by Diana Norman
‘She lectures women as well,’ she said, and picked up another sheet. ‘She wouldn’t approve of us, Ginny. It says here: “A woman’s obligation to promote good works in her husband restores her to all the dignity of equality.” I hope you’re promoting good works in Sir Charles.’
‘It’s a good day’s work if I can stop him raising hell at his club.’
‘Then you must be resigned,’ Philippa said, reading on, ‘because Miss More further tells us that “to demand equality is to quarrel with Providence and not with the government. For the woman is below her husband and the children are below their mother and the servant is below his master.” ’
‘Does she, indeed?’ said Georgiana. ‘Give me a pen.’
Jamie was back. ‘Scratcher’s a bit waxy, Mr Lucey, a-cause of he’s missing his pipe but I reckon that’s all to the good along of that’ll make him agreeable to do what the lady wants.’
‘Scratcher’s an opium eater,’ Mr Lucey explained. ‘I wonder if I should come with you. I only hesitate because he and I had a falling out over our last transaction. Better perhaps if Jamie accompanies you. He’s very sound in these matters, aren’t you, Jamie?’
As he cupped his hand round the back of the boy’s neck, Jamie preened with a mental and physical gratification. ‘I’ll see she don’t come to no harm.’
‘I know you will.’
Georgiana had got herself writing material and sat herself down on a stool with the absorption of one visited by a muse, so Philippa left her to Chadwell and Lucey.
As they walked down the street, she asked, ‘Are you happy as a printer, Jamie?’
‘Only a ’prentice yet, miss, but Mr Lucey, he says I’m comin’ on wonderful. Never learned nothing but how to filch till Mr Lucey took me up . . . he’s a tip-top man, miss. People laugh at him but they don’t know.’
‘No,’ Philippa agreed, ‘they don’t.’
They turned into a narrow, fetid alley, empty for the most part and with its few windows shuttered. Philippa nevertheless received the strong impression of being noticed, as if they were passing a succession of blind men who turned to watch their progress when they’d gone by. She saw that Jamie stared aggressively at some of the shutters and tapped the side of his nose with intent.
They stopped outside a door so badly rotted at the base that it only filled three-quarters of the entrance. ‘Do I call him Mr Scratcher?’
But that, it appeared, being the local term for a forger, was the man’s designation, not his name which, Jamie said, started with Vladimir and ended in more consonants than was decent. ‘Nobody don’t know where he come from and I reckon as he’s forgot but he talks a mort of languages and when his hand’s steady he can copy a cully’s signature so’s that cully’ll think he signed it.’
He gave one knock on the door, then slid his hand through a hole in the wood and lifted the latch inside. ‘Me again, Scratcher, with the lady.’
They had to leave the door open in order to see the man whose upper body sprawled across a table which, apart from the stool he sat on, made up the room’s only furniture. Philippa would have left it open anyway; the room was too cold to get any colder and its smell was strong and extraordinary—dirt dominated by the sweet scent of opium cut through by etching acid.
‘Mr Vladimir?’ asked Philippa.
He raised his head; he was so emaciated it seemed to take effort for him to do that much. ‘What you want?’
Being unused to seeing one, Philippa was shocked by his beard but it and his hair were the only flourishing things about him, a tangled black bush surrounding a large nose and a pair of dulled brown eyes. His grimy, beautifully-shaped hands began rasping at the wooden tabletop, as if he’d been awakened to a gnawing pain.
She explained what she had come for in tones used to reach the deaf; she had to compete with a thumping on the ceiling so rhythmic that she wondered if a steam pump was in operation in the room above.
He addressed Jamie. ‘She don’t look like she got the canaries.’
‘Canneries?’ A thick accent was not aided in audibility by the banging overhead.
‘Guineas, miss,’ Jamie translated. He raised his voice: ‘The lady ain’t short, Scratcher, she’s in disguise. She’ll pay a fair price.’
