The Sparks Fly Upward (50 page)

The play was ending—it seemed to have lasted a thousand years; Oroonoko and Imoinda were dead.

There was no epilogue; Aaron, who should have read it, was leaving the stage empty except for the separation of the slave mother and child, their hands imploring for each other as they were led off.

The bailiff beside Makepeace was sobbing his heart out.

The usual stunned silence and then the thunderclap of applause.

One curtain call, only one, for Aaron and Mrs Jordan. Only one for the other leading players, despite the roar from the audience.

The whole company came on. Makepeace's bailiff was on his feet, clapping, whistling, stamping; if his prisoner had wanted, she could have slipped away to China without being noticed.

Instead, she was intent on the line of the bowing, curtseying cast, which, she thought, was taking up a fraction more of the stage's width than it had before. Was there one more jewelled, black-corked, beturbaned Indian boy in it than usual? Somewhat shorter than the rest?

She looked up at Blanchard's box. He had seen; he was talking to the footman, pointing. She saw the footman hurry out.

‘Want to meet the players?' she asked her bailiff, already dragging him towards the stage. Behind her, a frustrated audience tried to clap the curtain into going up again.

So willing was her captor that, when they reached the Green Room, he pushed Makepeace aside and was lost to her, enveloped into the exuberant, sweating, shouting postmortem that was the inevitable result of another successful night.

Bracey, staggering slightly as if already drunk, pushed her way through the players towards Makepeace. ‘We're taking over the Boar's Head for a celebration,' she shouted. ‘All of us, in costume.'

Aaron came up and planted a black kiss on his sister's cheek. ‘You won't want to come, I expect,' he said, quite as loudly as Bracey. ‘You're tired. You'll want to take the coach home
now
. We'll order hackneys later.'

Makepeace looked at him in inquiry.

‘Now,' he said.

She nodded.

‘Come along then.' With Makepeace on one arm and Bracey on the other, Aaron led the way into the passage and towards the stage door, the whole company following him, still talking and laughing, still in costume, carrying the enchanted bailiff with them.

The other bailiff looked as disgruntled as any man who had spent an hour peering into prop rooms, stumbling over ropes and scenery and generally being hissed at for getting in the way. He held the narrow passage to the stage door, one hand up to stop the oncoming procession while he listened to Blanchard's footman who was whispering in his ear.

‘What?' Gabble from over-excited actors tended to inhibit communication.

‘He's dressed like a blackie,' the footman said, more loudly, ‘turban on his head or was. Smallish chap, about so high.'

‘I'll get him.' The bailiff scrutinized Aaron as if suspecting him of having suddenly shot up from ‘so high' to six feet tall. He began to walk forward, squeezed past the Widow Lackitt's ludicrous skirt, ignored Makepeace and slowly made his way down the passage, inspecting everyone in it. The stagestruck Nobby was pulled sharply out of the line and told to ‘go and help Tom watch the audience come out.'

Blanchard's footman was now talking to someone in the shadows by the door. It was Luchet.

Makepeace went towards him. The tutor, catching sight of her, quailed at her approach. Seeing the look on her face, the footman opened the door and escaped, leaving it ajar to the bad air of the alley and giving Makepeace a glimpse of yet another bailiff, this one with a cudgel in his hand, waiting to stop any eleven-year-old fugitive leaving the theater. Where Jacques was, what plan her company had devised she didn't know. Probably none of them would get away with it, the power of the law would come down on them all but, as God was her witness, she'd deal with the wobbling apology for a human being called Luchet before it did.

She grabbed his coat lapels and stood on tiptoe to put her face near his. ‘You betrayed your charge, tutor.'

He didn't try to deny it; he was appalled. ‘I did not mean for this to happen ...'

‘I'll write that on your tombstone,' Makepeace said. ‘Because, sure as the Devil's in Dockside, if that boy goes to his death your bollocks go with him.'

‘Missus, I swear, I did not know she would . . . She ask me who is the boy of mystery. I swear her to secrecy ...'

