The Flight of Sarah Battle

by Alix Nathan

Sarah sees Joseph daily, for he stops work for the moment and constantly has some new detail about the flight to discuss with her. His presence is a diversion from the tedium of the coffee house, whose heavy, dark masculinity is already seeping into Eve’s life, ready to choke her childhood. Eve will need to be rescued soon, though Sarah won’t think of sending her away to school, to some doubtful establishment in Chelsea, for instance. If only there was an Academy like the one in Philadelphia, where they teach girls mathematics, geography, chemistry, natural philosophy. As yet she knows no solution. She tells herself that once the flight is over she’ll talk to Mr Pyke and work out what to do.

  Meanwhile, she comes to expect Joseph, knows exactly when he arrives from the cheers and heckles of the customers.

  ‘The Conquering Hero!’ they bawl with admiration and irony. Someone trumpets out the famous Handel tune.

  ‘He’s to fly off into the ether with our beautiful Sarah, you know,’ they say to a newcomer.

  ‘Good Lord! Why?’

  ‘She says a woman can do it as well as a man.’

  ‘Oh, one of those.’

  ‘Not so. No bluestockings.’ It’s Thynne. ‘She’s always made up her own mind. Not like her mother, though now I think of it, making up her own mind got her killed.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Mistakenly shot by militia in the Gordon Riots. But Sarah, now, she’s a friend of this artist who’s to sketch the city from the heavens. He’s well known.’

  ‘Can we spare her, I ask you?’ says Challoner, one of those who still miss Wintrige.

  ‘Just this once. They’ll make a striking sight.’

  Sarah’s friendship with Joseph has become public, has become a pairing she never intended but is amused by, enjoys.

  *

  The day is hot and cloudy. Sarah and Joseph walk together through the crowd towards the enormous balloon, thirty feet in diameter, forty-five feet high, as big as a four-storey house, its alternate dark-green and yellow segments encased in a net, its oblong car draped in Tricolours and Union Jacks. On the ground around it is a cartwheel shape of barrels and pipes in which acid and iron filings have generated the hydrogen that fills the great globe.

  Someone pulls at Joseph’s sleeve and he turns impatiently.

  ‘Young man Young,’ says William Digham. ‘I’ve come to wish you success.’

  ‘William!’ Joseph’s grimace transforms. He wraps the old man in large arms.

  ‘I’ve not seen you in a while, Joseph, but there’s no need to suffocate me now that we finally meet!’

  Joseph bows his head. He has neglected his beloved master shamefully.

  ‘Off with you to your aërostatic globe. They’re waiting. Do your best. I’m watching your fulgent star rise to its zenith.’

  Jacques Garnerin waits for his companions in an elegant blue coat and French hat with the national cockade, chatting to bystanders and smiling, for all a showman at Bartholomew Fair, encouraging people into his booth. He is sinewy and slight, his noble nose and thin, sharp features wind-burned, his skin toughened like a sailor’s. Behind Sarah is Eve with her nurse, and Lucy, wretched at the sight of so many Tricolours, holding little Matthew’s hand. Sarah wears her best dress, its low neckline and short sleeves fashionable enough, and a large beribboned bonnet. She is red with heat and self-consciousness. It’s not unlike the first day she stood at the bar in Battle’s, when men scanned her perpetually till she felt skinned.

  She turns to hug Eve and kiss the child who looks with bright eyes from her to the balloon and back, too young to understand, aware only of a vast murmuring, a heaving sea of smiles.

  ‘I’ll be back soon, my little one.’ She steps up to the basket, wanting it all to be over.

  Joseph bows to Lucy and of a sudden, perhaps to cancel that formality, ruffles his son’s hair. Garnerin, the small, foreign entertainer, hands his two British aëronauts up steps into the car, springs into it like a boy. There’s only just room, for in the centre is ballast, bags of sand marked in quantities from kilos down to grams, suspended by four cords from the hoop at the base of the balloon’s netting. Attached to the car’s ropes are a thermometer, impressive compass, telescope and a barometer for measuring altitude. Dick, limping on his arthritic hip, carries over baskets of provisions with the help of a waiter. There’s applause. Battle’s has provided the food and drink! All of which is stowed in lockers under the seat on which Joseph sits, cluttered about with pens, pencils, chalks, brushes, paint boxes, sketchbooks and blocks, perspective glasses and his own pocket telescope. Jacques calculates that large Joseph, his equipment, and baskets of food and drink will balance the weight on the opposite side of the car to Sarah and himself.

