Vice (45 page)

“Charges?”

“Disorderiy be’avior, Sir John,” the head beadle spoke ponderously. “Inciting to riot … debauchery … damage to property.”

“Who brings the charges?”

“Mother Cocksedge and Mistress Mitchell, Yer ’Onor.”

“Are they here?”

“Awaitin’ yer summons, sir.” The beadle tapped his staff on the floor and twitched his nose with an air of great self-importance.

“Then summon them.”

Juliana turned her head toward the door. The two women bustled in. Mistress Mitchell looked like a respectable
housewife in her print dress and mob cap; Mother Cocksedge had thrown her apron over her head and appeared much affected by something, her shoulders heaving, great sobs emerging from beneath the apron.

“Cease yer blubbin’, woman, an’ tell ’Is Lordship yer complaint,” instructed one of the constables.

“Oh, I’m mint, Yer ’Onor, quite ruint,” came from beneath the apron. “It’s all thanks to those evil girls … them what encouraged the young gennelmen to break up my ’ouse. Haunted theirselves at ’em, got ’em all excited like, then wouldn’t deliver. An’ them three …” With a dramatic gesture Mother Cocksedge flung aside her apron and pointed at Juliana, Lilly, and Rosamund “Them three, what ought to know better, they was encouragin’ the others, poor souls what don’t ’ave ’alf the advantages, to use my establishment fer Mmmoral purposes.”

Juliana gasped. “Why, you old—”

“Silence!” The justice glared at Juliana. “Open your mouth once more, woman, and you’ll be carted from St. Paul’s Church to Drury Lane and back again.”

Juliana shut her mouth, seething as she was forced to listen to the two women spin their tales. Mistress Mitchell was all hurt feelings and good nature taken advantage of as she explained that she’d allowed some girls to use her best parlor for a birthday party, but instead they’d been preparing to create a riot at Mother Cocksedge’s oh-so-respectable chocolate house. They had a grievance against Mother Cocksedge and intended to be avenged upon her by causing her house to be wrecked by a group of angry young bloods.

They were evil, fallen women with no morals, set on their wicked ways, put in Mother Cocksedge, once more retreating beneath her apron. “But me an’ Mistress Mitchell, ’ere, Yer ’Onor, we don’t think as ’ow they should all be punished as much as them what lead ’em into evil. Them three from Russell Street.”

Mistress Mitchell bristled and agreed with a dignified nod.

Sir John Fielding regarded the two complainants with an expression of distaste. He was as aware as anyone of the true nature of their trade. But they were not on this occasion brought before him, and their complaint was legitimate enough. His head swung slowly around the semicircle of defendants, and his gaze rested on the three chief malefactors.

Lilly and Rosamund immediately dropped their eyes, but the bold-eyed redhead met his accusatory glare head-on, her green eyes throwing a challenge at him.

“Name?” he demanded.

“Juliana Beresford.” She spoke clearly and offered neither curtsy nor salutation.

Lilly and Rosamund, on the other hand, both curtsied low and murmured their names when asked, with an “If it please Your Honor.”

“Do you have anything to say to these charges?” He gestured to Juliana.

“Only that they’re barefaced lies,” she replied calmly.

“You were not gathered in this woman’s chocolate house?” The justice’s eyebrows rose in a bushy white arc.

“Yes, we were, but—”

“You weren’t gathered behind a closed door?” he interrupted.

“Yes, but—”

He thumped his fist on the table, silencing her again. “That’s all I wish to know. It is against the law for people to gather together for the purposes of incitement to violence and riot. I sentence you and your two companions to three months in the Tothill Bridewell. Those whom you have corrupted are free on payment of a five-shilling fine.”

With that he pushed back his chair and rose to his feet, yawning prodigiously. “I sat overlate last even, and then to be dragged from my bed in the small hours to deal with a trio of hotheaded troublemaking harlots is more than a man can abide,” he remarked loudly to a somber-suited man who had stood behind him throughout the trial and who now accompanied him from the room.

“Ye’ll be showin’ a little more respect to yer betters after three months beatin’ ’emp,” Mother Cocksedge declared, coming up to the three young women with a leer in her little pink eyes. “I doubt Mistress Dennison and ’er man ’ll be ready to take ye back afterward. We don’t like troublemakers in the Garden, and don’t ye ferget it, missie.” She jabbed a ringer at Juliana’s chest. Juliana would have retaliated if she hadn’t been held so tightly by a constable. The urge to spit in the woman’s face was almost overpowering, but somehow she resisted it and looked away from the hateful, triumphant grin.

