The Sparks Fly Upward (35 page)

‘I'm safe enough,' Philippa said to him now. ‘Mme Vernet is even letting me do some shopping—it will look strange if she's constantly queuing while she has a maid to do it.'

‘To queue' was the new verb. Somebody had likened the waiting lines of people outside the shops to a tail of hair and the word had caught on. You queued for everything, sometimes for hours, waiting for the rationed meat or bread to come in. Rumour went around: ‘Fouquet's has a consignment of stockings,' and you queued for those. Sometimes you joined a queue not knowing what it was for but hoping it was useful.

For Philippa, the queueing itself was an education and not an unhappy one. For one thing, the weather was sunny though, as an old countrywoman she met in the bread line had pointed out, the persistent drought was worrying—it meant that the queues next winter would be longer and for less.

For another, it brought her in touch with the ordinary Parisians, mostly women, but sometimes men as well, and the latest cautious gossip—you never knew if a Committee of Public Safety spy was listening in.

What it was like in the East End where extreme poverty and the Rue Saint Antoine enragés kept up the demand for more and more heads to roll, as if blood could feed the starving, she didn't know. But in the queues around the bourgeois sections of the Luxembourg and Quatre Nations dominated by the Cordelier Club of men like Danton and de Vaubon, she detected a deep and growing sickness at the slaughter perpetrated in the Republic's name.

Fewer and fewer turned up in the Place de la Révolution to watch the executions, and those who did were people you wouldn't want to take home to mother.

Standing at the window, looking out at the back garden and the doomed hens, she said suddenly: ‘Why can't it
stop
? Nobody wants it any more. They were muttering against Robespierre in the queue yesterday. What happened to our Revolution? I don't understand.'

‘Neither do I.' He took off his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Perhaps the expectation was too high; people wanted more bread and more power than it was possible to give them immediately. They became a mob. An individual is of value above rubies, a mob is reasonless.' He shook his head. ‘I am sorry for Robespierre; he didn't want this, either, he's on the back of a tiger and trying to direct it by pulling its ears.'

He isn't sorry for you
, Philippa thought,
he wants to feed you to the tiger.
But she had already broken the rules; in this room the present was merely an inconvenience, one that might kill him but still just a passing wobble in humanity's steady march towards betterment.

Somewhere under that mound of papers lay the
certificat de civisme
and travel documents she'd given him, less important than the essay that covered them that charted mankind's progress from its earliest days, that prophesied, that
promised
, a world where men and women would have no master except their own reason.

‘It will show that nature has set no bounds to the perfecting of human faculties, Philippa,' he'd said of it. ‘Independently of any power that would like to stop it, as the Terror is trying to do, so long as our globe exists the tempo will differ but we shall never go back.'

Oh, she loved him. ‘Don't let your coffee go cold,' she said and went to the door.

But today, because he was between chapters, he wanted her company. ‘I've become a garrulous old man,' he said, ‘whereas you've told me very little of yourself. You lay this burden of gratitude on me yet I know nothing except that it cannot be repaid. Tell me whys and wherefores. Speak English—I grow rusty. Have you kept up with your mathematics?'

She smiled and sat down. ‘No.' It was typical of him that this should be the first question he asked. ‘I've been too confused and in love.'

She could tell things to this clear and alien mind that she kept concealed from those they most closely concerned. She told him about Ffoulkes and his marriage, about Stephen Heilbron, about the Condorcet society and what Fitch-Botley had done to her, and threw in some makeweight about her mother—though they'd never met he'd always loved Makepeace stories.

Once she'd enumerated the portmanteau of problems that had driven her to France in order that he would not feel so indebted, she went back to the beginning, to the Ffoulkes's ball and her request for papers from The League and Sir Boy Blanchard's reluctance to help her. From this distance, the man's subsequent actions against her appeared ludicrous.

‘He had me followed,' she said, amiably. ‘Now there is someone who'll go to all lengths to avoid England's pollution by your damn republicanism.'

