The Sparks Fly Upward (37 page)

‘I told him I'd heard you were upset and needed a good fuck to calm ye down.'

‘You
didn't
.'

He got up, yawning, and began pulling on his breeches. ‘I told him I'd left some papers behind. Since he could have fetched them himself, I doubt he believed me, but that's his business.'

Soon it would be everybody's. Groaning, she sat down at her dressing table to brush her hair.

‘But the first explanation was the truth, wasn't it?' He'd descended into Irish ever since he'd got her to bed; his ‘truth' was ‘troot.' He padded over and took her head between his hands. ‘Wasn't it?
Wasn't it?
You're feeling better, confess it.'

Well, she was, but not due to him, thank you very much. It was remembering Andrew that had done it; Andrew, the rescuer.

In the looking glass, she could see his fingers in her hair; his hands were the most gentlemanly thing about him; strong and nice nails. She closed her eyes to them and felt the warmth of the bare skin above his waistband against the back of her head.

‘I was upset,' she said, stubbornly. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘Ah, well.'

She went on brushing her hair, listening to him dress and the door close as he went.

From the window she saw him emerge and walk off to the stables, calling for Sanders to take him back to the theater. It was ‘theater' now, not ‘t'eater.'

A shape-changer, a bog-trotter who'd learned tricks. Everything about him was wrong. He was a skulker. Time and again she'd caught him in the alley by the stage door talking—
in Irish
—with men who'd look better on a gallows. That bravado about fetching Philippa home . . . an actor's boast and about as honest.

The coach came crunching out of the stableyard and passed beneath her window in a spray of gravel. A hat was waved out of its window.

She didn't wave back.

She sat down again to finish her toilette, wondering how it was she'd been so sure he would come to her. And that he had. As if she'd called to him and he'd heard her.
‘Ye're not denying what's been between us these last weeks?'

I damn well am
, she thought.
If you think it's the start of a liaison between us, Mick Murrough, you can think again. I'm too old and respectable for
that,
thank you very much.

But the Makepeace in the looking glass had lost respectability, despite its tidy hair and a fichu that came up to its neck. There was a glow to skin that this morning had been haggard, a suspicion of prankishness in the eyes, a disorderly mouth. She was reminded of guilty little boys denying a raid on the comfit jar while sugar still stuck to their chops.

 

 

SHE had other things to do the next day than go to The Duke's. In any case, it was a day she'd known for some time that she must reserve for John Beasley.

The coach dropped the theater party at The Duke's and then crossed the river to Clapham to set Jenny down at a house Heilbron had told her was the latest headquarters of the Abolitionists. Makepeace, now very careful of her second daughter, wanted to inspect it.

She was surprised by its grandeur; in a rural setting like Clapham she'd expected a farmhouse. This was a mansion. She and Jenny were greeted warmly by a Marianne—daughter, it turned out, of Henry Thornton, a former governor of the Bank of England.

‘You're Mr Heilbron's friends, he's spoken of you highly. How good of you, Miss Jenny, we need all the help we can get—we are trying to organize public meetings and petitions ready for the Commons debate. Mr Wilberforce and Stephen are lobbying the members but it is slow work; so many of them want gradual change. They talk of moderation, silly men. Was our Lord moderate when He saw suffering?'

Makepeace watched Jenny gathered into a drawing room full of paper, ink, good works and good women, and left her there.

She's chosen wisely,
she thought.
Wilberforce, Heilbron . . . I must not forget these men are fighting the greatest crime of history. I am thankful for them, Lord, I am really. But, dear Lord, make them extend their humanity to
everybody
; don't let them strike off the black man's chains only to put them on women.

There was a crowd outside the Old Bailey and she stayed in the coach while Sanders went in search of Mr Hackbutt. A new sessions court had replaced the one that used to accommodate judges and lawyers under its roof, leaving the far end open to the weather—an attempt to protect their lordships from the prisoners' diseases that had proved faulty when a Lord Mayor, two judges, an alderman and fifty others went down with typhus after one gaol delivery.

