The Sparks Fly Upward (26 page)

‘Debt to be settled at the compter,' the second man said. ‘Arrest charges extra.'

There was a surge towards the doorway to watch Sir Charles put forcibly into a barred wagon such as was used for the transporting of felons, and driven away to the old round pigeon house in Cutters Lane that served as Chelsea's overnight lockup for drunks, criminals and debtors.

Makepeace waved.

‘What's happening? Why have they done this?' asked Jenny.

‘Looks as if the gentleman ain't been paying his coal bills,' Makepeace said equably. ‘Ought to pay your tradesman, I always say.'

‘Indeed.' The actor was looking at her. ‘Remind me never to order coal from your mother, Miss Jenny.'

‘
Ma
.' Jenny whirled round. ‘Was it . . . ?' She began to laugh, half scandalized. ‘Does Raby supply Sir Charles's coal?'

‘ 'Course not,' Makepeace told her, severely. ‘We don't sell door to door.' Suddenly, she grinned, effecting a transformation that was breathtaking. ‘But we supply the man as does.'

 

 

CONTENTMENT accorded by the spectacle of Fitch-Botley's public humiliation was tempered by the lack of Philippa to enjoy it. Jenny began writing an account of it to her sister but there was so much to relate and her own appearance at the rotunda had brought her so many invitations that the letter was still lying unfinished on her escritoire days later.

Makepeace, in high fettle from her triumph, was prepared to unbend a little to the man who had witnessed it with her and who had honored it with the deepest of admiring bows. With Jenny now attending so many entertainments, the actor's aid in sitting with Aaron and helping him make circuits of the garden by day was invaluable. She softened towards him sufficiently to join the rest of the household in addressing him as Sir Mick and privately absolved him of the various ulterior motives she had attributed to him.

It was a talk with Aaron that disabused her.

She and her brother were alone in the parlor that evening. Jacques and Murrough had gone to watch badgers in the woods; Luchet was in his room. She was knitting, a skill she'd picked up from Boston seamen—a working-class habit in the view of Chelsea's embroidering ladies but one which, since it was a useful handicraft and she knew no other, she saw no reason to drop.

Aaron was tired and querulous, worried that the walk they'd taken together had occasioned another assault on his heart. ‘It hurts,' he said, rubbing his chest, ‘I can't even walk lessen it hurts.'

‘That's because you ain't used to the crutches yet,' she told him, praying that it was. ‘Read your book.'

He was aggressive from frustration. ‘We're going ahead with the play, you know, Mick and I.'

So all this time the actor had been goading her poor boy into risking his life—merely so that he should not be deprived of strutting the stage. ‘There's a part in it for somebody who can hop, is there?'

‘I won't be appearing, I'll be managing. I can sit in the stalls with my damn leg up.'

‘No, you can't. You're not to disquiet yourself. Alexander Baines won't have it, nor won't I have it. I ain't lending you money so's you can kill yourself.'

Aaron tossed his book aside. He shouted, ‘I'm sick of borrowing off you, don't you see? You've paid for me ever since I can remember; this was my opportunity to pay you back.'

She was astonished by his vehemence. Her early sacrifices for him, all the money she'd given him since, when she had it . . . these had flowed to him without her considering it anything but the natural course of things, like water running downhill. For the first time she tried standing in his boots to see this cataract of loving largesse from his point of view—and saw him drowning under it.

She went on knitting for a while, then she said, ‘After Philip died, when they threw me and Philippa out on the street and you took me into the troupe . . . It'd been the workhouse for us else, me and Pip and Betty and Tantaquidgeon. You saved us, Aaron.'

‘Did I?'

‘You know you did.'

He was pleased. ‘Remember Pippy as baby Moses? And sending Tantaquidgeon on as a spear-carrier, and him so taken by the applause he wouldn't come off?'

She did remember but it was painful for her; it had been a time when she hadn't thought she could go on living without Philip Dapifer.

Though you didn't think you could go on living without Andra Hedley, neither. Life continues but, Lord, what holes are left in it.

