XVI. A Lucky Catch

Dulcie had last seen the printer running up Chancery Lane, the way she’d come. He could easily double back and go to Whitefriars Street where, Dulcie knew from Miss Mary, the man had his rooms. If the printer was going to escape London, he’d want his things, would he not?

The problem was, when she got to Whitefriars Street, she didn’t know the number of the house. There were three houses, all alike. Would she have to rap on the door of each one? If so, it might give warning to Mr Hunt if he were inside.

A child was playing with a small dog in front of the first house. She called out and the girl said, “There’s no Mister Hunt here. This be my house on the first floor and me sister’s on the second. Her man left her and she looking for a boarder. You need a place?” She threw a stick and the dog brought it back. The beast sat on its haunches, wagging its scrawny rope of a tail.

“Thank you, not at present,” Dulcie said, though she might one day have need of it. Miss Mary could be put in Newgate, or killed, if she didn’t stop poking her nose in other folk’s business—or try to move in with folk who didn’t want her—and then Dulcie would be alone. She had come to think of the Store Street house as her home. She blew her nose thinking of it. She was starting up the street when the girl called back to her.

“You want Mister Hunt, he lives two houses down, on the first floor. It’s me mum’s friend Hetty Croup’s the housekeeper. She don’t much like him—he keeps dead birds in his scullery and now she got some sick man puking up the place. But she needs the money.”

Dulcie hurried on up the street. She heard the girl’s pattens tapping along behind her.

A flight of rickety outside stairs led to the first floor. She stood on the landing to gather her thoughts. What would she do if she found the printer at home? But he knew who she was; he might think she’d come with a constable. The thought of the imaginary constable gave her courage. She took a breath to steel herself, and knocked.

“He’s not there,” the child called up. “I seen him go out just afore you come. He got in a hackney. He told the man to hurry up. Hurr’ up, hurr’ up,” she crooned, and rode an imaginary stick horse back along the muddy street.

Dulcie was turning to go down the steps when the door opened and a hatchet-faced woman confronted her. She had a shopping bag in either hand. “He’s gone out,” said the woman. “And we don’t need no more help in this establishment. So run along.”

“I was just leaving,” said Dulcie. “And I’m not looking for work. I work for Miss—Mrs Mary Wollstonecraft. You might know her book.”

“Nay,” the woman said, like Dulcie hadn’t spoken a word, and hustled past, nearly knocking Dulcie off the landing.

The door opened again behind her and a man beckoned her in. “Come in, miss. If you work for the authoress, then I’ve something to show her.”

Dulcie hesitated. It could be that Mr Peale, lately of a madhouse. The man might still be mad. In her view, madness was a contagion. And Mr Peale was an escaped convict. No matter what they said about his innocence, it was a fact. He was a convict. Though with his comely face and longish dark hair, he looked more like a wronged lover than a convict. There was a wronged lover in the romance young Annie had been reading aloud.

“It’s important,” the man said, holding out a drawing. “Your mistress should know about this. I didn’t discover it till after Hunt left or I’d have found a way to detain him. He was just here. But he’ll be back.”

“I don’t think so,” Dulcie said. “I think he’s flown the cage.” She pictured Cyrus Hunt flapping his wings as he sailed over a high fence.

When she entered the room, a bird landed on her head and she shrieked, thinking it the reincarnated printer. But it was only a yellow cockatiel. The wronged lover shooed it off.

“Take this to her,” said the lover, “and don’t lose it. It’s evidence. The man is mad, you see. You must warn your mistress. Here, I’ll tie a cord around it.” He coughed, and Dulcie put a handkerchief over her mouth.

While he rummaged in a drawer for a piece of cord, she peeked at the drawing. It pictured a naked woman in bed, a devil on her chest, a horse. Gad, it was The Nightmare again. That ugly little imp of Mr Fuseli’s. Why would Mr Peale want to give Miss Mary a sketch of that? The mistress already had her fill of nightmares. Dulcie had heard her cry out a dozen times in her sleep.

