The Flight of Sarah Battle

by Alix Nathan

  ‘It is your duty to see this fine monument so close to home. And think how useful it is were there to be a fire. Good God, this very house was rebuilt after a fire, was it not?’

  ‘In ‘48.’

  ‘Your father’s day. Well, they’ll put it out more quickly next time with this pump so close by.’

  Sam cannot remember when he last left the coffee house. His wife’s funeral? He has no need to go out. All arrangements with tradesmen were established years ago. There’s Dick for errands. Mrs Trunkett at a pinch. Dick limps, but gets there.

  For once Bullock and Thynne agree.

  ‘You must come. The Exchange provides most of your custom, Sam. The monument and pump have been paid for by many of those who frequent Battle’s. Besides it is an elegant thing.’

  ‘Elegant,’ he growls.

  ‘You need leave your house for twenty minutes only.’

  ‘Damn, damn!’ he mutters.

  They edge him out, a group who’ve drunk at Battle’s for years, who enjoy Sam’s crabbedness. They remind the old snudge, as if he doesn’t know it, of Sarah’s capable hands. Shuffle him along Change Alley to the painted iron obelisk decorated with emblematic figures and an image of the house of correction that stood on the spot in 1282.

  Sam gazes blankly, uneasy in the outer air. Smoke and fumes are his natural medium.

  Thynne reads: ‘This Well was discovered, much enlarged, and this Pump erected in the year 1799 by the contributions of the Bank of England, the East India Company, the neighbouring Fire Offices, together with the Bankers and Traders of the Ward of Cornhill. There now! 1799. It’s been standing since last century!’

  ‘No, no. Lyons would have us believe we are still in that century.’ They wag their fingers at each other and laugh.

  Sam is agitated. What is happening in the house while he’s not there? In his mind’s eye the waiters lounge in the kitchen, pick bits out of pans, swig the residue from glasses. Mrs Trunkett sleeps in the corner. A maid drops the red-hot fruggin as she stirs the fuel in the oven. Dick is entertaining his cronies in the yard. Men call for their drinks to deaf ears; someone’s dog shits all over the floor; a brawl erupts; someone else knocks out a plug of burning tobacco on a table. His heart begins to race, his skin goes cold.

  The table smoulders, smokes, a flame darts to the settle, leaps to the ceiling beams; snow falls, the yard ices over; gales howl round the chimneys, the sound of mobs smashing all the windows fills his ear, there’s heavy hammering on the door. Sarah is running away again!

  He pitches forward, strikes his head on the iron, slumps.

  Later they learn from the surgeon that the obelisk is not to blame. It caused a mighty contusion on Sam’s forehead but it was his heart that failed. An opinion is expressed that had he known, he would have regretted not dying on his own premises. This is countered by the argument that there’s far greater fame in death at the feet of a fine new monument than fizzling out, hugger-mugger at home.

  *

  Sarah has no time to mourn her father, even if she wanted to. Condoling takes place over coffee dishes, maudlin memories over punch bowls, funerary toasts to the clink of bumpers. She nods to all comments, assures older customers of continuation, gradually warms to a sense of freedom, not as great as when she ran away with Tom, but good all the same, definitely good.

  A complex freedom, for she is now quite sure that she is expecting a child and may yet not miscarry. That she didn’t bleed for months after Tom’s death she’d put down to the shock of losing him and the timelessness that ensued. All days thereafter were the same, meaningless, without form, blurred by grief. The world was empty. Her body mourned him by drying up.

  Now she begins to hope. Is relieved she will not need to explain to her father, but as yet tells no one. As her body changes shape, they’ll just decide she’s getting fat, she thinks.

  There is more than ever to do in the coffee house. Sam kept the accounts, paid the waiters, Dick, Mrs Trunkett and the kitchen maid, looked out for holes in the waiters’ striped stockings, stains on their waistcoats, admonished impertinence, ordered newspapers, tobacco, replenished drawers of pipes. Sarah absorbs these tasks, hires a girl to take her place behind the bar and feels the prick of reform. The newspapers can stay, she thinks, but she always wanted books in the coffee house, wanted the presence of intellectual matter beyond mere deals, politics and scurrility. She buys volumes for lending out, even hopes they might effect change to some of the more loathsome views she overhears. Tom certainly would have planted pamphlets and books. Oh Tom!

