The Flight of Sarah Battle

by Alix Nathan

  *

  ‘You’re quite certain about the lady?’ Matthew asks Joseph when he returns.

  ‘Yes. I know her well. Besides, I’ve given her a little something to make sure.’

  ‘If the constables come is there somewhere I can hide myself quickly? Or a window I can climb out of?’

  ‘There’s a cupboard behind my bench, Matthew, with two sets of doors, upper and lower. See? I keep paints and tools and well, all manner of things in the top part. You’ll have to go under the bench to get into the lower half. But there’s room enough for a man. I’ll make two small holes in the doors for air. I’ll clear it out immediately.’

  Barely able to squeeze himself into the space, Joseph crawls under his bench, bangs his head, curses, pulls out armfuls of papers, objects, clothing. Lucy and Matthew smile to each other at the sight of long legs protruding, at the shuffling, scuffling, papers, ever more papers.

  ‘If I may say it, Joseph, you look like a huge terrier digging for a bone,’ says Matthew.

  ‘I am!’ Joseph backs out, his patched breeches showing need of further mending. ‘A terrier worrying at authority.’

  ‘I want to do more than worry authority, damn them to hell.’

  ‘Lucy has told me what you did.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, that was nothing. A schoolboy’s trick. To impress someone.’

  They are silent. Lucy’s pride shakes.

  Of course he is no longer a boy. Two years have passed, in which she herself has changed greatly. Matthew’s voice no longer squeaks, his limbs, even his features have hardened with a fierce assurance that hadn’t fully formed before. He’d embraced her as a man, not a little brother.

  ‘Joseph, I must get a message to someone. Could you deliver it for me? Better you than Lucy, who would be noticed. At the George in St John Street. Tonight.’

  ‘Of course. It’s near here. Whatever I can do.’

  ‘That’ll be a start. Are you willing to do more?’

  ‘Joseph has so much work, dear Matthew, I doubt he has the time.’ Lucy feels events swirl away from her. Imagines both of them in hiding, both in danger. Her life dissolving into terror. ‘Many people buy his prints now. And there’s the new project, isn’t that so, Joseph?’

  ‘Yes, yes. But I have always supported the cause.’

  ‘What cause do you mean?’ Matthew asks, sceptical.

  ‘Why, liberty and equality of course. I am a friend of Democracy. I used to be a good member of the Corresponding Society. Did you ever attend the great meeting in St George’s Fields? Not that I…’

  ‘Oh the Corresponding Society. All talk. Debate.’

  ‘Debate is good. Ideas are disseminated. Those get to hear who might not otherwise have done.’ Joseph springs up. He is much bigger than Matthew, expects to dominate. ‘We used to send letters and pamphlets all over the country, encouraged men north, south, east and west.’

  ‘And what good has that done? You can no longer meet in big numbers, can you. No more than twelve! So many are in prison. Spies are everywhere.’

  ‘Matthew.’ Lucy has watched him without cease. ‘How do you know this if you have been confined to school all this time?’

  He blushes. ‘Oh. I can’t tell you. I have been reading.’ He dismisses her. ‘But I must act. It is useless to read, to meet, to talk. Read, meet, talk. Nothing changes.’

  Joseph has been searching through portfolios. ‘This is how I used to act, Matthew.’

  The boy glances at the sheets. Neither laughs nor smiles, replaces them.

  ‘I admire your talent. But these are old things. Who doesn’t laugh at the Prince of Wales? Or Farmer George or Pitt. Who ever heard of a king laughed off his throne? It’s not enough. The monarchy must be overthrown. A republic established.’

  ‘An impossible quest without bloodshed,’ says Joseph crossly.

  ‘Indeed! The Irish know what to do and how to do it. And French ships are waiting for the word.’

  ‘The French, Matthew? The French are up to their necks in blood. They kill their own. Jacobins guillotine Jacobins. We had our civil war a hundred and fifty years ago; we don’t want another. Look how people constantly cry out for peace!’

  ‘Would you execute the King and Queen?’ Lucy asks, barely audible.

  Matthew turns to her, flat certainty on his face. ‘What difference between the King’s turds and mine?’

  He pauses, waiting for her reaction. Hoots with boy’s coarse laughter. She has lost him.

