Wicked Company (13 page)

“My lords and gentlemen of the jury… what more can the man stand accused of? We believe there is but
one
God in this land! And McGann’s blasphemously crediting such powers to an
actor
is appalling beyond belief!”

Sophie bowed her head in abject misery, tears coursing down her cheeks.

“I think we have heard enough from this chit, m’lords,” the prosecutor said disdainfully, ordering her from the witness box. “The Crown versus Daniel McGann is ready to proceed to the worthy deliberations of the jury and my Lords of Justiciary.”

***

The verdict was not unexpected. Daniel McGann, printer and bookseller, was found guilty of obscene libel and blasphemy. Sentencing would be pronounced by mid-April, and while Sophie waited for the court’s decision, her sleepless nights were filled with anxiety that her father might well be hung.

On April 15, the Justiciary Court pronounced sentence: Daniel McGann would be publicly pilloried for his crimes and remanded to the Tolbooth for six months. The court had, in its mercy, decided to be lenient in failing to demand the death penalty or forfeiture of the convict’s whole moveable goods to the Crown.

“This is done at the intercession of such worthies as Lord Lemore and his friend and fellow nobleman, Lord Creighton, who urged this court to take pity on McGann’s daughter, as she has no other means of support than the shop,” Lord Auckinleck declared from the bench. Annoyance colored the judge’s final proclamation: “This court has shown you its mercy in not punishing you to the full extent of the law for selling books that rot women’s minds and tracts that pollute men’s. As your confessor would say to you—if you ever had the piety to attend kirk session—‘Go, and sin no more!’”

Five

Flanked by town guardsmen, the prisoner was led bareheaded and barefoot from the Tolbooth prison and into the open square at sun up. Sophie could see her father shivering in the early morning chill and he appeared dreadfully undernourished. His arms were like pale splinters shed from fresh-cut wood, and it made her wince to watch the guards roughly thrust his emaciated limbs into the stocks’ narrow openings. Worse yet was to see them push his head toward the pillory’s worn curve where his neck would be clamped until sundown.

Daniel seemed listless and glassy-eyed, and there was nary a sign that he had seen Sophie standing in the crowd. Several catcalls and a cabbage were thrown in his direction while the righteous Reverend Meeker, serving the dual role of accuser and prison chaplain, loudly cited examples of his wickedness. But for the most part, both onlookers and passersby stared silently at the bookseller whom the authorities had chosen to make an object of public scorn.

At the end of the long day, the town guardsmen unlocked the pillory and led the prisoner back toward his cell. Sophie crowded close and reached out to give his bruised wrist a squeeze.

“Write your Aunt Harriet,” Daniel croaked, “go to her in London…”

“No!” Sophie retorted. “I’m staying here with you!”

The redcoat rudely pushed her aside, prodding his charge in the direction of the prison whose menacing walls loomed overhead. Daniel’s gait was unsteady, his shoulders stooped, and his head remained thrust forward, as if frozen in the position dictated by ten hours in the wooden stocks.

“’Tis over, lass,” Hunter said quietly. “Let me see you home.”

Sophie nodded dully and allowed Hunter to take her arm. At least her father’s public degradation was at an end. She tried not to dwell on the fact that his prison term still had five months to run.

In late October, four days before Daniel McGann was due to be released from the Tolbooth, Reverend Meeker stood at the book shop entrance wearing an expression of studied calm.

“God has seen fit to summon your father to judgment,” Reverend Meeker announced without preliminaries. “He left this life last night.”

“W-what?” Sophie stammered, staring at the portly visitor as if he were speaking a language she didn’t understand.

“He died of jail fever.”

“Why didn’t you come for me!” she cried. She picked up a book on her father’s desk and slammed it down again. “You only had to walk a dozen paces or so to summon me! Why?
Why!”
she shouted.

The chaplain looked toward the shop door, as if considering an avenue of escape.

“These fevers come on fierce,” he explained, a nervous tic tugging at his protuberant left eye. “Four others died besides your da. ’Twas God’s will.”

