The Sparks Fly Upward Read online

  Why do we bother? We are like little boys aping grown-up men with our swearing and our smoking and our fantastic ideas of rescue, Philippa thought. None of us really believes Nicolas can receive his certificat in time, even if we can get one to him, even if he can use it should we do so. It is mere bravado.

  Emancipated women? When we call on a man to speak for us because we are too frightened to speak for ourselves? And that man a native of a country at war with our own?

  Where was an Englishman of sufficient stature to stand up and demand emancipation for his wife, daughters, his female servants, the washerwoman who came, unseen, at night to fill her tubs ready for twenty-four hours of scrubbing for pennies, the girls lured into brothels for lack of any other occupation?

  In this age of enlightened men fighting for reform she could not think of one who championed the cause of women for women’s sake.

  Stephen, why couldn’t it be you? You command the respect of respectable men, you could shatter the complacency of our generation. Why can’t you fight for the abolition of all slavery?

  She asked herself if she could love him then—and knew it to be a useless question.

  No, it would have to be Condorcet because he was all they had.

  And at least, she thought, he can’t get pregnant.

  Chapter Five

  THERE was only a limited amount of speculation Makepeace could expend on what Mrs Glossop might think of her husband escaping imprisonment in going to France, and by the time they reached Basingstoke she’d exhausted it.

  It was a thing she’d noticed about dedicated reformers, they took any help they were given for granted, as if it were a privilege for the helper. Glossop was putting her to a lot of trouble and expense, not to mention risk, and so far had said nothing in recognition of it.

  She was sorry for him, especially as there were reminders of his plight in the effigies of Thomas Paine being burned by gangs of rioters along the first bit of the Great West Road. Nor did she necessarily want gratitude, but she didn’t expect to get bored to death, either.

  After Basingstoke, which they reached without enquiry or any more burning effigies, she put him outside on the driving box with Sanders. ‘Nobody looks at coachmen,’ she told him. Which was true. ‘Except other coachmen.’ Which was also true. ‘And they’ll be going the other way.’

  It took over four days—she could not ask Sanders to do more than fifty miles a day in this weather—but, apart from the usual vexations of winter travel, it was an uneventful journey. If the hue and cry had been called out after Glossop, the coach was ahead of it and tollgate-keepers were too mindful of the cold to stand in it asking questions.

  Better if they had; it might have roused her. As it was, inactivity and a landscape of monotonous white and gray allowed her to reflect on her losses. It seemed to her that whether she went north or south in England, she followed a signpost that led to a death. In Northumberland it was Andra’s, in Devon it was the Dowager’s.

  She didn’t go north at all, while her trips to Devon had become rarer as the remembrance entangled in it refused to yield its pain. Makepeace had made only three female friends in her life; Betty, her nurse, and Susan, both of whom were American—and Diana, Dowager Countess of Stacpoole. All of them were dead.

  The last friendship had been the most unlikely. Once the owner of T’Gallants, the great house at Babbs Cove which was now Makepeace’s property, the Dowager had been chalk to Makepeace’s cheese: lofty, elegant, aristocratic, seemingly supercilious. They’d disliked each other on sight; only circumstances and a mutual regard for freedom had brought them together to help a contingent of American seamen who landed on their doorstep during a mass escape of prisoners from Plymouth during the War of Independence.

  A strange time, but the even stranger alliance between the two women had outlived it.

  Diana had been a little older than Makepeace was then, a widow, and she’d subsequently married the man responsible for the French end of the smuggling relay between Babbs Cove and France. From then on, she and Makepeace had met every year, either at T’Gallants or the chateau of Gruchy where Diana, who became Mme de Vaubon, had enjoyed a happiness she had never known before.

  It was short-lived. When she’d conceived at the age of forty-three there had been rejoicing in the villages on both sides of the Channel but the birth of her son, Jacques, had been difficult. Makepeace was with her when she died a week later from septicemia occasioned by a piece of placenta that had refused to come away.

  Even the death of Andra seven years later had not swamped that particular grief, indeed had exacerbated it, like a hook still tugging at the mouth of a landed fish, with its reminder that the last female contemporary who could have comforted her was not there.

