by Diana Norman
‘Reynolds.’
‘Painter, you said. D’you think he’d teach my Josh?’
‘Don’t see why not.’
That was the lovely thing about John Beasley, he had no concept of limitation. He invested in hopeless causes, tilted at impossible windmills, saw insult everywhere, not only to himself but to others—big white Joshua would be reviled if he did not help black little Joshua.
But his ranting could be tiresome; he was permanently angry, with God, with Man and especially with Barnabas Fulke—‘Fulke the Fucker’—who was his printer and his landlord and who exploited him.
‘You can’t hate everybody,’ she said.
‘Yes, I can.’
Unsuspected in so loutish a young man was the delicacy with which he began conducting Makepeace’s campaign, selling titbits of information to the more respectable organs that gazetted the comings and goings of Society or cooed gentle gossip about the fashionable into a thousand boudoirs.
London Magazine: Sir Philip Dapifer and his New England bride are frequently to be seen in the company of the Marquis of Rockingham. Lady Dapifer is a Bostonian and therefore particularly fitted to give her opinion and advice to his lordship on the American question.
‘Lord’s sake, don’t put that in. It was a private conversation.’ ‘Well, I knew about it.’
The Ladies’ Diary: It is forecast that the articulated hoop may have had its day; we happen to know that Mme Angloss, that most exclusive adviser to the ton, is dressing Lady Dapifer, wife to Sir Philip, more nearly to her natural and excellent figure.
Gradually, gently, Makepeace’s image was rehabilitated from that of bigamous, low-class trollop to dignified second wife, the pure bosom on which Sir Philip Dapifer had lain his wronged head.
His vilification of Catty was less gentle. He showed her today’s piece.
The Coach Commissioners would do well to look to what use is made of their conveyances before licensing hackney coaches; we have heard of a liaison which took place in one such last Sunday between the Hon. Percy Cavendish and the former Lady Dapifer, divorced wife of Sir Philip, when the blinds were down. No doubt the undulating motion of the vehicle, with pretty little occasional jolts, contributed greatly to enhance the pleasure of the critical moment . . .
Makepeace was horrified. ‘You can’t print this.’
‘Why not? Nice little gobbet—bon ton’ll love it. And it’s true—the driver peeked. It’s a topic of conversation among the cognoscenti already. Don’t look so mimsy; she’d have told the town crier if you’d done it.’
The thing was, Makepeace had—she and Dapifer, one rainy Sunday, on their way to Eton to see young Ffoulkes. Beasley was right about the undulating motion of a coach.
But we’re married, she thought. Catty isn’t even faithful to poor Conyers.
She felt her womb churn as if Baby Procrustes had flinched and she fell into a panic of disgust with herself, with Beasley, with a trade that paraded people’s frailty for the delectation of others. What sort of air was she feeding to the child in her womb? How had she become enmeshed in the grubby toils of this trade?
He was watching her; he had an almost feminine ability to pick up what she was feeling—and a masculine inclination to jeer at it. ‘Ain’t got the stomach for this?’
‘No.’
‘I found out something else yesterday. Want to know who’s feeding the poison to Picknicks?’
She was all attention. ‘Yes.’
‘Only Major Sidney Conyers, First Fucking Regiment of Foot Guards.’
She said dully: ‘He was nice to me.’
‘He was nice to Sir Pigwig an’ all, weren’t he?’ Beasley always sneered when he talked of Dapifer, as he did when he mentioned any member of the establishment. ‘All my-dear-schoolchum-and-I’ll-fuck-your-wife, wasn’t he? He’s a precious viper, that one, gambles like a lord but his pockets is marked To Let. I wouldn’t go anywhere lonely with him after dark. He wants a colonelcy, he’d like to buy his regiment—Jesus, what sort of army is it that promotes officers with no experience of battle just because they’re rich . . .’
Makepeace had listened to Beasley’s strictures on the British Army’s purchase system before. ‘You sure it’s him behind Picknicks?’
‘I tell you, he’s a black-hearted bastard. His men fawn on him because he lets ’em loot. There’s more than one highwayman carries a percentage of his takings back to Major Robbing Conyers and calls him “sir”.’
