The Flight of Sarah Battle

by Alix Nathan

  The night is silent. Nothing moves on the street outside, not even the goldfinders’ dripping cart. No owl flies; no night bird whistles or sings. Everything is dead. Except the great booming in her head. Her heart still there, its foolish, mindless, incessant booming. Refusing to die.

  She denied him. Denied him the smile he wanted. How can she live?

  Later, Martha knocks again.

  ‘Sarah, we wash him. The doctor will come.’

  ‘I’ll do it. Thank you, but I shall do it.’

  ‘They take him away.’

  ‘No! They mustn’t take him. Don’t take him away! Please don’t take him away!’

  She doesn’t sleep again. Night. The moonlight they had grown to love through unshuttered windows is absent, rightly. So should there be no dawn, the lesser silence they had also loved. She hates the creeping light, dreads day. Dare not sleep for fear of waking, innocent.

  Martha brings clean water, cloths and towels and Sarah washes his body, his loved body, now so thin. Now cold.

  He was never cold. Never motionless like this. It’s wrong: I have imagined it! In a moment he will wake!

  She dresses him in clean clothes. A spare red neckerchief, for she will never part from the other. Finds the miniature he’d had Birch paint in his coat pocket. No use to her. Why hasn’t she one of him? She puts it back. Something of her close to him. He said he wanted to keep it in his pocket always.

  All the while she talks to him as though he’s come in from a day writing in the shop, talks, planning what they’ll do tomorrow, talks low and lovingly, continuously so as not to hear no replies, as if by talking she’ll somehow keep him always as he always was.

  *

  Martha helps her through the days. The terrible footfall as they carry him downstairs. The plain coffin painted black. Hurried burial in a burying yard on the edge of town, attended by Daniel Eckfeldt and a few others from the Indian Queen. Some Quaker prayers. He would have understood why. Robert sends a letter. Will not return until the house has been thoroughly cleansed.

  Frosts bring winter. Black days. Days when sorrow stands, a cormorant, wings outstretched, unmoving. Days of unbearable longing. Days of remorse, terrible remorse for the smile she never gave him. Resentment, self-pity. Solitary nights of wild grief.

  Martha makes her eat. Comforts her as no one ever had before.

  She hates Robert, even obscurely blames him. He doesn’t repeat his view that Tom brought about his own death, but though she will never accept it, she cannot forget it. She finds herself loathing the sight of his feet since she can’t bring herself to look at his face; thinks of him attending his respectable Presbyterian God, coming away satisfied that all is in order.

  There is no God that cares. How can there be? He’d be an infinity of tears.

  In cold clarity she realises that soon she’ll run out of money. Her guide to London coffee houses made little; it was Tom’s pamphlets and articles that paid their rent. Perhaps she should demand Tom’s share of the business. But legally she has no right to it, though Robert does’t know that, and of course, Tom would not have wanted any radical publisher to shrink.

  There’s her promise to Tom to confront Robert. She doubts she can do it to any effect, knows Tom might have achieved something. Martha, she’s sure, expects no change. But Tom would have kept his promise, would want her to keep hers to him. She will do it. In time.

  She thinks she should move out, away from Robert, to somewhere cheap but she hasn’t the energy. Besides this is the room in which they’d lived, she and Tom. Their blissful bower, their shadie lodge. The chairs in which they’d sat together. The bed in which they’d slept.

  One day Martha says: ‘You so sad, Sarah. Maybe you go home to England?’

  ‘Oh. Maybe I should, Martha. Would you come with me?’

  ‘I cannot leave Willie.’

  ‘No, of course. Or Robert.’

  ‘He not let me go.’

  ‘Oh Martha! I don’t know if I can do it on my own.’

  ‘God Almighty help you.’

  ‘God Almighty and you, Martha. How like your name is to Mother!’

  Martha laughs and they both cry.

  The century is at an end. In December George Washington dies, the Father of his Country. It suits Sarah that all people mourn, that everywhere is hung with black.

