by Diana Norman
Snuffy Throgmorton was struggling through the crowd followed by a footman with a tray of ices for Blanchard’s party. ‘Fine play, Mrs Hedley. Makes one sorry the pater ever invested in West Indies sugar.’
She glowed. ‘Does it? Does it really?’
‘Too late now, though.’ He put his head down to hers. ‘No news of . . . I suppose?’
‘No.’
‘She’ll be all right. Ffoulkes pushin’ that end and Blanchard pullin’ this end, can’t fail.’
A little man was tugging at her sleeve; she couldn’t think why her heart sank at the sight of him.
‘A fine musical entertainment, Mrs Hedley, a truly splendid concert. ’ He winked at her and with the excitability of a convert tore across a piece of paper he had in his hand. ‘Had it been a play, I should have presented you with this, but no, no, the dancing . . . the songs . . . most musical, most musical. The Lord Chamberlain will be so informed.’
‘We’re legal?’
‘Yes.’
He was lying, bless him; they both knew it. This was a play with songs and dances and Murrough had incorporated them in order to enhance the story, not interrupt it. A love song that had no purpose in the original script, where it had been inserted for its own sake, he’d given to Ninon to sing apparently as part of her seduction of Widow Lackitt, but in fact, achingly, to the man she’d fallen for. When the players exited, leaving the stage empty except for the figures of the slave and her child, dancers rose from the undergrowth like plants come alive and curled back into the grass when they came on again.
Makepeace went back to her place. Félicie, she saw, like the rest of the audience, was settling for the second half even before the third bell was rung.
Jacques’s lanterns were darker now, the drum beat faster; the native Indians were becoming dangerous. Imoinda was reunited with her husband and again torn from him.
On paper, Makepeace had thought her a ninny. ‘She’s always swooning or weeping. I’d have kicked that damn governor in his credentials. ’
‘I’ve no doubt ye would,’ Murrough said, ‘but you’ve never known slavery.’
Under his direction, Betty Jordan played Imoinda as a young Amazon, a bow in her hand, a quiver of arrows on her back, a princess of the forest, bewildered into naiveté by the disaster come upon her. Her scenes with Oroonoko widened the audience’s eyes at the palpitating physicality of their love for each other. For this savage Romeo and Juliet, clothes were another enslavement they would have got rid of if they could.
‘Oh, my,’ whispered Makepeace’s neighbour as Imoinda struggled free of her captors to run across the stage and jump on Oroonoko, wrapping her legs around him and taking his face between her hands.
Aaron murmured, ‘Thanks be the Reverend Deedes ain’t here.’
But Makepeace’s shock was at the strong preference she felt at that moment for slitting Mrs Jordan’s throat rather than the Reverend Deedes’s. Leave him alone. He’s mine.
Dear God, was that how she felt about him? An actor? An Irishman? Two unreliable personae rolled into one? Look at him; how could you feign passion like that? He was projecting the lust he showed in her bed. Or perhaps he feigned it there, too. Either way he was betraying her. Heilbron was right; capturing the audience’s pity for the silent slave and her son was showmanship. It degraded the reality.
And I’m degrading me, she thought, sitting here and slavering for that swine. I am a middle-aged woman; I’ve been many things but a slut wasn’t one of them. He’s made me one.
Her husbands had been nice men; the excitement she’d experienced with them had been lambent in mutual trust, not this dark and unedifying dependence. In company, she was distant to him—a drunkard pretending to ignore the beckoning bottle. At nights she could hardly wait for him to open her bedroom door. He was her drug; when the ecstasy wore off, she foreswore it. Never again. Until the next time.
‘Nobody must know,’ she’d say to him.
‘I know.’ An answer that was equivocal, like everything else about him.
Of course he’d slept with Jordan, look at them. Lay off, you bitch, you bitch. He’s mine.
The light onstage flickered; a far-off roll of thunder was one of Jacques’s cannonballs rolling down a chute with a lining of wool. She knew this; it was a trick; she’d seen it, but the approaching storm carried a menace that raised the hairs on her arms.
