by Diana Norman
She looked at the three pieces of paper she’d written on. These weren’t intended letters to dear ones, they were to be last notes, pitiful, brave farewells hiding her rage that those same dear ones did not love her enough.
Did all suicides feel this savagery, this you’ll-be-sorry-now, as they departed the world?
In her case, how sorry would they be? Not too much. She lived on other people’s periphery; to nobody was she the fulcrum. Makepeace’s grief would be sharp for a while but she would survive it as she had survived so much else; she had never let her children interfere with the things she had to do; the loss of her eldest wouldn’t change that. Jenny, whose main life was also elsewhere, would be on hand for her if necessary.
Andrew Ffoulkes would grieve for her, yes; miss her, perhaps, as one missed a pet dog, experiencing a wry pang as some circumstance brought it to mind.
And Stephen? He would miss her least of all. She found that a comfort; the poor man carried the fate of slaves on his back, why should he be burdened further? She had been suitable; he had caught her in passing, rather as one hailed a boat that would carry one in the direction one wanted to go. There would be another along shortly.
One by one and slowly, she took the pages of her unwritten letters between her hands and crumpled them.
Well, well, she was of no real significance to any of them. It was incredibly painful to know it, yet at the same moment she felt curiously untrammeled. There was no time to spend on self-pity; she was free to concentrate on saving Condorcet without worry for those she left behind.
And I damn well will—had she known it, Philippa looked suddenly very much like her mother—somehow or another I’ll reach Paris.
Working swiftly now, she took another sheet of paper and redrafted her will. It had been drawn up years before and, apart from bequests to servants and personal items to her mother and sisters, who had fortunes of their own, the bulk of her estate had been donated to various and somewhat unmuscular charities. Now she divided it between Coram’s Foundlings Hospital and the Society for the Abolition of Slavery.
She asked that five hundred guineas each be bestowed on her friends, Lady Fitch-Botley, Mrs Kitty Hays and Miss Eliza Morris. Marriage automatically endowed a woman’s fortune on her husband to do what he liked with, but a personal bequest such as this would allow the three women some independence should they wish it.
Smiling at what he would make of it, she asked Mr Hackbutt as her executor to give another five hundred guineas to the female she knew as Mrs Scratcher. She wrote: ‘Mr Lucey, Number Twenty-seven Grub Street, is to be trusted to know the person I mean and will provide you with her address.’
Who else? Of course, Marie Joséphine. Perhaps, in the end, it was Marie Joséphine who would miss her most of all.
She bent to the paper again, wrote and shook sand over it to dry the ink. Now at least the Frenchwoman would be rich enough to nurse her sorrow in comfort.
She wished she could have seen Marie Joséphine to say good-bye. And it would have been nice to have had her company on the journey, but she would not run the woman into danger.
A female traveling a long distance on her own was a mark for men’s unwanted conversation, innuendo and harrassment, sometimes even assault, which was not something Philippa looked forward to during her passage through England and France.
How ironic that she, the Saint Joan of female liberation carrying the banner of freedom and independence into dangerous territory, should wish for a chaperone in order to do so.
Blowing the sand from her last will and testament, she said aloud, ‘Well, I didn’t make the world, did I?’
She took a deep breath and stood up to put on her coat. ‘I’m just going to improve it a bit.’
Chapter Seven
IT was unfortunate that, on entering Reach House, Aaron should fall heavily on a doorstep that rain had turned slippery and, as it turned out, should break his ankle. It was even more unfortunate that the step’s slipperiness was not the cause of his fall.
Since he made no sound apart from an initial grunt, Makepeace, tired from her long journeyings, was about to tell him sharply to stand up when light from the hall fell on her brother’s face as it lay against the stone flags. It was gray; only white showed under his flickering eyelids.
‘He’s ill.’
Hopkins was immediately despatched for the local doctor and Sanders, even more tired than his mistress, whipped up again and set off for London to fetch Dr Alexander Baines, the only one in whom Makepeace—not an admirer of the medical profession—had any faith.
‘Get him upstairs.’
‘I should not move him yet,’ the man called Sir Michael Murrough said. ‘It may be his heart. Best to let him lie a while.’
