The Sparks Fly Upward (25 page)

Today, however, having called at the lord lieutenant's apartments in the hospital's west wing in order to borrow a pair of padded crutches for Aaron, she contrived to let fall that an open invitation to a subscription masquerade they were giving at the gardens the following night in aid of the army would not come amiss. The lord lieutenant and his lady were pleased to extend it; Makepeace was one of the institution's benefactors.

It was a pretty drive home. The weather was beautiful; still frosty at night but with daytime sun bringing out blossom on the black-thorn. Rooks were busy adding twigs to nests that looked as if the elms had sprouted dark untidy fruit.

She spent it wondering whom to ask to accompany her and Jenny to Ranelagh; they required an escort. Aaron could not, obviously, and she didn't think she could stand another evening with the Reverend Deedes.

She pulled up the horse in order to get down from the trap and examine the primroses speckling the bank of the stream that ran along the road. It would be nice to pick some for Aaron but they were still only in the tiny pale furled umbrellas of bud and had not yet developed the achingly sweet, elusive scent, the epitome of spring, that they would gain later on, so she left them to grow.

Back at Reach House, Hopkins came forward to help her down but, before going in, she couldn't resist using the crutches and swung herself along, past the kitchen garden to the walled yard at the back where Constance was hanging out the washing, pegs in her mouth, the stretch of her young body as she reached up to the line being dreamily watched by the tutor Luchet who lounged against a mangle, book in hand like a Hilliard miniature.

Undoubtedly, it was springtime; to Makepeace's certain knowledge he'd fallen in love three times at the inns on the way back from Bristol, once with a lady traveler and twice with serving wenches.

‘Don't you ever do no teaching?' Makepeace demanded of him.

He was unperturbed. ‘
Madame
, the world is my schoolroom. I read poetry to this lady.'

‘She's busy.' To Constance, she said, ‘And don't you encourage him.'

Constance nodded after the Frenchman's retreating back. ‘He's harmless. A right mooner, that one.' She gave an artificial sigh. ‘I tried kissin' him but he still stayed a Frog.'

Makepeace shook her head at her. ‘Where's Jacques?'

‘He's with Sir Mick, blowing up things in the paddock.'

Sir Mick
, Makepeace thought.
If that man was ever knighted by the king, I'm a monkey's uncle.
As she crutched her way past the stables, there was a loud bang and a plume of smoke with debris in it climbed into the air behind the trees.

The actor and Jacques, both in their shirtsleeves, were sadly regarding a cylinder of which the top had peeled back into smoking, blackened petals. ‘Too high pressure,' Jacques said, as she came up. ‘We reduce next time.'

‘You get to your Latin,' Makepeace told him, ‘or there won't be a next time.' When he'd gone, she turned her attention on the actor. ‘The idea is to keep that boy alive. Perhaps you'd remember it. And he's supposed to get an education.'

‘What do you think this is?' He nodded at what had once been decent grazing and was now littered with metal paraphernalia.

She was surprised; he hadn't answered her back before. She watched him put on his coat. ‘It won't get him to university.'

‘It will get him into the new age. As for the old one, he and I are reading the sonnets to Aaron tonight.'

Stop it
, Makepeace told herself, harshly;
don't fall to his spell.
He may sound like a proper man but he's an
actor
. She watched him as he held up the tiny hand mirror that he always kept attached to one of his buttonholes by a ribbon and peered into it, smoothing his eyebrows. ‘That's a relief, for a minute I thought I'd lost 'em.'

They walked back together to where Makepeace had dropped the crutches when she'd heard the explosion. He picked them up and swung himself along. ‘We could play pirates,' he said.

She said stiffly, ‘Jenny and I are attending a masquerade at Ranelagh tomorrow night, Mr Murrough. Perhaps you would be good enough to escort us.'

‘I'd be charmed, dear lady.'

Whatever the moment had been, it had gone—reminding her of the primroses in promising scent yet possessing none.