‘You’re making it up,’ Makepeace said. Conyers’s class might sleep with other men’s wives but it didn’t go in for criminality.
‘Am I? When are you going to learn about bigwigs? They’re fucking your home country and you think they’re nice? They’re all robbers. Conyers ain’t doing it on a big enough scale yet, but he will. Look at the enclosures. If Fanny here, or me, stole a sheep we’d be swinging in chains. The bigwigs steal a thousand acres and call it an act of fucking Parliament.’
He interpreted her wince of guilt as disbelief. ‘I tell you, he’s your rat. I tracked down Picknicks’s proprietor, fellow called Grout, and got him drunk—that’s a guinea you owe me, incidentally—and he told me.’
She paid him his guineas. She was scrupulous not to lay out housekeeping money on Beasley’s expenses, but instead used cash from the hundred guineas Dapifer had given her for saving his life. She regarded that as her own.
Beasley had become sullen. As she got up to go, he said: ‘And if you want nice little pieces in the paper about your doings, you’ll have to do something. What d’you want me to write? The Duchess of Dunghill’s ball was graced by the absence of the lovely Lady Dapifer? You don’t go anywhere.’
‘Don’t know why we bother with that little noserag,’ Fanny said as they went home.
‘I don’t either.’ She did really; her visits to Beasley were as much to ensure he stayed out of prison and had enough to eat as they were concerned with her campaign. She noticed that Fanny, even while he aggravated her, tended to mother the young man; anyone so inept at survival commanded an infuriated solicitude.
Yet this morning’s visit had been unsettling; she’d known Conyers for a bad man but for such viciousness to underlie so pleasant an exterior was as if Nature itself had allied with him in trickery. But Beasley was rarely mistaken; his cobweb to catch information spread from coffee houses to the criminal rookeries, taking in servants’ gossip on the way.
And the little noserag was right about something else—she didn’t go anywhere. Unwilling to face a scornful London society, doubly so since Picknicks’s calumnies, she preferred to shelter in company with which she felt confident.
Blast, she thought, I’ve got to become one of the damn ton.
No need to blacken Catty’s reputation—Catty could do that for herself—if she could enhance her own.
London Gazette: Sir Philip and Lady Dapifer yesterday accompanied Lord Ffoulkes to the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich for the unveiling of a plaque to the young lord’s late father, a patron of the hospital. Lt. Governor Boys was in attendance at the ceremony. Afterwards Sir Philip, who is Lord Ffoulkes’s guardian, and Lady Dapifer, an accomplished oarswoman, took their charge rowing on the river.
Pensioners lining the terrace of the hospital bared their heads and saluted as they rowed downriver.
Once they were out of sight, Dapifer took off his hat and held Andrew’s for him as the child dropped the wreath onto the surface and stood watching until it passed out of sight beyond the river’s bend. Then they rowed back, returned to the carriage and, with Tantaquidgeon standing on its backboard, took the road for Eton.
Holding Makepeace’s hand, the boy was silent for most of the journey. She knew he was grateful to have said a personal goodbye to his father but, inevitably, he was suffering.
As they approached Windsor through a spring-scented dusk, he asked if their goodbyes could be made in the carriage. ‘May Tantaquidgeon take me in?’
Dapifer said: ‘It was nice of Lieutena
nt-Governor Boys to attend. Andrew, did your father ever tell you about him?’
‘No.’
‘It was when he was a youngster. He and seven others survived the sinking of the Luxborough Galley on a passage home from the West Indies by eating the bodies of their shipmates.’
‘Pip!’ Makepeace remonstrated.
‘Oh, joy,’ Andrew said, ‘a Red Indian and a cannibal all in one day. Won’t the fellows be green?’
Sitting in the carriage, they watched him go through the school’s arch, his legs trying to stretch to the pace of the tall Huron stalking beside him.
‘Thought he needed cheering up,’ Dapifer said, smugly.
‘I guess I’ll never understand men.’ She pressed her hip suggestively against his. ‘Shame we ain’t in a coach.’
London Evening Post: Among those in the Strangers’ Gallery for the House of Commons debate on the Stamp Tax were Sir Philip and Lady Dapifer . . .
