by Diana Norman
Everybody had to hand out playbills. They were an expensive item but the larger the area of distribution the greater the subsequent audiences.
Letting Tom Capper wander off delivering on his own, however, was not efficient. After three successive days on which he was brought back, comatose and in the cart of a concerned, admiring labourer, Aaron was forced to send Tantaquidgeon with him as his sobriety-enforcer.
The sight of a six-foot Red Indian in a market square intrigued the local populace as much as the posters did.
‘Your amiable friend is a phenomenon to these poor bucolics,’ Hartley Witney pointed out. ‘Use him.’
They already used him as cart-unpacker and-loader, scene-shifter and mule-driver. However, the next night, Tantaquidgeon was given a spear to carry during the last act of Amanta in the West Indies. Unmoving, unspeaking, he nevertheless attracted hoots of admiration. After that the bills for every play, whether set in Verona or Scotland, gave him an ethnic background to suit all tastes and featured ‘that Illustrious Noble Savage, Chief Hassan, own grandson to famed Pocahontas.’
But the greatest home-grown phenomenon was Fanny Cobb. Perhaps the late Mrs Bracegirdle had been numbered among her ancestry after all. The whiff of make-up sticks and footlight candles came to the girl’s nostrils like the scent of ocean to a stranded seal. She badgered the cast until Penthesilea Witney, always kind, taught her Polly’s songs from The Beggar’s Opera.
Fanny’s voice was pleasant enough, nothing special, and she could hold a tune but . . . ‘I want you to hear her,’ Penthesilea told Aaron.
‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ was not a particularly bawdy song but the way Fanny sang it was. She was not consciously seductive; merely by opening her mouth the girl released a contagious joyousness that was as sexual as it was unaware.
‘God bless us,’ said Aaron with feeling.
The next night Fanny was the musical entre’acte. ‘She’ll bring the magistrates on us,’ Peg Devereux said, jealously.
‘She’ll bring the house down first.’
She was singing again, now, in order to cover an unplanned hiatus in The Pharaoh’s Daughter caused by Tom Capper’s disappearance to the Red Lion down the lane. Aaron and Tantaquidgeon had gone to fetch him. The audience, apparently, was finding no incongruity in the sudden leap from Biblical drama to Cockney street songs just as, on Capper’s return, they would accept cruel Pharaoh’s comic knockabout with his clown. All part of the magic.
And it was magic, Makepeace could see that. The panic was magical. The elderly Hartley Witneys behind her, hastily reshuffling the sequence of the play, were magical. Fanny singing, Aaron tearing his hair out and loving it, Capper reducing his audience to helplessness . . . all magical. They jerked and postured in gyrations that were wonderful and inexplicable, as if she were watching from too far away to understand why they made them.
She was the marionette, not them. For them the dreadful journeyings were an adventure at the end of which they could perform behind six candles stuck in a dirt floor. She just got into a cart, stayed in it, got out, moving on strings, a wooden thing among the living.
‘Prompt.’
Peg Devereux was glaring again. The entr’acte was over, so was the comic scene. They had reached Act III without the prompter noticing. Makepeace turned her pages. ‘One child of Israel you shall not kill cruel father for . . .’
‘One child of Israel you shall not kill, cruel Father, for he is safely hidden.’
The play went on. In the wings the safely hidden Moses began to whimper. Makepeace handed the script to Fred Tortini and carried the basket through to the green room, a flapping tent attached to the barn’s side door.
Betty was counting the night’s takings. ‘ . . . an’ sixpence and a ha’pence and I don’t know what this is but it ain’t coin of the realm.’ She looked up. ‘Two pound, four shilling an’ sixpence ha’penny, a duck, two hens, a basket of bread, clutch of eggs an’ a pot of somethin’ as looks like someone been sick in it.’
‘Very good,’ said Makepeace politely.
‘Ain’t bad. We all eat tomorrow, any rate.’ She produced a small jar from the region of her bosom where it had been kept warm. Makepeace took it and began spooning its contents into Philippa’s mouth. Her milk had dried up three weeks before and the baby was on solid food—much too early in Betty’s opinion.
‘How’d she do as Moses?’
‘Very well.’
