Wicked Company (22 page)

“Well,” she said to Lorna, who had come to bid farewell this rain-spattered May day, “I’ve resolved to raise some funds to tide me over until autumn. I’m selling off volumes that aren’t appropriate for my new vision of the shop.” She pulled down a heavy tome titled
Sermons of the Established Clergy,
published in 1751 and, next to it, a book by Colonel David Dundas on
Principles of Military Movements Relating to the War of 1757 in the American Colonies.

“Those must have been purchased by your uncle
before
Ashby’s earned its notoriety,” Lorna joked, eyeing the weighty volumes.

“Aye,” Sophie agreed. “Mrs. Sheridan advised me to try Tom Davies’s book shop on Russell Street. He was a player himself, once, she said, and likes doing business with theater folk.”

Just then a loud thump reverberated overhead in Sophie’s lodgings upstairs.

“God’s bones! What was
that?”
Lorna cried with alarm.

Without answering, Sophie flew up the circular stairway at the rear of the book shop, hurtled past the printing press, and froze at the threshold to her living quarters. Aunt Harriet had pulled away the heavy fire screen, tossed it on the floor, and was now sitting among the cold ashes, munching on bits of coal. Black spittle dribbled down her chin as her eyes darted wildly from side to side.

“Jesu!”
Sophie cursed under her breath, “Lorna!” she shouted, but her friend had just arrived in the chamber. “Get some water, will you please? Come, Aunt Harriet,” she said in a calmer voice, “there’s a good lass… come, let’s get you tidied up. ’Tis not very savory what you’ve been eating, is it now?” she crooned, removing the last bit of coal from her aunt’s mouth and tossing it on the cold hearth. Her aunt stared back at her, a flicker of comprehension glinting in her eyes. “No need to eat coal,” Sophie chided gently, dipping a rag into the basin of water brought by Lorna.

Harriet Ashby blinked slowly several times and then looked from Sophie to Lorna and back again to her niece. She let Sophie clean her face and brush back her wild gray mane. Sophie’s heart contracted at the deteriorating condition of her only living relative. She knew Harriet McGann had at one time been a vibrant, intelligent woman. Gazing at her aunt’s miserable state, Sophie wondered silently what in heaven’s name she could do to make the woman’s life somehow more bearable.

***

A few days later, when the weather had turned even cooler and rainy in spite of the month, Sophie was cheered by the sight of James Boswell appearing unexpectedly at Ashby’s shop door. However, his gloomy countenance was instantly sobering.

“I have given up my dreams of glory,” he announced dramatically, swiftly accepting her invitation to join in a cup of chocolate she’d brewed on the open hearth at the back of the shop. “I shall travel to the Continent in August, and once again attempt to please my father by studying civil law at the University of Utrecht in Holland.”

“And you are not pleased, I take it, about your decision?” Sophie countered quietly, handing him his chocolate when he had settled in a chair. She perched on the corner of her desk.

Boswell sighed and flipped idly through the pages of a book lying on the counter.

“I don’t rightly know, Sophie,” he said bleakly. “I shall miss my friends and the excitement of the town…” His voice trailed off disconsolately.

“You’ve become a bosom companion of the great Dr. Johnson, I hear,” she said, smiling. “I assume he’s forgiven you your Scottish origins?” she teased. Dr. Johnson, the incisive pundit and writer of dictionaries, had a well-known antipathy to Scots.

“Aye.” Boswell nodded earnestly. “I met him in Davies’s book shop last month and we conversed for hours! He’s wise in marvelous ways and thinks this trip will settle me in the right path.”

“Then why so low-spirited and melancholy?” she asked. Boswell sighed a second time and shrugged despondently but remained silent. “Perhaps ’tis the gloomy weather,” she suggested.

“I’d rather be in London among the
literati
and not in some dull college surrounded by bores and law books!” he blurted suddenly. His eyes sought out Sophie’s beseechingly. “You can’t imagine how terrible ’tis to be a judge’s heir… to be dependent on his will and kindness… for funds… for
everything!
”

Sophie thought of her own orphaned state and bit back a tart retort. Boswell continued to sip his chocolate to the dregs and soon bade her a melancholy farewell.