Ladies’ Diary: We glimpsed Lady Dapifer among the crowd in the Strangers’ Gallery and attribute much sense to her for not indulging the current fashion for high heads which would otherwise have obscured the view of those behind her . . .
The carriage took them back through the night from Westminster to Grosvenor Square with Susan, exhilarated by the debate, shouting: ‘We won! We won! We won!’ over a clamour of church bells ringing out the news that the Stamp Act was repealed, rioting Americans would now return to being loyal citizens, merchants were once more in business . . .
Makepeace was pleased, though less excited than Susan; the repeal was not only a triumph for liberty and the America of Sam Adams, it was also victory for the men who had tarred and feathered Aaron. Aaron himself had refused to come to the House of Commons at all. Nevertheless . . .
She turned to Dapifer and mouthed: ‘Well done, my boy.’
He shook his head, whether in modesty or because conversation was impossible. He’d been busy lobbying for two days, not even returning home the previous night, and in the light of the flares his skin looked deathly.
In anticipation, she’d ordered Mrs Francanelli to prepare a celebratory dinner. Once they’d sat down, she lifted her glass to her husband. ‘To Liberty and all them as sail in her.’
‘To Auntie’s windows.’ Susan lifted hers. ‘As won’t get broken any more.’
Dapifer didn’t respond. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
‘We won,’ Susan said. ‘Mr Pitt was fireworks—I didn’t understand a word he said, but it had me cheering.’ Looking back on Boston from the other side of the Atlantic had changed her political perspective, or perhaps her original Toryism had been altered by attendance on too many English ladies of fashion.
Dapifer said: ‘What you heard tonight was the repeal of the Stamp Act. What you didn’t hear was the reading of the Declaratory Bill yesterday.’
‘Bad?’ asked Makepeace, watching him.
‘Bad.’ He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and chanted, like a schoolchild repeating a primer:
‘ “. . . the King’s majesty, lords and commons etc, to have full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America subjects of the crown of Great Britain in all cases whatsoever.” ’
He opened his eyes on the silent room. ‘Yes, I know. As a matter of fact, only two weeks ago the French King made a similar assertion of his rights to his own troublemakers. Oh God.’ He closed his eyes again. ‘I’ve lived to see us keep step with bloody Louis XV.’
The footman was serving foie gras but for a moment, for Makepeace, the redolence was cut through by a smell of tar and rope and open seas. It seemed to her that they came crowding into the room so that the marble eyes of the statuary in its niches stared sightlessly into other eyes creased around from searching long horizons: Americans, men mostly, some women like Susan’s auntie, people who sold things, grew things, made things, sailed ships. Grown-up men and women, their mouths open, shouting, shouting: ‘ . . . and that shout will be heard from end to the distant end of this Continent and across the oceans.’
She realized Dapifer, shockingly, was apologizing to her, to them. ‘Rockingham couldn’t have pushed through the repeal otherwise. The oligarchs had to save face. No, more than save face, save themselves. Allow the colonies to have a say in what laws are passed and our own people at home will start shouting: “No Taxation Without Representation.” Wilkes already is.’
Sam Adams knew, she thought. There’ll be no liberty unless there’s war first.
London Magazine: Lord Rockingham’s musical evening to celebrate the birth of the late Mr George Handel commanded a large audience among whom their Graces of Grafton and Portland, Sir Philip and Lady Dapifer, Mr and Mrs Dowdeswell . . .
In the early days of their marriage, Dapifer had arranged for Charles Burney, a doctor of music and a friend of his, to try and bridge what he called ‘the chasm between my wife and the great composers’. It hadn’t worked. Makepeace was tone deaf. Burney’d confessed to Dapifer: ‘I’d do better shovelling snow. Of the two your wife would prefer the mooing of a cow to Monteverdi—that’s if she could tell the difference.’
Tonight she sat in clanging boredom, making laundry lists, counting the chandeliers, watching a tiny spider weave a web on the padding in the towering hair of the Duchess of Portland in front of her and wondering if the clocks had stopped.
