Wicked Company (100 page)

“You do find the devil’s own mischief, m’girl,” Mrs. Phillips replied, shaking her mobcap. She peered around the room until her eyes fastened on Rory’s little cot where the lad was sleeping peacefully. “Lorna,” the older woman said emphatically, “take Rory to your lodgings for a few days. We can make Sophie a pallet in my back storeroom. Perhaps if the authorities think you’ve fled, ’twill blow by quickly.”

Sophie hesitated, then nodded her agreement to the plan. She had no alternative but to accept her neighbor’s protection. With a heavy heart, she gently woke her son and sent him on his way.

As a precaution, Sophie spent the next fortnight shut up in the Green Canister’s storeroom among the vials of mercury, oils and essences, washballs, potions, pills, and the packets of sheepskin condoms manufactured in France. Just outside the large cupboard where Sophie had fashioned a makeshift bed stood Aunt Harriet’s leather-bound trunk packed with Sophie’s belongings: her manuscripts, quills and half-empty ink pots, a few items of clothing, several books—including Garrick’s inscribed copy of
The Tempest
—and Rory’s playthings. Beneath this pile was hidden a pouch with nearly five hundred pounds in gold and silver coins, most of it thanks to the largesse produced by the successful run of
School for Fools.

As each day passed uneventfully, she grew more hopeful that the rumors of Sydney Ganwick’s imminent arrest had been exaggerated. Mrs. Phillips told her that Mary Ann Skene had never returned to her shared lodgings on the morning of Garrick’s death, and Sophie was grateful, for it avoided the necessity of explaining to the strumpet why she, her son, and their belongings had suddenly disappeared.

“Mary Ann must at last have found a more permanent patron,” Sophie remarked to Mrs. Phillips when the apothecary closed the shop one afternoon to partake of their midday meal.

“With
that
face?” Mrs. Phillips retorted scornfully. “He must be a wealthy blind man.”

Suddenly, a loud pounding on the door at the front of the Green Canister echoed through the shop. Mrs. Phillips ran to the threshold that provided a view out the window facing the road.

“Quickly! Hide in the cupboard!” she cried, her ample bosom heaving with anxiety as she trundled back into the storeroom. “They’ve just gone up the outside stairway… probably searching your chambers!”

“Who?” Sophie exclaimed.

“Kings Guards, from the look of it! Get in here!
Hurry!”

Sophie wedged herself into a corner of a small storage cupboard and pulled a length of linen over her head. Mrs. Phillips swiftly shut the door and retreated to the front of her establishment. Sophie could faintly discern the sound of furniture being moved overhead. The guards were evidently making a thorough search of her lodgings. After a half hour or so, she could hear the tread of heavy boots descending the steps that separated the staymaker’s shop from the Green Canister. Then: silence.

“They’ve gone,” a voice said ten minutes later.

The wooden boxes were hauled to one side and the cupboard door was opened. Sophie smiled gamely at Mrs. Phillips who had been joined by Lorna, the latter having arrived in the midst of the excitement taking place next door.

“They assume you’ve fled,” Mrs. Phillips said, mopping her brow. The older woman was clearly shaken by her encounter with the King’s officers. “The guardsmen eyed me all suspicious-like when I told ’em you’d left with your trunk and belongings a fortnight ago. They’ll be watching the shop, to be sure,” she added.

“Pray, where is Rory?” Sophie asked Lorna anxiously.

“Helping the man with the performing monkey in the Piazza,” Lorna soothed. “I left him happy as a lark. I feared bringing him here in case the guards were still posted across the road…”

“How right you were,” Sophie replied grateful for Lorna’s eminent good sense.

“Well, I suppose you won’t need this,” her friend sighed, handing Sophie a black-bordered card. The missive was an engraved invitation to Garrick’s funeral, February first. “This was delivered, care of Drury Lane. Few women are allowed to attend tomorrow,” she informed them, “and the actresses who didn’t receive invitations are up in arms.”

“Will Mrs. Garrick be there?” Sophie asked in a somber voice, a sense of bereavement sweeping over her anew.

