XI. Curiosity Killed More than the Cat

The girl had been driving Dulcie to distraction, dancing about the house with a chair cushion, boxing with the cat, then flopping down on the sofa to read aloud some dribble about a foppish rogue who was ogling a young girl. She was doing it just to annoy Dulcie. So when she begged to go outside: “Just down the street a little,” Dulcie gave in.

“Go then,” Dulcie said. “But see you don’t go more’n two streets in either direction. Or I’ll tell Miss Mary and she’d be angry with both of us. Here’s tuppence. There’s a sweet shop in Russell Square. Buy yourself some almonds.”

“Almonds get in my throat,” the girl said. “They make me cough.”

“Whatever you like then. Be it almonds or walnuts, I don’t care. Just go. Go and be back by noon hour.”

“You know I don’t have a timepiece.”

“Then look at the sky. The sun’ll be overhead at noon.”

“There’s cloud. It’s looking to rain.”

“Go,” Dulcie cried, “just go. Go!” Tossing her head, the girl went. The door slammed.

Now it was Dulcie’s turn to dance about the house. She did a reel across the room, facing an imaginary partner. He wore a scarlet waistcoat with tiny pearl buttons that caressed her cheek as the pair whirled about. They danced up one side of the room and down the other, up and down, up and down. It didn’t take long, the room was small. Finally exhausted—she hadn’t slept well the night before because of a rat knocking about inside her wall—she fell back on the sofa and took a nap.

When she woke she looked at the mantel clock and saw it was almost noon. The girl should be home soon. The fire was dying, the floor dusty. A mouse skittered across the raggedy blue-flowered rug Miss Mary treasured; it had been woven by her grandfather. Dulcie gave the impudent mouse a swish with her broom and it disappeared into a hole beside the fireplace.

Half-past-twelve donged and no Annie. Let a creature off the rope and it was gone. A disobedient child, aye. So then. Let her take her lumps. Dulcie trotted down to the kitchen to butter a hunk of bread and heat water for a dish of tea. Then trudged up two flights to her garret chamber.

She sat in the small rocking chair that Mr Johnson had lent her and sipped the tea. She chewed the white bread and butter slowly—it was sweet butter she’d bought at the marketplace. Dulcie wasn’t up to making butter herself, all that churning! And Miss Mary just shrugged when Dulcie added butter to the list of victuals to buy—she liked a little butter on her bread. Dulcie was lucky to have such a distracted mistress, her friends said. Dulcie wasn’t sure about that.

She dropped to her knees to pull the hatbox of papers out from under the bed. She had been born with a generous measure of curiosity. Too much, the parish nurse would say, making her go lie on her bed when she asked too many questions. When Mr Johnson rescued her from the cotton mills at age sixteen, he sent her first to work at William Blake’s house over in Lambeth, where Mrs Blake did her housekeeping stark naked—Dulcie never knew where to look. When the latter dismissed her for getting blood on one of her prize pieces of Belgian lace (she’d pricked her finger on a pin attached to it), Mr Johnson sent her to live with Miss Mary, and it turned out to be a good match.

Curiosity was a good thing to have, the mistress said. Dulcie consoled herself with that thought when guilt washed over her now and again for taking the bluestocking’s papers. She’d taken them on impulse, and now—well, what could she do but read them? And if she found anything that might relate to a killer, she’d give them to Miss Mary, who would know what to do. Miss Mary would praise her for this, wouldn’t she?

But curiosity could get one in trouble, too, and that was Annie’s problem. Lord knows how much she’d read in the papers Dulcie was spreading out now on the floor. She found a birth certificate that announced the birth of one Isobel Jane Amelia Frothingham on January 22, 1748: of Henry and Amelia Frothingham. Dulcie counted on her fingers. That would make the bluestocking four-and-forty years at her death. Four-and-forty! She had heard the lady tell another lady she was four-and-thirty. For good reason, all those jars of powder and milk of roses on her dressing table.

