The Sparks Fly Upward

by Diana Norman

  In her room, she washed, changed into fresh clothes and folded the ones she’d been wearing into the battered traveling bag. It distressed her terribly that she wouldn’t be able to say good-bye to Sophie and Eliza; she’d tried to convince Ffoulkes that she could break away to deliver a farewell note from herself and Condorcet to them before rejoining the men at Neuilly.

  He wouldn’t have it. ‘This is going to be tricky enough without putting bloody frills on it,’ he’d said.

  When everything was ready she lay down on the bed, convinced she wouldn’t sleep. In fact, she dozed in fits, waking up in a panic at having missed the dawn—only to find it was still dark. At one point she heard Mme Vernet and Sarrett go to their rooms but there was no sound from Ffoulkes’s or Condorcet’s.

  The first lonely tweet of a blackbird woke her; the sky was still pretending it was nighttime, only a suggestion of gray lay beyond her east-facing window.

  She went downstairs and made coffee for them all—Mme Vernet had left the cups ready on a tray—trying to find comfort in familiar movement, the thrum of the kettle. She took the tray upstairs, put it on the hall table, knocked on Mme Vernet’s door, then M Sarrett’s, took up one of the cups and carried it to Condorcet’s room, knocked before entering . . .

  He wasn’t there. The room was neater than she’d seen it, every book was piled tidily, the bed made, the bergère’s cushion plumped up, his misshapen slippers together by the small hearth. Manuscripts, exactly in line, were in a row on the table—the plan for a universal language, his treatise on the equality of women, A Sure Method of Learning to Count, an addendum to his work on integral calculus. His pipe lay in its cendrier which was clean of its ashes.

  The Progress was in the middle, facedown.

  She picked up its last page. ‘. . . independently of any power that would like to stop it, so long as our globe exists, the tempo may differ but we shall never go back.’

  The word finis was written large at the bottom.

  Knowing what she’d find, she went downstairs and out into the courtyard. The bar to the gate had been lifted and put carefully to one side where nobody would fall over it. ‘He’s gone,’ she said. ‘He’s gone.’

  She turned round to see Mme Vernet and Sarrett behind her. Both were dressed and for a second it flashed across her mind that they’d been in a plot to keep her safe while Ffoulkes and Condorcet set out together. But Mme Vernet’s face was hagridden and Ffoulkes was just emerging from the house.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she said.

  ‘Not long,’ Ffoulkes said, ‘I felt his pipe, it’s still warm.’

  M Sarrett had opened the gate and was looking up and down the empty street.

  ‘He’ll be making for the Suards,’ he said. ‘I can catch him before he gets to the barrier.’

  ‘The Suards?’

  ‘Friends of his,’ Mme Vernet said. ‘Fontenay-aux-Roses.’

  ‘Stay here, no point in dashing all over the compass,’ Ffoulkes said. ‘He may have left a note.’ He ran back to the house.

  Mme Vernet looked at Philippa. There would be no note. His gratitude to them all lay in his going—alone. He wouldn’t survive, of course; they all knew that. Not alone. Of all men he was least equipped with the cunning necessary to slink unnoticed through the jungle beyond the gate. That gentle, philosophizing, valuable sheep had trotted out into tiger country.

  Philippa put her arms round her. ‘Perhaps he’s going to say good-bye to Sophie. I’ll run after him.’

  ‘No,’ Mme Vernet said, ‘He won’t have gone there.’ Philippa heard her moan and, turning round, saw that Sarrett had gone.

  Everything was shattering, but she knew where Nicolas had gone. One last glimpse of his wife and daughter, a note through the lingerie shop letterbox. She could catch him up—he’d be going slowly.

  She kissed Mme Vernet’s cheek and went out into the Street of the Gravediggers. She caught a glimpse of M Sarrett at the bottom before he disappeared into the shadow of Saint Sulpice. She turned left up the hill, running. When she reached the top, she stopped and peered round the corner.

  The sentry outside the Luxembourg was nodding over his musket. She slowed so that her boots made no sound and started running again when she was out of sight. Curfew lifted at dawn but there were still very few people about.

