The Flight of Sarah Battle (22 page)

She can't speak. Takes his hands in both hers and kisses them.

‘Is darkness flaking yet?'

‘Flaking?'

‘Flaking darkness: dawn.'

‘Not yet.'

‘Have I told you that I love you?'

‘Yes. You have, often.'

‘Heav'ns last best gift, I love you dearly!'

‘Oh, I love you so dearly, too.'

‘My ever new delight!' But here he vomits again and from his eyes comes blood like a mockery of tears.

She wipes them and the blood that gushes from his nose and mouth. He struggles as if to speak but only blood comes. She wants to plead with him to stay, not to go, please to stay, never to go, never, but knows it would make him suffer more.

She sponges his head with water, strokes his hand as he groans with pain.

He opens his blood-bleared eyes and looks at her with desperate longing. She can't smile, can't, turns to wipe away her tears from his sight and suddenly he cries out greatly and has gone.

*

‘Sleep. Only sleep.' She closes his eyelids. ‘Only sleep, my darling.'

She washes blood from his face. Slips down from the bed onto her knees, holding his hand still, pressing her head onto it until his knuckles hurt her but it's nothing for the howling in her head destroys all outer feeling. It was as if she bleeds, now, only there's no outward sign of wound, just tearing, pulling apart, bleeding within.

She loses consciousness and waking, sees what she already knows but sees as if afresh and sobs until all moisture has dried up and her brittle, cracked body might break if only it would break.

Again she wipes the blood caked in his black hair, from his face, climbs up next to him, his body still warm – he'd been so hot – kneels and touches his cheek, his shoulders, arms, as though she might remind him to wake, might see those eyes again, bright, deep, stroke his head as she remembers wanting suddenly to do one day in the coffee house, kisses his mouth before it should get cold. Keep him cool the doctor said! Is he cool enough now to live? I'm wrong, he lives! Her fingers touch his lips to feel the breath that isn't there.

She lies down, her arm across his chest, her face in his hair still damp, smelling of sweat, death.

How can she have slept? Yet she finds milk, a plate of bread and cheese nearby, which she can't eat. Nor can she call to Martha.

Dead. He is dead. Again it strikes anew like an outrageous fiction: only turn the page and know it is untrue.

Gone. He has gone. He has left me. I can never speak to him again, hear him, see him move, smile, feel his touch. Never. Never. Why has he done this? Why has he gone? Why did he not think of me?

She digs her nails into her face, tears at her clothes, the grimy gown she'd not changed for days. She knows what it is to heap ashes on one's head.

‘Sarah, you must eat.' Martha stands by the door.

‘I don't want it. It will not bring him back.' She bursts into tears. ‘I'm sorry, Martha. Please let me be.'

Why did he ever go to the shipyards? Just to speak to sailors, to give out pamphlets. He might have lived! He needn't have done it. He should have remained here. Why didn't she make him stay here? If he hadn't gone he would never have become ill. Would have been here now.

The night is silent. Nothing moves on the street outside, not even the goldfinders' dripping cart. No owl flies; no night bird whistles or sings. Everything is dead. Except the great booming in her head. Her heart still there, its foolish, mindless, incessant booming. Refusing to die.

She denied him. Denied him the smile he wanted. How can she live?

Later, Martha knocks again.

‘Sarah, we wash him. The doctor will come.'

‘I'll do it. Thank you, but I shall do it.'

‘They take him away.'

‘No! They mustn't take him. Don't take him away! Please don't take him away!'

She doesn't sleep again. Night. The moonlight they had grown to love through unshuttered windows is absent, rightly. So should there be no dawn, the lesser silence they had also loved. She hates the creeping light, dreads day. Dare not sleep for fear of waking, innocent.

Martha brings clean water, cloths and towels and Sarah washes his body, his loved body, now so thin. Now cold.

He was never cold. Never motionless like this. It's wrong: I have imagined it! In a moment he will wake!

She dresses him in clean clothes. A spare red neckerchief, for she will never part from the other. Finds the miniature he'd had Birch paint in his coat pocket. No use to her. Why hasn't she one of him? She puts it back. Something of her close to him. He said he wanted to keep it in his pocket always.

All the while she talks to him as though he's come in from a day writing in the shop, talks, planning what they'll do tomorrow, talks low and lovingly, continuously so as not to hear no replies, as if by talking she'll somehow keep him always as he always was.

*

Martha helps her through the days. The terrible footfall as they carry him downstairs. The plain coffin painted black. Hurried burial in a burying yard on the edge of town, attended by Daniel Eckfeldt and a few others from the Indian Queen. Some Quaker prayers. He would have understood why. Robert sends a letter. Will not return until the house has been thoroughly cleansed.

Frosts bring winter. Black days. Days when sorrow stands, a cormorant, wings outstretched, unmoving. Days of unbearable longing. Days of remorse, terrible remorse for the smile she never gave him. Resentment, self-pity. Solitary nights of wild grief.

Martha makes her eat. Comforts her as no one ever had before.

She hates Robert, even obscurely blames him. He doesn't repeat his view that Tom brought about his own death, but though she will never accept it, she cannot forget it. She finds herself loathing the sight of his feet since she can't bring herself to look at his face; thinks of him attending his respectable Presbyterian God, coming away satisfied that all is in order.

There is no God that cares. How can there be? He'd be an infinity of tears.

In cold clarity she realises that soon she'll run out of money. Her guide to London coffee houses made little; it was Tom's pamphlets and articles that paid their rent. Perhaps she should demand Tom's share of the business. But legally she has no right to it, though Robert does't know that, and of course, Tom would not have wanted any radical publisher to shrink.

