The Sparks Fly Upward (2 page)

Past the gates and into the bend, its side alleys were like rat holes in a river bank. Rat holes with high-sounding names—Impasse de Montmorency, Rue de Venise, Passage Taillepain; holes infested with rats who could read, who'd stood up and torn down the Bastille with their paws.

She was just past the bend now and had to risk it. She flung herself to the left. Instantly, she was in stinking blackness. The alley was so narrow she could touch the wet, leprous walls on each side. When her fingers found a doorway, she pressed into it, pulling her skirt tight against her body.

He went past. She heard the curses as they grew loud then diminished. Even so, going on, she trundled her feet through the snowy sewage rather than stepping in order to make no sound.

Sweet Jesus.
He was coming back, sniffing for the trail. She stopped breathing; he was outlined against the mouth of the alley. ‘Come back, you bitch.'

Then he was gone and she heard his shout of ‘I'll catch you' echoing down the next passage to the left.

She crept on until her right hand touched nothing. She was at the edge of a courtyard dimly lit by a glow coming from a grating set low in one of its walls and, with it, like fresh breath in a graveyard, she could smell the scent of baking bread.

Taking the letter from her pocket, she went up to the grating and bent down to listen. She could hear Bercy swearing to himself as he beat the next batch of dough. Not a sight for the squeamish, as she'd learned when Nicolas insisted they watch in action ‘this most essential and noble of industries.' By the time Bercy had finished punching and stretching the twenty-pound chunks, so much sweat from his face and hair had flicked into the dough that she'd put herself on a breadless diet for days.

She rattled the grating and the swearing stopped instantly.

She looked around to make sure that all the court's shutters were closed. They were, but who could tell that there weren't ears pressed to them? One word could compromise her and the baker onto the guillotine's steps.

She poked the letter through the bars of the grating and let it sway downwards out of sight into the warm, yeasty interior.

There was a pause and then his voice. ‘Yes.'

Thanking the God she didn't believe in, Sophie de Condorcet made for home.

Chapter Two

ON the curlicued dais of Lord Ffoulkes's London house in Saint James's Square, thirty wigged and liveried musicians played in ravishing three-quarter time to those guests, the French and younger English, who swirled like blown flowers beneath the blaze of a thousand candles burning in ten gigantic chandeliers made of the best Venetian glass.

The rest of the company, those of a certain age and all of them English, clustered about the gilt Louis Quinze tables and chairs around the walls, and stared at them in something like shock.

‘It's a what?' asked Makepeace.

‘A waltz,' Philippa said. ‘Don't start, Ma.'

‘I'm not starting. But in my day you did that sort of thing in private.'

The circling dancers were grasping each other
all the time
. White female hands lay on male shoulders and masculine hands pressed intimately into the small of feminine backs.

From the next table, Lady Gladmain called: ‘What ye say, Makepeace? A French thing, so they tell me. Popular with Marie Antoinette, wouldn't you know it.'

Philippa winced. Lady Gladmain had a voice that could drill pig-iron, and there were two elderly French marquises at the table beyond hers.

‘Small wonder they cut her head off,' Makepeace called back.

‘
Ma
.'

‘Well.' The severe American Puritanism of Makepeace's youth had been dissipated by an adventurous life and two English husbands but occasionally it pulled itself together and said something. At the sight of supposedly well-brought-up men and women publicly pressing their bodies together, it was positively strident.

The fact was that her Puritanism had been nagging since the ball began. Even in small numbers those French exiled by the Revolution were irritating; en masse, like they were here, the emigrés exasperated the daylights out of her. A decadent load of wasters, in her opinion.

However, as guest of honour, she could hardly walk out.

One
of the guests of honour, at any rate. Andrew Ffoulkes was killing a lot of birds with this ball; his one stone was having to ricochet between honoring herself—it was her fiftieth birthday; introducing his young French wife to his English friends; and, to please her, smuggling down from Scotland the Comte d'Artois who was not only the bride's kinsman but, as brother to the late Louis XVI, the highest-ranking Frenchman in Britain.

Andrew had gone to a good deal of trouble, especially with regard to Artois, whose attendance had necessitated a word with the prime minister in order to release him from virtual incarceration in Holyrood Palace, as well as a promise that he would be returned to it immediately afterwards. That the count had to be smuggled out of Holyrood in an unmarked carriage was not so much due to his anomalous diplomatic position as to the bailiffs who hovered around the palace waiting to arrest him for debt.

The man's emergence into the ballroom had occasioned incoherent joy among the other French exiles and an exhibition of bowing and curtseying and hand-kissing which, in Makepeace's view, would have been more called for if the woman on Artois's arm had been his wife and not his mistress.

The music was slowing, the dancers making a last regretful twirl. Judging from the calls for an encore, the next dance was to be yet another waltz.

A thin, pale young man had appeared in front of Jenny. ‘If you please to honor me, mademoiselle?'

‘And who may you be, young man?' Makepeace felt the pressure of Philippa's foot against her ankle.
Don't start
. But if sixteen-year-old Jenny was to be clasped to a male bosom, her mother wanted to know whose it was.

The boy bowed. ‘Jean-Marie, Comte de Latil-Dupeyroux,
à votre service
, madame.'

A long name for a skimpy youth but Jenny, under cover of her fan, was pinching her beseechingly.

‘Oh, all right then.' The poor child had sat out most of the previous dances while her official escort, the Reverend Deedes, had been elsewhere in the room talking business.

Watching Jenny's delight as she was swept off, Makepeace thought guiltily what a good little thing she was. This was Jenny's first season in London and she could have expected more from it than the sedate weeks she'd spent uncomplainingly at the house in Chelsea where Makepeace had been unable to rouse herself to do much more than arrange a couple of whist parties and accept tonight's invitation.

