by Diana Norman
The stilted phrases sliced the air into neat pieces.
Peter Little called out: ‘This isn’t right, major,’ and somebody else said uncertainly: ‘No, it ain’t. You open they gates. Let’s rush ’em, lads.’
But words of power had been spoken in an educated voice. Lawful. Magistrate. Major. Riot Act. Order. Authority. The lantern gleamed on bayonets.
Conyers nodded and went away.
Nobody rushed the gates. Only a mud-spattered, hysterical woman shook them and went on shaking them, hour after hour, as if there was any hope of them opening.
People buzzed around her, trying to draw her away. She clung on to the bars like a monkey.
From the house came a file of glow-worms. Rain and darkness took away distance and depth so that the beetle-lights seemed to creep down a flat, immense blackboard.
The file reached the avenue. Its shine against the trees restored perspective. Not glow-worms, but a train of flares and lanterns; those carrying them blended into the darkness so that they seemed to carry themselves. People in black. Too far away to make out, too flickered by the waving branches. Heading for the church. Clustering in the graveyard.
‘It isn’t him,’ she said again and began screaming, pulling at the gate, kicking it, vomiting sound, commanding, begging, promising any abasement, only let me see him. It’s not him. I can save him. You’re burying him alive. He’s alive. Let me save him. I saved him before. It’s not him.
The lights broke away from each other, re-formed into their file to crawl back up the hill until the house swallowed them, one by one, and there was nothing.
They raised Makepeace out of the mud but couldn’t dislodge her hands from the ironwork. Eventually, when they saw that the baby was coming, they forced her fingers back and carried her away. Part of her, the best of her, stayed at the gate.
Baby Procrustes was born an hour later in Peter Little’s house. Makepeace bore the labour almost without interest, as if it had no validity of its own but was merely a physical manifestation of the greater agony.
Anyway, it was a girl.
Chapter Thirteen
‘WHERE is she?’
Betty walked with him along the village street. The weather had cleared but underfoot it remained muddy. The air smelled of leaves and cow-pats. In the fields seagulls followed the ploughs like a ragged train of lace blowing in the breeze. A blast of heat and the clang of hammering came from the smithy as they passed it.
Something should have stopped, Aaron thought. Everywhere there was occupation, and people avoiding his eye.
They reached the vast, iron embroideries that were the gates to Dapifer House. Plumed and blanketed, Tantaquidgeon looked outlandish against them. A figure was sitting at his feet, its head drooped into its lap like an exhausted beggar. Fanny Cobb stood helplessly beside it.
‘Three days, Aaron,’ Betty sobbed. ‘She keep comin’ back. You make her come away. You tell her.’
‘Makepeace? Makepeace?’ Aaron threw himself on the gates and rattled them. ‘Open up.’
A soldier shouldering a musket ambled out of a makeshift sentry box standing just within the grounds. ‘What now?’
‘I’m Lady Dapifer’s brother. Open these gates at once and let her in.’
‘Go home,’ said the soldier, wearily. ‘And tell the Indian if he tries to get her in round the back again, we’ll shoot the bugger. No trespassers.’
‘It’s my sister’s house, there’s a law against this.’
‘Take her home, son,’ the soldier said, gently. ‘Looks like she’s ill.’
At his side, Betty said: ‘Ain’t no good, Aaron, we tried and tried.’
Aaron knelt down and smoothed the hair back from his sister’s face. Was this broken thing Makepeace, feared landlady of the Roaring Meg, his surrogate mother, arbiter, lifelong prop? ‘Come away, ’Peace. Just for now.’
‘Aaron?’
‘I’m here, ’Peace. I’m here now.’
‘Pip’s in there,’ she said, ‘but they won’t let me go to him.’
‘We’ll make them, ’Peace. I promise. We’ll have the law on ’em.’
He got her to her feet and put one of her arms round his shoulder and the other round Betty’s so that she could walk. With Tantaquidgeon following, they went back down the street. Over his sister’s head, Aaron said to Betty: ‘They can’t do this.’
‘They’s gentry. They’s doin’ it.’
As they passed the forge, Edgar the blacksmith came out to them. ‘How is she, poor soul?’