‘Yes.' He was looking out of the window. ‘He's a traitor, you know.' He said it as if it were of passing interest.

‘He's a what?'

‘Hmm?' He turned from the window. ‘Yes, Brissot used him. Called him a flesh-monger, I remember. A shameful business but there were some of the old regime, some aristos we couldn't allow to escape; they were taking too much of the country's gold with them. Blanchard would offer them transit and then hand them over to the State.' Condorcet smiled apologetically. ‘In return for a portion of the gold, I'm afraid.'

‘Blanchard? Sir
Boy
Blanchard?'

He nodded. ‘Oh, yes.'

She stared at him; poor old man, his mind was wandering. But he'd been in the center of revolutionary government for three of its years; he'd
know
. ‘Andrew wouldn't have allowed it. '

‘Lord Ffoulkes? No, no, I doubt he was aware of it. His men seem to have run a most successful escape route. Certainly, we never caught them at it.' He smiled. ‘Perhaps we didn't try too hard; the greater the number of our aristocrats other countries had to support the better we liked it.'

‘But Blanchard . . . he sold some of them to you?'

‘Yes, yes.' The perfidy of men didn't interest him, perhaps because he'd never understood it. Anyway, some factor to the power of n, or a new idea for the book, was now occupying him. He began fidgeting with his papers.

She sat on a while longer, then groped for the door and went out. On the landing she gripped the balustrade, listening to voices and seeing visions of a beautiful mouth hiding bad teeth.

Ma knew, bless her.

For a moment she was assailed by pity for both betrayed and betrayer; how terrible to be the trusting Andrew Ffoulkes; how much worse
not
to be Andrew. What a burden on the soul; in England to twirl in the light of adulation from those you helped to escape knowing that in France you peddled human beings to a contemptuous enemy. A flesh-monger.

She could almost smile, remembering their encounter; an insignificant woman asking his help to bring to England one of the few people who could reveal what he had done and declare to his adoring, betrayed aristocrats, ‘This man is stained.' The energy he'd used in trying to stop her had been panic.

She stopped smiling. If he knew she'd succeeded, how much more would he do to stop her getting back? Her description would be sent to the Committee of Public Safety within the day.

He doesn't know. Nobody's even aware I'm in France.

Yes, they do. The smugglers know
.

But he can't know exactly where I am, nobody knows where Nicolas is hiding.

Yes, but why should Andrew tell Blanchard?

‘Jeanne?'

‘I'm coming, Madame.'

She went downstairs, frantically trying to remember whether she'd given Andrew Sophie's address.

Chapter Eleven

THE council of war in the Green Room had only one defeatist in its ranks.

‘I tell you they're going to close The Duke's down,' Makepeace repeated.

‘Not at all, not at all,' Murrough told her. ‘They're only going to refuse us a license to perform plays.'

‘It's the same thing, aint it?' Her eyes were closed with weariness. She felt as if she'd rolled down an extremely steep hillside and was being asked to climb up it again; she wasn't sure she had the energy. The Lord Chamberlain, more especially Stephen Heilbron and his understanding pity, had taken the stuffing out of her.

Salvos of not-at-alls and certainly-nots were coming at her from all sides. They amazed her; they weren't at all cast down.

‘We could turn
Oroonoko
into a burletta. We could ...'

There were apparently several ways to get round Lord Chamberlain rulings. If there were not, virtually the only theaters in the country would be Covent Garden and Drury Lane, those two holders of the royal patent, whereas nearly every big town now had its playhouse, or at least some hall where drama could be performed by one of England's bands of strolling players.

You could use what was known as the ‘snuff ploy;' get in some cases of snuff, charge the audience to sample it and perform the play free while it was doing so. ‘Colley Cibber did that, do you remember? Turned Lincolns Inn Fields into a snuff factory?'

