Wicked Company (23 page)

The two guardsmen who had taken them from the tavern hauled Sophie and her aunt from the coach and carried them like sacks of meal into a small, barren room where they were put in shackles and abandoned for several hours. At length, a burly orderly appeared. He unfastened their leg restraints and commanded that they walk ahead of him down a long passageway which funneled into a row of small cubicles barricaded by iron bars.

“In with ye, now!” the orderly growled, shoving them both into a cell eight feet square, crammed with eleven other women suffering various forms of insanity. Sophie staggered and fought to regain her balance on the straw-strewn floor. She stared, appalled, at the moaning, chattering, thoroughly demented souls surrounding her.

“Please,
please!”
she cried, “I’m not insane! My aunt—”

“’Tis what all the moon-mad say,” he interrupted, unmoved. With a practiced twist of his wrist he secured the lock.

Amid the cacophony of human misery rising around her, Sophie clutched the bars in desperation.

“No! Please!” she screamed. “I am
not
mad! ’Tis a mistake by the guards who captured my poor aunt! I’m
not
mad!”

The orderly ignored her loud protests and walked resolutely to his post with nary a backward glance.

***

The first days in Bethlehem Hospital were so harrowing that Sophie found herself observing her terrifying surroundings almost as if she were watching a tragedy acted on the stage. She soon discovered that the ordinary melancholiacs, with their sobs and silences, were the least threatening. However, the other frenzied, delirious souls who jabbered and raved around the clock often became like snarling animals, ready to attack. She had more than one bruise on her body to bear witness to this fact.

Oddly, there was an intermingling of the mad with the mere down and out: idlers, tramps, and petty criminals. They were quick to steal a comb or grab an extra morsel of food, and Sophie grew to be as wary of their behavior as of the raving maniacs.

Equally as ghastly as the mood permeating Bedlam was the sheer, desperate
idleness
of the detainees. The lunatics had virtually nothing to occupy them throughout the endless hours of their incarceration. Sophie’s quarters were filthy, and she and the others were shackled to the bed. Such barbarity in the name of medical science would be incomprehensible to anyone who had not witnessed it, she was certain. The physicians who ran Bedlam—and allowed ogling sightseers to peer at the inmates, manacled, naked, and sleeping in foul straw—also prescribed regular blood letting, vomiting, and purges.

“We must drive out the devil!” one physician’s aide mumbled grimly as he forced a feeding tube down Sophie’s throat after she refused to take a purgative.

The prevalent notion that these medicinals cleansed the body of ill humors prompted all manner of experiments on the patients. Behind the walls of the incongruously majestic building whose front portals were flanked by the famous statues depicting Mania and Melancholy, Sophie found herself strapped into a swing and rocked for five hours until she was so nauseated, she wished only to die. This, she learned through a conversation overheard between the institution director, Dr. John Monro, and an asylum worker, was part of a new trend in experimentation.

“Therapeutic science, old chap!” the doctor had pronounced gravely. “Mechanical chairs and those swings over there get the blood circulating… siphon off the poisonous humors, don’t you know. ’Tis the latest thing!”

***

As June melded into July and the heat and close confines of her cell brewed unimaginably foul odors, Sophie thought of suicide for the first time in her eighteen years. After six weeks in Bedlam, she could no longer conjure Hunter’s handsome face or David Garrick’s kindly features to soothe her terror. She gazed enviously at her aunt, who seemed oblivious to her surroundings. Harriet Ashby had retreated into a world disturbed only by the rhythmic banging of her gray head against the cell’s stone walls. Sophie, in contrast, was only too aware of the horrendous catastrophe that had befallen them both.

One Sunday in early August, Sophie gazed past the clutch of writhing, sobbing women in her cell to stare at a group of visitors who were being conducted, for their apparent amusement, through the asylum by none other than Dr. Monro himself. The callers were kept at a distance for safety’s sake, but Sophie could only stare at an extraordinarily tall gentleman, accompanied by a round-faced companion.