Aaron shouted: ‘How d’you think she is? And what are you people doing about it?’
Next day, taking Peter Little’s advice and his horse, he set off to appeal to the Lord Lieutenant of Hertfordshire. ‘Soon get this cleared up,’ he said. He was still sufficiently American to believe that it could be.
‘Civil matter,’ the Lord Lieutenant told him. ‘Nothing I can do.’
Aaron pointed out that he was appealing to the head of the county’s magistracy. ‘My sister, Lady Dapifer, is being denied access to her property by armed intruders and I want militia or bailiffs, or whatever arm of the law you use, sent to expel them.’
‘Young man, in this country we’re civilized, we don’t send in troops, we prefer legal methods.’
‘My sister has been evicted from her house, how legal’s that?’
But the Lord Lieutenant was acquainted with the situation through his reading of the newspapers and knew that the late Sir Philip Dapifer’s second marriage was questionable. He was a blunt man and made no bones about his and his wife’s friendship with the first Lady Dapifer ‘ . . . who may well be repossessin’ property that was rightfully hers in the first place. It’s a civil matter. Get your sister a lawyer and fight it out in the courts, not in my county. I wish ye good morning.’
Over the shoulders of the two footmen escorting him out, Aaron shouted: ‘You weren’t too bloody civilized to send in troops to Boston.’
But he was frightened. It was his first encounter with the invisible ranks which the aristocratic English held closed against outsiders.
Sir Toby Tyler MP was more courteous but pronounced himself equally hamstrung. ‘Matter for the courts, my boy.’ He also used a phrase that was to become hideously familiar. ‘I’m afraid that possession is nine points of the law.’
‘How many points the law got?’ Aaron demanded.
Sir Toby blinked. ‘Ten, I imagine. And the first Lady Dapifer’s just taken nine of ’em.’
There was another phrase Aaron was to become sick of. Sir Toby said it. ‘Inform me if there’s anything I can do,’ he said.
‘Anything’, however, Aaron noticed, did not extend to taking Makepeace and her child into his home nor prosecuting their cause—the first indication that possession had not only nine legal points but all ten of the status quo.
On his way home, a low autumnal sun poured honeyed richness onto grass banks, the harlequin-coloured leaves of trees, clusters of thatch and a great house on a hill, as if the countryside were flirting with him and trying to make him oblivious to the concrete in which it was set.
He swore at it and heard his American curses dissipate, absorbed into English birdsong.
Back at Peter Little’s house, Mrs Little opened the door to him. A nice, worn-looking woman, Mrs Little, whose love for her own husband had put her into an agony on Makepeace’s behalf. She’d had to farm her children out to villagers in order to accommodate them all.
‘Peter’s been called to the big house,’ she said, ‘but that Robert, Sir Pip’s man, is here. Perhaps he can persuade her poor Sir Pip is really dead.’
Aaron followed her into her scrubbed, sparse little parlour. Dapifer’s valet was kneeling on the floor, weeping into Makepeace’s skirt.
Betty stood protectively over her mistress; she’d never liked ‘that nan-boy’.
Makepeace’s eyes were directed out of the window. ‘They killed him,’ she said.
Despairingly, Robert looked up.
‘Oh, tell her,’ he said. ‘We weren’t well. We looked poorly by the time we reached London. I said to him: “You’re not well, my dear. Let me take Lord Ffoulkes back to school,” but, oh no, we had to stir ourselves and do it. Then they came. Thursday, that was. We didn’t want the Major in the house, you could see that, but didn’t we always have to listen to everybody? So in the Major comes and her, bold as a miller’s shirt the both of them.’
Robert sat up, wiping his eyes on Makepeace’s petticoat. ‘I tell you now, I was at the door. Not to make out the words, but they weren’t going to stop me listening. Talk, talk, talk, her voice mostly, sometimes the Major’s, ours once or twice, very quiet. And then crash. And her scream. Well, I didn’t care, I ran in. We were on the floor, bless him, breathing like . . . well, snorting really.’
‘They killed him,’ said Makepeace, still looking out of the window.
Almost regretfully, the valet said: ‘They weren’t nowhere near him.’
