The Sparks Fly Upward (10 page)

Eliza was quieter and equally attentive to her father who, though a kindly man by most standards, had stopped her allowance for a month when she'd cut her hair without his permission.

Only Philippa was assured enough in her family life not to be different when she was away from it. At home and at meetings, she looked and dressed like a conforming society woman but, as Kitty had once told her: ‘You are the most radical of any of us, which makes you the greatest curiosity of the lot.'

At one o'clock it became apparent that there would be no others.

Eliza sighed and tapped her coffee cup with a spoon. Dutifully, they discussed charity business first, a sale of work in the parish hall next week, the form of letters of appeal to be sent around the neighbourhood.

‘Now then,' the chairwoman said. ‘We are agreed that M de Condorcet must be rescued, are we not? In view of Sister Dapifer's disappointing news, how is that to be done?'

Kitty said, ‘What's the use of him to us if, when he gets here, he's regarded as just another blood-drinker? English opinion refuses to differentiate between the revolutionaries.'

‘Fact is, my dear,' drawled Georgiana, ‘the Revolution has done for all of us. The vote? We'll be lucky if we're not put back into chastity belts.'

‘We need him,' Philippa said. ‘We need a leader.'

‘I thought we had one,' said Kitty. ‘I thought we'd agreed to ask Mary Wollstonecraft to come and talk to us once she's back from France.'

‘I have news of Miss Wollstonecraft. She also has done for us, damn her,' Georgiana said. ‘Or, rather, has done for herself in more ways than one. While viewing the delights of the Revolution, still unmarried, she has managed to become pregnant. While in France, my dears, as the venacular has it, she has been jumbling her giblets.'

After a while, Philippa said, ‘How do you know? And, Ginny, if you use that disgusting phrase again, I shall leave.'

Georgiana waved her elegant hands in apology. ‘I'm so put out. It's so . . . so
careless
of her. I know because Lady Mountcashel told me—Wollstonecraft was her governess, if you remember, and Margaret has always kept up with her. She's had an affair in France with some American. Margaret says he has no intention of marrying her.'

There was another silence. After a while, Eliza said, ‘God help us.'

He was likely to be the only one who could. Wollstonecraft's book had spoken for them all, not condemning men but pointing out that the bondage of women was to humanity's disadvantage; one half of the population was being dragged in chains, a dead weight retarding the advance of the other half.

Only let women be free, she'd said, allow them full education, strengthen their bodies and their understanding so that they can contribute to the partnership. Society could never fulfill its potential until it was founded on reason. If man regarded himself as the only creature capable of reason and its uses, she wrote, ‘women have no inherent rights to claim and therefore, by the same rule, their duties vanish, for rights and duties are inseparable.'

Instantly, she had been portrayed as a slut. ‘. . . a philosophical wanton,' one ladies' magazine called her, ‘who would break down the bars intended to restrain licentiousness.' A speaker in the House of Lords warned his fellow peers not to allow their wives and daughters to read this ‘hyena in petticoats.' Smoking-room jokes in the clubs somewhat confusingly attached a penis to her while at the same time attributing to her a voracious sexual appetite for men.

There had been brickbats in plenty and now this, the most shining prophet of female emancipation, had herself supplied the enemy with its ammunition.

‘She's done for us,' Georgina said again, quietly.

There was no doubt that she had.
And yet
, thought Philippa,
only a free-thinking and uninhibited woman could have written as Wollstonecraft has done; why, then, are we blaming her for being what she is?

Kitty Hays stubbed out her cheroot in her saucer. ‘Damn her,' she said. ‘And damn Robespierre. They've put us back to being a charity. That's all we'll ever be, carriers of nourishing gruel to the poor. It's all they'll let us be.'

Marie Joséphine had taken the curious flea trap out of its case and carried it to the window to inspect it—a good flea trap was worth having—and a long slant of winter sun cast the shadow of the thing's mechanism over their table in a shape unnervingly like that of a guillotine.