Though when Dulcie looked closer at the drawing, she saw that the horse was not a real horse, but a hobby horse (Dulcie recalled it with horror). The devil not a devil but a monkey. In the background a great black bird flapped its wings over monkey and woman. And the woman’s face was Mrs Frothingham’s! “Guard it well,” the man warned.

Dulcie tucked the roll of paper under her cloak and ran down the outside steps, but not towards home. She’d had another thought—from those birds in the printer’s front room. Mr Hunt worshipped his birds, Miss Mary said. He wouldn’t want to leave London without the biggest prize of all, would he?

Dulcie knew where that prize was. It was in Grosvenor Square. In the bluestocking’s bedchamber. She would go there first, but with a constable this time. Definitely with a constable—that Mr Lawson if she could find him. Dulcie was no fool. She was not going to put her own sweet neck in a noose. Miss Mary had taught her that—though the mistress was always putting her neck into one, was she not?

Lower Thames Street led into Tower Hill and then the Tower of London, where thousands had lost their heads. It gave Mary a chill to see the eleventh-century stone prison loom up at the far end of the street. She fancied she could hear the menagerie of lions once kept there, roaring out their anger. She thought of the little princes incarcerated in one of its turrets in the time of Richard III. That led to anguished thoughts of Annie, and she hastened her step. She knew what had become of the queens and princesses who were locked in those towers—just because they couldn’t produce a male heir, or were in the way of a male heir, or had lost their youth. She was angry all over again at the damage done to women through the ages....

She wound her way down the street through fishmongers, fishwives, drunken sailors; turned down Dark House Lane and halted in front of the last house. It was a well-kept building of sandstone with a small garden in front and a path that led down to an inlet of the Thames; a battered blue skiff floated back and forth. Beyond, she could see merchant ships and fishing vessels; she smelled the stench of fish and sea coal. Not far to the east, one could take ship to France, or north to Scotland and thence to the former Colonies, as her brother Charles would soon do.

She stood a long moment in front of the house, wringing her hands. She was only a woman, yes—one must face reality. Men, especially desperate men, were bigger and stronger than she. How else had they managed to subjugate women all these centuries? Surely not by their wit! Though Dulcie and the constable might already be here. Had Hunt eluded them? Or were they on his heels, perhaps en route to the wilds of Scotland? They might never find him if he hid out among those savage clans.

A woman with a yellow dog and a bundle of wash in her arms crossed her path. The dog sniffed Mary’s gown. She nudged him off with a foot, squared her shoulders, and marched up to the black-painted door. She knocked. And knocked again. Presently the washerwoman trotted up behind: “Ye can knock till the cows come ’ome but they won’t let ye in. They’s funny people what lives ’ere. Not neighbourly, no. Won’t give ye no work neither, if that’s what ye’re after.”

Looking down at her smudged gown, Mary said, “Yes, I am needing work. I came to see the woman of the house. Is she in, do you know?”

“I think not, madam, I seen ’er go out, ’alf an hour back. But would she give me a nod? Oh no, she wouldn’t think on’t! She were all dressed up, too, waiting for ’er fancy man.”

“A fancy man? Oh, you mean her lover?” Mary asked, smiling at the woman who might be a source of information.

“Sure and ’e’s got her set up nice in this ’ouse. Though ’e’s a queer one, too, never speaks to a body, ’e don’t. Queer ’ouse ’tis, funny noises coming out all hours of day and night. She sings, says she, that’s what the noise is. But sometimes it sounds like someone calling for ’elp. But I know who that is.”

“And who would that be?” Mary’s heart pounded to think of Annie calling out.

“Why, the ghost. The ghost o’ Agnes Brown what used to live ’ere when I were a girl. She were strangled in that ’ouse, aye, she were. They found ’er in a tub o’ lye, a stocking round ’er neck, ’er skin ’alf et by the lye.”

Mary planted her feet firmly on the path for support. “And did this woman’s, um, fancy man know Agnes Brown? Would he have—killed her?”

“No, no, ma’am, for that were afore ’e come. Least I don’t think e’d of knowed her. Maybe ’e did though. Could be. I seen ’im come and go from ’ere—never once smiled or took notice o’ me, like I were a ghost meself.”

