His Last Fire Read online

  ‘You never said! You never asked me!’ Hectic, glittering, she began to whistle, fell asleep.

  ‘I got her through it. I’ve no idea why she survived. Couldn’t account for it then, can’t now.’ She was well, if weak, in time for the appearance of the husband and the grand physician. He was not asked to attend the family again.

  ‘I resumed work and at first spent little time thinking about what she’d said. Yet it crept into my heart and hid there.’

  ‘Lived like a toad crouching at the bottom of the cistern.’

  ‘I like toads.’

  ‘You let her slip away.’

  ‘Yes.’ The April day among bluebells under oak trees, when he helped adjust her shawl against still lingering chill. When somehow the moment passed.

  ‘Sawbridge, it was your own fault you lost her.’

  ‘Yes, it was.’ Condemned himself to a life of bleakness.

  ‘And she lost you. What was her life? Tolerable of course. Not happy. But how can I absolve you?’

  He helped Harley to bed, went home. Realised how over the years, after rehearsing again and again his fatal involvement in the riot of 1795, Harley had gradually calmed. He had reviewed his life, struggled to understand his failings, motives; succeeded. He was ready to die.

  Sawbridge was hale, strong, yet he had no knowledge of himself. Why did he let the most important things pass by? Why had he left it till now to tell Harley what Laetitia had said in her delirium? Was it reticence or cowardice? Was reticence cowardice? It was too late for Harley to help him find answers. And if Harley could also not absolve him he must remain unshriven.

  Cholera lashed the country. Only coffin-makers flourished. Laetitia, a middle-aged widow in her newly gothicised, battlemented house died along with her two older children; as did so many of the poor in their insanitary shacks by the common-sewer stream.

  Sawbridge is seventy, vigorous if somewhat stiff in the mornings, misses Harley, attends all sufferers as often as ever. Rides along lanes, up steep tracks beyond battered hawthorn. Laetitia’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Frances, with the old wise eyes of the prematurely born, sick with disease and terror of death, having watched her mother and siblings die, survives, and in relief and gratitude accepts Sawbridge’s offer of marriage.

  There is brief disgust at this action – the prudery of a small rural town – though it soon dissipates. The people are too fond of their surgeon-apothecary for it to last. The accusation that he’s married for money is groundless, since he insists he and his wife live as he’s always done in his modest grey-brick villa. There are no children. Frances learns to scrub instruments, hold bandages for the dressing of ulcers, soothe colic, clean bloody limbs.

  The first April, Sawbridge and his wife walk in the grounds of her house, shuttered, emptied. They stop to observe oak buds breaking out, bluebells soon to uncurl. She sits on a stone bench and is startled to find him on his knees in last year’s leaves, grasping her hand. He tells of his great, enduring love for her mother, of Laetitia’s exclamations after giving birth to her.

  Her existence shakes; and yet she feels relief, is glad. Understands. Consoles. Helps him up, his shrift complete.

  FROM THE LIFE

  The accident changed everything. At first, when he couldn’t walk without crutches, Digham made up a truckle bed for him in a cupboard off the printing room, where he’d sleep until he could take the stairs and return to his lodgings in Albion Place. This might seem like excessive kindness on the part of a master for his apprentice, but Digham knew the value of Joseph Young’s work and couldn’t do without him.

  Besides, a bond had formed between the two over almost seven years. Age, temperament, experience, politics, status, even size stood between them but were smothered by mutual respect. Joseph watched with awe William Digham’s rapid strokes with the etching needle; his witty put-downs of the Prince of Wales’s foibles and excesses, of ministers and their latest mistresses, the ridiculous ferocity of the French. William in turn admired Joseph’s engraving, the subtle variation of angles at which the young man pushed the burin’s lozenge-shaped point, his concentration no less than obsession. Together they produced satires sold in the shop below that amused, provoked, avoided prosecution.

  ‘What is this?’

  Digham stood beneath lines of damp prints drying like washing on a breezeless day. A little man, his baldness warmed by a felt hat, he peered at a sheet through thick lenses.