Then the terrible end came. Thunder cracked the ears. As Imoinda assisted Oroonoko’s dagger into her belly and the child she carried in it, there was a whoosh of protest from the audience.
We’ve gone too far, Makepeace thought.
But Oroonoko’s grief held them. ‘Soft, lay her down, we will part no more.’ Nobody moved. There was another sigh—this time of good-riddance—when the evil governor fell to the same dagger.
Silence as Dizzy spoke the last lines over Oroonoko’s body. Silence as the actors waited for applause on their corpse-strewn stage.
They don’t like it.
Silence as the curtain came down. Silence as Murrough came from behind it to give the epilogue. Which had been changed from the apologia Southerne had written for it to Cowper’s poem, ‘The Negro’s Complaint.’
‘It’s doggerel,’ she’d said.
‘Not the way I’ll do it,’ he told her.
‘Is there, as you sometimes tell us,
Is there One who rules on high;
Has He bid you buy and sell us,
Speaking from His throne, the sky?
In this mouth the hip-hopping lines became a howl of accusation. Behind him the slave mother and her son walked on quietly, hand in hand.
Ask Him if your knotted scourges,
Fetters, blood-extorting screws,
Are the means which duty urges,
Agents of His will to use?
From the wings appeared two of the hooded slavers who had sailed Oroonoko and Imoinda from Africa to Surinam. One took the mother by the shoulder, the other took the child—quite gently, ritually—and led them off, the woman to the right, the little boy to the left. For a moment their black pleading arms could be seen stretching towards each other from the opposing wings before they disappeared.
Aaron told Makepeace later that it was almost a minute before the cheers began. She didn’t notice. Neither did the woman next to her; she’d abandoned wiping her eyes and had spread her handkerchief over her chest to let the tears flow as they would.
There were twenty-two curtain calls, Aaron said, and fifteen of those broke with tradition when Murrough commanded the entire cast to come on rather than allowing the leading actors to hog the applause. Aaron said Countess d’Abreville and Henri, black mother, black child, who hadn’t spoken a word, received the greatest cheer. People were still crying, he said.
‘Better now?’ he asked her.
‘Yes.’
‘Not like you to break down.’
Ah, but he hadn’t seen the real thing, only the representation of it.
Yet that will do, she thought. It’s as near as we can get.
They were waiting for her on stage when she finally made her way to it. All of them, looking at her.
They’re expecting me to make a speech, she thought, to tell them how wonderful they were. She opened her mouth and lifted her arms, trying to find the words and found none that could reach even the edges of how wonderful they had been.
She dropped her arms, closed her mouth and shook her head.
‘She’s speechless,’ Dizzy shouted. ‘That’s how bloody good we were. The missus is speechless.’
They carried her in triumph to the Green Room.
She’d laid on champagne for them with cold salmon and cucumbers, game and salad, wondering in what mood they would eat it and drink it, and was glad now that she had at least been prepared to honor them for hard work. Abandoning economy, she’d also laid out a purse, known in the theater as ‘a firing,’ of double wages for each one. It seemed scanty in view of a triumph that might well, gi
ven good reviews and word of mouth, run long enough to make a profit. Oh well, she could always add more purses.
Speechlessness could not prove sufficient congratulation for long; actors, apparently, needed complimenting again and again. Bracey, you were so funny. Jacques, there never was such thunder. Monsieur Luchet, the songs were very, very pretty. Yes, Dizzy, I could have hated you, I nearly did, you were astounding. Monsieur le Comte, the scenery was alive. No, Countess, nobody could have recognized you but you should consider the stage as a career. And you, Joseph . . . Ninon, my dear girl . . . Henri . . . Thank you, thank you.
She became smeared with makeup from their kisses, pink, white and black. She watched them dwindle into everyday and wondered at the artistry that could raise them out of it, grateful to her boots for it.
This wasn’t being fair. Gritting her teeth, she approached Mrs Jordan.
‘Betty . . .’
‘I was good, wasn’t I?’
‘You were marvellous.’
