XVII. The Father Exposed—and Neck or Nothing!

But why would that Frenchman kill Mrs Frothingham?” Joseph Johnson asked two days later. He and Mary were in his library: she in an ancient rocking chair; he by the hearth, his swollen feet up on a stool. Galleys and manuscripts were scattered about on the floor, awaiting his attention.

Mary sighed. She had tried to explain to so many people. To the Bow Street magistrate, to her solicitor, to a footsore Dulcie—the latter had staggered into the house shortly after Mary bathed and fed a bedraggled Annie. On that evening of her rescue, they were a household of invalids.

“You don’t kill someone simply because she rejects your advances,” Joseph said. Mrs Murphy lowered his feet to place a kettle of steaming water on the stool, and he leaned forward to breathe it in sonorously. It transformed his hair into grizzled ringlets.

“You do if you’re desperate to have someone,” said Mary. When Henry betrayed her on that terrible afternoon, she had wanted to race up the stairs and strangle him, there and then. She knew the impulse.

But unlike her, Alfred de Charpentier would act on his desperation. He might well have ravished her, would he not, in that carriage? Though it was not herself he was enamoured with. If that is, he truly loved any woman. He couldn’t bear rejection, that was all. He had endured exile from his homeland, loss of property and title—and the final blow: humiliation at the hands of a clever, rich, desirable woman. It was all too much for his male amour propre.

Joseph’s expression was sceptical inside his wreath of steam. He was a wholly rational fellow; he couldn’t seem to comprehend so much passion in others. Though before Fuseli’s marriage, the artist had shared Joseph’s house for several years, and the two were still close. Was it true affection? Or merely need—someone else to mirror one’s self-image...

“The Frenchman is an anti-revolutionary,” Mary said. “He didn’t care for Isobel’s politics. I once saw him snatch away her red cockade—a joke but maybe not. And she’d just laugh and refuse him. In those last moments that anger would have exploded into violence. Love—or whatever you might call it—turned to hate. Besides, he despised bluestockings. He thought they were all affectation and pedantry.”

“Wait now,” said Joseph, looking up, wet-faced. “It was Hunt, not Charpentier, who wrote that note, Bluestockings Beware. You told me that, my dear—your Dulcie found a copy in his room. Hunt—my best printer, Mary, lost to me now (he frowned)—wrote it after he set up her body to parody The Nightmare, yes? It was not the French count but Hunt who despised bluestockings. By extension, that means you, too, are a bluestocking, my dear—more or less. Others are discussing your Vindication in their salons, did you know that?”

“Really? Ah.”

“And what of that poor footman, Mary? Was he not murdered as well? Was it Cyrus Hunt again?”

“Not he. I don’t think so—not for the footman. Cyrus would have no interest in him. More likely it was St Pierre who ran him down, wanting to halt the search for the painting thief. Remember: the footman had seen the thief, very possibly St Pierre. I told you I’d seen a blue carriage outside the printer’s lodging. And it was a blue carriage, according to Fuseli, that ran down the poor fellow.”

“St Pierre doesn’t have a carriage,” Joseph said. “Not in England at least. He comes and goes on foot, or in a hackney.”

“Hired, then, most likely. By Talleyrand, perhaps. Though Talleyrand would let St Pierre do the nasty business for him—give the footman a fright, not meaning to kill him. With the king’s refusal, they were desperate for the money the painting would bring. They didn’t want the footman telling whom he’d seen taking the painting. Why, I do believe all three absconded with it: St Pierre, Talleyrand, and Isobel Frothingham—what a conspiracy!”

“Or it was simply an accident,” said the perverse Joseph. “Carriages run into one another all the time, do they not? But less often into people on foot, like yourself, my dear. Who could that have been?”

She sighed. She wearied of this guessing game. She wanted to put it all to rest. But the publisher was waiting for her to speak, his brows, damp from the steam, like question marks. He would have her answer.

