The Sparks Fly Upward (14 page)

Once upon a time she'd wandered around the back of a fairground and into the area where they kept the animals. A troupe of performing dogs had been tied to a post, feline eyes had stared drearily out from cages . . . it had been like this; it had smelled like this. Except that here the animals were gone.

‘Where's the owner?'

The negro looked towards the warehouse. Its doors were thrown back, showing neatly piled stacks of crates in the interior. A table had been put near the doors to catch the last of the sun and two men were sitting at it, one small, one large, working at some papers.

‘Which of you's Mr Teast?'

The big man stood up, stretching. He wore a leather coat and a short-stocked whip stuck out of one pocket, its thongs trailing down to the floor.

‘Are you Mr Teast?'

He showed large teeth in a grin. ‘Wish I was, little lady. He's in Lunnon afeasting hisself and we're here, ain't we, Briggs?'

‘Yes, captain.' The small man, who wore cuff preservers over his sleeves, didn't look up from the papers.

‘There were some slaves just landed here,' Makepeace said.

‘There was. I landed 'em. And now I wants to get home.'

‘There was a woman ran away, with a child. You got her back.'

‘What of it?'

‘I want to buy her. And her little one.'

That got the attention of them both. The little man looked up, blinking, then gave a brief, unamused smile before dipping his quill into an inkpot and returning to his figures.

The captain settled one haunch on the edge of the table. ‘You do, do ee? Well, you'm too late. They're all on their way to where they'm going. Can't delay in this business, can we, Briggs? Time's money. Longer you keep 'em idle, more they cost.' He leaned towards Makepeace. ‘You couln't've afforded they anyway, ma dear. We deal in high quality here. What ee want? A nigger to help with the scrubbing?'

She was without her cloak, she realized, her sleeves were still rolled up, her skirt splashed with mud. She didn't look as if she had money. She hadn't; she'd given it to Sanders.

Behind captain and clerk loomed the vast capitalist enterprise that had infiltrated the country's bones, its fleets of ships, the banking houses, insurers, lawyers, dealers in stocks and shares; she felt as if she stood naked before a vast and efficient machine that had sucked the mother and child into its mechanism.

She knew then she wouldn't find them. Nor would the two of them ever see each other again. The knowledge robbed her of the power to be angry; she was beating on a door that wouldn't open.
Let me in. Let me find them.

‘I am a wealthy woman,' she said. ‘I can send to Coutts Bank and have a draft for any amount you like within the week. I'll give you my note.'

He laughed, slapping his thigh; she'd thought only stage villains did that.

She could see herself reflected in his eyes, a tiny demented thing with pretensions—and something else—he'd taken a fancy to her. After a long voyage, any female would seem attractive but her powerlessness was the draw; helplessness provoked lust in men like these.

She said sharply, ‘Where have they gone?'

Still grinning, without looking round, he said, ‘Tell her, Briggs.'

Briggs tutted; he was in a hurry, but he was a correct little man. ‘My dear lady, you must see that we cannot offend valued customers for the sake of a one-time-only buyer.' He drew a line under a column of numbers. ‘There we are, captain, all accounted for. I must be off. Mrs Briggs will be waiting. Will you lock up?' He began taking off his cuff preservers.

‘There y'are,' the captain said to Makepeace. ‘The picaninny's gone to a good home, you don't want to worry your pretty head about him. As for her, that's for us to know and you to find out. You come along with me and maybe as I'll tell ee over a glass of rum.'

‘You stinking pimp,' Makepeace said and watched his mouth go ugly before she walked away.

She paused by the black man, who was putting away his bucket and brush. ‘Where did they take them?' she begged.

He stared at her and started to say something but Briggs had followed her. ‘Time to go, Chalky.'

The man nodded and followed the clerk towards the boatyard. Makepeace ambled after them, to get away from the captain before he finished locking up the warehouse.

It was getting dark. The waterfront was emptying. The bare ribs of the
Hector
gaped at her as she passed it. Just before she reached the bridge, she sat down on a bollard, too dispirited to go on, grateful for the cold that pinched her.

I couldn't buy them all.

