The Sparks Fly Upward (11 page)

Yes
, she thought,
the boy and I could have met at Gruchy. Should have.

They'd arrived. Sanders opened the coach door and let down the steps for her to descend onto the apron of the Pomeroy Arms, always Makepeace's first port of call.

The night was frigidly still apart from the sigh of water on sand. The looming T'Gallants cut off the westerly moon's light from half the cove so that only the eastern cottages made a defined pattern of roofs and dark doorways, their fishing nets strung between them like spider webs. Behind them, a hunting owl swept optimistically over steep, white fields.

The scene never failed to move her, though nowadays a sense of excitement was missing, as if the pungency of sea and seaweed had been taken away.

The Pomeroy Arms smelled the same, though. A mixture of fresh whitewash battled with the old wood in its crazy, crisscrossing beams, logs burning in the huge grate, good cooking and the liquor ingrained in the tables of its booths.

Every time she entered it, Makepeace thought that if the inn were on a coaching route it would be celebrated and she thanked the Lord that it was too far off the beaten track to be known to any but its locals. Even so, it prospered well enough, acting as it did as church hall, dispensary, meeting house, grog shop, refuge for locked-out husbands, courthouse, assembly room and funeral parlor. It was the place where the village men sat every night and their women, coming to fetch them home, stayed for a glass of something. It was wormed with hidden cupboards and passages where contraband was disposed until the ponies came to distribute it through most of southern Devon. It was the beating heart of the village. And it was a secret.

Dell, shrieking, and Tobias, smiling gravely, advanced on her. Two children with pale, freckled negroid features were ushered out to ‘tell Jan Gurney that Herself has arrived.' Another was dispatched to help Sanders, an old friend, with the horses.

A chair was shoved under her bottom, her feet tipped onto a footstool towards the fire and a beaker of rum and butter put into her hand, another given to Thomas Glossop who was told, ‘Drink that now, it'll drive the Divil from your soul and the snakes from England. '

Makepeace gave a stage groan. With a dubious past behind her, Dell's marriage to the quiet, elderly black man who'd once been the Dowager's servant had been happy for them both, and contentment had enlarged the woman in more ways than one, allowing her Irish-ness full rein—along with her figure.

Knowing the inn's importance to the village, Makepeace had wondered if she was doing the right thing when she'd made this odd couple proprietors of the Pomeroy. But the choice had been a success; Babbs Cove might be isolated but few villages in England were as familiar with foreigners. Generations of illegal trading with other countries had brought it into contact with the polyglot world of seamen. French, Dutch, Irish, Lascars, Chinese, Turks, Russians, Africans, West Indians . . . what were another couple of oddities? Especially when their ale was good, their secrecy assured, their cooking excellent and, for all the landlady's Hibernian ebullience, it was the lisping but dignified and efficient Tobias who ruled the roost.

Dell ignored Makepeace's protest. ‘Are ye for France?'

‘He is,' Makepeace said, nodding at Glossop. ‘I'm not. I'm staying a couple of days before Sanders drives me to Bristol to meet Aaron. Will you put us up?' Preparing T'Gallants for occupation in this weather was a big undertaking; anyway, she preferred the inn.

‘Need ye ask? I'll do some lobscouse for supper, the way you like it.'

I was lonely
, Makepeace thought. She was still lonely but at least, in this inn, she was among those who'd known and loved the dead as she had. A beautiful drawing of the Dowager, sketched by Betty's Josh, hung on one wall. Upstairs was the room where de Vaubon had been nursed to health by his future wife. There was the false wall, mended now, that excisemen had stoved in during the search for French brandy . . . the bastards.

That was one thing she'd done by buying into the Cove's smuggling trade; she'd bought the local excise as well. Once the swine who'd been chief customs officer at the time had been gotten rid of, the rest had proved insufficiently paid to resist the considerable
pourboires
she'd offered them to let the pony trains go into the night without investigation. Philippa said it was corruption, Makepeace regarded it as insurance . . .

‘And there's a surprise for ye . . .' Dell was saying. A blast of cold stopped her as the door opened. ‘Here's himself now, he'll do the telling.'

