The Flight of Sarah Battle (2 page)

‘Want us overrun, do you, Thynne? You'll be bringing in the French next.'

‘And what
I
say is Lord George Gordon's mad. A third son. A lunatic.'

‘That's calumny, Thynne! Gordon's a leader. Looks every bit the part – you've not heard him speak, have you? The man's a great Protestant.'

‘And that's
all
we need. A precise puritan begot between two stock-fishes.'

‘
There's
toleration for you! I thought you drank toleration with your mother's milk.'

They ignored Sarah whose dreams splintered at sounds of disturbance all through the night.

She and her mother went to church as usual on Sunday where for once the sermon held the attention of the congregation, supporting the Protestant Association while not actually mentioning the word ‘papist'.

On her way back from school on Monday she walked rapidly past bands of men with rolled-up sleeves and bludgeons. And a cutlass, she thought, but kept her eyes on the ground, the stones of the street quite black where huge fires had burned out, leaving singed hinges and locks, handles and doorknobs on beds of ash.

She ran straight to Newton. A reserve had grown in her; she was no longer young enough to speak to adults with impunity. With Newton there was more: a smear of jealousy when, for a time, he came less often and was said to spend his time with ‘Maria'. She'd challenged him then and felt sudden regret as his face seemed to tumble downwards and he didn't reply.

Now she could offer him something; needn't wheedle.

‘There are men in the street with sticks.'

‘Thank whoever's in heaven you're safe, then!' He put his arm round her shoulder and hugged her to his side, which smelled deeply of tobacco and dust, and she lapsed into a hopeless fug of love for him.

‘Tell me what else you saw.'

‘Draw it while I tell you.'

‘I shall.'

‘They were fierce. There were lots of them, shouting at each other. They wanted to punch somebody I think. Not me: they didn't notice me. One had a cutlass. Give it to
that
one. And the others all have sticks. Big ones. That's right.'

‘Any women?'

‘There were the other day when they marched. Do them marching. I can tell you what was on their banners.'

‘Later. What else did you see today?'

‘They've had fires. Some were still burning. The street was black. Oh, and they were getting up the stones with picks and putting them in sacks. Horses will fall into the holes, won't they?'

‘Break their legs, poor beasts. Carts will topple over.' He was already drawing tilting carriages, passengers tipping like barrels down a chute. ‘What else, Sarah?'

‘One of them suddenly called out “Mansfield!” Then they
all
called out “Mansfield, Bloomsbury Square!” and ran off.'

Newton sketched everything, somehow just as she'd seen it. He included her, a diminutive figure, half hidden, watching behind a lamppost. She spread the sheets out on the table and called to the waiter, Bob, to bring Mr Newton a dish of coffee. She pored over the drawings and others came to look, as they often did, anxious to see which of them he'd skewered today. They saw legs, arms, staves, distorted faces, fires, smoke, picks, sacks of cobbles. Just as she'd told him. But no one laughed.

On Tuesday they kept her at home and bolted the coffee house shutters despite the heat. Sam Battle's mood was grim. Of course trade increased with new customers in flight from the mob, which was good, though someone had to risk their lives for more meat and fish from Leadenhall market (he sent the fifty-three-year-old boy, Dick). More to the point was the danger to Battle's itself. For the mood of the riot had shifted. Chapels were attacked, Catholic houses stoned, but people wanted more: MPs, ministers, justices too soft on papists, in favour of Catholic Relief. Libraries of burning books and papers lit the streets, the distorted faces of the crowd; grand homes were sacked, furniture and wainscoting sought for a particularly fine blaze. Destruction became delight, looting the lust of the moment. Sam knew it would only take one known papist sympathiser to duck into Battle's for the building to be attacked by the mob: its windows gouged like eyes, doors wrenched out like teeth, tables, settles, barrels heaped in a crackling pyre.

News flew in. The crowds were on their way to Newgate, armed with the very labourers' tools so recently used to build the huge new prison. You could hear bellowing as the keeper's house was stormed and fired, for Newgate was not far.

‘They're freeing the prisoners!' someone pushed through the drinkers, shouting and waving his arms. A cheer broke out at one end of the coffee house.

‘Liberty! Freedom!'

Yelling and cursing greeted this; fists shook.

‘They'll go for the other gaols. King's Bench, Fleet, Clerkenwell. The soldiers do nothing.'

‘Magistrates won't give the order.'

‘We want no massacres.'

At which point a fight broke out. Sam Battle, purple with fury, hauled man off man and her mother hastened Sarah upstairs to bed. There, in fear and fascination, she saw the flames of Newgate lick the glowing clouds, smoke out-blacken the night. And back and forth, between the fires, figures of men dancing triumphantly on the roof.

*

Nothing was normal in London on Black Wednesday. In the coffee house men woke from under their coats on benches, raised their heads from tables: so many hadn't dared go home the night before. Fire was re-lit under the coffee cauldron, water pumped, grounds measured and soon the smell disguised the night stink of bodies in unchanged clothes. Fortified, they crept away to worried wives, or joined spectators viewing the ruins of Newgate, watched Protestants plunder the Old Bailey Sessions-house.

‘They've done it,' Bullock said, returning in a sweat at midday. ‘King, Privy Council. Orders to shoot – without the Riot Act.'

‘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.