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In Which Events Take a Most Unsettling Turn
PICKETT ARRIVED AT the Hetherington residence, and suffered the misfortune of having the footman throw open the door to him just as Mrs. Hetherington was crossing the marble-tiled hall. To his chagrin, she appeared genuinely delighted to see him standing on the portico.
“Why, Mr. Pickett!” Her Irish accent, which he had previously found so lilting and musical, now served only to remind him—as if he needed a reminder!—of what he was about to do. “What a pleasant surprise! But does Mrs. Pickett not accompany you?”
“No, I—I’m afraid not,” Pickett said. “I’ve come to—I was hoping for a word with your husband on a—a matter of business.”
“Of course. Do come in! You may go, James,” she said, dismissing the footman with a nod. “I shall take Mr. Pickett to Mr. Hetherington’s study. I believe he is recording the rent receipts,” she added to Pickett, “but I’m sure he will welcome the interruption.”
Pickett was equally sure he would not, but had no choice but to follow the traitress across the hall to the same room in which he had first made the acquaintance of his magistrate’s friend. Unlike that earlier occasion, Mr. Hetherington was already present, seated before his desk. The brown velvet curtains covering the floor-to-ceiling windows had been tied back, but although the sun would not reach this side of the house until the afternoon, the indirect light was sufficient to cast the man into silhouette, giving him a somewhat sinister appearance that did nothing to ease Pickett’s mind.
“Robert, my dear, look who’s come to visit,” she announced. “Mr. Pickett, my husband tells me that yesterday he offered an impromptu dinner invitation to you and Mrs. Pickett for tonight. Dare we hope you have come to deliver your acceptance in person?”
Pickett shook his head. “I—I’m afraid not.”
“What a pity! Perhaps another night, then? I should so like to hear you sing again!”
“I—I believe we will be returning to London very soon.”
Mrs. Hetherington made suitably disappointed noises, then concluded with, “But I must not keep you standing here when you have business to discuss with my husband! Robert, you will let me know when you are finished with Mr. Pickett, will you not? We can at least give him tea before we send him back to his wife.”
Mr. Hetherington promised not to let their guest depart before she had plied him with this beverage, and she, satisfied with these assurances, took her leave. After the door had closed behind her, Mr. Hetherington addressed his unexpected caller. “Well, Mr. Pickett, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company? I believe my wife made some mention of business?”
“She did, sir, but I’m afraid it’s a business that brings me no pleasure.”
“Oh?”
Pickett’s eyes had by this time adjusted sufficiently to the sunlight to see his host’s face. Pickett wished they had not; having to look the man in the eye made the ugly business even worse. Taking a deep breath, he recounted the story, starting with the anonymous letter that had brought him from Bow Street and continuing through the letter he’d found on Ned Hawkins’s body, whose secrets had only been revealed by accidental proximity to a candle flame and whose handwriting exactly matched the one from Mrs. Hetherington.
“If I may say so, sir,” he concluded, “I like your wife very much, and I think it a great pity that her hospitality to me and mine should result in such unexpected and tragic consequences.”
“So do I,” the older man said with a sigh. He pulled open one of the lower drawers of the desk and leaned down to fumble amongst its contents. “But mayhap Patrick Colquhoun can console himself with the knowledge that his young prodigy was not nearly so clever as he supposed.”
Whatever reaction Pickett had expected, that was not it. “I, er, there must be some mistake—”
“Aye, that there is—and you’re the one who made it.”
Hetherington straightened in his chair, and Pickett found himself staring down the barrel of a blunt-nosed pistol. A hundred, a thousand images flashed through his mind in the space of an instant: Mrs. Hetherington’s arthritic hands; a footman stationed by her chair to cut up the meat that she could not; the pianoforte she could no longer play; and, worst of all, his own wife with her perfectly sound arm in a makeshift sling fashioned from one of his cravats, so pleased with her own cleverness in gathering handwriting samples by enlisting others to write her letter for her . . .
“It was you,” he said, feeling more than a little ill at the realization of what he’d missed. “You’re E. G. B.; your wife can’t write.”