  A band strikes up God Save the King. The Official Aëronaut of France, fidgeting throughout, stands to attention for the succeeding tune which no one recognises.

  ‘But that is not the Marseilleise,’ says Joseph, puzzled.

  ‘It offend Napoleon. I told them they must play Veillons au salut de l’Empire. Soon he become Emperor.’

  After four verses, during which it is the crowd’s turn to fidget and chatter, Garnerin unhooks bag after bag of ballast, hands them over the side of the car until the captive balloon pulls at its tethers.

  At last he signals, assistants untie the ropes, restrain the great ball by muscle power. The crowds hush.

  A sign, the ropes are loosed, a huge cheer breaks out, the ascent begins. Sarah feels the basket leave the ground, an upward pull through her body that makes her laugh out loud. Even as her child slips further from her, the little face blearing in her sight, her legs weaken with pleasure and she grips the car to steady herself. Jacques, so many successful flights in hand, moves about with panache, making the balloon rise slowly, letting it hang over the gardens for maximum effect. He holds a French flag himself, gives Sarah a Union Jack and with Joseph waving his sketchbook, they all three salute the crowds thronging the Gardens and all roads that lead to Ranelagh. The great vehicle moves massively, elegantly in a north-east direction, away from the packed banks of the river, from the waterworks, the creeks and sluice gates of Pimlico fenland. Still low enough for onlookers clustered in every window and house-top, perching in trees like cawing rooks.

  Joseph, breathless with excitement, sketches rapidly as they sail over Green Park and St James’s. Ducks peel from the lakes as the huge shadow passes. Westminster to the right, Charing Cross beneath.

  ‘Look, Sarah. See the stocks?’ he asks her.

  ‘I hope there’s no one in them.’

  ‘It might cheer the poor prisoner to see us. At least it would distract the pelters. Here! Use my pocket telescope. I’ve not enough hands for it.’ His steel spectacles have a second set of lenses, tinted, hinged up until needed, for all like mad eyebrows.

  Everywhere upturned faces.

  ‘Strand,’ Jacques points out.

  ‘The whores are lifting their eyes instead of their skirts,’ Joseph says to him.

  They move at speed between that road and the river. Or rather, road and river seem to move past below, for they feel no motion, borne at the wind’s pace.

  ‘Over there in the distance, are those St George’s Fields?’ Sarah asks Jacques whose thin brown finger traces a line on the map. She remembers the day, the shining day. Was it not June then, too?

  ‘I think St George’s Fields, yes. Now we release the bird.’ He opens a small wicker cage Sarah hadn’t noticed and a pigeon with a tiny Union flag round one leg, a Tricolour round the other, flies out without hesitation.

  Small boats jostle each other on the river. At this point there are no masted ships, held back by the multiple, stumpy legs of London Bridge. Anchored, the little vessels rock to the movement of their passengers who follow the balloon, cheer the pigeon’s flight, soon lost.

  Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill and the glory of a dome from whose pinnacle stone seems to cascade like water. They’re so near they almost touch it.

  ‘Who wouldn’t give their eye teeth to
touch St Paul’s?’ Joseph’s pencil runs over page after page. ‘If only we could stop!’

  ‘No balloon have ever taken this route before,’ says Jacques. ‘Look at the people. They desert their houses like in an earthquake!’ He reads the barometer. ‘Three thousand feet. I keep it low for them.’

  Cheapside. Sarah peers down. Somewhere near here is Winkworth Buildings, City Road, the place of her dismal marriage. Poultry, where her mother and Ben Newton were killed. Can she see Change Alley? Battle’s in its dark corner? Her life passes beneath her.

  The wind still carries them north-east. Such density of brick. Such insect-tunnel streets.

  To their right, masts and sails appear beyond London Bridge.

  ‘Look where they’ve pulled down the granaries in Tooley Street,’ Joseph announces. Gulls screech. Foul grey smoke from a brick stack puffs up, floats away.

  The Tower, flag flying. Matthew. Condemned. How will Lucy bear his death? And he, rash, rejected, loved, traitor, watcher of the wonderful flight like any other man, sees from one of his windows in the south-west tower the green and yellow balloon drift away from the city. Green and yellow: fine Irish colours, he thinks. Recently the United Irishmen have laid aside the national green and switched to yellow to protect themselves.

