His Last Fire Read online

  ‘I should have put that powder knife to better use. Exchanged the wretched wheat powder for lime.’

  But at the start he was fifteen and not oblivious to the exotic charm of dressing rooms off Portman square, to the unblemished beauty of a few, if not all of the powdered, to greedy, flirtatious glances. Lickbarrow his employer, who sometimes called himself Monsieur Lickbarrow, played erotic games with his clients by innuendo, flattery, discreet and indiscreet gestures. In such an atmosphere it was to be expected that Harley would not resist temptation when, after an appointment, he and Lickbarrow were fed and watered below stairs.

  He was seventeen when Molly declared him the cause of her expulsion from service. It was then, as they set up home in lodgings off Hedge Street that Harley became radical. A Foxite whose hair he’d been dusting with blue powder noticed him eyeing a pamphlet on the floor of his dressing room and gave it him. Harley learned that he was powdering the hair of the rich with the bread of the poor.

  Sleepless from the baby’s howling, Harley was nourished by revolutionary air abroad in the streets and at meetings he began to attend. He carried Paine in his coat, was stirred to the core hearing Thelwall. He posted handbills and joined both processions of triumph when Hardy and then Thelwall were acquitted at the Old Bailey. He enjoyed his double life, grooming Tory heads to the inner music of last night’s lecture:

  ‘Citizens! . . . the frying pan of despotism . . . king Chaunticleer with his crown, his coxcomb’.

  In the spring of ’95 Lickbarrow panicked at Pitt’s hairpowder tax. Not that the rich couldn’t afford to pay their statutory guinea – guinea pigs! – but the moral argument was stronger, would obviously hold sway. Harley’s radical friends found him work in a print shop.

  While his life as a husband disintegrated into squalor, complaint and recrimination, his mental life grew. He read fervently, talked with a rapid, nervous concision, earned the respect of his fellows.

  *

  She picks her way through leaning piles of paper. Shelves hold books upright, sideways, pressed into gaps, spilling over the floor. A fold in the turkey carpet almost trips her and she sits after Harley removes a heap of Blackwood’s and pulls nervously at the curtains. More light is worse; her fingers twitch with a longing to tidy, sweep, throw out.

  Harley coughs. ‘It’s kind of you to come so far,’ and coughs again. It’s no wonder, she thinks, with all that dust.

  ‘In your letter you wrote that you had something to say before you die.’ No glimmer of emotion in this Ann, the child he’d not cared to know. He sees a stout middle-aged woman, heavily clothed, unsmiling. She takes off her bonnet and gloves but retains her shawl, despite the stuffy warmth. He opens a window and a flock of papers blow onto her lap. July light glares at her embarrassment, her irritated frown.

  July spilled heat and blood.

  On the 12th of the month, 1795, a fifer told of imprisonment in a crimping house, claimed he’d been chained in a cellar. People ran, broke down the door, destroyed everything; soldiers dispersed them, hauled the fifer off to Newgate. The story was false – it was a public house, the King’s Arms; Lewis, the fifer drunk. (Not like the previous summer when George Howe, no older than Harley, escaping crimpers, jumped from a garret window. The image of thin, untried hands tied behind his broken back lived on in Harley’s mind.)

  Nevertheless, rebellion was abroad. The price of wheat ten shillings and sixpence and rising; a worthless war, calamitous defeats. The crowd, driven from Charing-Cross, smashed Pitt’s windows in Downing Street, surged on to St George’s Fields, gutted a recruiting house near the obelisk, set fire to furniture. Horse guards were called, the city and borough associations, Lambeth volunteers. A magistrate read the riot act to no effect. Guards galloped into the crowd, trampling, maiming, under arms all night. Harley and his friends joined the throng the following day.

  Ann Chance folds her hands and looks at him coldly.

  ‘I may live no more than two weeks, Ann.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear it. Is that what you wanted to say to me?’

  ‘I thought to explain why I left London all those years ago.’

  ‘You abandoned my mother before I was born. Do you hope to right that wrong? It is surely too late.’ He admires her reason, notes her refusal to call him Father.