  That Joseph’s apprenticeship was almost at an end didn’t mean he should make no effort, Digham remarked.

  ‘Whose idea have you etched so miserably? I need no counterproof to see that it has come out vilely.’

  Etching and engraving puny satires drawn by rich customers brought needed income.

  ‘That’s just it, sir. The idea is miserable; a paltry Tory jibe. It doesn’t deserve reproduction. It should be thrust in the fire.’

  The two men were so politically opposed that there were times when even copying Digham’s own designs carefully onto copper was distasteful to Joseph. Yet at least Digham’s ideas were conceived with humour and drawn with great skill.

  ‘We are being paid, Young. If Lady Parrot’s notion is feeble that is too bad. Your opinion is not part of the arrangement. You must do it again. Same plate – we can’t afford a new one. Burnish off these parts, deepen the lines round the figures.’

  Joseph sighed, began to rub the burnisher over the plate.

  ‘Or is it the ankle? Does it still hurt after your mysterious accident about which you’ve told us nothing? But, good Lord, an ankle’s little enough use in engraving!

  ‘Keep your Jacobin sympathies under your hat, young man Young,’ Digham concluded, looking over his spectacles at his doodling, dreaming apprentice, whose long legs stuck out awkwardly from under the bench. ‘When you set up on your own you’ll see how far you get with those opinions.’

  Digham barely concealed from himself a doubt that Young’s dreamy, idealistic character would produce satires with any force. It was all very well having your head full of Milton all day. He read too much, his coat pockets baggy with books.

  Digham felt a one-sided affection for the young man who’d come to him educated, precocious, withdrawn. When Mrs Young died suddenly, Joseph’s silk mercer father broke down, was bankrupt within a year and apprenticed the fourteen-year-old to Digham. The boy had shown himself good at drawing; his father couldn’t afford to keep him. He’d learned fast, become an excellent engraver. As long as he worked for Digham he was secure. But the older man nurtured a dread of letting him go. Surely, he’d founder without knowledge of the world.

  The star-wheel creaked. Batley bent his knee to push one spike, pulled another with his podgy arms. The pressman had worked for Digham for forty years. Digham looked again at Joseph staring through the lattice. Light in the printing room shone pond-green from a tree dense with new leaves.

  It was quite by chance that at seventeen Joseph heard courageous John Thelwall speak and found more than he’d lost when his childhood collapsed: feeling, inspiration, idealism.

  ‘I affirm that every man and every woman and every child ought to obtain something more than food and rags and a wretched hammock with a poor rug to cover it without working twelve or fourteen hours a day. They have a claim, a sacred and inviolable claim.’

  How they cheered in the packed hall! And Pitt brought in a gagging act just for Thelwall.

  Weekly, Joseph paid his penny to the London Corresponding Society, met the fellows in his division and was constantly stirred. He pasted bills with pot and brush, graduated to writing pamphlets, read and read, sharpening his ambition to move the crowd with his own oratory.

  He’d broken his ankle on the day of the bread riot. Shamefully, slipping in hot dung, knocked by a carriage. Not hurling brickbats, stones; not crying out with the rest. Not even anywhere near them. No one knew the true story
, but as soon as the ankle had mended he resumed his attendance at his division, anxious to assuage guilt and shame.

  He offered to write up the next bill for printing then found he was arguing against too many bills.

  ‘It’s no use,’ he said. ‘There’s such a quantity of bills posted everywhere – the public will not look at them!’

  Irritation with his fellow members pricked him like a rash. Too much noise at meetings. Too much reporting to and from the General Committee. The president and secretary both more finicky than the most crabbed of pedants.

  Each division must debate what was debated by each other division. Equality was thoroughgoing in the Society. Impatient with the laborious procedure, he was no longer stirred, when once the very utterance of certain phrases had moved him to tears. He began to sense a dislocation from his fellow Citizens, dyers, china-burners, wire-workers, locksmiths, sucking earnestly on their pipes.

