Death of a Radical

by Rebecca Jenkins

  “Whatever did I do to that woman?” Jarrett inquired plaintively.

  “Never gave her a second look’s my guess,” said Charles.

  “So why are you spared the cut direct?”

  “I’m a marquess!” he said smugly. “Don’t hit me,” he added, cheerfully. “Yes?” A middle-aged woman encased in a close-weaved wool gabardine that spoke of the well-paid servant stood at his elbow.

  “Mrs. Fancy,” Jarrett greeted her, recognizing Lady Catherine’s maid.

  Fancy acknowledged him with an incline of her head. “My mistress asks, will you join her in her box?”

  The orchestra—if a fiddle, a cello, a flute, a tabor player and a hurdy-gurdy man deserved the name—were nearing the end of the overture for the second time. Charles and Raif found Lady Catherine with Henrietta Lonsdale in the left-hand box overlooking the stage, sipping wine from crystal glasses, a large box of chocolates balanced on a chair between them.

  “There you are. Lord Charles, come sit by me,” the old lady greeted them. “I want conversation. Henrietta here knows nothing of the theater. Go on girl—take that seat over there.” Lady Catherine waved to the next box. “Escort her, Mr. Jarrett; they’re about to begin.”

  Charles bowed to Miss Lonsdale with a rueful look, as if to say grandes dames must be obeyed. Henrietta bobbed a curtsey and removed herself to the seat on the other side of the low partition. As she gazed resolutely at the scene below she sensed Mr. Jarrett draw the seat beside her back a little. She turned to him.

  “Am I blocking your view?”

  “No. I am quite comfortable.” Indeed, she thought. Mr. Jarrett looked remarkably at ease. She wished she felt the same.

  “I enjoy a good Macheath,” Lady Catherine remarked to Lord Charles. “Did y’ever see Kelly in the part? Too genteel by half. A dull, insipid sort of highwayman! Macheath should be a proper rogue. Fancy! Pour Lord Charles and Mr. Jarrett some wine.”

  The colonel was sitting across on the other side, his lieutenant behind him and Kelso the Richmond magistrate at his side. There were soldiers in the pit and more stood along the back wall. If there were insurgents about they’d hardly be gathered in this hall. Now would be the time to make mischief elsewhere, Jarrett thought. His eyes met Raistrick’s. The lawyer sat barely twenty feet away. The barn theater was an intimate space. Jarrett winced internally. When Bess stood this side of the stage, she’d be less than three feet from him. He flashed a glance at Miss Lonsdale by his side. She was examining the scene before her with every appearance of enjoyment.

  There was excitement, she reflected, in being one among so many waiting, in anticipation of being entertained. The last time Henrietta had attended a play, she had had to travel to Richmond. The shifting light of the flaring tapers threw shadows on the faces below, making the ordinary magical. For all she counted herself a rational being, Miss Lonsdale found herself caught up in the childish pleasure of it all.

  A middle-aged man with a comical mobile face, dressed in the style of the previous century, walked on stage.

  “Hogarth, by God!” declared Lady Catherine with relish.

  “Do you have a playbill, Mr. Jarrett?” Henrietta asked. “Who is that?”

  “Mr. Jefferies—I believe he was once at Astley’s. He will be Mr. Peachum, the thief-taker,” Mr. Jarrett answered.

  In his character as a receiver of stolen goods, the comic went through his book enumerating villains he might have hanged for a price, raising appreciative laughter in the pit by the sly insertion of worthy local names in the list. When he was joined by his playwife, Mrs. Peachum, Henrietta found herself liking despite herself the companionable couple who thought nothing of murder for self-interest. The songs, too, were good. The opera’s author had turned half the familiar tunes of her childhood to his use. Then Polly Peachum appeared.

  The bold redhead from Bedlington’s yard was transformed. Bess Tallentyre portrayed the author’s heroine with such fresh innocence Miss Lonsdale was quite bewildered. And her singing! If truth and feeling could be a sound, it was embodied in that voice. Mr. Jarrett was leaning back in his chair with an air of quizzical detachment. Polly advanced to the front of the stage. She stood barely an arm’s breadth away. In the light of the oil lamps at her feet her eyes seemed huge in her white-painted face. She turned them to Mr. Jarrett.