  The best she could do for her dead friend had been to look after the baby until its stricken father procured a suitable nurse. Afterwards she’d regularly gone back and forth to Gruchy to keep an eye on the boy. When de Vaubon, with his friend Georges Danton, entered the fraught world of politics in opposition to Louis XVI’s regime, young Jacques had spent nearly as much time with her in England as he had with his father.

  For his sake, she might have roused herself from despair after Andra’s death if the boy’s visits had been kept up but by then Guillaume de Vaubon was a celebrated figure of the Revolution and, anglophile though he was, decided it was unwise for his son to seem too much at home in a royalist country. It had been Philippa, in her frequent trips to Paris, who’d kept up the connection between the two families and ensured that the boy retained his fluent English.

  It was late by the time they reached the crest of the steep hill down to Babbs Cove; Makepeace had rejected the idea of stopping for another night on the road; there was a good moon, the ground was dry and Sanders was familiar with the way.

  Against the sound of dragging brakes as they went down, she heard Glossop ask, ‘Who owns that house then?’ Below them, frost on the dour, slated, multiangled roof of T’Gallants was gleaming in the moonlight, the only indication that the house wasn’t part of the cliff on which it stood.

  ‘It’s the missus’s,’ Sanders said.

  No, it ain’t, she thought, not really. To her, it would always belong to the tall, ivory-haired ghost who still haunted it, its face before her now, as she’d last seen it, fighting against incoherence, eyes going from hers to de Vaubon’s, lips trying to shape words and managing only, ‘Care . . . care.’

  Makepeace had leaned over so that her face was only inches from the suffering woman’s. ‘He’ll be the best cared for baby you ever damn saw.’

  A twitched smile, peace, a terrible howl from de Vaubon . . .

  She was afflicted by the thought of how little she had done for Diana’s child in the last two years. True, the boy now lived permanently in Paris with his father and Paris had become increasingly un-welcoming to all foreigners except those most dedicated to its Revolution, which Makepeace was not. In any case, last year France had declared war on England.

  But we could have met at Gruchy, she thought. De Vaubon had left the manoir of Gruchy in the hands of his steward and its villagers but it was still his and its trade with Babbs Cove still carried on.

  Wars had never prevented the activity of smuggling during the many conflicts between France and England in the past, never would. Gruchy on its lonely, wind-wracked Cotentin shore was, like Babbs Cove, isolated from government both geographically and temperamentally and in its view, which was also Babbs Cove’s, government, whatever its color, imposed starvation taxes that it was the individual’s duty to avoid. Government, said Babbs Cove and Gruchy, were enemies but the two villages had been trading with each other for centuries, trusting each other, sometimes intermarrying, always making a profit from their association. Therefore, government could both bugger off and fous-moi la paix. Gruchy, like Babbs Cove, decided who was friend and foe and over the years ‘ze missus’ had proved herself a reliable member of their company and was proud to be so.

>   Yes, she thought, the boy and I could have met at Gruchy. Should have.

  They’d arrived. Sanders opened the coach door and let down the steps for her to descend onto the apron of the Pomeroy Arms, always Makepeace’s first port of call.

  The night was frigidly still apart from the sigh of water on sand. The looming T’Gallants cut off the westerly moon’s light from half the cove so that only the eastern cottages made a defined pattern of roofs and dark doorways, their fishing nets strung between them like spider webs. Behind them, a hunting owl swept optimistically over steep, white fields.

  The scene never failed to move her, though nowadays a sense of excitement was missing, as if the pungency of sea and seaweed had been taken away.

  The Pomeroy Arms smelled the same, though. A mixture of fresh whitewash battled with the old wood in its crazy, crisscrossing beams, logs burning in the huge grate, good cooking and the liquor ingrained in the tables of its booths.

  Every time she entered it, Makepeace thought that if the inn were on a coaching route it would be celebrated and she thanked the Lord that it was too far off the beaten track to be known to any but its locals. Even so, it prospered well enough, acting as it did as church hall, dispensary, meeting house, grog shop, refuge for locked-out husbands, courthouse, assembly room and funeral parlor. It was the place where the village men sat every night and their women, coming to fetch them home, stayed for a glass of something. It was wormed with hidden cupboards and passages where contraband was disposed until the ponies came to distribute it through most of southern Devon. It was the beating heart of the village. And it was a secret.