  ‘I wish it would come over here,’ he thinks. ‘I’d climb in and sail the other way to Dublin.’ His days are a monotonous nightmare of waiting.

  Goodman’s Fields, market gardens, pastures where cattle stand. The wind is blowing them due north.

  ‘Now we ascend,’ says Jacques, the city finally behind them, the fields and hamlets of the East End shrinking to dabs of colour.

  ‘Madame Battle, you will feel the coldness un petit peu.’ He unhooks sacks of ballast and throws them out.

  They rise through cloud mass. Sarah shivers, reaches for her bag of winter clothes, two shawls, a cloak, gloves.

  ‘Thermometer reads fifteen degrees,’ says Joseph, ghostly in the mist, layer upon layer, three full shelves of cloud.

  Then they are through: vast blue opens above and around. The quicksilver shoots up five degrees more than summer heat. Whiteness lies thick beneath them.

  ‘Have we stopped moving?’

  ‘Non, Madame Battle, we merely seem stationary.’

  ‘We can see nothing against which to locate our movement,’ Joseph remarks, his sketchbook temporarily abandoned, his tinted lenses lowered against the glare.

  ‘Yes! You are right. And so we eat now. What have you brought for us, Madame Battle?’

  They pull out the basket, balance plates on napkins on their laps, hold glasses cautiously, eat, drink, smile at each other. Sarah is famished, having eaten nothing since early morning, and then, too nervous for more than tea. There’s ham and cold fowl, Mrs Trunkett’s best plum cake and three bottles of orgeat, wine and spirits too dangerous to take because of the air pressure. Balloons and champagne: those were the early days, before war with France.

  Eat, drink and smile again. Monsieur Garnerin leaps up constantly to check ropes, instruments, his markings on the map. His mood is imperturbable, his movements disturbing.

  ‘Jacques,’ says Joseph, ‘stop for a minute and tell us about your imprisonment in Buda castle.’

  ‘No! It is without purpose. The past is finished, it is dead. I never think of it.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t agree with that,’ Sarah says. ‘You’re quite wrong, Monsieur Garnerin.’

  ‘The past, c’est passé! Today is important and tomorrow.’ He checks the barometer.

  Sarah catches Joseph’s eye momentarily. Does he think that, too about the past, his own past, so conveniently abandoned? Yet she is glad he’s there with her now, excitable though he is. Over months, they have become used to each other’s ways, enjoy each other’s presence, talk with pleasing familiarity.

  He shows her his sketchbook.

  ‘Oh, Joseph, these are wonderful! Look at St Paul’s, the ships on the river. Even the people in the trees at Ranelagh. You seem to have drawn everything. Such skill.’

  ‘You are not drawing me?’ says Jacques, flicking through the pages.

  ‘They’ll make a most excellent book,’ Sarah says, ‘and increase your fame, too, Monsieur Garnerin.’

  ‘Now that we are cut off from the earth by these clouds, Sarah,’ Joseph says, ‘are you afraid?’

  ‘Madame Battle has no need to be afraid. I have much experience. I have ascended many times. You are safe, Madame.’ Sinewy Jacques is practical, has never known doubt.

  ‘I feel quite safe, Monsieur Garnerin, and not afraid at present, though a little apprehensive about the next stage, perhaps. It is a different world here. I begin to wonder if there ever was another.’

  Jacques frowns, but Joseph says: ‘Perhaps this is the only world and what we thought we knew before doesn’t exist. I can see from your expression you don’t agree, Jacques. You think this is nonsense. Sarah and I are Romantics. You, Jacques, are a man of science, a philosophe. You want to understand the workings of the world. You want to command it!’

  ‘Bien sûr. Who does not?’

  ‘It has never occurred to me to want that,’ Joseph says.

  ‘From up here I can understand what you mean, Monsieur Garnerin. From up here I could issue proclamations and orders! I feel like a queen.’

  ‘Sarah, Jacques would command the elements, I think.’

  ‘Whereas I see the world as one huge coffee house, you mean. Joseph, it was a joke. I imagined a cartoon of myself.’

  ‘I’ll draw it for you now. Look. Queen Sarah Rules the World from her Aërostatic Globe. I’ll finish it later, and work the world into a giant coffee house. For of course, that is what it is!’