It was Eliza, the sweet-natured, who kept them in line. She tapped her cup again. ‘To return to the original proposition, I see no reason why we should abandon M Condorcet to his fate. For one thing, he is too good a man to be killed by those monsters and we owe him much. For another, he would command attention. Father says that he was the only one of the revolutionaries the House of Commons would have given a hearing to. What do you say, Philippa?'

‘He's no orator.' She had been on a balcony in the Tuileries with Sophie when Condorcet had outlined his proposed revolutionary constitution to the Legislative Assembly and found herself nodding off to sleep, along with most of the 745 deputies. It was in small groups that the man's intellect and essential goodness became apparent. ‘But Eliza's right. He has great influence when you meet him. Women would listen to him as they wouldn't to us. Men, too. He never wanted France to declare war on us and I am sure that if we could get him an interview with Mr Pitt ...'

‘We ain't even got him to England yet,' Kitty pointed out.

‘Ah, well, as to that ...'

Walking home with Marie Joséphine, Philippa thought how ridiculous all of them must have seemed to the Frenchwoman if she'd had good enough English to understand what they were talking about, how ridiculous they all seemed even to themselves.

‘Marie Joséphine, wouldn't you like to be equal with men?' she asked.

‘With
him
?' They were passing the draper's shop again and Marie Joséphine gave a vicious little nod towards it.

‘With all men.'

‘I am better than Sanders,' Marie Joséphine said, offended. ‘He is a coachman, I am a lady's maid. And 'Opkin is only a footman.'

Why do we bother? We are like little boys aping grown-up men with our swearing and our smoking and our fantastic ideas of rescue
, Philippa thought.
None of us really believes Nicolas can receive his
certificat
in time, even if we can get one to him, even if he can use it should we do so. It is mere bravado.

Where was an Englishman of sufficient stature to stand up and demand emancipation for his wife, daughters, his female servants, the washerwoman who came, unseen, at night to fill her tubs ready for twenty-four hours of scrubbing for pennies, the girls lured into brothels for lack of any other occupation?

In this age of enlightened men fighting for reform she could not think of one who championed the cause of women for women's sake.

Stephen, why couldn't it be you? You command the respect of respectable men, you could shatter the complacency of our generation. Why can't you fight for the abolition of
all
slavery?

She asked herself if she could love him then—and knew it to be a useless question.

No, it would have to be Condorcet because he was all they had.

And at least
, she thought,
he can't get pregnant.

Chapter Five

THERE was only a limited amount of speculation Makepeace could expend on what Mrs Glossop might think of her husband escaping imprisonment in going to France, and by the time they reached Basingstoke she'd exhausted it.

It was a thing she'd noticed about dedicated reformers, they took any help they were given for granted, as if it were a privilege for the helper. Glossop was putting her to a lot of trouble and expense, not to mention risk, and so far had said nothing in recognition of it.

She was sorry for him, especially as there were reminders of his plight in the effigies of Thomas Paine being burned by gangs of rioters along the first bit of the Great West Road. Nor did she necessarily want gratitude, but she didn't expect to get bored to death, either.

After Basingstoke, which they reached without enquiry or any more burning effigies, she put him outside on the driving box with Sanders. ‘Nobody looks at coachmen,' she told him. Which was true. ‘Except other coachmen.' Which was also true. ‘And they'll be going the other way.'

It took over four days—she could not ask Sanders to do more than fifty miles a day in this weather—but, apart from the usual vexations of winter travel, it was an uneventful journey. If the hue and cry had been called out after Glossop, the coach was ahead of it and tollgate-keepers were too mindful of the cold to stand in it asking questions.

Better if they had; it might have roused her. As it was, inactivity and a landscape of monotonous white and gray allowed her to reflect on her losses. It seemed to her that whether she went north or south in England, she followed a signpost that led to a death. In Northumberland it was Andra's, in Devon it was the Dowager's.

She didn't go north at all, while her trips to Devon had become rarer as the remembrance entangled in it refused to yield its pain. Makepeace had made only three female friends in her life; Betty, her nurse, and Susan, both of whom were American—and Diana, Dowager Countess of Stacpoole. All of them were dead.

