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When the Dowager remarked, and meant it, that Mount Edgcumbe’s prospect was as fine as any she had seen, Admiral Lord Edgcumbe said: ‘Thank you, ma’am. The Duke of Medina Sidonia is supposed to have been good enough to say the same when he sailed past at the head of the Armada. He mentioned that he was resolved to have it for his own when he won England.’ There was a well-rehearsed pause. ‘He was disappointed.’
A legend worth repeating, and Lord Edgcumbe obviously repeated it often, but Diana believed it; the Spanish fleet had indeed swept past the slope of the wooded deer park in which she stood looking out to sea, while the house commanding it was enviably beautiful.
She turned to her left and shaded her eyes to stare across the river that separated her from Plymouth. ‘So that is Devon and we are in Cornwall.’
‘No, ma’am. This used to be Cornwall, the Hamoaze markin’ the division, but it is now Devon. A fifteenth-century ancestor of mine married an heiress from across the way who brought with her the property of the ferry. It would have been inconvenient to have a county boundary splittin’ the estate so …’
‘So he moved it,’ she said, smiling. Again, it wasn’t bombast. She’d asked, he’d answered; the Edgcumbes had no need to embroider history in which their name was already sewn large. Hardly a land or sea battle in which an Edgcumbe hadn’t fought like a tiger – to be suitably rewarded. Yet her host’s father had been the first to recognize Joshua Reynolds’s genius, while the Mozart this battle-scarred sailor had played for her last night had been as pretty a performance as any she’d heard from an amateur.
Never having penetrated so far into the South-West, she had expected, in her cosmopolitan way, to find its nobility embarrassingly provincial. Yet it appeared she had stepped back to the Renaissance and the venturing days of Elizabeth, when men of action were also dilettantes and vice versa.
Lady Edgcumbe too was, as ever, a relief, hospitable without being overwhelming, and with a confidence in her pedigree that showed in her choice of dress, which was eccentric but comfortable.
The Dowager would have forgiven an admiral overseeing the naval movements of one of the busiest ports in the country for being too occupied to pay attention to his guest but, like Aymer, like most aristocratic holders of office that she knew, Lord Edgcumbe saw no reason to curtail in war too many of the activities he had enjoyed in peacetime. His otter- and foxhounds were being kept in readiness for the hunting season, and he entertained.
Both he and his wife had greeted her as if it were perfectly normal for a widow to go visiting so soon after her husband’s funeral. Admiral Edgcumbe was a distant cousin of the Stacpooles, though his and the Earl’s acquaintance had been based on their professional meetings – Edgcumbe’s as a high-ranking admiral, the Earl’s as a Secretary of State. Their friendship was for his Countess, formed during the times they had stayed at Chantries.
The visits had not been reciprocated. Despite numerous requests for the Earl and Countess to come to Devon, Aymer had refused them all. ‘Damned if I’m venturing into here-be-dragons country to stay among a lot of canvas-climbers. Ruins the complexion, all that salt. Look at Edgcumbe’s – leathery as a tinker’s arse.’
Though nothing was said outright, Diana suspected that they had seen enough of her marriage to commiserate politely with her on the Earl’s death but not as if she were expected to be inconsolable. ‘Of course you need a change of air after all you’ve been through,’ Lucy Edgcumbe had said, with what Diana construed as double meaning. ‘We are so very pleased that your first sight of Devon is with us.’
She was grateful to them, and pleased with this part of Devon, with the marriage of land and sea and the dark moorland that brooded behind it.
For the first time in years she breathed in the air of outgoingness, of infinite possibility. There was something for her here. Not on Mount Edgcumbe itself, perhaps, but somewhere about … This was where she belonged, where she came from.
‘Over there’s the Eddystone, and that’s the cape Richard Hawkins sailed past on his way to the South Seas, there’s where James Cook set off on his circumnavigation and that’s where the blasted captains who deserted Benbow were shot …’
Ships were packed so thickly abreast in the Hamoaze that the miniature ferry she could see scuttling between them was almost redundant – you could cross by stepping from deck to deck. She wondered which were the prison hulks.