I wanted to save that one, oh, I wanted to save that one.

The cry would stay in her ears. The picture of the running woman and the bobbing head of her child was etched into her memory with acid. It would burn forever.

After a while there were lanterns and exclamations but by that time she couldn't make sense of them.

Somebody with a deep and beautiful voice said, ‘I'll carry her, Aaron. Ach, she's cold as snow.'

She was lifted and the somebody put the flaps of his coat round her so that she was pressed against his shirt and his body heat warmed her and melted the waiting tears. ‘They took the little thing away from her. Oh God, her cry. I can't bear it.'

‘It's a wicked world, so it is,' the voice said. ‘We'll find her, now. Don't you worry, mavourneen, we'll see to that. There, there,
A Mhuire is truaigh
. Whisht, whisht now.' The nonsense was crooned at her through a miasma of whiskey but it was soothing, if Irish. Like the lullabies her father had sung her.

Aaron was limping beside them. ‘Are you all right? At the inn they told Sanders where you'd gone and he told us. He's fetching the coach, ah, there it is. We'll soon have you tucked up in bed.'

‘Where's Jacques?'

‘I'm here, missus.' The voice came from the far side of the man who carried her. He sounded shaken, as the young are by the collapse of a respected elder.

Makepeace pulled herself together. ‘You can put me down, sir. I am grateful, but I am capable of walking.'

‘Thank the Lord for that, madam.' The voice had changed; it now drawled with the long vowels of upper-class English. She was put on her feet and her comforter, an enormous man, puffing slightly, made a bow involving a lot of hand-twirling.

‘Makepeace, this is Sir Michael Murrough,' Aaron said. ‘A very fine actor who has been good enough to join my merry band. He'll be coming with us to London.'

In the light of the coach lamps the man's face looked as round and flat as a clock.

Another actor
, she thought, wearily.
A fat, overblown, Irish actor. The worst kind.
Ah, well, life was full of disappointments.

Chapter Six

THE two women were glad of the moth-eaten shawls covering their heads and shoulders to keep out not only the cold but some of the City's noise. On any weekday it was appalling. Iron-shod hooves and wheels rumbled on cobbles, cart drivers yelled angrily at each other through the congestion, animals mooed, baaed, clucked, squealed their way to market and slaughterhouse. Chestnut vendors, newspaper sellers, sweeps, all bawled their wares.

In Eastcheap a very large woman in a frightening approximation of Highland dress was playing the bagpipes badly and drowning out the competition presented by the more usual fiddlers and ballad singers.

Chadwell, the Fitch-Botleys' groom, who'd been brought along as protection but had never ventured into London before, had his hands over his ears.

As they approached the Monument, Lady Fitch-Botley paused out of habit to wait for the crossing-sweeper to clear a path for them through the horse dung and Philippa, unable to be heard, had to give her a shove as a reminder that crossing-sweepers, expecting to be tipped, did not extend this courtesy to women dressed as poorly as they were. Nor did traffic stop for them. Chadwell had to jump to avoid being run down by a brewers' dray.

It was quieter after Moorgate but they had to take to byways and expose themselves to a different sort of danger. ‘Don't look around,' Philippa begged, ‘Just scuttle.'

Georgiana Fitch-Botley was not a scuttler. Encountering a brawny gentleman in a blond wig and a rather fetching
robe à la polonaise
in Lad Lane, and discovering that Cat Alley offered services other than those of mouse catchers, she developed an appalled fascination with London's street names which kept her head turning this way and that.

‘On this evidence, I suppose the Grub Street we're going to is infested with beetles,' she announced in her clear drawl. Some men who'd been conferring in a doorway looked up with predatory interest.

‘Keep your voice down, will you?' Philippa muttered. ‘They don't call this cut-through Floggers Alley for nothing.' She was relieved when they were through it without incident and waited until they were approaching the open space of Moorfields before she said, ‘Grub Street's got woodworm, and it was described as the home of lice in the Lords the other day, but no beetles beyond the ordinary.' She couldn't resist adding, ‘At one time it was called Gropecunt Lane but that was in the old days.'