  She consigns Rowlandson’s Wonderful Pig engraving to one of the snugs, out of her sight; hands the beautifully bound Amorous Scenes to Dick to burn.

  ‘Oh, but Miss Battle, there’s money in ‘em. You can’t burn em! ‘

  ‘I certainly can, Dick. Please do it.’

  ‘The men paid good money.’

  ‘What do you mean? Didn’t my father buy them?’

  ‘’E did so. But them there as wanted paid to look.’

  ‘I see. And did he get all his money back?’

  ‘I don’t know, Miss Battle.’ Dick’s firm allegiance to Sarah is not so strong that he can’t lie in Sam’s memory. Amorous Scenes had been a quickly profitable purchase. ‘But them there’d buy ‘em like a shot.’

  ‘If I agree, they must be removed for good, Dick. Taken right away. Never again brought into Battle’s.’

  ‘I promise, Miss Battle.’

  Later she’s aware of a turmoil in one corner of the big room, low voices, raised voices, thumping on the table, the passing of coins, Dick placing a large wrapped parcel in front of men pink with pleasure. Dick pink with pleasure.

  He offers her a handful of money.

  ‘They says for me to thank you, Miss Battle.’

  ‘Keep it, Dick, and put it somewhere safe. I hope you’ll not retire from Battle’s with it.’

  There’s plenty of money in Sam’s locked boxes. She buys The Task, Lyrical Ballads, Songs of Innocence and of Experience and the most beautiful copy of Paradise Lost she can find.

  2

  James Wintrige drinks coffee one morning.

  ‘I see you have a new wench at the bar,’ he says. ‘You have replaced yourself.’

  ‘I cannot do it all. Now that Father is dead.’

  ‘I heard.’ He looks at her with half a grin.

  ‘You did not reply to my letter. There are clothes and things of mine in Winkworth Buildings.’

  ‘You deserted me, Sarah. By law you can take nothing with you: everything there is mine. Come back and live with me. Remember, we are husband and wife.’

  ‘I don’t care to be married to a spy.’

  ‘And if I deny it?’ His eyes lurk in their shadows.

  ‘I read your letter to Richard Ford.’

  ‘You stole it.’

  ‘I found it. Of course it was not mine to read. But I did. You deceived me and all the men in the Society. I believed you when you spoke of reform, when you quoted Thelwall and Paine. It was all lies! Everything you did was for the government!’

  ‘Do you think I would leave incriminating evidence lying about? The letter was false, left to confuse in case they came for me.’ His frog mouth stretches as if into a smile.

  ‘I cannot live with you. I want nothing to do with you.’

  ‘You have committed adultery, Sarah. You are not the one to choose.’

  But our love is greater than all the respectable marriages piled in a heap as high as the spire of Arch Street Church! Tom said in Philadelphia. Her eyes fill.

  To cut short the conversation, to banish the sight of his fingers, anything to shift his greedy stare from her mouth, she agrees to let him bring her belongings, which he does one night as she’s about to close the coffee house. She pays the carrier, waits by the door with the key, longing for him to leave.

  He stands close. Words slip through thin lips.

  ‘If you will not live with me in Winkworth Buildings, then I sh
all live with you here. I am your husband. As I said, everything of yours belongs to me by law. Battle’s is mine.’

  Here’s a blow: she’s had no time to anticipate it. Weary from the day’s toil, she makes no reply; locks the door with relief when he stalks out.

  The next day a cart arrives with his books and writing table, boxes of scribbled foolscap, a trunk, more possessions than she’d ever seen when she lived with him. She hastens him to her father’s old room for she’ll not have him in hers; then, too late, regrets it, for Sam’s snores, the floor below, will now be replaced by his.

  Parsimony. That’s why he’s here. Ostensibly, they’d always lacked money, always depended for sustenance on what she brought back from the coffee house. Yet he was paid well by the government, Tom said. What had he done with that money while she returned each night with pies and meat and drink?

  Now, of course, with the Corresponding Society defunct he can no longer draw government pay spying on it. He has killed his golden goose, she tells herself. (Oh Newton, what a lovely satire it would make! Wintrige, wintry, thin, white, eyes sunk near to oblivion yet recognisably amphibian, studiously stabbing a great shining Corresponding Society goose to death with his pen and portable inkwell.) His work in the Customs Office only ever paid a very modest amount, whereas here at Battle’s he’ll have both board and bed. Even without her in it. She has a bolt fitted to her bedroom door.

  For a while the place buzzes with gossip and disgust. Dick, Mrs Trunkett, the maids and waiters refuse to come at Wintrige’s call; he enters the kitchen, looms over the stove or the huge preparing table, helps himself to whatever he can snaffle with long fingers, can gulp down frog-like. Sarah instructs them to serve him; for all her antipathy she doesn’t relish strife, and she can hardly let him starve.

  The customers are wary of a man with a reputation fuliginous as a smoke-house. They watch him when he’s visible but mostly he lurks in one of the half-curtained booths, puffing screw after screw of tobacco, drumming on newspaper pages, not speaking. For days.

  They try to winkle him out.

  ‘Will you give us a toast, Wintrige?’

  He mumbles, raises his glass.

  ‘What’s that you say?’

  ‘The King!’ They raise their glasses. Most of them. ‘Now you give a toast,’ he calls over to Thynne.

  ‘I will give you Jack Ketch.’

  A pause. Heavy breathing. Muffled titters.

  ‘Fribbling,’ mutters Wintrige. ‘Stupid, fribbling toast.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Thynne replies. ‘I only carry out your toast. You gave the first executive officer, the King, and I gave the last executive officer. Jack Ketch.’

  Laughter from some. Wintrige shrinks back into his booth and they don’t try again.

  He must have stopped working for the Customs Office for he never goes out. Sarah avoids him, wonders if he’s listening for new treasons. Yet he writes nothing, talks to no one except waiters when he orders increasing numbers of dishes. All the scribbling he once did has ceased.

  Sudden sunlight alerts her one morning. A clean underskirt unfolded from a drawer displays a slight black smear. Thumb-sized. She holds it to her nose, sniffs burnt tobacco.

  He’s been in her room! Searching for the incriminating letter of course. Has gone through all her belongings, which now she checks minutely, finding all carefully replaced: books, pamphlets exactly where she’d set them, her few clothes apparently undisturbed. Yet everything fingered by him.

  She runs to his bedroom, wakes him from dingy sleep. Shouts at his head half buried beneath pillows.

  ‘Wake up! You’ve been in my room, gone through my things!’

  ‘What is this? I’m asleep, Sarah.’

  ‘Then wake!’ She would hit him but couldn’t bear the touch. ‘You’ve been in my room, gone through everything. Looking for that letter no doubt.’

  ‘No worse than going through all my things in order to steal it! And you’re in my room, now! But I told you, the letter was a decoy. I don’t care about it. You’re imagining it. You know I spend the days downstairs. When would I have done it?’

  ‘You left a mark on my clothes.’

  His hand shoots out from the bedding, grips her wrist.

  ‘How do you know it was my mark and not some close friend of yours? Some beau. If your clothes are dirty it’s because of your dirty life.’ He pulls her hard towards him.

  ‘Let go of me! Let go!’

  ‘No! You’ve come to my bed. I’m your husband.’ He grasps her shoulders, draws her down over his bulk, struggling to keep her there while she beats at his chest and face with her left fist, her right arm trapped between her body and his.

  ‘Drab! Whore! I will have you!’

  Protecting his eyes with one hand, he raises his knees behind her to lever her onto her back. She pitches her own weight against his, propelled by revulsion and an odd sense of surprise that she never resisted him before. In the struggle, her hand becomes free and though he has hold of the other, she clutches at the bolster behind him, heaves it over his face and presses. To blot out his features, those lips, eyes, is all she would achieve. She doesn’t think to kill him and in any case she hasn’t the strength.

  Gasping, he breaks out, thrusts her onto the floor. She runs from the room, bruised, breathless.

  Now, she locks her door each day, as well as bolting it at night. Tries not to think of him. He continues as before, half hidden downstairs, silent from breakfast till supper. If by accident they catch each other’s eye, shafts of resentment make her look away. She recalls a phrase from the first days of their marriage: forgiving nature. That was it. He’d said she reminded him of his mother and grandmother who brought him up. Their colouring. Their forgiving nature. She’d wondered what he meant. Now she knows: they forgave him whatever he did.