The birdsong around her was answered by the tinny sound of officers being piped on and off their ships. From the height of the Citadel opposite came a bugle call and the tramp of marching boots. She had the impression that everyone in Plymouth could see her where she stood, outlined against a Grecian white folly; certainly she felt that she could see everyone in Plymouth. Was Philippa Dapifer one of those ants?
‘And that’s Millbay. See the Long Room? Centre of Plymouth social life, the Long Room. There’s to be a civic reception on Saturday. Be an honour for the Mayor if you’d come but no need if you prefer to be quiet. I shall attend, of course. Keeps up the town’s spirits, that sort of thing.’
If it was a matter of encouraging civic morale, she could do no less, despite her mourning, than to accept.
He was pleased and turned back to the view. ‘Funny place to put the Long Room, same shore as the prison. However, no accountin’ for what the blasted corporation gets up to … See those blocks? Crammed to the gunwales with Frenchies and Yankees.’
She saw them. Row upon row of rectangles, like a child’s building bricks scattered in the dust.
He looked down at her as if she’d flinched, which she hadn’t. ‘Perfectly safe, y’know. We keep ’em well locked up.’
‘My goodness,’ she said, lazily.
No need at this stage to mention Lieutenant Grayle. Caution had been driven deep into the bone by her marriage; for the female to show enthusiasm was to court mockery and disappointment from the male. She might raise the question of a prison visit later, as if it did not matter to her one way or the other.
Which, she told herself, it did not.
She took the Admiral’s arm and they walked back to the house.
From the look of it, Plymouth’s Long Room had been an attempt to recreate the Assembly Rooms at Bath. It had a ballroom, card rooms, a tepid bath but, Cotswold stone being unavailable, it had been built of red brick which, in the Dowager’s opinion, meant it fell short of elegance.
It had a lawn sloping down to the water of Millbay, consequently presenting a distant glimpse of the prison on one side of the bay and a barracks on the other. At work or play, Plymouth society liked to be on the tide’s edge and, with the view it gave them straight ahead of a low sun warming and gilding both sea and grass, the Dowager tended to agree with them. She wondered if Lieutenant Grayle could see it from the window of his cell.
Supper was very good, the music so-so.
The various dignitaries and wives introduced to her were what her experience of corporate entertainments had led her to expect: hugely pleased with themselves, overlarge, overdressed, accepting of why she was there – after a bereavement she would naturally wish to be heartened by a visit to fair Devon – and, as far as she could judge, unread except for stock market prices or the Lady’s Magazine.
Following the neglect of the navy during the uneasy peace after the Seven Years’ War, hostilities with America had stirred things up again and the town was prospering as never before. The building of new barracks, batteries and blockhouses as well as the necessary enlargement of docks for the influx of shipping was putting money in the corporation’s pocket.
A new dock had begun to be built big enough to take American and French prizes and it was rumoured that the King would be coming to Plymouth to see it under construction.
Several of the guests were in the later stages of mourning for young men lost in battle but the Dowager was credited with being as brave as they were in showing those damn Yankees that Plymouth could hold up its head under fire.
She was complimented on it. ‘Good of ee to come,’ the Mayor said. ‘It do encourage us all to see a Pomeroy back in Deb’n.’
‘Will you be thinking of settling down yere, your ladyship?’ said the Mayor’s wife, a lady who made up for shortness of stature by a towering wig.
‘Possibly.’
‘Where? T’Gallants? I heard the lease was up but they reckoned as it was to be sold.’
‘Really?’