  There is little to mark Christmas, for most of the churches, including Robert’s, ignore it. Daniel Eckfeldt invites Sarah to his house: as a Lutheran he’s retained his old German traditions. Touched by his kindness, she politely declines.

  On December 26th, eight days after Washington’s funeral, a memorial procession and service take place in Philadelphia, still the nation’s capital. Sarah stands near the Market Place in a silent crowd, the streets lined, every window of every house full of onlookers, and watches soldiers and clergy, the black-plumed riderless horse, the black-draped empty bier.

  ‘Mrs Cranch.’

  Astonished that he should approach her in her mourning gown, she turns her head away from the voice in disgust, but can’t easily escape William Leopard through the press of people.

  ‘A moment please, Mrs Cranch,’ he speaks quietly.

  She stares ahead, tears running over. Oh Tom! Tom!

  ‘Do you think of returning to England, Mrs Cranch?’

  She will not answer.

  ‘It occurred to me that you might. In which case, please take this.’

  He presses an envelope into her folded arms and shoves his way out through the crowd.

  Though inclined to drop it on the ground and trample it in the dirt, she takes the envelope back to Zane Street and breaks the seal.

  Unfolds a sheet of paper:

  Received with thanks from:

  Mr William Leopard

  [sum carefully erased]

  For Purchase of:

  Fare for Voyage and

  Reservation of Berth for: Mrs Thomas Cranch

  On: Fair American (Capt. George Legge)

  Sailing from: Philadelphia to

  London

  on January 18th, 1800.

  PART III

  1

  ‘Will I take it all the way for you, Miss?’ the porter at Wapping asks Sarah, tossing her box onto his shoulder as if it were a tea caddy. Irish, she thinks, like many were in Philadelphia.

  ‘I’m going to Change Alley; you couldn’t walk that far.’

  ‘That I could. But I surely won’t.’ He smiles with jagged charm.

  ‘I’ll go by hackney. Please would you carry the box until we find one. Oh. But wait a moment!’

  The pale girl she’d noticed minutes before, the girl searching so frantically for someone, has been met by a man who is remonstrating with her. Tall, his fair hair tied back, he tries to take the bag from her, puts his arm round her more to coerce than to console.

  Sarah steps towards them, stops herself in time. No. It is not her concern. She doesn’t know them. And here she is, staring like a child just as she did at the oddities and foibles in the coffee house.

  ‘Let us go then,’ she tells the porter.

  Little has changed in London in three and a half years. She has become used to clean brick and painted wood, to straight roads on a numbered grid, the New World’s rationality. Now she sees what was always here: ancient houses tumbled together, a pile of rubble where one has fallen, narrow roads jammed with carts, carriages, steaming horses. A few new warehouses stand by heaps of sodden ash. It’s true there are blocks of neat-cut paving in a main street or two, but St Paul’s is black as coal.

  The hackney nears Change Alley, her anxiety sharpens. How will her father react? She hasn’t warned him. No doubt he was disgusted when she fled, but it doesn’t mean he’ll welcome her return. Might he refuse to let her in? Where will she go then? Will he insist she move back with her husband? What has happened to him? James Wintrige, dissolved like a ghost into the past.

  At the same time she is glad to carry her sorrow to a familiar place
: a wounded bird seeking the thicket where once it nested. She knows there will be hazards.

  She enters the coffee house at the back, her box left in the passage outside the kitchen. Her courage faltering, she opens the kitchen door rather than take herself to her father’s office.

  It’s a bad time to intrude, late morning, food being prepared, cooking well under way. No one notices her till Dick, wiping his nose with his sleeve, looks up.

  ‘Miss Battle. Oh Miss Battle!’ He limps over to her, takes her hands in his knobbed fingers. ‘You’ve returned! Oh, but Mr Battle will be pleased,’ he says doubtfully.

  The cook, Mrs Trunkett, who comforted Sarah with love and terror when her mother and Newton were killed, pushes the arthritic boy Dick out of the way.