‘I ain't going to lose you, too,' she said.

‘Mick said you'd say that.'

‘
Did
he?' Was all her personal business to be discussed with that man? ‘If he's so almighty clever, let
him
put the bloody play on. He can do the acting
and
the managing.' She went back to her knitting. ‘And while he's about it, stick a broom up his arse and he can sweep the stage as well.'

‘You don't change, do you?' he said, grinning. He sat forward. ‘Listen, sweeting, you've no conception what a plummy chance this is. There's only two theaters allowed under patent in London and the rest provide no competition. We've got three advantages over them: We've got a tried and tested play; we've got Mick—wait till you see what he can do on stage;
and
'—Aaron sat back—‘we've got the blessing of the Lord Chamberlain. Deerfield's his brother-in-law. '

‘That's good, is it?'

‘It's practically unheard of. Makepeace, we must go ahead. Who knows, I could maybe establish a permanent company in London. Above all, we'll strike such a blow against slavery as'll advance abolition by years. Mick and I feel as strongly as you do, you know.'

She doubted it; Sir Michael Murrough felt strongly only about Sir Michael Murrough. ‘Who
is
he, Aaron? What was he knighted for?'

‘Well, you see, Makepeace, we must consider the
sir
a part of his stage name. It's not an uncommon practice among us theater people.'

‘So he was never knighted at all. Is there
anything
real about the man?'

‘Yes.' Aaron looked straight at her. ‘His heart and his talent.'

It was her brother's heart that Makepeace worried about—and Murrough's talent for capturing it.

Well, he wasn't going to kill her Aaron; she'd out-maneuver him. She shrugged. ‘Let him go ahead then. I'll advance him the cash—on the understanding you stay home and are restful.'

‘Advance Mick the cash?' Aaron blew air through his lips to produce the sound more usually made to amuse babies.

‘Run off with it, would he?' Makepeace was intrigued, this was the first breath against the actor her brother had uttered.

‘Run
off
with it, no. Run
away
with it, yes. I yield to no one in my admiration for Mick the actor. But Mick the businessman . . . he has no conception of economy. He wanted real horses and half the Irish army for Richard the Third's last battle. He'd actually pay spear-carriers . . .
pay
, I tell you, when most of 'em are happy with a square meal. “
Ach, God, Aaron, we've used those costumes for two seasons, let's be having some new ones
.” '

The imitation was exact but Makepeace didn't smile; she was shocked. She loathed waste. Early poverty had taught her that three pennies should do the work of four. She was prepared to cast bread upon the waters for this play but she damn well wanted it returned to her with advantage, not only for slaves but for Aaron.

He talked on, explaining the necessity for a business brain to cope with theatrical finance, how incapable Mick would be in running both production and management—a difficult enough job at the best of times; only Garrick had ever excelled at both—the eye that must be kept on actors and backstage staff alike if the whole thing was not to be an expensive disaster.

He loves it, she thought. Hopeless, now, to persuade him to lead a quiet life in the north; the strains of the theater might kill him but he'd find them a happier end than what, for him, would be a drawn-out death of an existence on his sister's charity.

And if this blasted play
could
establish him permanently in London it would at least obviate the added exertions of a traveling company.

She looked at him; he'd closed his eyes, worn out by expostulation.

He's not going to outlive me
, she thought in panic.

‘At least wait until your ankle's better,' she said. ‘Baines said to rest your heart until then. It can wait, can't it?' She was begging for their childhood together, all the shared memories of a waterside tavern, Betty, Tantaquidgeon, Boston, the uniqueness of faraway sounds and smells and people that would go with him if he died. ‘Please, Aaron.'

He opened his eyes. ‘I'm awful tired.'

‘There you are, then,' she said, relieved. ‘Wait.'

‘You do it,' he said.

‘Do what?'

‘You manage it. Till I'm better.'

‘The
play
?'