If this were a dance it would be different: she enjoyed dancing—a ball was one of the few Society entertainments she did enjoy. She could keep to a rhythm even if she couldn’t hold a tune, and under the tuition of M. Herriot, her Huguenot dancing master, was learning to cut an acceptable figure on the various ballroom floors.
Thanks to the example of the Marquis of Rockingham, who made sure that the Dapifers were included among the guests at any event of which he was the host, invitations were now being sent to the house in Grosvenor Square. It couldn’t be said that the nobility clasped Makepeace to its bosom, however. Catty might be scandalous but she had breeding, she was still Us. Makepeace wasn’t even English Them. The more rigid Whigs, especially the women, looked askance at Rockingham for shepherding this redheaded American into their society. (Reference was always made to her hair, as if it were an affront, a revolutionary flag, though there were other heads among the nobility nearly as flagrant.) Typical of Rockingham, where would his mania for reform take him next? However, he was Prime Minister and, after all, Sir Philip’s family had come over with the Conqueror, so one supposed one had to bow to the inevitable . . . Gradually, very gradually, Makepeace was being absorbed into the fashionable world as other shameful oddities, like actresses who had married well, had been absorbed before her.
Something marvellous was happening; the noise was over, people were clapping. The Duchess of Portland turned round: ‘My dears, was not that sublime? Is not the players’ execution perfect?’
‘Would be,’ muttered Makepeace, ‘if it hadn’t stopped short of hanging the swine. Is that the end?’
‘No. This is an interval.’
‘Oh, Lord.’
The Old Maid: A little bird has chirruped in our ear that Lady Dapifer is to be in the audience at Goodman’s Fields tomorrow night to watch her brother make his acting debut.
This was better than the opera. Less exalted, more shameful—holy Hokey, what would her mother have said?—but jolly. She stopped laughing long enough to gasp: ‘I didn’t know King Lear had funny dogs.’
‘I don’t think Shakespeare did either,’ Dapifer said grimly.
For this, his first performance, Aaron was playing a knight attendant on Cordelia. He had five lines in Act I, Scene IV. It may not have helped that Makepeace clapped his entrance, a solitary firecracker of sound echoing round the crowded, rickety auditorium before Dapifer could grab her hands, but it’s doubtful if he heard her. His eyes fixed on the audience like a sheep’s on the knife and stayed there.
‘ “Where’s my fool, ho?” ’ Lear asked him, ‘ “I
think the world’s asleep. How now! where’s that mongrel?” ’
Silence. Aaron stared at the audience, the limelight emphasizing his ghastly pallor. The audience stared back.
‘ “How now!” ’ repeated King Lear, ‘ “where’s that mongrel?” ’
There was an audible hiss from the prompt corner: ‘He says, my lord, your daughter is not well.’
Further silence broken by some booing.
‘I expect,’ said King Lear, ‘he reports that my daughter is not well. “Why came not the slave back to me, when I called him?” ’
‘What?’ said King Lear, sweating as the booing began. ‘Thou whisperest that he would not?’
Eventually, the Earl of Kent got Aaron off by grabbing an arm and dragging him.
After the performance they found him in the green room, still vomiting.
King Lear, who owned the company, reassured an anxious Makepeace that Aaron’s career in the theatre was safe. ‘No, no, dear lady, I prophesy a successful future for your brother. Stage fright afflicts the best of us. The late lamented Colley Cibber also was unable to speak one line on his first appearance yet did he not end up as Poet Laureate?’
‘Did he?’ Makepeace was grateful. ‘Oh, and I liked the jugglers and I’m glad the play ended so happy. I was feared it wouldn’t.’
King Lear bowed. ‘Madam, we aim to please.’
Makepeace had neither the art nor the inclination to deliberately mould herself to the set she was now in; it would be useless in any case—she was being accepted on sufferance and she knew it. But, inevitably, contact with its pumice began to smooth her rougher edges so that she fitted it better, almost without her realizing what was happening.
Her coiffure rose as her Puritanism declined. Unconsciously, her accent modified and her grammar improved. On Sundays she no longer attended the small Presbyterian chapel in Farringdon Street but, with Dapifer, joined the rest of the beau monde in the Wren splendour of St James’s, Piccadilly.