . . the next. She waddled on. Unseen behind her the sky blackened.
By the time she emerged from Dapifers Lane into the Great North Road the first drops of rain were hitting its surface in plump spatters. Even here there was little traffic today; the farming world was staying home to store the harvest. Northwards, to her left, the toll-booth waited for travellers, the smoke from its chimney ragged in the squall of the sudden breeze. A horseman jogged past her, hurriedly raising his hat.
Southwards lay the hill down which Dapifer’s coach would be coming. Makepeace turned right and walked towards it, making a long diagonal across the ruts of the road to Mrs Yates’s shop, a solitary cottage with beetle-browed thatch frowning over its windows. ‘I’m waiting for Sir Pip to come back from London, Mrs Yates. Can I watch for him here?’ The shop had a tiny glazed peep-window in its south wall; she could see the hill from it.
Mrs Yates set a chair, exclaiming at Makepeace’s long walk in her condition and such weather, then jumping as if she’d been goosed as Tantaquidgeon’s long shadow fell over the threshold.
Having offered Makepeace a cup of herbal tea and seen that she was in no mood for conversation, Mrs Yates said: ‘In the middle of making coughdrops I was, I’ll get back to ’em if ’ee don’t mind.’ She stole on tiptoe past Tantaquidgeon to her kitchen.
The front door had to be shut against the rain and the shop was dark, its elderly stock of almost everything just massed and varied shapes. The rain slanted past Makepeace’s window in gusts that blurred her view of the hill. The smell of wintergreen from the kitchen mingled with that of cheese and damp. Makepeace shivered. An ache was developing in her back.
In a sudden, slashing downpour she thought she saw the coach and ran to the door, pushing Tantaquidgeon out of the way. The hill was empty.
‘There now,’ said Mrs Yates, coming in as the wind slammed the door back shut. ‘Forget my own head next. There was a letter came Saturday and I meant to send it up but I been that busy with apples . . .’ She dabbed her hands among dark pigeonholes. ‘Here ’tis . . . ’ As Makepeace snatched it from her: ‘Tisn’t Sir Pip’s hand, I know that.’
My dear Lady Dapifer,
I beg you to remember your condition and not to be overly anxious but you should know that Sir Pip has been taken ill. In the event that it has slipped the mind of those looking after him to inform you, I thought it best to write. I entreat you not to flurry yourself. A doctor has been called and all is being done for him. In haste,
your friend and neighbour, Emily Judd
The date was Friday’s.
Get to him, get to him. Board a coach here? No. No, no, no, think. The stage wouldn’t pass until evening. The mail even later. Back to the house. Get the trap, Peter Little would drive her, or one of the men. Get to him.
Mrs Yates was hanging onto her arm. ‘You’re never goin’ out in this, missus?’
She threw the woman off and lumbered into the deserted road, Tantaquidgeon behind her.
And now the coach was coming. Suddenly the hill was busy: vehicles, horsemen and, unmistakably, the Dapifer coach with Thompson driving.
She sobbed with relief; he was all right, he’d come home. She stood where she was, waving her arms.
The coach slowed as Thompson saw her and pulled on the reins so that the horses slithered to a halt in spraying mud. Two riders in military, rain-blackened cloaks drew their mounts up on either side. She began picking her way through the mud.
A head peered out of the coach window, facing in Makepeace’s direction to see what was causing the delay. After a moment it said something she couldn’t catch over the noise of the rain. One of the horsemen saluted and then called to Thompson, ‘You heard the major. Drive on.’ He put his hand under his cloak as if to draw a sword. ‘Drive on.’
The reins were shaken. She saw Thompson’s face, wet, beseeching, turned to hers, as the coach went past her.
Two more outriders accompanied the conveyance that had been held up behind the coach. It was a funeral cart drawn by four black-plumed horses, the rain drooping the feathers down over their ears in a way that reminded Makepeace of Catty as she sat on the floor of her house in Bloomsbury, a bit of fan tickling her nose.
