V. The Nightmare Revisited

It was The Nightmare, just as Dulcie had heard it described. But crude, ugly, cruel—no pretty brushstrokes of yellow, red, and blue-green the way it would have been in the painting. And on Mrs Frothingham’s face: no sleeping sigh but a mouth wreathed in agony, for the lady had been strangled. A blue silk stocking was twisted about her neck. Her face and throat were a dark red; purple bruises shone on the back of her neck where her head was turned towards the window. A silvery-grey cat crouched at the foot of the bed, alive and purring, like it was waiting for the mistress to wake up and feed it. The pug lay beside the bed. It growled when it saw Dulcie.

“It ain’t right to leave the poor thing naked like this,” Cook said, her voice a grating whisper after all the screeching. She snatched up a satin sheet and draped it over the body. The cat jumped off the bed. It was then Dulcie saw the note—the cat had been sleeping on it. In large, neat block letters it read: BLUESTOCKINGS BEWARE.

Dulcie clapped a hand over her mouth. Cook ran shrieking out of the chamber, crying, “Justice! Justice!” Dulcie couldn’t seem to move her feet. She was still rooted there when Cook came back with a slightly tipsy justice of the peace, and a pink-cheeked constable, hardly more than a boy. The latter took one look at the corpse, turned pale, and crumpled into the carpet.

Dulcie got her feet moving again. “Give him smelling salts,” she told Cook. “Go on. In the drawing room.” While Cook ran downstairs for the salts, and the justice was preoccupied with the body, Dulcie scooped up a pile of papers from the desk and thrust them into the cotton pocket she wore at her waist. Though she’d deny it, she wagered that Miss Mary would read them with relish—after all, she was a writer. When the justice called, “Come back! I’ve got questions,” she pretended not to hear, and raced out the chamber door and down into the street where a ballad singer was grinding out a tune with a monkey on his shoulder. “Move off!” she cried. “With that ugly monkey! There’s a dead woman upstairs. You got no feelings?”

And then she thought: how shall I break the news to Miss Mary? For the mistress was a bookish person. And she owned a pair of blue stockings. Worsted, to be sure, not silk—but blue. Oh God in heaven—oh sweet Jesus on a cross—Miss Mary could be next!

Mary had scrawled two pages of script that read Henry&Mary, Henry&Mary over and over until she fell back to sleep, head down on the writing table.The purring cat and the pen rolling off onto the wooden floor were the last sounds she heard before the old nightmare took over: the carriage racing down the street with her and Eliza—then a brown goblin leaping into the carriage and jumping on her back....

The dream was shattered by a screeching in her ears. “Madam, wake up. Wake up! Murder most foul!”

Mary opened her eyes. It was Dulcie, who seemed to be hallucinating, out of her mind. Had she taken opium? Mary occasionally took a bit of laudanum to calm her nerves or stimulate her muse, but she drew the line at opium: she was not a Fuseli, or a young Sam Coleridge, arriving at the bookseller’s supper with a notebook full of fantasies from his opium dreams.

“Calm down,” she told Dulcie. “Have a cup of hot chocolate. I’ll have one, too.”

Dulcie would not calm down. She was ranting on and on about a dead woman. A stuffed monkey. A broken window. “It’s Mrs Frothingham!” she cried, “she’s dead. Dead from a blue stocking!”

This was altogether too much. How could someone be dead from a blue stocking? Getting up, Mary took the maid firmly by the elbow and marched her toward the kitchen. “Hot chocolate, I said. An antidote to whatever you took.”

“I took nothing, I swear it.” Dulcie stood before the kitchen steps, blocking Mary’s way. The freckles stood out on her face; her chest was heaving. “I went back to the Grosvenor Square house to get the baking pan and the recipe. Cook let me in, and then she went up to the bedchamber. I heard her scream.”

“Oh?” Mary was beginning to listen now. The dream of goblins and racing carriages had faded. What was it about a blue stocking?

