The Flight of Sarah Battle (10 page)

To those who pay her she is known as Lucy Young – even Digham calls her that, though he knows the truth. She is glad to have abandoned her previous name and her life with Joseph does resemble marriage to an extent. But Joseph is unpredictable. He ignores her for hours at a time, absorbed in his work or mysteriously contemplating some unseen thing before his eyes. Some vision playing on the wall. She keeps quiet, finds ways of doing her tasks with little noise.

‘Lucy, why are you creeping about like a mouse?'

‘I don't want to disturb you.'

‘But you disturb me by creeping about! Sit still or go out!'

She comes to accept his outbursts, though she rarely guesses when they'll take place. She does not complain that he is often out at night, reluctantly accepts his explanation that visits to taverns and places of obscurity are necessary for his work. Some days he springs up, puts aside the burin and clasps her in his arms as if he's just discovered her.

‘How beautiful you are, perfect, a flower. And to think I found you! I might have passed you by. Or I might have stayed at home that night and found your corpse in the morning.'

Must she be thankful to whomever he was with that night? For detaining him long enough that he might rescue her? But she's glad enough of his affection when it erupts.

‘Let me draw you while you colour those prints.'

She sits at the table and dips her brushes. It's simple work, though the subjects are puzzling, unsettling. They're mostly satires, some etched by Digham, some merely printed by him. Some are Joseph's and some from other engravers.

She colours Bond Street fops and the latest female fashions parading in St James's Park, at theatres or seated round faro tables. Charles Fox, swarthy, unshaven in buff and blue, thin, spinous William Pitt, the Prince of Wales bursting with excesses edible, drinkable, female; the demi-monde at the Pantheon, masquerades at Vauxhall; cockneys, Irishmen, the Persian Ambassador's beautiful wife, quacks, Quakers and Methodists. When she gets known for her fine colouring, William tells her, she'll be given topography or sporting prints, but for now it's caricatures, humorous prints.

Joseph's own satires shift from overt attacks on the follies of the monarch and Prince of Wales to witty depictions of demotic foibles. That he should hang around the Bow Street lock-up or sundry round-houses and watch-houses is understandable when the results are hilarious prints of pugilistic or hopeless inmates, ludicrous or fearsome keepers and constables. Capering against gloomy backgrounds, each is as absurd as the other, the catchers and the caught. His constables spill into taverns, too, though here a partiality for one side over the other is apparent. His apprentices, labourers and servant girls heartily enjoy themselves in their cock and hen clubs: red-cheeked, amorous, tipsy, bare-breasted, their features hardly caricatured at all. In burst the Officers of the Watch and the Runners, brutal, distorted, their lips and chins extended, bent, eyes misplaced, bawling, beating, lusting in heavy, black lines.

These prints sell well. Satires they are, but for Lucy they display Joseph's other life: drunkenness, flesh, roister. She realises her wretchedness is to be placated by money, that her heart must harden. He always returns with folders of new sketches, so that much of his explanation is true. But his breath smells of beer and tobacco, his clothes of other bodies, strong, rank.

Nothing she colours is as disturbing as the drawings she finds one day when Joseph is at Digham's. Bleak with incomprehension at his insults that morning, she seeks for clues about this man to whom she clings, peering at the disorder of his work bench, lifting papers carefully. Opening drawers. To find sheets and sheets of half-dressed men and women on plump pillows, in carts, on sofas, tables, propped up on gates, unhidden behind walls, bodices gaping, skirts up, breeches rumpled round knees, hats askew; buttocks naked and immense, breasts, thighs, parts minutely drawn, exposed, enlarged, red-tipped. Expressions of ecstasy. Gorging.

She's aghast. They're his work. From his mind. When he's gentle, affectionate to her do these images lurk yet in his thoughts? She thinks of her own timidity, her fright even when he first encouraged her into his bed; how demure she is, how utterly unlike these great women with their hair and breasts, shameless in their desire. Has he drawn these for himself or are they to sell? And one woman, with black locks and big, seductive eyes appears again and again in the drawings, her body and limbs arranged in ways Lucy could not have imagined. Voracious.

