The Flight of Sarah Battle Read Free Page B

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.

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    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.
    Instead, she must rehearse names of customers and drinks, quantities, proportions, when to order more loaf sugar, nets of lemons, when to call the boy, Dick, when to hail a waiter. She disliked her prominent position but worked hard, in part from an urge to defy. For, though unspoken, there was a belief no girl could do it all. Sam never praised nor encouraged, only criticised as his father had done before him.
    For a while her nightly ritual of grief gave way to recitation of lists: port, sherry, claret, cherry wine, arrack, rum, usquebaugh, gin, Brunswick mum, aqua vitae, metheglin, cider, perry, scurvy-grass ale, Welsh ale, Dorchester beer. Prices for a glass, a bottle. How much ale to put in flip, the exact amount of brandy, Madeira and green tea for Battle’s famous punch.
    In the day inner dialogues with Newton held her. ‘Draw this face, that scene!’
    â€˜Which scene? What face?’
    â€˜The man with all the chins.’
    â€˜He’s leering at you now.’
    â€˜Yes, yes, pin him down in your sketchbook. Get all those chins and whiskers!’
    â€˜And the scene?’
    â€˜Table in the corner. Man trying to sell watches. Pulling one after another out of his coat. How many has he got? They must be stolen: the Runners’ll be in and Father’ll be furious.’
    How they’d have laughed. No one guessed why she would suddenly smile. Some wondered it her wits had turned from grief. Most, seeing her ride a crisis unperturbed, remembered that Anne had been tough, as you had to be to put up with Sam Battle. Thought it was that.
    â€˜You’re so like your dear mother,’ they told her when they judged enough time had passed since Anne’s death.
    She knew better. It was as though she dedicated the life of her mind to Ben Newton: cried for him at night (once the lists were memorised), mentally conversed with him during the day, helped by the feel of the knot of green threads lodged deep in her pocket. She grew a skin of detachment that some