The Sparks Fly Upward

by Diana Norman

  ‘Yes.’

  It was a regular exchange. She weighed terribly on his conscience; he told her to go every day.

  When he was ready to leave she would have to, but in her mind—and, she sometimes wondered, perhaps in his—his book had become a Penelope’s shroud which would never be finished; he would go on writing it until some cosmic Ulysses stepped in, swept France clean of its quarrelling suitors and put everything right again.

  Curiously, for all the privation, she was content that this should be so. With death as a near neighbor, life narrowed down to an awful simplicity that was in itself a purpose. She was useful to people she cared for and who cared for her. England existed on a remote horizon, beautiful but also complicated by entanglements and emotions that it was a relief to be free of.

  Had she been in love with Andrew Ffoulkes? She hardly thought of him. Had she been going to marry Stephen Heilbron? It took an effort of will to remember why. Children, of course; she’d wanted children. But here, now, with death so close, motherhood was an option she was hardly likely to be offered.

  In any case—and this made her smile—Heilbron wouldn’t marry her now. Even if he could forgive this foray to France, he would find her unsuitable. Jeanne Renard was not at all his kind of woman and Jeanne Renard, having emerged from the box, could not be put back in it again.

  Strange, she thought, that in one of the most restrictive cities in the world she had been liberated; the ridiculous coconut shell had broken. Whatever the future held and however short it was going to be, she wasn’t going to spend it hiding the things she felt and not saying the things she thought. If she felt like swearing—and how often poor Philippa Dapifer had—she’d bloody well swear.

  Oh hell, she thought, I’ve become Ma.

  Briskly, she went downstairs to see if Mme Vernet had made the broth.

  Unless somebody famous was going to the guillotine, Rue Saint Honoré had lost interest. People looked up, of course—it was always worth seeing how others faced death—but crowds no longer lined the route. Even the number of National Guard that marched alongside had been reduced; there were no rescue attempts, people were too numb. Civilians, now allowed to accompany the carts on their way, were either the usual ghouls or family, friends and lovers who didn’t care that their tears were noted. To begin with, Philippa had been ashamed to be thought of as one of the former and equally embarrassed at assuming the tragedy of the latter. Now she tried not to think at all and just kept to leeward of the tumbrels, blessing a lack of height that kept her hidden from the other side of the road.

  On these days the Rue Saint Honoré, usually one of Paris’s cleaner thoroughfares, became a stinking corridor. In their spare time the tumbrels were used to transport pigs and calves to market, nor was their straw changed very often, so that the droppings of the animals mingled with those of the poor humans whose fear made them unable to control their bowels. Yet it was a dignified progress. The frightened were comforted by the brave. Most of the faces were calm, their sight fixed on the sky as if they were seeing its beauty for the first time, not the last.

  Philippa walked behind a girl whose hands reached up to clutch the skirt of an older woman with her own hands bound behind her who stood close to the cart’s side edge. ‘Go home,’ the mother kept telling her daughter, ‘Go home, dear. You must be the maman to the little ones now.’

  ‘I can’t bear it. How can I bear it?’

  ‘Go home.’ The woman’s voice was desperate.

  Philippa touched the girl on her shoulder. ‘She doesn’t want you to see it.’

  The girl broke away and sat down in the road, her head in her hands.

  And the woman said, ‘Thank you, mademoiselle.’

  Is that why you’ve got to die, Philippa wondered. Because you couldn’t remember to say citoyenne? What do I say? Je vous en prie? Think nothing of it?

  But the woman’s gaze had gone upwards; she was praying. Behind her in the cart a man was swearing quietly and furiously to himself.

  Oh, God, it’s Lavoisier.

  The energy was still there; dirty, unshaven, obviously ill, he still crackled with it. It had made dinners at the man’s house chaotic, poor little Mme Lavoisier trying to rescue dishes that were being pushed aside, the smell of chemicals overpowering that of roasts. Her stepfather had taken her ‘to meet the greatest chemist in France, in the world.’

  And how Andra had loved him, sure that sooner or later this Frenchman would solve the problem of coal damp, that killer of miners; Lavoisier’s book on the elements of chemistry had been his bible. She’d met Lavoisier again at the Condorcets’, expounding his discovery of oxygen, incomprehensible words made more incomprehensible by the speed and excitement with which he delivered them.

