by Diana Norman
But the Makepeace in the looking glass had lost respectability, despite its tidy hair and a fichu that came up to its neck. There was a glow to skin that this morning had been haggard, a suspicion of prankishness in the eyes, a disorderly mouth. She was reminded of guilty little boys denying a raid on the comfit jar while sugar still stuck to their chops.
SHE had other things to do the next day than go to The Duke’s. In any case, it was a day she’d known for some time that she must reserve for John Beasley.
The coach dropped the theater party at The Duke’s and then crossed the river to Clapham to set Jenny down at a house Heilbron had told her was the latest headquarters of the Abolitionists. Makepeace, now very careful of her second daughter, wanted to inspect it.
She was surprised by its grandeur; in a rural setting like Clapham she’d expected a farmhouse. This was a mansion. She and Jenny were greeted warmly by a Marianne—daughter, it turned out, of Henry Thornton, a former governor of the Bank of England.
‘You’re Mr Heilbron’s friends, he’s spoken of you highly. How good of you, Miss Jenny, we need all the help we can get—we are trying to organize public meetings and petitions ready for the Commons debate. Mr Wilberforce and Stephen are lobbying the members but it is slow work; so many of them want gradual change. They talk of moderation, silly men. Was our Lord moderate when He saw suffering?’
Makepeace watched Jenny gathered into a drawing room full of paper, ink, good works and good women, and left her there.
She’s chosen wisely, she thought. Wilberforce, Heilbron . . . I must not forget these men are fighting the greatest crime of history. I am thankful for them, Lord, I am really. But, dear Lord, make them extend their humanity to everybody; don’t let them strike off the black man’s chains only to put them on women.
There was a crowd outside the Old Bailey and she stayed in the coach while Sanders went in search of Mr Hackbutt. A new sessions court had replaced the one that used to accommodate judges and lawyers under its roof, leaving the far end open to the weather—an attempt to protect their lordships from the prisoners’ diseases that had proved faulty when a Lord Mayor, two judges, an alderman and fifty others went down with typhus after one gaol delivery.
The frontage of this one reminded Makepeace of nothing so much as the box of toy bricks Andra had once given to their daughters, all arched windows, pilasters and pediments. The crowd waiting in clumps for admittance along the spike-topped outer wall had delineated itself into two groups that were being kept apart by a stolid line of court officials.
Quite plainly, the one to the left of the gates consisted of Paine-ites, concerned-looking men, some of whom reminded Makepeace irresistibly of Tom Glossop. (She wondered how that poor little man was getting on in France and if he had met up with his wife yet.) There were a few women amongst them and, here and there, a clump-booted, alert representative of the laboring class—a sort to which their constitutional societies were giving access.
Well behaved and worried, they nevertheless appeared to provoke passion in the smaller but louder group on the other side of the gates. Fists and the union flag were being flourished at them along with catcalls of ‘Levelers!,’ ‘Traitors!,’ ‘Savages!,’ ‘Frog-lovers!’ One of these had brought along a soapbox on which he was urging passersby to prepare themselves for the day when ‘this lawless and furious rabble’—the Paine-ites blinked sadly at him—‘would murder them in their beds.’
‘Honestly,’ Makepeace said when Mr Hackbutt came to usher her into court, ‘you’d think that asking for universal suffrage was the same as wanting to cut the king’s head off.’
‘Ah well, you see,’ he said. ‘In France it has been.’
He’d reserved a seat for her in the public gallery. ‘How is John?’ she asked him. Instead of answering the question, he brought her up to date on the trial so far. The attorney general had opened it with a nine-hour speech of intricate detail, which, in Mr Hackbutt’s opinion, had done his side more harm than good. ‘Too labyrinthian.’ Erskine, for the defense, on the other hand, had brilliantly poured scorn on the Crown’s case that the men in the dock were traitors. He’d demolished the accusation that they’d procured arms with which to bring down the government, getting even the prosecution witnesses to admit that these were merely a few pikes and antiquated weapons with which to face the mobs attacking their homes.
‘You heard of the assault on poor Hardy’s house while he was yet in the Tower?’