She is crushed. Barely closes the drawer when he returns and finds her staring, pale and shocked.

‘Lucy, what is it, my love? You're faint. Here! There now, that's better. How lovely you are, even when the colour's gone from your cheeks. Perhaps especially then.

‘William has just paid me. Look! It's cockshut time. Twilight. Time to shut up the cock! Let's go to the Eagle and eat a broiled steak.'

In the warm, dark bonhomie of the Eagle her horror dims. She wonders vaguely if there's a room here, upstairs, where unspeakable things take place. Half listens for the sounds she supposes are made by those couplings. She dare not ask him about his drawings, is soon enveloped in alcohol and cheer. Later, back home, he carries her over to their bed like a precious being that requires the utmost tenderness.

*

Now there's his latest project: a series of prints of Shakespeare's women. Not satires, these will express all the different sentiments of both the heroines and the wicked women, even the lesser roles of Shakespeare's best-known plays. He'll employ stipple engraving, the effects soft and subtle as brushwork.

‘Collectors will want to buy each new one as it appears,' he says, bouncing with excitement, ‘or perhaps I'll have subscriptions. A set for fifty guineas.'

‘Will you give up the satires, Joseph?' Might she have him to herself at last?

‘Good heavens, no!'

‘How will you have time for both?'

‘I'll stop working on trade cards and advertisements for a start. I'm sure William can find someone else to do those. Besides, Lucy, here's the main point. You will be my model!'

‘Oh?'

‘You will make a perfect Desdemona, a wonderful Ophelia, an upright Cordelia.'

‘A Lady Macbeth?' She smiles faintly.

‘Haha! I'll find someone else for that. But I'll begin with you – all we need is suitable clothing for each character.'

‘Flowers for Ophelia.'

‘Yes. Let's start now! Desdemona, I fancy. Come, sit here – you're listening to Othello's tales of his life.'

‘But what about my clothing? And surely you need an Othello?'

‘I have a friend who looks just the part. He goes to Wood's. Clothing's a minor matter and everyone knows the story. It's her face, listening enthralled, that will be wonderful to see. We don't need Othello, yet. It's Desdemona's face that people will buy.'

‘What is Wood's, Joseph?'

‘Oh, it's a club in a tavern in Wych Street. Come on!'

He pulls her up, sits her on a low chair, arranges her head, her hands, her hair. Steps back to look and look again. Smiles with pleasure at the prospect of his task. Looks at her as an artist, not a lover, not a husband.

*

The sketches of Desdemona are so good that Joseph decides to produce paintings first, and then make engravings of them. The original paintings may themselves sell well. Moreover, he thinks there should be several different poses for various dramatic moments in the play. In the first painting Lucy is shown seated neatly, hands clasped in her lap, her face upturned in rapt concentration to the telling of an unfathomable tale, her delicate beauty not much changed from when he found her, for all her unhappiness. The second painting will show Desdemona pressing Othello on Cassius's behalf, flirtatiously questioning, unintentionally irritating her husband, rubbing on the new sore of jealousy. Lucy thinks this difficult until she imagines how, if they really were married, she might try to persuade him to give up his other world. He begins the painting with her on half of the canvas, the other half left blank until his friend shall appear to pose as Othello.

Digham comes to see the work. He casts short-sighted glances round the room, taking in their life.

‘You have made a teratical difference to these living quarters, Lucy.'

‘He means big,' Joseph explains.

‘I mean prodigious!'

‘And you accused me of being bookish, William.'

‘Not at all the same. I just like to hold on to the words that will shortly die. But what an excellent draughtsman you are, Joseph.'

‘I've always drawn, ever since I was a boy and had a few lessons before I came to you. Everything else you taught me.'

‘Yes, yes, but this is more than exercise. He has a great talent, Lucy, frappish though his mood may be at times. And you, Joseph, you have a perfect model.'

