by Diana Norman
She leaned forward so that the feather tickled Makepeace’s forehead; her hair smelled of bluebells, her breath of alcohol. She whispered: ‘Hurt him? I haven’t even begun.’
‘Why d’you hate him?’
‘I’m going to destroy him.’ The pupils of her eyes were enormous, a night-hunting creature’s. ‘And you, my dear. And you.’
The gloves came off. ‘We don’t destroy easy,’ Makepeace whispered back, ‘we love each other.’ And was appalled to suspect that this was the reason she’d come: to say this. There’d never been a prospect of peace.
‘You fucking bitch,’ hissed Catty.
The venom puffing from the woman’s lips into Makepeace’s nostrils was infectious. It was irresistible luxury to spit back: ‘And I’m carrying his son.’
If she could have recalled the words, in that minute she would have. The little face close to hers withered. The effect was dreadful, like watching a healthy apple shrivel within seconds. ‘Oh, don’t,’ Makepeace said; she’d not intended this. ‘Don’t.’
The man Conyers was beside them. ‘Time for bye-byes, me dear.’ He assisted Makepeace to her feet and hustled her into the hallway.
The footman opened the front door, letting in the damp, refreshing breeze.
Conyers said: ‘Have you a conveyance?’
She looked around and pointed. The cab had moved to the end of the street so that its horse could drink from a trough.
Fanny was beside it, dabbling her hand in the water, talking to Tom and the driver. When Conyers hailed them the cabman led his horse around to bring it to the house, Fanny and Tom following.
Conyers went sideways down the steps, one hand held towards Makepeace to assist her to the level of the street.
She heard him shout, ‘No!’
A push against her back tumbled her down the steps.
As she lay in the mud, face-up, she saw Catty Dapifer standing in the doorway, hands still outstretched, shaking. Then Conyers bent over her and his face blocked her view.
He was all anxiety. ‘Are you hurt? Damn steps are lethal. Slipped on ’em meself only yesterday. Nasty accident, that. Say you’re not hurt, I pray you.’ But the worry in his eyes, she could tell, was not for her.
For a moment Makepeace lay where she’d fallen, concentrating on an internal examination of baby Procrustes. He seemed to have survived; there was no pain there, only her wrist hurt where she’d tried to grab the steps’ rail, and an ankle was stinging. Yes, she felt sick, but that was not from the fall, heavy though it had been.
She tried to kill the baby.
Fanny and the footman were running towards her. Conyers was helping her up, talking, offering brandy, to take her to a doctor, to escort her home, but all the time determinedly pushing her towards the cab to get her away.
Makepeace kept inclining her head to see round him to the figure in the doorway, still incredulous. She tried to kill the baby. Not me, it was the baby. She tried to kill my baby. The words repeated in her head, so abominable that they took away her capacity to utter them. She could only gawp with shock.
‘What happened, missus?’ Fanny and Tom were beside her, quivering with concern, listening to Conyers’s explanation of ‘accident, accident’, looking towards where Makepeace was pointing. But the doorway was empty.
‘Didn’t you see?’
‘What, missus? Let’s get you home.’
The blank face of the cab-driver indicated that he, too, had seen nothing of her fall.
She was in the cab, Conyers settling her cloak so that it didn’t impede shutting the door. Their eyes met, his pleading, hers astounded.
‘She pushed me,’ Makepeace said.
‘Very shaken,’ he said, nodding to Fanny like a doctor to a presiding nurse, ‘but she seems to have taken no harm. I’ll have the steps seen to. Take her home quickly.’
As she was borne away, Makepeace leaned out of the window to look back. Conyers didn’t wait to see her out of sight but ran up the steps into the house to the woman who concerned him more.
Shock kept Makepeace silent on the way home; the fall had been frightening in itself but a deal more frightening was the realization that nobody would believe her if she tried to tell them that a lady of quality had just attempted murder.
When she confessed, on Dapifer’s return to Grosvenor Square, to what she’d done, he could barely talk to her for rage. ‘I see,’ he said, ‘another wife I can’t control,’ and left her sitting miserably in the drawing room nursing her sprained wrist.