‘Yes,’ Philippa said, and reiterated because she didn’t know whether this scarecrow had understood. ‘A passport and a certificat de civisme, a French identity card. I have my own here for you to copy . . .’ She took a package from her sleeve and laid it on the table. During her last visit to the Condorcets she had been required, as a foreigner, to be issued with a certificat—an identity card and testimonial of public reliability all in one. Now, under the Law of Suspects, the requirement was applied to all French subjects.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ the Scratcher said. ‘I do certificats whole damn time. What you want? Issued in Paris?’
‘Section Thirty-One.’ This was the section that included the Rue Saint Antoine; anyone coming from the area which had seen the downfall of the Bastille was likely to be regarded as above suspicion.
She was bewildered and relieved by the ease with which this man was accepting her commission; she’d expected greater difficulty. Indeed, originally she had intended to circumvent the whole unpleasant business of forgery by trying to buy a used passport and certificat from the French emigré community. Though the aristocrats, being personae non grata with the revolutionary government, were unlikely to have them, it was possible that their servants who had so loyally followed them into exile, would. But, again, awkward questions would have had to be answered.
In any case, traveling papers had to carry a description of the holder and she could not be sure of finding a man willing to sell her his who sufficiently resembled Condorcet by being in his fifties and six foot tall with brown eyes.
‘Fifty canaries,’ Scratcher said.
‘One,’ Jamie said firmly.
‘Forty-five or go fuck.’
Jamie took Philippa’s arm to usher her to the door. ‘This way, miss. We ain’t staying.’
Philippa was about to protest—she was unused to the niceties of barter—when a commotion broke out overhead; a series of choking grunts accompanied by a scream in dramatic coloratura.
What was terrible was that the two men took no notice. Scratcher was beckoning her with a limp hand and saying something, while Jamie teetered with her on the threshold.
‘There’s been an accident . . .’ she said.
‘Don’t you worry about that, miss,’ Jamie told her, and to Scratcher, ‘Two, and that’s generous.’
They continued to bargain. A curtain Philippa hadn’t noticed was flung aside at the far end of the room to reveal a tiny staircase and a large man. He was buttoning his front breeches flap. He passed them without a word and went out.
‘Thirty.’
‘Two and a half.’
A woman came down the stairs, tying the strings of her grubby bodice. She said, ‘Twenty-five and he ain’t doing it for a penny less.’ She looked at the astonished Philippa. ‘Oh, I heard,’ she said with aggression, ‘Don’t think I weren’t listening for being otherwise engaged. That’s a thin ceiling. You want a passport and a certificker you bloody well pay.’ She began to count on her fingers. ‘There’s the type—that’s got to be damaged special so it looks like the cheap print the Frogs use—there’s the Froggy ink, we got to find a press, there’s copying the committee signature ...’
‘If he’s done ’em before, you got this stuff already,’ Jamie pointed out.
‘Got? Got?’ The woman’s voice went up in a crescendo of desperation. ‘He sold it. We got to buy it all over. He sells ev’ything, ev’ything. Moment we got anything, the bastard pawns it for a pipe of bloody poppy. Look. Look.’ She circled the empty room, whacking the man at the table across his head every time she passed him. ‘We had furniture once. Where’s it now? Down the bloody fulker’s, that’s where.’
She seized the Scratcher by his abundant hair and pulled
his face up from the table, twisting it around so that they could stare at it, like Judith exposing the head of Holofernes. ‘See? He don’t care I got to whore to keep us, he’d filch the shillin’ I just earned if he could. Woul’n’t you?’
She shook the man’s head back and forth as if she were scrubbing something with it. ‘Woul’n’t you, you Polish pig?’
The man’s face, what could be seen of it, didn’t change expression as it flopped back and forth. His eyes remained indifferent.
The woman let go of her husband’s hair and went to pound on the wall instead, crying.
‘Two now,’ Jamie said, ‘and three on delivery.’
The woman’s weeping quietened.
‘Two now and ten on delivery,’ Philippa said. She brought her purse out from her sleeve and crossed the floor to insert two guineas into the woman’s hand. She set her own French papers and the instructions for Condorcet’s in front of the forger. ‘Dependent on it being done within the week.’
As they went back, Jamie lectured her on overgenerosity but she was unrepentant. ‘Mrs Scratcher needs the money,’ she said. ‘I think she’s a faithful woman.’