By mid-afternoon the sun emerged from scudding clouds, but Sophie found that Boswell’s Blue Devils had become contagious. Lorna had long since departed for Sadler’s Wells. Meanwhile, Sophie had received no response to her written enticement to Hunter. There was no denying it, she mused moodily. Hunter Robertson was a dreadful correspondent and Sophie could not spare money to frank another missive when there was apparently no realistic hope of gaining an answer.

Upstairs, she could hear Aunt Harriet moving restlessly about their living quarters.

“’Tis cooped up, I’ve been,” Sophie said aloud, “and ’tis making me as balmy as my aunt!” With an air of decisiveness, she locked the front door to Ashby’s Books and dashed up the circular stairs. “I’m just going out for a breath of fresh air,” she announced to Harriet, who was sitting on the bedstead, staring at nothing in particular. “I won’t be long,” Sophie added with forced cheerfulness, but received no reply. She settled a shawl on her shoulders to ward off the chilly wind that had blown the rain clouds south of the Thames, and descended the stairs leading from her lodgings into Half Moon Passage, now washed clean by the earlier storm.

Sophie inhaled the scent of summer as her eyes scanned the Piazza. The rain had turned the pavings to silver. Her spirits lifted somewhat merely at being outdoors after such a long time shut away in Ashby’s Books. She strolled down Bedford Street and turned through the tall iron gates into the verdant churchyard of St. Paul’s. Ancient, moss-encrusted gravestones tilted at odd angles in the velvet grass that surrounded the simple lines of the Actors’ Church. Sophie noticed a plump brown bird busily pulling a worm out of the moist ground.

“What a lucky fellow,” Sophie chuckled softly. “You have your supper right where you want it, don’t you?”

She stared at the bird, absorbed by the sight of its darting beak and the manner in which the creature cocked his head and stared back at her. Then she drifted several yards from the resourceful bird to inspect one of the granite headstones adorned by an exquisitely carved angel clothed in soft green lichen. She ran her fingertips over the gravestone’s indented letters, then pulled back with a sharp intake of breath when she discovered that the marker commemorated the death of a child who had perished in the Great Plague of 1665. That was only two years short of a century ago, she mused. From the dates etched in the stone she determined that the poor mite buried beneath her feet had only been three years old—about the same age Megan Robertson, Hunter’s sister, was when she died. Sophie’s palm cupped the small stone head of the angel.

How hard life can be,
she thought,
and with what random cruelty life’s blows sometimes befall us.

Her thoughts drifted back, recalling the look of utter desolation that invaded Hunter Robertson’s eyes whenever he made mention of the wee sister who had perished during the Starving. As a direct consequence of the failure of Bonnie Prince Charlie to recover his throne, his loyal Highlanders suffered swift and severe punishment meted out by government troops whose scorched earth policy resulted in the burning of dwellings and torching of crops throughout northern Scotland during Hunter’s childhood.

Sophie’s fingers brushed against the stone angel’s wings. She thought of her father, in his grave less than a year.
Punished
because religious and governmental authority dictated he could not read or sell certain books.

Random cruelty,
she mused, gazing up at the plain, straight lines of Inigo Jones’s St. Paul’s Covent Garden rising from the churchyard in which she sat.

How could there be a God when such things were allowed to happen?

Shaking off her melancholic thoughts, Sophie glanced at the sun slanting behind St. Paul’s Church and shivered in the shadows swiftly enveloping the graveyard. The drop in temperature reminded her that she’d been away from Aunt Harriet longer than she intended. Bolting past the cemetery gates, she ran down the road to Half Moon Passage toward the shop.

A crowd clustered in front of Bob Derry’s Cider House where an excited chimney sweep was pointing a soot-covered finger in the direction of the Great Piazza.

“Shed her clothes in the road and stark neckit, she be,” he announced wide-eyed to Bob and the assembly that had gathered in the lane to hear his wild tale. “’Air as gray as Father Time and lookin’ as old as ’im, she was,” he declared, his gaze acknowledging the arrival of Sophie, Mrs. Phillips, and the sometimes-strumpet, Mary Ann Skene, a frequent customer at the Green Canister. They had dashed across the road to listen to this horrifying intelligence.