  Perhaps it was the humiliation. For there had been that, too, as well as shame. Insensible after the collision, he’d been taken into a House, a superior whorehouse near St James’s where he’d wandered, drawn to the seat of power. There he was sneered at by its renowned owner whose carriage had injured him, a woman whose features he recognised from having engraved a series of Digham’s satires. It was a place where corruption and vice were of the highest order and he couldn’t run from it! Had been forced to remain and be laughed at.

  Shame, humiliation. His thoughts hobbled, confused.

  *

  One night, he and other members arriving early are confronted by the landlord of the Angel where the division meets.

  ‘You must move yourselves to an upper bedroom. I have a meeting of the Society of Loyal Britons to accommodate,’ the man tells them, looking anywhere but into their eyes.

  They know at once he means to get them out, has probably been threatened by the justices. Throughout the meeting, squeezed into an unsuitable attic, the committee seated neatly round the edge of the stained bed, a loud roar of meaty men bawling God Save the King, Rule Britannia, Britons Strike Home and such like assails them.

  Propelled by loathing, Joseph agrees to find another meeting place and goes straight to the Bricklayers’ Arms where, relieved at making an arrangement with the landlord, he takes a second drink.

  Through the ceiling comes the sound of music. The normally abstemious Joseph has a momentary shock. He thinks he hears again an exquisite voice singing an aria in Italian – his first experience of rapture. For shame had been followed by humiliation, humiliation by rapture. Immobile in a place no better than hell, he’d suddenly heard anguish expressed as pure beauty. All previous thought was re-etched, fine lines erased, grooves filled with copper burr. The song cut as deep as the steel could go. It rang in black lines over and over again, possessing his mind.

  But no, it isn’t that voice, that song; yet it is a woman’s voice and he follows it without hesitation through the fug of pipe smoke, stench of cheese, along rush-lit passages, up stairs. There in the rowdy crowd he pays his four pence for music and a girl, beer, punch and tobacco extra, and arrives at Digham’s the next morning late and bleary.

  Digham remonstrates, threatens, doesn’t demand an explanation. Guesses and is glad.

  The apprenticeship is over. Digham continues to employ Joseph as an engraver until he can afford to set up on his own. He tolerates the young man’s dissoluteness, for his work, however late in the day he produces it, is excellent. Joseph frequently attends the Bricklayers’ cock and hen club from which no one leaves alone and whose raucous activities provoke raids by the constables. The sketchbook in his coat is full of drawings. In time he pairs up with the singer. She is known best for her rendering of the old song Sandman Joe, rotating breasts and hips to make her listeners roar with lascivious pleasure.

  The disembodied voice of a whore singing Lascia ch’io pianga beats like blood at the back of his head.

  Digham holds a print out at arm’s length. Batley, sweating, rests on a stool in the corner. In the heat, the lattice has been flung open to cesspool and blossom.

  ‘Could land you in trouble, young man Young.’ For Treason he’s etched a saucy, youthful John Bull aiming sturdy buttocks at a poster of the King, firing a fart in his face. Lively strokes, brisk, bold, ebullient.

  ‘But I see you save your skin with a Pitt-like onlooker accusing our stout Bull of treason. A forceful satire. Ask five shillings for it.

  ‘And this print? My! So different. My! How well you’ve used stipple and aquatint. Wonderful effect.’ He takes it to the window. Pores over it.

  A woman laments in a garden; a figure of tragic beauty among weeping trees. Done with tenderness, startling.

  ‘Quite remarkable, my friend, and surely from the life,’ he says, convinced.

  ‘From my life, William,’ replies Joseph. ‘And not for sale.’

  AN EXPERIMENT: ABOVE

  She stood just inside the room, diminutive, her dress too big, drab against polished mahogany. Unaccustomed shoes. She was six; ten days ago he’d sent a ha’penny for her birthday. She replaced her brother in the weekly task, an older boy increasingly surly.

  He beckoned her to where he sat, looking through the great south window: his young magnolia virginiana not yet flowering. Beyond the garden, fields, sheep-strewn hills.

