The Sparks Fly Upward (57 page)

‘We'll stay on for a bit,' she said. ‘The four of us'll move up to T'Gallants, give the place an airing. I'm expecting somebody.'

By this time half the village had come to see the newcomers and was watching them drink the soup that Dell said would hold them until supper. Jan Gurney's wife shook her head over them. ‘Poor liddle buggers, thin as a rasher of wind both of 'em.'

‘We'll feed 'em up,' Makepeace said. ‘Rachel, tell Jan and the lads I'm expecting somebody. He may come by boat. But I suppose I'd better warn the farm as well, in case he arrives by road.'

Rachel was interrogative. ‘Ooh-ar?'

‘Irishman,' Makepeace said.

‘Not more bloody Irish,' Rachel said. ‘Us've got enough with Dell.'

‘'Fraid so. He said he'd meet me here—and he's one as keeps his promises.'

‘Wait for me now, Mrs Hedley, because if I go, I'm coming back
.'

And though the days slipped by, sweet assurance stayed with her. She reopened T'Gallants House and moved into it with her new family.

Tobias came up to help her, so did Rachel Gurney who was intrigued by this couple without a past. ‘What be us going to call 'em?' she wanted to know. ‘Eve and Abel, I reckon.'

‘We ain't calling them anything,' Makepeace said. ‘We're going to wait until they can tell
us
who they are.' For her, their name was Deliverance and always would be.

Their trust was slow in coming but Tobias said it would eventually. ‘Little 'un'll learn before she does,' he said.

He was right, he usually was. Jacques managed to persuade the boy to go with him and see his experiments at the inn by making steam engine noises and pointing. The woman watched from the window with Makepeace's restraining hand on her shoulder as the two boys crossed the bridge that lay between T'Gallants and the village. Her fists were clenched.

‘He'll be back,' Makepeace told her. ‘I promise he's coming back.' The woman stayed at the window until she saw the boys returning, then the tension went out of her. She turned, walked to the kitchen and came back with a broom and began sweeping the hall in the first brisk movements Makepeace had seen her make. She looked up and nodded. Makepeace nodded back.

They were good days. Makepeace saw them draw in from the seat under the great window in the hall, watching the shadow of her house fall over half the village as the sun slid down behind it, looking and waiting for a sail as she had looked and waited for so many.

He's late making his entrance
, she thought.
Damn actor.

But she never doubted that he
would
make it; she'd doubted him too much in the past.

Of course, she was asleep—still on the window seat—when the call came and the woman, who could hear a leaf fall, came padding down from upstairs to shake her gently awake.

Makepeace sat up; it was dark and for a moment she didn't know where she was. The woman pointed to the window and said something.

The moon had come up, huge and yellow. Jan Gurney and a couple of his sons were standing on the slipway to the beach.

She opened the window. ‘What is it, Jan?'

‘Vessel out yonder,' he yelled back. ‘Becalmed, we reckon. There's a breeze out to sea but it do incline to fall when ee gets near land ...'

She didn't want a dissertation on maritime weather. ‘What boat is it?'

‘Us be wonderin' whether to go out to her or p'raps her'll come in under sweeps or maybe, seein' as she might have passengers, she'll ...'

It was too far and too dark to see the lineaments of his face but she knew he was grinning. ‘You sod,' she shouted. ‘What
is
she?'

‘Gruchy sloop.'

She was off the seat and running, then running back to put on her slippers because of the shells on the beach, then running to the main door, out of it, running across the bridge.

By the time she got to them she saw that there were other figures, with guns, disappearing into the rocks that edged the beach. It never paid to be trustful in the smuggling business; the sloop from Gruchy might have been boarded by the Revenue on her way across the Channel.

But she knew.

‘They're rowing in, Dad,' young Peter Gurney said.

They made her retreat with them up the slipway to the shadow of the wall. ‘Just in case, my beauty.'

But she knew. She knew from the grunts that came across the water in time to the creak of rowlocks and the shape of the back against the moonlight as he heaved at the oars.

‘He's put on weight again,' she told them.

He had breath enough to sing, though.

 

‘He's an actor,' she told them.

‘Home, lads,' Jan called and men came scrambling down from the rocks, passing her without a word, until she was left alone on the beach.

She walked down to the water's edge and watched him heave the dinghy up on to the sand. ‘You took your time,' she said.

‘Ah, well, I had revolutions to see to.'

She went up to him and took handfuls of his jacket and buried her nose in his chest. ‘I love you,' she said.

‘I know. Did ye get the delivery?'

‘As per promised,' she said and began to cry.

‘Didn't I tell you I was the fella to keep the promises? And haven't I brought back a certain Miss Dapifer and a Lord Ffoulkes with me in that sloop out there? They'll be coming ashore soon.'

He led her up the beach and sat her down on a lobster pot, patting her back. After a while he found another lobster pot but it collapsed beneath his weight, so he found another. He gave it up and sat down on the sand next to her. She put out her hand and he held it.

She watched the moon become bigger and more orange, as if it were taking the heat of the day with it on its descent to the horizon, leaving the air refreshed.

At last she said, ‘Are they all right?'

‘Fine, fine,' he assured her. ‘Except they've fallen in love, poor souls. And so English and so honorable that he's to go back to his wife in the morning and she's returning to a life of abstinence. Robespierre could be proud of them if the bastard wasn't dead.' He sighed. ‘They're out there this minute, saying good-bye to each other.'

‘Ah.' She sat upright.

‘Ah,' she said again. ‘Now
there
I believe I can tell them something to their advantage.'

Author's Note

THE Marquis of Condorcet died—apparently by poisoning himself—within four days of leaving Mme Vernet's house, although his wife didn't learn of the death until after the Terror was over in late July. He'd managed to reach the home of two old friends, the Suards, at Fontenay, but they wouldn't let him in—an indication of what the Terror did to relationships. Exhausted and hungry, Condorcet made for an inn. There's a story that he ordered an omelette and, when asked how many eggs he wanted in it, said ‘Twelve,' the answer of an ignorant and extravagant aristocrat. I find it difficult to believe; there was severe rationing before he went into hiding and even under the care of Mme Vernet he could not have been unaware of it.

However it was, he aroused the suspicion of the innkeeper, who had him arrested. He was taken to the nearest lock-up and found dead the next morning.

In order to bring in other attitudes to the French Revolution, I've added the fictional characters of Philippa and Ffoulkes to the real, historical people who lived at Number 15 Rue Servandoni (Gravediggers) —a house that still stands. What I haven't made up is the fact that Mme Vernet sheltered Condorcet for nine months of the Terror and that during those months a room in her lodge was occupied by a Jacobin deputy, Marcoz, who didn't give either away.

Robespierre's address to the Convention on Thermidor 8 was the culmination of growing antagonism from several disparate quarters, which, with that last speech, coalesced against him and ordered his arrest. Even then, they couldn't have brought him down without the backing of a people sick of the Terror. The National Guard were reflecting public opinion when they broke into a committee room at the Hôtel de Ville to take him to justice. Whether he shot himself or was shot by somebody else, his jaw was shattered and he suffered horribly for the next fourteen hours until the executioner ripped away his bandage, the guillotine blade dropped and the Terror ended.

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