  She’d crossed the silent Ile de la Cité before Ffoulkes caught up with her, puffing, just before the Pont au Change. ‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’

  ‘He’s heading for Saint Honoré.’ She pointed across the river. ‘I can catch him.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just to the end of the bridge,’ she pleaded. ‘He can’t have got much beyond it. He’ll be limping, it’s amazing he’s got this far.’

  He looked around. The bridge was deserted. A few bait-sellers were digging for worms in the silt below before the tide came in. ‘All right, but no farther.’

  She ran ahead, he followed more slowly.

  As she got to the other side, two National Guardsmen emerged from behind a plinth that had once held the great equestrian statue of Louis XV.

  ‘Papers.’

  She’d left them behind in the attic with her traveling bag.

  A pike was leveled at her waist, she felt the length of the other one laid across her back.

  ‘What for?’ she said. ‘There’s no barrier here usually.’ But she’d left it too late, she’d paused, and her indignation was marred by a catch in her breathing with which she was suddenly having difficulty.

  ‘There is now,’ one of the guardsmen said. ‘Better come along.’

  They turned her round and began marching her back across the bridge towards the préfecture. She saw Ffoulkes idling at the other end.

  Go away, she thought. Please, God, make him go away.

  As the procession came up, he stood in front of it. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Out the way, soldier,’ one of the guards told him. ‘Nothing to do with you.’

  ‘You silly bitch, you’ve left your bloody papers behind again,’ Ffoulkes said to Philippa. Then to the guard, ‘Let her go, mate. She’s all right, been bedding down with me.’

  ‘And where’s that?’

  ‘Over there.’ He’d come up close now. Gently, he pushed the pike point away from her body then jerked a thumb towards the Ile Saint Louis, glimmering in the dawn. His voice went high to assume an aristocratic accent. ‘We’ve taken a room in the bishop’s palace, my man.’ Then grinned. ‘The bishop’s gone but the fucking goes on. Come on, mate, let her go. I fought at Valmy.’

  And they might have done; the respect for veterans of Valmy, the first glorious victory of the rabble that made up the Republican army, softened their faces into the envying sentimentality of those who hadn’t been there. But at that moment an officer on a horse with a plume in his hat came riding up from the region of the Palais de Justice with another guardsman at his stirrup. ‘What’s going on here?’

  Almost apologetically, the first guardsman told Ffoulkes, ‘Got to have your papers, citizen.’

  He wasn’t the fool she was; he’d brought his knapsack with him. He grumbled as he delved into it.

  The office leaned down from his horse to snatch the document out of his hand. He looked at it. ‘Collet.’ He put his other hand inside his frogged jacket and brought out another paper to consult it. ‘Collet, Collet.’

  And then she knew and he knew. Blanchard had provided his papers, as he’d provided all The League’s papers.

  Their eyes met. Andrew smiled.

  The officer on the horse was a youngster; suddenly, he became younger from amazement as if, looking through a lottery list of prize-winning numbers, he’d found his ticket on it. ‘Collet.’ He looked up with disbelief. ‘We’ve got the bloody Englishman.’

  ‘Run,’ Ffoulkes said gently. He threw himself sideways, wrapping his arms round the officer’s knee to pull him off his horse. Immediately, he disappeared under a meleé of guardsman.

  Phil
ippa later remembered trying to scalp one of the guards by pulling his head backwards by his hair but thought she must have lost sense for a minute afterwards from the shock of what, to judge from the state of her left eye, was a hefty punch in the face.

  Her next memory was of her own shadow stumbling ahead of leveled pikes with the sun of a glorious morning at her back, her hands tied, Ffoulkes being dragged along somewhere behind her, and a pedlar turning his head away as he waited for them to pass before setting up his pitch on the bridge.

  Chapter Fifteen

  HAD it not been out of season with Covent Garden and Drury Lane shut for the summer, those two great theaters might have used their power to persuade the Lord Chamberlain that The Duke’s was putting on an illicit play after all and thereby enforced its closure. Both begrudged any success not their own

  As it was, Oroonoko was the only drama in Town. Better than that, it was a production not to be missed by anyone with pretensions to art. Better even than that, it promoted a good cause; one could watch it with a clear conscience. From the second night onwards, it played to full houses that, had it been bigger, could have been even fuller. It did not matter that the haute monde had left London for the leafy provinces. In order to see this play, it came back in road-blocking coachloads.