  ‘You’ve come to collect the money, Mary. Do you prefer Polly? I’ve heard your mother call you that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know my name? You should address me by my name.’ His tone was kindly.

  ‘Mr. Powyss.’

  ‘Good. And do you know why I give you this money, Polly?’

  ‘So’s we eat more. So’s we eat more. Mr Powyss.’

  Sudden sunlight lit her face. Round, placid, unresentful. Barely curious. He saw her mother in her; fled the thought.

  He put the money in her drawstring purse, watched her unlatch the wicket, run, stop, dawdle on the path towards home.

  He felt glad. Turned back to his room: books, engravings, precious Apulian vases. Set of globes. Newly-made cabinet with sloping top, thin wide drawers, for his plans. Necessities of intellect and wealth. He focused on the page before him; fought off a surge of dismay.

  Moreham House, 14th June, 1797

  Dear Philip,

  Warlow’s child Mary now comes to collect the money. She’s a sweet girl of six and it cheers me to think I’m providing for her among the others. All the children look healthier than they did four years ago, even if they still resist shoes.

  Sometimes when I write to you, my friend, I understand how it feels to be a papist making confession! You ask if I consider my action purely good.

  He laid down his pen, put away the unfinished letter, rang for Stephens.

  ‘Dust is gathering on the shelves and objects, Stephens.’

  ‘Samuel doesn’t like that end of the room, sir.’

  ‘Tell him he must see to it or be replaced.’

  ‘No replacements around here, Mr Powyss, sir.’

  He went out to the hothouse. Built to his own design, nine foot wide, sixty foot long, heated by sea-coal boiler five months of the year. His senses rippled like cat’s fur. Cucumbers doing well. Melons, new this year, still small but promising. Bunches of tiny grapes, acid-green.

  Production was far in excess of need since he never entertained. He compelled the servants to eat pumpkins and rare vegetables. Production was not the point. What mattered was ascertaining the right conditions, recording: balance of soil, quantity of water, degrees of heat. Like the best gardeners he kept a calendar from year to year. Checked Miller’s Dictionary.

  After six weeks the child had lost her shyness.

  ‘Here you are again, Polly. Did they give you something in the kitchen?’

  ‘Yes. Tea. Piece of bacon.’ She picked her teeth.

  ‘Did Catherine
take tea leaves out of the pear-wood caddy? It looks like a big pear.’

  ‘Yes. Catherine said I’m a poor wee thing. It’s not true because you gives us money. She says because of father.’

  ‘What do you say about your father, Polly?’

  ‘He’s gone away. Is he dead?’

  ‘What do you think, Polly?’

  ‘Dead, I think.’

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself with any more thinking. Take the money to your mother and be kind to her and all your brothers and sisters.’

  ‘Yes, Mr. Powyss.’

  Again he watched her innocence. How she brushed the scented peas with her fingers on her way to the gate.

  He took out the letter, dipped his pen. Once, half-seriously, his old friend had accused him of amorality. Plants were neither good nor bad, caused no dilemmas of conscience.

  Perhaps there cannot be a human act of pure goodness. Such acts are for God alone. We do good as far as we are able. But remember, this is an experiment. I mean it to answer to both charity and science.

  The child must remain in ignorance. He’d speak to the servants. Their restlessness was increasing. He would not be coerced into paying them more.

  Worse, there’d been sounds. Distant but discernible. He’d keep talking when the child was there so she’d not hear.

  Your final question is more difficult to answer. Of course ill could come out of a good act. But surely it would be inadvertent. No one can intend both good and ill. That defies logic.

  He wouldn’t tell Philip about Hannah. Warlow’s wife. He’d certainly not intended what came about. Yet he could not call it ill. It was she who’d come for the money at first, her baby left with the oldest child – there were eight of them. She’d been shy, but accepted the money without question. As with Polly, no resentment. She was grateful, then awed and, he realised, relieved. He perceived something of what she had endured. Warlow was a big man, wilful, barely articulate, his movements propelled by bulk. Kindness not a quality he understood, so that she turned to it like light. Thin, tendril arms winding, fingers reaching up for life.