‘His heart?’ She was more alarmed than ever.
‘In the coach, wasn’t he complaining of a pain in his chest?’
‘I thought he was indigestive. He ate too much at the inn.’ Because she was frightened, she became angry. ‘Are you a damn doctor as well as everything else?’
The long days in the coach coming back from Bristol had been passed mainly in listening to Murrough’s experiences of mastering various skills across the length and breadth of Europe while simultaneously bringing vast audiences to their feet with his acting.
The actor was unrepentant, ‘Madam, I did Molière for the Théâtre-Français. Let us just loosen his necktie.’
Molière. Her brother was dying before her eyes and this buffoon was quoting some damn Frenchman.
However, she loosened Aaron’s collar and coat and sent Hildy for a cushion to put under his head. The rest clustered around, getting in her light and on her nerves. Jacques was looking frightened, his tutor as imperturbable as ever.
‘Where’s Philippa?’ Philippa would organize them.
‘She’s gone to Northumberland, Ma. Very sudden, it was.’ Jenny, woken by the kerfuffle, was hurrying downstairs in her nightrobe.
Damn. Just when she needed her.
‘Take Jacques to the kitchen and get him something to eat. And . . . him.’ She kept forgetting the tutor’s name. ‘And him.’ She avoided using the actor’s name. ‘Good girl, Hildy.’ Tenderly, she slid the cushion beneath her brother’s head and stroked his hair back from his face. ‘It’s all right, Aaron. You’ll be well soon. Prepare beds for everybody, Hildy. We’ll use Philippa’s when we get him upstairs, it’s narrow.’ If he were to need a lot of nursing, a narrow bed would make it easier.
‘Makepeace.’
‘Yes, dear. I’m here.’
‘Where’s Mick?’
The actor squatted down. ‘Me, too, me old son. You took a toss but you’ll be grand. Rest now.’
Aaron nodded, said, ‘It hurts,’ and lapsed back into semiconsciousness.
Makepeace glared around at the rest of the company. ‘Git.’
They got. The actor stayed and Makepeace let him since Aaron seemed to draw comfort from the man.
DR Perry, dispenser of healing to Chelsea, with whom, since her own health was excellent, Makepeace was unacquainted, wore the red coat, satin breeches and powdered wig of a doctor in the time of Queen Anne which, from the look of him, had been his heyday. He was accompanied by an apprentice who appeared to be in the last throes of depression.
He tottered in and blearily regarded the body on the floor. ‘Can’t bend down there,’ he said.
Since Aaron’s color had improved slightly, Hopkins and Murrough had carried him upstairs to Philippa’s bed where Dr Perry took his hand, palm up, in one of his own and traced the lines on it with a dirty fingernail. ‘Liver,’ he said. ‘Clear as ninepence. Undress him, he needs blistering.’
And such was the authority with which he spoke, and so desperate was she, that Makepeace nodded, though she was reluctant to expose Aaron’s back to outsiders; he hated anyone seeing it. The best she could do was send Hopkins out of the room and leave the handling of Aaron to the actor, who was showing a tenderness she hadn’t suspected in hi
m.
They had trouble taking off Aaron’s boots; he cried out when they tried. Murrough produced a knife and cut the leather, exposing a bruised right foot that looked out of true.
‘Sprain,’ piped Dr Perry.
When they removed the shirt, Makepeace saw Murrough’s eyes flicker at the state of Aaron’s back. He turned to the old man, interestedly. ‘Would you tell me, doctor, how you arrived at the conclusion that my friend suffers from his liver?’
‘Are you a doctor, sir?’
‘I am not, sir.’
Dr Perry sighed with exasperation and picked up Aaron’s hand again. ‘Do you see this?’ His talon traced the line at the base of Aaron’s wrist. ‘Deep, uncommon deep. It is the Lineamentum Iecuri and to those of us who are expert, it tells us the condition of the patient’s liver.’
‘Does it now? I’ll tell you what it tells me, it tells me you’re a gentleman who hasn’t read a medical book since Hippocrates was a lad. It tells me we’ll not blister a man who’s been blistered enough already and it tells me that we’ll be dispensing with your services. I understand there’s a doctor on his way, a doctor, sir, so with this lady’s permission we’ll wait for him and say good night to ye.’
He ushered the old man to the door and held it open while the apprentice, who lost his depression enough to grin appreciatively at him, followed his bleating and protesting master out. Murrough shut the door and came back to sit by the bed opposite Makepeace. ‘There’s too many murderers carry a doctor’s bag,’ he said.
There was a heavy silence, made heavier by Aaron’s labored breathing.
He was right. Makepeace knew he was right, it just hadn’t been his place to do it.
After a while she said reluctantly, ‘Aaron was tarred and feathered. When he was a young man. We were in Boston. It was just before the states rebelled against the British. They poured boiling tar over his back.’
Each sentence was an effort; it had been her fault.
‘The British was it?’ The actor directed his sympathy at Aaron. ‘That’s another t’ing we have in common then. For sure, haven’t I weals on my own back from their whips.’
‘It wasn’t the British,’ she said savagely; he always had to bring every topic back to himself. ‘It was American patriots—that’s what the bastards called themselves—the revolutionaries.’ Men who’d been her countrymen, her friends, customers of her waterside inn, men she’d agreed with about the bloody British rule, men she’d helped with their avoidance of British custom duties, fellow smugglers.
And she’d done one thing, that’s all. They’d thrown an Englishman into Boston Bay because he was an Englishman and she’d fished him out. Wonderful fish, too, as it turned out, titled, the man who was to become her first husband and Philippa’s father, but she hadn’t known it then; she’d fished him out because she couldn’t see a fellow creature drown, saved him and hidden him. And so the patriots had turned on her, burned her inn and tarred and feathered her brother.
‘Don’t you talk to me about revolutionaries,’ she said—she had a deep suspicion that she was addressing one. ‘Don’t you damn dare. Look what they did to Aaron, look what they’re doing to France. Causes . . .’ If her years in polite society hadn’t taught her not to, she’d have spat. ‘All they do is hurt people.’
If Makepeace could be said to have had a philosophy, this was hers—formed unalterably on the night in waterfront Boston when a voice had called out, ‘Here’s your brother, Makepeace Burke,’ and a prickled, black thing had staggered towards her, mewing with pain as it came.
He’d been her responsibility, always. Penitence Burke, already worn out by the worry and work her husband’s fecklessness had imposed on her, had died giving birth to him. Makepeace had been a child herself but not too young to know the baby’s life depended on her.
She’d brought him up, her and her old nurse Betty, sat all night in steam-filled rooms when he had the croup, starved themselves so that he could eat well, scrimped to give him the education they lacked.
And in one drunken incident they called patriotism, some men had taken the young body of which she’d been so mindful and stripped it and kicked it until it lay curled like a fetus at their feet and poured scalding pitch over it.
They’d nearly destroyed him, physically and mentally. Only Dr Baines, who’d treated him, and his own unsuspected courage had enabled Aaron to walk upright again with a mind less scarred than his back.
But it had destroyed something in Makepeace. When the bugles sounded and the drums took to beating, she was deaf to them. When politicians—who weren’t going themselves—flourished young men off to war against other young men, or when the revolutionaries waved a banner and said, ‘Go get ’em, lads,’ when they demanded that everybody pay duty to their cause, their country, she only saw the hacked limbs and skin that weren’t theirs to sacrifice.
She heard noises in the hall and went to the door to greet Alexander Baines as Hildy hurried him up the stairs.
In the quarter of a century since, as a ship’s doctor, he’d first been presented with the moaning, tarry hedgehog that the patriots had made of Aaron, he’d hardly changed at all. He was still skeletal, precise, irritable, his old-maid Edinburgh accent unameliorated by years of treating the complaints of the rich—and the poor—at his Harley Street practice.
Philip had set him up in it when they all reached England, knowing by then it had been the grace of God that had happened to make Baines the surgeon on the British warship that had sailed them away from Boston, the smoke from Makepeace’s inn still dirtying the sky behind them.
‘Pairhaps ye’d let me look at the patient,’ he said now, removing the gabbling Makepeace’s hands from his arm. And to Aaron, more gently, ‘Wail, Wail, my laddie, what’ve ye done this time?’
Murrough watched carefully as the bone-clean fingers lifted one of Aaron’s eyelids. When the doctor put his ear to Aaron’s chest, he nodded and left the room.
‘What is it?’ Makepeace begged after an age.
Carefully, Baines put the covers back over the top half of his patient and raised them over the lower half to begin examining Aaron’s foot. ‘His hairt has an incompetence.’ He sounded judgmental.
Makepeace said quickly, ‘It’s not his fault.’
‘I use the tairm in its medical sense, but, aye, since ye mention it, the fault is partly his. This is not the corpus of the young lad ye brought me on the boat, it’s turned flabby and unconditioned. Too much rich food, too much liquor . . . Is he still in the theatrics?’
‘Yes.’
Baines nodded. ‘Then too much aggravation and excitement and maybe a touch too much wickedness, I dare say.’
‘Stop lecturing. Is he going to get well?’
He didn’t answer as fast as she’d have liked. ‘I’ll not haver with ye, woman, he’s taken a jolt to the heart and if there’s another I’ll not answer for it. There’s an irregularity. But if he sairvives the next day or two, it’ll maybe settle—as long as he obeys the three great doctors ...’
‘Dr Quiet, Dr Diet and Dr Sleep,’ she said; he’d taught her well.
‘Ay. And this ankle’s broken which is maybe a blessing; he’ll be doing nothing til it mends.’ Alexander Baines finished bandaging and then closed his bag with a snap. ‘I’ll retairn tomorrow.’
‘Have something to eat.’
‘Na, na. I have other patients. A dram, maybe, to keep out the cold.’
She called Jenny to sit with Aaron while she took the doctor to the dining room to pour him a glass of whisky. The actor was already at the table—he was a tremendous eater—talking to Hildy and making her laugh. She introduced them and turned to other business.
‘They’ve battened and gone to their beds,’ Hildy said of Jacques and Luchet.
‘I’m sorry Sanders is driven so hard, he’ll have to take the doctor home.’
‘Howay, he can tak hisself to his bed termorrer.’ She blushed helplessly; after forty virginal years, Hildy had di
scovered the pleasures of the flesh. The shares Makepeace had given her in the coal mine would have enabled her to retire but she’d preferred to stay on as housekeeper and it had been to everyone’s pleasure when she and the widowed Sanders had married.
‘An’ ye’re not tewin yesel’ sitting wi’ Aaron tonight, neither,’ she said. ‘Ah’ll stay by him.’
Baines overheard. ‘Sound advice.’ His unlashed eyes, like an intelligent crocodile’s, regarded her. ‘Are ye well, Makepeace?’
‘I’m always well.’
‘Baitter than the last time I saw ye,’ he said. Philippa had called him in after Andra’s death to try and arrest what had seemed like a terminal decline. ‘But ye’ll not be sairving your brother by exhausting yeself. Sit ye down to yair meat, I’ll see myself out.’
She went with him to the front door. ‘Thank you, Alex.’
‘Yon seems an informed fellow,’ he said, nodding towards the dining room, ‘Would he be in the line of science?’
‘He’s an actor,’ she said, shortly.
‘Is he now? Ah well, that’s a pity.’ Dr Baines shook his head at mankind’s duplicity and went away.
She teetered for a moment between returning to the dining room or immediately making up a bed in Aaron’s room in which to sleep. She didn’t think she could stand any more of Murrough tonight; she lost energy in that man’s company. There was too much of him; his bulk and his voice had dominated the journey from Bristol, which had, in any case, been delayed at the start by his absence in the city for a whole day on what, he’d said, was ‘a matter of business, dear lady.’
That was another thing; he never addressed her by name. It was always ‘madam’ or ‘dear lady,’ robbing her of identity. Makepeace was used to making an impression, not always a good one, but people at least responded to her one way or another; this mountebank made her feel she bounced off him like an ignored and ineffective balloon.
That he had intruded on her at her most vulnerable—the lacerating memory of the running slave with the child cut and cut through her sleep—was another resentment. Who was he to comfort her? Or she to him? Another example of playing to the gallery, no doubt.