Yes, busy as she’d been, she’d heard of that; the attackers had wrecked it while yelling, ‘For Church and King,’ and in the process caused the death of Hardy’s wife in childbirth.
‘Terrible, terrible,’ Mr Hackbutt went on, shaking his wigged head sadly but keeping his legal eye on the legal fox, ‘yet the tragedy may do for us what even Erskine’s advocacy cannot—the jury were much distressed to hear of it. I scent a shift in the public’s opinion.’
Which was more than Makepeace was able to do. For one thing, despite the open windows, Newgate, next door, had steeped the court’s wood and walls in the smell of the filth in which it kept its prisoners; she could only scent the stink of humanity in terror and despair. For another, the man who now plumped himself onto the bench next to her was the one who had stood on the soapbox outside—she noticed that more anti-Paine-ites had been let into the public gallery than Paine-ites—and had come to see traitors confounded.
He was large, wore a round brown hat on top of a round brown face and a caped coat open to show a vast display of waistcoat banded in red, white and blue. Either he was copying the cartoonists’ John Bull or was the original version from whom the cartoonists had taken their prototype. In view of the heat in the court and his coat, it seemed useless to hope that the perspiration, which was already dripping from his hair, would decrease.
‘Ha, ha, madam, today’s the day,’ he announced. ‘We can expect before nightfall to see these men of violence dancing from a rope.’
He was, he told her, a proud member of ‘the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levelers,’ and he’d come up to London from his farm in Budleigh Salterton specifically for the trial, an attendance that had turned him into an expert. ‘Lord Chief Justice is being too fair to these would-be king-killers, in my opinion. They’ve all been given their say—which is just allowing their wickedness to find its way into the minds of the lower orders. We’d have every street beggar clamoring for a vote as good as mine, might as well give it to women. My way, they wouldn’t have a trial at all, English justice too good for ’em. String ’em up, I say. Teach them to attack property.’
‘Attacked yours, did they?’ Makepeace asked coldly.
He was immune to sarcasm. ‘Didn’t get the chance, ma’am. Down in Devon, we strike back first. Ousted the local Leveler from his house and burned it afore he could get ours. Shrieking for the magistrate, he was—wonderful how they call on the law they have contempt for. “I am the magistrate,” I told him ...’
Makepeace looked around desperately but the gallery was full.
In any case, they were bringing the accused up from the cells and into the dock. Thomas Hardy, Horne Took, John Thelwall—all men Makepeace had met through Beasley—and others she didn’t recognize. Men whose one crime, as far as she could see, had been to campaign peacefully for reform, men who wouldn’t be on trial now if the British establishment hadn’t been panicked into reaction by the Terror.
Perhaps it had cause to panic, she thought. If the men in the dock got their way, the propertied class of John Bull here would lose its power by act of parliament—hardly a less inviting prospect than being stripped of it by revolution.
All the defendants had the pallor and cough that their weeks in the Tower had given them but it was John Beasley—the last to come up—whose appearance shocked her most. He had to be helped up the steps by a warder; true, he shook off the man’s hand when he reached the dock but he’d shriveled. The familiar sulk was still on his face but it wa
s the glower of a sick man facing death.
She leaned forward and gripped the gallery’s rail, hoping that he would look up and she could wave. He didn’t, nor did he seem interested in the proceedings around him. He’s just trying to stay upright, she thought.
The judge under his sword of justice, the wigged heads, the jury stacked like biscuits in their box, all lost Makepeace’s attention—she spent the time trying to send strength into her friend by willing it.
At one point a burst of laughter interrupted her concentration. Erskine, the defending counsel was making his final speech. ‘. . . ridiculous that my clients’ approval of some of the French Assembly’s actions is evidence of their revolutionary sympathy. It is as well, my lord, that they did not say there were good things in the Koran or they might even now be charged with Mohammedanism. ’
There was a disgusted grunt from John Bull. ‘Wouldn’t put that past the rogues.’ But the jury was smiling. For the first time, Makepeace began to hope.
The judge had summed up—not unfairly if the fidgeting of Mr Bull on her left was any indication. It was time for the jury to consider its verdict. The twelve men trooped out, looking self-conscious, like communicants having taken of the bread and the wine and returning to the body of the church to think on their souls.