Apart from his yellow hair turning white, Jan Gurney had changed very little; he still had to stoop to pass under the inn's lintel, he could still pick Makepeace up and swing her round. ‘Did young Philippa get the letter?'

‘What letter?'

‘Gor damn, I took un to Plymouth, put the bugger in the post bag myself. Should've reached Lunnon by now. They handed it to us at Gruchy, trip before last. Come from Paris, so they did say.'

‘Who sent it?'

‘Ah diddun read un, did I? Reckoned it might be from that Sophie Condorcet as we brought over that time. Nice little woman, she was. How
be
our Philippa, anyway?'

In the interchange of news about families, the fate of the letter was forgotten.

‘'Tis as well you've turned up,' Jan said. ‘Us only got back from France three days since and 'twere a puzzle what to do about young Jack; whether send for ee or take un to ee in Lunnon.'

‘Jack?' She was fuddled from the tiring journey.

Dell called from the kitchen. ‘She don't know yet. He's gone to his bed.'

‘Jacques?'

‘As ever was,' Jan said. ‘Only safe when he'm asleep. Rest of the time he's as like to blow up the Pomeroy as not, ain't he, Toby?'

‘Exthperimental young gentleman,' Tobias said.

‘Will you tell me, for God's sake?' hissed Makepeace.

Jan sat her down and squatted on a stool opposite. He looked grave. ‘Reckon things must be pretty bad for our Gil, missus. Him and Danton has got upsides with Robespierre, so they told us at Gruchy. Tryin' to stop that evil bugger cutting everybody's head off, so they did say, which puts 'em both in line to losing their own according.'

‘Guillaume has sent Jacques over? Jan, it
must
be bad.'

Jan shrugged. ‘The boy ain't been told the extent of ut. Still thinks his daddy's Lord Muck and Muck of the Revolution along of Danton. Which he may be, I don't know. Just looks nasty, that's all I'm saying. Better have a word with the tutor when you get un alone. Weedy little sweet'eart but clever enough I don't doubt. Where is he, Dell?'

‘In his room.'

‘It must be bad,' Makepeace said again.

The intricacies of the French situation, who was in, who was out, had become too entangled and fast-moving for her understanding. Like almost everybody else in England, she regarded Robespierre as the Terror and the Terror as Robespierre. If de Vaubon and Danton were opposing that deadly little man, they were indeed risking their heads and the risk was obviously so great that Guillaume wanted his son out of danger.

‘They wouldn't guillotine an eleven-year-old boy, just because of his father,' she said. ‘Would they?'

Jan spat. ‘I don't put nothing past them buggers. Nobody do know what they done with that poor little lad of King Louis's, do they?'

Probably, they wouldn't kill Jacques
, she thought,
but he would lose the de Vaubon land, which, if it were deemed to belong to a traitor, would revert to the State. He'd be penniless and stigmatized.

And the thing was
, she thought,
that by ensuring the safety of his son, de Vaubon had quadrupled the danger to himself.
From the first, the revolutionaries had called themselves patriots so that, increasingly, the label ‘unpatriotic' had become a slur. Not to wear the red, white and blue cockade was unpatriotic, Philippa had told her, so was the use of
vous
rather than
tu
and the deferential
Monsieur
rather than
Citizen
. Under the new Law of Suspects, the appellation was now a death sentence.

And if sending one's son to safety in an enemy country was not unpatriotic, Makepeace didn't know what was.
Oh, Gil.

‘Things must be bad,' she repeated.

Taking a candle, she went upstairs and quietly entered Jacques's room. The boy didn't stir from his sleep and she stood for a long time, looking at him. The same dark hair as his father, though somewhat less curly than Guillaume's, the same excellent sallow skin, long nose and planes of the cheeks, and, yet, in that strange way of physical heredity, the parts combining to look like his mother.

At rest, he appeared younger than his eleven years, a little boy, but at the same time Makepeace glimpsed for the first time the man he'd become—if he was allowed to.

