His Last Fire (9 page)

Harley always knew that his deepest need must be denied him. Thomas Skelton of 17 Dyott Street, St.Giles's-in-the-Fields receives his final monthly payment, greatly more than usual, without having discovered the name of his benefactor, without having forgiven.

S
HRIVEN

I
t was over in eight minutes: catlin cut through skin and flesh, arteries ligatured, smashed humerus sawn, stump below shoulder cauterised. Gently he pressed more rum through the young man's lips, helped friends carry him to bed.

Swiftly, cleanly done. A life saved. So far. He knew how infection might strike in days, how even recovered there was no work for a labourer with one arm. He'd saved him for a life of bleakness.

Surgeon-apothecary Sawbridge was renowned for miles both sides of the border. From hill to receding hill. His immaculate surgery was rarely used. He set bones, pulled teeth, lanced boils, distributed draughts, instructions. Received little payment; persuaded the poor that vaccination wouldn't turn them into cows. Was renowned for his skill but also for his kindness conveyed through touch, expression, tender inclination of his body rather than words. His patients were humble, lives narrowed by necessity, afflicted by accident. What use were words to them?

Countless deliveries, babies alive, dead, whole, unformed; mothers encouraged, fathers consoled. They wondered why he'd never married, had children of his own. His delicacy with women, his sweet way with children who obeyed, never screamed, adored him, raised the same comment – what a good husband he'd make, what a good father. Until age changed the tense of the verb.

He had little time for marriage perhaps. His patients, spread widely, had large families in small spaces, hard lives in fields, woods, on freezing hillsides. Often he rode out, returned late. Then Harley came to the blue-slated school house, escaping disaster in London. A friendship struck that lived for almost forty years. Answered some need in each, dwelling as it did in honesty and acceptance. Normally spare of speech, Sawbridge opened up to Harley whose mental sufferings he tended. They exposed their lives to each other, peered, poked about, retrieved deep-lodged shards. Harley's life was more complex. Heavy, festering guilt required constant recitation at first. Later he complained that Sawbridge made light of the disappointment in his own life.

Sawbridge's apprenticeship had begun with placing leeches, pounding powders, holding bowls when blood was let. A silent boy. Witness to small and great suffering. An uncle funded a bout of study in London to improve on this rural round. Up and down the spiral staircase at St Thomas's he went to watch and learn the newest ways in surgery. Filled a stack of notebooks from lectures on anatomy, chemistry, physiology. Uneasy in the city he did little else but work. Back home among clouded hills, drab chapels, he began the practice that created so much local glory and puzzlement.

One of his patients was a small landowner whose family suddenly sprouted illness. Charmed by Sawbridge's medical confidence and apparent political reticence, the landowner invited him to attend bedsides and social events equally. To use the library freely, though he hardly had the leisure for it.

Unlike Harley's experience with women, carnal, disastrous, Sawbridge saw the landowner's daughter Laetitia and loved her straight away. She was sixteen, too young, but he could wait. He made no promises to himself, employed no visions. Observed; savoured proximity whenever it occurred. Watched her eat, dance, sing, chatter in a way delightfully alien to him. Sometimes walking, they became separated from the rest, ambled together among clusters of marble shepherds, shepherdesses, lines of tender exotic trees. Once he made a pencil sketch which he kept, folded, next to his heart and showed to Harley some twelve years into their friendship.

‘Only
now
you show me this vital piece of yourself! I'm offended.'

‘Nonsense! You know the story,'

‘But you
still
keep it next to your heart, Sawbridge.'

‘I'm a man of habit.'

‘Tell me again why you didn't marry her?'

‘It wasn't clear that my feelings were reciprocated.'

She married the eldest son of a neighbouring baronet, lived in a fine house not far away. Sawbridge attended her first two births; struggled to save her before the grand physician arrived from London for the third.

Now, Harley was dying.

‘No vicar, no preacher!' he reminded Sawbridge.

‘You know, people often confess at the end, believers or no. Even confess themselves to
me
.'

‘That's no surprise. There's that about you, my friend. You're like sunlight breaking through a dark wood – people turn to you, give themselves up to you. Look at me. What
haven't
I told you about myself? I am fully shriven. But it doesn't work the other way round. I've had to squeeze with all my might to get a drop from you. In another life you'd have been a priest.'

‘And who will shrive me?'

‘Surely
you've
nothing to confess? Your life's been a simple, daily heroism.'

