The Flight of Sarah Battle (26 page)

‘It is better for you that you didn't, perhaps. It's a hard thing for a wife to tell on her husband.'

‘But if I had, what would you have done then?'

‘Alerted everyone in the Society. Expelled him from it. Nothing else. We could hardly have brought a government spy to justice.'

She sits.

‘You must not blame yourself, Miss Battle. It is
we
who were at fault. We in the Society, the Society that was. We should have known, should have noticed. We were complacent, asleep! He seemed too foolish to be a spy.'

She shakes her head.

‘He
played
at being a fool. With me he played the serious thinker. I think he wanted to be an actor, you know. He liked the theatre, certainly. And
still
he plays!'

‘The letter you found showed Wintrige for what he was. For that we are most grateful. What we don't know is how much damage his spying did. No doubt he contributed to the destruction of the Corresponding Society. We'll never discover how many his reports consigned to prison.'

She covers her face with her hands.

‘Miss Battle, please. It was not my purpose to upset you. Quite the opposite. I came to
thank
you for sending us the evidence. And also the few of us who remain ask to be allowed to provide any help you might need. You are to call on us, please.'

She looks up. ‘Thank you. That is very kind.' Sees his glance shift inwards.

‘But I have also come for myself. May I sit?'

‘Of course.'

‘I am near despair, Miss Battle. We have been crushed; there is no future. A few rash men and boys risk their lives in futile revolution. They will achieve nothing; will be caught and hanged.

‘I miss Tom Cranch. We all do. His purpose never wavered. In his absence we have disintegrated too easily. He had enthusiasm, wit. Of course, he was an idealist, for which some criticised him, and he was impetuous, certainly, but he had courage. I doubt I have such strength, but it would help me to hear about it. To hear about him.'

Her mind floods with sadness. Can he know how much she longs to talk of her beloved Tom? Suspects he does.

She smiles at the forlorn apothecary. Tells him all about America.

3

Sarah's child is born in high summer when Change Alley is at its most fetid. She's attended by a man-midwife recommended by Pyke. He encourages her through a long labour with plentiful brandy and a novice's anxiety: it's only his second birth.

The baby is a girl whom she names Eve; who is fussed over by Mrs Trunkett, Dick, the waiters, the kitchen maids, so that now and then Sarah must send them away in order to gaze on the child herself. The child who is proof that she hasn't dreamed her brief life with Tom; that he was real, not a fantasy of perfection. Was he perfect? Of course not, though in that short time he seemed so, their unsanctified marriage blessed by love, by passion.

Pyke called Tom impetuous. Robert thought him an innocent, worse, culpable. True, he put himself in danger, and after he died she sometimes thought to blame him. That had not lasted. She loved him for the very idealism and energy that made it imperative he include the docks among all the work places in Philadelphia where he distributed his rousing pamphlets, so full of hope. The docks where yellow fever arrived on ships from the South.

How much more good might he have done? How much more happiness would they have had? She despises her craven self-pity, at least will not expose the child to the sight of it. But misery in the heart of the night is an old way, well walked since childhood, not one she can banish.

In moments of quiet she contends with her oscillating feelings.

That Tom will never know his child is a great sorrow. That Eve will never know her father is another, but Sarah intends to tell his daughter everything about him until he almost lives again. Sometimes grief is countered by the child's resemblance to Tom, his colouring, bright eyes, seemingly easy contentment. Suckling the baby, she laughs with remembered pleasure, weeps at her loss.

Dick and Mrs Trunkett run Battle's quite well for the month's lying-in. They keep Wintrige away from her; she supposes he's sulking. She employs a nurse, a motherly woman obscurely related to the man-midwife, and in due time is back downstairs supervising the running of the coffee house. Eve lives in the nursery, constantly visited by her mother who is determined her own childhood will not be repeated. Her daughter will not be raised among idle men, careless and ridiculous in their pravity; she will not be ignored by her mother, her earliest playmate a puppy on the filthy floor. Sarah sings and plays with her baby, whose laughter is catching. Reads rhymes by Blake, that poet Tom knew:

Merry, merry sparrow!

Under leaves so green;

A happy blossom

Sees you, swift as arrow,

Seek your cradle narrow

Near my bosom.

Pretty, pretty robin!

Under leaves so green;

A happy blossom

Hears you sobbing, sobbing,

Pretty, pretty robin,

Near my bosom.

In a few years Sarah will find good education for her. Only through education can women become independent said Constantia in the
Massachusetts Magazine
. Only through education might they hope to do something more worthwhile than work in a coffee house. She thinks of the night she addressed the Democratic Republicans in the Indian Queen, blushes at the memory. How little she knew. Yet Tom had faith in her. The notes for the pamphlet they were to have written lie locked in a drawer.

It's as well the child is not a boy for she would have searched perpetually for Tom's replica. Her love for Eve, her joy holding the dark, sweet baby, echoes with lament.

All about, London seethes. Hunger, resentment, loathing. Charcoal crawls over pavements, handbills and chalk scrawls cover walls:

K— G— and the farmer are busy crambing the empty stomachs of the poor with Bayonets

Crowds collect, swarm, face the Yeomanry united, no longer split between Jacobins and Monarchists. Women organise great protests outside Coldbath Fields prison, their husbands locked in damp cells without heat or light, legs ulcerated by frost.

Wintrige catches her arm one night. He's been waiting for her in the shadows.

‘It is time you saw sense,' he blurts.

He is fleshy and shambling, his legs uncoordinated through accumulation of weight. They have kept out of each other's way for weeks, but Sarah is aware of his behaviour, has had reports from Dick and Mrs Trunkett.