“Thank you,” Mary said, needing to move her inert legs and get into the house. She knocked again, and again the woman told her it was of no use to knock. Mary kept her back turned, and the woman drifted back up the street with her wash and her yellow dog.

When no one answered, Mary walked around behind the house. A clothesline was stretched between two trees with linen and a white flapping nightshirt pegged to it. On a second line: ah! Annie’s petticoat and shift! A closer look discovered the words PROPERTY OF FOUNDLING HOSPITAL scrawled in faded blue ink on both. Mary snatched them off the line—they were damp from river spray; the girl would need them.

“Annie!” she shouted, looking up at a window, bricked-up but for one pane. “It’s Miss Mary, Annie. I’m here to bring you home!”

A flock of crows cackled past and landed on the branch of an oak tree; they stared down at her with beady eyes. A pair of gulls dropped at her feet to scoop up something black, swooped up again, and out over the water.

“Annie,” she called again, and a rear door thrust open. “She not here,” said a short, pasty-faced girl. “She gone to Australia.”

“No!” Mary rushed toward the door. “Not my Annie.”

The girl stood calm. “I don’t know who’s your Annie. But my mistress’s Annie who I make porridge for every morning, went this afternoon just. Off with the mistress to take ship for Australia.”

“The Annie who wore this,” Mary pleaded, holding up the white shift. “A girl of thirteen, red hair and sea-green eyes? A girl who was forcibly abducted by your mistress’s man friend and brought here?”

The maid went to shut the door against the intruder, but Mary pushed her way in. “Take me to her room. I must see it. And don’t lie to me, miss.” She put her hands on the girl’s shoulders, and stared her in the eye.

“Leave me be! They’ll whip me, they know I let you in.”

Mary let the girl go and held up her purse (though it was devoid of coins—she’d have to recompense the girl later). “Her chamber.”

“Up there then,” the girl said, looking at the purse. She pointed to a narrow staircase. “Chamber’s empty. I tole you they took ’er this afternoon. An hour ago. Less.”

Mary ran upstairs, feeling dizzy, desperate, into the room at the top. Annie had been here, she saw that at once. There was the green cloak, the secondhand one Mary had given her after she brought her home from the orphanage. She was taking ship without her cloak—what did that mean? Australia, the girl had said? What was the weather like in Australia? She ran back down the stairs, the cloak in her arms.

“What ship, where?” she said. “I’ve a constable outside, you know. What time do they set sail?”

“’Ow should I know?” the girl said, in tears now. “I didn’t want ’er locked up in there. Neither the mistress did. But it’s ’er bread and butter, she say. Without Mister ’Unt, she can’t pay to live here.”

“Hunt? And where is Mr Hunt?” She opened her purse invitingly. It was Cyrus Hunt then, putting her on that ship. Or sailing with her—a sudden decision perhaps, God forbid.

“I don’t know. I don’t know nothing. They went that way. St Katherine’s Dock.” The girl stuck out a thumb to the east. “He told ’er, be there. They took a boat, I tole you, me mistress, Jib, and the girl.”

“Don’t just say ‘girl.’ She has a Christian name. Annie.” She grabbed the maid’s wrist.

“Ow-w! Don’t I know it? Leggo. I’m not stopping you. Go on down that dock. Maybe you’ll find them. Maybe they’re not there yet. I don’ know, don’ know, I tole you.” The girl’s face exploded with hot tears.

“All right, all right.” Mary let go the wrist. “But if Mr Hunt returns, don’t you say I was here. You’ll have your reward. Not this moment, but you will indeed, I promise. I do!”

Hearing her name called, Mary ran out and around to the front of the house where a phaeton had come to a halt: it was indeed the constable the solicitor had sent. “Down back,” she called out. “It’s quicker by boat. St. Katherine’s Dock. You’ll see Annie there. They’re taking her to Australia!”

If we see them, she thought, and she stumbled down the embankment to the weathered blue skiff she had seen earlier. The constable was a big-boned fellow with arms like rakes. He held the boat for her to get in, then got in himself as if to take the oars. But she already had them—she heard the man sigh. She offered a quick smile and rowed the boat east.