“Rosamund cannot survive Bridewell,” Lilly whispered to Juliana. “I can, and you can. But Rosamund is fragile. She’ll not last on her feet for more than a week.”

“She won’t have to,” Juliana declared with a confidence she didn’t feel. They were binding her hands in front of her with coarse rope, and with each twist and knot she was secured in the chains of powerlessness.

Lilly gave her a scornful look as if to say “Face reality” and endured her own bonds with tight lips. Rosamund continued to weep softly as she was similarly bound. The other women had been hustled from the room and could be heard across the hall, declaring penitence and gratitude as the two bawds paid their fines. They’d just been given a lesson on which side their bread was buttered, and it would be a rainy day in hell before they would contemplate standing up for themselves again.

“Come along, then, me pretties.” A beadle grinned at them and chucked Rosamund beneath the chin. “Ye’ll spoil them lovely eyes with yer tears, missie. Save ’em for the Bridewell, I should.” A hearty laugh greeted this sally, and Juliana, Lilly, and Rosamund were half pushed, half dragged out of the house to an open cart waiting outside.

Juliana waited in sick dread for them to fasten her bound hands to a rope behind the cart and pull her bodice to her waist. But they were shoved upward into the cart, and her relief was so great that for the first time since this ordeal had begun, she thought she might faint. She put an arm
around Rosamund and took Lilly’s hand in a fierce grip as they stood in the benchless vehicle, swaying and lurching over the cobbles.

Dawn was breaking, and the city streets were filling with costermongers, night-soil collectors, barrow boys, servants of all kinds hurrying to the market. The nighttime din had died down in Covent Garden, replaced with the coarse cries of the market people, the rattle of wheels and the clop of horses. As the cart bearing the three bound women was drawn through the streets, people jeered and threw clods of mud and pieces of rotten fruit; small boys ran along beside the cart, chanting obscene songs.

Juliana thought of being burned at the stake. She imagined being tied to the stake in front of a jeering crowd. She thought of the noose around her neck, mercifully squeezing consciousness from her body before they lit the faggots. She lived that nightmare and thus defeated the ghastly reality of the humihating journey.

John Coachman had fallen asleep on the driver’s box. He’d intended to nod off for a minute or two, but when he awoke, it was almost full light. He leaped from the carriage with an oath, still thick with sleep but his heart pounding with fear. Abandoning his horses, he plunged across the Garden, dodging the market folk as they put up their stalls. He’d seen Lady Edgecombe disappear in this direction, but where had she gone then? He stood wildly looking around as if he would see her sitting at her ease under the Piazza. But he knew that something was very wrong. And he’d slept through it. The duke would have his hide and throw him without a character into the street to starve.

“Lost summat, mate?” a friendly carter inquired, pausing with his laden basket of cabbages delicately balanced on his head.

John Coachman looked bewildered. “My lady,” he stammered. “I’ve lost my lady.”

The carter chuckled. “Covent Garden’s the place fer
losin’ a lady friend, mate. But there’s plenty ’ere where that one came from.”

The coachman didn’t attempt to explain something that he didn’t understand himself. His great fear was that Lady Edgecombe had been abducted, a fine lady in this den of iniquity. It wouldn’t be the first time. And it must have happened at least an hour ago. She could be anywhere in the city’s maze of mean, narrow streets and dark, dank courts.

“D’ye ’ear of the business last night at Cocksedge’s?” the carter asked, reaching in his pocket for his clay pipe, his basket immobile on his head despite his movements. He struck flint on tinder and lit the pungent tobacco.

The coachman hardly heard him. He was still gazing frantically around, trying to think of his next course of action.

“A group of them ’igh-class nymphs was taken up by the beadles at Cocksedge’s,” the informative carter rattled on between leisurely puffs. “Incitin’ a riot, or so the old bawd says. Got summat agin ’em, I’ll bet. She’s got the evil eye, that one, make no mistake.”

Slowly the words sank in. John remembered the scene he’d witnessed earlier. The flame-red hair stuck in his memory. “What’s that you say?”

The carter repeated himself cheerfully. “Took ’em to Fielding’s, so I ’eard, but …” He stared after the coachman, who was now racing back to his carriage and the stamping, restless horses.