“God had nothing to do with it!” she screamed at him.
“You
and all the other sanctimonious little toads have
killed
him. What have you done with his body?” she demanded fiercely.

“The kirk won’t have him,” the chaplain retorted, stung by her invective. “He was certainly no churchgoer. There’ll be no hallowed ground for a blasphemer like him!”

Sophie stared at the chaplain’s long black coat and the two white flaps hanging from his linen collar that denoted his calling. Grabbing hold of them, she yanked his bloated face within inches of hers and shrieked, “W-what have they d-done with my
f-father!”
The stutter that had plagued her when she testified at her father’s trial now made her words almost incoherent.

Sophie’s firm grip on the chaplain’s collar mottled his face with pink and white blotches, and his pale eyes began to water.

“T-the Royal Infirmary…”he choked out the words. “I heard they took him—”

Sophie shoved her shoulder hard against the chaplain’s barrel chest, sending him reeling into a bookcase. Before he could recover his breath, she had stormed out of the shop. She tore down Bell’s Wynd past the halls where she’d watched Hunter dance the minuet with assorted beauties of the town, and dashed heedlessly across the Cowgate, a rutted road which paralleled the Royal Mile. The buildings off College Wynd created a confusing labyrinth of stone walls and alleyways. At length, she reached the University of Edinburgh itself and ran pell-mell toward the Royal Infirmary.

The entrance to the stone building was eerily familiar, although in daylight, its walls seemed stark and colorless. Sophie headed impulsively toward the operating theater, recalling how the stairwell during Sheridan’s lecture series had been crowded with noisy attendees eagerly anticipating the evening’s program. On this day, however, all she could hear was a subdued murmur of voices as she reached the landing.

Without pausing to catch her breath, Sophie flung open the door. Suddenly, her eyes dilated in horror as she stared down on an audience of young medical students, seated in fan-shaped formation. Their attention was focused on a pallet at the center of the chamber. A physician—operating instruments in hand—was lecturing to his student audience. Beside him, a body lay face up on a table.

It wasn’t the vision of her father’s frozen profile that wrenched Sophie’s guts and made her gasp for breath, but the sight of his pathetic splinter of an arm, now gray in death. And as she stood staring down at the expanse of the operating theater, her gaze was riveted on Daniel McGann’s poor, emaciated limb—an extremity that was no longer attached to his body.

Both students and professors bolted to rigid attention when they heard the high-pitched, keening cry rising from the back of the lecture hall. Before anyone could scramble up the stairs to the top row of seats, the young woman, as deathly pale as the cadaver they had been dissecting, had crumpled to the floor.

***

Daniel McGann had been in his grave barely a day when his daughter chose her method of retaliation.

“No, Sophie!
No!
” Hunter said angrily, frustrated that she would not even look up from the small printing press. “Don’t
do
this!” he shouted at her as she continued to fiddle with the handle of the press. “’Twill only make things worse… ’twill only put you in terrible danger, like your da!”

“I don’t
care!”
Sophie retorted bitterly. She slapped the wooden form containing the metal letters in place, firm in her resolve to seek vengeance. Viciously pulling the handle, she caused a sheet of paper to move beneath the platen. Another fierce tug and the metal type in the wooden form imprinted the sheet with ink.

“Well, I care, and so do Will and Bozzy and
all
your friends in the Luckenbooths!” he argued.

“Bozzy!”
She spat the name. “James Boswell has not come near McGann’s since Da was arrested.”

“His father sat as judge!” Hunter protested. “’Twould only inflame the old man more to learn his son was your champion. Bozzy’s kept his distance to
protect
you. He told me so!”

Sophie merely flattened her lips in a thin, unforgiving line. In truth, the lass’s rigid composure since her father’s death had Hunter worried. She had maintained an eerie calm during the ten days required to make the unorthodox arrangements to lay his broken body to rest.