  She was dumbfounded. The Revolution was not only eating its own children, it was devouring the seed corn. Potential, wonderful discoveries were being tossed casually away, like trash into a basket, before they could be made.

  Jesus, he mustn’t die. He’s a gift. Sometimes God opened his hand and let a Mozart or a Shakespeare or a Da Vinci slide into the world as a present to it. The Almighty had generously done it again with Lavoisier—here, my children, have this teeming brain, it will prove useful to your understanding of my matter.

  And they had put this rare, extraordinary intelligence into a dirty cart and were going to kill it.

  He seemed more cross than afraid, anger sparked round him like Saint Elmo’s fire round a ship’s mast. Later she heard that he’d begged to finish an important experiment before they beheaded him. They’d refused.

  Robespierre’s lodgings were farther down the street; did he watch the tumbrels pass or did he take care to be at the Convention when they were going by? Would he feel anything if he saw the mother? Or Lavoisier?

  She was almost past the lingerie shop before she came to herself. Opening the door set its bell tingling. As she shut it, she clung on to the handle, feeling as if she’d been tumbling in space and waiting while the earth readjusted itself under her feet, listening to the rumble of infinite stupidity growing fainter as it made its way towards the Place de la Révolution.

  Mme Hahn was arranging silk stockings in a drawer, releasing the smell of lavender from the sachets in which her goods were kept. ‘Good day, mademoiselle.’ She never asked questions.

  ‘Good day, madame.’ Philippa stood for a moment, grateful for the fripperies surrounding her; who had money to buy them, she couldn’t work out.

  Upstairs, Sophie and Eliza were asleep on the bed, the mother’s body curved round that of the child’s, a sheen of sweat on both faces. The air in in the studio was hot and sour; Sophie kept the windows shut when she slept, afraid Eliza would wake up before her, climb up on the windowsill and fall out.

  Philippa crouched below the sill, careful not to be seen by the watcher opposite, and pushed up the sashes. The sudden noise from the street woke the two and their eyes followed every movement as she lifted the lid of her pail, took two bowls from the cupboard and filled them with broth. Slices of bread with melted cheese floated on the top—Mme Vernet hadn’t spared anything.

  When they’d finished the bowls, she filled them up again. ‘It won’t keep in this heat.’ It was like seeing rainwater reach the roots of wilted flowers; Eliza began chattering, Sophie declared herself fit enough to begin painting again—the last time she’d fainted at her easel. ‘Why aren’t you eating?’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’ She told Sophie about Lavoisier.

  Sophie had lost the capacity for astonishment. ‘I’d hoped he would be spared. Marat hated him. He bought a taxing right years ago. He used the money on his experiments and he set up free schools for peasant children in his area but . . .’ She shrugged. ‘He was a farmer-general of taxes. I hoped with Marat dead . . . But “The Republic has no use for savants,” is what they said. His poor wife. She was a child bride, too, we used to tease our men, say they stole us from our cradles.’

  Her mouth became ugly as grief widened
it into a horizontal band. ‘And here we are,’ she said.

  And there you are. Wordlessly, Philippa took Condorcet’s letter from her basket and handed it to his wife. Then she joined Eliza on the floor to play dolls. The child asked, ‘Will you wait till the man goes and does pooh-poohs today?’

  Philippa grinned at her. ‘Will you watch for me?’

  ‘Watch him do pooh-poohs?’ Eliza had reached the anal stage.

  Above them, Sophie was controlled. ‘Nicolas says that of course I must divorce him.’ Then her voice broke. ‘He says: “I have served my country, I have possessed your heart. There is no greater happiness.” He’s saying good-bye.’

  When it was time to go, Sophie, clasping Eliza close, stood at the window, and Philippa, on tiptoe like a sprinter, at the door. ‘He’s been constipated lately,’ Sophie said. ‘Too many croissants.’

  ‘He’s going pooh-poohs,’ sang Eliza triumphantly. Philippa ran for it.

  She was crossing the Pont Neuf when she realized she was being followed.