She pulled out a rough sketch of a young Isobel’s family: Mother in a hooped gown and feathery bonnet, father in boots and cocked hat, and Isobel squatting between them with a sly smile—a spoiled child, to be sure. But then in the corner, a thin boy with his tongue hanging out, looking on. Who was he? A little brother? Cousin? Servant boy? If so, why was he in the picture? A neighbour boy maybe, or a ward. And why the tongue hanging out—was he hungry? Feeble-minded?

She slapped the picture face down with the birth certificate and pawed through sketches of waterfalls, houses, trees, flowers, birds, and geese. Then three more rough sketches of the same boy but each time with a frown or pout or some distortion of the face. He would’ve been a thorn in her side! She flipped through boring school reports and notes from teachers in Miss Harley’s School: Isobel Frothingham sang a lovely duet Friday last with Miss Jane Owen.... Isobel wrote a fine essay entitled Five Things a Proper Lady Should Not Do. Dulcie never found out what the five things were because the essay itself was missing. And who cared, anyway?

Next Dulcie turned up a marriage certificate. Aha! it was in 1766, to one Mr Charles MacBride. Odd she hadn’t taken his name. Too early for him to be the father of Annie. And sure enough, a death certificate in 1768: Dead from a pistol shot, it read. A duel? Dulcie wondered. If Miss Isobel was sorry, there was no sign. No trace of a tear on the document. But a copy of Charles MacBride’s will said she was his full heir, there being no offspring. Five hundred pounds, two dozen books, six paintings, and a gold carriage-and-four went to Mrs Charles MacBride. So she had taken his name! But changed back to her maiden name—legally or illegally, and kept the Mrs. All part of being a freethinking bluestocking, Dulcie supposed. Nothing she’d ever want to be.

There were drafts of poems written to various lovers—including the man, now dead, who had set her up in the Grosvenor Square house, Miss Mary said, and left Mrs Frothingham his fortune. There were the packets of love letters Dulcie had earlier sampled. Ma belle Isobel, one began from Alfred de Charpentier, You are driving me to distraction. Je t’adore! When I saw you last night I thought an angel had lighted on my chair. Dulcie gagged.

She made her way through several documents relating to one Ann but with no father’s name. My child, one began in the bluestocking’s hand, like it had been an immaculate conception. Aha! Was young Annie the French count’s child? Mrs Frothingham had been in Paris, she’d said.

Mr Ashcroft’s letters were mostly about money: how she would have clothing and apartments to rival the queen’s, if he could but have a single night with her. In one letter he threatened to kill himself if she wouldn’t have him.

Or kill her? Dulcie wondered. Miss Mary must see this.

Now she was growing weary of fumbling through papers. Dropping them back in the hatbox, she saw two pages clipped together. A legal-looking document—maybe a will? It began, in Miss Isobel’s handwriting, with all the fancy words Dulcie had to sound out slowly, like they taught in parish school: I, Isobel Jane Amelia Frothingham, of the city of London, Kingdom of Great Britain, and being of legal age and in full possession of my faculties, do ordain this my last will and testament. I bequeath to God a soul polluted with sins I have not always regretted.

No doubt about that polluted, Dulcie thought. She glanced at the second page but saw no signature. Probably Miss Isobel meant to see a solicitor but got busy with her social affairs. Who would she want to leave her money and house to? Miss Mary had talked of some fat cousin who might want to claim everything.

Her knees were hurting: she needed to stand. Keeping out the will for further reading, she stowed the hatbox under the bed, and went downstairs. She would read the will whilst she finished her tea.

Hearing a knock, she dropped the will on a side table and opened the door to—speak of the devil—Mr Edgar Ashcroft, all in black and purple, like an aubergine. He looked right through Dulcie, like she was part of the wallpaper, and walked in. “Where is she?” he demanded of the ceiling.

“At a madhouse,” Dulcie said, and then bit her lip. “I mean to say, she’s gone off with a friend to visit the Bedlam, you know, to leave a gift of charity. Those poor folk in there need all the help they can get. And I don’t think she wants to see you.”

