The Sparks Fly Upward (22 page)

He'd been her responsibility, always. Penitence Burke, already worn out by the worry and work her husband's fecklessness had imposed on her, had died giving birth to him. Makepeace had been a child herself but not too young to know the baby's life depended on her.

She'd brought him up, her and her old nurse Betty, sat all night in steam-filled rooms when he had the croup, starved themselves so that he could eat well, scrimped to give him the education they lacked.

And in one drunken incident they called patriotism, some men had taken the young body of which she'd been so mindful and stripped it and kicked it until it lay curled like a fetus at their feet and poured scalding pitch over it.

They'd nearly destroyed him, physically and mentally. Only Dr Baines, who'd treated him, and his own unsuspected courage had enabled Aaron to walk upright again with a mind less scarred than his back.

But it had destroyed something in Makepeace. When the bugles sounded and the drums took to beating, she was deaf to them. When politicians—who weren't going themselves—flourished young men off to war against other young men, or when the revolutionaries waved a banner and said, ‘Go get 'em, lads,' when they demanded that everybody pay duty to
their
cause,
their
country, she only saw the hacked limbs and skin that weren't theirs to sacrifice.

She heard noises in the hall and went to the door to greet Alexander Baines as Hildy hurried him up the stairs.

In the quarter of a century since, as a ship's doctor, he'd first been presented with the moaning, tarry hedgehog that the patriots had made of Aaron, he'd hardly changed at all. He was still skeletal, precise, irritable, his old-maid Edinburgh accent unameliorated by years of treating the complaints of the rich—and the poor—at his Harley Street practice.

Philip had set him up in it when they all reached England, knowing by then it had been the grace of God that had happened to make Baines the surgeon on the British warship that had sailed them away from Boston, the smoke from Makepeace's inn still dirtying the sky behind them.

‘Pairhaps ye'd let me look at the patient,' he said now, removing the gabbling Makepeace's hands from his arm. And to Aaron, more gently, ‘Wail, Wail, my laddie, what've ye done this time?'

Murrough watched carefully as the bone-clean fingers lifted one of Aaron's eyelids. When the doctor put his ear to Aaron's chest, he nodded and left the room.

‘What is it?' Makepeace begged after an age.

Carefully, Baines put the covers back over the top half of his patient and raised them over the lower half to begin examining Aaron's foot. ‘His hairt has an incompetence.' He sounded judgmental.

Makepeace said quickly, ‘It's not his fault.'

‘I use the tairm in its medical sense, but, aye, since ye mention it, the fault is partly his. This is not the corpus of the young lad ye brought me on the boat, it's turned flabby and unconditioned. Too much rich food, too much liquor . . . Is he still in the theatrics?'

‘Yes.'

Baines nodded. ‘Then too much aggravation and excitement and maybe a touch too much wickedness, I dare say.'

‘Stop lecturing. Is he going to get well?'

He didn't answer as fast as she'd have liked. ‘I'll not haver with ye, woman, he's taken a jolt to the heart and if there's another I'll not answer for it. There's an irregularity. But if he sairvives the next day or two, it'll maybe settle—as long as he obeys the three great doctors ...'

‘Dr Quiet, Dr Diet and Dr Sleep,' she said; he'd taught her well.

‘Ay. And this ankle's broken which is maybe a blessing; he'll be doing nothing til it mends.' Alexander Baines finished bandaging and then closed his bag with a snap. ‘I'll retairn tomorrow.'

‘Have something to eat.'

‘Na, na. I have other patients. A dram, maybe, to keep out the cold.'

She called Jenny to sit with Aaron while she took the doctor to the dining room to pour him a glass of whisky. The actor was already at the table—he was a tremendous eater—talking to Hildy and making her laugh. She introduced them and turned to other business.

‘They've battened and gone to their beds,' Hildy said of Jacques and Luchet.

‘I'm sorry Sanders is driven so hard, he'll have to take the doctor home.'

