The Sparks Fly Upward

by Diana Norman

  He’d been interested by a young actress playing one of the queen’s ladies. ‘Did you see her, Pip? Frail little thing, fair hair, sorrowful look.’

  Like his mother. Like his first wife.

  She’d said, ‘I knew you’d notice her, you are always attracted by that complexion.’

  He’d protested, genuinely surprised, but she’d known that she was stealing that night from the ashy-haired, delicately boned female of piteous appearance, whoever she was, that he would eventually marry.

  As he had.

  It was a week of letters. There was one from Stephen Heilbron. He spared her from descriptions of the abominations he was uncovering, merely saying that God must weep to see them. He said he was facing more ferocious opposition from the slave traders of Liverpool than any he’d encountered before. ‘A hopeful sign, for it shows they feel the threat of the Society’s activities.

  ‘One slave trader, a great man in this city, had the impudence to tell me that a negro on a slave ship has nearly twice as much cubic air to breathe as a British soldier in a tent, that he had never heard of a slave being treated cruelly and he wished the English laborer half as happy. He tried to throw me with the old fallacy that abolition will turn the country into a scene of bankruptcy and ruin. I told him: “This or that measure is always supposed to ruin commerce—it never has, nor will.” ’

  He didn’t mention that he had again been physically attacked, though she’d read in the Morning Post that ‘Mr Heilbron was well pummelled by adherents of the merchants of Liverpool for his interference in their legal trade.’

  His courage brought tears to her eyes; as ever, she felt how he deserved more of her than she could give. Writing a letter back, she wracked her brains for incidents with which to amuse him since, as she knew, her excursion to Grub Street would not.

  Instead, she included news of Makepeace: ‘We have had an intriguing missive from Mama who has successfully met up with Uncle Aaron, and talks mysteriously of putting on a play after her return from the southwest.’

  The reply was affectionate but carried a sting in its tail. ‘Though I have ceased to be surprised by your mother’s adventuring spirit, I should be sorry if she should involve herself in the theater and sorrier yet were you to admit yourself to her enterprise. I confess that as a heedless youth nobody enjoyed a good play more than myself but I have been awakened to the theater’s innate folly and its occasion for vice of all kinds, since then I have eschewed it like the plague. Philippa, my dear love, let our minds dwell constantly on Eternity and the future consequences of our conduct.’

  The next day she heard from Andrew Ffoulkes. His letter had been posted in Birmingham and was written in the usual scrawl that suggested he was rushing off to do something else. The stewards on his various estates complained constantly that to read his instructions took especial training.

  ‘Milady wishes to be remembered to you through chattering teeth, wrapped her up in fur like Baby Bunting but the north proved too cold for her French blood, which was not even warmed by new engine sheds in Telford foundry, so on way home though must visit Norfolk first to see how turnips proceed. Hope B obliged with certificat for C.’

  ‘What does Andrew say?’ asked Jenny, watching her sister’s face.

  ‘He’s coming home.’ She tried to keep her voice matter-of-fact. ‘Félicie doesn’t like the cold. I think he’s hoping to divert her with his turnip experiment.’

  Jenny said, ‘Lady Ffoulkes don’t strike me as a turnip-lover.’

  Philippa grinned at her. ‘Nor me.’

  Jenny didn’t smile back. She reached over and touched Philippa’s hand. ‘Dear, dear sister,’ she said.

  Her compassion was shocking. She knows, Philippa thought. And this is how she sees me, as someone who picks up crumbs from the rich man’s table, waiting for a smile, a conversation left over from another woman’s feast. A barren little planet so far outside the sun’s warmth that its summer is but a snatched minute or two.

  She crossed to the sofa to sit beside Jenny and kiss her. ‘Does Ma know?’ she asked.

  ‘I think she does now. I . . . may have mentioned something.’

  ‘But you’ve always known?’

  She realized with a jolt that Blanchard knew as well; during their first few minutes in Andrew’s library on the night of the ball, he’d looked at her with the commiseration for the wounded that Jenny was showing now.

  It was unsettling that two such disparate pairs of eyes, one gentle, one hard, had pierced the coconut shell like skewers. Was it so obvious? Do I wear a placard: HERE IS A LOVELORN MAIDEN?