  As evenings end, small explosions of hatred arise from his corner in the coffee house. Eyebrows are raised at the sounds, noses tapped, winks and looks exchanged, for they’ve certainly noticed the scratches on his face. Then, when the house is empty and all have retired for the night, he begins his verbal attacks outside her bedroom. Complains about their married state, her obligations. On and on. Accuses her of theft, adultery.

  ‘By rights you should be hanged, Sarah. At least transported. You’d be glad of my existence after fourteen years planting potatoes with other felons in the Antipodes.’

  She refuses to reply; sits stiffly upright on the other side of the door, willing him away.

  Gradually he replaces wheedling with shouts. Some nights he bawls, hammers the door and threatens violence to it. She has another bolt fitted; knows constables won’t intervene without the presence of blood. He curses her, condemns her. Even weeps, laughs and weeps. It’s unlike anything from their previous life: she remembers his mesmeric murmuring before their marriage, how rarely he spoke after it. Perhaps he really did want to be an actor. Or were these genuine tears? Eventually she gets into bed the moment she reaches her room, curls down tightly under the blankets, struggles for sleep.

  Waits, taut, for the performance to cease; waits for the night’s quiet, where love, remorse and hope dwell beneath dreams.

  *

  All of a sudden he stops. Comes out of his booth, stations himself imposingly at a table near the fire. Drinks coffee as soon as it’s brewed, demands the day’s dishes as soon as they’re cooked. Keeps the waiters running.

  Cook touches Sarah’s sleeve. ‘Miss Battle, Mr Wintrige do eat a lot. More’n any other. Do I tell John to say to ‘im no? Will I put smaller on his plate, mebbe?’

  ‘We cannot ask a waiter to say no, Mrs Trunkett. And he’d soon see if he was getting less than the others. I can do nothing about it.’

  ‘Says here,’ James suddenly announces from his prominent place, clearing his throat noisily as if about to address the Commons, ‘two new spacious squares are now forming on the Duke of Bedford’s Bloomsbury estate, Russell Square and Tavistock Square.’

  Men tu
rn to stare. Apparently the man is transformed.

  ‘And,’ assuring himself of their attention, ‘at the north end and adjoining the new road, a very handsome dressed nursery-ground and plantations are already enclosed and laid out.’ Will he ride to hounds in his plantations, do you think? Ha hah!’

  An exaggerated yawn. No other comment.

  ‘Northwards of these it seems there’s to be a road of one hundred and sixty feet wide in a direct line formed through the joint estates of the Duke and of Lord Southampton, from these buildings to the junction of the two London roads to Hampstead, saving the circuitous and unpleasant routes, either of Tottenham Court Road or Gray’s Inn Lane.’

  ‘We know, Wintrige. We know all about it. And we’ve seen it for ourselves! The whole area is a mess of works.’

  ‘How can I know what you’ve seen for yourselves?’ he counters. ‘I don’t possess special powers.’

  Nudges from some. Wasn’the employed by the government? Special powers of a sort there. Or perhaps he wasn’t. Nobody knows. The man’s an oddity.

  ‘If you hadn’t hidden away all this time you might have heard us talk about it. Incessantly.’

  ‘Come now.’ The voice of Lyons who knows what it’s like to be put down. ‘Mr Wintrige has decided to join us. Let us welcome him.’

  An embarrassed shifting in seats. A muddy quiet. Wintrige scoops up the last pastry crust, soft in gravy, gobbles, pushes away his empty plate.

  ‘I’ll read about the riot instead. You’d rather listen to news of destruction than construction!’ He laughs, his mirthless eyes sliding from one man to the next.

  ‘You’ll set Thynne and Bullock at each other like cocks, if you do.’

  ‘Then we’ll ask Cook to pluck ‘em and roast ‘em,’ he retorts, looking for others to laugh with him. A snort, a snigger.

  Someone has always read from the newspapers in Battle’s. Not that people can’t read for themselves as once was the case, but it’s useful to be able to hear the latest story while warming one’s hands round a dish of coffee. And now that there are evening papers and weeklies it’s pleasant to listen to many different events and scandals. As long as the reader’s voice is tolerable and he doesn’t lard the article with too many tedious witticisms. James Wintrige tends towards monotony and his humour limps.