The Sparks Fly Upward (29 page)

It wasn't just France's
, Philippa thought,
it was mine and Ginny Fitch-Botley's and Hildy's and Mrs Scratcher's and John Beasley's, it was for people without rights, it was for women and men everywhere who work from dawn to dusk for two pence a day and have no say in the system that makes them do it. It was everybody's, it was the world's.

She rejected her original intention of contacting de Vaubon. To have had a member of the National Convention up her sleeve for emergencies had seemed a good idea, now it did not. It wasn't that she didn't trust him, though from the start he and Condorcet had adopted different revolutionary tactics. Condorcet regarded him and Danton as too extreme and careless in their dealings; de Vaubon thought Nicolas Condorcet to be an old woman—and had said so.

He and Makepeace were of a kind, which is why they'd been immediate allies in the smuggling business; he would help Makepeace's daughter if he could because he was a man who put friendship above politics.

But Makepeace's daughter, at that moment stumping over the bridge to the Left Bank, was too furious to ask for help. She would not, could not, even talk to member of a National Convention that had turned the greatest advance humanity had ever made into a stain upon history.

Not, the careful Philippa thought, angry as she was, unless it was necessary.

Rue Vaugirard ran along the top of a hill with the railings marking the grounds of the Palace of Luxembourg on one side and steep little streets running off it on the other, like ribbons hanging downwards off a lance.

She counted the turnings. ‘Rue des Fossoyeurs,' Sophie had said with that tight little grimace of hers. ‘I am not superstitious, as you know—I just wish it had been called something else.'

Street of the Gravediggers.

It was narrow and damp, the sun hadn't reached it yet, would stay only a little while when it did. It looked blind, the windows of its tall, respectable houses shuttered, doors barred.

Number Fifteen was halfway down on the right. Two big gates with a wicket in them suggested that a courtyard lay on the other side and that the story above them was the upper floor of a lodge.

The prescribed list of occupants was nailed to the right hand gate.

 

One resident's name, she knew, was not on it.

She closed her eyes for a moment. Opening them, she looked up and down the empty street. Then she grasped the ornate door knocker, lifted it and let it fall.

Chapter Nine

MAKEPEACE Hedley and Michael Murrough stood together on the stage of the Duke's Theatre in Eastcheap, looking out on the auditorium.

‘ “A little dusting,” ' Makepeace said, quoting.

‘Did I say that?'

‘ “A lick of paint.” '

‘That's all, really, dear lady,' the actor said. ‘A bit of restoration here and there.'

‘How about bit of demolition?' Makepeace said. still horribly calm. ‘Finish the job.'

‘It looks worse than it is,' he said.

‘Oh good.'

It looked appalling. Empty, neglectful years had done the theater harm but thieves had done worse; the proscenium curtain had gone, so had scenery and carpets and chandeliers and candle brackets and doorknobs with their escutcheons—in one instance an entire door. The boxes had been stripped of their gilt balustrades and stools, only scars showed where plaster cherubs and muses had once romped around the high, painted ceiling and walls. The orchestra pit was empty of chairs and music stands. The backdrop roller was broken so that a canvas of Venice's Rialto hung at an angle that threatened to tip its pedestrians into the canal.

A voice like a flute with a French accent came up from the stalls. ‘It is not so bad,
cherie
. The seating is intact.'

‘How can you tell?' asked Makepeace. ‘Nailed down, is it? I can't see under the rubble.'

‘But yes, it is.' The flute was undismayed. ‘It need only a sweep.'

Another voice, slightly Irish, said, ‘Will you look at this now?' A crumpled playbill was waved over the balcony of the circle. ‘They put on
Romeo and Juliet
with Mrs Cibber and Barry.'

There was a sound like an organ roll from beside Makepeace. ‘She speaks. O speak again, bright angel.'

‘O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo?' asked the circle.

The stalls chimed in:

 

There were murmurs of approbation all round the theater.

‘Look . . .' said Makepeace.

‘How about the sound?' demanded Murrough.

‘Not bad at all,' the circle told him, ‘Bit sharp, fine with a full house.'

‘Cherie, anything is better than the Abbey, it was an ear trumpet.'

‘Will you all STOP?' Makepeace said. She gained silence. ‘I'm sorry but there ain't going to be no sounds. There ain't going to be a play, not anything. Setting this place to rights would cost more than it's worth.
Look
at it.'

The silence grew deeper. ‘I'm sorry,' she said, and meant it. ‘I'd have liked to put the play on but it's got to pay its way for Aaron's sake. We'd be in debt before we started. This ain't a charity.'

‘I thought it was,' somebody said, reasonably. ‘For slaves or some such.'

‘Yes, well, I'll think of something else.' Even to herself she sounded shamefaced. ‘Perhaps you could put on a production in Hyde Park.'

There was a deep, reflective sigh.

‘Bracey's making tea in the Green Room,' somebody said. ‘We could give her some of that.'

‘Excellent idea.'

They talked about her as if she were a recalcitrant horse.

There were five of them. It seemed like more. They'd got off the boat from Dublin at Holyhead and made their way from Anglesey—God knew how; they hadn't a penny to bless themselves with—to land on the doorstep of Reach House like a flock of parakeets. ‘We're Aaron's players, dear lady. How
is
the poor darling?'

She'd let them settle in the parlor and had taken only one, the most insistent, upstairs to Aaron's room on the principle that en masse they would be too much for him, as they were too much for her. That one had been the French actress, Adèle de Beauregard, the one they called Ninon—they all had nicknames—and there'd been a lot of kissing and
cherie
-ings and ‘my treasures' between her and Murrough and Aaron but Makepeace had seen at once that here was another of Aaron's women.