“Well, sir, if you must: it was the count, I think now, trying to avenge my leap from his carriage, another hired or borrowed one—I’ll tell you about that later. Or, more likely, to discourage me from seeking Mrs Frothingham’s killer. Or was it Cyrus Hunt’s man Jib, who abducted Annie? Jib will talk when we find him. Or Ashcroft again, a form of intimidation. Men do that to women, you know.”

“Some men, some, my dear. I would never—”

“Of course you would not! On the other hand, we might never know. I’m sure it was in all their minds to keep me from interfering. Mary Wollstonecraft, the ‘hyena in petticoats.’” She smiled. She could smile now about that infamous label of Horace Walpole’s; at the time, the blood was pumping furiously in her head. “But you’re a Dissenter, Joseph, a Unitarian. You know we don’t have the answers to all of the questions.”

“As far as your accidents, Mary, I put my money on Hunt, with his head full of copper and lead,” Joseph said. “He was the one who arranged the bluestocking—including the stocking itself, no doubt, after Charpentier strangled her. He was a misogynist; I’ve heard him curse women’s manuscripts he was setting in print. In particular, your Vindication, Mary.”

“Oh, the villain!” Mary was definitely not a bluestocking, no. She was not so much a woman wrapped in a Grecian gown, quoting from literature, as a rational woman writing it (when, that is, she had the time and quiet to write). There was a difference, yes. Besides, she did not have a salon, or the funds to maintain one. Had she one, she would no doubt speak her mind to her guests, and then no one would return.

“Hunt came to her chamber after a birdcage, a foolish birdcage, did he?” Joseph croaked. The steam was beginning to loosen his congestion.

“Yes. Dulcie discovered him. The back of her neck is all black and blue from that rock, poor girl. Mrs Frothingham’s poem, ‘My Bedchamber’s Birdcage,’ was in the chapbook Hunt was to set in type. Doubtless he read the poem and determined to go after the cage. Or perhaps it was an heirloom he’d seen as a child.”

“And he found her there on the bed. But he didn’t see Charpentier.”

“I told you, dear man. He found the man’s shoe! It was one of those fancy red-heeled leather shoes made in Paris, with his initials inside. Surely you noticed them at the bluestocking’s routs. What could be more damning? But it was the letter that made the count confess.”

“Letter?”

“Really, sir, you don’t listen to me! I told you yesterday: Cyrus found a letter that the count had earlier left on her dressing table. It was his ultimatum to her: Be mine or die! She would not, and crazed, he killed her. What a brave soul she was to reject him!”

Already a fictional plot was brewing in Mary’s head: she must write it down or it would fade. She picked up a pen and a bit of foolscap from his table and began to write on the back.

“Stop! That’s Barlow’s work!” Joseph’s feet slapped the floor. The kettle tipped and a rivulet ran down and under a cabinet full of books.

Oh dear. It was a revolutionary pamphlet: Joel Barlow urging the French Convention to establish a democratic republic “on humane principles: no death penalty, no standing army, no colonies,” she read aloud. She righted the kettle, and blew a kiss.

He waved her away, and smiled. Then his face changed. They were rounding up priests and nuns in Paris, he told her—“Threatening to kill them. The news just came in. Now some of our Dissenters are condemning the revolutionaries. Blake has put off his red cap of liberty. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

He was having doubts himself, he said; he was horrified at the thought of La Guillotine; he made a zzzz-ing sound, and slashed at his throat. “They’ll have King Louis’s head, you watch. And Antoinette’s. You, Madame Sleuth, have been running about chasing fools and knaves while blood is spilling in Paris. Come back to the world, Mary. The real world. The cruel world.” He coughed from the effort of his impassioned speech.

She sat for a moment, thinking of that cruel world—she had seen it these past months in London, had she not? Then she rose, and kissed him on his grizzled head.

“By the way,” she said as she took her leave, looking at a portrait of Joseph’s mother on the wall. “You told me once, I believe, that your mother had red hair? Would it have been the shade of my Annie’s?”