  ‘Always,’ Jenny said, ‘and I’m so sorry. So sorry, Pippy dear.’

  Philippa kissed her again. ‘I shall be all right, you know.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m not the Maid of Astolat and sure as taxes Andrew Ffoulkes isn’t Sir Lancelot. Once I am married to Stephen and have a thousand children, think how happy I shall be.’ She smiled. ‘And I shall chase all your suitors away so that you may stay a perennial aunt and help me with them.’

  But Jenny was dealing in truths this evening. ‘I shall marry,’ she said, ‘but I shall not love anyone like you love Andrew. I couldn’t love any man like that. It isn’t helpful.’

  Philippa smiled ruefully. ‘Obviously not, but one can’t help one’s nature.’

  ‘I can,’ Jenny said.

  KINDLY neighbors had awoken to the fact that the two sisters were without their mother and deluged them with invitations it would have been churlish to decline. The week passed in morning coffees, afternoon teas, soirées and suppers. They were generally feminine affairs, most of Chelsea’s menfolk spending their days pursuing foxes, stags, otters and pheasants before the season ended, and their evenings in further masculine pursuits at their London clubs.

  It was a surprise, therefore, to Philippa and Jenny, even to its hostess, when Sir Charles Fitch-Botley turned up at his own house in the middle of an evening card party given by his wife—with a friend in tow.

  He kissed his wife noisily and announced to the company: ‘Blanchard here thinks I don’t spend enough time by my own fire, so I came to give it a poke.’ He giggled; he was drunk.

  His companion was not.

  ‘Sir Charles needed no persuasion to pass the evening in civilized company for once,’ Sir Boy said. ‘Lady Fitch-Botley, your servant, ma’am. We are fortunate to find you at home, but it is to be supposed you do not venture far these cold days.’

  ‘Oh, she don’t go much beyond Chelsea, do ee, Ginny?’ her husband said.

  Philippa saw that Georgiana was immediately floored and fumbled the introductions.

  So it had been Blanchard in Grub Street. She’d wondered all week if Scratcher was the same man he used for League business—after all, the number of forgers in London who could duplicate French papers was surely limited. That, therefore, was what he’d been doing in the vicinity and how he’d glimpsed Georgiana. Had he also seen her?

  Not, she thought, that it mattered. He would have inferred that she was there; it would have been too great a coincidence otherwise—Lady Fitch-Botley was unlikely to have ventured into such an area on her own initiative.

  Yes, he had. When it was Philippa’s turn to be bowed to, the eyes raised to hers were knowing. ‘Ah, Miss Dapifer. Have you solved that little puzzle we talked about the other day?’

  She took the offensive. ‘I believe so, thank you, sir. Have you solved your own? A matter of a dentist, I believe?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. We shall have to see which case has the quicker outcome.’

  He gave the thin smile other women found attractive; she saw only the acid in it. She was disturbed that his hostility to the rescue of Condorcet was so personal. What difference did it make to him that another soul, even one whose politics he did not agree with, was snatched from the fire? Yet he was prepared to lie in order to ensure that it was not. He’d told her that his forger had been put hors de combat by an injured hand cons
equent from beating his wife.

  But if Scratcher was the man referred to—and he must be—his hands had appeared uninjured. In fact, as she’d seen for herself, the only beatings likely to have taken place in Scratcher’s household were those inflicted by Mrs Scratcher.

  The man was unfathomable, but if there was battle between them, she had outflanked him. In two days’ time she and Lady Fitch-Botley would return to Grub Street, Ginny to deliver her next article for The Passenger, she to pick up Condorcet’s certificat.

  She smiled at him with the generosity of a victor, especially one who had good teeth, and joined him at a table to partner Ginny in a game of whist against Blanchard and Eliza Morris.

  By the end of the evening, she was left wondering whether she had been reading too many gothic novels and had misread him. The glimpse of the wolf had gone. Sir Boy Blanchard was better than charming, he was nice; not patronizing, but with an assumption that they were as well read as he was, showing an intimacy with charity work that won Eliza’s heart, an endearing impatience with himself when he forgot which cards were not yet out and an unflowery admiration of his partner’s and opponents’ play.