  ‘Sarah! Oh, how glad I am! Praise be to God!’ She presses Sarah hard to her stoutness, holds her at arm’s length, hugs her again, weeps copiously. ‘Oh, so like her mother she do look, standin’ here just like Mrs Battle. I did never think to see it! Is you returned for good now? Come, Dick, stir yourself, man, gawpin’ there. Take Miss Battle’s cloak and bonnet and things.’

  This welcome dulls fear enough for Sarah to knock on her father’s door at last and announce herself. The passage is dark, not unlike the ship from which she’s just disembarked, where, of a sudden, light might cut down a hatchway. But his office is empty and having sent her box up to her old room in the attic, she cannot resist passing through the waiters’ door into the main room. There, too, she remains unseen in the fume and din for some time, for who bothers to watch the door into the kitchen unless they’re starving, and the starving don’t resort to coffee houses. The street door is the one to keep an eye on if you’ve really nothing better to do.

  She sees her replacement behind the bar, unsmiling face on a grumpy body that stiffens whenever it’s approached. Despite this hostility the place is as full as ever it was, occupations entirely the same. And then a man who’s taken his coffee and newspapers at Battle’s for untold years catches sight of a new woman on the premises, looks again and alerts his companions to her presence. At which the entire table stands and raises its glasses and coffee bowls:

  ‘The prodigal daughter returns! Miss Battle, we are delighted to see you. Hurrah!’ The room rises and all join in the huzza until a hush falls and curious looks are directed to where, from a curtained snug, Sam Battle emerges. His face reddens, blackens. He walks out, disappears into the depths of the house.

  *

  Speech was never Sam Battle’s forte.

  ‘You’ve come back.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Shall you run off again?’

  ‘Dick has taken my box to my old room, Father.’

  ‘Oh. Well.’

  He doesn’t ask the reason for her return. The very name America, that treacherous, barbarous colony, is one he will not utter. And as to why she went in the first place, that is not to be thought of either.

  Nor is mention made of James Wintrige. Sam ever disliked the man, a sponger who spouted revolution. He’s not been seen for years. On Sam’s principle Sarah should certainly go back to her husband. But Dick has heaved her box upstairs and Sam’s well aware of the pleasure his old customers are expressing at her reappearance. Before the day is out he’s sacked the bad-tempered woman from behind the bar.

  Sarah’s duty always was to replace her mother when she, against his wishes, damned stupid woman, went out and got herself killed. The girl tried to wriggle out of this duty through marriage, but her worthless husband knew which side his bread was buttered. Then she ran away, the hussy! Now she’s back he’ll make sure she stays.

  In her childhood room Sarah goes straight to the window to scan the scene she knows so well. Gables, chimneys, tiles and broken lead guttering. Winter smoke aping snow clouds obscures the distance. Sparrows, whose freedom she once envied, furtive in the cold, hop into discarded nests of summer martins.

  She unpacks her box: places clothes in drawers, arranges a packet of carefully wrapped papers and a dozen or so books on the chest. From her skirt she takes a red neckerchief. The pocket full of thrums went years ago.

  She presses the neckerchief to her face with both hands and sobs in anguish.

  *

  Sam cannot refuse her an afternoon to collect her clothes from Winkworth Buildings. He’s certain there’s no danger she’ll remain there.

  It’s getting late and no one answers her knock. She stands outside, envisaging the gloomy interior, leans up against the door as though to hear her youthful, uncomprehending self sink into the silence of her marriage. She and Tom had run down the stairs when they fled!

  She brings a note for James, having anticipated, indeed hoped that he might not be at home:

  James,

  I am in England now and wish to collect my belongings.

  I shall not return to live with you although we are still married, knowing, as I do, for whom you work. I read the letter that you wrote to R. Ford. You will say that it was not my property to read, to which I say that I had a right to know to whom I was married.

  I now use my own name. I daresay you will not want me back in any case.

  Please send to the coffee house to tell me when I may collect my trunk and clothes. If you prefer to pack and give them to the carrier to take I shall pay him when he arrives.