Dulcie described The Nightmare almost exactly as Mary had seen it hanging in Henry’s gallery, except that it was not a stuffed monkey as Dulcie said, but an incubus on the sleeping woman’s breast. No hobby horse either, but a bulgy-eyed mare. Henry was in love with horses, especially stallions. She tried to explain that to Dulcie. Mary would go down and make the chocolate herself. She needed the stimulus; her nerves were popping out all over. Dulcie, somehow in her confusion, had come upon the painting. My God, she thought. Had the cook stolen it?

“Not the painting, no, ma’am,” Dulcie said. “Only like the painting. Mrs Frothingham is dead, I told you. It was murder, Miss Mary.”

“Murder? No! You’re certain of that? Then we must go at once!” Mary jumped up to find a fresh neckerchief. But none was to be found, so she smoothed out the wrinkled one.

“A justice of the peace is there. And the constable. He fainted. Oh, and madam, the murderer left a note. It said, Bluestockings Beware.”

“What?” Mary’s nerves were taking over her body; she was a walking nightmare.

“You must keep the house locked at all times, ma’am. Bar the windows.”

“They are already bricked up, all but the front one, you know that, Dulcie. Mr Johnson wants to avoid the tax.”

“Keep the doors locked then. Someone who hates bluestockings is on the loose!”

This time Dulcie broke down completely. Mary would give up on the chocolate and send the girl to bed. She took three deep breaths to quiet her skittery nerves and then pulled on her greatcoat and set out for Grosvenor Square. I don’t believe a word of it, she told herself: it is too outlandish a tale.

But what if it were true?

She stumbled on a slippery cobblestone and fell flat on her face. Her purse went flying against a shopper’s overstuffed bosom. “Mind how you go,” the woman growled, and left her lying in a puddle. Were the heavens falling down on her head—or was it hail? Hail, seeming as big as silver coins, battering her beleaguered brain.

At last she sacrificed a shilling for a sedan chair, and at Grosvenor Square was delivered to a scene of pandemonium: servants running in screeching circles, a dog howling, and a housekeeper with a face as grey as a pewter plate.

Upstairs, she gazed open-mouthed at the apparition on the bed; at the blue silk stocking around the poor woman’s neck, the stuffed monkey on her breast, the hobby horse with its one shiny green eye. Someone had put a sheet over the nude body—Mary was thankful for that. Yet Isobel’s open eyes looked flat, as opposed to the twisted mouth—and relatively calm, as if she had recognized the villain, had pleaded with him, did not believe he would kill her until the moment of tightening the stocking.

How long did it take to strangle a human being?

Long enough, Mary decided. Time would have already ceased to exist. What had passed through Isobel’s mind in that last long, horrific moment?

Sadly, one would never know. It would have been quite a feat, she thought, to climb to the second storey, break a window, strangle a woman, and then arrange horse and monkey. This was no crime of sudden passion—it was a premeditated killing. Someone had planned out this horror to the last fold of sheet beneath the bluestocking’s body, and then carried it out without remorse. She tried to close the staring eyes but they wouldn’t shut, as though the eyes were the last to let go of life. “‘There is murder in mine eye,’” she quoted aloud from Shakespeare, and then quieted when she heard footsteps.

“Step aside, madam, if you please,” said one of the men—had he heard her speak of murder? He was a justice; “the investigating officer,” he said, with a slight hiccough. An undertaker, sent for by the housekeeper, stood behind him, waiting to claim the body. The cook brought up a silver tray of biscuits and tea as though the mistress might suddenly sit up and take a sip. A whey-faced constable drank it instead, averting his eyes from the body.

The pug jumped up on the foot of the bed. It growled when the constable tried to remove it, then nipped the undertaker as he and a helper heaved the body onto a wooden pallet. A pale arm hung down; the helper tried to bend it back so it would fit on the plank but it had begun to go rigid.

Mary recalled her mother when they took her away for burial. One arm was uplifted as if seeking help from God—but God was looking the other way that day. “A little patience and all will be over,” her mother had said again and again; and finally it was over. And no help came.

Mrs Frothingham’s long hair caught in the door latch on the way out and the sheet slipped off the naked body. The young constable made a gurgling sound in his throat; his arm knocked against a glass case full of stuffed birds. The housekeeper, tall, gaunt, and crisp-tongued, hustled across the room to wrap the satin sheet more securely about the body, and then, blinking rapidly, clipped a lock of hair to tie up in her handkerchief. Men and corpse lurched down the steps to ground level and out into a waiting hearse. The justice stuffed hobby horse and monkey into a cloth sack for “evidence,” then squinted down at the note.

