The Sparks Fly Upward Page 9

  He had a book in his hand and one finger was holding it open at the place where his reading had been interrupted. Very irritating.

  Impassioned by the emotion she’d undergone upstairs, she felt an immediate impulse to bully him. ‘Well, young man, and what’s this about?’

  His response was slow and sweetly kind, as if he had to drag his mind away from higher things.‘You are Madame Hedley?’

  ‘I am.’

  Still holding the book, he fumbled in an interior pocket of his coat for a letter, dropped it, picked it up and handed it to her. ‘From M Vaubon.’

  She nearly snapped at him again but, of course, Guillaume had discarded the ‘de’ as too suggestive of rank. Philippa said that ordinary people called Leroi or Leduc were hastily changing their names to something ridiculous, like Egalité. God help us, what had happened to French common sense?

  Even the stamp on the sealing wax was plain where his device had once been an elaborately entwined dV. She broke it carefully.

  He’d written one line. ‘I trust him to you, missus.’

  She pressed her knuckles against her mouth.

  It was the message of a dying man. God, oh God, he knew he couldn’t win. They’d kill him.

  Suddenly, he was in the taproom, where he’d been so often before, one foot up on a stool, his enormous voice roaring out the latest escape from the customs cutters to an appreciative audience, the most alive person she’d ever met.

  I trust him to you, missus.

  Fine bloody time for you to be quiet spoken, she sobbed at him.

  Jan Gurney had come over and was patting her on the back. She handed him the letter, wiped her nose on the back of her hand and turned back to Luchet. ‘Well?’

  ‘The excuse is give out that the boy is ill and needs sea air,’ he said.

  ‘Given out,’ she said. His English was almost accentless and, to give him his due, he was quick to understand what she wanted to know.

  ‘Given out. Where Paris is concerned, Jacques is at Gruchy for his health.’

  Well, that was one thing; his people at Gruchy would never give him away.

  ‘What’s happening to M de Vaubon?’

  ‘When we leave him, nothing. He has make a great speech in the Convention, defending himself and Danton against the charge they are responsible for the massacres of September and would have save the King and Queen from execution if they could. He shout them all down. But he is too close to Danton. The enragés say the two are sorry for the State prisoners and they are against the Terror, and Robespierre suspect them of lack of virtue, that they are careless in the matter of money, corrupt.’

  They’re probably all those things, Makepeace thought. She’d never met Danton but Philippa had described him as de Vaubon’s virtual twin, large, loud, generous, a lover of good food, drink and women. What Danton’s approach to the making of money was, she didn’t know, but if it was like de Vaubon’s with his smuggling, it would hardly accord to the purist Robespierre’s idea of virtue.

  But Luchet was saying that sympathy for the Terror’s victims was the gravest charge against the two men. ‘In the Convention, Robespierre says, “I suppose a man of your moral principles would not think anyone deserve punishment?” And Danton leap up and shout: “I suppose you are annoyed if none do!” ’

  Yes, Makepeace thought, that’s the difference between men like de Vaubon and Danton and men like Robespierre. Perhaps it’s the difference between men everywhere.

  ‘Well, I know what side I’m on,’ she said and was irritated by Luchet’s lack of response. His report had seemed disinterested, patronizing, as if he were describing the struggles of flies caught on sticky paper. Perhaps he is, she thought, perhaps they are. But one of those flies is his employer and my friend.

  ‘And now,’ continued Luchet, still remote, ‘M Danton has go back to his home in Arcis and M Vaubon take me and Jacques to Gruchy and tell me to bring the boy to England. Perhaps they should not be absent from Paris at this time. It is a mistake to turn the back, I think.’

  ‘Oh, you do, do you? And I’m supposed to look after you, am I?’ She couldn’t help it, the man inspired aggression.

  He gave a shrug that was purely Gallic. ‘M Vaubon trust me with his son.’

  ‘Trusts,’ she said, automatically. ‘You don’t want to go back to the Revolution, then?’