Why, for all their puffing and bravado, did boys seem to her so much more vulnerable than girls? Andrew Ffoulkes, Josh . . . now Jacques de Vaubon, a poignant line of male humanity, sons she'd never had, for all of whom she felt a ferocious, protective impulse.

A hiss told Makepeace that her tears were dropping on the candle flame as she inclined over the figure in the bed. There was so much love encapsulated in it; Diana's love, the boy's love for his father, the father's sacrifice for the boy.

She wiped her eyes angrily—bugger it—and went outside to slam on the tutor's door and tell him to come downstairs.

When he joined her in a corner booth of the taproom, she could see why he'd earned Jan's description of ‘weedy sweetheart.' The smugglers of Babbs Cove suspected the sexual proclivity of any man unless he looked as if he could shin up a topmast in a nor'easterly, hold his liquor, spit five yards and wrestle a customs officer to the ground.

Quintus Luchet did not. He was misty, the sort of person one had trouble remembering afterward, with die-away eyes, slight frame, colorless complexion. His high-collared black coat needed a brush, like his long hair, and his shirt and loosely-tied cravat were grubby—a condition which, had it been the result of his travels, Makepeace would have forgiven, but she instead suspected to be the latest revolutionary fashion. Clean linen, Philippa had said, was unpatriotic.

He had a book in his hand and one finger was holding it open at the place where his reading had been interrupted. Very irritating.

Impassioned by the emotion she'd undergone upstairs, she felt an immediate impulse to bully him. ‘Well, young man, and what's this about?'

His response was slow and sweetly kind, as if he had to drag his mind away from higher things.‘You are Madame Hedley?'

‘I am.'

Still holding the book, he fumbled in an interior pocket of his coat for a letter, dropped it, picked it up and handed it to her. ‘From M Vaubon.'

She nearly snapped at him again but, of course, Guillaume had discarded the
‘de'
as too suggestive of rank. Philippa said that ordinary people called Leroi or Leduc were hastily changing their names to something ridiculous, like Egalité.
God help us, what had happened to French common sense?

Even the stamp on the sealing wax was plain where his device had once been an elaborately entwined dV. She broke it carefully.

He'd written one line.
‘I trust him to you, missus.'

She pressed her knuckles against her mouth.

It was the message of a dying man.
God, oh
God
, he knew he couldn't win.
They'd kill him.

Suddenly, he was in the taproom, where he'd been so often before, one foot up on a stool, his enormous voice roaring out the latest escape from the customs cutters to an appreciative audience, the most alive person she'd ever met.

Fine bloody time for you to be quiet spoken
, she sobbed at him.

Jan Gurney had come over and was patting her on the back. She handed him the letter, wiped her nose on the back of her hand and turned back to Luchet. ‘Well?'

‘The excuse is give out that the boy is ill and needs sea air,' he said.

‘
Given
out,' she said. His English was almost accentless and, to give him his due, he was quick to understand what she wanted to know.

‘
Given
out. Where Paris is concerned, Jacques is at Gruchy for his health.'

Well, that was one thing; his people at Gruchy would never give him away.

‘What's happening to M de Vaubon?'

‘When we leave him, nothing. He has make a great speech in the Convention, defending himself and Danton against the charge they are responsible for the massacres of September and would have save the King and Queen from execution if they could. He shout them all down. But he is too close to Danton. The
enragés
say the two are sorry for the State prisoners and they are against the Terror, and Robespierre suspect them of lack of virtue, that they are careless in the matter of money, corrupt.'

They're probably all those things
, Makepeace thought. She'd never met Danton but Philippa had described him as de Vaubon's virtual twin, large, loud, generous, a lover of good food, drink and women. What Danton's approach to the making of money was, she didn't know, but if it was like de Vaubon's with his smuggling, it would hardly accord to the purist Robespierre's idea of virtue.

But Luchet was saying that sympathy for the Terror's victims was the gravest charge against the two men. ‘In the Convention, Robespierre says, “I suppose a man of your moral principles would not think anyone deserve punishment?” And Danton leap up and shout: “I suppose
you
are annoyed if none do!” '