“They say she’s prostrate with grief. Hannah More and a few favorites have been granted permission by the Dean of Westminster to watch from a secluded gallery in Poet’s Corner immediately above the grave,” Lorna reported as Sophie read a note that accompanied her invitation. “This says I’m invited to join Hannah and Lady Spencer in the second-story gallery,” Sophie exclaimed, staring at the missive signed by Hannah herself.

“The procession will start from Adelphi Terrace,” Lorna explained, “and will proceed the four miles to Westminster Abbey. From everything I’ve heard, ’tis to be a grandiose affair, with Sheridan playing chief mourner, accompanied by fourteen pages. A production worthy of an opening night at Drury Lane,” she added with a tinge of sarcasm.

“What part is assigned to Lord Darnly in this gloomy pageant?” Sophie asked, wondering if she dared execute a plan that had just sprung to mind.

“Oh, he’s in the thick of the preparations, to be sure,” Lorna replied scornfully. “How can they ignore him? Young Lacy confided in me the other day that the earl had enticed him and his father to take on a mountain of debt with some scheme to discover a fortune of coal on their estate in Isleworth. The man holds mortgages on so many of their Drury Lane shares, he might as well be the Patentee himself!”

The following day, Mrs. Phillips stood in her storeroom among the boxes of apothecary supplies, pleading with Sophie not to attend Garrick’s funeral.

“’Tis bloody folly for you to go!” Mrs. Phillips pleaded. “There’s no one to save you this time, if you get caught!”

“I
must
go,” Sophie replied. “I owe him this, at least.”

There was no way she could express to this plainspoken woman the enormous debt of gratitude she felt toward David Garrick. From the very first, he had believed in her ability as a dramatist and had spared no effort to bring her talents to the stage. Recalling, suddenly, the lonely field outside Edinburgh where she’d laid her father in unhallowed ground, she was more determined than ever to bid a proper farewell to the man who had proven such a steadfast friend.

“Someone’s bound to catch you out!” she exclaimed.

“They’ll never recognize me,” Sophie said as she stepped into a pair of breeches, part of an elegant satin page’s uniform that Lorna, in her customary fashion, had spirited out of the Drury Lane wardrobe chamber late the previous night. “Everyone thinks I’ve fled London. Sheridan’s clothed the attendants accompanying the funeral cortege in these same costumes from last year’s Christmas pantomime!” She pulled on the crimson cuffed coat and adjusted the ruffles at her cuffs. “Here, help me adjust this periwig.”

“Well, pray, do sit in the gallery—away from the crowds,” Mrs. Phillips urged, absently adjusting the hairpiece and centering the lace attached to the collar of Sophie’s linen shirt.

“I think it may be safer simply to remain with the other pages,” Sophie replied, tucking into an inside pocket the engraved invitation with Hannah’s accompanying note requesting her to sit beside her. She threw her arms around Mrs. Phillips’s ample girth. “But when I return, I shall make plans for removing myself—not to mention sparing you, dear friend, from the danger of my discovery. Perhaps I’ll repair to Bath, as I did once before!” She grinned wickedly, eager to escape her storeroom prison and see the London sky once more.

Poor Hunter, she thought with a sharp pang of longing. How ghastly these last two and a half years must have been for him, locked up in Newgate. And now, if she and Rory were compelled to flee to Bath, or if the authorities should somehow discover her disguise…

Ducking out the storeroom’s back door into the alley behind Half Moon Passage, Sophie forced herself not to think of the dangers that lay ahead.

Thirty-Eight

The roads near Westminster Abbey were jammed with onlookers straining for a glimpse of the great man’s cortege. The line of David Garrick’s public mourners, plus a string of fifty carriages transporting the elite of both the nobility and the arts, stretched across the city for some four miles. Mounted troops kept a path open for the official procession and the assembled dignitaries funneled at a stately pace toward the entrance to the largest church in the kingdom.