The frontage of this one reminded Makepeace of nothing so much as the box of toy bricks Andra had once given to their daughters, all arched windows, pilasters and pediments. The crowd waiting in clumps for admittance along the spike-topped outer wall had delineated itself into two groups that were being kept apart by a stolid line of court officials.

Quite plainly, the one to the left of the gates consisted of Paine-ites, concerned-looking men, some of whom reminded Makepeace irresistibly of Tom Glossop. (She wondered how that poor little man was getting on in France and if he had met up with his wife yet.) There were a few women amongst them and, here and there, a clump-booted, alert representative of the laboring class—a sort to which their constitutional societies were giving access.

Well behaved and worried, they nevertheless appeared to provoke passion in the smaller but louder group on the other side of the gates. Fists and the union flag were being flourished at them along with catcalls of ‘Levelers!,' ‘Traitors!,' ‘Savages!,' ‘Frog-lovers!' One of these had brought along a soapbox on which he was urging passersby to prepare themselves for the day when ‘this lawless and furious rabble'—the Paine-ites blinked sadly at him—‘would murder them in their beds.'

‘Honestly,' Makepeace said when Mr Hackbutt came to usher her into court, ‘you'd think that asking for universal suffrage was the same as wanting to cut the king's head off.'

‘Ah well, you see,' he said. ‘In France it has been.'

He'd reserved a seat for her in the public gallery. ‘How is John?' she asked him. Instead of answering the question, he brought her up to date on the trial so far. The attorney general had opened it with a nine-hour speech of intricate detail, which, in Mr Hackbutt's opinion, had done his side more harm than good. ‘Too labyrinthian.' Erskine, for the defense, on the other hand, had brilliantly poured scorn on the Crown's case that the men in the dock were traitors. He'd demolished the accusation that they'd procured arms with which to bring down the government, getting even the prosecution witnesses to admit that these were merely a few pikes and antiquated weapons with which to face the mobs attacking their homes.

‘You heard of the assault on poor Hardy's house while he was yet in the Tower?'

Yes, busy as she'd been, she'd heard of that; the attackers had wrecked it while yelling, ‘For Church and King,' and in the process caused the death of Hardy's wife in childbirth.

‘Terrible, terrible,' Mr Hackbutt went on, shaking his wigged head sadly but keeping his legal eye on the legal fox, ‘yet the tragedy may do for us what even Erskine's advocacy cannot—the jury were much distressed to hear of it. I scent a shift in the public's opinion.'

Which was more than Makepeace was able to do. For one thing, despite the open windows, Newgate, next door, had steeped the court's wood and walls in the smell of the filth in which it kept its prisoners; she could only scent the stink of humanity in terror and despair. For another, the man who now plumped himself onto the bench next to her was the one who had stood on the soapbox outside—she noticed that more anti-Paine-ites had been let into the public gallery than Paine-ites—and had come to see traitors confounded.

He was large, wore a round brown hat on top of a round brown face and a caped coat open to show a vast display of waistcoat banded in red, white and blue. Either he was copying the cartoonists' John Bull or was the original version from whom the cartoonists had taken their prototype. In view of the heat in the court and his coat, it seemed useless to hope that the perspiration, which was already dripping from his hair, would decrease.

‘Ha, ha, madam, today's the day,' he announced. ‘We can expect before nightfall to see these men of violence dancing from a rope.'

He was, he told her, a proud member of ‘the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levelers,' and he'd come up to London from his farm in Budleigh Salterton specifically for the trial, an attendance that had turned him into an expert. ‘Lord Chief Justice is being too fair to these would-be king-killers, in my opinion. They've all been given their say—which is just allowing their wickedness to find its way into the minds of the lower orders. We'd have every street beggar clamoring for a vote as good as mine, might as well give it to women. My way, they wouldn't have a trial at all, English justice too good for 'em. String 'em up, I say. Teach them to attack property.'

