His Last Fire (8 page)

The doctor never used strait-waistcoats. Edward, crushed, was easily locked in his room. Toast and a basin of tea were given but not taken. Crouching on the floor in misery, he found the reindeer cameo under his bed and holding it tight in his fist beat his head against the floorboards in joy and wretchedness.

He was confined for days. When at last I was told, Foart said:

‘A
case of
hallucinatio maniacalis
. I cannot let him out.'

He rejected my pleas; furibund patients were a danger. Then suddenly he allowed Edward into the garden which was badly in need of weeding. From where, having encouraged him to eat himself back to strength, it was not hard with signals, rope and a waiting trap to have him over the wall.

Once more he roamed his land. Among rocks and bilberries. The magistrate relented, with assurances from me. But Edward was broken. He would not go indoors, for doors could close, be locked. Even near to the house someone might assault him with Babylon, ditches, laudanum, tragi-comedy. Electrical treatment to the head.

He moved the tent far into the woods, stoked a continuous fire, dosed himself with brandy, ate meat raw or ashy, blackened in the flames. He would countenance no one, scarcely even me. I kept some watch but wouldn't spy. He knew quite well that nobody would come if the tent caught fire in deep night and cooked him, stupefied, curled like an infant under piles of skins.

I returned to Brighthelmstone. Sold my valuable knife collection, opened a house for so-called lunatics. In Edward's library I'd found Locke's essay. Madmen have not lost their reason, he says, rather, ‘having joined together some ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths.' My asylum was no Collegium Insanorum. Certainly there were no strait-waistcoats, mechanical aparatus, bleeding, blistering. No well-clad mad-doctors. No self-analysis. Above all, no confinement.

I sought out Maria. The daughter of my employer before Edward. She had chosen to rehabilitate her dead mother's muddied reputation, rather than marry me, her mother's footman. By now her mother was surely forgotten by the world and I had something more to offer her. We could run the place together, treat madmen with understanding, common-sense, kindness.

Approaching her house, I relived her mother's incessant demands, domination. Maria's eager grasp in dark corridors and stairwells. Perhaps she had married, I thought, moved away.

Her mother's portraits covered the walls; her mother's novels filled shelves; her notes, poems, letters were piled in boxes, mounds, scattered over tables, floorboards. Maria sat in her mother's chair, by the window's perfect seascape, stout but recognisable. Looked round at me, her hands scuttering like mice among papers on her lap. Stared, unblinking. Turned back to the sea.

F
ORGIVEN

‘Y
ou'll be dead within the month,' apothecary Sawbridge tells him.

That's how it is with Sawbridge. Their friendship, Harley's only friendship, has grown out of the muck of truth. Has sprung up like rhubarb, bold and sour, its leaves poisonous, its body acidic, curative. They've never lied to each other, never eased discourse with sweet deceit.

Everything is grist: Reform, finally in place, trade unions, Ireland, cursed evangelicals, geology, dissection, Shelley, the railway, God. Sawbridge is moderate; Harley, the school-teacher, still radical. They set out their life-stories like specimens pinned through the heart, to closely scan and criticise. All is admitted, nothing discarded.

For years they argue over the tale of the dog so loyal that it would let no one approach the body of its dead master. Famished, it ate the upper part of the man's face, some of his neck, one of his shoulders. Sawbridge sees it as a simple demonstration of the limitations of the animal mind. Harley insists it is an emblem: the master freedom, dead, the dog revolution, intractably loyal to the concept, able to survive only by doing it violence.

Sawbridge examines Harley, his pulse, tongue, eyeballs, temperature. He listens to rasping breaths through his new stethoscope.

‘You might not last a fortnight, Harley.'

‘I've been waiting since '95. Thirty-nine years.'

‘You know my opinion of that.'

‘I do.'

‘I shall increase the laudanum.'

‘I'm sorry I shan't be there to give your eulogy, doctor to the humble. Sawbridge. Sawbones.'

There's little for Harley to do. He'll tell the Board to advertise for a new teacher. He's already willed his books and rickety spinet to Sawbridge. He's written to his daughter. The first child, a boy, died years ago. He'd left his wife before the girl was born, at the start of the new century. She might want to know why her father moved miles away from London, why they've never known each other. She'll be thirty-four now. Perhaps she will forgive him.

*

The harvest shrivelled in 1794. Then came a freezing winter. Ripples of ice crimped the shores of the Thames, leaving a central channel into which a man, drunk with warming brandy fell, froze to death and floated downstream. Harley provided food and fuel for his wife and baby from his wages as a hairdresser; his wife sewed linen bolster covers. The marriage was an obligation, the baby a sickly, squalling thing that broke the night to pieces.

‘My father fought for the king in America,' he tells Sawbridge. ‘A lieutenant. What glory! For nine years he sat all day in a chair by the fire with his bloody stump and mad eyes. Never spoke. I was terrified. Yet my mother bore him three more children.

‘I was the eldest. When he died I could no longer hide behind the few volumes given me out of pity by the schoolmaster. A hairdresser nearby offered work. I had no choice.

‘It seems to me that we powdered every head in the West End. I learned to curl, crimp, frizz, place false hair and hair cushions. I smeared scented pomatum, my fingers dipped in brick dust for the grip, combed, parted, pinned, scraped greasy foreheads with the powder knife and puffed superfine jasmine, attar of roses, heliotrope powder at four shillings a pound.

‘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.