‘No more than Amos dragging lambs out of ewes in a snowdrift.'

Harley's protest was lost in coughing that racked him; gasping, retching, he was too weak for further argument.

Sawbridge gave Harley a month. Harley could no longer teach but it was summer and there was no hurry for him to vacate the school house. How often had they planned new worlds together among leaning towers of books:
The Rights of Man
,
The Necessity of Atheism
, a heap of Cobbett's
Political Register
balancing on a
Pilgrim's Progress
supported by three volumes of D'Oyley and Mant. Now they sat sweating by Harley's fire, banked up despite the heat, Sawbridge in shirtsleeves, Harley shivering in coat and blanket.

‘I do have something to tell you if you'll hear me. I have kept this back from you even while you told me everything.'

‘I forgive you for that, Sawbones.' They laughed, Harley with pain.

‘I'd delivered several babies by the time Laetitia had her first confinement,' Sawbridge began. He hadn't found it difficult clearing out the crowd of female midwives and friends, he said, who in those days, fussing like geese, attended every birth from the highest to the lowest, excluding fresh air and men from wherever the birth took place.

He'd seen little of her since her marriage. Wasn't welcome as he had been at her father's. Her husband avoided him, employed him only when he had to, saw him as a purveyor of pills.

She was very frightened, shocked, unwilling to take much brandy. Sawbridge held her hand, encouraged her, even tried to divert her with memories of events in her recent girlhood at which he'd been present.

Her husband rode out on all these occasions so that when a fever set in after the third, premature birth, he was not to be found for several hours. As her mind began to wander, Sawbridge stroked her arm, felt her frenzied pulse against his wrist. Fragments of her life broke out without boundaries of time. She called for her dead father, gave household orders, sang childish songs, muttered prayers, all tangled with each other. Lay still. Flamed up again. Turned suddenly to Sawbridge, pulled at his shirt with extraordinary force.

‘You never said! You never asked me!' Hectic, glittering, she began to whistle, fell asleep.

‘I got her through it. I've no idea why she survived. Couldn't account for it then, can't now.' She was well, if weak, in time for the appearance of the husband and the grand physician. He was not asked to attend the family again.

‘I resumed work and at first spent little time thinking about what she'd said. Yet it crept into my heart and hid there.'

‘Lived like a toad crouching at the bottom of the cistern.'

‘I like toads.'

‘You let her slip away.'

‘Yes.' The April day among bluebells under oak trees, when he helped adjust her shawl against still lingering chill. When somehow the moment passed.

‘Sawbridge, it was your own fault you lost her.'

‘Yes, it was.' Condemned himself to a life of bleakness.

‘And she lost you. What was
her
life? Tolerable of course. Not happy. But how can I absolve you?'

He helped Harley to bed, went home. Realised how over the years, after rehearsing again and again his fatal involvement in the riot of 1795, Harley had gradually calmed. He had reviewed his life, struggled to understand his failings, motives; succeeded. He was ready to die.

Sawbridge was hale, strong, yet he had no knowledge of himself.
Why
did he let the most important things pass by? Why had he left it till now to tell Harley what Laetitia had said in her delirium? Was it reticence or cowardice? Was reticence cowardice? It was too late for Harley to help him find answers. And if Harley could also not absolve him he must remain unshriven.

Cholera lashed the country. Only coffin-makers flourished. Laetitia, a middle-aged widow in her newly gothicised, battlemented house died along with her two older children; as did so many of the poor in their insanitary shacks by the common-sewer stream.

Sawbridge is seventy, vigorous if somewhat stiff in the mornings, misses Harley, attends all sufferers as often as ever. Rides along lanes, up steep tracks beyond battered hawthorn. Laetitia's nineteen-year-old daughter, Frances, with the old wise eyes of the prematurely born, sick with disease and terror of death, having watched her mother and siblings die, survives, and in relief and gratitude accepts Sawbridge's offer of marriage.

There is brief disgust at this action – the prudery of a small rural town – though it soon dissipates. The people are too fond of their surgeon-apothecary for it to last. The accusation that he's married for money is groundless, since he insists he and his wife live as he's always done in his modest grey-brick villa. There are no children. Frances learns to scrub instruments, hold bandages for the dressing of ulcers, soothe colic, clean bloody limbs.