‘Very well.’ The magic of theatre escaped Betty. ‘Half a year old an’ actin’. That Sir Pip’s daughter we talkin’ about. What’d he think, his chil’ raised with painted Jezebels?’ She didn’t approve of Peg Devereux either.
‘I don’t know what else to do.’
It was no use for Betty to employ the child’s vulnerability in order to provoke her into a reaction, a plan or anger—she was incapable of those things; they washed around like wreckage of the woman she’d once been, flotsam in a sea kept at bay by wooden walls.
The only vulnerable sound in the world was not a baby’s crying, it was a man’s voice calling for his wife as he died among those who wanted him dead.
The odd thing was that her mind didn’t, couldn’t yet, accuse Catty or Conyers. That blame, too, circled in the sea outside, a leviathan. The real guilt was within the walls. God had presented her with the loveliest of His gifts and she had not protected it. She hadn’t seen how ill he was, hadn’t wanted to see.
And sometimes she blamed him for his complicity in abandoning her to this awful place where he didn’t exist. Catty wanted you dead—and you obeyed her.
Mr Burke’s Touring Company made its way slowly into Yorkshire, keeping ahead of its rivals by going always northwards so that it seemed to be keeping pace with winter while at the same time promising spring to snow-fatigued villages.
At Thornton-le-Dale, as she got out of her cart, Makepeace stumbled and couldn’t get up again.
The company extended its stay—‘By Popular Demand!’—until she was over the pneumonia and audiences were reduced to a trickle. Even then, she was still too weak to travel.
‘We’ll have to go on, that’s all the money we’ve got.’ Aaron pressed what there was into Betty’s hand. ‘And somebody paid with a goat. I’ll leave it with the innkeeper, it should give her milk. We’ll be at Fylingdale and then Whitby, which is on the map. Somebody’s sure to give you a lift.’
He paused. ‘I suppose we can’t take Philippa with us? Fanny’d look after her . . . Oh, all right, all right. She’s a draw, that’s all, I wanted her for Caroline’s Secret.’
Betty watched them go from the inn’s upper window, Tantaquidgeon striding forward at the mules’ heads, the painted, canvas-hooped carts garish against the sweep of the moor.
‘Caroline’s Secret,’ she said, bitterly. ‘Caroline’s Noah’s Ark more like.’ She turned on the figure in the bed. ‘You goin’ to live.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Ain’t a question. I’m tellin’ you. We ain’t goin’ on like this.’
She told Aaron the same when they caught up with the company and found him arranging its accommodation in two fisher-men’s cottages rented for the purpose.
He was busy and irritated. The Whitby justice of the peace, having Puritan objections to the theatre in general and actors in particular, had invoked the 1737 Licensing Act which made strolling companies illegal and refused them permission to perform. Penthesilea Witney had gone to see the man—a visit from that awesomely respectable woman usually changed the magisterial mind. But if it didn’t, Aaron was going to have to turn the entire script of Pharaoh’s Daughter into vaguely rhyming couplets, insert some songs and call it a ‘burletta’. Burlettas were not classified as drama and could be played anywhere.
It was difficult for him to comprehend that a way of life he found all-consuming and all-satisfying, hand-to-mouth though it was, was in fact helping to keep Makepeace in her limbo. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said to Betty, impatiently, ‘it’s a living. And
it keeps her busy.’ Privately, he was beginning to think that it didn’t matter what course was chosen for Makepeace; she was too broken.
Betty knew she wasn’t. ‘She need to catch up with herself. She been pushed down too far too quick; she need time to get over the grievin’ an’ take in what those shites done to her. Then she get mad. Then she do somethin’.’
‘What? What can she do?’ Aaron was stung by his own failure to avenge his sister. His request to Conyers to meet him in a duel had been dismissed with a note: Major Conyers is obliged to Mr Burke but would point out that, for their sake, he does not accept a challenge from his inferiors.
Aaron had raved but a weaselly relief stopped him pursuing the matter; he wasn’t a good shot and, while he could fence nobly enough on stage, an experienced swordsman like Conyers would cut him into portions. Another death in the family would be of no help to Makepeace.
‘She do somethin’.’ Betty was steadfast. ‘She jus’ need to be still for a bit.’