 

 

RANELAGH was a speculation from which a great deal of money, cleverly spent, was delivering a large return. It was
the
place to be seen; Vauxhall was nothing to it. The gardens were glorious and at their center stood the domed rotunda, a pretty circular shell which, inside, was fretted with white and gold pillared theater boxes overlooking a circular floor and, in the middle, a fat, gilded vermilion column that held up the roof.

To go in by one of the enormous pedimented doorways was to be immediately dwarfed to the size of an ant sheltering under an umbrella. Makepeace, determined to approve of nothing, thought the whole thing looked like an immense darning mushroom with a cotton-reel handle. But even she couldn't deny the seduction of the chandeliers hanging like golden snowflakes from the night blue of the dome and the music coming from an orchestra, fifty-strong, seated on the rising benches of a dais on one side of the room. Some two hundred people were already there and more arriving, but the great space allowed dancing in one area and supper tables in another without discommoding those who merely wished to parade and show off the latest art of their costumiers.

Most of the company wore masks, though Makepeace had forsworn them as diablerie for herself, Jenny and the actor. ‘Hiding her blushes, I reckon,' she said acidly of one woman whose Venetian mask concealed her face but not the arresting body that showed under the gauze of her dress. ‘If she
can
blush, that is. Don't she know there's a war on?'

But the excuse of raising money for the army had given Fashion the liberty to dress in its best and most fantastic, dance its shoes thin and eat a supper that would have kept a division of infantry fed for a week.

Chelsea, too, had also opted for patriotism rather than disapproval and its leading lights were out in force, including, Makepeace saw, the Reverend Deedes, his unmasked face carefully assuming a look of suffering in a good cause that would have outdone a martyr in the flames. London aristocracy had brought with it some of the French exiles, conspicuous from the contrast between their shabby, out-of-date Versailles dress and the brilliance of the masks borrowed from their hosts. From his lack of height and powdered wig, she recognized the Marquis de Barigoule, her former dancing partner on the night of Ffoulkes's ball.

She hurried through the throng, leaving Jenny to the care of the actor, and spent most of the evening alone in one of the boxes, partly hidden by its curtain and dividing her attention between the entrance and the swirl below her. And waiting.

Despite the crisp night air coming through the open doors, it was hot under the dome and most masks were soon laid aside. She watched the actor, with Jenny on his arm, go round the room, graceful for all his bulk, entering into easy and welcomed conversation with practically everybody, and within minutes being treated like an old friend.

Sir Mick-ing himself into favor
, she thought, sourly.
Everybody talks to him; Sanders, Hildy, Jacques, they all tell him things; I bet he knows a damn sight more about my business than I know about his.

He was attentive to Jenny, she had to give him that. Only once, while the girl was taken off to dance by the lord lieutenant's son, did he abandon her to go outside. Makepeace assumed it was to piss—the garden's bushes proffered less noisome accommodation than did the Rotunda's places of easement—but in the light issuing through the great portal onto the carriage area outside, she saw him talking to somebody.

Who it was, she couldn't quite see—the man was in shadow—but she got the impression that he wasn't a guest, more likely a servant attendant on one of the coaches that had come from London.

Only the day before, after she'd invited him to Ranelagh, the actor had asked permission to send Chadwell with a note ‘to a friend in Saint Pancras.'

There'd been no reason to withhold her consent and the note had gone. There'd been no further explanation from him, which she found suspicious since he was usually an inveterate chatterer. Was he in touch with his radical Irish friends? Or merely, perhaps, making an assignment with a woman.

Nothing to do with me.
But she kept an eye on him. His wonderful voice carried to her now and then as his perambulation brought him near her box so that she heard him talking charitable finance with the hospital's lord lieutenant, politics to the duchess of Gordon and even—God help him—joining in condemnation of the Vanity Fair around them with the Reverend Deedes. He reflected back the color of each, like a chameleon.

‘And where are your estates, Sir Michael?' he was asked by the duchess of Gordon.