“She will when she hears what I have to offer,” he said, “and it will not be a ménage à trois.”

Touché, Dulcie thought. Everyone, it seemed, knew about the scandal. Dulcie could have told Miss Mary it wouldn’t work to move in with Mr Fuseli’s wife, but the mistress didn’t ask Dulcie’s opinion.

“Tell her I ask only for a hearing. If she then refuses, why, I shall fade out of her life.” He took a step backward, though he could hardly fade away with that big belly and the two protruding teeth in the center of his grin. He smelled of perspiration and scent, and she stepped back herself.

“By the by,” he went on, “I found this on your doorstep—someone must have left it.” He tossed a wrapped packet at the sofa. It missed. When Dulcie made no effort to pick it up he stooped, grunting, fell heavily to one knee, and slapped it down.

“Thankee,” said Dulcie, and waited for him to take his leave.

“I saw your orphan girl,” he said, struggling up from his knee, “you might want to know that. She was in Eastcheap on Fish Street Hill, near London Bridge. Lot of young rogues about, ne’er-do-wells. I recognized her from the red hair. She looks like her mother.” He frowned, like that was to be held against her. “Everyone knows now that she belonged to Mrs Frothingham,” he told Dulcie. He coughed. “So. You might want to go and fetch her. Young girls oughtn’t be in London alone. Someone could take advantage. Fact—I saw her talking with a fellow. Not so young, neither.” He glared at Dulcie as though it was her fault the girl had gone there.

“I sent her for a packet of pins. There’s a shop near there has good sharp ones.”

Dulcie was lying, but she didn’t want him blaming her. Nor Annie neither. She disliked this pompous man in his ratty chin whiskers and old-fashioned bobwig and coat with trimmed sleeves the colour of vomit. He took a dandy-like pose, one foot behind the other, and gazed at the ceiling with a curled lip, like he’d seen a worm crawling beneath him (herself) and didn’t care to look at it.

“You’ll find Miss Mary at the madhouse,” said Dulcie, and made a monkey face.

He growled, and turning on his heel, slammed the door. “Good riddance!” she shouted after, though he was out of hearing.

A moment later a knock came at the door and she ignored it, until she heard Cyrus Hunt’s voice, announcing he’d come from St Paul’s Churchyard. “A book from Mr Johnson,” he called out. “He says to tell your mistress he wants a write-up for the Analytical Review.”

“Put it down,” she said, letting him in, and pointing to a parlour chair.

She surveyed the packet Mr Ashcroft said he’d found. She wouldn’t be surprised to learn he’d brought it himself, only pretended to find it on the doorstep. It was probably a chocolate sweet to try and woo the mistress with. She picked it up with her handkerchief and dropped it into the hall waste bucket, where it made a clunking sound.

As for that girl Annie, she, Dulcie, was not about to go looking. In Eastcheap with a not-so-young fellow indeed!

“Tell her he wants the review by next week,” the printer said, and let himself out the door without a goodbye.

She thought she would take a walk, down to the tallow chandler’s where she might run into Elbert, the apprentice, who would now and then sneak a candle stub into her pocket. Not that she particularly liked him. His nose was a beak, his ears stuck out like teacups. But it was nice to be noticed. A little teasing now and then never hurt a girl. It lent experience for when the real love entered one’s life. If it ever did. The butcher’s boy had come calling two or three times, but Dulcie had finally dispensed with him. Like Miss Mary, she seldom ate red meat.

The rain had all but stopped, she saw when she looked through the window; a hazy sun was pushing through. She left a key for Annie under a flat stone on the top step. If she hurried, she might see a rainbow.

And there it was: layers of red, orange, yellow, green... Like a painting the Lord hung in the sky. Dulcie wasn’t much for religion, but Someone, she felt, made that rainbow. A stout woman carrying a squirming sack and a squalling baby bumped into her, not apologizing, and when she looked up again, the rainbow was already starting to fade.

