Taking Liberties Read Online Free Page A

had now come floating back to her on an errant tide.
    They had been stolen summers in any case; she shouldn’t really have had them but her parents had been on the Grand Tour, there was fear of plague in London, and the Pomeroy great-aunt with whom she’d been sent to stay had been wonderfully old and sleepy, uncaring that her eleven-year-old charge went down to the beach each day with only a parlour maid called Joan as chaperone to play with a twelve-year-old called Martha.
    Devon. Her first and only visit to the county from which her family and its wealth had sprung. A Queen Anne house on the top of one of seven hills looking loftily down on the tiny, square harbour of Torquay.
    She listened to her own childish voice excitedly piping down years that had bled all excitement from it.
    â€˜Is this the house we Pomeroys come from, Aunt? Sir Walter’s house?’
    â€˜Of course not, child. It is much too modern. Sir Walter’s home was T’Gallants at Babbs Cove, a very old and uncomfortable building, many miles along the coast.’
    â€˜Shall I see it while I am here?’
    â€˜No. It is rented out.’
    â€˜But was Sir Walter a pirate, as they say, Aunt? I should so like him to have been a pirate.’
    â€˜I should not. He is entitled to our gratitude as our progenitor and we must not speak ill of him. Now go and play.’
    But if she was disallowed a piratical ancestor, there were pirates a-plenty down on the beach where Joan took her and allowed her to paddle and walk on pebbles the size and shape of swans’ eggs. At least, they looked like pirates in their petticoat-breeches and tarry jackets.
    If she’d cut her way through jungle and discovered a lost civilization, it could have been no more exotic to her than that Devon beach. Hermit crabs and fishermen, both equally strange; starfish; soft cliffs pitted with caves and eyries, dolphins larking in the bay: there was nothing to disappoint, everything to amaze.
    And Martha, motherless daughter of an indulgent, dissenting Torbay importer. Martha, who was joyful and kind, who knew about menstruation and how babies were made (until then a rather nasty mystery), who could row a boat and dislodge limpets, who wore no stays and, though she was literate, spoke no French and didn’t care that she didn’t. Martha, who had a brother like a young Viking who didn’t notice her but for whom the even younger Diana conceived a delightful, hopeless passion—delightful because it was hopeless—and would have died rather than reveal it but secretly scratched his and her entwined initials in sandstone for the tide to erase.
    For the first time in her life she’d encountered people who talked to her, in accents thick as cream, without watching their words, who knew no servitude except to the tide. She’d been shocked and exhilarated.
    But after another summer, as astonishing as the first, the parents had come back, the great-aunt died and the Queen Anne house sold. She and Martha had written to each other for the next few years. Martha had married surprisingly well; a visiting American who traded with her father had taken one look and swept her off to his tobacco plantations in Virginia.
    After that their correspondence became increasingly constrained as Diana entered Hell and Martha’s independent spirit conformed to Virginian Anglicanism and slave ownership. Eventually, it had ceased altogether.
    The Dowager returned to bed and this time went to sleep.
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In one thing at least her son resembled her: they were both early risers. Diana, making her morning circuit in the gardens, saw Robert coming to greet her. They met in the Dark Arbour, a long tunnel of yew the Stuart Stacpooles had planted as a horticultural lament for the execution of Charles I, and fell into step.
    The Dowager prepared herself to discuss what, in the course of the night, had gained initial capitals.
    But Robert’s subject wasn’t The