  Any daytime walk through Paris was like strolling around an orchestra in full blast; ears assailed not by the symphony but by its component parts—strident piccolo from a cluster of newspaper sellers, a blast of brass from a foundry, the deep grumbling tympany of the queues, but through Philippa’s progress there had sounded one constant and eventually nerve-twanging beat, like a ticking clock, like someone keeping time by tapping a metal triangle with a rod. Underneath the city’s daytime rising and falling cacophony, it was this regularity that imposed itself on her attention.

  She stopped halfway across as if to consider the view of the river and looked to her right but the perpetual busyness of the bridge, the second-hand stalls with their miserable artifacts, street painters, the stands of the barbers and tooth-pullers and the attendant people who loitered around them, made it impossible to pinpoint whoever was doing the tapping which, in any case, was momentarily drowned in the hubbub. Down on the mudflats, sand-carters and washerwomen were shouting to one another.

  Overacting, she mimed the start of someone who’s remembered an urgent appointment and almost ran across the rest of the bridge where she stopped in the shade of one of its lamps and turned.

  Now she had him. The click came from the iron-tipped end of a walking stick in the hand of an old soldier. Paris was full of them—‘old’ in the sense of no longer useful, back from a war that had shattered a part of them, bearded, often decorated, with a knapsack on their back, invariably shabby and cynical. This one was typical, except that he showed more purposefulness than most. And she was his purpose; she saw him look around and assume nonchalance when he spotted her.

  Then he made a mistake. In his hurry to catch up, he took two steady steps without the use of his stick. Now he’d remembered and was using it again.

  A government spy.

  She turned, shouldered her way through a group approaching the bridge and made as quickly as she could for Notre Dame. Her spine and the back of her hams had gone chilly. Minutes ago she’d been an ordinary Parisian, thinking herself and her friends hard done by; now she would do anything, anything, to return to that happy state. She was marked. The State knew about her; its terrible eye had fixed on her. The cat was extending its claws to pull her in.

  Her breath sobbed as she hurried. Let other people die, not me.

  The only decency panic left her was mere instinct: Condorcet would not go up the guillotine steps with her. I’m not going home. You won’t get him through me, you bastards.

  She was in the cool of the cathedral, running now, dodging from pillar to pillar, making for the north door. The place appeared empty and echoed to her own gasps.

  No clicking.

  Out into the sunshine again and a dive into the alleys of the ancient and sculptured labyrinth that had once been riddled by clergy, that Abelard and Heloise had walked five hundred years before. Deserted now; nobody about, gargoyles stared at her above little arches with Latin inscriptions.

  Not through me . . . not through me . . . bastards . . . bastards.

  No clicking.

  She stopped and held on with one hand to a doorway’s carved pillar while she bent over to get rid of the stitch in her side.

  And she heard him coming up the alley at her back. She felt in her basket for the empty iron pail and swung it round behind her, catching him in the stomach. She heard the cough of breath as it left his lungs and turned, ready to swing again, prepared to batter him to death in her panic.

  ‘Bloody Monday!’

  The words stopped Jeanne Renard’s arm in its arc, so that it lost its impetus and the pail only clattered onto the man’s bent head.

  ‘Ow,’ the spy said. ‘Stop hitting me, woman.’

  Life encompassed her again; beneath the whiskers and dirt was the face of Lord Ffoulkes, baron, whom she had once loved.

  And she was so scared again, for him, of him, of the untidy cataract of feeling he brought with him, that she became angry at his damn cheek in coming at all.

  In fact, she was furious.

  ‘Damn you,’ she said. ‘Go away.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  F FOULKES’S letter from Babbs Cove came in the middle of the dress rehearsal. Sanders, who’d returned to Reach House, had galloped back with it to the theater.

  ‘“Yes gone to France,”’ Makepeace read, ‘“Not Gurney’s fault. Would not take her. Sent her home with flea in ear. Thought she’d gone back to London till I said no. Investigated. Minx went along coast and paid Thurlestone pirates take her over. Following. Back soon. Missus do not worry. Yr devoted Andrew.” ’

  ‘Don’t worry, he says. Don’t worry, missus, just following your daughter into the furnace. I’ll kill her, Sanders. If the French don’t do it, I will.’ She clutched at his coat. ‘What am I going to do?’

