The Sparks Fly Upward (20 page)

‘He's been dismissed. Ask Sanders when he comes back to find him a place.'

She went back to the bedroom, opened her escritoire and scribbled a note to Jenny, took out some papers from one of its pigeonholes and inserted them neatly into the hold-all's pocket.

 

 

ON their way along the river track, they passed a man limping Londonwards, the fingers of one of his hands being nursed in the other.

‘Splash him,' Philippa told Petrie. As the trap's wheels spun yesterday's mud over the man's breeks, she bowed. What he shouted after them brought a blush to young Petrie's cheeks, not to hers.

Whether the horseman on a piebald who emerged from under a tree near the Physick Garden and cantered after them was another of Blanchard's myrmidons, she didn't know. She didn't care much.

 

 

HAVING been Makepeace's lawyer for years, George Hackbutt was used to the unusual. Once he'd heard Philippa's request, he sent for Mr Muddie who, he said, was the most discreet and reliable of his clerks.

‘Ah, Muddie. Miss Dapifer requires you to step along to Saint Mary Axe right away and give this package of money to a lady you will find there. In return she will hand you a document to return to us here.'

‘She's rather poorly dressed,' Philippa said. ‘Quite young, though she looks older. Dark hair. And she may be suspicious but if you will explain to her that I dare not come myself for fear of pursuit, she will understand.'

Mr Muddie accepted both package and instructions without a blink. He was an elderly, stooped little man with mild eyes and it was Philippa who was taken aback when he asked his employer, ‘Should I go armed, sir?'

‘Should he go armed?' Mr Hackbutt asked her.

‘Oh no, I don't think so.' How quickly men prepared for violence—but, then, violence could break out at any moment, as she'd found this very morning. These two expected it from the poor; it had come to her from a member of her own class.

However, it was unlikely to arise here, unless Mrs Scratcher was being followed, in which case she was sorry for whoever was doing it.

She had told the solicitor the truth so far as it went; she needed false papers to get somebody out of France. She hadn't mentioned the somebody's name. Her precaution, she'd said, was because she thought she was being spied on.

Mr Hackbutt took that in his stride as well; he not only assumed that the putative escapee was a royalist, but he shared the general belief that England had been infiltrated by a thousand agents of the Revolution.

Spies were being blamed for everything from a fall on the stock market to unrest in the Navy. An outbreak of cholera in Whitechapel had been put down to evil Frenchmen poisoning the water with rats-bane concealed in their snuffboxes. Poor rank and file émigrés who arrived in England without the connections possessed by most of the nobility were frequently likely to fall under suspicion and be imprisoned until they could prove their bona fides. One harmless Parisian hatmaker, fleeing the guillotine, had been picked up by the Houndsditch Watch ‘because he looked a villain' and was only released after a month when one of his former clients spoke for him.

From a window on the third floor of the building that housed Mr Hackbutt's offices, Philippa watched the foreshortened figure of Mr Muddie emerge from below, only to lose him immediately among the ant-runs of other paper-clutching clerks, lawyers and barristers going about the business of the Inn.

The grass of the square had not yet been cut and a wash of spindly pale mauve crocuses drifted across its lawn in lazy contrast to the black begowned figures scurrying around it.

There was a piebald among the horses tied to a hitching rail on the far side of the square; she noticed it because it was the only one—the legal fraternity, like most gentlemen, preferred monochromatic mounts.

She shook her head in disbelief that Blanchard had paid a horseman to wait on the London road in case she came by. But if he had, the rider's sojourn here would be fruitless.

She turned back to Mr Hackbutt. ‘And how do things go in the matter of Uncle John?' she asked.

‘Ah yes, Mr Beasley.' Mr Hackbutt spoke with distaste. ‘I will not hide from you, Miss Dapifer, that my long experience of that young man leads me to believe that he will not help his own case.'

