The Sparks Fly Upward by Diana Norman

responsible for the French end of the smuggling relay between Babbs Cove and France. From then on, she and Makepeace had met every year, either at T’Gallants or the chateau of Gruchy where Diana, who became Mme de Vaubon, had enjoyed a happiness she had never known before.
    It was short-lived. When she’d conceived at the age of forty-three there had been rejoicing in the villages on both sides of the Channel but the birth of her son, Jacques, had been difficult. Makepeace was with her when she died a week later from septicemia occasioned by a piece of placenta that had refused to come away.
    Even the death of Andra seven years later had not swamped that particular grief, indeed had exacerbated it, like a hook still tugging at the mouth of a landed fish, with its reminder that the last female contemporary who could have comforted her was not there.
    The best she could do for her dead friend had been to look after the baby until its stricken father procured a suitable nurse. Afterwards she’d regularly gone back and forth to Gruchy to keep an eye on the boy. When de Vaubon, with his friend Georges Danton, entered the fraught world of politics in opposition to Louis XVI’s regime, young Jacques had spent nearly as much time with her in England as he had with his father.
    For his sake, she might have roused herself from despair after Andra’s death if the boy’s visits had been kept up but by then Guillaume de Vaubon was a celebrated figure of the Revolution and, anglophile though he was, decided it was unwise for his son to seem too much at home in a royalist country. It had been Philippa, in her frequent trips to Paris, who’d kept up the connection between the two families and ensured that the boy retained his fluent English.
    It was late by the time they reached the crest of the steep hill down to Babbs Cove; Makepeace had rejected the idea of stopping for another night on the road; there was a good moon, the ground was dry and Sanders was familiar with the way.
    Against the sound of dragging brakes as they went down, she heard Glossop ask, ‘Who owns that house then?’ Below them, frost on the dour, slated, multiangled roof of T’Gallants was gleaming in the moonlight, the only indication that the house wasn’t part of the cliff on which it stood.
    â€˜It’s the missus’s,’ Sanders said.
    No, it ain’t , she thought, not really . To her, it would always belong to the tall, ivory-haired ghost who still haunted it, its face before her now, as she’d last seen it, fighting against incoherence, eyes going from hers to de Vaubon’s, lips trying to shape words and managing only, ‘Care . . . care.’
    Makepeace had leaned over so that her face was only inches from the suffering woman’s. ‘He’ll be the best cared for baby you ever damn saw.’
    A twitched smile, peace, a terrible howl from de Vaubon . . .
    She was afflicted by the thought of how little she had done for Diana’s child in the last two years. True, the boy now lived permanently in Paris with his father and Paris had become increasingly un-welcoming to all foreigners except those most dedicated to its Revolution, which Makepeace was not. In any case, last year France had declared war on England.
    But we could have met at Gruchy, she thought. De Vaubon had left the manoir of Gruchy in the hands of his steward and its villagers but it was still his and its trade with Babbs Cove still carried on.
    Wars had never prevented the activity of smuggling during the many conflicts between France and England in the past, never would. Gruchy on its lonely, wind-wracked Cotentin shore was, like Babbs Cove, isolated from government both geographically and temperamentally and in its view, which was also Babbs Cove’s, government, whatever its color, imposed starvation taxes that it was the individual’s duty to avoid. Government, said Babbs Cove and Gruchy, were enemies but the