‘It’s Sir Mick, of course. He carried us all to the heights.’ The actress regarded her straitly. ‘I hope you know what you’ve got in that man.’
What did she mean? ‘I hope I do. He acts and directs extremely well.’
She hadn’t congratulated him yet. Looking round, she saw that he’d gone. She found him in his dressing room, sitting in front of the looking glass, wiping off burnt cork with oiled wool and bewailing the effect on his complexion. He looked up at her reflection.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’ He patted a stool beside him and she went and sat on it, watching him. ‘D’ye love me best when I’m black? Or white?’
‘As long as it’s not parti-colored,’ she said. ‘You’ve left a bit by your ear.’ Her nails cut into her palms with the effort of not mentioning Mrs Jordan. I won’t, I won’t. She said, ‘The scenes between you and Betty were very affecting, very realistic.’
‘The woman’s a fine actress.’ He stretched. ‘And I’m the greatest actor and wouldn’t Shakespeare have worshipped me? Didn’t I take that sow’s ear of a play and turn it into something they’ll tell to their grandpups?’
‘Yes.’
‘And made the buggers think?’
‘You did that, too,’ she said.
‘You’ve been crying.’
She nodded. He was drunk, on champagne, on achievement . . .
He said, casually, ‘You do love me, you know.’
‘Do I?’
‘And I’ll tell you somepin’, Makepeace Hedley. I’ve known a lot of women and I’ve loved a lot of women, some of them me wives, but there wasn’t one I found weeping because a slave’s child had been taken away from her.’ He swiveled round to face her. ‘It was your play, missus.’
The door of the dressing room hit the wall as it was flung open to allow revelers in. ‘Come on, come on, there’s more champagne. We’ve got guests.’ The guests had already followed them into the room.
‘The Lady Félicie wants to meet the black buck she’s been droolin’ over all night,’ Blanchard said. ‘And there he is. My good sir, what a performance—not a dry seat in the house. When he has time, Pellew here’s going to send to have all his slaves in Jamaica released immediate, ain’t you, Kit?’
With it all, he managed to sound charming and nobody except Makepeace was listening to him anyway; he and Félicie and the others were hauled into a wild celebration that threatened to go on all night.
When it became too wild, Makepeace decided to save an exuberant Jenny from herself and ordered all those who wanted a ride back to Reach House to the coach. Murrough declared himself in need of beauty sleep and came with them. Only Luchet could not be inveigled from the presence of Félicie and was left to spend the night in the theater.
With her arm round Jacques, who’d nodded off to sleep on her shoulder, Makepeace spent the journey listening to Aaron and Murrough perform a postmortem on the play and wondering if she had the strength to take Ffoulkes’s letter out and show it to Philippa’s sister and uncle, adding their concern to her own.
As it turned out, that effort was left to the next day. When the coach drew up at the front door, Hildy was waiting for her.
John Beasley had died that afternoon.
Chapter Fourteen
LORD Ffoulkes was aggrieved. ‘That wasn’t very nice,’ he said.
‘It wasn’t meant to be,’ Philippa said. ‘What are you doing here, anyway? Rescuing somebody? In which case, go away and do it.’
‘I’m rescuing you, blast you. I don’t think I will now.’
‘Good.’
Since it was likely to be a long and heated one, Ffoulkes had expressed a need to have this conversation where nobody could overhear it and, if possible, sitting down. ‘Tirin’ work, limpin’ all the time and I’ve been hoverin’ all day in Rue Saint Honoré—do you know how many portrait painters there are in that damn street? Kept bumpin’ into Robespierre. Congratulated me on fightin’ for the Republic, bless him. If I hadn’t spotted you comin’ out of the petticoat shop, he’d have taken me home for tea.’
He’d arrived in Paris only that morning, having taken a diligence as far as Neuilly where he’d changed into his old soldier’s garb at a safe house then walked through the dawn into the city.
The two of them had crossed to the Left Bank and the Luxembourg Gardens, a tic of irritation twitching in Philippa’s cheek at every click of Ffoulkes’s stick. She nursed her aggravation against a man sent to fetch her home as if she were a child skipping off school.