  2

  Shouts of ‘land’ echo from the crow’s-nest to the lowest deck and all who can run up, pushing for a glimpse. At first there’s nothing to see, except great numbers of porpoises leaping and blowing close to the bow of the ship, without ever touching it. Sarah and Tom watch the energy and apparent joy; dare to think it an emblem.

  The banks of the Delaware appear, passengers jostle, straining for something familiar: trees, horses, a man with a cow. Two miles of broad river to Philadelphia, temporary capital of America, city of brotherly love. Charming Molly moves slowly, so slowly, as though allowing each passenger to absorb similarity, difference. Almost all are sailing to a new life. The voyage, a kind of purgatory, has tested, purged them; now they must ready themselves to step out into paradise.

  Many are taken ill during the eight-week journey, numbers die. Somehow, Sarah and Tom avoid the worst disease, though they’re sick for a while. At least their thinner, paler selves are safe from pursuit, they think, but their future is unknown. They have no home. No one awaits them. Yet better that than met by the master to whom one’s youth, one’s life is indentured.

  The crowds lining the sides of the ship become silent in the search for familiarity, like myopic scholars constructing a language from fragments: black smoke buffeting up from boiling tar, barrels rolling, men with axes, a whole hedge of fishing nets. They near the main dock and river traffic thickens as it does on the Thames. Gulls circle. Now they understand the pilot’s slow approach, for small skiffs and dinghies shoot here and there among the schooners and merchantmen, avoiding strings of barges, plunging carelessly into pathways and wakes, across fixed routes of solid scows.

  Sparse houses, small white churches, snow-covered jetties, piles of lumber. Grey plates of ice. Wharves, stores, boat-builders, warehouses, houses crowding the river’s edge, taverns: Ship-A-Ground, Boatswain and Call. Finally cranes, crates, shipyards, lines of docked vessels, tangles of masts and ladders, sailors everywhere, porters, lightermen, sacks round their shoulders for warmth. Faces through steam and smoke, black, white, brown, square-boned Indian. Recognisable and utterly strange.

  They turn to each other at the same moment, feeling that strangeness. It’s like waking from a long and troubled sleep, changed. They look at one another as if they’re marvellous beings. Astonished at what they’ve done. What they will yet do. Laugh aloud. Hold each other close.

  They have little to carry, wave away carters. Agree they should find the centre of the city, said to be the most beautiful in America. The air is cold; it’s hard to ignore blasts of heat through tavern doors. Travellers and sailors fill the roads, ponies, traps, horses, carts churning up a sludge of snow.

  They trudge on boards past river-licked wooden houses. Freezing mud becomes icy cobbles, roads widen, broad pavements appear, buildings grow in stature. Red-brick villas, rows of four-storey dwellings, steeples, municipally confident steps, tall windows, columns.

  Sarah stumbles. Tom takes her bag.

  ‘You’re faint, Sarah. We must eat.’ They smell coffee from a squat building on the corner of the street.

  ‘Old London Coffee House! Would you believe it?’

  ‘I didn’t think they had coffee houses in America, Tom.’

  ‘Everything will surprise us here.’

  Sarah drinks coffee, Tom hot toddy, quite unlike the punch she prepared daily at Battle’s, for its main ingredient is rum. They order two plates of stew. Men stare at them, assessing their provenance, their wealth, their relationship.<
br />
  The stew is warming, the meat unidentifiable.

  ‘Raccoon, sir,’ the waiter tells them. ‘Where’re you from?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘No raccoons in London?’

  The room, a simpler version of Battle’s, tables, chairs, smoke and coffee fumes, handwritten advertisements on the wall, begins to fill with takers for a sale, jaws chawing, spitting on the black tobacco-juice floor.

  ‘My wife and I have just arrived from London,’ Tom tells the owner, a wary Irishman with long sideburns.

  My wife.

  ‘We need rooms for a few nights. Where do you recommend?’

  ‘Your occupation?’

  ‘Printer and bookseller. My wife’s father owns a coffee house in London. We need good, clean rooms.’

  Another man might have taken up the connection. ‘No tippling houses for you, then. Keep clear of Helltown!’ he laughs, unfriendly. ‘The Bell, North of Arch Street. Eighth and Sansom. Tell Dobson I sent you.’