  Dell, shrieking, and Tobias, smiling gravely, advanced on her. Two children with pale, freckled negroid features were ushered out to ‘tell Jan Gurney that Herself has arrived.’ Another was dispatched to help Sanders, an old friend, with the horses.

  A chair was shoved under her bottom, her feet tipped onto a footstool towards the fire and a beaker of rum and butter put into her hand, another given to Thomas Glossop who was told, ‘Drink that now, it’ll drive the Divil from your soul and the snakes from England. ’

  Makepeace gave a stage groan. With a dubious past behind her, Dell’s marriage to the quiet, elderly black man who’d once been the Dowager’s servant had been happy for them both, and contentment had enlarged the woman in more ways than one, allowing her Irish-ness full rein—along with her figure.

  Knowing the inn’s importance to the village, Makepeace had wondered if she was doing the right thing when she’d made this odd couple proprietors of the Pomeroy. But the choice had been a success; Babbs Cove might be isolated but few villages in England were as familiar with foreigners. Generations of illegal trading with other countries had brought it into contact with the polyglot world of seamen. French, Dutch, Irish, Lascars, Chinese, Turks, Russians, Africans, West Indians . . . what were another couple of oddities? Especially when their ale was good, their secrecy assured, their cooking excellent and, for all the landlady’s Hibernian ebullience, it was the lisping but dignified and efficient Tobias who ruled the roost.

  Dell ignored Makepeace’s protest. ‘Are ye for France?’

  ‘He is,’ Makepeace said, nodding at Glossop. ‘I’m not. I’m staying a couple of days before Sanders drives me to Bristol to meet Aaron. Will you put us up?’ Preparing T’Gallants for occupation in this weather was a big undertaking; anyway, she preferred the inn.

  ‘Need ye ask? I’ll do some lobscouse for supper, the way you like it.’

  I was lonely, Makepeace thought. She was still lonely but at least, in this inn, she was among those who’d known and loved the dead as she had. A beautiful drawing of the Dowager, sketched by Betty’s Josh, hung on one wall. Upstairs was the room where de Vaubon had been nursed to health by his future wife. There was the false wall, mended now, that excisemen had stoved in during the search for French brandy . . . the bastards.

  That was one thing she’d done by buying into the Cove’s smuggling trade; she’d bought the local excise as well. Once the swine who’d been chief customs officer at the time had been gotten rid of, the rest had proved insufficiently paid to resist the considerable pourboires she’d offered them to let the pony trains go into the night without investigation. Philippa said it was corruption, Makepeace regarded it as insurance . . .

  ‘And there’s a surprise for ye . . .’ Dell was saying. A blast of cold stopped her as the door opened. ‘Here’s himself now, he’ll do the telling.’

  Apart from his yellow hair turning white, Jan Gurney had changed very little; he still had to stoop to pass under the inn’s lintel, he could still pick Makepeace up and swing her round. ‘Did young Philippa get the letter?’

  ‘What letter?’

  ‘Gor damn, I took un to Plymouth, put the bugger in the post bag myself. Should’ve reached Lunnon by now. They handed it to us at Gruchy, trip before last. Come from Paris, so they did say.’

  ‘Who sent it?’

  ‘Ah diddun read un, did I? Reckoned it might be from that Sophie Condorcet as we brought over that time. Nice little woman, she was. How be our Philippa, anyway?’

  In the interchange of news about families, the fate of the letter was forgotten.

  ‘’Tis as well you’ve turned up,’ Jan said. ‘Us only got back from France three days since and ’twere a puzzle what to do about young Jack; whether send for ee or take un to ee in Lunnon.’

  ‘Jack?’ She was fuddled from the tiring journey.

  Dell called from the kitchen. ‘She don’t know yet. He’s gone to his bed.’

  ‘Jacques?’

  ‘As ever was,’ Jan said. ‘Only safe when he’m asleep. Rest of the time he’s as like to blow up the Pomeroy as not, ain’t he, Toby?’