  ‘I cannot right it but I am sorry and ask your forgiveness.’

  ‘Tell me why you left London.’ I’ve made a pointless journey, she thinks.

  Harley and his companions merely intended to observe the attack on the Royal George recruitment house. It was evening though not yet dark and the air stank of summer sewers, smouldering wood, burned varnish. The crowd jeered at the soldiers, laughed, bawled news of the wounded to each other. Harley eased his way towards the smashed house. As bedding was thrown onto the road and lit to cheers, more lifeguards and Surrey fencibles arrived. Then three companies of footguard, their hair pulled back, greased, powdered.

  A roar of fury leapt through the crowd and Harley, fired by fellow-feeling, trembling with rage, stooped for stones to throw, sticks, horse dung. He hurled a burned chair leg, a brass drawer handle at the mass of soldiers. There was a stirring satisfaction in it. Moving nearer, he saw a man close to the line of lifeguards.

  ‘Pull the reins!’ he called to him. ‘Pull them towards you!’

  The man reached out, horses jostled. Suddenly the lifeguard raised his sword. Harley picked up a brick and threw it hard, saw it strike the lifeguard, draw blood.

  The moment joy surged through him the sword came down and sliced off the hand clutching the reins. In the tableau he’d never erased from memory, Harley saw the man gape in disbelief at his handless wrist, the horse rear then trample him as the guard brought down the forelegs.

  Harley looks at his daughter. This woman with lines of impatience at the corners of her mouth.

  ‘In 1795 I was a radical.’

  ‘Radical!’ She pulls her shawl about her, protecting herself from him. ‘I was born in 1800. You surely need not tell me about 1795.’

  Oh reason not the need!

  The crowd around him pressed forward, huzzaing and crying ‘shame!’ at the lifeguards. No one noticed how Harley stood apalled. No one knew which missile he had thrown. He saw a body carried away. Later he thought to ask at St Martin’s bone house, but hadn’t the courage to find the name.

  For five years Harley lived in half-light. He’d not killed the man yet he had caused his death. He told neither wife nor companions of his torment, fearing their excuses, their easy attribution of blame elsewhere. He shrank into himself. His companions thought his sensibility too great and knew, also, of the burden of his marriage. For the baby, unwanted, resented, had died and Molly strayed, returned and strayed again.

  With Pitt’s terror, open meetings were abandoned though the friends met and drank together. Danger touched them all when Hadfield, one of their group, made an attempt on the king’s life. Harley drugged himself with books, hiding in the authority of print. Clothed himself in consoling pedantry.

  One day near the St Giles rookeries he saw the man. He knew him by his single hand and from his expression which still registered astonishment, overlaid by pain and despair. His legs were bent inwards from the knees, crimpled, his feet turned towards each other, his walk a mockery.

  Harley went up to him.

  ‘Sir. A word with you, please!’ The man, whose eyes were fixed on the path, on how to remain upright upon it, shambled off.

  ‘Sir! I beg of you. Let me speak.’ The man half turned, waved his handless arm in Harley’s face.

  ‘Hear me, sir,’ Harley pleaded. Staring up at him, shaking, the man groaned from a profound inner pit of misery. Then he twisted precariously, stumbled along the street, hauled himself up some steps, leaning exhausted against the frame as he unlocked the door.

  For Harley leaving London was not flight. His
actions in the riot had ruined the cripple’s life. His own life appeared to him a series of random states – his work, his marriage, his encounter with radicals. He would take himself in hand, act only with purpose, make all well. A border land seemed suitable. Remote. Bleak.

  His resolve began badly. Lately he had taken Molly back in bitter charity. As he packed his box with papers, books and five patched shirts, he knew that she was expecting his child. He asked her to come with him, knowing she would not and later, in the blue-slated school-house received her letter about the birth of his daughter.

  ‘Very well, then. I’ll begin in 1800.’

  ‘Why did you leave?’

  ‘I caused harm to someone, unintentionally. I resolved to live a better life.’

  ‘You caused harm to my mother by leaving her.’

  ‘Your mother preferred to remain in London. I sent her regular payments to keep you clothed and fed until such time as you might marry.’