  Had she been superstitious, though, it might have concerned Philippa that, notwithstanding, he and Eliza won every rubber.

  ‘IT was good of Sir Boy not to mention seeing me to Charles,’ Georgiana said when they embarked for London Bridge two days later. ‘It is not as if I were committing a sin, but I fear Charles would not approve of my journalism.’ Her eyelashes fluttered at the last word, amused at her own pride in it.

  The article she was to deliver today was a progression on last week’s, an attack on those who refused to countenance change, but this time concentrating on the cause of women. She had drawn heavily on Wollstonecraft’s Vindication but, wisely, did not mention her source.

  ‘Women are urged to be modest and obedient,’ she’d written, ‘yet these terms are used in order to ensure their thralldom, for what passes for virtue nowadays is only a want of courage to throw off prejudice.’

  It was an admirable piece. Philippa thought that, however minutely, it would help to push society’s thinking beyond the boundaries, even while inflaming it. But she, too, was sure Fitch-Botley would not approve.

  She said: ‘In any case, Sir Boy has no reason to connect an anonymous editorial in The Passenger with your presence in Grub Street. He must merely think that you were there on my account.’

  ‘So he must.’ Georgiana was relieved.

  Philippa was less reassured for herself. There had been a curious incident the day before when, minutes after Marie Joséphine had set off for the village for her afternoon off, they’d heard her shrieking.

  Running down to the carriage drive to the archway, Philippa and one of the footmen found the Frenchwoman still shouting imprecations and shaking her fist at the Thames’s apparently empty embankment.

  When they crossed the lane to look over the rail, they saw a man in a skiff hastily pulling away upriver.

  Marie Joséphine’s imprecations echoed across the water after him. ‘Voleur! Va-t’en, cambrioleur!’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Il se cachait derrière le voûte. He thinks to thieve the house. He will kill us while missus is away. Va chercher les chiens de garde.’

  What passed for the Reach’s chiens de garde were probably on Sanders’s and Hildy’s bed, their usual place when Sanders was away. The two friendly retriever spaniels had been bought as a present by Makepeace for the coachman, the only member of the household who liked to shoot game. Hildy and every other female member of the family spoiled them dreadfully, much to Sanders’s chagrin.

  Philippa managed to calm her maid down. ‘He is here two days,’ Marie Joséphine explained. ‘Yesterday I think he makes pee-pee in the entrance and I shout him to go away but today again he is here. Il reste caché to murder us.’

  ‘Just takin’ a breather out the wind, I reckon,’ Hopkins said with a shrug at female French dramatics.

  But Philippa, watching the skiff shoot past the grounds of the hospital, was inclined to trust Marie Joséphine’s instinct that the man was up to no good. True, March had come in with a slicing wind but it would be curious for a rower to beach his boat and clamber up an embankment in order to get out of it.

  However, there was little to be done but alert the Watch to a prowler and make sure that all shutters and doors in the house were securely bolted at night.

  Philippa had lodged the incident at the back of her mind, but just now, as their waterman took her, Georgiana and Chadwell upriver, she’d turned to glance at the view from the stern—the slope of Chelsea Hospital’s gardens down to the river was worth a look—and saw a skiff some two hundred yards behind their boat, on the same course.

  It was a blustery day but sunny and the choppy water was speckled with reflections that bothered the eye so that detail at a distance escaped it, yet Philippa received the impression—as she had previously—that the skiff was a good one, a racing craft such as gentlemen used in their competitions, and that its rower, in rough clothing, his head and mouth hidden by a scarf, looked as much out of place in it as would a farmhand mounted on a thoroughbred.

  She told herself that suspicion was the penalty suffered by those pursuing secret activity, as she was. There were hundreds of such skiffs on the river and no reason why some of them should not belong to a working man. Strange, though, that such an ill-fitting combination of boat and rower should crop up twice in three days on this particular stretch . . .