  ‘Exthperimental young gentleman,’ Tobias said.

  ‘Will you tell me, for God’s sake?’ hissed Makepeace.

  Jan sat her down and squatted on a stool opposite. He looked grave. ‘Reckon things must be pretty bad for our Gil, missus. Him and Danton has got upsides with Robespierre, so they told us at Gruchy. Tryin’ to stop that evil bugger cutting everybody’s head off, so they did say, which puts ’em both in line to losing their own according.’

  ‘Guillaume has sent Jacques over? Jan, it must be bad.’

  Jan shrugged. ‘The boy ain’t been told the extent of ut. Still thinks his daddy’s Lord Muck and Muck of the Revolution along of Danton. Which he may be, I don’t know. Just looks nasty, that’s all I’m saying. Better have a word with the tutor when you get un alone. Weedy little sweet’eart but clever enough I don’t doubt. Where is he, Dell?’

  ‘In his room.’

  ‘It must be bad,’ Makepeace said again.

  The intricacies of the French situation, who was in, who was out, had become too entangled and fast-moving for her understanding. Like almost everybody else in England, she regarded Robespierre as the Terror and the Terror as Robespierre. If de Vaubon and Danton were opposing that deadly little man, they were indeed risking their heads and the risk was obviously so great that Guillaume wanted his son out of danger.

  ‘They wouldn’t guillotine an eleven-year-old boy, just because of his father,’ she said. ‘Would they?’

  Jan spat. ‘I don’t put nothing past them buggers. Nobody do know what they done with that poor little lad of King Louis’s, do they?’

  Probably, they wouldn’t kill Jacques, she thought, but he would lose the de Vaubon land, which, if it were deemed to belong to a traitor, would revert to the State. He’d be penniless and stigmatized.

  And the thing was, she thought, that by ensuring the safety of his son, de Vaubon had quadrupled the danger to himself. From the first, the revolutionaries had called themselves patriots so that, increasingly, the label ‘unpatriotic’ had become a slur. Not to wear the red, white and blue cockade was unpatriotic, Philippa had told her, so was the use of vous rather than tu and the deferential Monsieur rather than Citizen . Under the new Law of Suspects, the appellation was now a death sentenc
e.

  And if sending one’s son to safety in an enemy country was not unpatriotic, Makepeace didn’t know what was. Oh, Gil.

  ‘Things must be bad,’ she repeated.

  Taking a candle, she went upstairs and quietly entered Jacques’s room. The boy didn’t stir from his sleep and she stood for a long time, looking at him. The same dark hair as his father, though somewhat less curly than Guillaume’s, the same excellent sallow skin, long nose and planes of the cheeks, and, yet, in that strange way of physical heredity, the parts combining to look like his mother.

  At rest, he appeared younger than his eleven years, a little boy, but at the same time Makepeace glimpsed for the first time the man he’d become—if he was allowed to.

  Why, for all their puffing and bravado, did boys seem to her so much more vulnerable than girls? Andrew Ffoulkes, Josh . . . now Jacques de Vaubon, a poignant line of male humanity, sons she’d never had, for all of whom she felt a ferocious, protective impulse.

  A hiss told Makepeace that her tears were dropping on the candle flame as she inclined over the figure in the bed. There was so much love encapsulated in it; Diana’s love, the boy’s love for his father, the father’s sacrifice for the boy.

  She wiped her eyes angrily—bugger it—and went outside to slam on the tutor’s door and tell him to come downstairs.

  When he joined her in a corner booth of the taproom, she could see why he’d earned Jan’s description of ‘weedy sweetheart.’ The smugglers of Babbs Cove suspected the sexual proclivity of any man unless he looked as if he could shin up a topmast in a nor’easterly, hold his liquor, spit five yards and wrestle a customs officer to the ground.

  Quintus Luchet did not. He was misty, the sort of person one had trouble remembering afterward, with die-away eyes, slight frame, colorless complexion. His high-collared black coat needed a brush, like his long hair, and his shirt and loosely-tied cravat were grubby—a condition which, had it been the result of his travels, Makepeace would have forgiven, but she instead suspected to be the latest revolutionary fashion. Clean linen, Philippa had said, was unpatriotic.