“Oh, E. G. B. isn’t a person,” Hetherington said, giving him the rather pitying smile he might bestow on an engaging but particularly slow child. “It stands for ‘Erin go bragh’—or ‘Éire go Brách,’ if you prefer the Gaelic form. Roughly translated, it means ‘Ireland forever,’ and is a favorite expression amongst all those who support the cause of Irish independence. As for my wife, she can indeed write. But not for very long, and not without pain, so for the last several years I’ve handled her social correspondence. Did you never even suspect, then? Tut-tut, Mr. Pickett, I should have thought better of you, after reading your magistrate’s testimonial—which was quite glowing, by the bye.”
“You were Mr. Colquhoun’s friend!” Pickett insisted. “You were above suspicion!”
“Like Caesar’s wife?” He shook his head, but the gun never wavered. “I’m sure Patrick Colquhoun would tell you that no one is above suspicion, Mr. Pickett. I daresay a few more years at Bow Street would have taught you that. It’s as I said before: You’ve been asking the wrong questions.”
The wrong questions, indeed. Small wonder Ned Hawkins had been so reluctant to identify himself, when the Bow Street Runner he’d sent to London for had no sooner set down his bags than he was asking how to contact the very man Hawkins had summoned him to investigate!
“Unfortunately,” Hetherington continued, “you won’t live long enough to benefit from a lesson hard-learned.”
Pickett’s eyes never left the small, cold circle of metal aimed at him, but his brain took frantic stock of his surroundings. The study door behind him was closed—he remembered seeing Mrs. Hetherington shut it behind her—but even if it were standing wide open, he would never be able to reach it in time. Nor did the tall windows along the opposite wall offer any escape, for Mr. Hetherington, still seated behind his broad desk, blocked his access to them.
“If you shoot me,” Pickett said slowly, “your wife will hear the gunshot and come to investigate.” He wished his voice didn’t sound so tremulous. If he was going to die in any case, he might as well meet it bravely, in a way that would make Julia and Mr. Colquhoun proud. The thought gave him courage, and he stood a bit taller, forcing Hetherington to adjust his aim slightly upward.
“Aye, that she will. But you provided me with the excuse yourself. That ‘business’ you had with me,” he explained, seeing Pickett at a loss. “You had thought to buy a pistol from me. Unfortunately, it will accidentally go off while you are examining it. A pity you’ll be so careless, but young people so often are, you know.”
“If we’re to speak of carelessness,” Pickett said, “I wonder at your allowing that letter to fall into the wrong hands.”
Hetherington gave a grunt of annoyance. “I have no idea what aroused Ned’s suspicions, and I suppose I never will,” he said pettishly.
“Perhaps he became suspicious of your willingness to take the risk of offering such a ‘public service’ as illicit mail delivery without some ulterior motive,” Pickett suggested somewhat tartly, no longer constrained by good manners.
“Oh, the mail scheme has existed for decades,” Hetherington said dismissively. “I only became involved quite recently. And if I may be allowed to boast, I made changes to the process that made it much more efficient—and much less likely to be discovered, at least by anyone in a position to prefer charges.”
“Congratulations,” Pickett put in drily.
Hetherington chuckled. “I do like a man who can keep a cool head in a crisis! I can see why Patrick Colquhoun took such a fancy to you. But as you surmise, I had my own reasons for not wanting to trust my correspondence to the Royal Mail. For whatever reason, Ned Hawkins became suspicious and went to the cave, retrieved my letter from the bag, and read it. It’s unlikely he recognized the code—it involves writing in lemon juice or some other acidic substance, which weakens the paper and causes it to turn dark when exposed to heat. But having recognized my handwriting, he no doubt read the accomplishments of my children and, knowing I had none, realized there had to be more to the letter than appeared at first glance, and assumed the worst. In any case, he was on his way to my house to confront me with his discovery when we met on the cliff path. I daresay you know the rest; it was your wife who saw me push the fellow, was it not? I always thought so, but could never be entirely sure. That being the case, I have been extremely reluctant to eliminate the potential threat lest I be mistaken, but now—”
“Julia poses no danger to you,” Pickett interjected quickly. “She knows someone pushed Ned Hawkins, but could not identify you.”