‘Miss Battle, you be best buy 'im off,' Dick advises.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Tell ‘im there's more food and better at Slaughter's and you do pay ‘im to go there.'

‘Dick, would that it were so easy! I'm
married
to him. There's nothing I can do.'

‘Oh.' He wrings his arthritic hands.

In the dark corridor, Sarah tries to pull herself from Wintrige's grasp.

‘It is time
you
saw sense, ‘ she cannot help retort. ‘Let me be!' But his clutch is tight. ‘I shall call out for help. They've not all gone yet.'

He lets go. ‘Sit and talk with me, Sarah.'

‘There is nothing to talk about. But I'll repeat my wish that you cease making a spectacle of yourself.'

‘You
benefit
from it since they buy more coffee and liquor. And so I earn my keep. But why do I speak like this? It is all mine anyway!'

She is almost out of hearing when he calls after her. ‘Your child! Your child should have a father. Come, Sarah. Let us live together and bring up the child. I shall be a good husband and father. I promise.'

‘Your promise is worthless.'

He shouts at her: ‘They think it's my child. If you want to be respected it
must
be mine.'

‘They know perfectly well she's not yours. And they forgive me. You will have nothing to do with my child. Never ask me again.' She hurries to the nursery where she has a bed alongside Eve's cot. Locks herself in, takes the baby in her arms, wipes tears where they fall onto the tiny forehead and rocks them both to sleep.

She is woken briefly by studied moans from Wintrige's room, followed by snores.

*

Men pour in to watch Wintrige. Dick and the waiters abandon their earlier attempts to ignore him, since much of the food and drink he consumes is bought for him by others.

To the relief of many, Wintrige drops his newspaper readings. His role is that of clown, entertainer: to astonish, to hold the crowd. His timing is precise, they watch in suspense. Will he actually eat
all that
? Will he down yet another bottle of port without puking? He spins out consumption like a storyteller, expressing uncertainty, near disaster, satisfaction, obscene delectation, through the movement of his eyes and brows, through a range of subtle hums and sighs. Between dishes he crows, boasts.

‘Oh what a tedious life I led in the customs house!' An imaginary actor's existence appears. ‘Oh, what ennui in the theatre! What boredom compared to the anticipation of another of Mrs Trunkett's pies, her lardy paste and steaming kidneys! Who needs a woman when you can thrust your fingers into puddings and suck on jellies!'

A roar of delight from his audience.

‘How the juices ooze! Lick, lick, lick!' He squeals with pleasure. ‘And another bowl of Mrs Wintrige's punch, John!'

His limbs and digits thicken, his face and body swell, his clothes gape open. Each evening the effort begins to tell, he groans as he chews, soaks a towel with sweat that sheets his lurid red face.

Bets are laid, increasingly large sums won. Winners usually hand a proportion to Wintrige himself, placing it next to the by now senseless man slumped, snoring, among licked-out bowls and plates, drained bumpers.

When Sarah insists the twice-daily event take place out of the way, upstairs, she is politely, firmly denied. And then Wintrige breaks a record, eats a whole menagerie of meat and fish. Clown becomes hero. Unknown to her, bills are posted by cronies of Dick who, for all his affection for Sarah, has never lost his loyalty to her father.

Heroic Consumption!

Watch the great Eater and Drinker J. Wintrige

Beat all known Records!

Battle's Coffee House, Change Alley. Twice daily.

How Sam would have loved this show: its money-making monstrousness.

‘'E'll be laughin in ‘is grave,' Dick says, to Mrs Trunkett's disgust, ‘rubbin' ‘is bones togever wiv glee.'

Nor are Mrs Trunkett and Sarah the only people to loathe the spectacle. Handbills are torn down or defaced:

Shall the Poor starve while the Spy stuffs himself?

His shameful secret, so carefully kept, is scrawled on walls. How do they know? But who cares now that he was once a spy? The Corresponding Society is defunct. The fist is closing on conspiracies.

Sarah is helpless. More and more she retreats to the nursery where, the sound muffled, she feeds Eve or plays with her. She is too distracted to read; instead she handles the books brought back with her from Philadelphia, lovingly opening them, holding the pages to her nose, scenting the lees of that life. How different it was! Each day, each night revealed its own new colour, its richness. Everything she did emerged from love, from confluence.

There was no falsity, no coercion, unlike in childhood when she had been compelled to take over her mother's role, her life dominated by Sam. Then Wintrige manoeuvred her into a marriage that failed to save her from her father and imposed its own bleak tyranny. Now, he's dropped the bleakness, seems, absurdly, to have linked arms with the ghost of her father and imposed a dictatorship of repulsive misrule.

Yet she had tried ways of escape before: the world of conspiratorial laughter in which she lived with Ben Newton; her deluded belief that she'd escape Battle's through Wintrige; flight with Tom as soon as he offered it. ‘Come with me,' he'd said, embraced her and they'd gone.

But how can she extract herself from this present vileness? She can think of no way to do it. She longs for quiet, for love, for Tom. For Martha's companionship. Relives those joyful, short-lived days; murmurs the tenderness to her gurgling baby.

*

In retreat one day she stops before a picture. She's passed it often without noticing, for surely it's just a pretty country maid? The expression catches her. It's an engraving of a young woman, flowers in her hair and hands, singing perhaps, her face and dress slightly disordered. It
isn't
just a pretty country maid. A delicate desperation looks out of the frame.

She wonders about this young woman. Who has engraved it, who painted her in the first place? It's not a picture Sarah knew as a child. Her father must have bought it when she was in America, but from whom? She looks through the account books, finds purchases made soon after she'd left, from an engraver, J. Young, Little Russell Street: