The Sparks Fly Upward Page 11

  Aaron was limping beside them. ‘Are you all right? At the inn they told Sanders where you’d gone and he told us. He’s fetching the coach, ah, there it is. We’ll soon have you tucked up in bed.’

  ‘Where’s Jacques?’

  ‘I’m here, missus.’ The voice came from the far side of the man who carried her. He sounded shaken, as the young are by the collapse of a respected elder.

  Makepeace pulled herself together. ‘You can put me down, sir. I am grateful, but I am capable of walking.’

  ‘Thank the Lord for that, madam.’ The voice had changed; it now drawled with the long vowels of upper-class English. She was put on her feet and her comforter, an enormous man, puffing slightly, made a bow involving a lot of hand-twirling.

  ‘Makepeace, this is Sir Michael Murrough,’ Aaron said. ‘A very fine actor who has been good enough to join my merry band. He’ll be coming with us to London.’

  In the light of the coach lamps the man’s face looked as round and flat as a clock.

  Another actor, she thought, wearily. A fat, overblown, Irish actor. The worst kind. Ah, well, life was full of disappointments.

  Chapter Six

  THE two women were glad of the moth-eaten shawls covering their heads and shoulders to keep out not only the cold but some of the City’s noise. On any weekday it was appalling. Iron-shod hooves and wheels rumbled on cobbles, cart drivers yelled angrily at each other through the congestion, animals mooed, baaed, clucked, squealed their way to market and slaughterhouse. Chestnut vendors, newspaper sellers, sweeps, all bawled their wares.

  In Eastcheap a very large woman in a frightening approximation of Highland dress was playing the bagpipes badly and drowning out the competition presented by the more usual fiddlers and ballad singers.

  Chadwell, the Fitch-Botleys’ groom, who’d been brought along as protection but had never ventured into London before, had his hands over his ears.

  As they approached the Monument, Lady Fitch-Botley paused out of habit to wait for the crossing-sweeper to clear a path for them through the horse dung and Philippa, unable to be heard, had to give her a shove as a reminder that crossing-sweepers, expecting to be tipped, did not extend this courtesy to women dressed as poorly as they were. Nor did traffic stop for them. Chadwell had to jump to avoid being run down by a brewers’ dray.

  It was quieter after Moorgate but they had to take to byways and expose themselves to a different sort of danger. ‘Don’t look around,’ Philippa begged, ‘Just scuttle.’

  Georgiana Fitch-Botley was not a scuttler. Encountering a brawny gentleman in a blond wig and a rather fetching robe à la polonaise in Lad Lane, and discovering that Cat Alley offered services other than those of mouse catchers, she developed an appalled fascination with London’s street names which kept her head turning this way and that.

  ‘On this evidence, I suppose the Grub Street we’re going to is infested with beetles,’ she announced in her clear drawl. Some men who’d been conferring in a doorway looked up with predatory interest.

  ‘Keep your voice down, will you?’ Philippa muttered. ‘They don’t call this cut-through Floggers Alley for nothing.’ She was relieved when they were through it without incident and waited until they were approaching the open space of Moorfields before she said, ‘Grub Street’s got woodworm, and it was described as the home of lice in the Lords the other day, but no beetles beyond the ordinary.’ She couldn’t resist adding, ‘At one time it was called Gropecunt Lane but that was in the old days.’

  ‘Lord, Pippy, they believe in calling a spade a spade ’round here, don’t they.’

  Philippa thanked God she hadn’t let Jenny come with them. Even so, she’d miscalculated the effect that a walk through one of London’s least salubrious areas would have on somebody who hadn’t seen it before. Philippa herself found these places frightening but heartrending; as a child she’d been lost in the slums of Plymouth and only rescued from the fate awaiting lost little girls in a big city by the woman who was now landlady of the Pomeroy Arms at Babbs Cove. It had been an experience that made her less censorious than most towards the life of sin and those forced to lead it.

  Georgiana, however, was being exposed to sights she hadn’t dreamed of and if she was fascinated she was also appalled.

  ‘The Society for the Suppression of Vice could have a field-day down here,’ she said, ‘and perhaps it should.’