“The Shakespeare Head’s in a fair state, and
that’s
a tavern what’s seen a lot of life, I ken tell ye that! But never seen no neckit creature like Mistress Ashby runnin’ through the place, screechin’ and hollerin’! The constable’s been called!”

“Oh, dear God!” Sophie cried, setting off at a dead run down Henrietta Street, across the wide expanse of Covent Garden’s Great Piazza.

The scene inside the public house was worse than Sophie could have imagined. A dozen or so patrons of the notorious drinking establishment had leapt to the tabletops for safety while a platoon of town guardsmen moved toward a corner. There crouched a wild-eyed Harriet Ashby, stark naked. In one scrawny hand, the pathetic soul wielded a cooking pot, and in the other, a sharp carving knife, apparently snatched from the cook.

“I’ll play the harlot!” the normally retiring Aunt Harriet was screeching at the prostitutes and dandies who frequented the dark den. Her skin was flushed and her eyes glittered with fever. “Sons-of-whores, all of you! God strike you
dead
for what you’ve done! Seducing m’husband to your wicked ways!
God strike you dead!”
she shrieked, her hysterical voice renting the air in an ear-splitting crescendo.

One hard-faced Bow Street Runner, as the local keepers of the peace were known, moved toward her, brandishing an iron fire-poker snatched from the hearth. He drew closer, but before he made a move to fell her, Harriet grabbed his forearm and sank what teeth she possessed into her attacker’s flesh.

“Ooowww!” he snarled, pushing her roughly against the wall where she collapsed from the force of his shove and slid down to the floor. Dazed, the old woman began to cry in high, keening sobs that racked her bony shoulders.

“She’s cracked, Toby!” growled one of the men bent on capture. “Everyone ’round here knows Ashby’s wife’s got syph in the head.”

“Aye!” grunted the man with the lacerated arm. “Bedlam’s the place for her,” he said, referring to the nickname given to the fearsome repository for the insane officially called Bethlehem Hospital in Moorgate. “C’mon… let’s take her!”

“Can’t you blockheads see?” screamed Sophie, running toward Harriet. “She’s terrified!”

Sophie leapt between the men and the poor, bewildered soul whose body was trembling uncontrollably. Standing with her back to the sobbing old woman, she stretched out her arms to prevent the two men from charging such a defenseless creature. The man with a crescent of teeth marks on his arm grabbed Sophie’s shoulders roughly and gave her a hard shove. Instinctively, Sophie shoved back and slapped the man’s face in the bargain.

“Why you little vixen,” he cursed, grabbing her by the arm and twisting it behind her back, “you’re as brainsick as
she
is!”

“Aye, they’re
both
daft!” someone called from atop a table at the side of the tavern. “Bedlam! Bedlam! Take ’em to Bedlam!”

The cry to banish the intruders to London’s warehouse for the insane became a rhythmic chant.

“Bedlam! Bedlam! Bedlam!” shouted the patrons who were clearly unnerved by the sight of a wild-eyed, wrinkled old woman, naked as a prune, and her ferocious niece, disturbing their afternoon tipple. Sophie was defenseless against the mob who roughly seized both her and her aunt and dragged them out into the wide Piazza amid the stares of curious pedestrians. Under the horrified gaze of Mrs. Phillips and Mary Ann Skene, standing helpless on the sidelines, Sophie and Harriet’s extremities were trussed with lengths of cord and the two women were dumped unceremoniously into a hackney coach. The Bow Street Runner named Toby rubbed his sore arm where Harriet’s teeth marks had branded him and climbed aboard with the driver.

“Fleet Street to Moorgate,” he barked.

Sophie felt the coach lurch, dumping both her and Aunt Harriet from their precarious position on the seats into a heap on the carriage floor. Her aunt began emitting high, frightened cries that sent shivers up Sophie’s spine.

After several minutes of trying to catch her breath, Sophie twisted in her bonds and was finally able to sit up, her head bouncing against the stained velvet padding of the coach door. Silent tears streamed down her face as she stared through the window and saw the roof of Drury Lane pass by. Everyone she knew who had influence enough to attempt to extricate her from this wretched nightmare had departed London for the summer. She was alone with a madwoman and soon she would be surrounded by hundreds more.