Chapter 18 #3
“Where are they taking us?” she asked Thomas Hardy, who sat across from her, whistling despite one eye swelling shut.
“Watch house,” he said cheerfully. “We’ll make our bed in the hole tonight an’ be hauled afore the justice o’ the peace in the mornin’. You’ll be turned loose, miss, but it’s the Old Bailey for me, I don’t doubt. Hanged or transported, if Pitt has his way. He’s been out for my hide for months.”
Henrietta put a hand on her neck. “I am very sorry,” she choked.
Her stomach clenched at the thought of being brought up on charges.
What would her father say? Or Charley? Aunt Althea would never allow a criminal in Marsibel’s company.
And she would certainly never be made a votary of the Minerva Society if she were sent to prison.
She felt cold all the way to her fingertips. Oh, what had she done?
At the end of a painful, bouncing journey, she and her fellow passengers stumbled out of the coach in front of the Bishopsgate watch house, a shabby building set amid a reeking fen.
She smelled unwashed bodies and bad food, the lime thrown down to cover the rotting stench, the sooty smell of burning coal, and beyond that, the fetid reek of the river.
A watchman herded her down a dark, damp hallway into a room equally close and rank-smelling.
“You’ll get yer answers in the morn, when ’is worship speaks to ye,” he snarled as he shoved her roughly through a wooden door. “Me, I’d leave ye ’ere to rot with the rest of the blowsabellas.” And the door slammed shut in her face.
“Oi, brush off, ye clod’opper,” a female voice screeched.
Henrietta turned and sneezed as the smoke from a rush light insulted her nose. An urge to cry tightened her throat, and she swallowed it. She’d argued that women needed to cultivate strength of mind and character. Well, here was her chance to prove her case.
Blinking her eyes to clear them of tears, she looked around the room and made out dim shapes. She stood in a long, narrow cell with a stone bench running along one side and a dark window letting in dim lamplight at one end. Several women looked her over from head to toe.
“This’un wears ’er bedgown to work,” one snickered, fingering a ruffle on Henrietta’s sleeve. “Rolled ye right out o’ the sack, did ’e? What’s a matter—didn’t like the taste of ’is sugar stick?”
The lump in her throat turned to panic.
“’Igh-end wares,” observed another, tugging at Henrietta’s skirts. “Not Covent Garden, then, or I’d a seen ye! Where ye from, spooney? Cheapside? Drury Lane? Seven Dials?”
“Not the Dials,” snorted a third. “Not a pox scar on ’er.
That’s a fine and fancy gown the Bartholomew doll ’as.
I think me wants it.” In the dim light, Henrietta saw the wicked gleam of the other woman’s eyes through layers of heavy makeup.
She took a step backward. In a moment, she saw, she was about to be swarmed by a horde of women, and if she didn’t think quickly, she was going to end up naked and bleeding, with her eyes clawed out.
“I was…at the London Tavern,” Henrietta said, trying to sound authoritative.
As she edged backward, the stone seat hit the back of her knees, and she fell onto it.
“I thought I was leading a debate on the rights of women. The recourse of dependents and why women should be educated.” She surveyed the faces of the women around her, which ranged from scornful to disbelieving, and covered her mouth with her hand.
“I had a very fine argument prepared as to why women should be allowed to govern themselves so they don’t end up—”
“’Ere,” said an older woman, the most well-dressed of the bunch. “’At’s wot happens to those as shift for themselves.” She kicked at the thin straw pallet lying on the floor, one bed to serve the entire group. “We end up ’ere, we do.”
“Evidently,” Henrietta said in a tiny voice.
These were the women she was arguing for.
She oughtn’t be terrified of them. They were merely women bereft of protectors, left to live by their own wits and skills.
Women who didn’t give a fig for the Society she had tried so hard to enter because they had seen that society level its punishing hand against them, as it did to all women who would not keep to their place.
She had never felt so small or quite so helpless, not even when she was at Miss Gregoire’s, waiting for her father to recall her.
Who was going to help her now? Jasper was away, her uncle might not know for hours or days what had happened, and Charley—Charley might very well wash his hands of her.
This debacle could sink her with her family for once and all.
She would have to get herself out. She rubbed her eyes, straightened her shoulders, and set aside the hand that was fingering the lace at her sleeve.
Henrietta Wardley-Hines, bluestocking, reformer, and advocate of rights for women, did not slump in a filthy cell in the watchhouse and cry about her woes.
“Very well, then. Here we are, and here we cannot stay. What gets us out of here?”
“You do.” The older woman bent at the waist and looked Henrietta in the eye. “You get us out of here, spooney, an’ you’ll get to keep your fancy frock, and your pretty little neck along with it.”