They found a bench away from the trees with a long view in either direction and sat down, sweating under the exposure of the late afternoon sun. ‘You’ve worried the missus horribly,’ Ffoulkes told her in English. ‘Goin’ off like that, not a word. She was frantic.’
Philippa stuck to French. ‘Then go back and tell her I am safe and well. I shall return with Nicolas when he’s finished his book.’ And was instantly aware that she sounded childish, as did Condorcet. It made her crosser.
He expired. ‘God save us. Has anybody pointed out to the mad old goat that this is no time to write his memoirs? You’re coming home with me, Pippy. Now.’
‘No. Go back to your wife.’
He thumped his stick on the ground with both hands, which, she saw, were suitably calloused and had broken nails as befitted a conscript soldier. He’d always had nice hands; still had, despite the wear of their disguise. She felt the need to punish him for having nice hands.
‘You look ridiculous in that beard,’ she said, ‘And I can see the glue.’ Dear, dear, more childish by the minute.
‘Skin trouble if anybody asks,’ he said. ‘Pip, stop it.’
The Luxembourg Gardens, like the Tuileries, were surprisingly well kept. Now that they were open to the public, they were required to be in the same order that the palace’s owners had previously enjoyed. The first roses were coming into bloom and a gardener was weeding one of the beds.
Yet the Terror was here; you couldn’t get away from it. The huge paling fence that hid the lower half of Marie de Medici’s palace, a reminder that the place was now a prison, took away symmetry, making incongruous the children floating paper boats on the lake, their watching, chatting mothers nearby. Beneath its bulbous slate roofs, prisoners’ faces lined the upper windows like wilting poppies. At nights their friends gathered on this side of the fence to shout and receive messages.
‘Had some rare times there in the good old days,’ Ffoulkes said, breaking the silence, ‘Look at it now.’
‘Good old days,’ she repeated harshly. But she was defending the indefensible; at nights the calls going back and forth between the free and the condemned carried to the Street of the Gravediggers. They sounded like the cry of nightjars and kept her awake.
‘Time to go home, Pippy,’ he said.
‘No.’
He began urging her, the professional pointing out dangers to the amateur. She could tell she shocked and puzzled him; he was trying to re
assess her but he couldn’t get beyond their old relationship and stayed patiently in his role as friendly, amused and amusing godfather.
That won’t do for Jeanne Renard, she thought.
‘Come on,’ he said, getting up. ‘I’d better see the old boy for myself. Where do we go?’
She stayed where she was. She didn’t want him to meet Condorcet. He would intrude on Mme Vernet and the orderliness of Number Fifteen, contemptuous of it, unsettling it, unsettling her.
‘For all that’s holy, Pip. What’s got into you?’
But, of course, there was a better, a vital reason to keep him away—she was amazed she’d forgotten it. ‘Did you tell your friend Blanchard where Condorcet is?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know where he is, do I?’ His stick hit the path, making gravel fly. He forced himself to quieten. ‘You’re all right, are you, Philippa?’
‘Je n’ai pas mes règles à ce moment,’ she told him, shocking him further. Menstruation was mentioned in whispers, if at all—and then only to other women. ‘Did you tell Blanchard where Sophie is?’
‘Good God, girl, I can’t remember. One was in something of a rush. I might have mentioned Rue Saint Honoré. What’s that got to do with the price of fish?’
‘Because if you told him, he’ll tell the Committee of Public Safety.’ She repeated what Condorcet had told her.
‘Sir Boy Blanchard, informer to the Frogs.’ He was grinning. ‘And I’m the Queen of the May.’
‘I don’t care,’ she said, ‘Condorcet’s been safe for nearly nine months where he is, I’m not risking him now. I hope you’ve got somewhere to stay because I’m not taking you to him while you’ve got friends like Blanchard. ‘
He was still amused. ‘Thank you for asking, ma’am. As a matter of fact The League’s got a cozy little house not far from here. Belongs to a graphite dealer—that’s me in my other chapeau, incidentally.’
‘Let’s go there.’
‘What?’
