The Sparks Fly Upward (33 page)

Some proved impractical, like his idea for wafting the scent of a rainforest—the action of the play took place in Surinam—into the auditorium by warming a combination of grasses and spices on strategically-placed hot plates. The principle was good, the execution was not. As Murrough said, coughing and wiping his eyes, ‘It's usual to try and keep the audience breathing until the finale, my son.'

But Jacques got the traps to work silently and at different speeds so that an actor could apparently spring out of the ground or gradually materialize, like a ghost in a graveyard.

He had even acquired the much-desired cannonballs for the play's thunderstorm. An appeal and a promise of free tickets to a captain of the Honorable Artillery Company in nearby Moorfields had produced two that were damaged and four that had come warped off the production line. He and Joseph had trundled them back on a trolley and constructed a wooden chute backstage down which to roll them.

Their first trial brought work to a standstill. The noise was tremendous. The usual method of depicting thunder—shaking an undulating piece of tin—was outranked in reverberation like a penny whistle by a full orchestra. Makepeace had to cover her ears. Murrough said, ‘That's God in a temper, sure enough.'

Jacques shook his head. ‘The sound is good but it does not come from the right place. It is an earthquake, not a storm. The chute must go up. We have to suspend it above the stage.'

The cast's eyes flickered to Murrough. The idea of six seventeen pound spheres of iron descending on their heads had occurred to all of them. Purist, however, had appealed to purist. ‘Up it goes, then,' Murrough said.

Jacques's greatest success was with the lighting. He invented a switch that could be operated by wires leading from the lanterns hanging over and around the stage, changing the glass panels in their sides so that they emitted different colors. At a touch, a brightly lit comic scene could be darkened with purple shadows at the entrance of the villain, or give the effect of the sun rising or setting.

Murrough promised that ‘See the Dawn rise over Surinam' would be included in the playbills.

The playbills were another of Makepeace's tribulations. After a row with Murrough, which led to another journey home in silence, she complained to Aaron. ‘He wants four thousand printed. Four
thousand
.'

Aaron nodded. ‘Five would be better.'

‘You won't see London for paper.'

‘That's the idea. You've nearly a thousand seats to fill every night for a week at least. Every wall in the City must have a poster stuck to it and the prettier members of the cast should be distributing hand-bills in the street next week.'

‘Next week?'

‘You open in ten days.'

‘Oh dear Lord.' Work on the theater had become almost an end in itself. ‘We'll never be ready.'

‘I could help, Mama,' Jenny said. ‘I could hand out bills at least.'

‘No you couldn't.' Makepeace was definite. ‘No daughter of mine is soliciting strangers in the street.'

It appeared she had another rebellion on her hands. Jenny was envious of the favor shown to Jacques and Marie Joséphine. ‘Half the family is having an exciting time and I'm here twiddling my thumbs.'

‘You're being useful, you're looking after your Uncle Aaron.'

‘No, I'm not. Chadwell drives him to Chelsea Hospital every day but he won't take me.'

‘She might inflame the pensioners,' Aaron said, as Makepeace turned on him. ‘It's just a work of charity. Arranging a pageant for the anniversary of the taking of Quebec. I was asked to organize it by the governor himself.' He smiled. ‘Actually, I'm rather enjoying it. As the only thespian, I have an army hanging on my every word. I'm thinking of invading London.'

He did look better; the gray was out of his face and he was leaner.
He's behaving well
, she thought. Perhaps gentle, parochial occupation such as organizing an amateur pageant could do him no harm. She'd feared that talk of happenings at The Duke's would be a bugle that set him pawing the ground to rejoin the battle but the tap of death's finger on his shoulder had given him pause for reflection. Never having spent time in the country, or wanting to, he was now enjoying it, sniffing the scent of bluebells wafting from the woods with a pleasure he had previously accorded to the smoke of a good cigar.