At Grosvenor Square the housekeeper’s daughter, Dulcie saw, was drunk. She lay snoring on the drawing room carpet, a bottle on the floor beside her, leaking wine. But someone was upstairs—she heard thumps. She tiptoed up to the hall outside the bedchamber. And there was Mr Hunt on his knees, gazing at the birdcage with its stuffed aviary of red, blue, green, and yellow birds. He had the glass cover off; he was stroking the feathers of a bluebird. He coveted them, she could tell—all those dead stuffed birds.

That’s why he killed the bluestocking, she thought: he wanted to put her on a golden perch in a cage—that’s what Miss Mary would say. Miss Isobel was just another dead bird to him. The printer’s mouth hung open. Bubbles of saliva formed at the corners; his lips held a smirk. He hung the glass top back on the golden base and then, oh so carefully, placed it in a large cloth bag.

Where was the constable she’d sent an errand boy for? She turned back to wake the servant to summon help. The pug trotted up behind, and began to growl. The printer saw her; he was wedged in the doorway with his bag. She held onto the banister, trying to calm her hands that were fluttering like swallows.

“It’s not yours to take,” she said. Her voice was brave, but she was a mouse in the face of this scowling man. A man in the very room where he’d strangled a clever woman. She wished now she had not come alone. But she had to act bold. She hadn’t read eight pages of the mistress’s Rights of Woman for nothing.

“It belongs to Mrs Frothingham,” she said.

“Mrs Frothingham is dead.” His steely eyes fastened on hers.

“Then it belongs to her kin.”

“Then it belongs to me,” he said. He put a hand to his cheek, and for a moment she recognized the boy in the sketches, the one thumbing his nose at a young Isobel.

“Annie,” she cried righteously. “Mrs Frothingham’s daughter. It’s her that owns it now. You want it so badly, you go ask her. Maybe she—she’ll let you have it.”

Dulcie ran down the stairs. She’d been daft not to fetch the constable herself. She dashed into the drawing room and shook the sleeping maid. “Wake up. There’s a thief in the house. Run! Fetch a constable!”

“Thief!” the girl cried. “Sweet Jesus, what’ll I do? How’d he get in? Mo-ther!” Stumbling up, she banged into a chair, knocking it over.

Dulcie heard the man on the stairs. When she turned back, he was heading for the door with his prize.

“Help, thief!” Dulcie cried, running after him into the street. She shrugged off one of her pattens and hurled it at his back. He yelped, and stumbled on a loose stone. She snatched the bag and ran back to the house—she would lock him out. He tackled her as she went and the rolled-up sketch of the bluestocking’s Nightmare flew out of her pocket; the bag dropped on the stone step. The cage glass shattered. The printer roared with anguish. A rock struck her on the back of the neck; the day brightened a moment as she pitched forward, and then slowly darkened....

Annie was in a fog. It was something, maybe, they’d put in her porridge. She’d gulped it down to make herself strong, but instead she fell asleep. She was still groggy when they got her up: the woman of the house and the brother, Jib. They’d dragged her out of the chamber and down the stairs into a small green boat. “Pick up yer feet, damn ye,” the man kept saying, while she wanted only to lie down and sleep.

She opened her eyes wide, and willed herself to wake up. She heard the lap of water, ships’ horns, faraway voices, laughter. Finally they pulled up to a pier, and dropped her on a landing bench. “Leave her sleep here, she won’t run,” she heard the woman tell the man, and then the man: “Her’s a tricky one. Take no chances till the ship sails.” Then his voice went away. Annie tried to get up but something kept pulling her back down. She was a boat sinking into the sea, and she could only go down with it.

Moments—hours later (how long had she slept?) she woke in a ship’s tender crammed with young people, her hands tied before her. They were on the river; people on the pier growing smaller as she watched. “Young thieves,” she heard one sailor tell another. “They’ll know what to do with ’em when they get there.”

