Nathan The Flight of Sarah Battle

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-910409-61-9
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 280 Seiten

Born in her father's coffee house in Change Alley, London, Sarah Battle is raised in an atmosphere of coffee, alcohol and intrigue. After witnessing the destruction and chaos of the Gordon Riots, she longs to escape her surroundings for a better life but is trapped in a marriage to James Wintrige, a member of the Corresponding Society but also a government spy. She meets the radical thinker, printer and bookseller Thomas Cranch who offers her an escape to the New World. Sarah finds solace in her new love and the thriving, democratic world of Philadelphia. But fate may yet deliver her back to London. She has never secured a divorce from her husband and the Change Alley coffee house is still hers. The Flight of Sarah Battle is set in the turbulent last decade of the eighteenth century in a London where riot constantly rumbles and Bartholomew Fair entertains, and against the promises and excitement of Philadelphia, where new building, hope and a democracy not quite fully realised are shadowed by the terrible threat of fever and war.

Alix Nathan was born in London and educated there and at York University where she read English and Music. She now lives in the Welsh Marches where she owns some ancient woodland. She has published many short stories and her debut collection His Last Fire was published by Parthian in 2014. She has recently completed another novel, Into the Depths.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nathan, Alix

Leseproben

1

In Change Alley lecherous sparrows nested in roofs, hopped on and off each other in constant copulation. Cheeping incessantly, they fought in the gutters at Battle’s, her father’s coffee house. Sarah Battle watched life outside her window high in the building every day of her childhood; on dark mornings she listened for the scratch of pecking, pelt of rain. After the Cornhill fire in 1748, begun at the peruke-maker’s, Battle’s had been rebuilt. There, twenty years later, Sarah was born.

Downstairs, light fed through large windows, but the Alley’s other buildings, peering in, crowded out the sun. There was space in the big room to drink and eat at open tables, to mingle, move from group to group, even address the company, but also to huddle in private behind thin walls of high-backed settles. Where deals took place, stock was shifted by jobbers and brokers from the nearby Exchange, vital figures passed on or withheld.

To a little child the place was enormous, full of the noise and smell of men. One woman officiated at the curved bar in the centre, Anne, her mother, and a cook worked in the kitchen, but all the rest were men, loud, looming. They patted her head, laughed at her, asked her impossible questions, fed her morsels of bread like a caged goldfinch, though she didn’t have to sing for them. Made her sip chocolate, teaspoons of punch when her father wasn’t looking. She played with the puppy among their legs and feet, learned that they would be charmed by her presence through a rack of steam and smoke. Wondered why some kinds of rowdiness caused her to be removed to the kitchen or up to her little room where she knelt on her bed and gazed across roofs. Heard the shouting and thumping continue floors below.

Often if the puppy was asleep she watched unobserved. How men picked their noses and teeth, rubbed their thighs, scratched their groins, clapped the backs of their friends, causing showers of white dust. She saw wigs slip, staring to see if fuzz, matted strands or naked skin lurked beneath. Saw eyeballs roll, lips purse at the man who read aloud the morning news each day, watched earnest talk, handshakes, secret signs, money pass and fingers touch their lips when they saw her see.

Her childish view fixed on the peculiar, absurd, self-important. She smiled to herself at singular expressions, habits, movements supposed unseen, food and drink slopping and dripping, fish bones flying, chops dropped, crusts lodged in odd places, men no better than babies. Hid under tables when overcome by giggles.

She might have continued to decorate Battle’s with her innocence. Sam Battle, brought up to the business by his own father, knew her value, but her mother had modest ambitions for her daughter and, egged on by educated customers, put Sarah to school. Where she learned the necessary elements and failed to enjoy the companionship of girls unlike herself.