Joseph looked up: drops of moisture stood out on his forehead. “Why, what are you trying to say, my dear? There are redheads all over London. Yes, indeed. Wild Scots and Irish. You see and hear one on every corner, oh my, yes.”

Mary smiled down at him; she rubbed his neck. “And how did you know that birdcage was in the bluestocking’s bedchamber? I never told you that detail.”

“What? Why—I just assumed, I mean, you said—you, you d-didn’t? Well...”

“Isobel Frothingham was always daring men. Trying to seduce them. She once told me so. Men who were considered inaccessible, who would never approach her on their own. Perhaps Annie’s father was one of those.”

“Oh! You think so?” His face was scarlet.

“Thirteen years, Joseph, almost fourteen years ago? Look in your diary. She seduced you, plied you with claret—you love claret. She took you up to show off her precious birds, and for once, a little tipsy, in spite of yourself, you—”

She paused. Now his face was a sunrise.

“Goodbye then, dearest man—my publisher, my surrogate father,” she said, leaning down to kiss his cheek. “I am off to the real world, as you told me I should be.” She felt his breath on her own cheek. “To Paris. To see for myself what is going on there.”

“Oh, but Mary—La Guillotine. So much has happened in France since we first spoke of going.”

“No worse than what I’ve been through these past weeks in London.” She thought a moment. She would need funds. For the boat, the coaches, her lodging—though a friend of Everina’s had rooms there, did she not? She could prevail on the woman’s hospitality. Still... “I’ve a new book in mind. A sort of historical and moral look at the Revolution in Paris. It cries to be written, does it not? From an Englishwoman’s point of view? You underestimate women, sir. We want to know what is going on in our world. We want to play a part in it.”

“Yes, of course, dear lady, have I ever denied that? But that other book, Part Two of your Vindication?”

“And Annie,” she said, ignoring Part Two. “You will keep her here with you while I’m gone? She loves books; she would be a great help to you. You could call her ‘Mary’s ward.’ Just a short visit, yes? To get to know her?” She did not wait for his assent, though she saw the gleam in his eyes, the wonder. The apprehension.

Downstairs, she warned a startled Mrs Murphy about a new young house guest, and strode out the publisher’s door. She walked with her arms swinging all the way to Store Street where she had left Dulcie and Annie arguing over who was going to clean up after the cat that had disgorged again; and went up to her chamber to sort out clothing for the trip to Paris.

She must see La Guillotine for herself. She could not let the world spin by and herself not there, for the ride. And she would write that book on the Revolution (she would ask Joseph for an advance of funds). She would leave Dulcie in charge of the house—have her look in on Annie now and then at St Paul’s Churchyard. In truth, the thirteen-year-old might benefit from Mrs Babbit’s School for Young Ladies on the corner of Store and Gower, as she would suggest to Joseph; Babbit’s had a solid curriculum. She would not be long away—six weeks, six months at the most? Who knew?

“I shall soon set out for Paris. Alone,” she told Dulcie when she came downstairs with an armful of linen that needed washing. “Neck or nothing is the word!”

Dulcie drew a stubby finger across her neck, and let her tongue loll; Mary laughed. “But don’t go,” Dulcie pleaded. “Please, miss, don’t go, I beg you. ’Tis madness to go to that bloody place.”

Mary smiled. What had she to lose? Henry Fuseli was gone from her world. Annie would be with her father. Her brother Charles would soon (she hoped) make his fortune in America and offer her sisters a home—though for the time being at least they were employed. She would one day bring Eliza to meet Annie, and perhaps adopt her: a girl to make up for the loss of her own child. She would send her father a few guineas each week through Joseph. Her mind was free, uncluttered, ready for adventure. For revolution.

“I’m a spinster on the wing,” she cried. Dropping the laundry, she snatched up a sofa pillow and moved about with it. “Who knows?” she said, gliding close to Dulcie, stage-whispering in her ear. “In Paris I might even take a husband. For the time being, that is.”

“Poor fellow,” said Dulcie. And neatly dodged the pillow that Mary flung at her.