  ‘The Revolution has turn ugly,’ he said. ‘I am concern only for beauty.’ Dreamily, he tapped his book which, she saw, was a collection of Virgil’s Eclogues—in Latin. ‘Before you call me here, madame, I wander the Tuscan hills in the company of genius.’

  ‘Better get back to them, then,’ she snapped.

  When he’d gone, Jan Gurney took his place opposite her. ‘Told you.’

  She shook her head. ‘He’s no molly,’ she said. ‘He’s a romantic. That’s worse.’

  SHE was woken the next morning by the noise of tapping coming through the window of her room overlooking the inn’s backyard. Jacques was hammering a piece of metal on the well head. A fire burned under what looked like an old metal wash bucket, small pieces of some machine were scattered about the cobbles.

  ‘What are you doing, you blasted boy?’

  He looked up apologetically. ‘I try to muffle the hammer, missus.’

  ‘Not enough. What are you doing?’

  ‘I try to make a steam pump. It would be good. To pump water from the well for M Toby and Mme Dell.’

  ‘You’d need a surface condenser,’ she said out of her years of marriage to Andra, and received a look of such affection it made her smile; her stock had just gone up. ‘I’ll get dressed and we’ll go for a walk.’

  When they met, they kissed on either cheek, French fashion, but he wasn’t too old to hold her hand as they went through the village.

  Out at sea, gulls made livid parentheses against dull, snow-laden clouds but in the east, where the sky was clear, a wintry dandelion of a sun was coming up, reflecting full on window panes so that they seemed to blink, casting a path across the cove and lending such an improbable gold to water, grass, rock and the lines of little cottages, that they might have been painted by a sentimental watercolorist.

  The air was crisp and women were hanging out bedding to blanch it rid of fleas. They nodded companionably at Makepeace, as if they’d seen her only yesterday; all the news she’d given Jan last night had already been disseminated. Rachel Gurney called out, ‘’Morning, missus. ’Mornin’, Jack. Step in for a zider on the way baack.’

  ‘I like England,’ Jacques said.

  ‘May have to stay for a bit, so your pa says,’ Makepeace told him. ‘He’s very busy.’

  ‘Papa is busy always.’ It was said without rancor.

  She wondered at the boy’s lack of inquiry but it appeared that he was used to being left in other people’s care during de Vaubon’s many absences. Jacques said, ‘He is going on mission to the Loire, you know, and may be away a long time. It is why I come here.’

  That was the story, then, and he seemed satisfied with it; he had little apparent awareness of the political situation; being sent to England was merely a reversion to the summers he’d spent with Makepeace in the past and he didn’t question why any more than he had then. Obviously, de Vaubon had been able to isolate him from the worst excesses of the Terror.

  He talked about the rented house in the quiet suburb of Saint Cloud where he’d been able have a workshop in the garden in which to build model steam engines. They were his passion, and part of his complacence in coming to England was that it was the home of steam power. ‘I have brought my cylinders and a boiler,’ he said, hopefully. ‘They are in the stables. M Gurney said I would sink his boat but I think he joked.’

  ‘I’d better get you a workroom then,’ she said and felt him squeeze her hand.

  ‘Have you met M Watt?’ he asked.

  ‘James Watt? Yes, he was a friend of Andra’s.’

  ‘Ohhh.’ She might have admitted to a nodding acquaintance with God.
‘What is he like?’

  She didn’t say she’d found the Scotsman suspicious, ungainly, penny-pinching and morose. She said instead what was equally true, ‘Very clever.’

  There was a sigh of envy. ‘Will I meet him? I must ask him many things.’

  They had reached the end of the village and took the path up to the headland that looked across the cove to T’Gallants. The sheep crunching the grass were dirty yellow bundles against the frost.

  By the time they reached the top, Jacques had lain before her his plans to become a great engineer applying the motion of steam to everything that could be made to move by its power. ‘I will build a steam carriage for you. You can go everywhere without horses.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘How will it get water?’

  A wave of the hand, so like his father’s. ‘There will be water stations along every road. A Frenchman built the first steam carriage, M Cugnot. You hear of Nicolas Cugnot? Mine will be better.’

  ‘What happened to his?’

