The Sparks Fly Upward (49 page)

She realized she was being mollified. ‘What do you want, Stephen?'

She knew what it was: He wanted to marry Jenny. Or, as he now put it in the course of a long and charming speech: ‘To pay my addresses to your younger daughter.'

And although she knew that Philippa would not mind being passed over, indeed might actually rejoice in being freed from a promise she should never have made, Makepeace was so angry on her behalf that she didn't make it easy for him.

‘Dear, dear,' she said, nastily, ‘How can that be? You're hand-fasted to my elder daughter.'

‘No, missus,' he said gently. ‘Philippa has rejected me. You and I both know, and so does Philippa, that going to France was her way of ending the engagement.'

It was true; Makepeace was aware it was true, but she was still aggressive. ‘Her way of trying to save a friend and decent man from the guillotine.'

‘The Marquis de Condorcet, yes,' he said. ‘We discussed him, she and I. I told her I was prepared to see her help him by sending him the necessary papers to leave France but she knew that any deeper involvement could not be tolerated. The man is an atheist.'

‘Oh, well, deserves to have his head cut off, then,' Makepeace said.

‘Missus, missus.' He refused to be provoked. ‘We will not argue over atheism. But, don't you see, Philippa's action has proved she would find me no more suitable as a husband than I would find her as a wife.'

Why did he always have to be so reasonable? Philippa—and it had surprised her mother as much as anyone else—was a chip off the old block; as headstrong as Makepeace had ever been, as freedom-loving. And this man could not endure that in the female, certainly not in a wife. Freedom for slaves, yes. Freedom for women?

Stephen Heilbron, whom the world regarded as a libertarian, hated by slave-owners as a revolutionary, was as rigid in convention as any Puritan. He was not for Philippa, nor she for him.

‘Is Jenny going to accept you?' she asked.

‘I believe so. She is devoted to my cause and, I like to think, to myself. She has indicated as much.'

Makepeace could hear the bars being cemented into place. Heilbron and his ilk had shut down Philippa's Society for Whatever Rights she'd wanted for women. They would have shut down The Duke's if they could—and, one day, probably would. What came next? A Society for the Suppression of Actresses? The Society for the Suppression of women like me? The gates were slamming on feminine freedom. Jenny and her generation were being persuaded to close them on their own imprisonment.

Dear God
, she thought,
I've had the best of it.

‘Don't
you
see,' she said, ‘that you shouldn't even be asking me this? We're not trading slaves, Stephen. You don't need me to say yea or nay, have her, don't have her. If Jenny says she'll wed you, that's enough. She's old enough to make up her own mind. She can give or withhold her consent as she likes. For God's sake, man, she is a free human being.'

‘I have your permission, then,' he said.

‘Good-bye, Stephen,' she said, and went. There was no point in staying.

 

 

THAT night, at the theater, they came for Jacques.

It was towards the end of the interval. Makepeace was at the-front of house, ushering in the half-timers, the people that had come to fill the upper gallery for the second half of the play.

She was always brusque with them at first, resenting the fact that they were only paying half the price, but they were invariably poor; famished-looking students, shop girls, old theater workers who remembered Garrick in his prime. Therefore, just as invariably, she would end up explaining to them the action of the play so far and directing the more elderly into any vacant and comfortable seat in the stalls.

‘Oroonoko is an African prince who's been captured along with his wife by slavers . . .' she was saying to a couple of men when one of them stopped her.

‘Mrs Hedley?'

‘Yes?'

‘Are you the owner of this establishment?' A neat man—she'd put him down as a clerk—he made it sound like a bordello.

‘I am managing this theater, yes.'

He produced some paper. ‘I have here a warrant. You are ordered to deliver to me the body of a certain Jacques de Vaubon, otherwise known as Jack Watt.'

She didn't look at the warrant; she wouldn't have been able to read it for terror. ‘Why? What do you want with him?'

‘We are informed he's a French spy.'

She gaped at the man. ‘He's eleven years old.'

‘His age don't matter. Our information is he's son to a notorious French revolutionary.'

‘Eleven,' she said. ‘He's eleven years old. What are you going to do with him?'

‘That's not our business, madam. Or yours. Usually they get sent back to France.'

‘No,' she said. ‘No, he came here for safety.'
I trust him to you, missus
.

‘Not our business,' the man said again. He didn't care one way or the other. ‘Our business is executing this warrant. Where is he?”

‘He's not here.'
Oh God,
God, she should have denied all knowledge of the boy. Told them he'd gone to Timbuktu, wherever that was. Told them he was dead, which, if he were repatriated to France, he might be. De Vaubon and Danton at war with Robespierre. If they lost, their heads would topple into the basket. The guillotine was killing children quite as young as Jacques.

Images kept pace with fractured thoughts; she was seeing Jacques in a tumbrel with his father, Jacques mounting the steps . . .

And then she saw the eyes of the man with the warrant focused on something across her shoulder, saw him nod as if in response to a direction. She turned round.

Sir Boy Blanchard was standing behind her, a champagne glass in his hand.

She turned back, but the two bailiffs had gone, pushing their way through the crowding half-timers into the body of the theater.

Blanchard was all concern. ‘What is it, missus?'

‘You,' she said in a long breath. ‘
You
told them.'

‘Told them what?'

But she was running out into the street, down the alley, through the stage door. He'll be underneath the stage with his traps.
Please God, let him be under the stage.
Unless the two magistrate's men were familiar with the geography of a theater, its doors and corridors would bewilder them. We can make a run for it.

Sanders. Where was Sanders with the coach?
Usually, he came early to fetch them so that he could watch the last scene. Smuggle Jacques into it and go.
Go where?

‘Where's Jacques?' She'd bumped into Bracey.