‘Shouldn’t be long,’ John Bull said. ‘Only takes seconds to say “Guilty” ’
But Mr Hackbutt, when she found him, was sanguine. ‘Erskine has been masterly,’ he said. ‘ I have hopes, I have hopes.’
‘I’ve got an errand to run,’ Makepeace told him. ‘Will there be time?’
He thought there would.
Whether there was or there wasn’t, she had to see Andrew Ffoulkes.
But at St James’s Square, Lord Ffoulkes’s butler told her that His Lordship and his wife had not yet returned. They were expected later.
The jury was still out when Sanders delivered her back to the Old Bailey. John Bull had resumed his soapbox and was haranguing a crowd that had grown and, to judge from the heckling and the occasional egg he was receiving, was proving unsympathetic to his point of view.
George Hackbutt’s right, she thought, public opinion’s shifting.
But it was the jury’s decision that mattered and it took three more hours before they made it. Makepeace spent them pacing the Old Bailey courtyard, sometimes going outside to sit in the coach, not being able to bear inactivity, and returning to the courtyard to pace.
What were they talking about in that jury room? What other verdict could they come to other than guilty? It was the one they were supposed to give; the lord chief justice, the attorney general, both of whom had advised prosecuting for treason, wanted them to give it. So did the prime minister, his cabinet, practically every peer in the land, most of parliament. So did the king.
‘Jury’s coming back.’
This time Makepeace took care that she was seated well away from John Bull.
The twelve men filed in as self-consciously as they’d filed out, looking at nobody. Was this a good sign or a bad? Were those twelve sober-suited, ordinary, undoubtedly property-owning men going to hang her friend of twenty-five years?
As ever, when she was nervous, Makepeace rubbed her hands agitatedly up and down her knees—and was asked by her neighbor to desist.
The procedure was taking forever. The men in the dock couldn’t stand it, she couldn’t stand it.
The clerk of the court asked, ‘Gentlemen of the jury, what is your verdict?’
‘Not guilty.’
Makepeace’s hands went still. Amid the cry of ‘Disgraceful’ from John Bull, the cheers and hubbub of the court, the beat of the judge’s gavel trying to stop it, a great and loving peace descended on her. There were times, not too frequent and not too many, but there were times when she was very, very proud of England.
By the time she got outside, it was to find that the Paine-ites had been joined by their supporters and a crowd less concerned with reform than rejoicing in what it regarded as an English jury’s right to cock a snoot at government. Erskine was having to appeal to it to let the judge get to his coach. The best-known of the acquitted men were being carried shoulder high. Makepeace saw Hardy set in a carriage, its horses replaced by men, being dragged in triumph towards the West End.
She found Beasley cowering in the court doorway.
‘Aren’t you proud?’ she asked him. ‘Wasn’t the jury brave?’
‘So it bloody well ought to be.’ It was automatic gracelessness; the fight had gone out of him. The ridge of his nose and cheekbones were almost poking through his skin; scurvy had lost him some teeth so that his mouth had puckered into an old man’s. Lice crawled in his lank hair.
Sanders helped her to get him to the coach. ‘You can drop me at St James’s Square,’ she told him. ‘Then take him home. Give him to Hildy.’
To Beasley she said, ‘Young man, you’re staying with me till you’re better.’
‘Ain’t going to get better,’ he said, for all the world like a small boy refusing to clear up his toys.
‘Oh, shut up.’ But he frightened her, and so did the tenderness with which Sanders settled him against the coach’s cushions.
LORD and Lady Ffoulkes had returned from their honeymoon—for the last half of which, it appeared, they had been joined by their friend Sir Boy Blanchard.
When Makepeace was ushered into the dining room the three were at dinner; Lady Ffoulkes and Sir Boy were teasing his lordship.
Sir Boy’s fine eyebrows went up at the sight of Makepeace but he rallied, ‘We were just saying, Mrs Hedley, could you conceive of any other man in England who would take his bride to a steel mill and a turnip farm on their voyage de noces?’