It was like dying mothers, stolen paintings, runaway girls. Here one moment, gone the next. Now there was only the empty smoky-blue sky overhead, the sun a bleeding circle so far above her stretched neck she couldn’t begin to imagine the distance.

In spite of herself, she found her feet heading for London Bridge. She must find the girl before the mistress got home from her madhouse. Or else she’d have a tongue-hiding!

The madhouse matron had lied. There was a man in the room on the left. Mary saw him through the slit in the door. He was sitting on the bed, dressed in rags; his right leg was chained to a spike in the centre of the room.

“Mr Peale!” she cried, and the man swiveled his head. His face was a waterfall of wrinkles, his chin whiskers grey and straggly. One arm had been cut off below the elbow. Had the artist been tortured, so radically altered?

The man pulled himself up off the bed; a fierce eye peered out at her. “I be Geoffrey Wineapple,” he said. “Me daughter-in-law put me here—she be a sempstress. Said I took up too much room in her house. Help me, miss. Help me out o’ here.”

A chorus of voices set up along the hall. Help me, help me. Set me free-ee... I’m Mary Magdalene. I saved our Lord. Tell ’im to save me. Save me-ee.

“Don’t listen to ’em, miss,” the matron called up, sounding irritable. “Go home now. There’s naught for you to do in this place. Your Mr Peale’s not here, I said. Now go.”

Mary was not ready to leave. Not yet. She required answers. “Do you always believe the people who bring in the poor devils?” she called down. “Like that woman who just left—who will be back in, she says, at her husband’s whim? Who said Peale was mad when he was not? Do you have a conscience? Do you have a heart?”

The woman laughed. “Me husband and me be running a business, that’s what. I be Mrs Bludgeon. I don’t go looking for hearts. They pays their money, dearie, and we takes ’em in.”

“Who put him in here? Who?”

“His brother, I told ye! Or claimed to be. Doctor’s orders, he said.”

“Would a doctor allow you to chain him up like that?”

“Policy, dearie, policy. We can’t have ’em go running about, knocking the attendants down, can we now?”

Mary would write this into her sequel to Vindication: how a husband could lock up his wife at whim in a madhouse. How a daughter-in-law could incarcerate her father-in-law because she wanted his room for a sewing room. She would speak to Mr Johnson. She would engage a body of men and come back to rescue these forgotten folk.

Someone pinched her elbow; she was face to face with a toothless woman, dragging a long chain. “Too late,” the woman squealed. “Too late, we all be doomed. We be going straight to hell.” The mouth was a perfect circle, the flesh inside seemed grey and rotting.

Had Mary met up with one of the Three Fates? Alarmed, she ran down the stairs.

Mrs Bludgeon stood there grinning. “You see? You see why we’re here, do you? You want to save that one, eh? Let ’er loose—trotting about, pinching folk?”

Mary didn’t know, her head was spinning. She was suddenly afraid, as though the matron would see through her, detect a streak of madness and fetter her feet. She thrust through the front door and heard it, mercifully, lock behind her.

Lillian ran to grab Mary’s hands. “Mr Peale? Was he there after all? Speak to me. Tell me, Mary, where is my fiancé?”

In hell somewhere, Mary wanted to say. But Lillian was so desperate, so needy, so desiring of his safety, she said only: “I think the matron was telling the truth. Someone took him away. I don’t know whom. A relative perhaps. He may well be back home, she said.”

“A relative, you think? He never spoke of such a person, but perhaps...”

“Or he escaped, and she didn’t want to tell us.”

“Escaped? Oh! And he might be home this very moment!” She ran toward the carriage. “Hurry, Mary. We must go home.” She turned back. “Or perhaps he does have a cousin somewhere. I’ll find out. It might be he or she who has him. Do you think so? Could it be?”