‘Dear Lord, what is it, missus?'

‘They've come for Jacques. Bailiffs, magistrate's men. Two of them.' Tears were pumping out of her eyes, she could hardly see. ‘They're going to deport him. Bracey, I've got to get him away.'

Polly had come up. ‘What's this?'

Makepeace ran on, while behind her Bracey said, ‘Something about a couple of quodders come for Jack.'

‘
Have
they, the bastards.'

The two men were on the stage now, having clambered under the curtain and were blundering among the flats, knocking one of them over.

Makepeace dodged backstage and lifted the trapdoor. ‘Jacques.'

Out in the orchestra pit, the Marquis de Barigoule had brought his baton down to begin the overture to the second half. She hissed louder over the music: ‘
Jacques
.'

Nothing. A single safety lamp showed a mass of hanging ropes, pulleys and lifts like a torture chamber—but no human being.

She made for the Green Room, then stopped. The émigrés. Once they heard the hated name de Vaubon, they wouldn't lift a finger to help her save Jacques.

They'll hand him over. Oh God, this is enemy territory. Where
is
he?

Where were the bailiffs? She went back to the wings. They were still on stage, staring at a black and commanding Aaron who was saying loudly, ‘My dear fellow, I am the leading actor of this production and I do not know the whereabouts of every whippersnapper in its employ, French or not.' He caught Makepeace's eye. ‘Fly away with him, I say. And be off with you, too. The curtain is about to rise.'

Of course, that's where he was—in the flies, readying the damn cannonballs for the storm scene. And he'd have heard.

She began praying that neither of the bailiffs would look up; she kept her own eyes rigidly to the horizontal.

Which caught the attention of the better-spoken man. ‘Here, you, lady. You come and stand with Nobby. Don't want you warning our subject, do we?'

Makepeace was ushered into the wings on the prompt side and her arm firmly held by the man called Nobby. ‘You can't do this,' she said. ‘You can't keep me here.'

‘Miss, we got a warrant signed by a judge. We can do anything.'

The conversation between the other bailiff and Aaron was still going on. ‘I'm not here to stop the play,' the man was protesting. ‘We're to apprehend this Vaubon and apprehend him we will. Our information is he's here, so you be a good little actor and get about your business and we'll get about ours. I got a man watching the front and another at the back so he's not getting out. And while you're playacting, I'm searching. That clear?'

Aaron nodded and dragged the man off the stage just in time—the curtain was going up.

Makepeace stood. Just stood. If she was aware of anything, it was only of the grasp on her arm and the voice of de Vaubon.
I trust him to you, missus
.

Somewhere there was guilt—
I brought him here, I should have hidden him
—but it was subservient to a searing grief. He'd be taken from her, as the little slave boy had been taken from his mother.
He's mine, he's my little boy.

Everything she knew so well, the lights, the music, the rustle of costumes and the smell of greasepaint as one player after another pushed past them to go on stage, thinned to a gray hell where demons capered beyond her comprehension. Only the Countess d'Arbreville and Henri on the other side of the boards, clasping each other, had relevance. They'll take him away from me.

To her captor, however, here was an experience he'd never known. He kept nudging her, asking questions she didn't hear and didn't answer. Suddenly, between scenes—she couldn't have said which—she found herself being taken away from the wings and down to the stalls. Two protesting members of the audience in the front row were being ousted from their seats by the display of a warrant. She was sat down.

The bailiff sat next to her. ‘It's good, this is,' he said. ‘Might as well make oursel's comfy.'

Some sense began to return. They haven't caught him yet. Somehow he's got away. Unless, the dampening thought, unless they
have
caught him and dragged him off already and haven't bothered to tell this dolt next to me.

She glanced up to Blanchard's box. Félicie, as usual, was transfixed by what was happening on stage, leaning forward, her pretty mouth parted. Blanchard was sitting back, frowning slightly. His eyes flickered and met her own for a second, then looked away.

You did it
, she thought.
You told them.
She was as sure of it as of anything in her life.
None of the émigrés, it was you.
But
how
had he known who Jacques was, and
why
had he then betrayed the boy . . . ?

Luchet
, she thought.
Luchet told you. No, not you, he told Félicie.
The tutor had laid the information, an I-know-something-important gobbet, at the adored one's feet, and Félicie, of course, had told Blanchard.

Her own words, spoken a long time ago to Philippa, came back to her. ‘
He's a schemer. I ain't jealous of him, he's jealous of me. He's jealous of everything Andrew has
.'

Was it that? As sordidly simple as that? Smashing something in a line of affection that led back to the man Blanchard called his best friend?

Mick knew
, she thought.
You're his Danny O'Whatsisname. You're a born betrayer.

It came to her that tiny changes were occurring in the play onstage. Familiar lines were being altered, additions made. Widow Lackitt had come on in an unscheduled appearance, gaining a laugh where there shouldn't have been one. Makepeace heard Chrissy say unscripted, as if of one of the slaves, ‘Is he not ebonied?' And the answer, ‘Black as the Earl of Hell's waistcoat', gaining another laugh.

What are they up to? They're up to something.
Then she answered herself:
Bless them, oh God bless them, they're hiding him.

She had allies. Never on the side of authority, they were upholding liberty as they saw it. This troupe of barnstorming sinners, this rag-bag harlequinade of hers was marching to her aid—and Jacques's.

Melting with love and gratitude, she was nevertheless frightened.
Whatever it is, they'll overdo it, they can't help it. Look at them mugging.

She glanced up to see if Blanchard had noticed; he knew the play as well as she did. His eyes had narrowed, he'd lifted a finger to beckon forward the footman he and Félicie invariably brought with them to stand behind them in the box and run their errands.