  Gentleman’s Magazine wrote: ‘Sir Michael Murrough’s performance has lit a flame that will not be extinguished in our lifetime.’

  The Ladies’ Diary thought: ‘The play’s power to delineate the passions, to move to pity, as well as the high quality of style and diction, must have particular appeal to our fair sex.’

  Protests by the Society for the Abolition of Slavery that it was not authorizing the production were ignored. The public assumed it was; play and cause became synonymous. Cowper’s The Negro’s Complaint became Oroonoko’s Complaint and was printed and sold in the thousands. Hairdressers catered for a craze for ‘the Imoinda style.’ Fancy dress balls were sprinkled with Oroonokos, Imoindas and Widow Lackitts—these last invariably men. A magistrate reading the Riot Act to a crowd protesting against press gangs was yelled at. ‘You’re no better than the governor in Oroonoko.’

  JOHN Beasley was buried in the dusty little cemetery of Saint Dionis near his birthplace in Lime Street. A ferocious atheist, he’d once said he wanted to lie in unconsecrated ground but Makepeace was too distressed to arrange that, even if it had been possible, which she didn’t think it was. ‘It’s better than Chelsea,’ she apologized to his spirit. ‘You always hated the countryside.’

  Anyway, the Reverend Deedes would have balked at one of Makepeace’s friends in his local churchyard, let alone a man who had written his own epitaph as:

  ‘Here lies the body of John Mark Beasley.

  He championed Reason

  And died quite easily.’

  The priest at Saint Dionis wasn’t happy about that, either. ‘Reason’ was becoming a dirty word, tarnished with the patina of Revolution. His archdeacon wouldn’t like it, he said. However, the sum Makepeace was prepared to pay for the repair of his one-hundred-year-old roof quietened his objections and, presumably, those of his archdeacon.

  It was one of the few overcast days of the summer but retaining a clammy heat. The priest, not having known the deceased and suspecting the worst, conducted an unornamented service while eyeing his congregation with suspicion. This was small; but what Beasley’s friends lacked in number they made up in devotion. Two undoubted prostitutes wept throughout, so did a printer in multicolored clothing and a tasseled cap. As Mr Lucey said, sobbing, ‘The dear boy wouldn’t recognize me in black, would he, Jamie?’

  There were no relatives; either he had none or they’d disowned him.

  There were a couple of shifty-looking, ink-stained representatives from Grub Street, a black man in livery who shouted ‘Hallelujah ’ a lot, the barmaid from his favorite drinking hole, the Pen and Goose, and a bailiff who turned up for old times’ sake, telling Makepeace, ‘He were a pleasure to arrest, so he were. Always inquired after the family.’

  The grand friends, Goldsmith, Dr Johnson, Reynolds, were all dead and as he’d aged Beasley had grown too cantankerous to make more like them. In any case, Makepeace thought, the independent-minded society to which they’d all belonged had died with them. England’s gates were closing against men of free thought; they were unpatriotic.

  The odd thing is, she thought, only England could have produced them.

  Gripping Sanders’s arm, she followed the coffin into the graveyard, a small and more friendly place than the church’s classical Wren interior. The East End had nestled up to surround it with the back of shops and businesses. From an overlooking ground floor window came the smell of ink and the thump of a printing press that must, she thought, make the man they were burying feel more at home.

  As the deceased’s oldest friend and, anyway, the giver of the funeral meats now being set out at the Pen and Goose, she was given the right to drop the first clod.

  Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. She’d never felt more lonely in her life.

  Sanders sprinkled his bit of earth and stepped back to join her. ‘Got us into some scrapes, that little bugger.’

  ‘Got us out of them, too,’ she said.

  ‘That he did. Never could scare him off, could they?’

  It was a more fitting epitaph than Beasley’s own, although—and this comforted her—he had indeed died easily. ‘Went in his afternoon nap,’ Hildy had said.

  It was typical of him, Makepeace thought, that the only smooth path he’d ever taken had been death’s.