‘Oh, she has learned her part well,' he agrees, offhand.

‘No. There's more than that in her face. Lucy, you have felt for Desdemona, with her, that is obvious. And Joseph has understood it, my dear, else he could not have conveyed it.'

Here is a man who is kind!

*

Despite the frequency of Joseph's nocturnal absences, Lucy is not inured to them. After a night away he returns accompanied.

‘Lucy, this is Fanny Lobb. Fan, Lucy Dale.'

She recognises the big, dark woman from his hidden drawings, if in reality less sumptuous than her portrayal.

Something prevents Lucy from running from the room or vomiting at their feet. Fanny has smiled at her without triumph. She cannot smile back, cannot speak, her body shudders inside her clothes, she longs to sleep.

‘Fan will be Emilia to your Desdemona, Lucy. I'll need to make you somewhat thinner, eh, Fan? You're a servant, see, to Desdemona, Lucy that is. You must look subordinate. And you're married to the most evil man in all Shakespeare!'

‘So you said, Joe. What's that make me then?'

‘Oh, you're not evil, Fan. In fact you kill yourself out of love and loyalty to Desdemona.'

‘I never!'

‘You do. But I shan't paint you killing yourself, don't worry.'

Fanny fails to catch Lucy's eye. There's common cause here, Fan thinks, both of them attached to odd, intoxicating Joe; clever Joe, full of surprises. A looker he is, with his long fair hair, but moody. The girl loves him, he's told her that himself and she obeys him like a slave, no doubt of it. She can't delight him as she, Fan, has done all night, her body still thundering, her clothing sticky. However, this Lucy is perfect. With woman's eyes she sees how the girl's features are delicate and neat, small, exquisite as she could never be. Like, like a little cake she once saw in a pastry-cook's, all scalloped edges with tiny, shiny fruits. He wants her for how she looks, she supposes. Needs her, Fan, to fuck him good and proper when he's drunk, smoked his smoke and she's entertained the club with her singing, rotating her hips to ‘Sandman Joe'; needs this other one to look pretty about the place. Patch his breeches.

‘The willow song, you remember?' Lucy begins to cry.

‘If it's a song as you want I'll sing it, eh, Joe? Ain't ‘eard me, ‘as she?'

‘It's not like that, Fan. Different song altogether. A lament.'

‘Oh lord, no. Let's ‘ave us something to eat, I say. Got any bread and cheese, Miss Dale? Bit of bacon? Some of us ain't eaten since yesterday.'

Lucy gathers plates and knives, food from the press, warms the teapot. Joseph yawns. Passing Fan as she lays things on the table, Lucy identifies at last what she's smelled on Joseph so many times. A rankness from the woman's clothes, the body beneath.

There's knocking on the street door. Rapid. Repeated. Joseph goes to see and the women listen, try to consider how to act in his absence, but in no time two sets of feet leap up the stairs, burst into the room.

‘Matthew!' Lucy runs to the slight young man standing, hesitant, next to Joseph. She sobs, can't stop.

‘Lucy, Lucy. Now, now. It's not so bad.'

He cannot know how bad it is.

‘Have you escaped? Thank God!' She drinks him in, clutches his hands as a thrown rope. ‘Oh, but Matthew, this is Joseph.'

‘Your husband. We introduced ourselves just now, and I'm very glad to meet you, Joseph.' Fanny, astonished at the news of Joseph's marriage, is ignored. ‘Yes, I have escaped. Can you hide me for a day or so?'

‘Of course,' Joseph says. ‘I shall be proud to. But will they not think of coming here to look for you?'

‘First they'll try the Tower. Do my parents know this address?'

‘I don't think so. I was deliberately vague about where we live. You haven't written to them, have you, Lucy?'

‘Certainly not.'

Matthew hastens on. ‘I shan't stay for long. I have the name of someone. He'll tell me where it's safe to go.'

Fanny says: ‘I'm going ‘ome, Joe, then. Another day, eh?'