  ‘Suppression of poverty would be better,’ Philippa said, bitterly. To her it was so obvious; she could not understand how other people didn’t equate sin with desperation. Stephen, for instance, refused to see that extreme poverty was also enslavement. But then, he hadn’t been exposed to it as she had. She wondered what effect it would have had on him if he’d been adrift and penniless in the back streets of a naval town. Then she wondered what effect it would have on him if he could see her and Lady Fitch-Botley now, in their shawls and patched petticoats and scuffed shoes.

  It had been necessary to come on foot—to turn up on Grub Street in a coach or a sedan chair would have attracted an attention she wished to avoid—but that meant passing through places where even a good pair of boots was an incitement to theft. So they had dressed appropriately and come from Chelsea by water to London Bridge steps and walked up.

  As protection, Chadwell was proving useless; he hadn’t yet recovered from coming face-to-face with the fellow dressed as a woman in Lad Lane. He straggled bandy-legged behind them, gawping his innocence and being accosted by prostitutes, male and female. Eventually, Philippa had to take one of his arms and Georgiana the other and they’d walked him along between them to keep him safe.

  They cut north across Moorfields—and desperation pursued them. What had been London’s first recreational park where laundresses once laid their washing to dry on bushes, sheep grazed and yeomen had practiced at the archery butts, was now a few acres of scuffed bare earth edging the great brickworks where transient laborers, up from the country to earn a crust for the winter, had built huts for their families.

  Men and women huddled in the cold by an open fire, carving clothes pegs out of twigs as they waited for work. Their ragged children pursued soldiers entering and leaving the grounds of the nearby Honorable Artillery Company, begging for pennies.

  Georgiana swerved away to go and enquire solicitously of a woman who was crawling along a path on her knees and one hand, the other arm encircling a suckling baby, followed by a crying toddler.

  She came back disgusted, trying to scrape vomit off her shoes with a twig. ‘I thought she was ill, but she’s drunk. Money for gin, apparently, but not for food.’

  ‘Gin’s cheaper,’ Philippa said.

  Grub Street had managed to escape the Great Fire and, therefore, Wren’s project for a new, stone-built, airy London. Crazy-beamed upper stories still hung higgledy-piggledy over the unpaved roadway as they had in the days of the Tudors. Its name had changed, however, and its streetwalkers driven out to have their place taken by what successive governments had continued to find a greater evil—writers.

  If you were a poor and radical hack, if you wanted to lampoon authority, had a complaint or a poetic bent—frequently the same thing—or merely wanted to transcribe the obscene to paper, if you wrote songs, polemics, wrote anything, you ended up in the cheap lodging provided by Grub Street and its surroundings.

  Philippa had often accompanied her mother on visits to John Beasley’s lodging at Number Eight, sometimes to go bail for him or bring him food—and had come to love the place.

  It crackled with endeavour. The smell of paper and ink that came from its only shop, a stationer’s with a delicious selection of notebooks, rulers, quills, editions of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, primers, examples of various print, easels, chalks, paper clips and blotters in its window, compensated for the sewage running along the gutters. A bottle shop and a tavern called The Scribbler’s Arms suggested the street’s other preoccupation. Abstracted men, and an occasional woman, stared out of the upper windows, chewing th
e end of their pens while, from downstairs rooms, came the screech of a printing press’s weight being screwed tightly down onto a forme.

  The air of danger was different again here, emitted by the risk the inhabitants ran. At any moment magistrates’ men could appear to march into a house and drag away a protesting writer who had upset the government’s sensibilities or, more often, his creditors.

  Offending presses were supposed to be broken up, and more magistrates’ men came with warrants to that effect—as they had for John Beasley’s after his arrest and not for the first time. One of Philippa’s errands today was to ensure that his was rescued from destruction. Presses were valuable and, fortunately for the printers, magistrates’ men were human. What usually happened was that they disassembled a press, took it to a pound where, once some silver had crossed their palms, the pieces were smuggled back to somewhere else in Grub Street and put together again.

  Of its very nature, the street’s literary radicalism had bled into its surroundings, as a splash of ink seeps more palely into wet paper, so that it was encircled not just by small associated tradesmen like paper-makers and stationers but by people of more dubious callings who also served it or required its services; struck-off lawyers, defrocked priests, agents provocateur, hunted men wanting to publish their innocence, apothecaries selling strange substances, Jacobite apologists and—Philippa hoped—forgers.

  They passed Number Eight, where there was silence, on to the lopsided door of Number Twenty-seven and sounds of printing activity.

  Philippa knocked and declared herself, adding her bona fides, ‘Do you remember me, Mr Lucey? I am the missus’s daughter.’ People frequently forgot her but never her mother, she was used to it.

  ‘Of course you are,’ said a voice with enthusiasm, though a careful eye peeped out at her from behind a curtain before the door was opened. ‘Come in, come in. My heart, what are you wearing? And who are these dear people?’

  Philippa made explanations and introductions. ‘Ginny, this is Mr Lucey who takes over editorship of The Passenger when John Beasley can’t.’

  They were led into a monochrome room, all lead, black beams, distemper and white paper, its light coming not from the street windows, which were curtained but from a large window at the back, overlooking a yard. The flat bed of a press that hadn’t changed in design since the time of Gutenberg took up most of the space. In what was left, an aproned young man was squinting at a chapbook and choosing type from racks to set into a forme.

  Mr Lucey provided the color; he was tall, abnormally thin and wore a brilliant turquoise tasselled smoking cap on his bald head, a pink and gold brocaded waistcoat and green breeches from the days when they still tied them at the knee with ribbons. His long, tapering fingers flirted constantly with the air and looked inadequate for the pressure all printers had to exert on the great lever of their press. Like most members of his profession, he had a bad back and his hand went frequently to his suffering lumbar region.

  ‘You’ve heard the latest, of course?’ Mr Lucey clutched at the press’s handle for support as if transmitting the news was going to be too much for his legs. ‘You know what they’re accusing poor dear John of?’

  ‘Sedition, surely.’

  Mr Lucey’s chin and eyes described a withering arc. ‘High treason. Treason. Do you know where they took him and Horne Tooke and John Thelwall yesterday, the lambs? To the Tower.’

  ‘Treason?’ Philippa’s shock was sufficient to gratify even Mr Lucey. She turned to Georgiana. ‘Oh God, Ginny, they’ll hang him.’ Sedition had been bad enough but at least it was not a capital crime. She looked back at Lucey. ‘How can it be high treason to publish a tract on reform?’

  ‘Well, they say he and the others formed a convention and, as we know, thanks to our bloodthirsty Froggy friends, the word “convention” has become a tribal war whoop against anyone who disagrees with Mr Pitt.’

  Mr Lucey had fetched down a book from a shelf. ‘Here we are. I looked it up yesterday. High treason defined in a statute of 1351 as “compassing the death of the King or levying war against him.” ’

  He shut the book with a slam. ‘Well. They raided Number Eight yesterday looking for arms, didn’t they, Jamie?’

  The young typesetter looked up and nodded.

  ‘We all know our John, the dear heart. Breathes fire like a dragon but couldn’t wield a hatpin, bless him. Anyway, they raided Number Eight and came away with a blunderbuss. Old Mr Prosser, he’s got the rooms above John’s, he told them it was his, he collects memorabilia from the Civil War. Didn’t he, Jamie? Didn’t he say it was his? Over and over, he told them but, no, they would have it the thing was John’s. It’s old enough to blow up in their faces if they fire it—and I do, do hope it does. What your dear mother will say when she hears, I can’t think. Such a friend she’s been to him.’

  ‘A lawyer,’ said Philippa, ‘we’ll get him the best lawyers.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Mr Lucey looked dubious, ‘though I always agree with dear Ollie Goldsmith who said: “Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.” ’

  Georgiana broke in brightly: ‘Or Shakespeare who said: “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” ’

  ‘Dick the Butcher,’ exulted Mr Lucey. ‘I’ve found a twin soul.’

  Philippa interrupted their exchange of literary esteem. The sooner she could finish her business here, the sooner she could organize John Beasley’s defense. ‘I need a forger, Mr Lucey. It’s a matter of helping a friend escape from France. Before he went off to get arrested, Uncle John said that you might know of someone who could make a French certificat for me.’