  The others departed for the Pen and Goose, and Sanders waited for her at the gate while she said good-bye.

  I’m sorry Philippa ain’t here for you. She’s the only one now that understood and loved you like I did. But she’s gone chasing off to France. You’d have approved, I dare say; you never counted the cost, either. I wish she hadn’t gone, John. I wish you hadn’t, either. There’s nobody left.

  A large shape loomed up beside her.

  ‘I thought you were at the theater,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, well, Aaron’s putting ’em through their paces to see they don’t get slack. He said you’d absolved him from attending the funeral.’

  ‘Aaron never liked him much.’

  ‘I’m sorry I never knew him.’

  ‘Not many people did. Only enough to kill him with their stinking prisons.’ She turned away and they walked towards the gate. ‘Will you come to the wake?’

  ‘No, I’ve been summoned. I’ve some people to see—they sent a message to the theater.’

  Always these mysterious people, she thought. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Me other employers, ye might say.’

  Never a straight answer, either.

  They went out together into Backchurch Street, Sanders following them at what Makepeace felt was an unnecessarily discreet distance. Did he suspect? Probably.

  Murrough said, ‘You’re the keeper of the purse, missus, how long d’ye reckon the play will run?’

  ‘Forever, according to the bookings.’ Most productions rarely had a repertory run of more than six nights but since The Duke’s company had no repertoire neither was there any reason to limit Oroonoko’s availability to a greedy public.

  He nodded. ‘Now, if I have to go away ...’

  She panicked. ‘Where would you go? Why? When would you go?’

  ‘If, I’m saying. If I have to go ...’

  ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘We . . . we’d lose money.’

  ‘There speaks me little counting house.’ He looked around; they were approaching Fenchurch Street. He spotted another churchyard and hurried her into it, sitting her down on a tomb and standing over her. ‘I’m sorry to be telling you on this sad day,’ he said, ‘but I’ve been sent for and if I have to go it’ll be quick with maybe no time to explain. Listen ...’

  ‘Are you in trouble?’

  His little eyes almost disappeared as he smiled. ‘No, for once. Or not with th
e law at any rate, not yet. Listen ...’

  ‘It’s Ireland, isn’t it,’ she said, dully. ‘You’re going to do something terrible for Ireland.’

  ‘Will ye listen?’ He blew out his cheeks and sat down beside her. ‘Very well, it’s Ireland. And it’s France. And the two of them together. My masters set a low score by my acting and think higher of me as a go-between ...’

  ‘Don’t go,’ she pleaded, ‘I’ve lost two to France already.’

  ‘Are you listening to me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Aaron can play Oroonoko.’

  ‘Aaron?’

  ‘Ach, he’s not a bad actor, not of my caliber of course, but not bad at all. He’s well again and he’s stamping to do it, which is worse for his health than not doing it at all. And the wonder of Oroonoko is you can play him with a limp or one arm or any other deformity slavers inflict in their wickedness. Missus, I want you to retire.’

  ‘What?’ She stared at him but for once he was serious.

  ‘Look at yourself. You’ve suffered enough grief lately to choke a horse. You’ve worked your little arse thin making a working miracle out of that barn of a theater, which is running itself now. So I’m thinking it’s time you took a holiday ...’

  He’s going to ask me to go with him.

  But he wasn’t.

  ‘This Babbs Cove of yours,’ he said, ‘Aaron tells me its air is balmy, its sands are yellow and the smugglers guard you like a tent-pot of bacon. Go there. Take Jacques with you.’

  ‘Jacques?’ She felt she was being swished back and forth under a waterfall of words that became more Irish the more intent they became.

  ‘I’m uneasy for the lad,’ he said. ‘My informants tell me things don’t go well for his father, nor for Danton, neither. It’s not that so much, though, it’s . . . I don’t like the way Blanchard shows an interest in him.’

  ‘He’s showing an interest in all of us,’ she said, bitterly. Since opening night, Blanchard had been an almost constant presence in the theater. He hadn’t merely attended every performance, he came early, slipping in the moment the stage door opened to the staff and cast, sometimes with Félicie, sometimes alone. Turn a corner backstage and he was there. Enter a dressing room and there he was, talking, joking, flattering, asking questions.