Philippa's did, too. Mr Hackbutt and ‘the young man'—she thought how expressive it was of Beasley's permanent and sulky adolescence that he should be so described by an elderly man little more than ten years his senior—could never see eye to eye on politics. George Hackbutt was at heart a hunting country squire who happened to be an excellent lawyer; the near-black paneling of his office was decorated with the heads of foxes and cases of stuffed fish that had met their end on his estate in Surrey. His sympathy lay with Whig landowners like himself and not at all with the anarchic Beasley who, to add to their differences, loathed the outdoors and a nature which, he felt, was out to waylay him.

Their long and unlikely connection was Makepeace, for whom Mr Hackbutt had a high regard and who had used him to release her friend from the coils of the law in which he so frequently became entangled.

But, though they might interpret it differently, both men had a concern for the principle of justice. When Philippa had approached Mr Hackbutt to take on Beasley's defence, it was to find him already appalled that, against sound legal advice, the Attorney General was to prosecute the radicals for high treason, of which they were certainly innocent, rather than sedition, of which they were probably guilty.

‘A rash and violent decision,' he'd told Philippa. ‘Won't do at all, ain't fair and won't work. Can't see what Mr Pitt's about, bringin' down a deer with artillery. Juries don't like it.'

‘Did they let you into the Tower to see Uncle John?' she asked now.

‘They did, though not without considerable persuasion. The fools'—thus did Mr Hackbutt refer to the government—‘have suspended habeas corpus, did ye know? Is this a way to fight the Terrorists? To abandon every principle achieved since Magna Carta? We'll be settin' up a guillotine in Parliament Square next.'

‘How was he?'

‘Beasley? Enjoyin' his martyrdom, I'd say. The others less so. My terrier could've nipped a dozen rats in the cell they're bein' held in—place hasn't seen the light of day since the late unlamented Bloody Mary was on the throne. Now, now'—he patted Philippa's shoulder—‘we must not give way. And though it's me as says it as shouldn't, I am to be congratulated—I've bagged Erskine for the defense.'

‘A good thing?' asked Philippa.

‘Thomas Erskine? Finest counsel in England. Set Erskine on the scent and he'll run the varmint to the kill.' Mr Hackbutt flourished a hunting horn that acted as a paperweight on his desk.

‘Uncle John's lucky to have you,' Philippa said, and meant it. ‘Ma will be grateful.'

‘Ah, well, your mother, you know,' Mr Hackbutt said, as if that explained everything. ‘But I'll tell you this. I'd've taken the case even so, not for Beasley, not even for your mother, but because I'll not stand by to see the law twisted in a plot to convict men on a wrong charge.'

He leaned back in his chair and grimaced. ‘It ain't makin' me popular around the Inn, I can tell you. “Sidin' with Paine-ites against your king and country, Hackbutt? Where's your patriotism?” they ask me. “Where it always was,” I tell 'em, “on the same side as English justice.”'

It was an unsought reminder that there was still decency to put on the scales against the weight of men like Fitch-Botley. Philippa found herself comforted to the point of tears.

Mr Muddie returned soon after. He carried a package wrapped in a dirty scrap of cloth, which he handed to Mr Hackbutt who handed it to Philippa.

‘All well, Muddie?'

‘The transaction was without incident, sir.'

‘Well done.' He turned to Philippa. ‘Is that what you wanted, Miss Dapifer?'

She was holding in her hands a cardboard passport stamped with the insignia of the French Republic made out to Jean-Pierre Brosse—the most forgettable name she'd been able to think of. Tucked inside it was a
certificat de civisme
declaring M Brosse's right to French citizenship, his address, 42 Passage de Lappe, Paris 31, his age and description, and it was signed on behalf of the
Comité Révolutionnaire, Paris Section Trente-et-un
by a squiggle which, since section heads were constantly changing, didn't matter.

Small wonder that Andrew and his League had been able to make rescue after rescue while they carried papers like these. If forgery was an art, Scratcher was its Rembrandt—both passport and
certificat
reeked of poverty-ridden bureaucracy; the type was worn at its edges by apparent overuse, and the written details attested to the hurried, jaded hand of the Watch Committee member that was supposed to have filled them in.