Mary was perspiring head to toe. Her skin was pinched under the whalebone stays. Why did folk think she had all the answers? When the truth was, she had none at all. She had only the questions. “I don’t know,” she said, “I just don’t know.”

She was struck with the magnitude of all she did not know about people. Selfishness, jealousy, envy, greed—noxious traits she had known in her own family, in her small circle of acquaintances; traits she had read about in Shakespeare’s tragedies of kings and queens. Traits she found even in herself at times, sad to say. But to find them everywhere, amongst all the classes... It was like a boulder dropping down on her head, briefly illuming her brain, her reason, then crushing her into bits. She thought of the Parisians, rising up against the nobility. Were the poor better at heart than the rich? Should she judge rich and poor equally?

She could not speak at all now. She could only wring her hands. She was like her mother in the power of her feckless father: he, bankrupt, contemplating yet another uprooting. Another failure in farming or whatever ill-suited occupation he turned his hand to. And for which he would covet the little money she earned from her books.

Her London house looked like the kingdom of heaven after that madhouse. It was already evening. Mary was spent, but oddly exhilarated. The daffodils were out in her small garden—she had come out of a madhouse, where it was forever winter, into spring. She had not found Roger Peale, but she had a new cause to write about—when, or if, that is, she would find the peace of mind to write. She fumbled for the key in her purse, barged into the house, and stumbled against the waste bucket that Dulcie insisted on keeping in the hallway; the bucket tipped, expelling its contents on the carpet. She called for Dulcie, but no reply. She called for Annie. “Answer me, both of you!”

Still no reply. She supposed they were out together. She had made Dulcie promise not to let the girl out by herself and she had to trust the maid. She had to have faith in the human heart—in Something, Someone higher. But with all that had been happening of late: the strangling of Isobel Frothingham, the Fuseli fiasco, the madhouse, she was beginning to have serious doubts. What just God would allow such perfidy?

She threw down her cloak and hat and flopped onto the sofa. Her whole body ached from that miserable coach. Her ears still rang from Tommy’s piercing shouts and Lillian’s outcries about Fuseli who, the young woman now feared, might have hired someone to return Roger to Newgate Prison. “Speak to Mr Fuseli, I beg you,” she’d wept over and over, as though Mary were a magician and not the spurned female in a hopeless love triangle.

Mary could not speak of that triangle to Lillian: it was too mortifying. It was all over town now. Mary had shrunk in mind and spirit from the betrayal. Even her physical stature had diminished; returning from Lillian’s house, she had seen herself reflected in a window—and yes, she was noticeably shorter. Let Lillian seek out Roger Peale’s relatives who might have taken her man. Though, in retrospect, Mary felt that Roger might still be in that madhouse, hidden from her in some closed-off attic or cellar. Who knew? Mary didn’t. For now she was done with madhouses.

But she couldn’t just lie here. For one thing, her stomach was upset. Her body needed to eliminate. Our minds are prisoners of our bodies, she reminded herself; they are adjuncts to the flesh and bones. She pushed herself up off the sofa. She would use the necessary down in the cellar; for some reason she was shivering. She went back to the hall wardrobe for a shawl, and discovered the tipped-over bucket. Among the contents was a packet addressed to her, unopened. Something important perhaps, from the publisher, or the printer—how lax of Dulcie to let it fall into the waste! She dropped it on the sofa and went down to the cellar.

Squatting there, she contemplated the waste in her own life. The old guilts and humiliations pushed up again, even in daylight: Eliza accusing Mary of losing her child. Over and over Mary saw Sophia Fuseli, ordering her out the door—the loud, blond fury of her; Henry on the stairs, cold and silent. (Was he really jealous of Mary’s new fame as Lillian Guilfoy had suggested?) She saw her sisters, unable to find and keep suitable employment as governesses. Her brother James, wanting to be a naval lieutenant, but with no funds to equip himself, awaiting a hand-out. The youngest, Charles, dreaming of America, but with no money or occupation. It was all laid on Mary’s doorstep.