  ‘Nothing else to do, missus, only wait. He’ll get her out, will Lord Ffoulkes; damn Froggies won’t down him.’ Sanders belonged to the one-Englishman-worth-ten-Frenchies school of patriotism.

  She must wait. But the ‘nothing else to do’ did not apply. She put the letter in her apron pocket where it weighed her down, like rock, as she scurried.

  Oroonoko was opening tonight; the date on the posters said so, and the reason that they were holding the dress rehearsal on the same day was because the costumes had not been ready. Nothing was ready. There were still a thousand playbills to be handed out in the streets and none of the company available to do it, not one.

  Murrough had co-opted every man-jack of her émigrés, dress-makers, scene-shifters, into the cast. Now they were Caribbean planters, servants, sailors, Indians, negroes and assorted extras and, it seemed to Makepeace, merely lolling about in the wings waiting for infrequent forays onto the stage in order for Murrough to shout at them.

  She grabbed three of the prettiest, the Countess d’Abreville and her son and Mme de Césarine-Delorme and was urging them towards the foyer when a vast voice from the stage said, ‘Bring them back.’

  ‘Do you want these bloody playbills handed out or not?’

  ‘Bring them back.’

  Sullenly, she let them go. ‘I thought they were supposed to stay behind the scenes.’ It was why the aristocrats had taken work in the theater in the first place—to hide from the public eye their shame at having to work at all. But one sniff of greasepaint and the buggers had become stagestruck, though the two women were taking the precaution of wearing eastern veils, as if English planters in Surinam chose their wives exclusively from Arabia. Young Henri, now a delicious little black serving boy, was unrecognizable.

  She scoured the theater for help. Luchet, as usual, could not be found. Jacques was sending Murrough mad by perfecting his effects and rolling cannonballs down the mended overhead chute over and over. The Comte de Penthémont, an apron over his sailor’s costume, was too busy putting final touches of paint on a backdrop. The scene-shifters, Prince de Luxembourg-Turpin and Marquis de la Platière, now also sailors, said they had a quick scene
change coming up and dare not leave their posts. Marie Joséphine was doing last minute repairs to the costumes.

  She wished she’d brought everybody from Reach House but Hildy was attending John Beasley’s sickroom and could not be left alone.

  Joseph she didn’t even ask; a man who could tackle anything was too valuable to leave the theater for a moment. She blinked at his feathers. ‘What are you?’

  ‘I am Indian, missus.’

  ‘Good God.’

  She peered hopefully into the orchestra pit. ‘Non,’ Marquis de Barigoule said, before she’d even asked.

  In the end, she enrolled Sanders. Such passersby as accepted the playbills took them from Sanders because they thought they advertised a new coach line, and from Makepeace because the paper was thrust at them like an assassin’s knife and they were afraid not to. From their faces, the auguries for their attendance were not good.

  When she got back two new figures were lounging in the stalls.

  Blanchard got up for a graceful bow; Félicie ignored Makepeace’s curtsey.

  ‘Lady Ffoulkes received a note from her lord this morning,’ Blanchard said. ‘It appears he has indeed gone chasing off to Paris to find your daughter.’

  ‘I know,’ Makepeace said miserably.

  At this Félicie turned on her. ‘I am not content. Andrew promise me not go back, ’e promise.’

  Blanchard said soothingly, ‘She is his goddaughter, my dear. And Andrew is an honorable man.’

  ‘It is not honorable to leave ’is wife.’

  ‘So you’ve heard from him as well, have you, missus?’ Blanchard asked. ‘I hope you will keep us informed if you receive news that we do not.’

  ‘In the name of all Divinity, will ye be quiet down there?’ A black-corked Murrough with a sword apparently stuck into his guts was glaring down at them.

  Blanchard stepped forward. ‘Mr Oroonoko, I presume? I do apologize. Her Ladyship and myself are by way of making a preliminary sortie—we’re bringing a party to tonight’s performance.’

  ‘There won’t bloody be one unless I get some peace in this house. Start again, Chrissie, from “Nay then I must assist you ...” ’