‘I’d set her up somewhere, you know I would, but there’s no money. We’re only getting by as it is.’
‘You been a good brother to that chil’,’ Betty said, soothingly. ‘Maybe she set herself up. I found this.’
Makepeace’s enforced convalescence in the little inn at Thornton-le-Dale had given Betty the opportunity to carry out what life on the road had not: a spring-cleaning of their travelling kit. The pitifully few clothes they possessed had been washed and darned, some of Philippa’s dresses sacrificed to enlarge the others, boots patched and oiled—and the bulging holdall they had borrowed from Peter Little, which contained everything, had been turned inside out to be brushed.
This had inveigled itself behind a rip in the holdall’s lining, stuffed away by Betty and then forgotten in the haste of the eviction from Hertfordshire.
‘I asked her what is it an’ she don’t remember, then she say it jus’ property an’ throw it away, like she don’t want to remember.’
‘Property?’
Betty held out the squashed documents. ‘You look ’em over, Aaron. I kin read or’nary but I ain’t up to scriv’nin’.’
He took them to the window. ‘ “Manor of Raby in the County of Northumberland . . . held in fee simple”—Lord, this is old—“four hundred and two virgates . . .” ’
‘What’s a virgate?’
Aaron squeezed his education for a clue. ‘About thirty acres, I think. A lot, anyway. “Préciput”—I don’t know what that is—“messuage”—Hell and high water, Betty, that’s a dwelling-house—“fishing rights, brew-house, forest . . .” This is an estate!’
‘We can sell it?’
‘She can’t live there, for sure. It’s in Northumberland.’ Aaron had been a Bostonian and was now a Londoner, a townsman heart and soul; he was prepared to exploit the poor savages who lived north of Potters Bar but be damned if he took up residence among them. ‘That’s about as far north as you can go without painting yourself with woad.’
‘You sure she own it?’
‘Seems to. There’s a deed of transference from the owner to Makepeace Burke that looks legal enough. Wonder why she used her maiden name? It’s dated only last year. Still, there it is, she’s got property. Should buy her a nice little place in Chelsea.’
Or a tavern on the river, a second Roaring Meg, not too far from Josh. Betty’s imagination was soaring. But in Betty’s book one didn’t sell a pig in a poke without examining it, any more than buy one. ‘We better go see this Raby. Quick.’
Chapter Fifteen
‘GAN a step doon the lonnon passin’ the stob an’ ye’re hyem,’ the wagoner said. ‘Aa’d tyek ye but Aa’m queer.’ He flicked his whip and they watched the wagon lumber away northwards.
‘What he say?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe Tantaquidgeon scared him.’
To the east, on their right, there was a path that meandered to where the land petered out in sand-hills and sea; against darkening clouds they could see gulls and a white smudge of smoke from hidden habitation.
But the wagoner’s whip had indicated a track that led west, into moorland deserted by everything but sheep. The air held miles and miles of unpopulated silence, broken only by curlews and a slight clank in the breeze from a gibbet.
Betty nodded at the bones in the gibbet. ‘Trampled in the crush, I guess. Well, let’s git.’ She was regretting bitterly her insistence that they investigate the Raby estate. Her image of a manor house had petered down to a shepherd’s hut—if they were lucky.
Newcastle upon Tyne had proved to be a town of unexpected prosperity and they’d seen industry as they travelled the road leading from it, but the further north they went the greater sense they had of approaching the space at the end of the world.
‘Should’ve waited for Aaron to come with us,’ Betty told herself.
However, Newcastle had been avid for entertainment and prepared to pay in hard cash for seats under canvas in a timber yard; it would not have done to interrupt the company’s run.
Fanny had loyally, if reluctantly, offered to come along as well but Aaron couldn’t spare her; a large, admiring, male clique attended every performance on her account.
So here they were, three of them with a child, trudging along ruts that showed no sign of recent traffic, presumably already on Raby land.
Should’ve brought vittles, Betty thought. Have to butcher a sheep an’ cook it. I’m too old for this-all.