‘Howay, he can tak hisself to his bed termorrer.' She blushed helplessly; after forty virginal years, Hildy had discovered the pleasures of the flesh. The shares Makepeace had given her in the coal mine would have enabled her to retire but she'd preferred to stay on as housekeeper and it had been to everyone's pleasure when she and the widowed Sanders had married.

‘An' ye're not tewin yesel' sitting wi' Aaron tonight, neither,' she said. ‘Ah'll stay by him.'

Baines overheard. ‘Sound advice.' His unlashed eyes, like an intelligent crocodile's, regarded her. ‘Are ye well, Makepeace?'

‘I'm always well.'

‘Baitter than the last time I saw ye,' he said. Philippa had called him in after Andra's death to try and arrest what had seemed like a terminal decline. ‘But ye'll not be sairving your brother by exhausting yeself. Sit ye down to yair meat, I'll see myself out.'

She went with him to the front door. ‘Thank you, Alex.'

‘Yon seems an informed fellow,' he said, nodding towards the dining room, ‘Would he be in the line of science?'

‘He's an actor,' she said, shortly.

‘Is he now? Ah well, that's a pity.' Dr Baines shook his head at mankind's duplicity and went away.

She teetered for a moment between returning to the dining room or immediately making up a bed in Aaron's room in which to sleep. She didn't think she could stand any more of Murrough tonight; she lost energy in that man's company. There was too much of him; his bulk and his voice had dominated the journey from Bristol, which had, in any case, been delayed at the start by his absence in the city for a whole day on what, he'd said, was ‘a matter of business, dear lady.'

That was another thing; he never addressed her by name. It was always ‘madam' or ‘dear lady,' robbing her of identity. Makepeace was used to making an impression, not always a good one, but people at least responded to her one way or another; this mountebank made her feel she bounced off him like an ignored and ineffective balloon.

That he had intruded on her at her most vulnerable—the lacerating memory of the running slave with the child cut and cut through her sleep—was another resentment. Who was he to comfort her? Or she to him? Another example of playing to the gallery, no doubt.

And he was vain; she'd caught him looking at his reflection in the coach window and stroking the underside of his chin as if admiring a still-tight jawline.

Which it wasn't.

As for cadging—he'd have the cross off a donkey's back. On the way he'd spent liberally enough—
‘There, landlord, that's for a dry bed and a wet bottle'
—but she'd discovered it was Aaron's money, a loan, he was bestrewing on all and sundry.

And Aaron didn't
mind
. He was besotted with the man.

‘My dear girl, he is the greatest actor I've ever seen.'
Standing in the hall, Makepeace waggled her head and shoulders as she mouthed her brother's admiration.

He damn well was. He put on like he was the king of Eldorado but as far as she could make out he was escaping from some wrongdoing in Ireland. The reason that Aaron had slipped into England via Bristol and without the rest of his company, with whom he usually travelled, was now explained; he was accompanying a renegade.

‘We thought it better not to go through the bigger ports—in case,' Aaron answered when they were alone. ‘Somebody who knows his face from over there might have recognized him. He's very slightly persona non grata in Ireland just now, he needs to stay incognito. '

‘Incognito?
I seen parades of elephants more incognito than him.'

‘That's why they won't suspect him. Who'll notice another eccentric knight up from the shires?'

‘Suspect him of what?'

‘He's a United Irishman, Makepeace.'

‘What's that?' She'd collapsed onto a chair. ‘Oh God, Aaron, don't tell me he's another bloody revolutionary.'

He'd sat down beside her then. ‘A radical, not a revolutionary and not a bloody one. They call themselves a brotherhood of affection. They merely want the Irish Parliament thrown open to all Irishmen, regardless of rank and religion. At the moment it's a Protestant oligarchy.'

Was it? Makepeace's knowledge of the Irish political scene was hazy—deliberately so. An upbringing in Puritanical Boston had instilled in her its repulsion for the Roman Catholic religion and, since Ireland was full of Papists as well as Protestants who behaved little better, she'd closed her mind on it as a place too queasy to dwell on. Nor had the fact that her father had been Irish Catholic endeared the country to her. In her mind it floated sunlessly in a sea of ill will, its people emerging warped from its bogs into the sun of nicer lands.

