Taking Liberties Read Online Free PDF

dear?’ He always considered an action in the light of Society’s opinion. ‘Robert, I do not think that to enquire after a young man on behalf of his worried mother is going to lose us the war.’
    She was punishing him a little; he should not have been niggardly over her pension but also, she realized, she was resolved to do this for Martha. It would be a little adventure, nothing too strenuous, merely a matter of satisfying herself that the boy was in health.
    â€˜Well, but . . . when do you intend to do this?’
    This was how it would be—she would have to explain her comings and goings. And suddenly she could not bear the constraint they put on her any longer. She shrugged. ‘In a day or two. Perhaps tomorrow.’ To get away from this house, from the last twenty-two years, from everything. She was startled by the imperative of escape; if she stayed in this house one day more it would suffocate her.
    â€˜Tomorrow? Of course not, Mama. You cannot break mourning so soon; it is unheard of. I cannot allow it. People would see it as an insult to the pater’s memory. Have you taken leave of your senses?’
    â€˜No, my dear, merely leave of your father.’
    She watched him hurry away to wake Alice with the news. She was sorry she had saddled him with a recalcitrant mother but he could not expect compliance in everything, not when her own survival was at stake. People would think it a damn sight more odd if she strangled Alice—which was the alternative.
    I shall go to the Admiralty, she thought. Perhaps I can arrange an exchange for young Master Grayle so that he may return to his mother. Again, it can make no difference to the war one way or the other. We send an American prisoner back to America and some poor Englishman held in America returns home to England.
    Odd that the subject of John Paul Jones had arisen only yesterday. Had not Jones’s intention been to hold the Earl of Selkirk hostage in order to procure an exchange of American prisoners? Goodness gracious, I shall be treading in the path of that pirate. The thought gave her unseemly pleasure. She stood at the edge of the yew-scented Dark Arbour, marvelling at how wicked she had become.
    When had she taken the decision to act upon Martha’s request? Why had she taken it? To outrage her family in revenge for a niggardly pension? Not really. Because of the picture Martha had tried to draw of her son? If she understood it aright, Lieutenant Grayle had a physical likeness to his maternal uncle.
    An image came to her of Martha’s brother, a young man in a rowing boat pulling out to sea with easy strokes, head and shoulders outlined against a setting sun so that he was etched in black except for a fiery outline around his head.
    Dead now. He’d joined the navy and one of Martha’s letters had told her he’d been killed aboard the Intrepid during the battle of Minorca in 1756. She’d put the mental image away, as with the other memories of her Devon summers, but its brightness hadn’t faded on being fetched out again.
    His nephew had ‘such a desire that all may have Liberty’, did he? Well, she might enjoy some liberty for herself while procuring his. It would give her purpose, at least for a while.
    But, no, that even hadn’t been the reason for her decision. It was because she owed Martha. For a happiness. And the debt had been called in: ‘. . . as you too have a son . . .’ Because Martha agonized for a son as she, in a different way, had agonized for hers. Perhaps she need not fail Martha’s son as she had failed her own.
    Then she stopped rummaging through excuses for what she was going to do and came up, somewhat shamefully, with the one that lay beneath all the others, the one that, she realized in that second, had finally made up her mind.
    Because, if she didn’t do it, she’d be bored to death.
    She stepped out from the arbour into sunlight and walked