  ‘That was the least you could do.’

  ‘Indeed it was. Understand that our marriage barely existed. Before your birth your mother was unfaithful to me. We were not happy. Not ever.’

  She reddens and looks down. ‘She is dead and cannot defend herself.’

  ‘It was not Molly I left so much as my life in London. I came here to do some good; to teach the young.’

  ‘You chose children who were nothing to you over your own child.’

  ‘I’m sorry that I was no father to you, Ann. Even if you cannot understand, can you not forgive me?’

  She stares at the violet silk of her skirt. Sun no longer burns through the angled panes.

  He relieves her.

  ‘I have lived a quiet life.’ He waves his hand around the room, stirring up dust, coughs. ‘I have little to leave. Do you have children, Ann?’ She stiffens at the use of her name once more. ‘And your husband …?’

  ‘We have no children. Mr Chance has a very successful business – he is the most important mercer in Reading. We have four servants and our own coach and pair.’

  ‘You will be remembered in my will, nonetheless.’

  *

  Sawbridge’s eulogy for Harley is short; the funeral attended by few mourners. Mrs Chance is not among them.

  Sawbridge knows but doesn’t speak of Harley’s thirty-nine years of expiation. He doesn’t say that their friendship was Harley’s principle comfort. Had he been a priest Sawbridge would have offered God’s mercy, but neither man believed. What Sawbridge offered was reason, patience, truth; with these Harley’s torment had lessened. He had been a good teacher. His pupils remembered him: too young to notice his radical views, old enough to feel his kindness.

  As he boxes up the books, treading delicately between piles of pamphlets, Sawbridge thinks of Mrs Chance, described by his friend shortly before his death. How will she react to her solicitor’s letter with its enclosure of four pounds? With a tightening of the lips, a gasp of disgust.

  Harley always knew that his deepest need must be denied him. Thomas Skelton of 17 Dyott Street, St.Giles’s-in-the-Fields receives his final monthly payment, greatly more than usual, without having discovered the name of his benefactor, without having forgiven.

  SHRIVEN

  It was over in eight minutes: catlin cut through skin and flesh, arteries ligatured, smashed humerus sawn, stump below shoulder cauterised. Gently he pressed more rum through the young man’s lips, helped friends carry him to bed.

  Swiftly, cleanly done. A life saved. So far. He knew how infection might strike in days, how even recovered there was no work for a labourer with one arm. He’d saved him for a life of bleakness.

  Surgeon-apothecary Sawbridge was renowned for miles both sides of the border. From hill to receding hill. His immaculate surgery was rarely used. He set bones, pulled teeth, lanced boils, distributed draughts, instructions. Received little payment; persuaded the poor that vaccination wouldn’t turn them into cows. Was renowned for his skill but also for his kindness conveyed through touch, expression, tender inclination of his body rather than words. His patients were humble, lives narrowed by necessity, afflicted by accident. What use were words to them?

  Countless deliveries, babies alive, dead, whole, unformed; mothers encouraged, fathers consoled. They wondered why he’d never married, had children of his own. His delicacy with women, his sweet way with children who obeyed, never screamed, adored him, raised the same comment – what a good husband he’d make, what a good father. Until age changed the tense of the verb.

  He had little time for marriage perhaps. His patients, spread widely, had large families in small spaces, hard lives in fields, woods, on freezing hillsides. Often he rode out, returned late. Then Harley came to the blue-slated school house, escaping disaster in London. A friendship struck that lived for almost forty years. Answered some need in each, dwelling as it did in honesty and acceptance. Normally spare of speech, Sawbridge opened up to Harley whose mental sufferings he tended. They exposed their lives to each other, peered, poked about, retrieved deep-lodged shards. Harley’s life was more complex. Heavy, festering guilt required constant recitation at first. Later he complained that Sawbridge made light of the disappointment in his own life.

  Sawbridge’s apprenticeship had begun with placing leeches, pounding powders, holding bowls when blood was let. A silent boy. Witness to small and great suffering. An uncle funded a bout of study in London to improve on this rural round. Up and down the spiral staircase at St Thomas’s he went to watch and learn the newest ways in surgery. Filled a stack of notebooks from lectures on anatomy, chemistry, physiology. Uneasy in the city he did little else but work. Back home among clouded hills, drab chapels, he began the practice that created so much local glory and puzzlement.