  A very slight twitch of the mouth, so like his mother. ‘It knocked many walls down and King Louis put him in prison. But mine will be better.’

  ‘How did you become interested in steam engines?’

  ‘Andra.’ He was surprised she should ask. ‘He knew everything. Do you remember? When I was little he took me to Paris to meet Benjamin Franklin?’

  He chattered on, talking about Andra without caution and she realized that everybody else sidled tensely up to her husband’s name, thereby making him so much more dead. Here was Andra as he had been and she was grateful.

  The view was tremendous. ‘There’s T’Gallants. That used to be your mother’s house,’ she said. ‘Still is, really.’ She’d told him this before but he might have forgotten. However, it didn’t work by machine and so didn’t interest him.

  ‘Is that Plymouth?’ he asked, pointing to a tiny cluster of sail in the far west. ‘Does it use the shutter telegraph? Brest can send a signal to Paris and receive another back in a few hours if the wezzer is good.’

  ‘You’re ahead of us there,’ she told him. ‘The Admiralty’s only just begun setting up relays to London.’ She didn’t approve; telegraph was excellent if it helped shipping but fast and accurate signaling between coastguards would do the smuggling business no good.

  He climbed a few rocks and then came back to her.

  ‘How does M Gurney manage to get past the blockade?’

  ‘He waits for bad weather.’

  It was why smugglers were first-class sailors; conditions that sent other boats scuttling into harbor were their opportunity. Even a blockade, such as the British were trying to impose on French shipping, had to be lifted in a storm or too much damage was done to vessels beating back and forth against a lea shore.

  Mention of the war reminded her. For all their fluency in English, both Luchet and Jacques could not be mistaken as anything other than French. Even the boy, who had the better accent, suffered an occasional lapse of his ‘th’s.’

  She raised her voice above the breeze that was coming up and beginning to pound the sea against the rocks below them. ‘Jacques,’ she said, ‘don’t forget England’s at war with the French Republic. While you’re in this country, you and your tutor are going to hear a lot of bad things said against revolutionaries like your pa. I don’t expect you to agree with them but you mustn’t disagree, not out loud, you mustn’t. If it gets known who your pa is, you’ll be in trouble, you might even be arrested.’

  She didn’t want to frighten him, but this was vital. The British government was becoming as nervous of spies as the Comité de Surveillance in France. And if the French emigrés suspected that the son of de Vaubon, a man they hated, was in their midst . . . they could get him deported, they could even kill him.

  She was assailed by an image of the boy brutally beheaded in a back alley, a note attached to his torso: ‘Revenge for Marie Antoinette.’

  Complications piled up. ‘You’ll have to change your name,’ she said, and added, as Jacques’s nose wrinkled, ‘Don’t you cause no trouble. I ain’t looking over my shoulder every minute for some royalist with a dagger. He might miss you and get me.’

  She saw him laugh; his teeth were a pleasure against his olive skin. He’ll be beating ’em off when he’s older, she thought. He grew serious: ‘Can I be Watt?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can I be Jacques Watt? Not ashamed of de Vaubon but like . . . like a nom-de-guerre.’

  She saw his point immediately. He wouldn’t be dishonoring his father, merely adopting a nickname. ‘But Watt ain’t very French.’

  ‘No, but you see, Watt, Watteau, Water, Steam. I shall be Jacques Steam.’

  ‘Watt it is.’

  The wind was strengthening, blowing seagulls off course, ruffling gorse and the sheep’s coats, livening the deadness of the cold with what could well be the first bluster of spring. Glossop would have a bumpy time of it across the Channel.

  They started to go back down the hill. Makepeace was still worried. ‘I’ve got to go to Bristol and meet my brother but perhaps you should stay here.’ He would be safe enough hidden in Babbs Cove where strangers, if any, were immediately scrutinised and, often enough, sent away.

  He stopped and looked away to sea. ‘I would like to be with you,’ he said, hopelessly.

  He’d been left too often. Come to think of it, she couldn’t bear to be parted from him now. I trust him to you, missus.

  She put a hand on his shoulder. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘but we’re damn well going by horsepower.’

