Chapter Ten
Jeremy Collier got up and bowed. “Mistress Goodricke,” he called with his oiliest charm, “I am most delighted to see you in good health. I was under the impression that you were confined to bed with one of your fevers.”
He brought out an obviously fake smile, and poured her a cup of beer.
Sarah looked across the dingy sitting room that was also supposed to serve as a schoolroom.
“What are you doing here? I was hoping you’d been smuggled off to France.”
“Come now, Sarah,” her father broke in, “that is no proper way to address your godfather.”
She sniffed and took her hat off. She sat carefully on one of the less rickety chairs. “The last time I noticed, he was on the run from the law.”
She reached for the cup. As usual, the beer was off. She drank it anyway. She looked at Collier. He’d spent his life hating the dissenters. Serves him right he now had to dress as one of their preachers to go about unarrested.
“Aren’t we now felons for receiving him?”
The smile didn’t drop from Collier’s face. “There can surely be no fault, my dear child, in receiving a faithful servant of the King.”
He bowed his head. “Are we not all of us his faithful servants?”
Sarah scowled. She had no time for arguing with anyone. But, if she didn’t drive Collier away, he’d sit here all day, talking treason that any one of the six boys outside might hear. What would that government spy have not wanted to be told?
She gathered her thoughts for the maximum offence she could manage.
“Even you must have noticed the game is up,” she sneered. “The war’s lost. The French won’t restore James because they can’t. He’ll die in France. When William dies, he’ll be followed by Anne. What happens after that doesn’t concern people like us.”
She put her cup down. She glared at Collier, wondering if he’d get the message, or if she’d have to resort to phrases like “Piss off!”
Her father was trying to pull himself to his feet. “Sarah!” he gasped. “Oh, Sarah! James is King by the Grace of God. If an Act of Parliament says otherwise—yea, if all the people in England stand behind the Act—he is King still. Our duty is to serve him as best we can.”
Collier turned his glittering eyes in her direction. “I fear, Obadiah,” he said smoothly, “your daughter has suffered the corruption I warned you against. It is not fitting that a woman should write for the stage, and not fitting that she should write for such a stage as may be found in Parker’s Lane.
“I tell you that every species of moral filthiness may be found in that playhouse. I have, with mine own eyes, seen women to dance there, with their legs on full display, and horrid blasphemy on their lips.
“Let me provide you with a single instance of how your daughter earns her bread….”
“Oh, shut up!” Sarah had had enough of this.
“You may recall that I’m a widow. If I live with my father, it’s from choice, and I’m mistress of my own life. How I earn my bread is my business alone.”
She glanced at her father. He looked as if he’d start crying. She’d not point out that his total earnings—when the boys paid at all, that was—were three shillings a week. Without her own irregular, though often large, earnings, he’d barely pay the rent on this dump, let alone eat.
Instead, she went back to politics. When it came to giving offence, she’d only started.
“You’re both wasting your lives on a cause that would be worthless, even if it weren’t without hope.”
She stopped. Collier deserved to be reminded of all he’d given up when he refused to swear allegiance to William. But she knew her father thought every day of the living he’d had to resign, and of the void into which he’d stepped.
She looked briefly away from the pair of fools, only one of them culpable. The door to her own tiny room was closed. It was hardly surprising her father had assumed she was asleep in there. She didn’t normally wake till noon. She needed to be in there now.
If only Collier didn’t seem to be enjoying the waste of her time.
“When James was King,” she went on, “he ruled as half tyrant, half fool. The real wonder isn’t that everyone who mattered called in his daughter and son-in-law, but that they waited so long to be rid of him.
“And when William did turn up, what was the response of our ‘Lord’s Anointed?’ Why, he ran away to France so fast, he didn’t have time to pack a change of clothes. From there, he was sent off to Ireland at the head of a French army. Every one of our own people there too trusting to take up arms against him he turned over to a rabble of native papists, who stripped them naked.