“I’m not a thief!” she cried, and the girl beside her laughed and said, “Tell ’at to the navy. All I done was take a mutton chop for me mum, and ’ere I am. Though Australia may be better’n eight o’ us in two rooms. I ain’t had a whole night’s sleep since I were born, I ’aven’t.”

“Nor me,” said a boy. “Six in a bed, and every ’alf hour a new shift coming in. But any place’s better ’n Cheapside. Me old lady were glad to see me off, I could tell.”

“Well, I won’t go!” Annie said. “I’ll drown myself first.” She tried to lunge over the side but a big-fisted boy caught her about the neck with his two roped hands.

“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “You’ll make out, you will. Just go along with ’em. They’ll make a stop in France, I heard say. We’ll try then, I’ll help you.”

Annie did not want to go to France. They didn’t speak English there; they ate snails and cut off people’s heads. She wanted to go home. She bit hard into the rope that held her wrists together. It was an old rope: she’d break it even if she pulled out her front teeth. Freedom was more important than teeth—Miss Mary said so. Liberty, equality, fraternity: she chanted the words over and over under her breath while she stared down into the choppy waters. Liberty, equality... Except for that pond she’d long ago floated in, she’d not been in water deeper than a wooden tub full, and she’d hated that. Even so, she let her wrists dangle in the river, thinking to soften the rope. The tender was rocking with the swift current; the motion made her want to puke over the side, then slip off. But the rope, though fraying, still clung to her hands.

Back by the shore folk were shouting; a dozen small boats were converging. She couldn’t hear what the shouting was about—a flock of gulls was squabbling over a crust of bread someone had dropped overboard. One gull picked it up and the others followed into the sky, protesting. They were victims, like Annie.

She pulled her numb hands out of the cold water, and asked the boy to tug on the slack rope. He did, though he warned her: “They find out, you be punished. Maybe hung.”

“Pull hard,” she ordered, and he pulled, and nearly wrenched her wrists in two but the rope slipped off. “Turn your head,” she ordered. He didn’t, but never mind. She tugged off her filthy gown. “You’ll drown!” he hissed, and for a moment she hesitated. Then she held her nose the way she did off that creaking board at the pond, and went head-first into the grimy waters.

And sank. Good night, good night...

Cyrus Hunt jumped out of the carriage with his cloth bag. The nosy servant girl wouldn’t follow him this time. He had the birds, the golden perches, and the base—he’d have a glass top blown later. He’d made arrangements for Isobel’s girl to be on that ship with the other thieves; she’d stolen one of his handprinted books, he told the magistrate; he’d hired a “witness.” Peg was on the pier with her brother—Jib was a rogue; he wanted his share of the estate. Cyrus was prepared for that: three pounds in the fellow’s pocket, promises of more. “Estates aren’t settled in a day,” he reminded Jib. But the fellow just stood there like a raven, waiting to lick the bones clean. “Off with you,” he told Jib. “Ready?” he asked Peg. She waved her arm at a line of carriages.

“Aye, ready and packed.” She blew her nose, then blinked up at him. He nodded, and squeezed her arm. Peg was good for what he required. Though he would have to drop her—he didn’t need a live-in mistress; he couldn’t bear one in the house all day. He’d take Peg with him to the Scottish border, then disappear.

He had a ticket for America—a single ticket. He would leave from the port of Leith. There were birds in America he’d never seen—birds as yet uncatalogued, unsketched. He would change his name; he would make something of himself under a new name. He would give up the printing for his art. America was so vast, so lawless, he’d heard, you could hide a hundred wanted men in a square mile of its forests. In a year or two when it all blew over, the girl out of the way in Australia, he’d come back and claim his property. He had every right. He and Isobel Frothingham had the same father, didn’t they? That made them half siblings.

The Wollstonecraft woman was all smoke and no flame. He had heard about her foray into the Fuseli house. Ignorant. Scandalous. Never mind her disagreeable book that he’d put into print. He’d wanted to drown it in ink.

He touched Peg on the arm. “The girl’s on the ship?”