She heard him leave the house. Tom came in to tell her that Sir Pip had gone to his club; she was not to wait up.
She could hardly blame him; in view of what had happened her venture seemed ludicrous, and she was forced to re-examine her own motives for making it at all. What she’d impulsively thought of at the time as an attempt to protect him, present Catty with good New England common-sense and stop her press campaign, now revealed itself to be a jumble of unworthy motives that had nearly brought Baby Procrustes to disaster.
She jumped as the doors slammed open and her husband reappeared. ‘The bloody club can wait,’ he said, ‘I’m going to tell you what you’re fit for.’ He looked ill but not as white as he had when she’d first told him.
His list of her sins, which he enumerated as he strode the room, coincided very nearly with her own. She was an arrogant, headstrong Yankee, a whited sepulchre of a Puritan, pretending a lofty soul with a Christian mission to take peace and light into darkness when in truth she’d been meddling in matters none of her business and making him look a hag-ridden fool before a vicious and delighted audience. ‘I can’t wait to see the cartoon they’ll make of this.’
‘I’m truly sorry,’ she said, and meant it.
‘You flaunted yourself, didn’t you? Trumpeted our happiness, your fecundity in her face.’
Makepeace felt the edges of her mouth tug into a momentary grin—‘I sure did’—before she could compose them again.
‘Knowing she has no children? Seems incapable of having any? What did you expect?’
She shouted: ‘I didn’t expect her to try and kill the baby!’
‘And you,’ he said, quietly. ‘Christ, she could have killed you.’
It was the ultimate reassurance. Makepeace got up and crossed the room to him. Holding him, she felt an almost agonizing contentment.
After a little, he said: ‘I should have told you she was insane.’
‘Don’t talk about her.’
‘It’s important.’
She saw that it was. He pulled up a chair so that they could sit facing each other and hold hands.
He said: ‘You must understand that she can’t help it. She needs protection from herself and I couldn’t give it. God forgive me, I couldn’t stand madness. It was cowardice, Procrustes, not kindness, not noblesse oblige; when I went to New England to divorce her, I wasn’t sparing her, I was deserting. That day Ffoulkes and I discovered her with Conyers, do you know what I felt? I felt relief; she’d given me an excuse to be rid of her, she was somebody else’s responsibility.’
He was leading her into the innermost centre of a mental labyrinth for which she had no clue. She couldn’t follow him. She said: ‘You had to leave her, she’s wicked.’
He shook his head. He said: ‘You realize, don’t you, for all his faults Conyers is the better man?’
‘He’s a bad man. He betrayed you.’
‘He loves that afflicted soul, poor devil that he is.’
He was talking to himself, making forays in a land of greys that an irritated Makepeace could only see in black and white.
‘She ain’t afflicted. She slept with your friend, she wants money for doing it and she tried to kill your baby. She’s evil.’
Dapifer came back from wherever he’d been. ‘I don’t believe in evil.’
‘Yes, you do.’ Makepeace was on home ground. ‘ “He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good”. It’s how God set the world up. If there wa
sn’t evil, we couldn’t know the good. Simple. Come to bed.’
He wondered if she knew she was paraphrasing Milton. Probably not; it was her creed, the clarity of an uncluttered soul. She knew the good and held to it, had held to it, knowing it was to her disadvantage, when she rescued him not only from Boston harbour but from much else. For all her narrow, single-minded Puritanism, she was health, the only health he had.
What would she say if he told her that he didn’t believe in God either, but that the nearer he approached death the more he trusted in the personal salvation Makepeace Burke Dapifer continued to offer him?
She’d be shocked, he thought. He took her to bed instead.
Chapter Eleven
GRUB Street was more than an unsavoury lane in an unsavoury area of London; it had become a swear word describing everything cheap and scurrilous in the writing profession.