‘Didn’t have to be, did they?’ Betty said. ‘They bothered him to death.’
Robert closed his eyes.
Outside the wavered, greenish glass of the parlour window, a thrush was singing in an apple tree, punctuating the stresses of the valet’s falsetto as it recounted the death of a beloved.
At first, he said, Dapifer’s repetition of ‘Heart, heart’ had been received as an indication of where the pain lay. Only Robert recognized that his master was demanding to be taken to Hertfordshire. ‘It was “Hert . . . Hert . . . Hert . . .” with him, and “Crust” over and over.’
In a sudden return of the old jealousy he pulled away from Makepeace’s knees. ‘Yes, yes, we meant Procrustes. He wanted you.’
The man turned to Aaron. ‘I said. Shall we send for her? I said. I told them fair and square, he wants her, I said. But nothing was done.’ His shoulders sagged. ‘Anyway, she couldn’t have got there in time.’
Sir Finlay Robertson, a doctor resident on the other side of the square, had been called in. ‘Very important,’ Robert said, perking up for a moment. ‘Attends royalty and I don’t know what-all.’
Dapifer was carried to his bed, leeches had been applied. There’d been a consultation between the doctor and Conyers which Robert didn’t hear, ‘but you could see Sir Finlay didn’t have hope.’
Catty, he said, had been hysterical and had confined herself to another room. The valet’s voice became higher and more mincing. ‘ “Can’t bear to see poor Pip like this.” Well, who could? But I wasn’t going to leave him and I didn’t, never let go of his dear hand.’
The doctor had been back and forth; Conyers had left the house and come back again.
Everything had been provided for the patient’s relief. ‘But you could see it wasn’t going to be any good. Our breathing. . . oh bless us.’
The noise of it had filled every room, Robert said. It had gone on grinding, on and on like a millwheel, all night until—and Robert had lost track of time—the house was suddenly silent.
So, now, was the Littles’ parlour, except for the thrush’s careless twittering and the creak of a windlass as, further away, someone drew water from the village well.
It hadn’t seemed unreasonable, Robert said after a while, to take the body back to Hertfordshire for burial. It was the Dapifer ancestral home, the family tomb was there. ‘And she was there.’ He nodded his head towards Makepeace; there seemed no point in addressing her directly.
The haste with which transport was arranged, and that Dapifer’s important friends were not invited to accompany it as mourners, might have struck him as strange but he was, he said, too distressed to have his wits about him. He was only glad to be given a place in the coach. And to have an escort of Conyers’s soldiers seemed only proper.
Every time the cortège stopped, the Major and Catty moved away to talk secretly and with calculation. ‘Whisper, whisper,’ Robert said. He’d thought they were discussing arrangements for the funeral.
Once at Dapifers, he’d stayed with the coffin like a dog at its dead master’s side, followed it to the graveyard, heard the stone grate back over the tomb . . .
The song of the thrush in the apple-tree mingled with Robert’s weeping.
From upstairs, where Fanny was looking after the baby, came the sound of crying. ‘Time for that chil’s feed,’ said Betty.
They were trying to interest Makepeace in her daughter, at least to choose its name. The vicar on the estate was too careful for his benefice to perform the christening but Peter Little had found a priest in Hertford prepared to do it.
Once she’d taken Makepeace upstairs and seen the baby begin sucking, Betty left them both to Fanny and joined the two men and Mrs Little in the garden. Evening was bringing out scent from an overcrowded herbaceous border where transparent pods of honesty glowed like moon-pennies.
Mrs Little shaded her eyes to where the sun was setting behind Dapifers. ‘I wonder where Peter’s got to.’
‘Mebbe we can shift her now,’ Betty said. ‘Where we goin’ to go, Aaron? We cain’t stay here.’
‘London. Her lawyer.’
‘When do we set off?’ Robert asked. At Betty’s and Aaron’s stare, he said: ‘Well, I ain’t staying with them, am I? She’s got the right of it that far—they done him in. It was them upsetting him as done for us.’ Tears began again. ‘I’m still his man, I’ll always be his man and he didn’t want her—’ a wave of his hand towards Dapifers—‘he wanted her’—his thumb jerked towards the parlour window.