“I am relieved to hear it, for her sake as well as my own. It would be a pity to be obliged to do an injury to so charming a lady. I found the very idea so repugnant that I slipped down to the inn one night and threw a rock through your window in the hopes of frightening the pair of you into returning to London, thus sparing me the necessity of taking some more drastic action. Unfortunately, you allowed your emotions to overpower your intelligence.”
I should have left her on the mail coach, Pickett thought despairingly. I should have sent her back to London, even if it killed me. Interesting choice of words, that . . .
Hetherington shifted in his chair. “But ‘Tempus fugit,’ as the saying goes, and I would prefer to have this business settled before Brigid returns. Have you any last words, Mr. Pickett?”
It appeared his time was at hand. “Will you at least answer one question first?” Pickett asked, as much an attempt to delay the inevitable as it was an urge to satisfy a very real curiosity.
Hetherington gave a careless shrug, which Pickett took for an affirmative.
“Why?” he asked simply. “You have a good life here, a life many men would envy. Why would you risk it all to betray a country that has been good to you? Your wife, I could see, perhaps—”
“You know nothing of my wife!” the older man snapped, and Pickett thought the mask slipped, revealing a glimpse of the embittered man behind the affable manner. “My poor Brigid has little enough reason to love the English. Tell me, are you familiar with the battle of Carrickfergus?”
“No, I’m afraid not,” Pickett confessed.
“I thought not. Few people are these days, as England hardly showed to advantage in the affair. They remember it well in Belfast, though. It was almost fifty years ago, during the Seven Years’ War. A French privateer named Thurot took the Irish town of Carrickfergus and captured its castle. Held it for five days, too, until the Royal Navy showed up to drive him out. He made Belfast uncomfortable enough in the meantime, though, with his demands for supplies and ransom money.”
“Oh?” Pickett was not quite certain where his adversary was going with all this, but reasoned it could only be to his benefit to keep the man talking. Perhaps by the time Hetherington came to his point, he—Pickett himself—would have miraculously thought of some way out of his present dilemma.
“My wife’s father cast his lot with Thurot,” Mr. Hetherington continued. “He had a grudge against the English dating back to the famine of twenty years earlier, when a late frost killed all the crops. Brigid had not yet been born, but her parents’ three older children died in the outbreak of starvation and disease that followed.”
“I’m very sorry to hear it,” Pickett said. “Still, the English can hardly be blamed for the weather.”
“No, although there were those who felt Whitehall might have done more to help relieve the suffering. In any case, the English must certainly be blamed for what followed. When the French withdrew from Carrickfergus, Brigid’s father was arrested, and all his property was confiscated. But even though the English had stolen her inheritance, they weren’t done with her yet.” Hetherington’s breath came fast and hard, and Pickett knew with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach what he was about to hear. “He was being held in the castle pending execution when she went to visit him one day. Half a dozen British soldiers waylaid her. They kept her for four hours, and when she scratched one of them in the face, he retaliated by breaking her fingers. She wasn’t yet fourteen years old.”
“Oh, God,” breathed Pickett. It was a wonder the man was still sane. If such a thing had happened to Julia . . .
But no, he wasn’t going to think about that. It was that—asking the wrong questions, thinking first of Julia’s safety and Ned’s murder only a distant second, imagining what he might have done had it been Julia who was guilty of such a crime, when he was compelled by the bonds of love and the vows of matrimony to cherish and care for her—that had led to his being where he was now: on the receiving end of a pistol.