Hunter and Will had hired livery and a hearse to take them to the burial site. It was located in a back field of a small farm belonging to a distant relative in Penicuik, south of the city. The young men had marveled privately at Sophie’s iron resolve to see her father’s remains interred in a beautiful spot, as no church in Edinburgh would allow his grave within its precincts. Then Sophie’s pent-up fury had finally burst into the open. Hunter and Will Creech had arrived back in the city at dusk, and the hired carriage had paused in front of the book shop to allow Sophie to disembark. Will then rode with the driver back to Boyd’s White Horse Inn while Hunter followed Sophie into the book shop. She walked directly to the composing table and immediately sat down on her stool. With growing apprehension, Hunter watched her methodically select metal letters and slide them into a wooden composing frame. Reading the type backward with some difficulty, Hunter began to understand what form her rage was going to take.

The first broadside to emerge from under the platen confirmed his worst fears. He yanked it from the drying tray and pointed angrily at the screaming headline.

“‘The Immorality of Censorship Considered, by Sophie McGann, dated fourteen November 1762,’” he read aloud with a facility that would have amazed both himself and his erstwhile teacher, had they both not been so upset. “‘…wherein she castigates the churchmen of St. Giles, the city magistrates, and especially the Lords of Justiciary for their inhuman act of imprisoning her worthy father and letting go free a certain nobleman who possesses engravings of an obscene nature.’”

Hunter slapped the broadside on top of the printing press in exasperation. “That’s good… that’s truly bonnie of you, Sophie!” he said sarcastically. “’Twasn’t enough that your poor da died of the jail fever.
You
want to libel Lemore so you can hang by your neck on a public platform!”

“You don’t want me to tell the truth about what happened to Da because it might have some bearing on
you,”
she retorted furiously. “The authorities might exercise their arbitrary powers over
you
and the playhouse—and wouldn’t
that
be inconvenient, now that you no longer have to juggle for a living and can prance about the stage with those harlots like Gwen Reardon, who calls herself an actress!”

Hunter colored and remained silent as Sophie lined up a second sheet of paper.

“Well, ’tis dangerous, what you’re doing, and that’s a fact,” Hunter said finally, watching her mechanically put the paper under the platen and pull the handle across the press. “And it won’t change a
thing,”
he added quietly.

“That’s the safest way to view it, I suppose,” Sophie said acidly, continuing her work in a steady rhythm. “Let someone
else
fight for the freedoms you enjoy.”

“Oh, rubbish, Sophie!” Hunter responded with some heat. “You’re not printing these placards to preserve my right to ‘prance upon the stage with Gwen Reardon,’ as you describe it. You’re seeking revenge against Lord Lemore… you think you can show those churchmen the evil of their ways. You’re even cracked enough to think Bozzy’s father will somehow see how right you are and how wrong the decisions from the bench. And you’re willing to destroy yourself doing it!”

Sophie suspended her frantic activity and looked at him coldly.

“You’re on
their
side,” she said in a low voice. “Rather than risk a hair on that handsome head of yours, you prattle on about caring for my safety. You’re nothing but a pretty, pleasure-seeking coward, Hunter Robertson! Now, why don’t you leave?”

Hunter was stunned by the venom in Sophie’s voice. It was true, he acknowledged inwardly, that he had always managed to survive by charming and outfoxing his adversaries, rather than by locking horns, as Sophie wanted to do. Did that mean he was a coward? As for the rest, well, the pleasure-seeking part ’twas true enough. Gwen was an appealing bit of fluff, a light o’ love that took his mind off… the past.

Hunter stared at Sophie’s trembling form and the feral, wounded look in her eye. For such a slender wee thing, she was like a wild Highland storm, he thought sadly, driven by her demons and haunted by the hideous memory of her last glimpse of her beloved father. Because she couldn’t very well attack her genuine adversaries—except in print
—he
was the safest target for her fury and despair. Hunter understood that, yet he was hurt by her words and confused when his brotherly feelings toward her seemed tainted now by emotions he couldn’t quite discover.