  It’s begun to snow. A group of some fifteen black youths and girls stand in the freezing slush.

  ‘The sale!’ says Tom.

  ‘Are they slaves? Some of them are children, Tom.’

  ‘Bonded labourers, Ma’am,’ says a man. ‘You British?’ He spits.

  Tom takes Sarah’s hand, hastens her away.

  Matthew Dobson, the Bell’s keeper, is jovial, his tavern a small new building pressed between taller dwelling houses with a yard and stabling at the back. He checks their credentials, shows them a room under the roof, overlooking the street. Flakes shutter the panes.

  Two candles illuminate them.

  She removes her bonnet, shakes free her hair. ‘I keep expecting to be knocked off my feet as the ship rolls.’

  ‘We should rest. I’ll seek out Robert Wilson soon and hope he’ll have work for me. We’ll need an income in a matter of days.’

  ‘I too must find work.’

  ‘Think what you could do with that coffee house, the Old London. Write to Sam and ask him to buy the man out. Don’t look shocked! I’m not serious!’

  ‘I think I’d rather forget the past.’

  ‘In its entirety?’

  ‘Of course not! But I want to remember only what was good. Working in Battle’s was like living under water. Now I realise it. I couldn’t breathe. I knew nothing about life on land.’

  He takes her hands. ‘My dearest,’ he says, ‘it’s our honeymoon now, our honey-month. We’ve had our wedding night, have we not, squeezed into our corner of the ship?’

  ‘It was like going to bed in a drawer!’

  They laugh at the memory of the awkwardness, the promise that it drew from them nevertheless.

  There isn’t much in the room under the Bell’s low roof: a chair, wash-stand, jug and basin, a small grate in which Dobson lights a fire. The mattress is lumpy with straw and corn husks: after the voyage it’s luxury. They don’t leave it till late the following day. A new world.

  *

  They find Robert Wilson’s shop on Second and Chestnut, the street unpaved. In its double-fronted windows are books, bottles of ink, inkwells, pens and writing paper.

  ‘Ink!’ Tom says. ‘Altogether a bigger place than Cranch’s in Berwick Street. But no matter. I’m certain he won’t be too grand for me; Baldwyn spoke well of him. I’m optimistic.’

  He links his fingers in hers. Their reflections, side by side, smile back at them from the glass.

  Robert Wilson’s eyes are an extraordinary blue, unblinking. It’s what you notice first about him and for a while notice nothing else. He reads Baldwyn’s letter while they wait and glance round the shop, both sides of which are filled with books.

  ‘Tom Cranch! Excellent!’ They shake hands. ‘And Mrs Cranch!’

  They’ve decided to pass for man and wife until they make true friends who will understand. Many in Philadelphia are Presbyterians or Quakers who might be offended, they think.

  Wilson is a Scot.

  ‘How is my old friend Baldwyn? We grew up together, wee lads. I tried to persuade him to move here, but he went to London and stayed.’

  ‘He is well but sore-pressed as all are in England and, of course, Scotland too.’

  ‘Is it a social visit you’re making, Tom? Or have you and Mrs Cranch chosen to live in this boom land in stead of the old country?’

  ‘We hope to live here, Robert. But we made no arrangements except for Baldwyn’s letter, for we left in a hurry. You may know how the government is closing in on those of radical mind. The Anti-Sedition laws were about to be enacted. We brought little with us, either belongings or money. I have abandoned my business, not doing well, it’s true, though I’ll surely sell it. Sarah was working in her father’s coffee house, Battle’s near the Exchange.’

  ‘In other words you are in need, my friends.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You bring nothing tangible with you, but you have talents, so that any man who helps you may anticipate a return, eh?’

  ‘As Baldwyn says in his letter, my business was similar to yours. Printer at the British Tree of Liberty. 98, Berwick Street, Soho. Although,’ looking about him, ‘much less prosperous.’

  ‘Ah prosperity! Philadelphia is certainly prospering; printing, publishing, bookselling are all doing mighty well. Everything else, too. Roads are being laid, canals cut. Masons and wrights won’t take less than two dollars a day. This is as good a time to flee the old world as any. And,’ he suddenly stares at them, ‘I perceive you are newly married.’

  They look at each other.

  ‘Is it so obvious?’ Tom asks.