The last friendship had been the most unlikely. Once the owner of T'Gallants, the great house at Babbs Cove which was now Makepeace's property, the Dowager had been chalk to Makepeace's cheese: lofty, elegant, aristocratic, seemingly supercilious. They'd disliked each other on sight; only circumstances and a mutual regard for freedom had brought them together to help a contingent of American seamen who landed on their doorstep during a mass escape of prisoners from Plymouth during the War of Independence.

A strange time, but the even stranger alliance between the two women had outlived it.

Diana had been a little older than Makepeace was then, a widow, and she'd subsequently married the man responsible for the French end of the smuggling relay between Babbs Cove and France. From then on, she and Makepeace had met every year, either at T'Gallants or the chateau of Gruchy where Diana, who became Mme de Vaubon, had enjoyed a happiness she had never known before.

It was short-lived. When she'd conceived at the age of forty-three there had been rejoicing in the villages on both sides of the Channel but the birth of her son, Jacques, had been difficult. Makepeace was with her when she died a week later from septicemia occasioned by a piece of placenta that had refused to come away.

Even the death of Andra seven years later had not swamped that particular grief, indeed had exacerbated it, like a hook still tugging at the mouth of a landed fish, with its reminder that the last female contemporary who could have comforted her was not there.

The best she could do for her dead friend had been to look after the baby until its stricken father procured a suitable nurse. Afterwards she'd regularly gone back and forth to Gruchy to keep an eye on the boy. When de Vaubon, with his friend Georges Danton, entered the fraught world of politics in opposition to Louis XVI's regime, young Jacques had spent nearly as much time with her in England as he had with his father.

For his sake, she might have roused herself from despair after Andra's death if the boy's visits had been kept up but by then Guillaume de Vaubon was a celebrated figure of the Revolution and, anglophile though he was, decided it was unwise for his son to seem too much at home in a royalist country. It had been Philippa, in her frequent trips to Paris, who'd kept up the connection between the two families and ensured that the boy retained his fluent English.

It was late by the time they reached the crest of the steep hill down to Babbs Cove; Makepeace had rejected the idea of stopping for another night on the road; there was a good moon, the ground was dry and Sanders was familiar with the way.

Against the sound of dragging brakes as they went down, she heard Glossop ask, ‘Who owns that house then?' Below them, frost on the dour, slated, multiangled roof of T'Gallants was gleaming in the moonlight, the only indication that the house wasn't part of the cliff on which it stood.

‘It's the missus's,' Sanders said.

No, it ain't
, she thought,
not really
. To her, it would always belong to the tall, ivory-haired ghost who still haunted it, its face before her now, as she'd last seen it, fighting against incoherence, eyes going from hers to de Vaubon's, lips trying to shape words and managing only, ‘Care . . . care.'

Makepeace had leaned over so that her face was only inches from the suffering woman's. ‘He'll be the best cared for baby you ever damn saw.'

A twitched smile, peace, a terrible howl from de Vaubon . . .

She was afflicted by the thought of how little she had done for Diana's child in the last two years. True, the boy now lived permanently in Paris with his father and Paris had become increasingly un-welcoming to all foreigners except those most dedicated to its Revolution, which Makepeace was not. In any case, last year France had declared war on England.

But we could have met at Gruchy, she thought. De Vaubon had left the
manoir
of Gruchy in the hands of his steward and its villagers but it was still his and its trade with Babbs Cove still carried on.

Wars had never prevented the activity of smuggling during the many conflicts between France and England in the past, never would. Gruchy on its lonely, wind-wracked Cotentin shore was, like Babbs Cove, isolated from government both geographically and temperamentally and in its view, which was also Babbs Cove's, government, whatever its color, imposed starvation taxes that it was the individual's duty to avoid. Government, said Babbs Cove and Gruchy, were enemies but the two villages had been trading with each other for centuries, trusting each other, sometimes intermarrying, always making a profit from their association. Therefore, government could both bugger off and
fous-moi la paix
. Gruchy, like Babbs Cove, decided who was friend and foe and over the years ‘ze missus' had proved herself a reliable member of their company and was proud to be so.