And here was Mary, needing a mother herself. And none to be had. She blew noisily into a handkerchief.

Then ordered herself to carry on: escape London—go to Paris and throw herself into the revolutionary maelstrom where women, with the help of Condorcet and outspoken females like Olympe de Gouges and Manon Roland, were beginning to be noticed as equals. “Persevere, Mary! Don’t let wagging tongues fell you.” Thrusting up her chin, she got off the pot.

Back upstairs, she slit open the sealed packet with a pocket knife—then sank back on the sofa in shock. Who had sent this? It was a poorly executed sketch of The Nightmare, stuck clumsily into a gilded frame. And on the bottom, scrawled in red ink: Look in the wine cellar. You will be surprised what you find there.

What wine cellar? Ridiculous, she thought. There was no wine cellar in her house.

Unless...

“Oh,” she said aloud, and pulled on her spring cloak.

Annie thought it might be the same man who had earlier assailed her; she was standing near the place where it happened. He was not wearing a black hooded cloak, but he had dirty fingernails and a fat red nose, and a torn handkerchief around his meaty neck. Was it the handkerchief he’d strangled her mother with? No, that was a stocking. Even so, to be safe she ducked behind a pair of black-frocked parsons. The man might be her mother’s killer, a man who hated bluestockings; aye, there were folk who did, Miss Mary said. He wanted to make an example of one, so he climbed in her window and arrgh... She had read a horror story like that in one of the books in the Foundling Hospital library. But then one of the parsons stepped forward to shake hands with the villain, and the red-nosed man grinned a toothy grin, and his voice was high-pitched and not the growl of the man who’d attacked her. So she moved on.

But she kept looking. She wanted to find that man. It was silly, but she had this hunch. Why else had he singled her out that time from among all the young girls idling about near the river? She walked up and down Fish Street a dozen times and then down by the riverfront, and saw a half dozen burly men in raggedy black but didn’t see him.

She was squatting on a rock to watch the riverboats float by when she heard a woman’s voice—and then a male voice answering. The voices were moving along the bank behind her and she scooted farther down to listen; then glanced up to see a pair of dirty black boots with ragged yellow tassels on the tops.

“Jib, honey,” the woman’s voice whined, “when’er you n’me goin’ off on our own? ’Ow long that sister o’ yours goin’ run your life?”

“When the money comes in, Bett,” the man’s voice said. “Jus’ a matter o’ time. Me sister’s fellow says so. Then she gets her share from ’im, ’n I get mine. And you get me.”

He grabbed the woman and she giggled; she stuck a finger in his big ugly belly. “Better not be too long or I might find me some other chap gimme what-for, eh?” She stuck out her tongue, and then ambled up the bank to the street. Jib laughed and jingled some coins in his pocket while Annie held her breath—he was close enough so she could smell him. And it was him, she was certain. And then he walked away.

He was the man, aye. He’d attacked her, she wagered, because he thought she knew something about him. Or saw something. Or because he discovered—she didn’t know how—that she was her dead mother’s daughter. She crept back up the bank and into Fish Street. Jib was standing there in front of The Flying Fish, peering into the pub’s window. This was Annie’s chance: to follow him, find where he lived, and then call a constable. If nothing else, to punish him for assaulting her before. Wouldn’t Miss Mary be surprised?

As for bossy Dulcie, well, Annie couldn’t wait to show her up. The man Jib was moving on now; she stayed ten paces behind as he swaggered along and turned the corner into Great Tower Street. They weren’t far from the Tower of London—that was a monstrous place! Englishmen could be nasty mean, Miss Mary said; they shouldn’t blame others who were just trying to free themselves from tyranny.

Tyranny. Annie repeated the word she had learned from Miss Mary; she let it roll on her tongue. Tyranny was what this man Jib might’ve done to her mother. She would see he was sent to the Tower and hanged and then disembowled (she’d read that in a book), and then thrown to the dogs. All for killing her lovely, poetical mother.