  Sarah Battle

  She walks back slowly, the familiar route, though then it was always dawn’s ash light or late-night darkness, accompanied by Dick. There’s no change in the streets except where houses have collapsed from age or been pulled down by mobs. She’s heard something of recent times, of the disastrous last year of the old century: how in the spring great falls of snow buried mail coaches all round the country and mailmen rode or walked the post to London. How famished crows fell out of the sky, how lambs froze dropping from the womb. Preachers and madwomen threatened crowds with destruction of the world. Thousands left London. And while neither earthquakes nor pestilence appeared and the prophets were locked in the madhouse, in the summer rivers burst their banks, the ground flooded, harvests failed. Only the numbers of starving grew.

  Men in their cups tell her this, pleased to find a woman who will listen. Once she disdained their attention. Now she hears them out, responds politely and escapes to her own thoughts. This they don’t notice, content to talk at the pleasant woman, older, perhaps a little sober, but still comely.

  Among themselves they fight over peace with France, whether to sign a petition insisting on negotiations. Most agree with the mayor, alderman and liverymen of the City who have already sent their own petition to the Commons.

  Hovering before the fire, tamping tobacco in pipe bowls, they expend more spleen on the question of exactly when the new century began.

  ‘We speak of it, but has it begun at all?’ says a man looking up from his newspaper, shiny with the assurance of authority.

  ‘Oh Lyons, how absurd!’

  Lyons taps his source, blushes, smiles nervously.

  ‘It says here that just because we’ve begun to count eighteen it doesn’t follow that the century must be changed.’

  ‘Who says, man? Whose nonsense is this?’

  ‘Lalande. Lalande the astronomer says it.’

  ‘But he’s a Frenchman, Lyons!’

  ‘Rothersay, move away from the heat. Let Lyons tell us what he knows. Read it out, Lyons.’

  ‘Lalande has published a pamphlet.’

  ‘Tell us, then!’

  ‘He says whatever calculation is to be made, we commence by one and finish by one hundred. Nobody has ever thought of commencing at nought and finishing at ninety-nine.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It follows that the present year, 1800, incontestably belongs to the eighteenth century.’

  An explosion of guffaws compels Lyons to shrink back to his place on the settle.

  Sarah, untouched, attends to the warming of punch. There are those who try to catch her eye, flirt with her, self-conscious now
they’re freed from wigs. Her position is ambiguous of course. She was married, but where’s the husband? She ran off with a lover so she’s a woman of the world. Are there babies somewhere? Are her opinions radical like the printer’s with whom she eloped? Did she become bored with the man or was it homesickness that brought the handsome woman back all that way?

  They don’t ask, are all the more intrigued. But in any case her tasks are too many to allow much conversation. Without discussion, without even a spoken request she resumes the role she played before she fled. Every part of it: checking, ordering, supervising. The days caked with coffee grounds and alcohol, broiling meat and fish. Waiters, maids, Mrs Trunkett, Dick all look to her commands just as before.

  Sam speaks only when he must. One day she’s astonished to overhear him say with glee: ‘My daughter has returned, you know!’

  My daughter. My wife. Like her mother she has no existence of her own separate from Sam’s, from Battle’s. At night she hears her father’s snores from his room below, his groans as he reaches down for the pot and hauls himself out of bed.

  It is as though no time at all has passed. As though three years’ sojourn in the New World has taken place entirely in her mind. Three years quickened by discovery, delight.

  Those martins in whose nests the sparrows squat, do they remember their winter over the sea? They will return soon, come April, she realises with a momentary lightening of the heart. They will be here under the eaves, before the swifts come screaming in the dusk.

  She remembers her twelve-year-old self; how no one spoke of her mother’s death or Newton’s. How strange that now she should repeat the pattern of her girlhood. Mourning at night with all the zeal of unextinguished love.

  *

  A handsome pump is erected in front of the Royal Exchange over a well, unearthed in Cornhill not long ago.

  ‘Sam Battle, you must come with us to see the pump in its obelisk case,’ says Bullock. ‘Did you not contribute something towards it?’

  Sam grunts. They don’t know he didn’t.