  “But he so teased me and he so pleased me,” she sang poignantly.

  The notes undulated through the house enchanting every ear. She seemed to be singing just for him. As the lady who happened by circumstance to be sitting at the gentleman’s side, Henrietta didn’t know where to look.

  Bess was up to her old tricks. What had he been thinking to allow himself to be trapped in such a situation! Jarrett shifted his position and looked across the audience, resolutely thinking of other things. He noted that Lieutenant Roberts was no longer sitting in his place behind the colonel. At the back of the box nearest the door, Favian wasn’t paying attention to the stage at all. His eyes were fixed on the girl in peach. Jarrett thought of Grub’s friends from the Red Angel. Given their interest in ballad singing, surely they would be here somewhere. He scanned the pit. Bess finished her song and was drawn into dialogue further off. He caught Miss Lonsdale’s gray eyes watching him.

  “The singing is rather fine, do you not think?” she asked.

  “Indeed.”

  Favian pushed the heavy door to behind him. He had watched her slip out, but where was she? A horse whickered and he saw a pale figure over by the stables. Lally was stroking the nose of a roan poking its head over a half-door. She smiled at him as he approached.

  “My seat is directly over some of those tapers. The smell of hot tallow!” she pulled a comical face. “I was near dying for lack of a breath of clean air.”

  “Do you like the play?”

  “I like the songs.”

  “And the highwayman?” asked Favian, thinking that Mr. Greenwood cut quite a dash in the part.

  “He is rather old,” she replied, her attention on the horse she was petting. The roan was an old nag with a rough coat, mixed with gray.

  “Your glove …” he warned.

  Lally looked at her hand. There was a greasy smudge on the palm of her kid glove.

  “Oh dear! You need a bath,” she told the roan severely.

  The sounds of the opera were muffled within the barn. There were just a couple of lamps burning in the yard. In the night it seemed an entirely private place. She cast a glance back to the barn door.

  “Shall we take a turn round the yard?” he suggested quickly. “Before we go in. The air is so crisp and fresh.”

  Through the archway the vista of cattle pens stretched out beside the tollbooth. All was shadow and quiet. It was as if they were the only ones awake in a sleeping world. She turned up her face and he forgot himself in the sweetness of her expression. He felt the startled intake of her breath as his mouth touched hers. His hands slid about her waist.

  A horse whinnied over by the church.

  “There’s someone coming.” Lally broke away, alarmed. Footsteps were approaching. A brisk manly tread. Favian drew her into a darkened doorway just in time. The man strode past them. He could feel her heart beating against his. Her hair smelt of roses.

  “The coast is clear,” he said, smiling down at her. She wrinkled her nose, her eyes mischievous.

  “We should go back,” she said.

  “Do we have to?” he protested, and kissed her again.

  He raised his head.

  “What?” she asked.

  “There’s someone there, over by the tollbooth.”

  She turned in that direction, responding to the intensity of his expression. Favian was peering through the dark, a small frown creasing his forehead. At first she saw nothing, then a group of shadows shifted and she glimpsed a silhouette, its edges silvered in the moonlight.

  “I know that—” he began.

  “Adelaide!”

  “Dear Lord! That’s my uncle call
ing me!” Lally slipped out of his arms, pulling her shawl about her. “Stay here. He must not see you.”

  The door to the barn theater was open and in the shaft of light Mr. Bedford stood looking about. Her light slippers pattering on the stone, Lally ran along the shadows back to the roan horse, who watched her, twitching its ears.

  “I’m here uncle,” Favian heard her say. Her voice was light and unconcerned. “I was feeling faint and came out for a breath of air.”

  “You come in now,” came the abrupt reply.

  He heard the door slam. His heart was pounding. It couldn’t be and yet … Suddenly it all made sense. His first thought was to consult Raif, then he steadied himself. That was no longer possible. He must act alone.

