The Flight of Sarah Battle Read online

  ‘There’s gangs with iron bars,’ someone said.

  ‘Going from house to house demanding money for the poor mob or the true religion.’

  Thynne glared at Bullock.

  For a while there was a lull. Waiters skimmed back and forth, silent water beetles. Sarah sat beside Newton, but he was pale and wouldn’t smile. Wouldn’t draw a thing.

  She pulled at his sleeve. He was missing an excellent scene between the emaciated, sharp-chinned Thynne and Bullock whose lumpy nose looked as if it awaited slicing in the kitchen with the rest of the vegetables. She plaited and unplaited the longest thrums from his pale green cuff. Could see that the coat had once been fine.

  Later there came a noise greater than any they’d heard yet. Not quite the same as Newgate though the engine wheels and yells were there; but ten times as loud.

  ‘They’ve fired Langdale’s, Langdale’s distillery,’ shouted the latest messenger, his face sooted over. ‘The vats are going up, and most of the street with them.’

  ‘They’d be better off drinking the stuff than igniting it. Lunatics.’

  ‘You can be sure they’ll have drunk as much as they could first.’

  ‘There’s pools burning in the street, they say.’

  Roaring, blazing alcohol, a lurid light flashing in, even to the dark end of Change Alley. Silenced them all. A roomful of hares, quivering, poised to run. In Sarah’s mind black shapes continuously jumped among flames.

  Her mother rushed in from the kitchen.

  ‘Sam, I must go to Charlotte. See she’s safe.’

  ‘Damn, no! You shan’t, Anne, it’s all afire out there.’

  ‘I must. My own sister. She’s only in Poultry; it’s further on is the fire. I’ll bring her back with the baby.’

  Sam scowled, would have locked her in his office, but he wanted no scandal. And that damned sister. Good for nothing.

  ‘I’ll go with her, Sam. I’ll see she’s unharmed,’ Newton offered and hurried her out before Sam could stop them.

  The day palled. With Newton gone there was no diversion from the strangely silent room where everyone listened. They drank of course, smoked, chewed, spat; but sat, clamped, askew.

  Surges of violence, like days of battering gales, became a background. On the whole they seemed distant, sometimes moving nearer, but not too close. The massive boom of the burning distillery ceased. Then came a new noise to Sarah’s ears: Smack! Snap! Mid-chew, mid-puff, diners and smokers stopped at the crack of muskets, a different kind of shout, of orders issued.

  Eyes widened in alarm, messages flashed from face to face. Shoulders hunched as if ashamed. Without Newton there to explain, to draw what he heard, she guessed. The men with the rolled-up sleeves and bludgeons, the ones who’d set the gaol alight, who’d capered on the roof, who’d stolen things from shops and houses, attacked fire engines, were being shot by soldiers. Shot and killed. She’d never seen anyone killed. Not seen anyone dead, though once a chair-mender was stabbed with his own knife by a rival and when she walked past later, there was blood on the street.

  She looked towards the door each time it opened.

  ‘Shot some on Blackfriar’s Bridge,’ somebody reported. ‘They were setting the toll houses on fire. Militia are drawing chains across the streets now.’

  Sam sent Sarah to bed. There was no refusing her father; it was already late. She took Newton’s sketchbook to give him tomorrow. She’d have to wait till the morning to see Charlotte and the baby safe. Through her half-open window countless fires glowed and flickered, doubled in the panes. Musket shots and screams sank into the distance. The smell of summer burning was different from winter fires. She shut the casement. There were no figures jerking and hallooing on rooftops.

  *

  The sound of violence moved out of hearing of Change Alley. For two days shopkeepers wouldn’t open and people lurked indoors, the streets given over to soldiers and armed volunteers. Looters and thieves hauled away more spoils, shots were exchanged south of the river but destruction was done.

  London was ravaged. Buildings blinded, smashed and blackened, hundreds killed by musket balls, bayonets, not a few from falling masonry, burning spirits, glass-severed arteries, too many gulps of neat gin. Among those shot were Anne Battle and Benjamin Newton, mistaken for rioters as they rushed across Poultry to rescue Charlotte and the baby, their bodies hauled into St Mildred’s Church before the second round.

  When they told him, Sam Battle scowled, snarled, just as he’d done before she left.

  ‘Told her not to go,’ became his refrain for months after.

  Sarah cried aloud and was taken into the kitchen where Mrs Trunkett, the cook, near smothered her in apron and panic. They sent her off to school once it was clear the riots were over and there the lessons continued as though nothing had happened.

  In the coffee house the customers treated her with caution as if she might bite, with embarrassment as though it were their fault her mother was dead. She rejected their pity. At night she mourned into her pillow, realising before long that her greater loss was Newton. For most of Sarah’s twelve years Anne had been too busy to do more than occasionally cast an eye on her daughter from the other side of the room. Ben Newton had drawn for her, laughed with her. They’d conspired. She had no other friend.

  She tried to imagine him dead and couldn’t. She turned the pages of his sketchbook, to find that what made her smile made her cry at the same time. Would she never laugh again? She told herself it was her duty to laugh at Newton’s witty drawings, he’d be cross if she didn’t, but it was a long time before she obeyed herself. All the while, gusts of sparrows fought and swifts screamed in the dusk.

  Sam Battle’s relief that his premises had survived, fought with his fury that his wife had got herself killed and could no longer run the coffee house with him. But then he thought of a simple solution, obvious and money-saving.

  2

  Sarah learned quickly and grew into the part. She must make up the daily orders for meat and fish for cook to poach, roast, bake, fry; supervise the grinding of coffee beans, measuring of pumped Thames water; the mixing of sugar and milk with ground cacao in readiness for the sweet-toothed; the boiling of sassafras for saloop. Who else but she must tick the inventory of flasks, glasses, pewter pots, cloths, coffee dishes, cutlery, aprons, debt-books, pencils? Ensure that orange peel not used for punch was collected, dried and stored for lighting the fires. Chase the dog, now elderly, out of the kitchen.

  After two years, when she was almost fifteen, Sam saw that Sarah’s maturing female charms would draw the men, cause them to linger, chalk up another. He sacked the woman who’d served for years. From mid-morning Sarah must stand behind the curved bar, the comely girl pouring port, claret and porter, whisking egg into cups of chocolate.

  She was a reluctant beacon. Heat and steam drove her naturally high colour to a perpetual blush. Her strong bare arms prickled. Men strode or sidled up; barked their orders from heights or leaning, lisped; intimidating or intimate, she struggled to keep them all at bay. Her emerging womanhood drew most of them, but there was more to Sarah for those few who troubled to look: hearty peasant origins precluding neither intelligence nor strong feeling. She longed to shake her hair out of its mob cap. Learn more of the distant world described by Newton.

  Instead, she must rehearse names of customers and drinks, quantities, proportions, when to order more loaf sugar, nets of lemons, when to call the boy, Dick, when to hail a waiter. She disliked her prominent position but worked hard, in part from an urge to defy. For, though unspoken, there was a belief no girl could do it all. Sam never praised nor encouraged, only criticised as his father had done before him.

  For a while her nightly ritual of grief gave way to recitation of lists: port, sherry, claret, cherry wine, arrack, rum, usquebaugh, gin, Brunswick mum, aqua vitae, metheglin, cider, perry, scurvy-grass ale, Welsh ale, Dorchester beer. Prices for a glass, a bottle. How much ale to put in flip, the exact amount of brand
y, Madeira and green tea for Battle’s famous punch.

  In the day inner dialogues with Newton held her. ‘Draw this face, that scene!’

  ‘Which scene? What face?’

  ‘The man with all the chins.’

  ‘He’s leering at you now.’

  ‘Yes, yes, pin him down in your sketchbook. Get all those chins and whiskers!’

  ‘And the scene?’

  ‘Table in the corner. Man trying to sell watches. Pulling one after another out of his coat. How many has he got? They must be stolen: the Runners’ll be in and Father’ll be furious.’

  How they’d have laughed. No one guessed why she would suddenly smile. Some wondered it her wits had turned from grief. Most, seeing her ride a crisis unperturbed, remembered that Anne had been tough, as you had to be to put up with Sam Battle. Thought it was that.

  ‘You’re so like your dear mother,’ they told her when they judged enough time had passed since Anne’s death.