The hooded driver took it past her, gleaming black mahogany with a brass rail round its sides. Rain bounced on the lid of the coffin.
She didn’t move. It wasn’t him.
The cortège turned left, into Dapifers Lane.
She said quite brightly: ‘Well, what’s all that about, I wonder?’ And began to run.
Peter Little, coming to find her in the trap, met her at the bridge. ‘Oh dear God, are you all right?’
Tantaquidgeon was helping her along as she struggled to walk through a contraction. ‘Get me home.’ Tantaquidgeon lifted her in.
‘Lady Dapifer . . .’
‘It isn’t him,’ she said.
‘We don’t know who it is, they’ve shut the gates.’ It was so dark he’d hung a lantern from the whip-holder and in its light his eyes were pale and staring.
Words didn’t associate with their meaning or things with what they were. She said: ‘It isn’t him.’
He turned the trap with difficulty. Leaves driven by the rain plastered themselves against her face as they went up the hill.
Half the village stood by the gates in groups hunched over lanterns which illuminated patches of glistening rain and faces distorted by upthrown light so that they were unrecognizable.
The world had come loose. No moment flowed into another; instead static, vividly drawn tableaux presented themselves and were washed away by the rain to make way for the next.
An outline had Fanny’s shape. ‘Oh, missus, they say he’s dead. Oh, missus.’
Josh knuckling tears from his eyes.
Another shape enfolded her and spoke in Betty’s voice. ‘You gotta be strong now, girl. You gotta mind that babby. They gone an’ turfed us out.’
The gates were high; she had never seen them closed before, their wrought iron was angular and coldly wet against her hands. One of the coach’s outriders stood behind them; she could see the white cross of webbing under his cape and the gleam of a bayonet.
‘Let me in. I’m Lady Dapifer. I live here.’
‘Sorry, miss. No admittance.’ A neutral voice, not unkind, not sympathetic. The patterned shadow of the gate blacked out one of his eyes.
‘Let me in.’ She broke. ‘Pip. I’m here, Pip.’ Once she’d begun shouting for him she couldn’t stop. ‘Pip, they’re not letting me in.’
The rain wouldn’t accept the sound she made, earthing it into the mud, so she shouted louder.
A light sprang up in the churchyard on the hill; there was movement.
The soldier turned to somebody she couldn’t see. ‘Better fetch the Major.’
Someone behind her put an arm across her shoulders. She shook it off, rattling the gates, shrieking like an imprisoned animal.
Conyers was at the gate with two more soldiers. ‘This is unseemly, madam. I must ask you to desist and go away.’
She didn’t understand. ‘This man won’t let me in.’
He didn’t move. The same shadow that had fallen on the soldier’s eye obliterated one of his.
He didn’t understand, she realized. She was a maenad to him, wet hair plastered to her face, unrecognizable. She said with relief: ‘You know me, I’m Makepeace Dapifer. We met. Please let me in, I must go to Pip.’
‘I do not know you, madam.’
He gestured to the soldier with the lantern to raise it so that its light shone on his face. He shouted: ‘People of Dapifers, I regret to inform you that Sir Philip died three days ago in London. His wife was with him. We are about to bury him.’
Somebody screamed. A man’s voice yelled: ‘We’re comin’ in. We needs to see ’un. Why you stoppin’ us?’
‘I am Major Sidney Conyers, Lady Dapifer’s champion. On her authority I am seizing this property and all Sir Pip’s properties back to her, his lawful wife.’
‘His wife’s yere.’ A female voice.
‘That woman’s an interloper, as will shortly be proved in a court of law. The true Lady Dapifer is once more in possession of her husband’s land and my men here will see to it that order is kept. There will be a magistrate here in the morning: don’t make it necessary for him to read the Riot Act.’ The strain went out of Conyers’s face and it became kindly. ‘Go home, good people. Mourn our dear Sir Philip as I shall. Let his lady bury him in peace.’