The thought of the mother she hardly knew brought on the sniffles. She wiped her nose on her sleeve and walked on. Jib stopped to talk to a woman standing by her gate, and Annie darted behind a tree.

It wouldn’t do for the man to see her. She waited, breathless, not daring to look until she heard the voices cease. Then she peered cautiously out. But Jib was nowhere in sight. She’d lost him! She pummeled her thighs with her fists. She’d had her chance and lost it.

Blinking back the hot tears, she scurried on down the road, and turned right into Lower Thames Street. She walked into the shadow of an enormous church—St Magnus the Martyr. She wanted to go inside and light a candle for her martyred mother. But then she saw the man again! He led her past a dozen quays on the riverside and smack into the biggest, noisiest marketplace she’d ever seen in her life. Billingsgate, she heard a woman call it. Boats of all shapes and sizes were lined up on the river, full of stinking eels, codfish, carp, and who knew what other ugly fish, for Annie disliked fish of any kind. And the yelling, cursing, and shrieking...

She waited at a distance while Jib purchased a sackful of scallops, then haggled over the price, and finally tossed some coins at the fishwife and pinched her fishy cheek. Then he turned back a few yards and darted left into an alley—Dark House Lane, the crooked sign said. Annie moved cautiously into the lane, past a smithy, and then an ironmonger’s—until a rumble of thunder made her pause and look up into the sky. If there was one thing she feared, it was thunder—and worse: lightning. As a child at the Foundling Hospital she would throw herself under a bed or table at the first bang.

A hand shot out from behind a tall bush and clapped around her wrist. She started to scream, but managed only an arrgh before the other hand stopped her mouth. She smelled beer, old sweat, urine. Her own fear.

“Followin’ me, was you, young miss?” said Jib. “I was ’opin’ we’d meet up again. I know some’un’d be real glad we ’ave. Well, then, welcome to me sister Peg’s place. Come in and we’ll have a hot dish o’ tea, shall we?”

“I need your help,” Mary told Joseph Johnson, whom she had found at home in his rocking chair, sitting with his feet in a pan of steaming water, his throat wrapped in flannel. He had caught a cold, he said, he ached up and down his body. He might be nearing his life’s end; she should be advised.

She wanted to laugh at the theatrical way he said it, and now he was smiling, but the laugh caught in her throat. She loved Joseph—he mustn’t die, no! She couldn’t bear it.

“I must go to Grosvenor Square and hoped you would accompany me, but I see you’re indisposed. So I’ll go myself,” she said. Though in truth, Mary would rather cross the Channel to the land of the revolutionaries than return to Isobel Frothingham’s house-of-the-dead. It was Dulcie’s tale of the footman stealing the wine that had made her think of Grosvenor Square. She laid a hand on Joseph’s forehead. It was not hot: he did not, thank goodness, have a fever. “Now don’t say that again about dying,” she teased, and ruffled his hair. “I won’t allow it. But I do need your advice.” She handed him the anonymous note about The Nightmare. When he started to speak, she interrupted. “Now I know what you’re going to say. There are wine cellars all over England. But why send this note to me if there weren’t one nearby? It may be fraudulent or it may not. But we must go and see.”

“We?” He reread the note, muttering to himself, and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. He was loyal to his friend Fuseli, she knew that; he would want the painting found. Finally he lifted his feet out of the water and she knelt to rub them with a warm towel. “You and your curiosity—it kills more than the proverbial cat,” he said. “So very well, I’ll come. But not till after my tea. Barlow is back from Paris for the week, and will bring an old friend from Liverpool. They’ve revived our Society for Constitutional Information. This in the face of the mad king’s proclamation against seditious meetings and political clubs! Publishers and writers are in dire danger. You, Mary, are in danger.”