Jamie rolled his eyes. ‘She ain’t Mrs Scratcher and nobody couldn’t call her faithful.’
‘I think she is,’ Philippa said. ‘She could have left him.’
At Number Twenty-seven, Grub Street, Georgiana’s muse had just released its grip. ‘There,’ she said, waving the paper she’d been writing under Philippa’s nose. ‘So much for Hallelujah Hannah. I’m inspired. Gervase here says he’ll give it front page on The Passenger, won’t you, Gervase? Oh ho, Miss More, just you watch us apples swim.’
‘A remarkable piece,’ Mr Lucey nodded. ‘I salute a new talent.’
Georgiana was dancing. ‘Read it, read it.’
Philippa read it. The handwriting was schoolgirlish, the spelling bad and its punctuation nonexistent but, as an attack on Hannah More and her insistence that society’s status quo should be maintained, it was telling. The title alone, ‘More of the Same,’ was inspired.
The article’s thrust was that change was vital for Britain’s health; society had to change and had always changed ‘. . . or would we not even now be paying our tithes to the Pope, Miss More? Would we have rejoiced at the glorious Revolution, Miss More?
‘We change our clothes and our bedsheets for cleanliness, why then must we not allow fresh air into a system that will allow those laboring in darkness to breath it ...’
Slavery, Georiana had written, was soon to be consigned to the pit that had conceived it but other slaveries must go with it, that of women for a start . . . There had to be reform at all levels of class.
‘Nor should we be so frightened by the Terror that we refuse to contemplate change. Because Scylla has wrecked the ship of France, must we assume that Charybdis is a less welcoming shore?’
Philippa clutched the paper to her and flopped down onto a stool. ‘Oh, Ginny,’ she said, ‘you’re a writer.’
Lady Fitch-Botley was still hopping with self-gratification. ‘Ain’t I just? I’ll tell ’em. I can tell ’em every week, can’t I, Gervase?’
‘Delighted,’ said Mr Lucey.
So was Philippa. She had reluctantly prepared a somewhat dry editorial, though on a similar theme, but she recognized that she’d been surpassed—and was happy for both The Passenger and her friend that this should be so. There was an animation to Ginny that she’d never seen before.
They said their good-byes and went out into Grub Street, Georgiana floating on triumph. ‘I always wanted to write, Pippy. I knew I could. I used to pen stories for the boys when they were little but Charles disapproved; he didn’t want them brought up on fairy tales. But now I have an outlet ... Oh, hello ...’
Philippa turned. ‘Who are you waving at?’
‘I saw . . . I was sure I saw Sir Boy. You know Boy Blanchard, Pippy.’
‘Are you certain?’ She looked in the direction Georgiana indicated but saw only two women bargaining with an onion seller.
‘My dear, you don’t mistake that gentleman. So attractively vulpine. Of course I saw him. And I think he saw me.’ Her face changed. ‘Lord, what if he tells Charles?’
Sir Charles Fitch-Botley was not a man to be amused at his wife inhabiting an area like Grub Street dressed as washerwoman.
‘If it was him, he can’t have recognized you,’ Philippa said, more in comfort than belief—Georgiana’s beauty was not usually found among washerwomen, who lost theirs early. ‘But surely, Chadwell will tell Sir Charles.’
‘Oh no, Chadwell is my man.’
Philippa wondered at a household where husband and wife kept their secrets and their servants had different loyalties. Then she thought, I shan’t tell Stephen about this visit, either.
Then she thought, But when we are married, I shall do nothing behind his back. Once Nicolas has his certificat and has escaped, there will be no need to.
They went on down to the river, Chadwell looking nervously around him, Georgiana still chattering, Philippa in thought.
It wasn’t until their boatman was rowing them past Westminster that Lady Fitch-Botley left the subject of her literary achievement. ‘I did so take to Gervase Lucey yet, oh dear, I have a dark suspicion that he and that boy are . . . you know . . . lovers.’
‘They probably are.’
‘But it’s a hanging offense.’
‘Yes.’ Philippa thought of John Beasley locked in a dungeon of the Tower facing the death penalty, she thought of Mr Lucey and Jamie whom the law could persecute for being what they most happily were.