She ignored him. As Lord Ffoulkes hurried round the table to kiss her, she said, ‘Philippa’s gone to France, Andrew.’ She turned on Blanchard. ‘And it’s your fault.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Yes, it is. I heard it all from Jenny. If you’d given her Condorcet’s papers when she asked . . . It took too long. In the end it was quicker to take ’em than send ’em.’
‘I thought you’d arranged it for her, Boy.’ Ffoulkes’s voice was quiet.
Blanchard’s was reasonable though his face was pale. ‘My dear man, I had every intention of it. I told her so. It just could not be done on the instant—the estimable Scratcher was hors de combat from an injured hand . . . Anyway, are we certain the young lady has taken this dramatic step?’
‘Yes, we are,’ Makepeace was speaking to Ffoulkes. ‘I got a letter from Ginny this morning. That’s where Pippy said she was going, up north. She ain’t there, Andrew. Ginny asks how she is.’
There was a silence. Blanchard filled it with silk. ‘E’en so. One hestitates to suggest it but there are gentler reasons for a young lady’s absence than a precipitate run into the cannon’s mouth.’
Lord, how she hated him. And how he hated Philippa. Why he did, Makepeace didn’t know, but Chelsea gossip put him somewhere behind Fitch-Botley’s discovery of his wife’s radical doings and the subsequent assault on her daughter.
You bastard, she thought.
Andrew was sitting her down, pouring her wine, asking for details.
Félicie said, ‘Some food, Madame ’Edley? A little cheese, per’aps? No? Then forgive me that I retire, I am weary.’ The conversation did not look like it would center on her. As she drifted past Blanchard, she touched his shoulder. ‘You stay for cards, later?’
He put up his hand to cover hers for a second. ‘Of course.’
Andrew, Makepeace saw, didn’t notice his wife’s going. ‘Tell us, missus.’
She told them what she knew, Blanchard interrupting frequently but kindly to suggest that it was nonsense; Philippa’s disappearance could be interpreted in a dozen ways, the most likely being a romance.
‘I know her,’ Makepeace spat at him.
‘So do I,’ Andrew said. ‘God, missus, she’s your daughter right enough. Now then, she’ll h
ave gone via the smuggling route, you agree?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s the smuggling route?’ Blanchard asked.
Makepeace’s eyes begged her godson to be quiet about it; add smuggling to all her other nefarious activities and her name would irretrievably be mud.
Andrew’s eyes reassured her. ‘A private matter between the missus and me,’ he said. ‘If I find she’s gone, I’ll follow her. All right, missus?’
‘Oh, Andrew.’ She’d wanted it; but now she was afraid for him.
‘Yah,’ he said. ‘I’m the arrow you shoot after the one you’ve lost, ain’t that right, Reynard? That’s how you find arrows.’ He laid his cheek against hers. ‘Done it a hundred times, ain’t we, Boy? Easy as lick a dish. It’s what we do. London’s teemin’ with aristos we’ve nipped from under Robespierre’s snout. I’ll have that little baggage back in England quicker’n you can sneeze.’
‘Thank you.’ She put her arm round his neck and held him close.
‘No.’ Blanchard’s chair scraped back. ‘I will go.’ He stood tall, looking down at them both. More quietly, he said, ‘I go, Andy. It’s only just. If it was my fault, it’s my responsibility. Only tell me where she is—one presumes she was making for wherever Condorcet’s holed up.’
Ffoulkes looked at him with affection. ‘Good try, old man, but this one’s mine. You’re to stay and look after Félicie for me.’
‘Oh no, my lord, Miss Philippa is my bag.’
‘She’s my goddaughter.’ The words lashed; Ffoulkes had finished with pleasantries. ‘She tell you where Condorcet’s hidin’, missus?’
‘No.’ Makepeace felt humiliated; Philippa had not confided in her. Blast the girl. And blast me, I was too tied up in myself.
‘Nor me.’ Ffoulkes began striding. ‘She’d had a letter from Madame Condorcet . . . that’s right.’ He wagged a finger at the air and started walking again. ‘What did she say . . . something, yes, that’s right. The woman was earnin’ her living painting portraits. Paris, somewhere. Where?’ He banged the heel of his hand against his forehead. ‘Damn, where was it?’