  She knew better. It was as though she dedicated the life of her mind to Ben Newton: cried for him at night (once the lists were memorised), mentally conversed with him during the day, helped by the feel of the knot of green threads lodged deep in her pocket. She grew a skin of detachment that some disliked, others found provocatively attractive. She soon hated compliments.

  She longed to stir up the dense stodginess of the place, to shake the ruck of customers who sat behind papers for hours at a time. There were eight morning papers and one evening newspaper at Battle’s; Sam bought in several copies of each. Sarah pictured a Newton sketch where each man was nothing but a newspaper with a pair of legs and fingers gripping itself. As a child she’d sat among legs, looking up at men, some of whom were still there, appearing much the same, perhaps more lined, shabbier, more fixed in their ways. Now, from behind the bar she glanced down upon them, recognised their peculiarities from a distance.

  ‘They say Percy’s has lectures every Friday, Father. Let us have lectures here, too. Or concerts.’ She had only a vague notion of either of these, though surely Newton would have wanted concerts. He often hummed to himself.

  ‘Many people would come, not just these stock-jobbers making their deals.’

  ‘Whatever’s got into your head?’

  ‘I want to raise Battle’s up a bit. Everyone is dull here.’

  ‘Dull? Lectures?’

  ‘Well, I should like to hear some music.’ Twice on her way from school she’d passed musicians in the street. Had wanted to whirl and fling herself about.

  ‘I’ll not have it. We’ve the auction room upstairs for a sale once in a while. That’s enough. Think of the sandwiches. I’d have to pay another hand in the kitchen to cut all morning.’

  ‘More sandwiches but fewer chops, less venison. Let us do it, Father.’

  ‘No! Damn, no! There were consultations here when I was a boy. Corn-cutter did all the coffee houses one after the other. He died and Sally Mapp did bone-setting. Place was full of hobbling and coughing. I did away with it. I’d rather have an East India giantess on show than instruments.’

  ‘Let us at least have books here.’

  ‘I don’t mind a learned pig that knows its letters like the one in Pall Mall. That’d bring ‘em in! No! Newspapers is enough.’

  She didn’t try again, worried away at her knot of thrums, abandoned dreams.

  *

  Having lost her youth with her mother and Newton, Sarah became humourless, existing on a pulse of memory. She carried out her tasks with efficiency acknowledged by Mrs Trunkett, Dick and the waiters, if not by her father. Efficiency had a satisfaction in itself. Severity towards easy leers also became habit. A sense of apartness had begun with Newton, watching others, not joining them. She was contained, fortified, even against the physical turmoil of becoming a woman: accepted change, confusion, the onset of blood, thought little of it.

  She’d had two models of womanhood: the woman who used to serve at the bar and her mother, Anne. Charlotte, well, that was the woman she was supposed not to emulate; with a dear little boy, no husband, poverty. Mrs Trunkett was more like a grandmother. What had they done, those two overburdened women, her mother and the barmaid but work hard at the beck and call of men? She knew of no alternative.

  At first she was unaware of offers made to Sam Battle for her hand in marriage or simply for her person. He dismissed each without hesitation. When she did hear, she was glad he turned them down, for no one resembled Newton.

  Eventually she was left dispirited. Too many years passed. Cauterized years. She remembered the warmth of Newton’s body next to hers, the joy of pressing up close to his fusty jacket. Knew the memory would thin.

  At twenty-two, welling desperation compelled her to notice some of the customers not as caricatures but as men.

  One man, a head above the others when he joined the crowd at the bar to order port, sometimes scribbled at a table or read a book. And watched her. She turned away, then couldn’t help but notice how often he was there. He was different from the rest. His thin face, shadowed eyes, his concentration began to fascinate her, so when one day he introduced himself she was not displeased.

  ‘James Wintrige, Madam.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Clerk in the Customs Office.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Custom House, near the Tower.’

  She asked him what he wrote so vigorously. Newton would have drawn him drowning under an enormous wave of paper inked over with tiny words.

  ‘A play. I hope they’ll take it at Drury Lane.’

  ‘Oh!’ Playwrights rarely came to Battle’s.