Ninon visited him on Sundays and the rare occasions when Murrough allowed her time off. She was not invited to stay the night, nor did she ask to, but Makepeace had become resigned to what was obviously an affair that had been going on for a long time. Considering his past record, she decided that Aaron could have done worse. Despite her grande dame exterior, the actress had proved to be a sensible, hard-working, somewhat jaded woman. She flirted with anyone who would flirt with her but it was an automatic response and not designed to go further, more a habit of which she was tiring. Her affection for Aaron appeared genuine, as was his for her, and brought contentment to them both.

In fact, Makepeace's prejudice against the entire acting profession was undergoing a change. True, nearly every member of the cast had looser morals than she would have liked; Mrs Jordan, it turned out, was the mistress of Lord Radcliffe; little Mrs Gardham had an illegitimate child back in Dublin; Polly Armitage was having an affair with a married man. And only yesterday Dizzy Distazio had overnight gambled himself into a debtor's prison.

Yet there wasn't one among them, poor as they were, who would have traded their profession for the idleness of a kept woman or man that their beauty and sexuality might have gained them. They were devoted to the stage and, despite frequent squabbles, to each other. When news arrived of Dizzy's plight, Jordan had pulled a gold bracelet—a present from her lover—off her arm without comment and given it to Polly Armitage to pawn so that their colleague could be released.

Their language was salty, like their stories, but they curbed both when Jacques was in hearing distance.

Jenny, thought Makepeace, would not be harmed by being in such people's company—as long as it was only in daytime. After all, there were houses belonging to the highest peers of the realm in which vastly darker deeds were perpetrated than the sins committed by her poor band of players.

‘You'll be needing a prompter,' Aaron said, artfully. ‘I usually choose an intelligent young woman for the job. Her respectability's ensured by the fact that she can't be seen.'

‘Can I, Ma? Can I?'

‘I'll see.'

So Jenny, too, joined the workers at The Duke's.

The one impression of the dramatic art from which Makepeace could not be moved was that it was silly. Murrough squirming in Oroonoko's death throes, Ninon slapping her thigh and being taken for a young man when everyone else could see she was a mature woman, declamations of heroism or evil by men who then came off stage and read the paper . . . she wondered how they could do it without feeling foolish.

These were, of course, glimpses, caught as she hurried from one job to another; she hadn't yet seen the play in its entirety and worried that it didn't promise well.

‘Aren't you . . . don't you feel embarrassed when you've done that?' she asked Bracey after Widow Lackitt had screamed her way through one particularly outrageous speech.

‘Too loud was it?' Bracey was immediately anxious. ‘Sir Mick wants her played broad.'

They were speaking in different tongues. Makepeace left it.

As they entered the last week, more things went wrong than went right.

A glaring misprint in the playbills—insisting that the performance was to be held at The Puke's Theatre—meant they had to be done again.

Mrs Jordan, who had a chill, lost her voice and Murrough his patience: ‘Then bloody find it, and quick.'

Costumes were unfinished, so was the scenery. The émigrés, seizing their chance, sent the Comte d'Antrais to Makepeace demanding higher wages.

But it was the moment when the bailiffs came again for Dizzy and Makepeace, having paid them off, boxed the actor's ears for him, that the theater, figuratively and almost literally, came falling down around her own.

She was standing on the side of the stage at the time and developing her theme of ‘You gamble again, you little bastard, and I'll chop your liver for pig swill,' in a voice that reached to the back of the stalls when she noticed three men coming down the aisle.

At that moment a succession of crashes shook the building. There were screams.

Simultaneously, Makepeace recognized two of the visitors—and knew with deadly instinct the purpose of the third—even as she took in the fact that Jacques's chute up in the flies had collapsed, allowing six cannonballs to plunge through the other side of the stage.

For a moment she stood between two worlds.

Each had its tableau. The one on the stage held Mrs Jordan with her mouth open to scream—the shot had just missed her; Ninon, who'd been trying on her costume, appeared wearing breeches and very little else; Jenny, assisting her, held her discarded bodice; Murrough was breaking the third commandment in a voice that blew candle flame sideways; Widow Lackitt had frozen in the act of waggling her backside at her supposed suitor, Polly.