Originally a hiding place for seventeenth-century dissenters with their printing presses—Oliver Cromwell lived there for a while—over the previous hundred years it had become home to hacks, scandal-sellers, ballad-mongers, poets, political scribblers and dictionary-compilers eking out their existence in the shabby upper rooms rented to them in return for their output by the booksellers who owned the shops below.
It was also a battlefield for the irreverent and dispossessed versus the establishment, its gunfire the clack of printing presses in its basements. Occasionally an outraged government sequestered one of them, only to have its fly-by-night owner establish another somewhere else. Makepeace on her visits became used to seeing one inhabitant or another escaping from a window as magistrates’ bailiffs or debt-collectors broke down his door.
As usual, when visiting the ungodly, she went early. Apart from Grub Street itself, the district of Moorfields in north-east London contained nearly every other species of person and activity she most disliked: brothels, soldiers—the Honourable Artillery Company had its headquarters and ranges there—dicing hells and Roman Catholics.
This morning she didn’t bother to knock on the decrepit door in one of Grub Street’s alleys but, with Fanny, went straight in via the cellar where a sleepy printer’s devil was already at work. He nodded to them as they walked through to the winding staircase that climbed past the bookseller’s apartment to the first floor. Here they knocked. Last time they’d walked in on Beasley in bed with a woman.
There was no reply today and, when they gave up and went in, no woman either. He was asleep, his bare backside protruding from frowsty bedcovers. Fanny lifted the corner of a blanket between finger and thumb and covered the protrusion before she and Makepeace started clearing up. They never knew why they did this, the place was past tidying, but no female of character could be presented with it and not try.
It was a largish room made claustrophobic by the number of books it contained. They were stacked in untidy piles against the walls, on the floor, on the window bench; they made up the missing leg of a table; they formed a dusty, mouse-nibbled frieze around the bed. Even if Beasley spent all his income on literature, which, to judge from the state of his clothes and person, he did, there was no accounting for the vastness of his library. The flyleaves Makepeace peeked at showed they were ex libris other people, probably stolen.
An air of piety was lent to the room by a framed and embroidered text over the bed which, on closer examination, proved to be the ‘princes’ error from the Printer’s Bible: ‘Printers have persecuted me without cause.’ Some cupped wallflowers fought a losing battle with the overpowering fug of ageing paper and a full chamber pot.
Once they’d pushed open the window from its worm-eaten frame, picked up and folded the clothes on the floor and cleared quills, paper and ink pots from the table, Makepeace set out some fresh bread and cheese and a can of steaming coffee she’d bought in Clare Market.
‘Breakfast,’ she said. ‘Get up.’
The bed swore. An eye opened; a hand gestured towards Fanny: ‘Want to fuck?’
‘With you? When pigs fly.’ She held out a shirt she’d laundered, the only fresh thing in the room apart from herself and Makepeace.
They averted their eyes as he squirmed, grumbling, out of bed, put on the shirt and struggled into a pair of breeches that Makepeace proffered sideways on a pair of tongs. Slurping coffee through a mouthful of bread and cheese, he managed to spill some on his clean shirt.
Makepeace shook her head in wonderment at herself. Here was her ally, her chosen ally, in the fight against Catty.
After her disastrous foray to Bloomsbury, there had been no let-up in the ammunition Catty had supplied for Picknicks to fire at her; indeed, the articles and cartoons had increased.
It has come to our ears that the female claiming to be the second wife of Sir Philip Dapifer was recently to be seen in Bloomsbury pleading with her predecessor not to pursue the case which cites her supposed marriage to Sir Philip as bigamous. Money was mentioned but the lady was ejected by Lady Dapifer’s indignant footman.
The paragraph was accompanied by a drawing showing Catty as Britannia, with ‘Lady Dapifer’ inscribed on her sash, standing on a plinth and brandishing her trident at a female figure crawling at its base. The caption read: ‘Begone, Bigamist!’
Dapifer had refused to look at the piece when she tried to show it to him. Nor would he contemplate libel proceedings against the paper, saying it would be a descent into mud which would, in any case, merely smear it over a wider area.