  Henrietta wondered at herself for laughing. This New-gate comedy was an outrageous combination of the most blatant immorality blended with true feeling. Polly’s plight had become real to her. Her heart was moved despite herself. The heroine’s singing was sweetness itself, although Polly’s innocent bloom was a little rubbed once her lover stepped on stage. Dressed in a red, waisted coat, long black boots and a tricorn hat, Mr. Greenwood’s highwayman was a picture of gallantry. Indeed Macheath’s deluding charm was so persuasive that Miss Lonsdale found herself torn between enchantment and disgust. Miss Polly, she thought, was a little too easy with her highwayman’s intimacies. As Macheath wrapped his arm about his lover’s waist and kissed her neck, Henrietta was uncomfortably conscious of Mr. Jarrett’s presence beside her.

  “Were I laid on Greenland’s Coast,” sang the highwayman, tracing his inamorata’s neckline with his finger. “And in my Arms embrac’d my Lass / Warm amidst eternal Frost / Too soon the Half Year’s Night would pass.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Jarrett saw Miss Lonsdale blush. The pearl drop that hung from her ear quivered. Her dress was cut to the new fashion with nothing but a thin scarlet strap across the shoulders, leaving a hand’s breadth of pearly skin exposed before it met the kid of her long white gloves. The necklace resting on her bosom caught the light as it rose and fell with the gentle swell of her breath. It had an antique, Italian look about it; filigree gold-wire flowers with deep red garnets for petals and pearls at their hearts. They showed to advantage against her skin. Her eyes met his with an inquiring look.

  “May I compliment you on your necklace? It is Italian, I think?” he murmured.

  “Indeed it is. It was my grandmother’s. Do you know Italy, Mr. Jarrett?”

  “My mother has resided there some years.”

  Lord Charles leaned toward Lady Catherine.

  “What do you make of our Macheath?” he asked.

  “A fine rogue!” answered Lady Catherine with relish. “A proper, red-blooded man!”

  *

  He had taken his horse from the stables unhindered. With their customers at the play, the ostlers were gathered in Bedlington’s bar. The wind had specks of ice in it. As he rode they stung his face. He covered his mouth and nose with his muffler and pulled down his hat. A thin, otherworldly strength whipped his blood through his veins. He had never felt so tremblingly alive. There was a sort of coldness about his extremities but in his core he was sustained by the radiating certainty that he, Favian Vere Adley, was at last engaged in action of real consequence. He was in possession of information that only he could communicate. His friends depended on him. He strained his ears to listen for a rider ahead, urging his horse on.

  A good mile away as the bird flies, up across on the moor, nets lay like shadows on the ground. The moon, a bright disc in the sky, illuminated the crisp tracks in the light covering of snow.

  “Done?” Duffin called out low. Queenie twisted in the poacher’s large hands, her nose quivering.

  “That’s the last one,” answered the boy, knocking in the peg. He opened the wooden box he carried slung around him. Duffin placed Queenie on the ground.

  “Now you go to it.”

  The ferret chirruped and slipped down the hole.

  When The Beggar’s Opera was performed at the Theater Royal, Covent Garden, it was usual for the tavern scene with the ladies of the town to be played much reduced, with the worst indecencies being excised for the sake of the morals of the town and the sensibilities of gentlewomen. Mr. Sugden’s company played the scene as the author meant it. A chair had been provided mid-stage for Macheath to sit on while he enjoyed the company of his doxies. Bess, dressed in brown curls and a remarkably low-cut dress as the amorous Dolly, one of the ladies of easy virtue, dragged the chair over to the left-hand side of the stage. Macheath, thereby, was forced to follow and sit just below Lady Catherine’s box. The gentlewoman and her guests, therefore, had the best view as “Dolly” and Jenny Diver (Mrs. Sugden in a red wig) competed to occupy Mr. Greenwood’s lap, exchanging banter of a decidedly lewd nature.

  Lady Catherine and Lord Charles gave every appearance of being well entertained. Beside her, Mr. Jarrett seemed to have gone to sleep with his eyes open. Henrietta stared at her gloves. She was profoundly relieved when the manager Sugden, masquerading as the bawd, Mrs. Coaxer, took center stage with his comedy.

  Jarrett slid a side-glance under his lashes. Miss Lonsdale sat very straight. She had grown strangely familiar to him over the last few months. He was easy in her company. She had a calm poise about her that did not make demands of him, unlike some other women of his acquaintance. The candlelight played on the soft velvet of her bodice. It molded pleasingly to the curve of her breast.

