The Flight of Sarah Battle

by Alix Nathan

  ‘You may laugh, Bullock. When the money’s all gone on sailors and ships and troops and cannon and shot and feeding prisoners, it’ll be more than just the industrious poor crowding the soup shops, you’ll see!’

  ‘I’ll tell you how many meals are served in the soup shops every day.’

  ‘No, Lyons, don’t! We’ll go there ourselves and watch Bullock and Thynne banging at each other when they’re both waiting for their broth.’ Laughter from listeners.

  Bullock squeezes his lumpy nose with lumpy fingers.

  ‘They’d save the expense of prisoners if they did what they ought to with the Irish.’

  Someone chirps up: ‘At least there’s good use for the Tower.’

  ‘We should learn from your libertarian French, Thynne,’ Bullock continues slowly. ‘Heads off quick as a blade; much the cheapest way. Decorate the walls with ‘em, like we used to do on Temple Bar.’

  ‘You always were a pig. Don’t deserve the name Bullock: insulting to our great English beef,’ counters Thynne, his sharp features straining to puncture his rival.

  ‘Irish, French, let’s clear our minds of foreigners,’ a pink-gilled man steps in from the margins. ‘Have you seen the new prints at Digham’s in Paternoster? Shakespeare, our great Shakespeare, now there you have a man to unite us. Prints of all the women in his plays.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ The minds of the company wheel round.

  ‘Desdemona, Cordelia, Imogen, Portia, Ophelia. Enough to bring a tear to the eye.’

  ‘Whose are they?’

  ‘You won’t have heard of him. Engraves his own paintings. He sells the originals for more guineas than I can afford. Setting up his own shop now, I hear.’

  ‘His name, Fellowes?’

  ‘Joseph Young.’

  ‘Oh I’ve heard of him. Not exactly for his Desdemonas I’d say!’

  ‘Aha! Then Sopwith, tell us about those. Have you got some? Will you bring them here?’

  ‘You don’t buy them, you hire the portfolio by the night. Not sure if Sam’d have it.’

  ‘Upstairs, maybe, in the auction room.’

  ‘Get Sam over here, Fellowes. He’ll not mind as long as we pay.’

  *

  Money flowing soon enables Joseph and Lucy to move to better premises. He rents a narrow house in Little Russell Street with a shop window big enough to display a print in every pane and installs a printing press on the first floor. Second and third floors house meagre domestic arrangements. There, too, Lucy has her painting table, in a room high above the printing press, though she must also listen out for the shop doorbell, run downstairs, smile, take money from buyers or their servants, note sums in the account book she’s covered in offcuts of flowered wallpaper.

  She worries constantly about Matthew. Three days after his sudden appearance in Albion Place a ‘friend’ came for him and that was the last they’d seen of him. Joseph takes a note with their new address to the George in St John Street and returns in black mood.

  ‘Was he there?’ She sees the answer on his face.

  ‘No. Of course not. He is safe somewhere no doubt.’

  ‘Did they say so?’

  ‘No, of course not! They wouldn’t tell me that. They don’t trust me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Matthew was right, there are spies all over the place. I might be one for all they know. The man in the George will have to move to another alehouse now I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Then I shan’t know where to send letters.’

  ‘No, you won’t! Lucy, you must cease thinking about him. He has chosen a desperate way. These are men of violence. They are at war with the government. They are right to attack corruption, lies, injustice; for that I am on their side. But their methods are mad and they will come to grief.’

  There is no comfort for her.

  But he is happy with her work. She colours all his prints, exactly as he prescribes. He is meticulous about the Shakespeare scenes for which there is great demand. Customers are particularly pleased when they find they can buy one or more from the same young woman figured in them.

  William Digham’s promise of sporting and topographical prints evaporates – indeed they rarely see the little printer now that Joseph has his own press, his success. Here’s another disappointment for Lucy who felt gladdened purely by his presence. It consoles her to keep in mind the possibility of fleeing to him, a safe house of kindness and understanding. It would take longer to get there of course; she’d need a hackney or a sedan.