  They went back to the village, relieved to be in each other’s company.

  BRISTOL was a beautiful city, a busy, bright, bustling, bullish, bouyant city and—as far as Makepeace was concerned—a bastard. She loathed it. Every visit she made, and those had been as few as possible, she loathed it more.

  Its docks and harbors prickled with masts like toothpick cases, its shipping constantly setting sail for and returning from exotic ports, the foreign tongues chattering in its streets, should have reminded her of her American birthplace, Boston, though in fact Bristol’s situation on the confluence of the rivers Avon and Frome was lovelier. It even smelled sweet, its air filled with the scent of chocolate, rum and sugar from its refineries. But to Makepeace’s nostrils there always came the underlying stink of rottenness, an ineradicable base of filth such as became apparent when the tide went out to reveal the sewage on the bed of the Avon as it curved gracefully between steep, wooded cliffs.

  Slavery.

  To the innocent eye, Bristol looked like any other successful town in England. The slaves being landed at its docks were no more than the comparative few who were fetched up for sale to supply the wealthy with a fashionable black servant in London.

  It was only after a while that you became aware that the ships’ chandlers along its waterfront stocked a large range of strange goods among the usual marine provisioning—hand- and foot-cuffs, mouth bits, whips, branding irons, that the bottoms constructed in the shipyards were being fitted with curious, small compartments into which human beings could be inserted like books into a library shelf.

  It was only then you realized that Bristol’s sweet air was the refinement of a trade that went on thousands of miles away, unseen by the ships’ owners and builders and insurers who sent them out, in which seventy thousand souls a year were transported from Africa to work and die on the plantations in the West Indies. Next to Liverpool, Bristol ran the biggest slaving trade of any English port.

  Makepeace knew about slavery. As a child, Betty, the best of women, had made the Middle Passage from Africa to Virginia as one of six hundred living beings spooned into its interior. Ordure from the bodies on the shelf above had dripped down on her and her mother, to whom she was manacled. A sailor used to come round every two days to inspect the cargo and give it water, his lantern the only light they saw. On the sixth inspection, he’d looked at Betty’s mother and said, ‘ ’Nother one,’ and they’d c
ome and taken the body away to sling it into the sea.

  ‘But I wasn’t never certain she was daid ’cos I heard her moan,’ Betty used to say. Then she’d wipe her eyes and add, ‘Better the sea took her, mebbe, ’cos Ma was a proud woman and she couldn’t never have stood nekkid in the marketplace when they come to sell us.’

  Betty had survived it. She’d survived the branding and the beating and the work of the plantation and the swamp she’d had to wade through when she ran away from it. She always said her life began when she encountered the horse and cart in which Makepeace’s parents were traveling north after another of Mr Burke’s unsuccessful ventures in farming. Makepeace’s father had his faults but he and his wife considered slavery an abomination in the sight of God.

  So did Makepeace. To her, Bristol’s merchants and their wives reeked of it, as if their finery and perfume could not be rid of the sweat from the black bodies that had paid for them, as if the sheen of fat on their skin had been squeezed from the marrow of other people’s bones. The beautiful Queen Anne squares, the sugar houses, the carved gateways, the gardens, the churches, had been built with profit gained from vast and unimaginable suffering.

  It was a slaving city and gloried in it. At the news that the latest abolition bill, for which Wilberforce and others—among them Makepeace’s prospective son-in-law—had worked so hard, was defeated yet again in the House of Commons, the bells of Bristol had rung in triumph amid civic celebration.

  Well, the damn place wouldn’t get a penny out of her. She’d chosen an inn outside the city walls in which to spend the night and was prepared neither to drink nor eat while she waited for her brother. The trouble was, the packet from Wexford with Aaron aboard would only arrive at Bridge Street Landing when the tide came in—and at the moment the tide was out. It would be a longish wait.

  In fact, of course, she’d have to spend some money; Jacques was agog at the overflowing confectionery shops, the international character of the streets, the fair advertising fluting snake-charmers from India, tightrope walkers, a two-headed lady, etc., and it was a shame to deny him. Sanders could look after him and Luchet while they saw the sights.