She could practically smell a section headquarters, nearly always a requisitioned church, hear the hubbub resounding against marble walls, see the queues of applicants for food and fuel tickets, destitution relief,
certificats
for this, for that.

‘Thank you, yes,' she said. ‘This is what I wanted.'

She still had business to transact. The excellent Mr Muddie, duly authorized, was sent to her bank to withdraw specific monies, and she asked for a copy of her will.

Mr Hackbutt settled her in what he called his counsel-chamber, a surprisingly large room on the next floor up where his clients could consult with him and their barrister. She was provided with writing materials, a glass of madeira and some biscuits, and left alone.

Solitude in daytime was something she was rarely permitted; it was as if there were an unwritten law that women should never be left to their own thoughts; they must be constantly attended, never walk by themselves, keep perennial company over embroideries, card, tea and coffee tables. On arrival from the north, Jenny had automatically assumed that she would share her half sister's bedroom as she did Sally's at home and had been hurt when Philippa pointed out that there were plenty of bedrooms in the house and she must choose one of them for her own.

She allowed the room's quiet to soothe her for a moment, the luxury of it accentuated by the muffled sound of far-off traffic.

Crossing to the window, she looked out. It had turned into a golden afternoon; a group of young clerks had taken off their coats and were being lectured by a gowned senior into putting them on again. The rail on the other side of the square held half a dozen horses—none of them piebald.

She sat down, settling her feet on the wide sill so that she was angled in its corner, only the glass of the casement between her right side and the drop below.

Why Fitch-Botley's ravings had determined her to go to France and deliver the documents herself, she still wasn't sure but it was time to let the decision, made during that encounter, catch up with her and assemble its logic.

Reasoning was elusive; the sight of Georgiana at the window, ashamed, a weal across her face, kept dragging itself across her memory like wire across raw flesh. Fitch-Botley's voice still blared in her ears, always now to be associated with the smell of feces:
‘There'll be no petticoat revolution in this house as the bitch has found out.'

Suddenly, it gave way to another, gently dogged. ‘Don't you see, Philippa, liberty is indivisible or it is not liberty.'

Men like Fitch-Botley tore liberty into pieces, taking a bit for themselves, calling it democracy and denying the rest to everybody else. Even Stephen wanted to give only some of it away. When he'd freed the slaves, would he complete the process and allow them the vote? No more than he would allow it to women and the rest of the unpropertied class.

The two men, one bad, one good, had this in common; they both apportioned freedom and, in doing so, destroyed the thing itself.

Liberty was whole or it was nothing.

Only one person she knew had ever said that. ‘Either no individual has rights or else all have the same rights. Anyone who does not grant the rights of another person, whatever that person's religion, color or sex may be, has by the same token forsworn his own.'

In her possession Philippa Dapifer held two pieces of paper which might, with luck, grant liberty to Condorcer, who wanted to give it to everybody in the world.

And you didn't put universal liberty in the mail.

She was amazed at herself for ever having thought she would, knowing, as she had, that it might be lost, discovered, delayed, not reach him in time.

Cowardice on her part, that's what it had been. An unacknowledged and shaming compromise between a high-minded gesture and a wish to continue the life she was living.

For what? What sort of life
was
she living? A limbo, except for occasional moments spent with the man she loved? Marrying one she didn't?

How very sordid
, she thought. In the Principled Life Stakes, she was running a long way behind the admirable Mrs Scratcher.

A loud clunk and a
whirr
that not only startled her ears but set up a vibration in the seat below her hocks, causing her to scramble down before she could attribute them to the bronchitic overture of the great clock set in the masonry just outside the window. It began to strike the hour and, as if they had been woken up by it, so did the other thousand or so mechanisms in church towers and public buildings from Whitechapel to Westminster.