“You know what that means, do you not?” Mary said. “Bluestockings, beware? I, too, am one—well, more or less.”

The justice turned to stare at her; he glanced down at the inch of black worsted stocking that showed beneath her petticoat and gown and ran a tongue over his thick reddish lips.

“It does not mean I always wear blue stockings,” she said. “It means I am a literary person.”

“Then you better watch out,” said the tipsy J.P. ”Or we be carryin’ you out next.” He grinned, and signaled for the constable to follow.

“You realize this has something to do with the stolen painting,” she called after them, infuriated now with their insouciance. “You must look in that direction!” But already the door was banging shut. Fools, she thought: they would not have the brains to find murderer or thief.

Or perhaps murderer and thief were one?

But the murderer was not Roger Peale. She did not for a moment believe the young artist had caused the murder of Isobel Frothingham or the Fuseli footman. Mr Peale was in Newgate Prison. She hoped the unrestrainable Fuseli would consider that fact.

She glanced about the chamber. There had been a struggle toward the end: bed sheets dragged on the floor; bits of glass gleamed from the broken panes. The strangler would have escaped through the window he had entered. She looked down onto the busy square. Folk were lolling about, watching the body being shoved into the horse-drawn hearse. They were pointing up at the broken window. Across the square a sweep’s blackened head poked up out of a chimney. A phaeton dashed down the street, its prancing horse’s hooves hurling dust onto the corpse. The chairmen were squatting on the front steps, waiting for her as she had asked. One of them was peeling an orange—oblivious to the death.

There was blood on the window sill, where the killer had cut himself. The justice had tried to scrape it off, but what good did that do? He could not link it to any man. The authorities had less evidence than Mary, who at least knew the attendees at Isobel’s soirée the week before. And at tea yesterday. Chatty Dulcie had described the tea party, down to the pauses in conversation. Mary counted the guests: Talleyrand and his confederate St Pierre—sometimes disagreeing. Madame de Genlis with the Bastille stone set in a medallion about her neck—Mary had heard about that stone: the word Liberté was inscribed on it in diamonds. Would Madame, who came from a noble but impoverished family, have envied her hostess’s wealth? Alfred de Charpentier, who had arrived, uninvited, towards the end, undoubtedly an unwelcome guest—Mary recalled the frown on Isobel’s face when he had sidled up to her at the piano.

And oh, she must not forget that arch-conservative, Edgar Ashcroft. He was not at the tea party, but like Mary, Isobel had refused his proposal of marriage. A vindictive fellow, she felt certain. Thinking of her own refusal, a frisson of fear came over her. Then vanished with a squaring of her shoulders.

Yes, Henry would have to look beyond poor Mr Peale. She would appeal to him (she smiled slightly at the pun). He must see that her own life, as a more-or-less bluestocking, was in danger over his painting.

She leant an elbow on the window sill and propped up her chin with her hand. Danger? She rather relished the thought. If there were no money at present for a trip to revolutionary Paris, why then a London murder—two murders now—would have to do. A stolen masterpiece—and a young artist planning to escape from an impregnable fortress? What folly!

Roger Peale was struggling to keep himself awake in spite of the loud snorings of his cellmates—when someone, or something, jostled his elbow. The escape was scheduled for some time in the middle of the night—one had no way of knowing what hour in this foul blackness, or even what day. He sat up and listened. It was not St Pierre; Roger smelled only the unmistakable stench of the night turnkey. He was to be put in a separate cell, the fellow said. The key turned in the lock; the grate opened. The turnkey had a prisoner with him—another drunk by the sound of the protests; he thrust the man in, and then grabbed Roger by the collar.

“Yer bedchamber’s ready for ye,” said the vile fellow. “Nice and cozy, oh my, silk sheets, eh? Say yer bye-byes to yer playmates here.”

Roger stumbled behind: his heart, like his feet and hands, in loose chains. He tried to think of nothing; he wanted only to sink into oblivion, to let his mind go—for that, he knew, was what happened in a solitary confinement—if that’s where he was headed, for some inexplicable reason. No use to retain the rational mind when, in madness, one could dwell in a dream world.

