Taking Liberties by Diana Norman Read Free Book Online Page A

There’s maybe another letter floundering around the seas somewhere telling us she’d changed her mind, maybe Strang couldn’t take the two of them after all, maybe Susan decided to wait for better weather.’
    But . . . four months, he thought; Susan should have written again, there should’ve been news one way or another in four months.
    Makepeace didn’t hear him. She was being assailed by certainty. God had drowned her daughter. Philippa and Susan had set off from New York and not arrived. Somewhere on the voyage, the Lord Percy had gone down.
    It seemed inevitable now, as if she had known it in advance and allowed it to happen. Because of all the years she had let pass without seeing Philippa or summoning her home from America, God had chosen the ultimate punishment.
    I didn’t go to her. I didn’t fetch her back. Andra wanted me to, but I didn’t.
    It was as if her daughter had been calling to her across the Atlantic in a voice that she’d been too busy to hear, allowing it to be subsumed in work, her marriage, the birth of other daughters.
    Guilt snatched at a rag to cover itself. She didn’t want to come back; she wrote she’d rather stay with Susan in America.
    The small figure of her daughter at their last interview in London stood in front of her now, as clear as clear, listening to her explain that Aunt Susan wanted to return to America and that Betty, who had been Makepeace’s nurse as well as Philippa’s, would be going too. They wanted to take Philippa with them—the child was the apple of their eye, they had looked after her while Makepeace was busy—and Makepeace was giving the child the choice.
    A plain, grave little girl with Philip Dapifer’s long face, his sallow skin and hair, but without the humour that had made her late father so attractive. As she’d considered, she’d looked like a small, studious camel.
    â€˜Would you be coming too, Mama?’
    â€˜No. I have things to do in England. I must go up North again soon.’
    So much to do. Well, there had been. She’d still been struggling to adapt to the loss of Philip and gain wealth from the coalfield she’d won so that she could beggar the two people, one of them Philip’s divorced first wife, whose chicanery had robbed her and Philippa of his estates when he died.
    Andra had been merely her business partner in those days, someone in the background. She’d been alone, obsessed with taking revenge on the first Lady Dapifer, which eventually she had, oh, she had , and never regretted it.
    She remembered, agonizingly now, how she had defined the matter for herself then: did she love her daughter enough to abandon the struggle and go back to America—possibly a better mother but undoubtedly a beaten woman? And the answer had been no, she didn’t.
    Now, again, she heard Philippa make her decision.
    â€˜I think I should like to go. Just for a visit.’
    Don’t go. Stay here. ‘Are you sure?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    It had been punishing at that moment to experience what the child must have felt every time Makepeace had left her . How much greater the punishment now.
    So she had let her go. She’d watched Susan and Betty, her best and only women friends, take Philippa’s hands and lead her up the gangplank of the America-bound boat, all three of them alienated from the woman to whom they’d been devoted because she hadn’t had time for them. And with them had gone another beloved child, Betty’s son Josh.
    At the last, Makepeace had reached for her daughter.
    â€˜I’ll come and fetch you back, you know. If you like America, we might even stay there together.’
    The small body resisted. It had been the worst moment then; it was the worst moment now. Philippa hadn’t believed her.
    The wave that had gathered speed and weight somewhere out in the Atlantic to come rushing at her crashed over Makepeace. She