And because he had been unable to distance himself from the case enough to examine it objectively, his life would be forfeit for the sins of his long-dead countrymen. Still, Pickett refused to give the man the satisfaction of seeing him beg for a mercy he knew would never be granted. And so they stared at one another, Pickett braced for the shot that would put an end to his existence, his adversary engrossed in thoughts of injustices long past. The only sound in the room was the ticking of the clock over the mantelpiece, a noise that seemed to Pickett almost preternaturally loud as it counted off with relentless precision all the lost moments that he would never live to see: He would never see Julia again, never lie with her in his arms, never see his infant son or daughter, never watch it grow up—
Suddenly the crash of breaking glass shattered the silence. Pickett did not waste time in wondering why. He lunged across the desk, grabbing Hetherington’s pistol arm and wrenching it with every ounce of strength he possessed. How long they struggled, he didn’t know—it seemed like hours, but was very likely a matter of seconds—but the deadlock was broken when the door opened and a lilting Irish voice asked, “Robert, what was that—?”
The gun went off with a deafening report, and the look of utter horror on Hetherington’s face made Pickett’s blood run cold. The pistol fell from the man’s hand, and he pushed past the desk, calling his wife’s name in a strangled voice.
Pickett, still sprawled across the desk on his belly, scrambled to his feet and turned in time to see Mrs. Hetherington slowly crumple to her knees. The expression on her face was one of utter astonishment, and across the bosom of her fashionable gown, a crimson stain bloomed like some obscene flower.
“Brigid, a mhuirnín,” her husband crooned, gathering her in his arms.
Instinctively, Pickett averted his gaze, then blinked as he took in the wreckage that had saved his life. One of the tall windows was shattered, and shards of glass littered the carpet. A rock the size of his fist lay in the middle of the floor, obviously the cause of all the damage, and on the terrace just outside—
On the terrace just outside stood Julia, staring at him with huge, stricken eyes set in a face drained of all color. “You—you’re alive,” she stammered. “You’re alive.”
Heedless of the glass crunching beneath his feet, he crossed the room in three strides and, not bothering to open the window, ducked through the gaping hole and stepped over the sill.
“I’m alive,” he assured her, and caught her in his arms as she swayed on her feet.
She stroked his face with one trembling hand. “It was Mr. Hetherington.”
“Yes, I—I know.”
“He isn’t the only one who can throw rocks,” she said, with a trace of her usual spirit.
He had to smile a little at that. “No, he isn’t—for which I am very grateful.”
“John, the snakes—”
“Snakes?” echoed Pickett, all at sea.
“I can’t—I can’t hold them off any longer,” she said, and went limp in his arms.
“It’s all right,” he murmured, cradling her closer. “They can’t hurt you.”
He slipped one arm beneath her knees and picked her up bodily, then turned back toward the window just in time to see Hetherington close his wife’s sightless eyes with one gentle hand. Tears ran down the man’s face, but hatred burned in his eyes as he looked up at his late adversary.
“I—I’m sorry, sir—” Pickett began.
“You’re sorry? You’re sorry? You don’t know what ‘sorry’ is!”
“It was an accident—”
Hetherington’s gaze shifted to Julia, lying insensible in Pickett’s arms. “No, you don’t know what ‘sorry’ is, not yet, but you will. You have a wife there, one you love. Shall I do to her what you did to mine? Shall I make you beg for her life, as you were prepared to make me beg for Brigid’s? No, not today,” he said, as Pickett darted a quick glance at the pistol lying on the carpet, mentally gauging how long it would take for Hetherington to snatch it up and reload. “But someday, someday when you’re least expecting it, when you’ve convinced yourself that it’s safe to lower your guard—”
His voice rose in volume with each new threat, and it was with no small sense of relief that Pickett noticed the butler, two footmen, and a wide-eyed housemaid, who had all come running and were now crowded in the doorway to the study.
“Send for the magistrate,” Pickett instructed the butler. He glanced down at the lifeless heap that had once been the lady of the house. “This—this was an accident, but there are other charges against your master that are not. And be sure you keep him here until the magistrate arrives,” he added, instinctively holding Julia closer. “Don’t let him get away.”
One of the footmen, the same one who had cut up his mistress’s meat at dinner, glanced from the gunshot wound in her chest to the weapon lying on the floor next to his master’s desk, and apparently drew his own conclusions. “He won’t be going nowhere,” he declared stoutly, setting his jaw.