“Oh, I know that already.” She handed back the towel, flung up her arms, and danced over to the door. “I’m in danger for any number of reasons. I crave danger—it makes me feel alive. Have I not lately braved wild dogs and a house full of mad folk? Well, more about that later. Shall I sit in my house all day, sipping tea? No! That note may be fraudulent and it may not. But I need to explore it. I need to put down Henry Fuseli. It’s virtually all I think about now—making him pay. I must find the painting and prove the young artist did not take it. I must prove Fuseli wrong.

“Wrong, wrong!” she chanted, feeling her cheeks heat up as she went into the dining room where the men were singing Ça Ira, the revolutionary song. Joel Barlow was holding forth against the arch-conservative Edmund Burke, who cherished the monarchy, the holding of hereditary property, and class distinctions, and who now claimed the Dissenters were calling in foreign forces to help with their “plots.”

“He would indict Priestley,” Barlow shouted, “he calls him a dangerous man.”

“Aye,” Priestley cried, “well may they think so. We’re all of us dangerous men—”

“And women,” Mary cried out, her cheeks flushed.

“—if love of liberty,” Priestley went on with a quick nod to Mary, “free speech, and conscience be dangerous.”

“Hurrah,” cried Blake, waving his red cap of liberty, “a toast to all dangerous liberty-loving men and women!” Barlow struck up another chorus: “Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira,” they sang with him, “Les aristocrates à la lanterne!” Which meant hanging from a lantern post, Mary knew—oh dear. Blake emptied the remnants of his wineglass on his head, and everyone laughed to watch it running down the side of his face. Tom Paine raised his tankard to announce that he was soon to appear in court for encouraging revolutionary societies “in all of England. They accuse me of sedition. But will that stop me?”

“Nay!” cried the Dissenters, Mary among them. She was a staunch admirer of Paine.

“Aye and they will,” corrected Blake. “From what I’ve heard, Paine, you’d be well advised to go to back to America at once. If you’re not sought now, you soon will be.”

“It may be,” said Paine, “but first another round of wine!” He whistled at Mrs Murphy, who was leaning against the wall, to all appearances half-asleep. On the second whistle she thumped over to the cabinet for the wine. “Vive Tom Paine! Vive la Révolution! Vive le vin rouge!” the Dissenters cried, and raised their glasses.

Joseph entered the room in his blue bedslippers. He was looking quite pink-cheeked after his steamy footbath. He unrolled a handful of foolscap on the table: revolutionary pamphlets, with the watermark of a jester’s hat on the covers—Blake’s work on the fiery year of 1789, complete with illustrations of the fallen Bastille. Joel Barlow’s pamphlet, urging the French convention “to establish a democratic republic on humane principles.” The author read aloud, to cheers: “No standing army. No death penalty.” To Mary he shouted: “Arrangements for your brother Charles to sail for America—alone, I’m afraid. Business calls me back to Paris.”

Mary waved her hands. There was too much going on at once. For now she could think only of what she might find in Isobel Frothingham’s cellar. It might be The Nightmare, and then what would she do with it? She prayed it would not be another corpse; she shook her head at the ghastly thought. She gulped the wine Paine was pressing upon her, and squeezed his wrist to show her support and sympathy. On her other side Joseph was now holding up a bit of sweet pork to her mouth and she swallowed it, though she ate little meat these days.

“One more nip of claret and then we’ll go,” Joseph said. “It’ll be a waste of time, I fear. We’ll undoubtedly find naught in the cellar but a pile of the bluestocking’s poems. Hunt is printing them up. She paid him to do so, but they’ll need censoring, says he: ’twould be an embarrassment to her heirs.”

Her heirs? Mary thought of Annie. She had not seen the girl when she returned from the madhouse—where could she be this time? But Dulcie was taking care of the minx, was she not? Of course, the girl was all right! If Mary couldn’t rely on Dulcie, who was there, really? Mary’s sisters were both in new governess positions she’d helped them procure—and already complaining. Mary wished she had money enough to set them up with a new school, but there was none to spare at the moment. She accepted a second glass of claret when Paine lifted the bottle to pour. For what she had to do, she told herself, she would need the wine.