‘So I heard. Course, ’tis your family home, I know …’
They were not put off by her unwillingness to be pinned down; property was interesting. ‘Ah reckon as ee’d be better off in something modern – my brother-in-law do know of a place in Newton Ferrers, very nice that is. Hear that, chaps? Her ladyship’s a-thinkin’ of taking over T’Gallants at Babbs Cove. Fallin’ down I reckon it is by now. I’ve said to her as my brother-in-law …’
‘We shall see,’ she said and turned away.
The music began again and, as her semi-mourning excused her at least from dancing, she was able to retire to an empty table at the far end of the room. It was the first time in many months that she had attended a social event and now she was wishing she had not; she found burdensome the noise, the heat from bouncing bodies, the requirement of constant conversation.
She had intended to slip quietly into this countryside for relief from the last twenty-two years in quiet and solitude. It had been unexpected and somewhat distressing to discover that the arrival of a Pomeroy would cause such interest.
‘Countess? Lady Stacpoole? Oh, let me sit with you, Ah’m overcome that you’m gracing our poor liddle Long Room.’ It was a woman with a headdress of feathers and a large bosom, all quivering.
Without warmth, the Dowager indicated a chair and the woman fell onto it. ‘You don’t know who I am, do ee?’ she said, roguishly. ‘I’m Mrs Nicholls, Fanny Nicholls.’ She paused, as if waiting for the surprise to sink in.
‘How do you do.’ A minor official’s wife. To be discouraged as soon as possible. Feathers and bosom displayed on public occasions. The lace on the purple dress slightly careworn and with a suspicion of grubbiness. She had the most peculiar eyes, very still, their gaze attaching onto one’s own like grappling irons. Above a constantly moving mouth, the effect was disturbing.
‘We’m related, you know,’ Mrs Nicholls said. ‘My maiden name was Pomeroy.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Oh ye-es. Your ladyship’s great-grandaddy and mine were brothers. Jerome Pomeroy was my great-grandaddy.’
‘Indeed.’ The Dowager appeared unmoved but she was caught. Great-great-uncle Pomeroy, well, well. One of those unfortunate scandals occurring in even the best-regulated families.
‘Your great-grandad’s elder brother, he was. You’ve heard of him, surely.’
Diana was spared a reply because Mrs Nicholls, in manic chatter, expanded on the story at length while the Dowager dwelt on a more edited version among her own mental archives.
Jerome Pomeroy. The only one of her ancestors for whom Aymer had shown any admiration, one of the rakes whose debauchery had flourished with the encouragement of Charles II, libertine and poet, a member of the Earl of Rochester’s set until, like Rochester’s – and Aymer, come to think of it – venereal disease had sent him frantic for his soul’s salvation, to which end he had joined a sect of self-professed monks in East Anglia and died, raving.
At that point a certain Polly James, actress, had entered the scene, claiming the Pomeroy barony for her infant son on the grounds that Jerome had married her three years before. The hearing in the Court of Arches had proved that, if there had indeed been a marriage, it was of the jump-over-broomstick type of ceremony and, in any case, could not be proved.
Polly and her son were subsequently provided for, sent into oblivion and the title had passed to Jerome’s younger brother, Diana’s great-grandfather.
‘… there, ’tis wunnerful strange, your ladyship. You and me sitting here so friendly. Both of us Pomeroys. Just think, now, if it had gone the other way, I’d be the ladyship, wouldn’t I? And my son over there, he’d be Baron Pomeroy.’ She waved a waggish finger. ‘I do hope as we’re not going to fall out over it.’
‘I doubt it.’
The woman’s account of their kinship might or might not be true – it very well could be. In either case, it hardly mattered now; since she herself had been an only child, the title had passed to a distant cousin in Surrey and a claim to it could not be resurrected at this late stage.
‘Very interesting, Mrs Nicholls. Now, if you will excuse me …’ She rose to get away from the eyes that were so at odds with the woman’s over-jovial manner.
‘Oh, but you got to meet my son.’ Mrs Nicholls gestured frantically at a man over the other side of the room, watching the dancing.