‘You've changed your tune,' she'd accused her brother.

Even before the punishment the American patriots had visited upon them both, while she was still a sympathizer with their cause, Aaron had always regarded himself as a loyal subject of King George the Third and had held the English establishment, its style, its dress, as an example to be copied.

‘If you'd played to audiences all over Ireland as often as I have, you'd damn well change your tune as well,' he said. ‘The real Irish . . . they're treated like cattle, their language and education stamped on, no positions open to them . . . I tell you, Makepeace, it makes you ashamed, it makes you want to shout
this can't go on
. If there isn't a revolution there soon, there damn well ought to be. For the first time I've begun to have fellow feeling with our father.'

‘You didn't have to cope with the drunken old bugger.'

‘Makepeace, we toured Mayo. Fat estates, starving peasantry. God, no wonder he left it for America.' Then Aaron had put his arm round her shoulders and she'd known what was coming. ‘I thought perhaps we, you, could put Mick up while he's here, keep him out of harm's way.'

‘How long?'

‘Oh, until Viceroy Camden stops seeing a revolutionary behind every shamrock. Things will have calmed down by the time we've put on the play.'

And that was another thing . . .

She went upstairs to see to Aaron but Hildy and Jenny were with him, making up a bed on Philippa's divan for whoever would watch him through the night. They told her to go and eat. She
was
hungry and Aaron
did
look better.

She stumped back downstairs again and into the dining room to seat herself at the other end of the table. Constance, one of Sanders's daughters by his first marriage, hurried in with a dish of chicken and rice, helped her tenderly to it and, at a nod from Murrough, recharged his plate.

‘His heart, then,' the actor said.

‘So it seems.'

‘Too large, bless him.'

It sounded like an epitaph and she was immediately on the attack. ‘He's got over worse; he'll get over this. I'll see he does.'

The actor raised his glass to her—Hildy had left a decanter of the best claret on the table for him, now, she noticed, half full. ‘Let us drink to that, ma'am.'

She was too superstitious to ignore such a toast, so, though she was not a great drinker, she poured herself a glass and raised it in return.

‘My presence must be a distraction at such a time,' he said. ‘Dear lady, I shall remove it from under your roof tomorrow.'

More posturing
, she thought;
he doesn't want to go, probably can't afford to.
This was merely a gauntlet thrown down for her to pick up.

She let it lie. ‘You must do as you please, of course.'

Then, because it sounded so bald, because Aaron had asked her to let the man stay, because the Puritan ethic of hospitality she'd inherited was as strong as any desert Arab's in his tent, she was forced to add, ‘But you will be no distraction, sir. You are welcome to stay.'

He was on it like a dog on a rat. ‘Very kind, ma'am. I thank you.' He bowed courteously from his end of the table and she, sorry that she'd given way, nodded somewhat less courteously from hers.

I've got enough with Aaron, she thought, and there's John Beasley to be saved from the damn gallows, and now I'm burdened with this, this . . . whirligig.

Trying to find the essence of the man opposite her was like clutching at wet soap, her inability to grasp it deepened her distrust. He talked to Aaron in a slight and not unattractive brogue; to her he used the remoteness and long
a
's of upper-class English which, when she rebuffed him as she frequently did, thinned into the acidity with which it was addressed to inferiors.

Even his looks were a contradiction, she thought; his face might have been a round of cheese into which a child had poked a finger to make the eyes and mouth but when he spoke, ah well, then, you heard a voice capable of calling shepherds from their sheep to set them running towards a Bethlehem stable.

And she distrusted it. Either he was so unsure of himself that he eddied in the direction of any prevailing current—and she suspected his self-regard was too high for that—or he was a plain fat liar and he was hiding something. She examined his every statement for the motive behind it.

Why did he profess affection for Aaron? Why had he been so concerned when she wept for the slaves? Was he really an Irish patriot or was he running from a more dastardly deed in a land of dastardly deeds? If he was such a marvellous actor, why was he penniless?