‘What isn’t?’ she asked, bitterly.
A letter came from Makepeace to tell her daughters that the journey to Devon had passed without incident and that Tom Glossop had left for France. ‘All well Babbs Cove,’ it read. ‘Dell fat. Expects again. Sends affectn as do all. Yr Uncle Aaron arrived safe, also fat, but have to wait for rest of troupe that did not catch same boat. ACTORS . . .’ This last word underscored several time. ‘Also accompanied by fat Irish player who don’t like. Am putting on play on return. Much to tell. How Beasley? Expect in two weeks. Yr loving mother, M Hedley.’
Makepeace’s letters always promised more than they delivered.
‘Putting on a play?’ Jenny remarked. ‘Ma hates the theater.’
‘But Uncle Aaron loves it and she loves Uncle Aaron, so I suppose he’s suborned her.’
‘Oh, Pippy, what joy.’
The sisters clasped hands at the thought of it.
Makepeace, with her American Puritan background and, even more, her belief that acting was no job for a mature adult, refused to countenance attending any play other than her beloved brother’s, which meant that, since his was a touring company, such occasions were rare. She herself couldn’t pretend to save her life and generally distrusted those who made a career of doing so. It was not, however, a prejudice she passed on to her girls. If they wished to see grown-up men and women, most of them no better than they should be, dress up, clown, and speak words not their own, then so be it.
Her daughters did. Jenny, Sally and their aunt had a permanent box at Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s excellent Theatre Royal. And, though keeping her mother company in Chelsea had made Philippa a less regular playgoer, she went to the theater whenever she could.
Twenty-six years earlier, Sir Philip Dapifer’s death had brought Makepeace to mental and economic destitution. With the newborn Philippa to support and accompanied by Betty, the former slave who had come with her from America, and Tantaquidgin, her Huron servant, she had found sanctuary for the four of them with Aaron’s troupe, then a band of ill-assorted thespians forced to perform in market squares, inns and any barn they could beg from a local farmer. Baby Philippa, earning her keep, had been floated on a paper stream as the basketed Moses in The Pharaoh’s Daughter, been clutched to a bosom and speared in Macbeth and had generally raised tears to bucolic eyes from Land’s End to John O’ Groats.
‘And never misse
d a cue, bless you,’ her uncle had told her. He’d tried to prevail on her to take up the profession ever since but she’d refused; she knew her limitations. Nevertheless the smell of theater reawakened an excitement in her blood, as if she’d imbibed greasepaint along with her mother’s milk.
‘I haven’t been to a play since . . .’ She stopped.
‘What was it?’
‘It was Mrs Siddons in something. Richard II, I think . . .’ Her memory was imperfect because, for once, the play had been of less importance than her companion.
Andrew Ffoulkes, just back from another rescue mission in France, had turned up at Reach House, bringing noise and bustle like a sea breeze into its grieving interior. ‘Right y’are, missus. Come along, Pippy, get your traps, we’re off to see the divine Siddons. Do you both good.’
Makepeace had refused to be done good to but she’d urged her daughter to go and, guiltily but faintly resisting, Philippa had gone.
Wonderful, wonderful. All the way to London, he’d talked of the excursion he and The League had made to France. She could remember that perfectly, every word. This time they’d snatched most of the de Précourt family almost from the gates of prison. ‘Couldn’t get the poor old Count, though,’ Andrew had said. ‘Only persuaded the Countess to come away for the sake of her children. Brave little devils, too. When I gave the eldest something to eat, she said: “Thank you, m’sieu, now I can admit I am hungry.” Wouldn’t complain before, d’ye see.’
He’d glanced at her. ‘All right, all right, Pip, there were thousands of hungry little ’uns before the Revolution but I didn’t know them, did I?’
All the way back, she remembered now, they’d argued about the character of Richard II. She thought him tragic; he thought the king ‘about as useful as marmalade. All that sittin’ about tellin’ sad stories.’
Unlike Stephen who became perturbed if she disagreed with him, Ffoulkes enjoyed their arguments though he pretended it was lèse majesté for the godchild to contradict the godfather.