“Hunter! Bozzy?” she screamed, and then burrowed her head under the foul straw at the bottom of the filthy chamber, concluding that she had seen an apparition and was, at last, going mad. Toward the end of August, as the hot days continued to make Bedlam a living hell, the squat, burly man who was so expert at forcing feeding tubes down patients’ throats inserted a large key in the lock of Sophie’s cell and poked his head in. His eyes surveyed the human wreckage scattered about the abominable chamber.

“You,” he bawled, pointing at Sophie. “Sit up, miss… and don’t you be tryin’ any tricks on old Gus, will you now? Put on this smock.”

Sophie stared dumbfounded as he unlocked her shackles. Her ankles felt light as swans feathers as she followed him out of the cell and down the hallway. Eventually they entered a well-appointed chamber so flooded with sunlight, she had to squint. Brushing her matted hair out of her eyes, she stared with astonishment at the sight of several people taking tea with the infamous Dr. Monro.

“Ah… here’s the lass,” Dr. Monro said graciously, as if he were introducing an honored guest. “Your friends have come for you, Sophie, my dear,” he said, gesturing toward a plump woman whose gloved hands Sophie knew to be stained with various tinctures she compounded for her clients at the Green Canister.

“Mrs. Phillips!”
Sophie cried joyfully, but before she could truly assimilate the reality of her neighbor’s presence in this comfortable sitting room, Hunter Robertson rose to his full height, setting down his tea cup on the rosewood table provided for their convenience.

She stared at him, openmouthed, convinced as she had never been of anything in her life, that he was a cruel specter come to haunt her nightmares in this ghastly hall of horrors.

“Sophie?
Sophie?”
Hunter gasped, visibly shaken by the sight of her matted hair, her painfully thin body, and the dark bruises that formed smudged crescents under her hollow eyes.

She moved toward him in a trance, her bare feet padding softly on the Turkey carpet. Sophie glanced at its rich ruby colors and recalled its near twin in the equally well-appointed sitting room of the lecherous Lord Lemore. She stood stock-still. This
had
to be part of her nightmare. She would waken to the bitter reality that there was no one to save her. No one to breach the high thick walls that had closed off her world for more than two months.

“Sophie, pet… ’tis me,” Hunter said softly, taking note of the wild, tormented look that had flickered in her haunted eyes. He reached out and grasped her hand gently. “Yes, dear heart… ’tis truly me… Hunter… come to take you away from here.”

Mrs. Phillips extended a packet to Dr. Monro.

“Here ’tis… as we agreed,” she said shortly. She stood up abruptly. “We’d best get Sophie home and scrubbed up. I don’t know what you’ve been dosing her with, but I suggest fewer purgatives for your patients and more hearty beef broth. The lass is as thin as a pike!”

“Wouldn’t want this… uh… unfortunate mistake to be bandied about, now would we?” Dr. Monro said quietly, refusing to accept the packet Mrs. Phillips had proffered to him. “I’ll need your promise on that before I release her.”

“This
mistake,
as you deem it, doctor, has done great harm, as you can plainly see,” Hunter said in a low, angry voice.

“But the tale will remain among
us,”
Mrs. Phillips pronounced with a warning glance in Hunter’s direction. She pushed the packet into Monro’s hands. “We bid you good day.”

“Aunt Harriet…” Sophie insisted weakly, pulling against Hunter’s supporting arm. “We c-can’t leave Aunt Harriet.”

“Now, any attempt to defend
her
sanity is quite fruitless, you know,” Dr. Monro said crisply. “She ran naked through Covent Garden in front of dozens of witnesses!”

“Your aunt must stay,” Hunter said gently, once again taking Sophie’s arm firmly in his.