Not that Mr. Hetherington was showing any signs of making any such attempt; with his outburst over, all the fight seemed to have gone out of him, and he sobbed over the dead woman whose head he cradled on his lap. But while they awaited the magistrate’s arrival, Pickett had a more urgent priority, one who was just beginning to stir in his arms.
“John, you’re all right?” Julia asked. “He didn’t hurt you?”
“I’m fine,” he assured her, turning slightly in order to block her view of the woman’s body. He supposed he ought to set her on her feet now that she had recovered from her swoon, but in the light of Hetherington’s threats, he couldn’t bring himself to let her go. “But what are you doing here? Not that I’m complaining,” he added hastily. In fact, had it not been for her timely intervention, it would have been he instead of Mrs. Hetherington who lay dead on the floor.
“I realized the handwriting looked too bold for Mrs. Hetherington to have managed it with her crippled hands, and thought her husband must have written it for her. I practically ran all the way from the Hart and Hound, rather than wait for Jem Hawkins to return with the wagon. And then when I got here, I found Mr. Hetherington holding a gun on you! Oh John, I’ve never been so frightened in my life!”
Pickett thought that was saying something, given the fact that during the one year of their acquaintance she had faced standing trial for murder, hanging from the edge of a cliff, and being trapped in a burning theatre.
“I’m taking you back to the inn to rest,” he told her. “I can’t stay with you—I’ll have to come back here and tie up a few loose ends with the magistrate—but then you can pack your bags. Tomorrow we’re going back to London.” London, where he would be faced with the task of explaining to Mr. Colquhoun what had taken place here—and how his own mishandling of the case had allowed it to happen. Still, he was forced to admit that the outcome could have been worse—much worse. He breathed a sigh of relief. “Tomorrow we’re going home.”
EPILOGUE
In Which John Pickett
Must Give an Accounting of Himself
“And there you have it,” Pickett concluded miserably. Almost a week had passed since the disastrous denouement, and now he stood before the magistrate’s bench, making his report to a scowling Mr. Colquhoun. “You warned me—more than once—about the dangers of taking a case too personally, but that’s exactly what I did. I botched this case in just about every way it’s possible to botch one. I—I am sorry, sir.”
The magistrate looked up from the written report in his hand to regard his most junior Runner over the top of the wire-rimmed spectacles he wore for reading. “No one expects you to be perfect, Mr. Pickett. You’re only twenty-four years old—”
“Twenty-five,” Pickett corrected him.
The bushy white eyebrows rose. “Twenty-five?”
Pickett nodded. “This past March.”
“Well, in that case, you should have known better.” With Pickett momentarily taken aback, the magistrate pressed his argument. “It seems to me the fault must be partly mine, for giving you the impression that my acquaintance with Robert Hetherington was much warmer than it actually was. It’s true that at one time we were upon visiting terms, and our wives were once very close. But then my Isabella came along, and James not long after, and it can be painful for a childless couple to find itself forever in the company of a growing family. We drifted apart, and it wasn’t until I was about to dispatch you to the Lake District that I recalled Hetherington had bought a property there. I thought it might help you to have a contact in the area; I had not considered what decades of disappointment and bitterness could do to a man, and for that, I owe you an apology.”
Pickett could not allow these self-recriminations to pass. “The fault is mine, sir, and mine alone. I couldn’t stop thinking of Julia, of how I would have felt, what I would have done if I had discovered she was guilty of a crime—not treason, but the murder of her first husband. I lost all objectivity, and because of me, an innocent woman is dead.”
“She might not have been so innocent, you know,” the magistrate pointed out. “The plot is being investigated as we speak, and it may turn out that she was up to her neck in it.”
Pickett rather hoped she was—not to assuage his own conscience (at least, not only for so self-serving a purpose), but because it seemed to him that the woman deserved some measure of vengeance. “Even if she was, sir, she still deserved the right to face her accusers, to offer a defense of her actions. Perhaps, after hearing her past history, a jury might have been lenient.” A shadow crossed his face. “More lenient than I was, in any case.”