There's her promise to Tom to confront Robert. She doubts she can do it to any effect, knows Tom might have achieved something. Martha, she's sure, expects no change. But Tom would have kept his promise, would want her to keep hers to him. She will do it. In time.

She thinks she should move out, away from Robert, to somewhere cheap but she hasn't the energy. Besides this is the room in which they'd lived, she and Tom. Their blissful bower, their shadie lodge. The chairs in which they'd sat together. The bed in which they'd slept.

One day Martha says: ‘You so sad, Sarah. Maybe you go home to England?'

‘Oh. Maybe I should, Martha. Would you come with me?'

‘I cannot leave Willie.'

‘No, of course. Or Robert.'

‘He not let me go.'

‘Oh Martha! I don't know if I can do it on my own.'

‘God Almighty help you.'

‘God Almighty and you, Martha. How like your name is to Mother!'

Martha laughs and they both cry.

The century is at an end. In December George Washington dies, the Father of his Country. It suits Sarah that all people mourn, that everywhere is hung with black.

There is little to mark Christmas, for most of the churches, including Robert's, ignore it. Daniel Eckfeldt invites Sarah to his house: as a Lutheran he's retained his old German traditions. Touched by his kindness, she politely declines.

On December 26
th
, eight days after Washington's funeral, a memorial procession and service take place in Philadelphia, still the nation's capital. Sarah stands near the Market Place in a silent crowd, the streets lined, every window of every house full of onlookers, and watches soldiers and clergy, the black-plumed riderless horse, the black-draped empty bier.

‘Mrs Cranch.'

Astonished that he should approach her in her mourning gown, she turns her head away from the voice in disgust, but can't easily escape William Leopard through the press of people.

‘A moment please, Mrs Cranch,' he speaks quietly.

She stares ahead, tears running over. Oh Tom! Tom!

‘Do you think of returning to England, Mrs Cranch?'

She will not answer.

‘It occurred to me that you might. In which case, please take this.'

He presses an envelope into her folded arms and shoves his way out through the crowd.

Though inclined to drop it on the ground and trample it in the dirt, she takes the envelope back to Zane Street and breaks the seal.

Unfolds a sheet of paper:

Received with thanks from:

Mr William Leopard

[sum carefully erased]

For Purchase of:

Fare for Voyage and

Reservation of Berth for: Mrs Thomas Cranch

On:
Fair American
(Capt. George Legge)

Sailing from: Philadelphia to

London

on January 18
th
, 1800.

PART III

1

‘Will I take it all the way for you, Miss?' the porter at Wapping asks Sarah, tossing her box onto his shoulder as if it were a tea caddy. Irish, she thinks, like many were in Philadelphia.

‘I'm going to Change Alley; you couldn't walk that far.'

‘That I could. But I surely won't.' He smiles with jagged charm.

‘I'll go by hackney. Please would you carry the box until we find one. Oh. But wait a moment!'

The pale girl she'd noticed minutes before, the girl searching so frantically for someone, has been met by a man who is remonstrating with her. Tall, his fair hair tied back, he tries to take the bag from her, puts his arm round her more to coerce than to console.

Sarah steps towards them, stops herself in time. No. It is not her concern. She doesn't know them. And here she is, staring like a child just as she did at the oddities and foibles in the coffee house.

‘Let us go then,' she tells the porter.

Little has changed in London in three and a half years. She has become used to clean brick and painted wood, to straight roads on a numbered grid, the New World's rationality. Now she sees what was always here: ancient houses tumbled together, a pile of rubble where one has fallen, narrow roads jammed with carts, carriages, steaming horses. A few new warehouses stand by heaps of sodden ash. It's true there are blocks of neat-cut paving in a main street or two, but St Paul's is black as coal.

The hackney nears Change Alley, her anxiety sharpens. How will her father react? She hasn't warned him. No doubt he was disgusted when she fled, but it doesn't mean he'll welcome her return. Might he refuse to let her in? Where will she go then? Will he insist she move back with her husband? What has happened to
him
? James Wintrige, dissolved like a ghost into the past.

At the same time she is glad to carry her sorrow to a familiar place: a wounded bird seeking the thicket where once it nested. She knows there will be hazards.

She enters the coffee house at the back, her box left in the passage outside the kitchen. Her courage faltering, she opens the kitchen door rather than take herself to her father's office.

It's a bad time to intrude, late morning, food being prepared, cooking well under way. No one notices her till Dick, wiping his nose with his sleeve, looks up.

‘Miss Battle. Oh Miss Battle!' He limps over to her, takes her hands in his knobbed fingers. ‘You've returned! Oh, but Mr Battle will be pleased,' he says doubtfully.

The cook, Mrs Trunkett, who comforted Sarah with love and terror when her mother and Newton were killed, pushes the arthritic boy Dick out of the way.

‘Sarah! Oh, how glad I am! Praise be to God!' She presses Sarah hard to her stoutness, holds her at arm's length, hugs her again, weeps copiously. ‘Oh, so like her mother she do look, standin' here just like Mrs Battle. I did never think to see it! Is you returned for good now? Come, Dick, stir yourself, man, gawpin' there. Take Miss Battle's cloak and bonnet and things.'

This welcome dulls fear enough for Sarah to knock on her father's door at last and announce herself. The passage is dark, not unlike the ship from which she's just disembarked, where, of a sudden, light might cut down a hatchway. But his office is empty and having sent her box up to her old room in the attic, she cannot resist passing through the waiters' door into the main room. There, too, she remains unseen in the fume and din for some time, for who bothers to watch the door into the kitchen unless they're starving, and the starving don't resort to coffee houses. The street door is the one to keep an eye on if you've really nothing better to do.