  ‘Och, yes! You even blush in harmony. Now let’s talk business. I take it that’s what you want. You have not come to beg for money, eh?’

  ‘I hope you might have work for me. And Sarah does not want to be idle.’

  ‘Come through into the back of the shop and we’ll toast your arrival. You’ll soon notice how we find any excuse for a toast in this city.’

  Robert’s office is dominated by a huge desk spread with papers. Cupboards round the walls, some with doors, some without are stacked with yet more paper in piles, rolls and boxes. On shelves to one side stand numerous earthenware bottles of ink with neat labels:

  Robert Wilson’s Patent Indian Ink

  or

  Robert Wilson’s Patent Writing Ink

  Sepia

  Or blue, green, red.

  Beyond the office they glimpse two printing presses. Robert pours out three glasses of Madeira.

  ‘Here’s a welcome to you, Mr and Mrs Cranch! You’re supposed to drain your glass, Mrs Cranch.’

  ‘I have lived with drinkers all my life,’ she says. ‘I have filled hundreds upon hundreds of glasses. I find I can only sip it.’

  ‘Och well, all the more for Tom and me, eh?’

  ‘Here’s to you, Robert!’ Tom proposes. Sarah raises her glass, the men drink another and Robert refills.

  ‘Here’s to the future!’

  They drink, Sarah sips. The future has arrived.

  ‘If you’d remained in London would you have continued with your business, Tom?’

  ‘I was printing more and more of my own pamphlets. You shall see some shortly. I was hoping to shuffle off the printing, move to publishing purely.’

  ‘The very thing! How remarkable! We are of one mind on that. Look now, sit down both of you and let me tell you about myself, so you know what you’re in for, eh? I came here fifteen years ago, in ‘81. Began in quite a humble way.’

  ‘Why ‘81?’

  ‘Oh, did I see the writing on the wall, eh? Well, no. But too many printers were crowding the market in Edinburgh. As a Scot I preferred to keep out of England. A wholly new place pulled me to it.’

  ‘I can understand that.’ It’s Tom’s way: he can’t resist a life story.

  ‘I started in South Street making ink and printing; then I graduated to Front Street and finally to here. Perhaps it’s the wrong end of Chestnut Street, too ne
ar the docks, but the books sell well. However, printing makes little money. There’s always trouble with journeymen: they’re unreliable and forever demanding more dollars.

  ‘So I’ve begun to publish and put out the printing to others. Let them have the headache! The presses are up for sale. I shall keep the bookshop and publish. Much more lucrative!’

  ‘And what do you publish, what do you sell?’ Tom asks.

  ‘Whatever makes money of course! But I favour a Democratic Republican view whenever I can. That’s what we are here now: Democratic Republicans. I even sell Jacobin stuff, far too extreme, but there are folk who’ll buy it. We publishers sell each other’s work: I’ll take something I wouldn’t read myself if they take my new guide books.’

  ‘What do you think of these?’ Tom jumps up, produces the pamphlets he had on him when he was arrested, pamphlets for which the Corresponding Society had failed to pay him.

  Robert reads rapidly, his eyes blue hoverflies darting, probing.

  ‘We could put them out in a matter of days, Tom. We’ve an election this year: republican readers will be pleased to hear a radical London voice. They’ll buy them in armfuls.’

  ‘Then there are these.’ He hands over King Killing, The Reign of the EnglishRobespierre, The Happy Reign of George the Last.’ Remains on his feet, too excited to sit again.

  ‘By God, you’re a Jacobin yourself!’

  ‘I published them, I didn’t write them, Robert. Bloodletting is not my line.’

  ‘They’re damned provocative, all the same. You put yourself in danger. Och, no wonder you fled!’

  ‘The place was thick with spies! You couldn’t mutter in an eating house without being reported. But, good Lord, there are plenty of Jacobins in Scotland, Robert.’

  ‘Not me, man!’

  ‘Well, I anticipate a purity and simplicity here I’ve never yet seen.’

  ‘Don’t count on either. But I’ll take you to meet every Democratic Republican I know and that’s a good many. Then you’ll quickly learn how to identify the enemy, the Federalists. There’s a lot going on. And now, Mrs Cranch, shall you be content to sit at home and sew and instruct the cook, eh?’