She should have done; she knew that. Force of circumstance had meant that others had played a greater part in bringing her three daughters up than she had; she'd been too busy. In the case of Jenny and Sally, the two youngest, they'd been left in the care of their father's Northumbrian sister-in-law while she herself worked on the coal-shipping end of her and her husband's mine.

The mine accident that had caused Andra Hedley's death had imbued Newcastle and its surroundings with insupportable horror for Makepeace and she had moved away, refusing to return. Jenny and Sally still lived there. These last few weeks had been the longest time mother and daughter had spent together since Jenny reached puberty.

Even less had been done for an irate Sally, who was too young to come out and had been left behind in the north.

No, she had done nothing for her daughters, except to make them rich.

She nodded her head towards the dancers. ‘And if young Frog-me-lad thinks he's getting his hands on a penny of our Jenny's money, he can think some more,' she said out loud.

‘Oh, Ma,' said Philippa sadly.

‘What?
What
?'

‘Listen to yourself.'

I do, she thought. I can hear my own discontent and I can't stop. Time had ameliorated shock and grief but not the way she had accustomed herself to them; misery had become a habit. So had its infliction on others.

When she'd entered her dressing room tonight, she'd seen that Hildy had lain a gray silk gown out for her because ‘Ah'm not lettin' ye flap round that theor ballroom like a craa.'

She'd supposed she could not but she'd sworn at her maid for making her put off the deep mourning she'd worn for nearly two years. Not that it made a difference; Hildy was used to being sworn at.

For a long while after Andra was killed she'd not cared what she wore, wandering like a madwoman in a shift and bare feet. Now the customary mourning period was long past, but she still wore black so that she could be a mobile memorial to him, a bitter remonstrance for those who persisted in getting on with their lives, even though, as time went on, her own pain treacherously lodged itself in an attic of her brain where she could begin to live with it.

She would put on black again tomorrow because to wear anything else would mean exerting herself out of her irritable inertia and she had no idea how to do it. Her habit was black, like her temper.

And you look well in it
, said Makepeace's conscience. This was a new and guilty realization that made her crosser; black suited her white skin and her red hair which was still only slightly frosted; she'd begun to suspect that vanity was superseding sorrow.

Two tall men took their seat at her table. ‘I am surprised Miss Jenny has been permitted to take part in this exhibition,' Reverend Deedes said. ‘Had I been here at the time I should have advised against it.' He addressed the air as if it were a congregation.

‘Where were you then?' she snapped. Deedes, cadaverous and forty, was not a young girl's dream as an escort, certainly not Jenny's, but he was Makepeace's neighbor in Chelsea and, due to her reduced social circle, the only bachelor she'd been able to think of. It had been nice for him to be asked; the bugger could at least do his job.

His companion leaned across the table. ‘William, we have been so neglectful of the ladies it little behooves us to complain if they desert us.' He put his hand over Makepeace's, smiling. ‘But forgive us, missus; William and I have been about the Lord's work.' He inclined his head towards the back of the ballroom. ‘I believe we have persuaded Lord Malthrop to vote for the abolition bill at its next appearance. '

As always, when she looked at Stephen Heilbron, Makepeace saw terrifying goodness staring back at her. An admirer had once likened his face to that of Christ at Gethsemane and, while shocked by the blasphemy, she'd never been able to rid herself of the comparison. He was about the same age as crucified Christ and, yes, the face on the cross might have looked like this one, ravaged by his own and others' pain, luminous with love for sinners.

He'd come into their lives through Deedes. At that neighbor's insistence and because she supposed she ought to do
something
, Makepeace had joined the Chelsea branch of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery with her eldest daughter—and nearly been thrown out of it. The other members got on her nerves. It seemed to her they spent too much time prattling in justification of what they were doing as if they needed to cite reasons why negroes qualified as sensate beings.

To Makepeace, born in multicolored Boston and raised by a rescued slave, this was so self-evident that comment on it was not only unnecessary but impudent. Betty had made a motherless childhood supportable and, now that Betty herself was dead, Makepeace's love had been transferred to Betty's American son.

‘It don't need saying that black people are people, so why do they keep saying it?' she'd grumbled to Philippa about her fellow members. ‘If Betty and Josh don't qualify for the human race, it ain't worth running. Slavery's evil, everybody knows that. Let's just get on and fight it.'

Philippa, typically, had advised patience and diplomacy. But then the consignment of Wedgwood medallions had arrived, ammunition for the Society's battle, depicting a kneeling black man with up-raised chained hands encircled by the inscription: ‘Am I not a man and a brother?'

The Society had been proud of them. Makepeace, shown one, had looked at it and said, ‘Of course he damn well is,' and been ushered out of the door.

But then Stephen Heilbron, already one of the Society's best-known campaigners with Wilberforce and Clarkson, had come out from London to encourage his Chelsea troops and paid her a visit. ‘'I beg you to come back, Mrs Hedley.'

Philippa must have talked to him and he must have talked to Deedes. He played to what she realized had been her sense of superiority over the other anti-slavers.

‘You are advantaged, you see, experienced as we are not . . . So few of us have the privilege of intimacy with the race we are trying to serve. It is not enough for those of us like me who do the work for the love of God, we need those, like you, who will work for the love of the people themselves.'

Seductive stuff from a man who'd risked beatings from the slavers of Bristol and Liverpool to gain evidence for Parliament of their trade's innate barbarism, who toured the country to proclaim it—and looked as if he neither slept nor ate in the process. ‘You must forgive the mundane, Mrs Hedley. William Deedes and the others may not be pierced by the sword that pierces you, but they help us roll the stone uphill, and they want you back.'

‘They want my money,' she'd said, nastily. She'd given near a thousand pounds to the cause since she'd joined.