John Coachman clambered onto the box, cracked his whip with a loud bellow of encouragement, and the horses broke almost immediately into a canter, the coach swaying and lumbering behind. They sideswiped a stall and the owner raced after them, yelling curses. A child was snatched just in time from beneath the pounding hooves by an irate woman. A mangy dog dived between the wheels of the carriage and miraculously emerged unscathed on the other side.

Outside the magistrate’s house on Bow Street, the
coachman pulled up his sweating horses and with trembling hands descended to the street and ran up the steps to bang the knocker. The footman who answered was lofty and unhelpful until he saw the ducal coronet on the panels of the carriage. Then he was all affability. Yes, there had been a group of whores brought before Sir John an hour or so ago. Three of them sentenced to Tothill Bridewell, the others let off with a fine that their bawds had paid. And, yes, one of the women sent to Tothill had been a tall green-eyed redhead. He vaguely remembered that she’d been wearing a dark-green gown.

John Coachman thanked the man and retreated to his carriage. His world seemed to have run amuck. Lady Edgecombe taken up for a whore; hauled off to Tothill Bridewell. It made no sense. And yet there was no other explanation for Her Ladyship’s inexplicable disappearance.

He turned his horses toward Albermarle Street, his mind reeling. It was backstairs gossip that there was something smoky about the way Lady Edgecombe had come to the house. The whole marriage with the viscount reeked to the heavens. And she was installed in the chamber next to the duke, her bridegroom now gone from the house.

He knew well, however, that the conclusions he drew would avail him nothing when facing the duke’s wrath. It was with sinking heart that he drove into the mews, handed the horses over to a groom, and entered the house by the back door.

The house was in its customary quiet but efficient early-morning bustle, waxing, polishing, brushing, dusting. The kitchen was filled with the rich aromas of bacon and black pudding, the boot boy and scullery maid carrying steaming salvers into the servants’ hall. The coachman knew he would have to confide in Catlett if he was to speak with the duke. And he knew that he must speak with His Grace before many minutes had passed.

He approached the august figure of Catlett, seated at the head of the long table sampling his ale and examining with a critical eye the offerings laid before him by the boot boy.
The lad’s mouth watered as he watched the dishes move down the table. He and the scullery maid would have to wait until everyone had eaten before they’d be allowed to rummage for scraps to break their own fasts.

“Eh, John Coachman, and ’ow be you this fine mornin’?” Catlett asked genially, spearing a chunk of black pudding with the end of his knife.

“I’d like a word in private, if ye please, Mr. Catlett.” The coachman turned his hat between his hands, his eyes filled with anxiety.

“What? In the middle of me breakfast?”

“It’s very urgent, Mr. Catlett. Concerns ’Er Ladyship and ’Is Grace.”

Catlett irritably pushed back his chair. “Best come into me pantry, then. You, lad. Put me plate on the ’ob to keep ’ot. I’ll dust yer jacket fer ye if ’tis a mite less ’ot than ’tis now.”

Wiping his mouth with a napkin, he led the way to his pantry. “So what is it?”

He listened, his eyes widening, as the coachman told him of the night’s happening and the total absence of Lady Edgecombe.

“Taken up fer a whore?” Catlett shook his head in incredulity. “’Ow could that be?”

“Dunno. Accident, I daresay. She went to fetch a fan, got caught up in the riot.” John snapped his fingers.

“Sir John wouldn’t send Lady Edgecombe to Tothill Bridewell,” Catlett declared. “So she must not ’ave told ’im ’oo she is.”

“Aye. But why?”

“Not fer us to ask,” Catlett pronounced. “But ’Is Grace must be told at once. Ye’d best come wi’ me to ’is chamber. ’E’s only been back fer a couple of hours.”

The coachman followed Catlett into the front of the house and up the stairs. A parlor maid, waxing the banister, gave him a curious look, then dropped her eyes immediately as Catlett clipped her around the ear. “You got nuthin’ better to do, my girl, than gawp at yer betters?”

“Yes, sir … Mr. Catlett … no, sir,” she mumbled.

Outside the duke’s bedchamber Catlett said, “Wait ’ere.” He pushed open the door and entered the darkened chamber. The bed curtains were drawn around the bed. He twitched them aside and coughed portentously.

The duke seemed to be deeply asleep, an arm flung above his head, his face in repose curiously youthful, his mouth relaxed, almost smiling.