“No, Mr Hunt, no. Now prepare yourself. Annie’s dead. Drown-ded,” she whimpered. “She pitched overboard—never come up. I seen it meself. It was her. I’d recognize that red hair o’ hers fifty yards off, ’deed I would. She’s gone, Mr Hunt. Drown-ded.” Peg puled into a handkerchief.

He stood a moment in shock; felt the sweat on his brow, a needle of pain. Then slowly a wave of relief flooded his body. He hadn’t intended to kill the girl. Just have her gone before she knew enough to make a claim on the estate. The girl out of the way, he might not have to go to America, after all. He had proof that that other fellow killed Isobel; he had the shoe the man lost, climbing into her bedchamber, strangling her. It was that fellow, no doubt about it. He had the letter the angry man would’ve flung at the bluestocking, saying “Be mine or die!” But he couldn’t tell anyone, that was the bloody thing of it. They would ask how he came by the shoe and the letter. They would think he did it. When he was not a killer, no. Not that.

Though Isobel’s girl—well, that was an accident, her own foolishness. Not his fault.

It was that other one killed Isobel, aye. All Cyrus had to do, when he saw, was arrange her. He couldn’t help himself. The hobby horse in her chamber, the one they used to ride on, him and her. The stuffed monkey—it was his, and she took it! She was always cruel to him: a tease, a little snob. Playing tricks, at his expense. In later years—she never acknowledged him, even in the print shop. He didn’t want to think of the hundred little humiliations.

But then he had heard footsteps, and Cyrus had to make a quick exit—without the birdcage he’d come for. But he had the shoe the murderer left. He’d found it under the bed, the pug gnawing on it. He’d taken it on a whim. A kind of self-defense.

“The bags are in the coach?” Peg nodded. “Then we’ll be on our way.” He nudged her elbow. “Hurry, will you?”

Still she balked, staring out at the river where a small blue skiff was moving up towards the dock, and farther off, a fishing boat with two men aboard. “I said now, woman. Pull yourself together. Move, will you, woman!”

Annie was paddling with cupped hands, the way she’d seen a dog swim a pond—and scissoring her legs. Though this was no pond—she had to heave her body against the current that might rush her out to sea. She spit out a mouthful of brackish water and kept her feet and hands churning. For now she was able to stay afloat, even advance slowly towards shore. She dropped her face into the waves and saw she could go faster that way, though she must keep coming up for air. She lifted her right arm and scooped the water. It propelled her farther still from the tender that wasn’t turning about, though a far-off, wind-blown voice was shrieking, “Girl overboard... Pick ’er up... She’ll drown...”

The voice inside her said she was not going to drown: she must get to shore. And then what? Would they send her in a second boat to the ship? It seemed pointless, and she let herself sink again.

She was exhausted now, her arms and legs like logs. The water was spurting into her mouth, though she tried to keep it shut. She couldn’t go on, couldn’t... couldn’t...

When someone close by cried, “Ahoy! Girl there in the water. Drop a rope,” she could only hold up a weak hand and try to clasp it.

A strong arm hauled her up and into a boat. “Lucky catch. Biggest o’ the day,” a man said, and the other one laughed.

In moments she was face down and spewing bilge water into a net full of squirming fish.

It was the printer, there on the dock. Mary rowed harder, her arms nearly pulling out of their sockets. “It’s him,” she said to the constable. Already Hunt was turning, hurrying back to a row of waiting conveyances.

“Let me.” The constable’s blue coat was drenched, like her gown; she squatted in the bottom of the boat and let him take the oars—the boat nearly overturned with the awkward change of places.

A fishing boat passed to starboard and blocked her view of the shore. She urged him on: “Hurry!” The printer might have Annie with him—tied and gagged, and lying in a carriage. Or was she already on that ship out there, which was preparing to weigh anchor? “Pull!” she yelled. “Pull, pull, pull!”

The fishing boat landed at the far end of the pier, and then they, too, were skimming up on shore. Folk milled about, waving, shouting, laughing. But no Hunt in sight. She and the constable raced to the row of sedan chairs and carriages, peering inside, one by one. But no young girl. No Cyrus Hunt.