  They spoke a little more each day. Or, rather, he spoke and she listened. It was not the first play he’d written; he had great hopes of performance this time because he knew a famous actor. He mentioned a name and over the weeks more names speckled his conversation, currants in a new-baked bun: writers and thinkers he knew, authors of books he’d read. She’d heard of none of them but swiftly understood that here was someone whose life was of the mind, just the kind of person she’d once envisaged attending lectures, even giving them, in a superior Battle’s coffee house.

  Of course plays didn’t make money, he said. His post in the Customs Office paid him to live. And it wasn’t only plays that he wrote at his table, sipping coffee from the dish, sometimes smoking a pipe, eating rarely. He penned letters, the minutes of meetings.

  She experienced the thrill of the illicit. Not that the new Corresponding Society was illegal, not yet. Battle’s customers were split politically; it was not a coffee house like some, allied to one party or faction. Many regulars came straight from the Royal Exchange where views depended on financial success and financial success depended on the protection of markets and stopping incompetent wars. On the whole they supported the government, but not always and there were plenty of gradations of whiggery and radicalism among those who drank and ate and smoked and joked, did business and argued. But anything that smacked of Jacobins, as he insisted on calling them, was anathema to Sam Battle. And of that Sarah was well aware.

  James Wintrige was a secretary in the Corresponding Society which, he explained to her in low tones, wanted reform of parliament and votes for all adults.

  ‘Are they Jacobins?’ she dared to whisper.

  ‘Certainly not. Reform, not violence.’

  ‘Ah.’

  He spoke of the ideas debated each week by members of the society.

  ‘This is the great Age of Reason,’ he informed her, staring at her nose, her mouth all the while with half-closed eyes. ‘Why do we have Reason if not to use it? And with it we see that too many suffer at the hands of a few. The few have wealth and power because they obtained it from their fathers or friends or they bought it or stole it.’

  His voice mesmerised her. Words slipped through lips that barely moved and these, when he stopped, he patted with long fingers, as if to check they were still there. Such thin lips, wide beneath a long philtrum. For a moment Newton intervened: �
�His mouth is like a frog’s.’

  ‘Surely frogs don’t have lips?’

  ‘This one does.’

  ‘All men want liberty,’ Wintrige intoned.

  ‘Do frogs want liberty?’

  ‘And women?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘Of course! Women want liberty too. By ‘men’ I mean women. That is, women, too. The tree of liberty has begun to grow. In Paris for instance.’

  ‘Oh.’ It was 1792. ‘I thought that in France…’

  ‘Beware to whom you listen. Here it will grow peacefully because all men want it, even if they don’t yet realise that they do. We must enlighten the nation.’

  The burr of Wintrige’s voice intoxicated her as alcohol had never done. His was not great speaking; his rhetoric was borrowed, which she didn’t know, but its stuff was strong, rolled out relentlessly.

  She had never thought about power, wealth, the many, the few. The world outside Battle’s came in daily to drink, eat and smoke. That was enough. It was not Newton’s world of sea, ships and exotic lands. Outside were violent, inexplicable lives glimpsed through her window, seen hurriedly in passing on a few streets, heard about:

  ‘Sarah, your mother is dead.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Shot by soldiers. An accident. They took her for part of the mob.’ (She had wanted to laugh at the absurdity of her mother with rolled-up sleeves and a bludgeon, while yet she cried.)

  ‘And Newton? Ben Newton?’

  No longer a child, she must face this outside world. If James Wintrige told the truth, it was not a violent place but a rational one. There was hope of change for the better, he said, if only men employed Reason.

  He wooed her with his luminous phrases. Enlighten the Nation. Tree of Liberty. Here in cobbled, brick-brazen Change Alley, where the sun found it hard to break in, people knew little of trees. Sarah, deprived, watched sparrows on slates. And ‘enlighten’! Did Wintrige realise how the word shone in Sarah’s imagination?

  He wooed her with names, knowledge, superiority. How could she resist?

  He would be her revolution. Through him she would have the courage to encounter life outside Battle’s. Through him she would touch a world of intellect, ideas. Her mother might have wanted that, she thought, gradually understanding that there was more to her mother than she’d perceived. She could release herself from her father’s blinkered views, his crudity. Five years after the Gordon riots he’d bought a print of Rowlandson’s WonderfulPig picking out letters to a tittering, fashionable assembly and hung it in a prominent place. He hoped that new customers would think the wonderful animal had displayed its literacy in Battle’s.