  She colours Joseph’s engraved satires though not his ‘Amorous Scenes’, as they’re entitled on the covers. Has no idea who limns the pink glut of limbs. As the portfolios, bound in brown morocco, are hired not bought, Joseph need not produce so many prints. In any case it’s the follies of street life, tavern life, theatre life that pour from him in great variety. The sketches he makes are mere reminders, for at his bench he cuts straight into the copper as if the figures caper out of his head: pickpockets, labourers, sellers, harlots. Two half-naked women wrestling in Murphy’s in Little Russell Street itself. In that engraving Joseph surrounds the women with a jovial, drinking crowd, cheering on the fighters. On the left a small, unexpected figure in black, turns an eager gaze at the flying breasts, plump, tangled arms and thighs. Disturbed though unprotesting, Lucy reddens the unmistakeable cheeks of lascivious, gawping Rev. Mr Dale.

  *

  Come August end Joseph takes her to Bartholomew Fair, exuberant with life in the face of loud demands to close it down. Before, they’d have walked from Albion Place. She feels an odd sense of return when the hackney drops them into what at all other times is Smithfield, now pulsing with people rather than heaving with penned animals.

  Laughs, shrieks, drumbeats, bugles, blind fiddlers, perpetual hurdy-gurdies. Acrobats and traders call out their skills and wares, and there’s a constant blast of Sausages! and Pies! Hot Mutton Trumpery! Stinkin’ Shrimps! Teeth Ache!

  Joseph is elated, a drunken man in full control of his wits. He pulls Lucy through the crowd; they buy cheesecakes and ices, drink saloop, laugh like the happiest lovers in the world. Tossed on the waves of anarchy, Lucy darts excitedly from booth to booth, plays like the child she never was.

  They are both children with money to spend. They watch harlequins cavort on wooden boards, buy tickets for Synget’s Grand Medley on a precarious stage, the audience booing and clapping according to each performer’s dress: dancer showing her legs: applause! singer with too many ostrich feathers on her head: boo!

  ‘I went to a theatre when I was a boy,’ Joseph says. ‘The Destruction of the Bastille, it was. It wasn’t a play at all but a representation. I loved it. Someone took me, I don’t remember who, to distract me from my mother’s death.’

  They gaze at an elephant and monkeys cooped in Miles’s Menagerie, ride in a swing boat, watch a man eating fire, pierrots treading a taught rope, a parade of painted Indians, severe and sad. Give pennies to one-legged, no-legged, one-eyed sailors; a whole fist of pennies to the armless, legless man who fills a pipe, lights and smokes it; peep behind curtains at an albino lady; peer down a microscope at the smallest bible in the world.

  Again and again Joseph stops to sketch on his pocket pad, picks up the comments about his pretty companion.

  ‘Hear what they say about you Lucy!’ He puts his arm round her, plants a public kiss on her flushed cheek.

  In hastily erected booths, whose starred and mooned sacking flaps on crude poles, sit fortune tellers and sly sellers of simples promising eternal youth and cures for every ill. A necromancer predicts for pennies in a dark alley.

  Someone runs past, there’s a hue and cry, dogs join in, a child is knocked to the ground. Joseph and Lucy become separated and when at last he finds her she is surrounded by beggars wheedling for money, pawing her clothes. A fascinated crowd watches as Lucy, shaking, unable to escape, hands over her purse.

  ‘Don’t mind ’em, miss.’

  ‘Nah! Don’t give it ’em!’ />
  ‘Go on, give ’em some’at.’

  ‘Give ‘em your shawl! That’s worth a bit.’

  ‘No, don’t, miss. I’ll get a Runner.’

  A set-to, punches, hair-pulling, bodies knock into Lucy – their forgotten cause.

  Joseph strides through the onlookers and suddenly no one’s there.

  ‘Lucy! What’s this? Frightened by a few beggars? They would never do you any harm. They just want your money.’

  ‘They were pulling me, mauling me. They would have taken my clothes if you had not arrived.’ She is white. Weeping.

  Three musicians appear with a crowd of hangers-on. One plays an organ strapped to his shoulders, another a reed pipe, the third a tambourine he tosses into the air, catches on the tip of one finger and resumes playing without the music having missed a note or a beat.

  Joseph sketches rapidly and shouts at Lucy.