Mr. Colquhoun flipped back through the written report before him. “Did you succeed in disarming him, then? I’m afraid I missed the part that said it was your finger pulling the trigger.”
“No, but it was undoubtedly I who pushed her husband’s arm so that the ball meant for me struck her instead.”
Mr. Colquhoun regarded his inconsolable young Runner in silence for a long moment. “Show me,” he said at last.
“I—I beg your pardon?”
“Show me,” the magistrate said again. He pointed his index finger like a gun, and aimed it across the bench at Pickett. “Disarm me, as you tried to do Robert Hetherington.”
“Better not, Mr. Pickett,” Harry Carson, a member of the horse patrol, called impudently. “If you do, it’ll make an awful mess.”
Pickett turned, and saw that every member of the Bow Street force who was not actively engaged in an investigation had gathered around to watch.
“I—I can’t—” Pickett protested feebly.
“That’s just what we’re going to put to the test,” declared Mr. Colquhoun. “Do to me exactly what you did to Hetherington. Whenever you’re ready, Mr. Pickett.”
Something was different, something aside from the obvious, and after a few seconds’ consideration, Pickett realized what it was. “He didn’t have his arm stretched out. It was bent at the elbow.”
“Meaning you had to reach, say, an extra foot or so,” the magistrate said with a nod, adjusting his “weapon” accordingly.
Pickett stared at the hand pointed at him. The events of that morning were never far from his thoughts, so it took only a moment for the flesh and blood to vanish, replaced by an image of the very real pistol held by a man who had threatened not only Pickett’s life, but every happiness he had ever known. He took a deep breath and lunged across the bench, causing the wooden railing to groan beneath his weight and scattering his painstakingly transcribed report in all directions as he grabbed the magistrate’s forearm. Mr. Colquhoun’s arm immediately went limp, and Pickett fell sprawling belly-down on the desk, banging his chin in the process.
As his audience burst into startled laughter, he picked himself up with what dignity he could muster. “You weren’t even trying!”
“No, I wasn’t,” confessed his magistrate, unrepentant. “If Hetherington had done likewise, his shot would have gone into the floor. But he didn’t. He fought back, and it was his resistance, not your attempt to disarm him, that caused his wife’s death. It was indeed a tragic accident, but one for which her husband, not you, must bear the blame.”
“It’s supposed to make me feel better, knowing that I couldn’t overpower a man more than twice my age?”
Mr. Colquhoun regarded his protégé with a twinkle lurking in his blue eyes. “Do you want absolution, Mr. Pickett, or don’t you?”
Pickett glanced down at the railing he clutched with both hands. “The bench is a bit higher than Mr. Hetherington’s desk,” he said.
“I doubt it would make much difference. Do you recall whether your feet were on the floor?”
Casting his mind back, Pickett remembered sliding off the desk to turn and identify the reason for his foe’s horrified expression. “No, sir. They weren’t.”
“There you are, then,” said the magistrate decisively. “You might have had the advantages of youth and strength, but he held the more stable position, seated behind his desk while you lay across it.”
Mr. Colquhoun might consider the matter settled, but there was one element Pickett could not dismiss so easily, not while Robert Hetherington still lived. The assembled audience began to disperse, realizing the show was over, and Pickett waited until they were out of earshot before confiding in a low voice, “You should know, sir, that he—he threatened Julia. He promised to come after her—not immediately, he said, but later, after I’ve had time to lower my guard.”
“I should think by that time he’ll be six feet under—and may God have mercy on his soul,” the magistrate said. “Mr. Pickett, you said yourself that he is being held in prison pending the Carlisle assizes. I’ll make inquiries, and let you know when he’s been executed.”
Pickett let out a sigh. “Thank you, sir. I was hoping you would.”
“And now,” pronounced Mr. Colquhoun, glancing over his shoulder at the large clock that hung on the wall above his bench, “I intend to go home and seek my dinner. I suggest you do the same.”