  ‘Look at her,’ Mr Lucey exclaimed to Georgiana. ‘The very pattern of an English rose and can I find her a forger. So like her dear mother in many ways. Well, Miss Philippa, it so happens that I can, not that I’ve used him in an illegal capacity, of course, but occasionally one wants things authenticated that haven’t been authenticated, if you know what I mean. Only the other day one got one’s hands on a long-lost play by Ben Jonson which dear Ben had neglected to sign though one knew it was his ...’

  He caught Philippa’s eye and bridled. ‘Don’t you look at me like that, miss. We all get inky fingers if we’re to survive in this business.’

  ‘You mistake me,’ Philippa told him, gently, ‘I am very grateful.’

  Mollified, Lucey slapped the back of one of his hands with the fingers of the other. ‘There I go, such a temper. I’m just a-tremble over this treason affair. All forgiven? Now, I’m not saying Scratcher’s your man but he is foreign and very thick with our Froggy friends.’

  ‘He sounds the perfect thing.’

  ‘Not perhaps the best description of our Scratcher.’ Mr Lucey went to an ink-stained shelf and scribbled some words on a scrap of paper. ‘He’s not the most salubrious member of our little coterie, is he, Jamie? Festering would not be too strong a word. And cautious . . . my dear, he suspects his own fleas of informing on him.’

  ‘Perhaps you could let him know that I won’t.’

  ‘That’s what I’m doing. Jamie dear, run this round to Scratcher and see if he’s fit to receive. We don’t want Miss Philippa encountering him in one of his turns, do we?’

  While they waited, Lucey told them he had already been to the Tower to see if he could gain admittance to the prisoners. ‘And got nowhere, of course. When I demanded to see the lieutenant, the beefeater I talked to was unbelievably rude, he told me to . . . well, I won’t tell you what he told me to do but he wouldn’t let me in. I said to him, I said: “I suppose I’ll only be able to see my friends when their heads are stuck up on poles, will I?” But it was lost on that vermin, of course, simply lost.’

  In the circumstances, Philippa thought it had been brave of Lucey to go at all, especially if he’d been dressed as he was now. But courage was all around. Hidden upstairs, Lucey told her, waiting for distribution, were several dozen copies of Paine’s Rights of Man, which he had managed to retrieve from Beasle
y’s print shop before they could be burned—‘Such a worthy book’—and he was happy to accept some money with which to rescue Beasley’s press from the pound. ‘Do thank your mother,’ he said, as he took it and, resignedly, Philippa said she would.

  While the printer was out of the room fetching some refreshment, Georgiana explored, picking up one of the sheets that Jamie had been setting into type. ‘Hannah More,’ she said. ‘Look at this, Pippy, he’s publishing the enemy.’

  ‘Pirating the enemy, I think.’ It did not seem likely that a woman who was gaining fame as a purveyor of morals and education to the poor would use Lucey to print her tracts; it was hardly less surprising to find Lucey prepared to broadcast strictures echoing the hellfire that Old Testament prophets had promised to the Cities of the Plain.

  ‘I’m sure dear Miss More would be delighted to have her work disseminated in these sinful parts, permission or no permission.’ Lucey had returned, tray in hand. ‘Those little chapbooks sell like Christmas beef at a penny a time. That only provides me with a ha’penny profit. Still, times are hard and a ha’penny is a ha’penny.’

  He looked over Georgiana’s shoulder. ‘Ah yes, The Story of Sinful Sally—very popular. I’ve seen raddled old whores break down and cry at poor Sally’s decline into sin and her eventual repentance. Of course, it has to be read to them ...’

  ‘I suppose if she’s inspiring the lower classes to learn to read ...’ Georgiana said, doubtfully.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Philippa said. ‘I just wish she wouldn’t lecture them.’

  Miss More’s works had been urged on her by Stephen, who was an admirer. There was no doubt the woman wrote entertainingly for a public that was otherwise catered for by churchmen prepared to bore it into virtue, but Philippa disliked her insistence on telling the poor to be content with a position that had been designed for them by Providence, at the same time urging them to give thanks for an upper class good enough to bestrew them with charity.