Taking Liberties by Diana Norman Read Free Book Online Page B

couldn’t see; she was thrashing about in a roaring darkness.
    Oliver tried to reach her. ‘Don’t, Missus, don’t. We don’t know yet. There’s a thousand explanations . . .’ She wasn’t hearing him. He could only hold her close and wait for the initial agony to subside.
    Unmarried and childless, Oliver could only guess at her pain but he suspected guilt was part of it. He’d once asked his father why Philippa had gone away. Andra had said: ‘Weren’t my choice, lad. We weren’t wed then. I’d have kept the lass, we got on well, her and me, the time she lived at Raby before she went. I’d’ve loved her like my own.’
    And he would have done, Oliver knew; Andra Hedley’s reverence for all living creatures was especially for children. Reluctant that his son should think less of Makepeace, he’d added: ‘Weren’t her fault, neither. The bairn’s birth were a time o’ despair for her. Husband just dead, filched of home and fortune that very day by as brazen a pair o’ schemers as ever graced a gibbet. Beat dizzy, she was. Took years to get back and by then there’d opened a breach twixt her and little lass they could neither of ’em bridge. Philippa’d become closer to others than to her ma and when they upped sticks for America, she went an’ all. Nobody’s fault, lad, nobody’s fault.’
    Oliver neither understood nor approved of those parents, the very rich and the very poor, who sent their children to be brought up in other households; he didn’t come of either class. Neither, he thought, does the Missus. Her first marriage to the aristocrat, Sir Philip Dapifer, had been only a temporary elevation; by birth and breeding she was as bourgeois as himself, the daughter of a Boston innkeeper.
    Yet he considered that even now, secure and happily married once more, the Missus was not sufficiently attentive to the two daughters she’d had by Andra. Too often, in Oliver’s opinion, she stayed overnight in Newcastle through press of work, rather than returning to Raby.
    True, the little girls were happy and vigorous children, well looked after by his and their mutual Aunt Ginny, apparently not aware—as Philippa must have been—that they weren’t receiving full value from their mother.
    Scenting disapproval, his father had emphasized: ‘Oliver, tha marries who tha marries. I wed a businesswoman and knew it afore I wed her. I’d not change her.’
    He’d not received full value himself, which is why the matter weighed on him; he’d been motherless with a father working long hours in the mines to keep them both—and, this was the rub, that same father often abstracted during their precious hours together. For if Andra had married a businesswoman, Makepeace had married an engineer, self taught but boiling with invention, his mind bent on lessening the dangers miners faced every day underground. But that was nature; Andra Hedley was a proper man. To be a proper woman, Makepeace Hedley had also to be a proper mother. And she was not. And now suffered because she was not.
    Censorious he might be, but it was impossible for Oliver to watch, unmoved, the crucifixion of a woman who’d always been kind to him.
    â€˜I drowned my baby,’ she kept saying, ‘I drowned her and Susan.’
    â€˜We don’t know,’ he kept saying in return, ‘we don’t know, Missus. Let’s find out afore we give way.’
    In the end, he managed to reach her. His words began to penetrate the deluge of despair she was lost in and she grabbed at them as if he’d thrown her a rope.
    â€˜Might not be that, might it?’ she begged. ‘Might be something else. Could’ve been blown off course, couldn’t they? Landed in the West Indies, maybe?’
    â€˜Certainly they could.’
    â€˜Who’d know?’
    â€˜The Admiralty,’ he said, firmly.