But if he chose to ignore it, Makepeace knew others did not. Susan told her that Picknicks was being handed around in the salons which she and Mme Angloss visited and was read with frowning disapproval by Rockingham Whigs and with glee by his opponents.
She became frightened by how vulnerable her husband’s decency made him. He was the real target of the filth Catty was throwing and it was damaging not only his position in society but his health. She’d had to summon Dr Baines to him one evening when he’d come back short of breath after a difficult political meeting. Baines said it was exhaustion and recommended rest although, with the imminence of the Stamp Tax debate, there could be none.
Something had to be done. Appealing to Catty had been a mistake; there was no treaty to be made with that enemy. On the other hand, to receive broadside after broadside from her guns would sink them. Makepeace had lived nearer to the earth of humanity than her husband. Yes, they could fight Catty through the courts, but by that time they would already be defeated; there wouldn’t be a judge in England whose mind wouldn’t already have been contaminated against them.
Something had to be done.
She’d unearthed the dog-eared card the man called John Beasley had given her in Hyde Park and sought him out. At first it was with the idea of finding the publisher of the tormenting Picknicks and either cajoling, threatening or bribing him into silence. Which, as Beasley said when she found him, showed how little she knew about the press. ‘If there’s someone as’ll read it, there’s someone as’ll print it.’
‘It’s not you?’ He had, after all, been responsible for the first cartoon, the one which had shown her and Catty fighting in Grosvenor Square.
‘Nyah. That was against both of you bloody nobs. This’—he flicked the copy of Picknicks with a dirty fingernail—‘is one-sided. This is a campaign.’
‘Who is it, then?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Don’t matter. I tell you, if there’s someone as’ll read it . . .’ Papers like Picknicks flourished and withered. The Passenger, his own attempt at publishing, had failed, but that, he said, was because ‘bigwigs’ had considered it too liberal and outspoken and had conspired against it. He saw conspiracy in everything.
Disappointed, she’d been preparing to leave when he said, with meaning: ‘Shit sticks if you don’t fling it back.’
Her own sentiments exactly.
She and Beasley went into partnership. She saw no reason to tell Dapifer about it, though it made her uneasy that she acted behind his back. But if his sense of honour prevented him ret
aliating against Catty’s guns, Makepeace’s did not.
John Beasley was everything that should disgust her: he was gauche to the point of barbarism, opinionated, morbid, rabidly antireligious; if you named it he was against it, yet she . . . liked wasn’t the right word . . . felt friendship for him.
It was peculiar; when he wasn’t outraging every Puritan principle she still held and exasperating her beyond bearing, she could confide in him as to nobody else and. . . this was the thing. . . know he would keep the confidence. He was fanatically loyal to the few, very few, people whom he admired, and on that day in Hyde Park the previous autumn she had won not only his gratitude by saving him from the pursuing bailiffs but his admiration, partly by her ability to swear and partly as an American, a nation he identified with because the government bullied it.
His first nervous question when he’d answered her knock had been: ‘Where’s the one in the Park, where’s Madam Midnight?’
‘In Hertfordshire.’
That he was frightened of Betty was somehow endearing. And he didn’t like Catty Dapifer, neither her adultery—though despising the institution of marriage, he was censorious of those who betrayed it—nor her habit of aiming her carriage at pedestrians in the park. ‘Nearly winged me once, arrogant bitch.’
‘How’d you know who she was?’ Makepeace had asked.
‘Bigwigs ain’t got a monopoly on who’s who. Nor gossip neither.’ He knew everything, or pretended to, and sulked if he was caught out in an error.
He picked up and sold his information in the political and literary coffee clubs. Makepeace imagined him sitting, glowering, in a corner, but discovered that this was not so; somehow he’d inveigled himself into the world of the arts and boasted of his conversations with ‘Sam Johnson’ or ‘Davey Garrick’ or ‘Josh Reynolds’ or ‘Ollie Goldsmith’ or ‘Charlie Fox’.
Makepeace had to take his word for it that they were influential men. They sounded raffish to her; the eccentric Beasley would suit their company.
‘This Josh . . .’ she said wistfully.