The first April, Sawbridge and his wife walk in the grounds of her house, shuttered, emptied. They stop to observe oak buds breaking out, bluebells soon to uncurl. She sits on a stone bench and is startled to find him on his knees in last year's leaves, grasping her hand. He tells of his great, enduring love for her mother, of Laetitia's exclamations after giving birth to her.

Her existence shakes; and yet she feels relief, is glad. Understands. Consoles. Helps him up, his shrift complete.

F
ROM THE
L
IFE

T
he accident changed everything. At first, when he couldn't walk without crutches, Digham made up a truckle bed for him in a cupboard off the printing room, where he'd sleep until he could take the stairs and return to his lodgings in Albion Place. This might seem like excessive kindness on the part of a master for his apprentice, but Digham knew the value of Joseph Young's work and couldn't do without him.

Besides, a bond had formed between the two over almost seven years. Age, temperament, experience, politics, status, even size stood between them but were smothered by mutual respect. Joseph watched with awe William Digham's rapid strokes with the etching needle; his witty put-downs of the Prince of Wales's foibles and excesses, of ministers and their latest mistresses, the ridiculous ferocity of the French. William in turn admired Joseph's engraving, the subtle variation of angles at which the young man pushed the burin's lozenge-shaped point, his concentration no less than obsession. Together they produced satires sold in the shop below that amused, provoked, avoided prosecution.

‘What is
this
?'

Digham stood beneath lines of damp prints drying like washing on a breezeless day. A little man, his baldness warmed by a felt hat, he peered at a sheet through thick lenses.

That Joseph's apprenticeship was almost at an end didn't mean he should make no effort, Digham remarked.

‘Whose idea have you etched so miserably? I need no counterproof to see that it has come out vilely.'

Etching and engraving puny satires drawn by rich customers brought needed income.

‘That's just it, sir. The
idea
is miserable; a paltry Tory jibe. It doesn't deserve reproduction. It should be thrust in the fire.'

The two men were so politically opposed that there were times when even copying Digham's own designs carefully onto copper was distasteful to Joseph. Yet at least Digham's
ideas were conceived with humour and drawn with great skill.

‘We are being
paid
, Young. If Lady Parrot's notion is feeble that is too bad. Your opinion is not part of the arrangement. You must do it again. Same plate – we can't afford a new one. Burnish off these parts, deepen the lines round the figures.'

Joseph sighed, began to rub the burnisher over the plate.

‘Or is it the ankle? Does it still hurt after your mysterious accident about which you've told us nothing? But, good Lord, an ankle's little enough use in engraving!

‘Keep your Jacobin sympathies under your hat, young man Young,' Digham concluded, looking over his spectacles at his doodling, dreaming apprentice, whose long legs stuck out awkwardly from under the bench. ‘When you set up on your own you'll see how far you get with those opinions.'

Digham barely concealed from himself a doubt that Young's dreamy, idealistic character would produce satires with any force. It was all very well having your head full of Milton all day. He read too much, his coat pockets baggy with books.

Digham felt a one-sided affection for the young man who'd come to him educated, precocious, withdrawn. When Mrs Young died suddenly, Joseph's silk mercer father broke down, was bankrupt within a year and apprenticed the fourteen-year-old to Digham. The boy had shown himself good at drawing; his father couldn't afford to keep him. He'd learned fast, become an excellent engraver. As long as he worked for Digham he was secure. But the older man nurtured a dread of letting him go. Surely, he'd founder without knowledge of the world.

The star-wheel creaked. Batley bent his knee to push one spike, pulled another with his podgy arms. The pressman had worked for Digham for forty years. Digham looked again at Joseph staring through the lattice. Light in the printing room shone pond-green from a tree dense with new leaves.

It was quite by chance that at seventeen Joseph heard
courageous John Thelwall speak and found more than he'd lost
when his childhood collapsed: feeling, inspiration, idealism.

‘I affirm that
every
man and
every
woman and
every
child ought to obtain something more than food and rags and a wretched hammock with a poor rug to cover it without working twelve or fourteen hours a day. They have a claim, a sacred and inviolable claim.'

How they cheered in the packed hall! And Pitt brought in a gagging act just for Thelwall.

Weekly, Joseph paid his penny to the London Corresponding Society, met the fellows in his division and was constantly stirred. He pasted bills with pot and brush, graduated to writing pamphlets, read and read, sharpening his ambition to move the crowd with his own oratory.