  ‘That’s nonsense. What a chaplain’s daughter you are! Protected from the world. But you don’t live in your tower any more. These are our poor.’ He gestures all about him. ‘All these are poor, not just the beggars.’ He throws a coin into a bag attached by a stick to the tambourinist’s hat, forcing the musician to bow his head in thanks and mockery.

  A girl, sweating with effort, pushes a barrow past them loaded with baskets of pears. ‘Look at her. These are the people Matthew is fighting for. For whom he’s hatching vain Empires. These are the people for whom he’ll start a revolution. For whom he’ll kill.’

  ‘Kill?’

  ‘We’ll go home, Lucy. Come on, my flower. I have sketches for a whole new series here. Worth every penny I’ve spent.’

  He buys her a stick of cherries. She reminds him that he did this once before when they first met, but he cannot remember.

  4

  Robert Wilson, Bookseller and Publisher, Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, is thriving. A year after arriving in the city, Tom contributes a substantial sum from the sale of Cranch’s in Berwick Street for a share in the business, and while he’s not yet a partner, his say in major decisions becomes increasingly important. He takes specific responsibility for the pamphlet war which, together with certain newspapers in the city, keeps up opposition to the Federalists, with an eye to winning the presidency at the end of the century.

  For the Democratic Republicans lost the election of 1796 and now have to endure four years of Federalist president ‘His Rotundity’ John Adams.

  ‘Before we know it, there’ll be a hereditary aristocracy, just you watch, eh?’ says Robert. ‘And they’ll restore the monarchy to boot!’

  As usual Tom is keen to hand out his pamphlets himself. That way he can read bits out to people and help bring reason to those who cannot read themselves. He walks the muddy, unpaved streets all day, encountering carters and market traders, fishermen and medical students, carpenters, masons, plasterers. Shaking hands, breathing the air of the unrepresented. Returns greatly excited, cannot stop talking throughout supper, relating stories of singular lives.

  ‘You’ve no need to do this,’ Robert says. ‘Peddlers will take your pamphlets out of the city along with the chapbooks and almanacs, catechisms and primers.’

  ‘Yes, but in the city, Robert, people must hear, must know.’

  ‘Och, you’re such an innocent, Tom. Do you think they really listen, all those grimy men with their adzes and hammers, eh?’

  ‘Of course they do!’

  ‘Don’t get too close, will you? We don’t want the yellow disease in Zane Street.’

  Sarah has persuaded Robert to reduce the subject of her book and rename it merely Guide to Coffee Houses of London. It has come out sooner and sold fewer copies, but, the work complete, she is able to spend time in the shop. She shelves new books, gathers together the publications Robert will swap with other publishers. Occasionally stands still in quiet dampness to recall the loud smells and smoke of Battle’s, enjoy astonished relief that she really has left all that behind.

  Her education was adequate but barely matched the ambition that hatched in her as a girl. It began with Ben Newton tutoring her in her letters, then telling her about the world outside Battle’s, outside England. James Wintrige, for all the blankness of her marriage to him, spilled dried twigs that, against his intentions, caught fire. Only Tom Cranch recognised the seriousness hidden by pink cheeks and womanly charms, the only attributes Wintrige and the coffee house customers ever noticed. He saw the look in her eyes as she observed, doubted, commented to herself. Saw intelligent scepticism, born of amusement and grief.

  The shop is well stocked with books, pamphlets, newspapers and magazines. Robert keeps all the newest writing, however extreme by his standards, for there are buyers he doesn’t want to lose. Tom shows Sarah works that would never have come her way trapped in Battle’s: the new volume of Blake whose ‘Echoing Green’ he copied out for her in London. His favourite Milton. Sarah pays one dollar for the latest reprinting of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and takes it back to Zane Street, a piece of unexpected treasure.

  Education is the key to better women’s lives, she reads. Remembers that it was her mother who’d wanted her to go to school, while Sam saw no point in it. For him it was enough that she could count. Now she has time to read and read. Not that her life has ever resembled those women Wollstonecraft decries, pursuing beauty and the flattering worship of men, shopping, reading frivolous novels. But nor does she ever want to be without Tom.

  ‘Mary Wollstonecraft says that Milton’s Adam worships God, but Eve worships Adam,’ she says to Tom.