Diana had already noticed him. Amidst all the gaudiness and glitter, the plainness of his uniform stood out, though it was undoubtedly a uniform – like a naval officer’s dress coat but lacking its ornamentation. Without the epaulettes, braiding and the silver binding to the buttonholes, its dark blue cloth seemed to take in light and give none back.
So did the man, which was why the Dowager had noticed him. He was thirtyish, regular-featured, not unhandsome, yet there was an extraordinary non-reflectiveness to him, as if the chatter of the people around him and the music were being sucked into a well. He was alone, even in a crowd.
At his mother’s signal, he came towards them without changing his expression.
‘Yere, ma dear,’ Mrs Nicholls said. ‘This is the Countess of Stacpoole – you know who she is, don’t ee? Your ladyship, this yere’s my son, Captain Walter Nicholls. We gave ’un Walter in memory of Sir Walter Pomeroy, him bein’ a descendant.’
Captain Nicholls’s response to knowledge of who she was puzzled the Dowager. It might have been that of a hunter who had waited all his life for the sight of one particular quarry – yet there was no excitement in it, merely an added, almost relaxing, quietness. Had he been a master of hounds, his so-ho would have been uttered in a whisper, but both dogs and fox would have known it was doomed.
Most disturbing. Did he resent her? No, it wasn’t resentment, it was … she didn’t know what it was and would spend no further time on it.
‘Your ladyship.’
‘Captain Nicholls.’
The mother prattled on regardless. ‘And a fine son, tew, your ladyship, though it’s me as says it as shouldn’t. Educated and on his way up, aren’t ee, Walter? Board of Customs Comptroller for this area, goin’ to root out all the dirty smugglers along the coast. And if he dew, the Lord Lieutenant’s promised as King George’ll give him a knighthood, idden that right, Walter? So us’ll soon be back to greatness, won’t us, Walter?’
‘Mother,’ Captain Nicholls said, flatly.
Mrs Nicholls clapped her hands over her mouth, but over them her eyes remained fixed on Diana’s. ‘An’ you’ll never guess, Walter, but what her ladyship’s thinkin’ of returning to T’Gallants, our mootual ancestor’s home. Ah, ’twill be like Sir Walter Pomeroy come back, like Good Queen Bess’s olden times.’
Yes, well. The Dowager bowed and made another move to leave but now it was Captain Nicholls who barred her path.
‘T’Gallants?’ he asked abruptly. ‘You’re going to live at Babbs Cove?’
The Inquisition would have had better manners. ‘I don’t know, Captain Nicholls. Whether I do or not is a matter of concern only to myself.’
‘No, it isn’t.’ He darted his sentences, each as unornamented as his dress, and stared after them into her face, as if to make sure they arrived at their destination before he began another. Somewhere along the line he had discarded the Devonshire accent but his eyes were his mother’s. ‘I must have your permission to search the house before you take possession.’
‘Indeed?’ He was mad; they were both mad.
‘Yes. I’ve tried before. The caretaker refuses to let my men in.’
Was this lunacy or total lack of social grace? Either would hamper his rise in his profession, yet, if his mother were telling the truth, the title of comptroller suggested fairly high authority. She suspected obsessive efficiency.
Then she thought: Caretaker?
He jerked out the next sentence. ‘And the local magistrate refuses me a warrant.’
There was something childlike in his confession to being thwarted; in anyone else it might have been endearing but nobody, ever, would find this man endearing.
She did not like him; she did not like his mother. Most certainly, she did not want him rootling in her house, whether she occupied it or not. ‘If a magistrate refuses his warrant, I fear I must withhold mine,’ she said and moved away.
Again he blocked her, presumably to argue, but she was rescued by Admiral Edgcumbe. ‘What’s this? What’s this? We leave business at the door, Nicholls, along with our swords.’
‘That gentleman appears to want to search my house,’ she said as they walked off.
‘He would. Recently been made comptroller for the area. New broom sweepin’ clean. Typical blasted Customs. Hard worker, though, always looking for hidden contraband.’