The tableau held three men in the aisle justified in what they had come to do. Reverend Deedes's face displayed joyous horror. The stranger was nodding, yes, indeed. Stephen Heilbron, kind and wise, sorrowful.

She stood on the equator of two antipathetic hemispheres and knew to which she belonged.

Her rogues and vagabonds, ever ones to exaggerate a sensation, swooned and exclaimed around the hole in the stage without noticing their manager being handed a paper from the Lord Chamberlain's office that closed the theater down.

Chapter Ten

THE new maid at Number Fifteen in the Street of the Gravediggers scattered the remains of the grain in the back garden's poultry run and watched its two hens run flapping towards it for their last meal. Doomed, poor things. No more grain. The scraps they once fed on were now the household's meals. The ax awaited.

Philippa was sorry; the hens made pleasant noises, little balloons of sound popping in their throats. Two more living things silenced. But, as she told them, shutting them in, ‘Innocence is no excuse nowadays.'

She returned to the scullery, crossed the kitchen floor she'd just washed to reach the hall and went out of the front door into the courtyard. A lovely morning, the emerging leaves of the vine on the wall were translucent green in the dawn.

The silence was eerie. Difficult to believe it wasn't Sunday, which it wasn't. Even on Sundays, the bells of the churches would have been exercising their tyranny over the faithful; come to church, come to church. Now they were only rung in the case of alarm.

No dogs barking. The order had gone out to have canines destroyed; they ate too much. No cocks crowing; a voluntary extermination, that—in case they alerted poultry thieves to their presence. No cooing pigeons; even sparrows had to watch their step or they ended in somebody's pot.

In the empty, aimless air, the buzz of a bee dodging among the blossoms in the courtyard's plum tree sounded very loud. Ah, the stationer opposite had opened his bedroom window and was coughing out of it. Paris would begin work soon.

She picked up the boots Citizen Marcoz had left outside the door of his lodge and took them back to clean with the rest. She liked cleaning boots; one had something to show for the effort.

In a moment she would prepare the breakfast trays for the household, crisping last night's leftover crusts in the oven to approximate toast, putting out pots of Mme Vernet's
confit des pruniers
, making the coffee from yesterday's grounds. She liked that, too. Orderly activity, a comfort in a world threatening to reel off its axis.

They'd executed Tom Glossop yesterday.
Don't think of it, don't think.
She'd been walking towards the underwear shop in the Rue Saint Honoré when the tumbrels came by. Two of them, both crowded. Hadn't wanted to look. Had looked. Seen the face she'd last encountered in her mother's kitchen at Reach House, Uncle John Beasley's friend, the little man fleeing arrest for distributing Paine's
The Rights of Man
.

He'd been so
frightened . . . don't think of it
. . . so bewildered. Only the aristocrats in the carts had known why they were there and stood up straight. The rest, shopkeepers who'd sold above the maximum perhaps, women who'd hoarded a few bars of soap, an old man who hadn't killed his dog, a disliked neighbor informed on by other neighbors . . . all these had huddled together in disbelief that they were to die for it.

And Mr Glossop, wondering to the last what his wife would say as they sliced off his head for advocating what they were supposed to advocate.

She'd wanted to call to him, supply one last friendly face in that avenue of stones. But he wouldn't have seen her, he was blind with terror. And she'd been too frightened; she had Condorcet's life to consider as well as her own. Face it, she'd been too frightened on her own account.

In Sophie's studio, she'd sat with her head in her hands. ‘I wanted to apologize to him,
somebody
should apologize to him.'

‘And to Tom Paine,' Sophie had said. ‘He'll go by and I shall hide for shame. Nicolas thought him the greatest Englishman he'd ever met.'

‘Paine? They haven't arrested Tom Paine? Why? He's a member of the Convention.
Why
?'

And Sophie had said, ‘Why anybody?'

On the way home—already Number Fifteen had become home—she'd gone by the Conciergerie and looked at the list of the next day's guillotine victims on its great spiked gates to see if Tom Paine's name was on it.