  They pack away the meal, stow the baskets. Joseph has removed his greatcoat, both men take off their jackets.

  Suddenly the clouds below disperse and the world appears. The whole country spreads magnificently beneath and beyond them. Sarah gasps and Joseph, elated, grasps her hand.

  ‘We are in heaven, are we not? To look down like this is perfection. I never felt so happy!’

  She takes her hand from his, gently, steadying herself on the basket.

  ‘Madame Battle, you feel dizzy?’

  ‘Certainly not, Monsieur Garnerin.’

  ‘You feel well?’

  ‘I feel exhilarated.’

  They are fifteen thousand feet above a boundless land, which at first appears as swathes and blocks of greens and browns like a canvas in preparation. The balloon’s shadow moves across it, the only cloud. Then they lean over the side and are amazed to see objects picked out in extraordinary clarity. Joseph insists Sarah use his snakeskin-covered pocket telescope, but even without magnification, they point out to each other ruts in roads, furrows in fields, thatch in hamlets, chimneys in towns. Their hearing, too, has sharpened strangely so that sounds reach them: the rattle of carriages, lowing of cattle, mewing of kites and buzzards, shouts of surprise and joy.

  ‘This is remarkable,’ Joseph says, ‘quite remarkable.’

  ‘When people ascend first time, sometimes they talk of God,’ Jacques tells them.

  ‘I can understand that,’ says Sarah. ‘The ordered beauty of the natural world.’ That day at the Schuylkill River. ‘But think of the thousands of lives below, the tragedies, pleasure, love, the sadness, and we can neither see nor hear any of them! Like the ship’s captain who cares nothing for the mice on board!’

  She thinks: ‘My own life, too, is as nothing in the universe. Yet now for me each second is full, so full of everything that is happening, all that has happened.’

  ‘Of course you don’t believe in God, Jacques,’ says Joseph. ‘You are a man of the Revolution. For you, men are masters of the universe.’

  ‘Not yet masters complete, Joseph. Not of the whole world. But I shall conquer the sky. Balloons first. And parachutes. I design a parachute. Madame Garnerin have jumped already.’

  ‘How astonishing,’ Sarah says. ‘Was she not af
raid?’

  ‘She feel no fear.’

  ‘Do you believe in a deity, Sarah?’ Joseph asks, dipping his brush rapidly, sketching, scratching with his nail.

  ‘A distant one. A first cause.’

  ‘Well! I thought all deists were men!’

  They ascend higher and a west wind drives them over a forest. Jacques is attending to the map.

  ‘Here is the Epping forest.’

  ‘The easiest thing to sketch so far, let me tell you. Look, it’s like a great gooseberry bush.’

  He daubs and streaks, trying out greens merging into blue, black shadows, a distant sift of cloud while yet the sun still burns.

  They move rapidly, high, to the east.

  In the huge blueness Sarah’s senses are keenly alert. She feels her body glow with the sun’s heat, her mind open so that past and future spread like a magnified map. She sees like a blade.

  And knows what she must do. Suddenly. What she must do for Eve and for herself.

  She must leave Battle’s. Sell it. Its darkness and smells, closed, inward-looking, a standing pool, black, stagnant. She will take Eve away from its influence. Sail once more, for the last time, to Philadelphia. Live there, work there. Publish and sell books herself. Take up where Tom left off.

  ‘I shall do what he did,’ she thinks, ‘what he would have done had he lived, what we would have done together. I learned something of the business there, enough to try. Sell cheap reprints, he said, so as to publish more pamphlets and unknown writers. I’ll finish our pamphlet on women’s education.

  ‘I can do it with the money from selling Battle’s; I don’t need Robert Wilson. What was it Tom said about me? He thought I was wasted in the coffee house. She will find a new way in this new world. I shall!

  ‘Lucy and little Matthew can come with us, live with Eve and me. And Martha will be there, dear Martha. She will help Lucy laugh. Yes. I shall do all this.

  ‘Oh! It’s like the moment when the clouds dissolved! I can see it all set out: Sarah Cranch & Daughter, Books and Printseller, Market Street, Philadelphia.’

  Joseph notices the change in Sarah’s face, her features seeming both to sharpen and to shine. An inner exultation. Sketches her as well as he can without her knowledge. No cartoon, he catches uplift, illumination.