‘Really? Does he think there is some at T’Gallants?’
‘There probably is,’ the Admiral told her.
‘Really?’ She was shocked.
‘Oh yes,’ the Admiral said, without concern. ‘Smuggling’s the local industry round here. Fishing and smuggling, the two are synonymous.’ He patted her hand. ‘No need to worry, Diana, your Devonshire smuggler’s a rogue but not a dangerous rogue. And he’ll be facing a hard time now that Nicholls has been appointed to catch him. A regular ferret, our Nicholls. And out for glory. If he can sweep the coast of smuggling, he’ll be well rewarded.’
He sounded regretful. Diana thought he showed extraordinary laxity to a trade she knew by hearsay to be ugly; the Fortescues in Kent, with whom she’d stayed occasionally, gave blood-chilling accounts of smuggling gangs torturing and killing Revenue men sent to round them up. Not, she remembered, that such murders had prevented Lady Fortescue serving tea on which no duty had been paid.
‘That’s Kent,’ Admiral Edgcumbe said dismissively when she mentioned it. ‘East of England villains. Ugly. Different again from your Devonian or even your Cornish lads. Your West of England smuggler’s a fine seaman, d’ye see? Has to sail further to fetch his goods from France.’
The Dowager failed to see how good seamanship necessarily denoted good character, nor how an admiral presently engaged in a war with France could tolerate with such apparent charity fellow-countrymen who traded with the enemy. But Lord Edgcumbe appeared to regard the supply of cheap brandy, Hollands and tobacco as necessary to the country’s morale.
That used to be Aymer’s attitude, the Dowager remembered – until he’d became a minister in His Majesty’s Government and discovered by how much the Treasury was being welched.
His Majesty’s Exchequer had estimated that duty, standing at four shillings per pound, was collected annually on 650,000 pounds of tea. Less happily, it also estimated that the nation’s annual consumption of tea was at least 1,500,000 pounds and therefore it was losing nearly three million pounds in uncollected revenue. As for brandy, smugglers could provide it at five shillings a gallon (and make a handsome profit for themselves while doing so) which left honest wine merchants and publicans with the choice of staying honest and paying for legal brandy at eight shillings a gallon or going out of business.
From then on Aymer had advocated drawing and quartering for offenders against the Revenue.
At supper – the second of the night; how these people ate – she found herself surrounded by a blue and gold coronal of naval officers who, spurred by the story of Nicholls’s attempt to search her house, were a-brim with tales of smugglers and smuggling.
She looked covertly towards their wives, who had formed a separate nosegay of their own, to see if they minded. She must be careful; if she was to settle in this area, she must not outrage its female society. Already she had refused all invitations to dance and was emitting no signals saying she wished to flirt, which she did not. Aymer had knocked such playfulness out of her very early on.
Admiral Edgcumbe, she knew, was merely paying her the attention due to an esteemed guest by a kindly host. The others? Well, she was new on stage and, despite her listlessness and the grey dreariness of her dress, still not totally repulsive.
Her main concern was Captain Luscombe who’d proved most eager to bring her an ice from the supper table, which, since he had been introduced to her as the officer in charge of Millbay Prison, she had graciously allowed him to do. But as the good captain was a fat fiftyish bachelor, susceptible, as she’d learned from Lady Edgcumbe, to anything in petticoats, she didn’t think the ladies of Plymouth would begrudge her this minor conquest.
The glance reassured her; the women were serene, they saw her as no threat. Perhaps jealousy was an emotion naval wives could not afford, or was reserved for the unknown women their husbands encountered in other ports. The Admiral and his cronies were being allowed to entertain a newcomer with tales the ladies had heard many times before, while Lady Edgcumbe and her cronies indulged in more interesting local gossip. Satisfied, the Dowager inclined her ear to stories related with affectionate shakes of the head more usually awarded to naughty children.
It was a relief that Babbs Cove was not the centre of them.