“Yes, sir,” said Pickett, and turned away, prepared to suit the word to the deed.
“Oh, John,” the magistrate called as he reached the door.
“Sir?” Pickett asked, pausing to turn back.
“Do you and Mrs. Pickett intend to make a habit of this? Taking it in turns saving each other’s lives?”
A faint smile touched Pickett’s lips. “One can only hope, sir.”
“You’re all right, then?”
“Not just yet,” Pickett confessed, “but I will be.”
And with this promise, he left the Bow Street Public Office and turned his steps toward Curzon Street, and the woman who had the power to make it so.
Author’s Note
Warning: this note contains spoilers. If you haven’t yet read the book, you might want to do so before proceeding further.
Some books require more research than others. This one required a lot. Thankfully, I had the opportunity to see the Lake District for myself when I visited the area shortly after the book was finished, which allowed me to flesh out descriptions of setting—and where I startled a tour guide by asking, “Are there places along the river where the bank is high enough that you could push someone over and kill them?”
While researching online for some reason the husband of an Irishwoman might bear a grudge against the English (sadly, never far to seek in the history of Anglo-Irish relations), I came across the second Battle of Carrickfergus, which had taken place in 1760 (there had been an earlier one in 1597), and which I incorporated into my story.
My investigations into mail smuggling proved more elusive. Much has been written on the smuggling of brandy and tobacco across the Channel à la Kipling’s “five and twenty ponies trotting through the dark,” but I could find very little on the domestic smuggling of letters beyond the fact that it existed, and was apparently widespread. I found no particulars, however, which forced me (or left me free, depending upon how one looks at it) to rely on informed imagination in creating my own story. The two anecdotes cited by Robert Hetherington in Chapter 14—that of a brother and sister working out their own method of communication, and the assertion that four of every five letters mailed from Manchester were sent by means other than the Royal Mail—were drawn from actual writings, albeit from about twenty-five years later; in fact, both constituted part of the debate that eventually led to postal reform and, in 1840, the creation of the Uniform Penny Post, which allowed letters to be sent for the same cost regardless of distance, with the postage to be paid by the sender, rather than the recipient.
Interestingly, the smuggling of domestic mail seems to be linked to the rise in literacy: When only the upper classes could read and write, the cost of receiving letters was immaterial, as they could easily afford it. As literacy spread to the middle and sometimes even the lower classes, however, it became necessary for them to look for affordable ways of corresponding with friends, family, and business associates, despite the dubious legality of those ways.
On the subject of letters, the old “lemon juice as invisible ink” trick is something every schoolchild knows today, but there was a time when it was the latest in high-tech intelligence. For instance, George Washington is known to have used it, and trained spies in its use, during the American Revolution.
Finally, one detail that might be confusing to American readers: In Regency England, one went to the “post office” to hire a post chaise, the Regency equivalent of a rental car; one took one’s letters to (or fetched them from) the “receiving office.”
About the Author
At the age of sixteen, Sheri Cobb South discovered Georgette Heyer, and came to the startling realization that she had been born into the wrong century. Although she probably would have been a chambermaid had she actually lived in Regency England, that didn’t stop her from fantasizing about waltzing the night away in the arms of a handsome, wealthy, and titled gentleman.
Since Georgette Heyer died in 1974 and could not write any more Regencies, Ms. South came to the conclusion she would have to do it herself. In addition to the bestselling John Pickett mystery series (now an award-winning audiobook series!), she has also written several Regency romances, including the critically acclaimed The Weaver Takes a Wife.
A native and long-time resident of Alabama, Ms. South now lives in Loveland, Colorado.
Sheri Cobb South loves to hear from readers! Look for her on social media:
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or email her at Cobbsouth@aol.com
Read all the John Pickett Mysteries:
Pickpocket’s Apprentice: A John Pickett Novella
In Milady’s Chamber
Family Plot
Dinner Most Deadly
Waiting Game
Too Hot to Handel
For Deader or Worse
Mystery Loves Company
Peril by Post