“I’ve seen with my own eyes the last stages of the syph,” Mrs. Phillips added bluntly. “Your uncle John was a danger to the entire neighborhood. Mice nibblin’ cheese, remember,” she said, pointing to her skull, “and when there’s no cheese
left…”

“No!” wailed Sophie. “No… no… NO! We c-can’t leave her in this… ghastly…
pit!”

Dr. Monro’s chin jutted forward with an injured air. “How
dare
the chit rant on like this!” he fumed. “She’s mad, too, I tell you, and shouldn’t be allowed on the streets! I wash my hands of her!” he pronounced pompously. “Don’t think you can bring her back here! I’m finished with her!”

“You’ve been highly paid to release her,” Hunter said icily. “And you know full well her wits are no more addled than yours!”

In the midst of the argument, tears had begun to course Sophie’s cheeks, but she couldn’t seem to speak or even make a sound. Hunter stared down at her, concern etched on his handsome features. Abruptly, he scooped her up in his arms and carried her to the hired coach whose driver waited patiently outside the hospital’s impressive facade. Sophie gazed listlessly through exhausted eyes at the horses pawing the ground near the large statue depicting a weeping giant. The bronze plaque on the base dubbed it Melancholy. Suddenly, Sophie herself began to weep loud, convulsive sobs.

’Twas just like the Tolbooth
—
only worse!
she thought distractedly, raising her head above Hunter’s broad shoulder to stare in horror at the statue’s tortured features. Poor, benighted Aunt Harriet. She would die in this horrible place, just as surely as Daniel McGann had died of jail fever. And she, Sophie, would live with her guilt over that for the rest of her life.

Book 3

1763-1764

Players, Sir! I look on them as no better than creatures set upon tables… to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.

—Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell,
The Life of Samuel Johnson

Ten

Sophie remembered little of her first few days of freedom. She dimly recalled Hunter carrying her up the stairwell to her lodgings at Half Moon Passage and putting her to bed. Her unsettled sleep those first fitful nights was filled with repetitious nightmares, dreams that pulled her back into the filth and horror of Bedlam. And always in her dreams there was the sound of Aunt Harriet’s keening cry—echoing her own feelings of helplessness and terror. Sometimes Sophie would waken to discover the entreaties were her own, at which point Hunter would rise from the pallet on the floor of the printing chamber to soothe and cosset her until she fell back to sleep.

Several days after her liberation from Bedlam she was roused by the sound of a loud thump-thumping up the stairs outside the landing that separated her chambers from those of Mrs. Phillips.

“Blast and bother!”
a familiar voice cursed.

Then the door swung open on its hinges, crashing with a thud into the wall. Hunter entered the room walking backward, dragging a large tin tub in his wake. Before Sophie could greet him, he disappeared down the stairs once again, reappearing several minutes later with two steaming buckets of water which he poured into the container. Again, he descended the outside stairs and returned with two more pails of water he’d fetched from the well behind the Green Canister and blended the contents with the others. Sophie propped her head on one hand and drank in the sight of his broad shoulders and luxuriant hair pulled back neatly, periwig style, and secured with a black ribbon.

“I quite like you as my lady’s maid,” she said softly.

Hunter glanced up from the packet of dried flowers he was spooning into the bath.

“Ah… at last… Her Nibs awakes… and saucy as ever, I’m glad to see,” Hunter replied. “’Tis a welcome sign you’re on the mend.” He pointed to the potpourri he was holding over the steaming tub. “Mrs. Phillips’s notion,” he laughed. “She swears ’twill soothe your body
and
your mind—for a mere sixpence, of course.”

“Mmm… smells like heather and roses.”

Hunter gave the packet a sniff.

“I do believe you’re on the mark, poppet. Now c’mon… in with you. I’ll let you have your bath while I accomplish a few errands.”

Disappointed that he planned to depart so soon, Sophie shyly wrapped the bed linen around her thin body and padded toward the center of the room.

“I must look like a skeleton… an
exhumed
skeleton at that. I’ve not washed my hair in months,” she said.