‘Swore,' Makepeace amended automatically. ‘What else did you tell her as she'll have told Blanchard?'

‘Nothing,
nothing
.'

She looked behind her. Noise reverberated round the dark little passage. Protest at being kept from celebration was being raised by voices trained to carry, and towards the end of the line, the bailiff was causing the Countess d'Abreville to have hysterics by accusing seven-year-old Henri of being a French revolutionary spy.

Makepeace turned back to Luchet. ‘Did you tell her how you and Jacques came into the country? Or where?'

‘No,
no
.' This was genuine. ‘She did not ask.'

‘Are you going to?'

‘No.' The man was sulking now. ‘She promise she would say nothing but she tell
him
. She betray me.'

‘There's a lot of it about.' Satisfied, Makepeace let go of the man's shirt. She'd have liked to hit him, but to create a further kerfuffle seemed unwise and anyway the bailiff was allowing them to go.

He was telling his fellow in the alley to come inside and search the theater now that everyone else was gone. ‘I'll see this lot off. Is Tom watching the front?'

‘Letting 'em out in groups.'

The usual admirers, male and female, were awaiting the cast at the end of the alley but even in the ensuing melée, the chief bailiff stuck to Makepeace's heels as if instinct told him she could lead him to his prey. Nor could she dodge him because Aaron's arm trapped hers. He walked slowly, both he and Bracey on the other side lowering their heads graciously to the spontaneous applause of the crowd as they passed.

Again, Makepeace had to wonder if Bracey was drunk; instead of her usual graceful walk, the actress was tottering as she went. Seeing Makepeace lean forward to look at her, she gave a broad wink.

They were in the street now, colliding with passersby who stopped to watch the costumed parade in amazement. Some of The Duke's audience was still trapped in the foyer and only being allowed to leave in threes and fours.

Makepeace's coach, an attraction in itself, was waiting outside. Dizzy had overtaken them and was talking to Sanders. Aaron's feathers nodded towards a one-horse carriage on the other side of the street. ‘They intend to follow you home,' he muttered out of the side of his mouth. ‘Don't let 'em.'

Sanders had opened the coach door and was letting down its steps. Makepeace felt the bailiff push past her and scramble inside, pulling at the coach's cushions, tapping its roof. Sullenly, he got out again. ‘Empty. All right, get in.' He stood by the door to make sure she did.

Aaron helped his sister inside, keeping the door open. ‘Godspeed, ' he said.

She leaned forward to kiss him. ‘Keep him safe,' she whispered.

‘Same to you,' he said.

Bracey took his place, putting one foot on the steps to raise her face to Makepeace's and kiss it, her great skirts billowing.

Makepeace felt something slither against her ankles. The coach rocked slightly.

Bracey shut the door. The window was down and Makepeace reached out to her with both hands. ‘Thank you,' she said; she had difficulty with it. ‘And Bracey ...'

‘Yes, missus?'

‘Tell the company from me, they were . . .
extra
wonderful tonight.'

Widow Lackitt was grinning. ‘We bloody were, weren't we?'

Sanders cracked his whip and the coach jolted forward at a rate that threw Makepeace back against the seat so that there was no chance to wave good-bye to The Duke's and its actors—something for which she was always sorry.

The body on the floor started to get up but she put her foot on its head. ‘We ain't out of the woods yet.'

It grumbled. ‘I do not like to hide under women's skirts.'

‘You be grateful,' Makepeace said. She opened the flap to the box. ‘Anyone following us, Sanders?'

‘They are, missus. But we got the speed.'

She sighed. This was déjà vu. ‘Sanders, why do we always end up on the wrong side of the law?'

‘Don't know, missus. But we always do.'

This time, though, she couldn't go back to Reach House. They would know where she lived, and where Jacques lived; Blanchard would have told them. This time—and it struck her hard—she could never go back.

‘Where to, missus?'

‘Babbs Cove,' she said.