Aaron warmed to him; but it was going to be hard to support his sister and the others, let alone take on another mouth to feed. He said so.
‘No money at all?’ Robert said.
‘She got a pearl brooch on her as he give her,’ Betty told him, ‘an’ that goes to pawn tomorrow.’
‘I’ve a hand with ladies’ hair,’ he said, ‘I could set up for a hairdresser.’
‘What with?’
They’d defeated him and were sorry; behind the irritating posturing lay a breaking, loyal heart and a rare sense of honour. Aaron nodded towards the big house: ‘Keep you on, will they?’
He gave a dreary shrug. ‘Expect so. I used to do her hair, she said I was better with it than anybody.’
‘Stay with ’em.’ Aaron took his limp hand. ‘We need someone behind enemy lines.’
‘A spy.’ He was cheered. ‘My dear, you shall know what I know as soon as I know it. I’ll get a black cloak. We can use a code.’
They watched him prance back to the house along the village street on his high heels, the long feather nodding in his hat. ‘He look like a titmouse strayed into a farmyard,’ Betty said, wiping her eyes.
Peter Little came slouching back. He could hardly bear to tell them. The call to the big house had been to inform him that if ‘the troublemakers’ were not promptly evicted from his house, indeed from the village, he and his family would be—it was Dapifer property.
He said: ‘They’re maintaining the will Sir Pip made that left everything to the first Lady Dapifer is the only one valid because she’s his only wife. It’ll be a matter for the civil courts. What can I do?’
Betty patted his bowed shoulder. ‘Ain’t your fault, you got to think for your childer.’ And to Aaron she said: ‘Ain’t the villagers’, neither. Chattels cain’t choose who owns ’em. Slavery taught me that much.’
They couldn’t have stayed in the house any longer, anyway; four people, having learned separately of Dapifer’s death from the London Gazette, immediately and coincidentally boarded the same coach to Hertfordshire, and the arrival that night of Andrew, Lord Ffoulkes, truanting from school, a distraught Susan Brewer, Dr Baines offering medical help and, astonishingly, John Beasley, surly as ever, added to the overcrowding.
At last Betty managed to strip Makepeace of the dress she’d refused to take off since Dapifer’s body had been brought home. She set out a bodice, petticoats and shawl provided by Susan with which to replace it in the morning.
‘You got to look
decent tomorrow, no matter what,’ she said firmly. ‘We gettin’ that chil’ named afore we take the coach for London. An’ we callin’ her Philippa after her pa.’
There was a long silence. ‘If you say so.’
Betty sagged with relief. Until now Dapifers had been the only place that held validity for Makepeace. Wicked as anything else Catty and Conyers had perpetrated against her, Betty knew, was the deprivation of her husband’s death. Without watching life depart, closing the coffin lid, taking part in the obsequies and interment, for her, for all of them, it was as if he’d merely sauntered off into the mist.
She took the soiled dress down to the wash-tub. There were some neatly rolled documents in the pocket let into the skirt. She had neither time nor light to read the densely written pages and put the roll into the holdall that, along with a rush basket and baby clothes, they were having to borrow from the Littles.
The next morning, at the hasty christening in a Hertford side-chapel, the priest protested: ‘All of you?’
‘All.’
‘Him too?’
‘He’s a baptized Christian,’ Aaron said. ‘All of us.’
Betty, Mrs Little, Susan Brewer and Fanny Cobb were pronounced godmothers to Philippa Dapifer. The ceremony also gave her seven godfathers: an estate steward, an American uncle, a small lord of the realm, an equally small black boy, a Scottish doctor, a Red Indian, and a hack scribbler who didn’t believe in any of it.
‘Oh yes,’ Mr Hackbutt said, ‘he changed his will right enough. “To my beloved wife, formerly Makepeace Burke of Boston . . .” She’s entitled to everything, bar annuities to the servants. But we have to prove to probate that she is his wife against the first Lady Dapifer’s assertion that she is not. Did you manage to safeguard his deed box?’
‘Deed box?’ Aaron looked at Betty.
Betty put her face close to Makepeace’s, speaking as if to the deaf. ‘Where’s Sir Pip’s deed box?’ The response was a tired shrug.