  One of his patients was a small landowner whose family suddenly sprouted illness. Charmed by Sawbridge’s medical confidence and apparent political reticence, the landowner invited him to attend bedsides and social events equally. To use the library freely, though he hardly had the leisure for it.

  Unlike Harley’s experience with women, carnal, disastrous, Sawbridge saw the landowner’s daughter Laetitia and loved her straight away. She was sixteen, too young, but he could wait. He made no promises to himself, employed no visions. Observed; savoured proximity whenever it occurred. Watched her eat, dance, sing, chatter in a way delightfully alien to him. Sometimes walking, they became separated from the rest, ambled together among clusters of marble shepherds, shepherdesses, lines of tender exotic trees. Once he made a pencil sketch which he kept, folded, next to his heart and showed to Harley some twelve years into their friendship.

  ‘Only now you show me this vital piece of yourself! I’m offended.’

  ‘Nonsense! You know the story,’

  ‘But you still keep it next to your heart, Sawbridge.’

  ‘I’m a man of habit.’

  ‘Tell me again why you didn’t marry her?’

  ‘It wasn’t clear that my feelings were reciprocated.’

  She married the eldest son of a neighbouring baronet, lived in a fine house not far away. Sawbridge attended her first two births; struggled to save her before the grand physician arrived from London for the third.

  Now, Harley was dying.

  ‘No vicar, no preacher!’ he reminded Sawbridge.

  ‘You know, people often confess at the end, believers or no. Even confess themselves to me.’

  ‘That’s no surprise. There’s that about you, my friend. You’re like sunlight breaking through a dark wood – people turn to you, give themselves up to you. Look at me. What haven’t I told you about myself? I am fully shriven. But it doesn’t work the other way round. I’ve had to squeeze with all my might to get a drop from you. In another life you’d have been a priest.’

  ‘And who will shrive me?’

  ‘Surely you’ve nothing to confess? Your life’s been a si
mple, daily heroism.’

  ‘No more than Amos dragging lambs out of ewes in a snowdrift.’

  Harley’s protest was lost in coughing that racked him; gasping, retching, he was too weak for further argument.

  Sawbridge gave Harley a month. Harley could no longer teach but it was summer and there was no hurry for him to vacate the school house. How often had they planned new worlds together among leaning towers of books: The Rights of Man, The Necessity of Atheism, a heap of Cobbett’s Political Register balancing on a Pilgrim’s Progress supported by three volumes of D’Oyley and Mant. Now they sat sweating by Harley’s fire, banked up despite the heat, Sawbridge in shirtsleeves, Harley shivering in coat and blanket.

  ‘I do have something to tell you if you’ll hear me. I have kept this back from you even while you told me everything.’

  ‘I forgive you for that, Sawbones.’ They laughed, Harley with pain.

  ‘I’d delivered several babies by the time Laetitia had her first confinement,’ Sawbridge began. He hadn’t found it difficult clearing out the crowd of female midwives and friends, he said, who in those days, fussing like geese, attended every birth from the highest to the lowest, excluding fresh air and men from wherever the birth took place.

  He’d seen little of her since her marriage. Wasn’t welcome as he had been at her father’s. Her husband avoided him, employed him only when he had to, saw him as a purveyor of pills.

  She was very frightened, shocked, unwilling to take much brandy. Sawbridge held her hand, encouraged her, even tried to divert her with memories of events in her recent girlhood at which he’d been present.

  Her husband rode out on all these occasions so that when a fever set in after the third, premature birth, he was not to be found for several hours. As her mind began to wander, Sawbridge stroked her arm, felt her frenzied pulse against his wrist. Fragments of her life broke out without boundaries of time. She called for her dead father, gave household orders, sang childish songs, muttered prayers, all tangled with each other. Lay still. Flamed up again. Turned suddenly to Sawbridge, pulled at his shirt with extraordinary force.