  With an extravagant toss of her curls, her hips swinging, Bess crossed the stage. Now she was playing to Justice Raistrick. Jarrett let out a slow breath.

  “Women are decoy ducks, who can trust ’em?” the betrayed Macheath exclaimed.

  Charles, who had been enjoying Lady Catherine’s excellent claret, rocked back in his chair and shot Jarrett a look under raised eyebrows.

  As he was dragged off in pasteboard chains, Mr. Greenwood cut such a noble figure he had the entire sympathy of the pit. They booed the treacherous whores until they were hoarse.

  He was getting tired. The specks of ice had turned into a flurry of snow. Shadows distorted the land around him but there was enough moonlight to make out the road. There was a fork up ahead marked by a thorn bush. His chest was tight. His mind had been so happily occupied he had not thought once of his chest all day. In his previous existence he would never have thought of being able to put himself to such exertion. “Try to refrain from sniveling, Grub, it disturbs the game,” he muttered to encourage himself. His mission spurred him on. Time to rest later.

  He heard a horse blow through its lips behind the thorn bush. He turned toward the sound and was struck by a great weight. He slid from the saddle.

  “Which way shall I turn me—How can I decide?” sang the besieged Macheath, holding his ears.

  “One Wife is too much for most Husbands to hear,

  But two at a time there’s no mortal can bear.

  This way, and that way, and which way I will,

  What would comfort the one, t’other Wife would take ill.”

  The self-assured rogue who played with women’s hearts was getting his come-uppance.

  Mrs. Sugden, a neat, rounded, brown-haired woman with speaking dark eyes and a surprising turn for spite, was Lucy Lockit, Macheath’s discarded lover. She made an excellent foil to the sentimental Polly. The two women’s rivalry had the spice of truth to it. Lucy was particularly good at dissembling sympathy, her expression shifting to pure malice out of her rival’s sight. It was alarming how short a time it took for morals to be corrupted. Henrietta forgot to be shocked at Lucy, with her padded belly, singing of how she had been “kissed by the parson, the squire and the sot,” and laughed along with the rest. Lucy was preparing to poison Polly, the pair circling each other like two wary cats, pretending to be civil while disguising their sharpened claws.

  Lord Charles rested his arm on the partition between them.

  “So who’s your money on, Miss Lonsdale?” he asked.<
br />
  “Lucy, I think,” she answered in the same spirit. Her prejudice against Bess had not entirely dissipated, however enchanting her performance. “I feel for the poor girl. Polly is pretty, ’tis true, but surely Lucy has the greater claim. Macheath should be responsible for his child.”

  “If I recall the play,” Lord Charles murmured, “that belly does not make Lucy so singular.”

  “I beg your pardon?”“I think you’ll find the highwayman has other wives.”

  It was a good catch. Duffin folded his bag over the warm rabbit corpses. Queenie, sleepy after her exertions, was curled up in her box. His dog barked a little way off.

  “What is it, Bob?”

  The hound was hard to discern against the purple and gray land but he picked out the outline of Bob’s pricked-up ears. They were turned toward the brow of the hill. The poacher stood listening. By rights they were on Grateley land, but the estate had no real gamekeeper. He thought he heard horses not far off. Sounds carried on a cold night like this. The cross lane to Pennygill was over that hill.

  “Got a lay up,” the boy called out disgustedly behind him.

  “Your Badger again?”

  “Aye.”

  “Any notion where?”

  “Round here maybe.” The boy was lying full length, his ear pressed to the frosty earth, listening. His ferret had stopped in the burrow below to eat a kill. The only way to reach him was to dig—if they could find him.

  “We’ll have to send the old hob down on a line then. Get your spade out. It’s your bloody weasel.”

  *

  The audience was well pleased with their entertainment. The ale consumed had loosened tongues and collars. Macheath in chains, condemned, stood alone facing his fate at the hangman’s noose. His gallant demeanor and the lilting regret of his song—“Oh Cruel, cruel case; must I suffer this disgrace?”—brought tears to many an eye. The highwayman rallied his courage. Mr. Greenwood advanced to the front of the boards, a handsome manly figure, and sang with open-hearted disdain for the law that sought to crush him: