The Sparks Fly Upward

by Diana Norman

  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 pleasa
nt 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.

  ‘When, in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government.

  My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.’

  So far, the name of the man who’d written those things and had come to France to help transform it into that world, wasn’t on the list. She didn’t know if she had the courage to look for it again tomorrow. Oh, God, how could they kill him?

  Don’t think about it. Don’t think.

  She brushed Citizen Marcoz’s boots until her elbow ached, polished them off with a soft cloth and took them back to the lodge door. In a moment—and she still had trouble believing this—Marcoz would set off for the National Convention of which he was a member, the same Convention that had condemned to death and proclaimed outlaw the man who was hiding across the courtyard from his own lodging.

  ‘Do you think he knows you’re concealing Nicolas?’ she’d asked Mme Vernet. It seemed incredible that he did not, although he never entered the house itself.

  And Mme Vernet said calmly, ‘If so, he has not betrayed the fact.’

  He was a dour-looking man, with black up-curled eyebrows, living alone, always frowning—unsurprisingly, Philippa thought, considering the things he was asked to approve in the Convention. Perhaps, by not betraying Condorcet, he was salving some part of his conscience. He’d asked no questions about her sudden arrival and employment at Number Fifteen, didn’t talk to her at all, merely grunted on the one occasion when he’d opened his door as she was putting his boots down.

  He was rigidly courteous to Mme Vernet if they met in the courtyard but, Philippa thought, the devil himself would have been polite to Mme Vernet.

  She went back to the house and prepared three breakfast trays, balanced them one on top of the other and carried them carefully upstairs. On the first landing she put the trays on the hall table, lifted one to put it outside Mme Vernet’s room, knocked to let her know it was there, and took another to the next door behind which slept M Sarrett, Mme Vernet’s distant cousin.

  There was a connecting door between the two rooms which, according to Sophie, allowed the two to be less than distant, a liaison Philippa at first found somewhat shocking and then didn’t. Both were widowed, at any moment they could go to the guillotine for helping Condorcet. The Terror was no time for middle-class morality.

  If they were having an affair, it was decorously conducted. Everything Mme Vernet did was decorous. That first day she had invited Philippa into her parlor, sat her down in one of its uncomfortable chairs and listened, her hands neatly folded in her lap.

  It was an ugly little parlour, typical of the French bourgeois; heavily furnished and dark, though very clean, smelling of beeswax and lavender sachets. But it was surprising. Other such rooms Philippa had known in the past had displayed a large and gruesome crucifix, this one had a statue—work of the late M Vernet, an artist who’d belonged to the affrighted nymph school of sculpture. Adding to the overcrowding, she stood in a corner, her marble hands up-raised as if in horror at the hideous chiffonier next to her.

  Sophie had called Mme Vernet an angel but it took time to recognize her seraphic qualities. She was angular, late fortyish, dressed in black, her thin hair pulled severely back under an equally harsh cap. The most celestial thing about her was her calm. If it had not been for the loud tick of the ormolu clock on the mantelshelf, Philippa could have thought that time stood still, her own voice merely going around and around in the face of Mme Vernet’s stillness.

  Her explanations and intentions finished, the tick of the clock took over while Mme Vernet considered them. When she spoke at last, her mouth made prim little pecking motions, like that of her own hens.

  ‘Eight months ago when my doctor, Dr Cabanis, asked me take in the gentleman now residing upstairs, I asked only one question: “Is he virtuous?” Dr Cabanis assured me he was. “Then let him come,” I said. I have had no reason to regret that decision. The gentleman is not only virtuous, he is a man of genius engaged on a great work.’

  ‘Yes,’ Philippa said, slightly mystified at this departure from the matter in hand. ‘But now we can get him to safety. May I see him?’

  Later, she realized Mme Vernet was warning her.

  As if she’d been making a social visit, she was left waiting while Mme Vernet went upstairs to establish that Condorcet would receive her. His permission having been given, the maid who had let her in was called to
escort her to his room on the third floor.

  Half an hour later Philippa had returned to the parlor, angry. ‘He won’t go.’

  ‘No,’ Mme Vernet said. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘There is no yet, madame.’ Philippa’s fury pitched her voice above the damn clock. ‘He’s in danger, you’re in danger, and he wants to finish a book.’

  ‘It is a great book,’ Mme Vernet said quietly. ‘I have been privileged to read its chapters as he completes them. The Progress of the Human Mind. It is a work of optimism. Mademoiselle, can you not admire the spirit that can envisage such a book at this time?’

  ‘No,’ Philippa said. ‘Frankly, I can’t. He can finish it in England without endangering everyone around him. Point it out to him, madame. He’d listen to you.’

  ‘He has. He has wished to leave many times for fear of endangering myself and M Sarrett. “Where will you go?” I ask him. “The Convention, sir, has the right to place you outside the law; it has not the right to place you outside humanity. Stay and finish your book.” That is what I tell him. I set no limit to his stay. Will you take some tea?’

  Even sentences, no more weight attached to one than the rest.

  So she drank tea, not knowing then that it was the last of Mme Vernet’s precious store, gulping cup after unnoticed cup as her resentment built—after all this trouble, all this way, progress of the human mind, progress of human cowardice more like, battening on this poor woman, stupid, stupid, obstinate man.

  Mme Vernet questioned her gently. How was Mme Sophie? And the little girl? Would she return to England now? Had she somewhere to stay the night? Useful domestic questions made Philippa realize she was cross and hurt on her own account. Nobody had asked her to come. She had as good as erupted into this place yelling, ‘Fly, fly,’ nudging the wire on which Mme Vernet maintained her balancing act, carrying her household with her.

  The prosaic little woman opposite her, she saw, was as magnificent as the man upstairs who wrote of hope while bloody death rampaged around him. Of course he must finish the book. Why should he drop a work of hope—and, God, if the world ever needed hope it was now—to accompany Philippa on a journey that he knew, and she knew, could be the death of them both?