There was the similar ‘chocolate ploy,' providing a cup of chocolate per person. ‘And that's better,' Polly Armitage said. ‘That way the buggers don't sneeze during the performance.'

Or, since the Lord Chamberlain couldn't forbid a concert, you could charge for a musical entertainment—‘hire a fiddler or two, dance the odd hornpipe'—and invite the audience to watch you ‘rehearsing' a play gratis during the interval. ‘Goodmans Fields got away with that for three years.'

Or, on much the same principle, you could turn the play itself into a musical entertainment, punctuating it with song and dance and calling it a ‘burletta.' In his early days, they assured Makepeace, the great Garrick himself had appeared in a
Macbeth
that included fifteen songs and a hornpipe.

She looked around at them. Dizzy's fine, long face flickered with persuasion, Ninon's lifted as if encountering an old enemy, little Chrissy Gardham kneaded her hand, trying to enthuse her through her skin.

Irreverent to church and authority. Vagabonds, all of them—literally. None of the statutes passed against them by Henry the Eighth, by Elizabeth, by the Puritans, by Walpole, had been rescinded. The laws that had clipped the ears of their predecessors, put them in the pillory, in prison, could still do the same to them; government hated mockery as much as it hated the transmission of ideas.

She contrasted their faces to the miser's purse that was the Revered Deedes's.

How sorry, he'd said, he was to see her, his neighbor, a widow and consequently in need of Christian protection, consorting with these, the lowest dregs of humanity, this nursery of impious immorality, contamination and damnation . . .

He's rehearsed this
, she'd thought.
He trod the boards of his bedroom, practicing his alliteration and striking attitudes at his looking glass. He's as much a performer as those up on the stage.

‘. . . ribaldry and obscenity. I could not shirk my duty to one of my own flock. The Lord Chamberlain was informed out of the need to save you from yourself.'

‘And I'm out to save slaves, you pious little pizzxle,' she'd shouted, not above some alliteration herself in her temper, ‘so get out of my theater.' And she'd shredded the Lord Chamberlain's injunction and thrown the pieces after him.

Stephen Heilbron, however, had remained, kind and careworn as ever. ‘I know Deedes can be insufferable,' he said, ‘but he came to me when he heard I was back from Liverpool and,
dear
missus, as there is no man to direct your family, I—who will soon belong to it—hold myself responsible for you.'

‘Well, you ain't,' she told him sharply. ‘Of all people, you ought to see what I'm doing here.'

‘I understand what you are trying to do and that I must seem pharisaical in your eyes. But, missus, the means are foul, don't you see? No matter what the end? Attitudes to slavery must be changed by bringing people nearer to Jesus Christ and only by that. A playhouse merely brings the Christian religion into contempt.'

‘Why does it?' She didn't understand him; Christianity was strong enough to look after itself. ‘
How
can it?'

Gently, he took her by the shoulders and turned her round so that they both faced the stage and the splintered hole that Jacques's cannonballs had made in it. ‘Were you not trying to imitate the Almighty's wonderful act of thunder? Oh yes, I know the tricks—dropping peas on a drum to make the sound of rain. Can you not see you are making mockery of him and his most blessed gifts?'

At which point Makepeace decided the man was mad. She'd left him and followed the cast's flight to the Green Room.

Chrissie Gardham said, ‘Missus, the Marquis thinks it wouldn't take much to turn
Oroonoko
into a burletta, it's got songs already.' They were all looking at her. The Marquis of Barigoule was with them, now part of the team, nodding in confirmation.

Murrough was watching her. He always watched her.

They filled the shabby room liked a crowded flower arrangement, elegant even when they were troubled; the men placed like dark fronds between the overblown roses of the women balancing on the stalks of their pretty, white-stockinged feet.

Such good companions, she thought. Yet they made her feel lonelier, even jealous; she might long to be one of them but the foot-lights divided them; she could never enjoy the easy understanding they shared. Part of her belonged in the auditorium. They knew it, kind as they were to her, and she knew it.