‘Ireland, ma'am.' As if he owned half of it, and immediately changing the subject: ‘Tell me, Duchess, what's your opinion on the Triple Alliance? Lord Camden was saying only last week, he feared Austria will make peace with France ...'

Makepeace actually saw her own stock rise when it was learned this splendid newcomer was staying at Reach House. ‘Yes, Mrs Hedley is my hostess, a most excellent person . . .' This was to Reverend Deedes: ‘We were not acquainted before, but while her brother appears to take comfort from my presence in his illness, I must remain and render what assistance I can.'

The suggested reluctance, a man sacrificing better things to do by attending the sickroom of a friend, was excellently done, even if Makepeace translated it as reflecting on her competence. However, it also acquitted them both of what Deedes—who would suspect Saint Paul and the Virgin Mary if they were living under the same roof—might otherwise deem an irregular relationship. The tone implied that Sir Michael, with his estates in Ireland, would not consider Mrs Hedley, tradeswoman, as bed fodder if she were served up naked with parsley.

And it's mutual
, Mrs Hedley thought.

But then, very few of the glorious company below her actually did anything, they merely
were
. Other people made money for them, collected their rents, managed their land and handed them the profit. Only in manufacturing towns like her beloved Newcastle did people say, ‘And what line are you in?' Up there they even asked it of women because you never knew which widow had taken over her husband's business or which daughter had inherited her father's or even, with so many men gone to the war, started up her own and was running it without trouble.

It was hot in her box; the red velvet with which it was lined smelled of dust and stale perfume. Suddenly this scented, golden globe nauseated her; what am I doing among this trash? I'm as bad as these wasters, battening on Raby, leaving it to young Oliver to run it. I'll go home, I can face it now. I'll stay for Beasley's trial and then I'll take Aaron home to God's own clean country.

The actor's moon face was directed at her—so he'd known where she was all the time. He was miming. Did she want an ice? Something to drink?

She shook her head and turned her attention to the entrance where there was a commotion. Sir Charles Fitch-Botley had entered with a crowd of friends. Georgiana, Makepeace noted, was not among them, although the group contained some women as well as Andrew Ffoulkes's friend, Blanchard.

They'd been drinking and were noisy. Fitch-Botley's boom to the lord lieutenant, ‘Sorry 'm late, old dear. Been at m' club. When's supper?' could be heard over the music.

Makepeace got up, hitched her neckline into place, smoothed down her skirt and went downstairs. Making her way through the crowd, she bumped against Fitch-Botley and apologized with a Judas's kiss of a curtsey. ‘Beg pardon, sir.'

Blearily, he bowed back; he didn't recognize her.

Makepeace went up to Jenny and the actor, positioned herself between them, taking each by the arm, and led them to where she had a view.

Fitch-Botley and some of the others had gone up to the orchestra in its white and gold stand and were demanding that it play ‘somethin' lively.'

Two dourly-dressed men in heavy boots, who'd been standing in the entrance, began to cross the floor, causing some of the guests to raise their lorgnettes at them.

Jenny was chattering. ‘You ought to have heard Lady Gladmain on the subject of Mr Pitt, Ma, she ...'

‘Definitely,' Makepeace said.

One of the men was tapping Fitch-Botley on the shoulder. ‘Sir Charles Fitch-Botley?'

‘I am. Who the hell are you?'

Afterwards, and it was a subject in Chelsea inns and coffee shops for some time to come, one of the men either produced a paper and was slapped across the face by Sir Charles, or was slapped first and produced his paper afterwards.

In any case, the result was the same; Sir Charles was being frog-marched round the pillar towards the door. The orchestra fell silent, leaving only an unaware flautist twittering arpeggios with his eyes shut.

Some of the Fitch-Botley coterie, trying to hinder their friend's unwilling, kicking progress, were loudly warned by the second man that to do so contravened the law. ‘Legal arrest. He ain't paid his coal bill. Two years' supply. Forty-two pun and tuppence.'

Boy Blanchard stopped the procession by standing in front of it, waving a purse. ‘There's no necessity for this, here's the money.'