It seemed like hours they staggered, even crawled, through the underground labyrinth of rat-infested halls and tunnels, past iron cages only big enough for men to squat in. Now they stumbled down crumbling steps, the turnkey unlocked a great squeaking door—and to Roger’s astonishment, a gust of fresh air blew into his face! He breathed in deeply; felt a vertigo, as though he might drown in the air. He heard a clinking of coins, and the rustle of paper; the turnkey gave him a shove through a low door and pushed him out into the night.

He gulped in the air, and overwhelmed—collapsed onto the ground.

Then astonishingly, St Pierre emerged to pull him up, and shove him half-senseless over a back wall and into a waiting coach. “Take the south road out of the city,” he ordered the coachman.

“Prisoner escaped!” It was the turnkey shouting drunkenly behind them. “I’m ’alf-dead I am, ’elp! Who give him the knife? ’E stabbed me! ’Elp! ’Elp!”

“I’ll repay you,” Roger whispered to the Frenchman when the horses started to run, “if I get out of this alive. What can I lose? Better to hang in fresh air than die in that dungeon.”

St Pierre laughed. “Mais oui, mon ami, I should think so. And you can repay your lady, not me. I have scarce a farthing to my name here in England.”

“But where would Mrs Guilfoy have found the money to pay off that fellow?”

The Frenchman shrugged. “Somewhere, I don’t know. A desperate lady, eh? Here, lift your hands so I can get at those manacles. We’ll unchain the ankles when we arrive at our destination. Just thank your stars, mon ami, you are free. Ah, voilà, they are off. Wave your arms, eh? Put your head back and rest. Your host has a copper tub: we will have you smelling like a rose. You will wake up tomorrow with your lady love by your side.”

“And you? What do you gain from this?” Roger tried to exercise his arms, but they resisted: they were weights hanging from his shoulders.

“Your lady’s gratitude. I would move heaven and earth for her friendship. I have just now moved it, have I not? Lucky you are not in the old Newgate. In those days, they tell me, no one got out—innocent or guilty. Here. Drink this—for your strength.” He handed Roger a flask.

The coach, which was particularly malodorous, jolted them through a dozen narrow streets where frequently they had to back up for a rival coach, and then restart. They rolled over a bridge—Roger could hear boat whistles below in the Thames, shouts and oaths of the rivermen—and beyond the night lamps of London. Then on into a deep silence, except for the clip-clop of hooves. A light snow fell through the dark trees; it lulled Roger into a state of semi-consciousness. He was too fatigued to anticipate the meeting with his beloved, to ask when and where they would meet. Placing his trust in St. Pierre, he let his body ride on with the horses of the night, then let go into sleep....

“Your money or your life!” The coach jolted to a stop; Roger tried to sit up but his head lolled on its aching stem. He heard the thud of fists on flesh, grunts and groans, a shot; then St Pierre’s voice, outside: “Save yourself! Make for the woods!”

Roger wouldn’t—couldn’t move—not with the shackled ankles. He had no money: the turnkey had taken his watch. He had nothing to lose but his life. And Lillian. Yes, adorable Lilly—somewhere, awaiting him. No, he was in no condition to fight—St Pierre should realize that. Let the highwaymen do what they would. He sank back against the head-rest.

Another shot rang out. A scream: “My leg!” It was St Pierre. Through the glass Roger saw his rescuer writhing on the ground. This time he lunged for the door but it was locked. He fell back against the leather seat; already the horses were racing on with the coach. He could do nothing. He believed in fate: things happened or they did not. There was no going back.

Hours later—days perhaps, for all his muddled brain knew—the coach stopped. A man and woman came running to propel him up two flights of rotting steps to a small chamber with a cot and a grated window; a bowl of cold gruel sat on a scarred table, an insect floating in its center. He was hungry enough to drink it down. “What place is this?” he asked between gulps. “Who are you? Where is my fiancée?”

But they left without a word and turned the lock in the door. His legs were still fettered. He dragged himself to the cot and fell face down on it. He wanted only oblivion. Sweet oblivion...