He was smiling and she realized he was a smarter actor than she'd thought he was. ‘Makepeace, I've seen you manage watermen on the Tyne that would have scared Genghis Khan. What did they used to say in Newcastle? That keelmen were frightened by nowt but a lee shore and Makepeace Hedley? What's a company of lily-sniffing actors compared to them? You do it.'

Chapter Eight

IT was such sunny weather and so warm that the driver of the Cherbourg-Paris diligence rolled up the side coverings and his passengers were able to look out on the countryside as they were lurched through it.

Only one, a neat, cheaply dressed little person, who'd got on at Valognes clutching a worn traveling bag, was going all the way to Paris—to help her sister-in-law with the children, she said, now that her brother was in the army.

Ah, yes, the army. Immediately fellow passengers were in sympathy. Everybody had a brother, a son, a husband, a cousin, in the army. Since the
levée en masse,
practically every young man in France had been called up to fight the British or the Prussians or the rebels or somebody.

It was the war, not the Terror, that occupied the minds of the people getting on and off the diligence; women going to see relatives, balancing a hen or baskets of preserves on their knees, the chemist traveling to Caretan to restock his store of drugs, the salesman with his case of scissors, the commune councillor on his way to report to the district chief at Saint Lô, the young widow taking her children to her parents' home in Beauvigny. That and prices.

Things had calmed down. The Revolution's soldiers who'd come last year to punish and repress Caen's insurrection had been recalled by a government realizing that they inspired more rebellion than loyalty. Madame La Guillotine was no longer thirsting for the blood of poor men and women of the Calvados who were only concerned with feeding their children.

The currency of the revolutionary assignat was regaining value after having threatened to become a worthless piece of paper. The law of the maximum, which was supposed to keep prices down and wages steady, was working a little better than it had.

If the men could only come home safe from the war, God would be in His Heaven again—here one of the market women looked nervously at the commune councillor. Was one allowed to mention God? Yes, one was—Robespierre had deemed atheism to be a concept of the aristocracy—although, strictly speaking, one should really refer to Him as the Supreme Being so as to cater for all tastes.

Paris
. Did she really have to go there? Why not bring her sister-in-law and nieces and nephews to live in the country? The bloody Parisian sansculottes were more trouble than they were worth, thought they ruled France just because they controlled the capital. No idea of what went on outside; passing laws, decreeing this, decreeing that, most of it ridiculous.

Here, my child, have a bite of this sausage; my uncle makes them to his own recipe. Good, eh?

And yet, Philippa thought, as each new friend stepped down from the diligence to have his or her place taken by someone else, despite what they'd been through—upheaval, bloodshed, the reversal of everything they'd known—there wasn't one who mourned for the days of Louis XVI. Their eyes were brighter, their minds wider, they considered their prospects better, for the Revolution.

When the diligence stopped at Saint Lô to change horses, there was a rowdy crowd gathered around something in the market place. In the old days it would have been a dancing bear or a bull-baiting. Immediately she became afraid that she would hear her first blade drop. But she was told no, no, guillotining was done in Paris; this was merely a bit of fun, a priest being forced to marry a nun.

THAT apart, and against all expectation, it was an invigorating journey. While she'd been in England her mind had imagined France as clouded, as if its weather must reflect its political darkness. Instead, sun shone on a springing countryside, fresh and young. The chateaux she passed were windowless and gaping, their geometrically tidy gardens now grazed by sheep and bullocks—and they looked kinder for it.

She'd heard that awful desecrations had taken place on the altars of churches but at two, where the doors were open, men and women were peacefully rolling fat, round cheeses inside for storage, and she thought what a sensible use of a cool, spacious interior that was.

Nor was she harassed for traveling by herself. Though the shouts of the harpies in Paris demanding incredible things had been quieted, the part they'd played in the overthrow of the Bastille and the monarchy had raised the awareness of feminine power, not least among women themselves. Also, women were keeping everything going in the absence of the young men; farming, marketing, even working in munitions factories. There was a sense of comradery between the sexes she had never encountered in England; both were sliding together in this sometimes terrifying, sometimes exhilarating glissade to freedom.