The Garrick family coach, devoid of passengers, rolled in its place of honor past the crowds lining the road. The vehicle was flanked by pages clothed in precisely the attire selected by Lorna for Sophie’s disguise. Behind the empty carriage was the hearse containing Garrick’s body, lying in a casket covered with crimson velvet. Mounted horsemen followed, garbed head to foot in black livery, and behind them were scores more coaches carrying the principal actors from both royal theaters, led by London’s literary lions Richard Sheridan, Edmund Burke, and Samuel Johnson. How strange, Sophie thought, that Dr. Johnson appeared so distraught by Garrick’s death when he had once withheld support from his friend’s efforts to celebrate the Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford. As for Dr. Johnson’s shadow, James Boswell, Sophie had heard he was home in Scotland.

Many disjointed memories of her nearly two decades in London replayed themselves in Sophie’s mind as she slipped into line with her fellow pages marching alongside Garrick’s carriage.

Can it be possible I’ll be thirty-five years old next year!
she mused.

The astounding realization startled her as the cortege drew in front of the double-towered Abbey. Her eyes returned to Garrick’s casket, which was now being lifted from the hearse by a group of distinguished pallbearers: a duke, two earls, a viscount, and several legends of the theater.

The Abbey’s carillon began to toll dolefully, echoing the church bells now ringing the melancholy tidings throughout the city. With every chime, the lump in her throat seemed to grow larger. Blinking back her tears, she continued in line with similarly clad companions who mounted the steps leading through the arched doors into the cathedral.

A one-eyed beggar crouching near the entrance suddenly extended a wooden alms bowl in brazen fashion toward Sophie’s chest.

“A penny sir!’’ he rasped. “Just a penny!”

“Be gone with you!” Sophie snapped, realizing too late that she had forgotten to lower her voice to a masculine growl.

The ragged street dweller peered at her with both his good eye and the pulpy mass where his other orb had once been.

Ignoring the poor wretch, she quickly made her way past the west entrance and into the nave amid the surging crowd.

Inside, the frigid air echoed with the shuffling footsteps of hundreds of guests moving toward the spot where Garrick would be interred beneath a granite slab. To Sophie’s dismay, Roderick Darnly was one of the first dignitaries she spied as the pallbearers solemnly bore their burden toward the freshly dug grave in the Abbey floor. Accompanied by his ubiquitous hireling, Trevor Bedloe, the two men—one tall and imposing, the other slender and at least a foot shorter than his employer—headed through the throng in the direction of the notables’ assigned seats. As Sophie took up her post among the line of pages flanking the site, she did her best to ignore the presence of the two men.

Sophie glanced at the ceiling capped by three dizzying tiers of lacy stone arches that soared over her head. Purcell’s grand funeral service, blending choir and organ, created a powerful dirge that echoed throughout the enormous church.

The mourners from Drury Lane huddled near an area dedicated to St. Edward, the Confessor. This group included Mr. Collins, the doorman, and Mr. Hopkins, the prompter who had allowed Sophie to serve as copyist for Kitty Clive. Next to them stood the men’s wardrobe keeper, the boxkeepers, and the humblest stage servants—all there to mourn their departed leader.

David’s brother, George, pale and trembling, was hastily provided a chair. Sophie thought the poor man looked near death himself. Politicians, artists, merchants, and noblemen jostled for position as the casket neared Poets’ Corner where Great Britain’s literary lights and artists were laid to rest in pomp and glory. Chaucer was buried here, along with Coleridge and Dryden. Oliver Goldsmith had joined them not many years ago, and now…

Blinking hard, Sophie glanced toward the rear of the Abbey. She thought she discerned Mavis Piggott and several other ladies of the stage outfitted in mannish attire. Their garments appeared suspiciously like the costumes worn by Joseph Surface, Sir Peter Teazle, and the other familiar fops peopling Sheridan’s
The School for Scandal.

Suddenly, Sophie’s gaze was riveted on one of the few mourners dressed in female garb. There, partially hidden behind a pillar, stood a sumptuously gowned figure with a ripe, voluptuous body and an astonishingly homely face. The woman was clad in somber gray silk of the most luxurious quality and sported a hat decorated with gray and black plumes.

Mary Ann Skene, late of Half Moon Passage, was adorned as fashionably as if
she
were the grieving widow! Where on earth, Sophie marveled, could the habitué of back streets and London brothels have acquired such expensive finery in so short a time?