Then she saw him at the far end of the line: heaving a fallen case onto the top rack of a coach—shouting at the driver to get moving; shoving a woman into the interior.

“Halt, you’re under arrest. Halt, I said!” The constable raced forward. He brought the man down with his truncheon; the printer’s head knocked against the rear wheel of the coach. The woman jumped down and tried to run off. Mary caught her sleeve and yanked her about.

“Where is she? Where is Annie? Where is my ward? Is she on that ship? I know who you are. You brought Annie here to take ship.” She had the woman by the throat. The woman was gagging, begging, flailing her arms. Mary loosened her grip.

“I never wanted...” the woman pleaded. “I only did it for him.” She turned towards the printer, who was being thrust headlong into the coach, his wrists tied. “He said she was an orphan. I been good to her, fed her nice. We had us some grand talks.”

“Is she on that ship?”

The woman shook her head, then threw up her arms; tears creased her cheeks. “Gone. Drown-ded. I seen the red hair. Och, I seen her jump out and go down, G’bless her soul.”

Mary was in shock. She couldn’t speak. The constable was calling to her: “Taking the rogue to Bow Street. I should take that one as well?” He pointed to Hunt’s mistress.

The woman was clutching Mary’s legs, howling her innocence. Mary waved the driver on and yanked the woman up off her knees. “It was someone else drowned—it had to be! It was some other poor girl. What proof have you? Because if Annie’s on that ship we need to halt it.” Far out on the river she heard sailors shouting commands.

“I seen ’er jump,” the woman persisted. “Seen that hair. Didn’t come up. ’Twas her.”

“But she might be swimming to shore.” Could Annie swim? Mary herself could barely swim, though she knew how to stay afloat, tread water as she had on hot days in the childhood river at Barking. She’d done it instinctively, as Annie would have. Annie was wily, a survivor. Annie was not a drowning kind of girl. Mary would find someone to row her out to that ship.

She ran back to the dock. A dozen or so people were gathered about a fishing boat that had just pulled in, its nets crammed with fish. And more than fish. A half-drowned rat—a red-haired rat, dripping and wailing—she hadn’t wanted to be brought to this shore. “Not a thief,” she cried, “I don’t belong on that ship. Find Miss Wollstonecraft. I belong to her—she’ll tell you. Find her!”

Mary couldn’t call out; she was overcome. She staggered over to embrace the girl, to hold her tight. It seemed to be young Fanny, up from her bloody childbed, up from the grave—no, a live Annie, up from the depths of the sea, clad only in her shift. She wrapped the child in the green cloak she still carried, though it was soaked from spray. Then, finding her tongue, in spite of herself, she scolded. “Why did you run off like that? If you hadn’t gone, you wouldn’t—I wouldn’t—” The words clung to her tongue.

“I didn’ run off,” Annie said, water spilling out of her nose and mouth—Mary mopped it up with her damp skirts. “I had to get out of the house. It was that Dulcie. She was horrid to me. She said I got into the sugar when I did not. Least not so much as she said. I had to get out, and I saw that man who—” She coughed and spat up more water, and Mary rubbed her back. “And—and I followed him—just trying to help. ’Twas awful. That man wanting to send me to Australia! Where is he? Put him in gaol!”

“And so we shall,” Mary said. The printer’s mistress had disappeared, but it was all right now, she had Annie.

“And what would I do in Austra-li-a?” Annie was sobbing—a bystander put a hand on the girl’s head; another made the sign of the cross. Mary gathered the girl into her arms and hustled her off to a sedan chair. She had no money but the chairmen wouldn’t know that until they arrived at the house. Sometimes coins dropped between the sofa cushions—she’d look there.

When an official came to interrogate her about Annie’s identity: “Who is she? Should she be with the others on that ship?” she shrugged him off. “I’ll have the law on you for attempted abduction,” she scolded the astonished man. “For calling my ward a thief. Now let us pass. This girl needs a hot bath. She must be kept warm—she almost died in that frigid water. Did you not, child?”

“I did. I almost died.” Annie broke down into sobs that wouldn’t subside until Mary held and rocked, and rocked her, all the way home to Store Street.