  ‘Oh, she’s right. Milton conforms to his time in that. But his Adam and Eve have a wonderful love for one another. I recognise it and cherish it in him. My fairest!

  ‘Look at these two essays I’ve found in the Massachusetts Magazine,’ he says. ‘A writer called Constantia. She wrote them seven years ago, before Mary Wollstonecraft. I asked Robert who she was and he told me not to waste my time with women’s words.’

  ‘Robert likes women to be quietly occupied. Sometimes he stares with those ice-blue eyes as if he’d silence me for good.’

  ‘I think he’s about to ask you to write a book on a domestic matter. You’d better be prepared, my love.’

  ‘Why does he never speak of his wife?’

  ‘I suppose because she’s dead he can’t bear to. If you were to die I’m not sure how I’d live.’

  ‘Ah, Tom. But Robert is not a sad man.’

  ‘True. Or he’s decided not to reveal his sadness to others.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘I admire how firmly he holds his views, yet at times it’s stiffness, pig-headedness. I’d like to shake him out of it. But I’m not tall enough! He might whack me with his paddle hands, stamp me into a pancake!

  ‘You’ll like Constantia, Sarah. She thinks Adam more to blame than Eve; says that Eve, after all, sought knowledge in good faith, sought to improve her mind. It’s a nice point.’

  *

  ‘Sarah, what do you think to speaking at the Indian Queen?’ Tom asks her. ‘They need to hear the voice of an intelligent woman.’

  ‘It’s hard being the sole woman there. I’m sure they only tolerate me because of Robert and you.’

  ‘No doubt. But it will do them good. Presumably they do talk to their wives, though only about the qualities of the new preacher and whom to invite to dinner.’

  ‘To complete our meeting,’ says Daniel Eckfeldt, ‘Mrs Thomas Cranch will address us.’

  By now, late in the evening, the men are somnolent with tobacco and rum punch, but they rouse themselves in the room’s choke-thick air to listen to the fair Englishwoman with the pleasantly polite demeanour. Not a bluestocking. Surely not fiery.

  ‘Mr Eckfeldt and Gentlemen, I speak as a woman, perhaps the first to address you in the Indian Queen.’

  ‘Well said!’ someone calls out and is immediately hushed.

  ‘As you know, I come from the old country where both men and women endure gross rep
ression. Here I am, proud to be in a land freed from its yoke. In the city of brotherly and sisterly love, where all is promise. A city in which recently it has become possible for a girl to attend a Young Ladies Academy and learn mathematics, geography, chemistry and natural philosophy.’ She can’t remember what comes next. Looks down at her notes.

  ‘I shall allude to ideas already afloat; I have originated nothing. I don’t mean to lecture you; I mean to ask more questions than make assertions.’

  The assembly shifts slightly. She is going to bore them after all.

  ‘Let us hear your questions, Mrs Cranch,’ says Eckfeldt.

  ‘That men have physical superiority to women is obviously true.’

  Breasts swell; she almost gives up.

  ‘Does it follow that because their bodies are stronger than those of women, so are their minds? A lion is stronger than a man. Is his mind superior to that of a man?

  ‘Of course there are differences between people. Within the sexes, one man may be more quick-witted than another, one woman more quick-witted than her sister. But why should all men be more quick-witted than all women?’

  Someone rises to his feet and waves but Eckfeldt holds up his hand.

  ‘We shall hear Mrs Cranch. We shall not interrupt.’

  ‘For the moment then, I should like you to concede that God made differences in mental strength between individuals, not between one sex and the other. That being so, we must ask: if women have reason, imagination and judgment as men do, how will they employ these mental faculties?’

  ‘It is an intriguing question,’ Eckfeldt says in his heavy way, breaking his own injunction. Sarah pauses, uncertain whether he will continue. She wants to complete what she’s dared begin.

  ‘Can it be sufficient for a woman to exercise these faculties on the needle and the making of pies?’ She hears her inner voice ask her who then will sew and cook? She hastens on. ‘Can it be sufficient that women occupy their days in efforts to retain and enhance their physical attributes for the pleasure of men?’

  Chairs scrape. Men puff on their cigars. Chaw. Yawn. One man, wide awake, stares at her intently. She sees, suddenly, William Leopard.