She had watched those around her become impatient of Makepeace’s grief and was herself at last wearying of the burden it put on her; she had done nothing since Dapifer’s death but make vast decisions. Ain’t my place, she thought self-pityingly, old nigra woman like me; time she was doin’ the orderin’.
But Betty still held to the belief that the motive behind this expedition was good. The bustle of other people’s activity left Makepeace rudderless; she must be forced to take the tiller, run her own tavern again, assume responsibility for her daughter. The discovery that she had something to sell whereby all these good things could be achieved had seemed God-sent—and now didn’t. Who’d want to buy bare moorland?
‘How much you wager to win this place?’
Makepeace didn’t want the memory. ‘Seventy guineas, maybe.’
‘Cheaper if you lost the bet.’
They hustled on in failing light to keep ahead of the rainclouds behind them, the two women taking turns to carry Philippa, who was becoming heavy, Tantaquidgeon with the holdall on his shoulder.
You let pirates board my chil’s boat, Lord, an’ you ain’t doin’ nothin’ to save her. Nothin’.
The rain caught up with them. They sheltered under some wizened trees but were forced out by encroaching darkness, afraid they’d soon be unable to see their way. Despite the joggling, Philippa slept under Makepeace’s cloak like the good child she was.
‘Whatever it is they gone pulled it down,’ Betty panted. Even a shepherd’s hut had become desirable. She and Makepeace were stumbling now, unable to see where they were going. They kept their eyes on Tantaquidgeon’s feather floating ahead, trusting to the Indian’s cat’s eyes.
He stopped. They’d breasted a hill. Below them, in a dip, was a light.
Praise the Lord.
They went down towards it, slithering on the muddy incline. Not a hut but an ugly house, its shape wetly black against the lesser darkness of the moor. A glimmer from a downstairs window showed a yard, dilapidated outhouses, more mud and a woodpile with an axe in one of the logs. They picked their way through. Betty rapped on the window.
There was movement, the glow faded from the window, more movement and a man’s voice: ‘Howay, ye porvorse sod, git back.’ A sound of fumbling at a door to their right and a grumble: ‘Wha’s aboot this sneck? If it’s gaugers Ah’ll push your bloody fyesses in.’
Betty had the presence of mind to shove Makepeace ahead in case the door, once opened, shut again. Visiting black women and Red Indians were probably rare in these hills.
He cut short Betty’s apologies and explanations and hurried them in. There was a donkey in the passage behind him, as well as a pig and several hens. He shooed them away, telling his visitors to step carefully over the manure. ‘Ah’ve had no time to mend the hemmel, d’ye see.’
They were in a room that was dark except for a small coal fire. He shut the door to keep the animals out and busied himself lighting candles. ‘Thought you might be the gaugers.’ He caught Betty’s look of incomprehension. ‘The excise, pet. There’s no peace from the sods wi’ candles dutiable.’
He was a grim-looking man, of medium height, though his width of chest and shoulder made him seem squat, like a pugilist—an impression enforced by a powerful neck and a broken nose. He had black eyebrows and dark hair, grizzled at the sides and cut brutally short.
The room was clean but bare and too high and too narrow, like the house. He’d been reading, a book lay on a stool beside a grandfather chair with a bootlace to mark his place. There was no other furniture.
Betty was led to the chair, a chaff mattress was fetched and curved against the wall for Makepeace to sit on, the stool offered to Tantaquidgeon, who ignored it.
The man introduced himself. ‘Andra Hedley, the factor of this place. Gi’ us those wet clothes.’
The divestment of their cloaks revealed Philippa. He knelt down to her. ‘What cheer, wheen-love. Hoongry? Shall us see what’s in the yettlins?’ He held out his hand, Philippa took it and toddled with him to the door. They could hear him talking to her as he lifted her down the passage.
Betty nodded at Tantaquidgeon to go after them, just in case. It was an automatic precaution, she wasn’t really concerned; whatever a yettlin was Philippa would be safe with it—and him. The man exuded power enough to split rock, but not, Betty felt, the sort dangerous to little girls, except as an energetic sea was dangerous. He hadn’t asked their names or their business, nor had he batted an eye at their variety of race. On receiving them his Northumbrian dialect had ameliorated into something nearer English; he’d greeted Philippa with concern; he was offering food.