He'd broken his ankle on the day of the bread riot. Shamefully, slipping in hot dung, knocked by a carriage. Not hurling brickbats, stones; not crying out with the rest. Not even anywhere near them. No one knew the true story, but as soon as the ankle had mended he resumed his attendance at his division, anxious to assuage guilt and shame.

He offered to write up the next bill for printing then found he was arguing against too many bills.

‘It's no use,' he said. ‘There's such a quantity of bills posted everywhere – the public will not look at them!'

Irritation with his fellow members pricked him like a rash. Too much noise at meetings. Too much reporting to and from the General Committee. The president and secretary both more finicky than the most crabbed of pedants.

Each division must debate what was debated by each
other
division. Equality was thoroughgoing in the Society. Impatient with the laborious procedure, he was no longer stirred, when once the very utterance of certain phrases had moved him to tears. He began to sense a dislocation from his fellow Citizens, dyers, china-burners, wire-workers, locksmiths, sucking earnestly on their pipes.

Perhaps it was the humiliation. For there had been that, too, as well as shame. Insensible after the collision, he'd been taken into a House, a superior whorehouse near St James's where he'd wandered, drawn to the seat of power. There he was sneered at by its renowned owner whose carriage had injured him, a woman whose features he recognised from having engraved a series of Digham's satires. It was a place where corruption and vice were of the highest order and he couldn't run from it! Had been forced to remain and be laughed at.

Shame, humiliation. His thoughts hobbled, confused.

*

One night, he and other members arriving early are
confronted by the landlord of the Angel where the division meets.

‘You must move yourselves to an upper bedroom. I have a meeting of the Society of Loyal Britons to accommodate,' the man tells them, looking anywhere but into their eyes.

They know at once he means to get them out, has probably been threatened by the justices. Throughout the meeting, squeezed into an unsuitable attic, the committee seated neatly round the edge of the stained bed, a loud roar of meaty men bawling
God Save the King
,
Rule Britannia
,
Britons Strike Home
and such like assails them.

Propelled by loathing, Joseph agrees to find another meeting place and goes straight to the Bricklayers' Arms where, relieved at making an arrangement with the landlord, he takes a second drink.

Through the ceiling comes the sound of music. The normally abstemious Joseph has a momentary shock. He thinks he hears again an exquisite voice singing an aria in Italian – his first experience of rapture. For shame had been followed by humiliation, humiliation by rapture. Immobile in a place no better than hell, he'd suddenly heard anguish expressed as pure beauty. All previous thought was re-etched, fine lines erased, grooves filled with copper burr. The song cut as deep as the steel could go. It rang in black lines over and over again, possessing his mind.

But no, it isn't that voice, that song; yet it is a woman's voice and he follows it without hesitation through the fug of pipe smoke, stench of cheese, along rush-lit passages, up stairs. There in the rowdy crowd he pays his four pence for music and a girl, beer, punch and tobacco extra, and arrives at Digham's the next morning late and bleary.

Digham remonstrates, threatens, doesn't demand an explanation. Guesses and is glad.

The apprenticeship is over. Digham continues to employ Joseph as an engraver until he can afford to set up on his own. He tolerates the young man's dissoluteness, for his work, however late in the day he produces it, is excellent. Joseph frequently attends the Bricklayers' cock and hen club from which no one leaves alone and whose raucous activities provoke raids by the constables. The sketchbook in his coat is full of drawings. In time he pairs up with the singer. She is known best for her rendering of the old song
Sandman Joe
, rotating breasts and hips to make her listeners roar with lascivious pleasure.

The disembodied voice of a whore singing
Lascia ch'io pianga
beats like blood at the back of his head.

Digham holds a print out at arm's length. Batley, sweating, rests on a stool in the corner. In the heat, the lattice has been flung open to cesspool and blossom.

‘Could land you in trouble, young man Young.' For
Treason
he's etched a saucy, youthful John Bull aiming sturdy buttocks at a poster of the King, firing a fart in his face. Lively strokes, brisk, bold, ebullient.

‘But I see you save your skin with a Pitt-like onlooker accusing our stout Bull of treason. A forceful satire. Ask five shillings for it.

‘And
this
print? My! So different. My! How well you've used stipple and aquatint. Wonderful effect.' He takes it to the window. Pores over it.

A woman laments in a garden; a figure of tragic beauty among weeping trees. Done with tenderness, startling.

‘Quite remarkable, my friend, and surely from the life,' he says, convinced.

‘From
my
life, William,' replies Joseph. ‘And not for sale.'