‘Attacked yours, did they?' Makepeace asked coldly.

He was immune to sarcasm. ‘Didn't get the chance, ma'am. Down in Devon, we strike back first. Ousted the local Leveler from his house and burned it afore he could get ours. Shrieking for the magistrate, he was—wonderful how they call on the law they have contempt for. “I
am
the magistrate,” I told him ...'

Makepeace looked around desperately but the gallery was full.

In any case, they were bringing the accused up from the cells and into the dock. Thomas Hardy, Horne Took, John Thelwall—all men Makepeace had met through Beasley—and others she didn't recognize. Men whose one crime, as far as she could see, had been to campaign peacefully for reform, men who wouldn't be on trial now if the British establishment hadn't been panicked into reaction by the Terror.

Perhaps it had cause to panic, she thought. If the men in the dock got their way, the propertied class of John Bull here would lose its power by act of parliament—hardly a less inviting prospect than being stripped of it by revolution.

All the defendants had the pallor and cough that their weeks in the Tower had given them but it was John Beasley—the last to come up—whose appearance shocked her most. He had to be helped up the steps by a warder; true, he shook off the man's hand when he reached the dock but he'd shriveled. The familiar sulk was still on his face but it was the glower of a sick man facing death.

She leaned forward and gripped the gallery's rail, hoping that he would look up and she could wave. He didn't, nor did he seem interested in the proceedings around him.
He's just trying to stay upright
, she thought.

The judge under his sword of justice, the wigged heads, the jury stacked like biscuits in their box, all lost Makepeace's attention—she spent the time trying to send strength into her friend by willing it.

At one point a burst of laughter interrupted her concentration. Erskine, the defending counsel was making his final speech. ‘. . . ridiculous that my clients' approval of some of the French Assembly's actions is evidence of their revolutionary sympathy. It is as well, my lord, that they did not say there were good things in the Koran or they might even now be charged with Mohammedanism. '

There was a disgusted grunt from John Bull. ‘Wouldn't put that past the rogues.' But the jury was smiling. For the first time, Makepeace began to hope.

The judge had summed up—not unfairly if the fidgeting of Mr Bull on her left was any indication. It was time for the jury to consider its verdict. The twelve men trooped out, looking self-conscious, like communicants having taken of the bread and the wine and returning to the body of the church to think on their souls.

‘Shouldn't be long,' John Bull said. ‘Only takes seconds to say “Guilty” '

But Mr Hackbutt, when she found him, was sanguine. ‘Erskine has been masterly,' he said. ‘ I have hopes, I have hopes.'

‘I've got an errand to run,' Makepeace told him. ‘Will there be time?'

He thought there would.

Whether there was or there wasn't, she had to see Andrew Ffoulkes.

But at St James's Square, Lord Ffoulkes's butler told her that His Lordship and his wife had not yet returned. They were expected later.

The jury was still out when Sanders delivered her back to the Old Bailey. John Bull had resumed his soapbox and was haranguing a crowd that had grown and, to judge from the heckling and the occasional egg he was receiving, was proving unsympathetic to his point of view.

George Hackbutt's right
, she thought,
public opinion's shifting.

But it was the jury's decision that mattered and it took three more hours before they made it. Makepeace spent them pacing the Old Bailey courtyard, sometimes going outside to sit in the coach, not being able to bear inactivity, and returning to the courtyard to pace.

What were they talking about in that jury room? What other verdict could they come to other than guilty? It was the one they were supposed to give; the lord chief justice, the attorney general, both of whom had advised prosecuting for treason, wanted them to give it. So did the prime minister, his cabinet, practically every peer in the land, most of parliament. So did the king.

‘Jury's coming back.'

This time Makepeace took care that she was seated well away from John Bull.

The twelve men filed in as self-consciously as they'd filed out, looking at nobody. Was this a good sign or a bad? Were those twelve sober-suited, ordinary, undoubtedly property-owning men going to hang her friend of twenty-five years?