Chapter Sixteen

THE most shocking thing about their trial was how run-of-the-mill it was and how tired the court was. When Ffoulkes's and Philippa's turn came they were merely customers in a long, long queue to be served by men with a tedious job to do before shutting-up time. There was no special interest in the fact that they were English. The Tribunal had tried Englishmen and women before, as it had tried Germans, Dutch, Spaniards, Danes and sentenced them all to death; it killed internationally.

The setting was nice; late-evening sun lit the wonderful ceiling of the Salle de Liberté but its walls echoed back voices sharp with fatigue, and the click of boots as National Guardsman patrolled the line of prisoners at the bar. On the other side of the wooden barrier that separated the body of the court from the public stands there were eight spectators, two of them asleep. The chamber had been absorbing heat all day and had lost none of it. The jury was trying to keep awake but, like the judges, it looked more tired than the prisoners.

Since nearly all crime was now considered a conspiracy against the Republic, the Convention had decreed that all those on conspiracy charges should come to Paris for trial and suspects were being brought to the capital in the thousands from all over France. If prisons and the guillotine were to cope, the process had to be expedited. Elsewhere in the building four other Revolutionary Tribunals were hearing cases—and would do far into the night. To save time, defendants were allowed neither witnesses nor counsel, juries had the choice of two verdicts: guilty or acquittal.

Ideally, the accused were tried in the morning, received their sentence at two o'clock and, if guilty, executed at four. In reality, most had to wait their turn to die, sometimes for weeks.

They were heard in batches. Alongside Ffoulkes and Philippa was a baker, a farmer and his son from the Vendeé, two priests, a shop girl who was pregnant, the
ci-devant
Countess Hervé Faudoas, her daughter, Mme de Galles, and an elderly couple from Saint Omer who were still trying to find out what they were accused of.

Philippa was in a state of detachment through shock; she noticed some things in detail, mostly unimportant, while others passed her by. She might have been watching an inferior play that she had to sit through but on which the final curtain refused to come down. She was aware it was her fault they were there at all and that any moment the guilt of causing Ffoulkes's death as well as her own would obliterate her, but not yet; she couldn't feel anything yet.

She had apologized nevertheless. When he'd achieved some awareness after his battering at the hands of their captors, she'd squinted out of her one good eye in order to dab his bloodied face with her apron and said she was sorry.

Now, here at the bar of the court, she supposed she should apologize again; he didn't seem to have noticed the first time. She touched his hand. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘So you bloody well should be.' He was odd. Not angry but absent, as if his mind was on other things, as if she didn't deserve his attention. Which, she supposed, she didn't.

She kept expecting God to give her back the minutes at Number Fifteen and again at the bridge so that she could amend them. The Lord must find this massive punishment too great for a moment or two of impetuosity. He would save Ffoulkes, surely.

But the play went on and on and he was showing no sign of intervening in it.

She did thank him for the fact that, by rushing out of Number Fifteen without her papers, there was nothing to connect her with that address. Nor had Ffoulkes been registered as living there. As long as M Sarrett hadn't been arrested as well, that household could remain as undisturbed as it was before Condorcet entered it.

And where was
he
? She tried to stretch her mind to that wandering innocent but couldn't.

She supposed she really ought to concentrate on the matter in hand.

The president, irritable and tired, was addressing the thirteen members of the jury. ‘Interrogation of the prisoners has already taken place, citizens.' His tone suggested they could take the rest of the evening off. With his three assisting judges he sat on the high bench, facing the prisoners from under a broad-brimmed hat with plumes and a tricolor cockade. Before him on the bench lay a bell and two loaded pistols, ready at each hand for any prisoner who became unruly, although it had become apparent that the person he'd most like to shoot was the state prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, also beplumed, who sat on a cross bench between jury and accused.

There'd already been prosecution errors. Several of the defendants on the list had been attributed with the wrong sex. Now Fouquier-Tinville got up to announce that he was offering no evidence in the case of the shop girl; she'd been arrested in mistake for her mother who'd been heard to say, ‘Fuck Robespierre and the price of bread.'