“When William followed him to Ireland, what did James do? He ran away again, this time from the field of battle. It’s not for us to feel sorry for the natives. But they trusted him, and he shat all over them. He’s now snug in his French palace, while his host makes war on us.”
Again, she paused. She thought of what she’d learned from a renegade Jesuit who sometimes drifted into Mrs Clapton’s.
“The Chinese believe that every ruler in possession has the Mandate of Heaven, and that he loses possession when that Mandate is withdrawn. Well, James has been out of possession for seven years, and there’s no one but a few malcontents who want him back.”
She’d guessed right that Collier was enjoying himself. “Oh, my dearest friend Obadiah,” he quavered in mock outrage, “surely your daughter has turned Whig!”
He turned away from the old man, and smirked at her. “How fortunate there are men in this country who do not think as she does. Do you not recall the firmness with which Sir John Friend and Sir William Parkyns suffered martyrdom last month?”
Sarah felt what remained of her temper slipping away.
“They were the lowest kind of assassin,” she nearly shouted. “Worse, they were so stupid, they were watched almost from the beginning of their plot. If he was privy to what they were about, James isn’t fit to lead a pirate ship, let alone rule in England.
“You were a troublemaking fool to go along to their execution. You were lucky the mob didn’t string you up beside them.”
The sun shifted position in the room, striking on something that shone like a mirror. She leaned forward to pull a newspaper aside on the little table before her father. She looked at the three half crowns.
“Where did this come from?”
Collier rolled his eyes. “Your father said the recoinage has left you both out of funds. You’d not object to help from his oldest friend? I’m only ashamed that persons of our quality should have to think 7/-6d so very great a sum.”
He turned to her father, and continued in Greek about his movements till Sunday. With another look at Sarah, he remembered himself in time, and switched into Hebrew.
She looked at the new coins. More than that, and she’d have had positive cause for suspicion. But Collier was her father’s oldest friend, and each had done his best to help the other since the Revolution.
As quickly as it had started, the impenetrable conversation ended. Collier was on his feet.
“Sarah,” he said with a sudden turn to earnestness, “one of these days, you will have cause to think better of me. For the moment, I fear I must take my leave of you.”
He looked about for his hat.
ooOoo
Out on the landing, Polly was continuing with her entertainment. Collier shrugged and looked at young Stephen, who was now finished with Matthew, and was going through Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount. He patted the boy on the head, before hurrying downstairs.
Sarah stood watching till she heard the front door bang shut.
Chapter Eleven
Dressed only in her grey shift, Sarah sat in bed. She had her writing board on her knees. Twelve drops of laudanum in gin were producing a wondrous internal rising of the sun. She looked through the open window. If she went closer and leaned out, she’d have a fine vi
ew over the rooftops towards the dome of St Paul’s. The smell from the Fleet Ditch could be a nuisance. But there was a southerly breeze this afternoon.
She looked out at the cloudless sky. She closed her eyes and looked away.
When she opened them, she was looking at the slim volume of sermons her husband had published a few weeks before he began to cough blood. It stood on the one shelf in the room, beside it on one side her Bible, on the other a treatise on optics one of her admirers had pressed into her hand.
“Poor Richard!” she murmured. “Poor beautiful Richard!”
Even with the buffer of opium to keep the sadness at bay, she told herself to put his face out of mind. It was the same with the face of the hanged man. Unopened, the Irishman’s package was beside the bed. She wouldn’t think of that either. If undeniably important, it was less urgent than the work in hand.
Careful not to break its long stem, she filled her pipe and set it to the candle she’d brought in from the main room. She took in a lungful of smoke and expelled it towards the window. She took another, and then another.
As charcoal turns white in the blast of a bellows, so the opium was steadying and enlarging her mind. Now savouring a delicious happiness that felt as if it would never end, she dipped her pen and hovered above the sheet of paper.
And she wrote:
Take flight, I bid, on wings of art,
Our jolly London to depart;
And over France and Italy,
And where the fabled cities lie
Of olden Greece—come, let us fly,
Till shall, from overhead, be seen
The City of Great Constantine….
End Matters
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