The best thing about Sarah’s early life in the coffee house was Benjamin Newton, who made her sit beside him while he drew pictures which to her were real. Through him she’d learned her letters, whole words: bottle, pie, goose, wig and graduated to sentences: the goose wears a wig, swigs the bottle and gobbles the pie. She began to read from books plucked out of his apparently infinite pockets. Through him she heard about existence outside her smoke-thick, closed-in world: sea, ships, animals strange beyond belief, other lands, snow-deep, heat-dry, Turks, Lapps, Scots. Before long, recognising a shared attitude with his child companion, Newton sketched regular customers in familiar poses, their characters or weaknesses exposed: greasy tricorns, fantastic shoe-buckles, popping eyes; men who fiddled with their ears, gawped at scandals in the Morning Post, snored then gasped themselves awake. Among his sketches, the formidable Sam Battle occasionally appeared, armed cap-à-pe, as did Miss Sarah Battle laughing behind her hands with a scrawny, bird-like friend labelled B—n N——n.

Newton was young, unknown, sold his drawings to print shops when he could. He rarely paid his tab but Sam didn’t press too hard, seeing that men enjoyed his satires, lingered, ordered more coffee, more punch. Her mother, Anne, was glad to have the child off her hands. For Sarah, Newton was a private magician, drawing for her, casting his delicate smile at her alone. He wore no wig, his hair was wayward, his clothes unkempt, and he hummed sweet tunes. While he sketched or read a book of verse, she pulled off thrums from his ragged cuff; held a hoard of short green threads in her pocket to keep him always present.

‘Look, Newton,’ she’d say, poking him in the side, annoyed by his absorption. ‘Over there.’

‘Where? What?’

‘Look; where I’m pointing.’

‘If you point they’ll see and stop doing whatever they’re doing that’s funny.’

‘Oh! The man behind the man warming his arse at the fire.’

‘You ought not to say ‘arse’ if you’re going to grow up into a lady,’ he’d say, mumming disapproval.

‘The man at the table behind the man at the fire. Look at him, he’s sliding off his chair.’

‘Well observed, Sarah! And if someone moves the table even slightly down he’ll go.’

‘Quick, draw! Draw him! Quick!’

She rushed back from school, imagining that he’d spent the day waiting only for her return. And he did, indeed, always have some newly-drawn absurdity with which to make her laugh. In turn she would mock her teacher voraciously for him, tell half-invented tales about the other pupils, watch them appear in wonderful exaggeration on the paper before her. It was like conspiracy with an angel: Newton was her authority, Newton, his books and his drawings.

They were always side by side.

‘Man behind you. Don’t look yet.’

‘Is it seriously funny? I thought you were reading that poem.’

‘He cut up his meat into pieces. Sucked the gravy off each one in turn, then he put them to dry round the edge of his plate. Now he’s slipping them into his pocket. Look, look!’

She prodded him. He’d stopped humming. In repose Newton’s face looked sad. It felt like a threat.

As she grew older and it was seen how well she could read, others made her stumble over the Morning Chronicle and Gentleman’s Magazine, birthday odes for the King, even significant bits of Blackstone’s legal Commentaries. She obliged, though their amusement was greater than hers.

*

In June 1780 thunderous heat kept casements wide open all night. Mephitis of cesspools replaced the pungent pipe-smoke and boiling coffee steam which hung in clouds in Change Alley. Returning early from the school she hoped soon to leave, Sarah found herself suddenly pressed up against buildings, pushed aside by crowds surging past from St George’s Fields, across London Bridge and down Cornhill. The banners they held up said Protestant Association, they waved flags, sang hymns and wore blue cockades in their hats.

‘Is you a papist?’ a woman glared into her face. ‘Git you indoors if you is.’

Sarah was familiar with her father’s view of papists (Irish weren’t they?), though he’d not ask questions if Irish customers paid well and caused no trouble. The woman fluttered a pennant on a stick at her. No Popery, it read.

The mood was sprightly in Battle’s.

‘North’s a dismal fool. We’ve enough Irish; we don’t need more. Every other house a mass-house.’

‘You would say that, Bullock.’

‘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...