‘Lord, Pippy, they believe in calling a spade a spade 'round here, don't they.'

Philippa thanked God she hadn't let Jenny come with them. Even so, she'd miscalculated the effect that a walk through one of London's least salubrious areas would have on somebody who hadn't seen it before. Philippa herself found these places frightening but heartrending; as a child she'd been lost in the slums of Plymouth and only rescued from the fate awaiting lost little girls in a big city by the woman who was now landlady of the Pomeroy Arms at Babbs Cove. It had been an experience that made her less censorious than most towards the life of sin and those forced to lead it.

Georgiana, however, was being exposed to sights she hadn't dreamed of and if she was fascinated she was also appalled.

‘The Society for the Suppression of Vice could have a field-day down here,' she said, ‘and perhaps it should.'

‘Suppression of poverty would be better,' Philippa said, bitterly. To her it was so obvious; she could not understand how other people didn't equate sin with desperation. Stephen, for instance, refused to see that extreme poverty was also enslavement. But then, he hadn't been exposed to it as she had. She wondered what effect it would have had on him if
he'd
been adrift and penniless in the back streets of a naval town. Then she wondered what effect it would have on him if he could see her and Lady Fitch-Botley now, in their shawls and patched petticoats and scuffed shoes.

It had been necessary to come on foot—to turn up on Grub Street in a coach or a sedan chair would have attracted an attention she wished to avoid—but that meant passing through places where even a good pair of boots was an incitement to theft. So they had dressed appropriately and come from Chelsea by water to London Bridge steps and walked up.

As protection, Chadwell was proving useless; he hadn't yet recovered from coming face-to-face with the fellow dressed as a woman in Lad Lane. He straggled bandy-legged behind them, gawping his innocence and being accosted by prostitutes, male and female. Eventually, Philippa had to take one of his arms and Georgiana the other and they'd walked him along between them to keep him safe.

They cut north across Moorfields—and desperation pursued them. What had been London's first recreational park where laundresses once laid their washing to dry on bushes, sheep grazed and yeomen had practiced at the archery butts, was now a few acres of scuffed bare earth edging the great brickworks where transient laborers, up from the country to earn a crust for the winter, had built huts for their families.

Men and women huddled in the cold by an open fire, carving clothes pegs out of twigs as they waited for work. Their ragged children pursued soldiers entering and leaving the grounds of the nearby Honorable Artillery Company, begging for pennies.

Georgiana swerved away to go and enquire solicitously of a woman who was crawling along a path on her knees and one hand, the other arm encircling a suckling baby, followed by a crying toddler.

She came back disgusted, trying to scrape vomit off her shoes with a twig. ‘I thought she was ill, but she's drunk. Money for gin, apparently, but not for food.'

‘Gin's cheaper,' Philippa said.

Grub Street had managed to escape the Great Fire and, therefore, Wren's project for a new, stone-built, airy London. Crazy-beamed upper stories still hung higgledy-piggledy over the unpaved roadway as they had in the days of the Tudors. Its name had changed, however, and its streetwalkers driven out to have their place taken by what successive governments had continued to find a greater evil—writers.

If you were a poor and radical hack, if you wanted to lampoon authority, had a complaint or a poetic bent—frequently the same thing—or merely wanted to transcribe the obscene to paper, if you wrote songs, polemics, wrote
anything
, you ended up in the cheap lodging provided by Grub Street and its surroundings.

Philippa had often accompanied her mother on visits to John Beasley's lodging at Number Eight, sometimes to go bail for him or bring him food—and had come to love the place.

It crackled with endeavour. The smell of paper and ink that came from its only shop, a stationer's with a delicious selection of notebooks, rulers, quills, editions of Dr Johnson's Dictionary, primers, examples of various print, easels, chalks, paper clips and blotters in its window, compensated for the sewage running along the gutters. A bottle shop and a tavern called The Scribbler's Arms suggested the street's other preoccupation. Abstracted men, and an occasional woman, stared out of the upper windows, chewing the end of their pens while, from downstairs rooms, came the screech of a printing press's weight being screwed tightly down onto a forme.