  She kept an eye on it until, nearing the City, she lost sight of it in the traffic of the river which, in Londoners’ efforts to avoid the throng of the streets, was becoming almost as congested. They had to wait in a cluster of other boats lining up to approach the landing steps. Once ashore, they were sucked into the maelstrom of the City’s crowds where the man from the skiff, if he were indeed following her and Georgiana, would be one among a thousand.

  She shrugged. Why should anyone be following them?

  But the chill of suspicion struck again when they reached the print shop. Mr Lucey, it appeared, had talked to a male caller.

  ‘He was struck when I mentioned that a lady had written the latest editorial. “We must not underestimate the fair sex,” I told him. “Shakespeare says in women’s eyes are the books, the arts, the academes, that contain and nourish all the world.” And he agreed.’

  ‘Did you tell him who the lady was?’ Philippa asked.

  ‘Oh, no. One does not break the anonymity of a leader writer.’

  ‘When did he call?’

  ‘Let me see, when was it, Jamie? The same day last week that you ladies did . . . yes, it was—not long after you went.’

  ‘Was he a rough-looking man?’

  ‘Indeed not.’ Mr Lucey was offended. ‘Quite the gentleman and obviously a free-thinker, put himself down as a subscriber to The Passenger.’

  He fetched the subscription list and pointed to the name: ‘S. Smith, Esq.’ The address was Boodle’s Club.

  Philippa’s eyes met Georgiana’s. Blanchard was a member of Boodle’s. But, then, so was nearly every man of fashion. And S. Smith, according to Lucey, had been very fashionable. ‘Plain cloth, you know, but the cut, my dear, and the fit. How he dared venture in these parts . . . but he’d heard of my work, he said. In any case, he looked like a man who’d acquit himself well against any of the brutes around here.’

  Definitely Blanchard.

  Georgiana shrugged. ‘Very well, he knows what I’m up to. Even nicer of him to keep it from Charles, most enlightened of him.’

  Apparently, she accepted the man’s right to inquire into her business; Philippa found it sinister. As she and Jamie walked on to the Scratcher’s house, the image of a spider collecting flies in its web for later consumption kept occurring to her.

  Mrs Scratcher was out or, at least, not at work today. The hovel was quiet. An iron pot from which issued the smell of stewing meat hung over a fire in t
he tiny grate.

  There were other improvements, a good candle on the table lighted several quills with variously cut nibs, ink bottles and two small pieces of paper on one of which Scratcher, wearing a pair of mended spectacles, was carefully inscribing.

  He pushed the spectacles up so that they disappeared into his hair as Philippa and Jamie entered. His eyes were sharper today but even less welcoming than they’d been the week before. ‘Tell her go fuck,’ he said to Jamie. ‘I got other work.’

  ‘Ain’t you done it?’

  ‘Busy,’ Scratcher said. ‘Tell her go fuck.’

  Jamie was incredulous. ‘You’re never passing up ten canaries?’

  ‘Busy,’ Scratcher said, ‘Tell her go fuck.’

  Philippa snatched up the papers on the table. One was a bill ‘for work done’ amounting to £70. The other might have been an exact copy except that its total was £200. Somebody had commissioned Scratcher to make him a profit. All in a forger’s day’s work and nothing to do with her.

  Jamie was arguing. After a bit Scratcher reached into a filthy pocket and produced the original two guineas down payment which he flung on the table at them. ‘Now go fuck.’

  ‘I’ll offer you more,’ Philippa said desperately. ‘I’ll offer you anything, ’

  Jamie, however, pulled her to the door and out into the alley. ‘No good, miss. Twelve guineas is more’n he’ll see in a month o’ Sundays, if he won’t do it for that . . . I don’t understand it, I don’t. But it ain’t the money, that’s for sure. It’s some’ing else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dunno. For certain he ain’t gone honest.’

  ‘Are there any other forgers around?’

  ‘Plenty, miss, but none of ’em don’t do French.’

  The wind blew the alley’s detritus around their legs, a sodden piece off a poster lodged itself against the hem of Philippa’s coat; an incomplete headline read, ‘WANT ...’

  She felt shriveled and angry, not at Scratcher—one did not blame detritus for being what it was—not even at Blanchard whose refusal to help had put her in this situation, but at Sophie. Why did you ask me? I am not fitted to deal with these things.