There'd been a number of them over the years, always the same as to type, but she'd only known well the two he'd married. At least, he'd called the second one his wife, being somewhat vague as to what had happened to the first—disappeared rather than deceased, apparently. There'd been a child by that particular Mrs Burke and, to Makepeace's distress, it had gone with her.

Andra Hedley had insisted that, however outraged her Puritanism might be, she must not only receive the second Mrs Burke but be nice to her. ‘Which do ye want to keep to, pet? Your principles or your brother?'

So she'd kept to her brother, though why, if he'd had any choice in the matter, Aaron should have made the change was difficult to see; both marital peas might have come from the same pod. Both were actresses, slightly vulgar, thin, brunette, overexuberant and, to Makepeace's mind, overfriendly. Both had treated her as if she were as risqué as themselves, presumably because she'd had two husbands, one of them titled, rich and previously divorced. There'd been a companionable women-of-the-world winking from them; the second Mrs Burke had actually complimented her on having ‘done well for herself '—a phrase that had enabled Makepeace to bear the eventual severance of that alliance with equanimity.

Ninon, being thin, dark and animated, went down immediately as another from the formula and there was no mistaking the mistiness of Aaron's eyes as she settled a silk-covered haunch on his pillows and smoothed back his hair in what Makepeace considered an unnecessarily proprietorial manner.

She had to leave them together in order to attend to the rest but, on the way, sought out Hildy. ‘Send Sanders for Dr Baines. And tell Constance she's to go and sit in Aaron's room and stay there.'

‘Is yon lad worse?'

‘He will be if he's left alone with this one. She's
French
.'

‘Aw deor.' Hildy had run for it.

Baines didn't arrive and Ninon had the grace to come downstairs after a short interval. The woman was reassuring though, again, irritatingly proprietorial. ‘You look after
mon pauvre
ve'y well,
madame
. He mus' not be excited, no?'

Hospitality required she put them all up for the night. By that time the invaders, especially Ninon, had nearly everyone in the household eating out of their hands. Luchet bobbed in the Frenchwoman's wake like a lovelorn cork. She won Jacques by taking the rest to look at his inventions and showing baffled admiration.

Marie Joséphine, however, did not succumb. ‘That one is no
grande dame
; she is a peasant, like me.
C'est une imposture
.'

‘They're actors,' Makepeace told her. ‘Imposture's their trade.'

Their gossip at dinner was so enchanting that Makepeace had to frown at the maids who gathered outside the slightly open dining room door between courses so that they could listen to it. Hopkins had to be reminded to serve the gravy.

They had enough politeness, or self-interest, to include Makepeace in their conversation and expressed delight that Aaron had persuaded her to be the company's business manager. Nevertheless her dining table had assumed the bulwarks of a vessel that sailed without her; she was reminded of the aristocratic dinner parties she'd had to attend with Philip Dapifer when, without one antagonistic word being spoken, she'd been left in no doubt that she was an interloper.

It wasn't that these players overrode her personality but that they changed it. As their patron and a non-thespian she must be pandered to; she found herself being altered into a sort of bountiful bookkeeper, an elderly aunt who had wandered into a young person's party, to be respected while she was present but oh-what-a-relief when she went.

Yet Murrough was of her own age, so was the stout woman they called Bracey.
And you won't see forty again either, you baggage
, she'd thought, looking at Ninon.

To her relief they intended only to stay the one night at Reach House; they had friends in London among whom they would scatter themselves. She thought Murrough might go with them, but he showed no sign of it.

The next morning they'd packed into her coach, arranging to meet her in two days' time at the theater to view it and begin making arrangements for the production. Ninon took a tearful farewell of Aaron but promised to come back often ‘to keep up his spirits.'

‘Long as that's all she keeps up,' Hildy said, darkly.

Now, sitting in the wreck of the Duke of York's Green Room, they wove Makepeace around with persuasion and charm, like Titania's fairies enchaining Bottom.

Jacques, who had enveigled himself into the outing, reinforced their argument that the theater could be made good, his eyes pleading; he had found wonderful mechanisms under the stage still intact.

Would she not admit that the theater's structure was sound, its pillared, pedimented outside impressive, only needing a lick of paint? Oh, very well, several licks, but that was nothing. Inside, they could do the clearing and cleaning themselves.

Makepeace regarded the smooth hands fluttering at her. Those of the two young men, Paul ‘Polly' Armitage and Señor Distazio, ‘Dizzy,' were as white as those of Jane Jordan and Chrissy Gardham, the ingenue. ‘Carpenters?' she asked. ‘Decorators? Plumbers? That's before we even start hiring stagehands.'

‘Oh pish,' Mrs Jordan said. ‘There are always little men just begging to be employed in that sort of work.'

‘In Dublin, maybe,' Makepeace said. ‘But there's a war on over here and all spare little men are in it. You employed an English plumber lately?'

She knew that by arguing with them she lost ground. Partly, she wished to be persuaded; it had been so long since she'd been as exhilarated by a project as she had by this. Nor did a day go by without her hearing the slave shriek for her child.

But it was hopeless; to restore the theater to a place of entertainment that competed for audiences with Drury Lane and Covent Garden, as it had to, would cost more than it could ever recoup—and would thereby deeply offend the businesswoman in her, besides putting Aaron in her debt forever.

Most of all, she was no longer convinced that the play would do what Murrough and Aaron had promised her that it would. They'd given her a copy of
Oroonoko
to study—unwisely as it turned out because she thought it was rubbish.

The two-dimensional words on the script read badly to her, silly and flat. By making the hero a betrayed African prince, the play-wright had, she thought, used special pleading instead of portraying the enslavement of real people.

Worse, running through the drama was a comic tale involving a couple of English girls hunting husbands—to which end, for reasons Makepeace failed to grasp, one of them had to dress as a man. As for the sexual innuendo . . .