Excerpt: City Mouse, Country Mouse***

A Novel
by Carol Rachael Rose Jaye

[***Currently has only a BAD working title based on the Aesop fable. Readers--PLEASE HELP!!!!!]

Epigram:

". . . [T]hat most sedative of all fever draughts, high birth and low means . . . the change from the brocade to the huckaback of life. . . . "

--Rosina Bulwer Lytton,
"Two Ghost Stories,"
Shells from the Sands of Time (1876)

PART the FIRST:
Huckaback

Chapter One

On a stormy forenoon, in a sopping-wet gown, in the parlour of the vicarage near Saint George the Martyr’s Church in Borough High Street, and in full view of witnesses, Johanna Lytton finally said “I do.”

I should know. I was one of those privileged to be present. My mates Cal and Puddles were the others. None of us would have missed the historic moment for all the shite in Hercules’ fabled livery—before he started shovelling.

My arse was out the window. Literally. So was Cal’s, if perhaps to a lesser degree. I stood squarely in the mud outside the vicarage with my head poking in at an open window so as to view the whole spectacle to best advantage. Cal perched—no, let me be honest—I must call it what it was—lounged on the sill with his feet dangling.

Puddles—so nicknamed for his inexplicable fondness of just such unfortunate weather as that which I herein recall—kept sketch at the outer door. It wouldn’t do for anyone to come upon poor Miss Johanna now, least of all that villain Sowersneade. Or young master Shad, for the matter of that. He wouldn’t have liked the proceedings at all, I felt certain.

The “I do’s” were a casual affair, and I thought nothing of munching an apple as I looked on, but I heard every word, believe me.

“Then,” the priest continued, “do you, Johanna, accept this—this—Drake MacLachlan to become yer wedded husband?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Are ye sure, child?”

“Yes, Mr. Eachan. For heaven’s sake, we’ve been over it fourscore and fifty times.”

The Reverend Mr. Eachan tsk-tsked and shook his head. “Do ye truly believe yer problems will be solved thereby?”

(Cal rolled his eyes and overtly, unashamedly yawned.)

“I do. Of course I do, or I wouldn’t even be considering it.”

“You choose danger—”

“No, freedom!”

“—and the loss of the final shreds of yer already tattered reputation—”

“Yes, I do!”

“—even over yer typical good sense and my own innumerable misgivings?”

“Mr. Eachan,” Johanna said in a quieter, calmer tone, laying a rain-dampened hand over the aging vicar’s, “I have to do this. There is no other way.”

“Flapdoodle, lass! There are countless other ways!”

“Suggest one!”

Perhaps it was as well, I thought, that the potential groom was not actually present. Miss Johanna went on:

“I am destitute, Mr. Eachan. For a young lady of my class, that is paramount to a sentence either of death or of intimate personal ruin. My only tolerable choices are to find work—and options as to what sort of work remain painfully slim, for a girl in my position—or to marry. Would you have me accept the ‘tender’ and fully ‘self-sacrificing’ proposals of Mr. Sowersneade—especially after what happened in the livery?”

“No, my colleen-bawn, certainly not, but—”

“Oh. Then perhaps you’d prefer I set up shoppe in that oldest of professions open to penniless women?”

Mr. Eachan massaged the lines between his eyes.

“Johanna, ’tis only that . . . ye know nothing of this man MacLachlan.”

“I know enough.”

“As do I, where it comes to that! He’s a Scot, for God’s sake.”

It was now Miss Johanna who rolled her eyes.

“Do ye even know from what corner of Scotland he hails?” Mr. Eachan asked.

“No . . . although I can tell you that he doesn’t speak like the Edinburgh doctor who attended Papa.”

“Merciful Heaven” (Mr. Eachan winced and pinched his forehead), “a Highlander! ’Tis tantamount to his being utterly, irredeemably heathen! Worse—he’s probably a Presbyterian!” He groaned.

Johanna bit her lip but couldn’t restrain it from tugging upward at one corner. “This, from an Irish Protestant.”

Mr. Eachan wagged a warning finger. “We’re—we’re speakin’ of—of him, not of me!” He roached his thick greying locks away from his stress-knotted temples, then snapped up a poker and sparred with the hearthcoals until they surrendered and agreed to blaze with a healthier roar. “For God’s sake, lass, wring your skirts again and get yerself closer by the fire, here—else ye’ll soon enough be followin’ after yer da (poor, luckless fellow!).”

Johanna sidled up to the warmth.

“Now. If ye be so keen to cross the border into the upcountry, I beg ye one final time, let me write and apply to your Aunt Kenington.”

“She’d never have me. Nor would I wish to be dependent upon or beholden to someone so entirely out of countenance with Papa.”

“Are ye sure ’tisn’t only that your pride’ll not permit ye to—?”

“Pride!” Johanna snorted. “I’ve none left.”

Mr. Eachan favoured her with a knowing smile. “Aye. Ye have.”

She turned from him and twined her hands. “Two years in debtors’ prison tends to strip away the final vestiges of pride, of worth, of self-respect. I can never again hold my head up, among our old friends and neighbours. It’s why I need to leave this city, if I can.”

“And your Highlander? Does he know that until you come of age, you haven’t a farthing’s dowry? That you’re blessed your father (God rest him) set aside any means for you at all, in such a way his creditors could never lay a finger on it? That you sleep in the stables rather than throwing yourself on the parish or accepting that reprehensible turnkey’s charity?”

“I—I haven’t quite explained all that to him,” she admitted. “Not yet.”

“Mmm.” Mr. Eachan plopped onto a long, highbacked settle and slapped his palms to his black-trousered thighs, in which attitude he braced himself for several moments. “At the very least, allow me to perform the ceremony here, before you depart with the ruffian.”

“I’d like that, sir—of all things—but the gentleman has impressed upon me that we’ve no time to lose—”

(“Doubtless he has,” the priest muttered.)

“—and that before he ever met me or knew aught of my predicament, he’d already intended to depart for Scotland tonight.”

“Your papa would not have approved of this business, Johanna. Any of it.”

“He wouldn’t approve of my tossing myself, like some sort of . . . soupbone reward, to that dog Orham Sowersneade, either. Not even to ensure that our debts would finally be paid, as I’m painfully aware they still must be.”

“But my girl, your reputation—!”

“If Papa cared so much for reputation, either his or my own—or for my future marriage prospects—then perhaps he should have considered them before he invested everything we had in that—that—wretched railroad scheme, and proceeded to spend a projected fortune before a shilling of it had been made!”

Streaming water curtained the doorway to the bowered stoop, and washed roof, walls, and closed windows free of soot and coal-smoke, thoroughly obscuring vision of the churchyard and drowning any sounds from without, whilst (I hoped) muffling from the outside world, all discussion within. Rising wind caught and mingled the scents of wet clay, raw fish, street offal, rotting cabbage, prison sweat, gin, and even furlongs-away river-filth, and hurried them under our noses, through the parlour’s one open window, for our little group’s olfactory review. A percussion of thunder bammered at the stained glass of the nearby sanctuary. The rain seemed in a fair way to carry off the city—bearing all of Southwark in a flood down the Thames to the sea—rinsing out every colour around us but grey. Now Miss Johanna’s tears joined the downward flow, and Mr. Eachan hugged and patted and comforted her as he might, until at least the indoor storm had passed.

“Is there absolutely nothing I may do to sway you from this ill-founded course?” he asked.

Johanna sniffled and dried her eyes with a clean, if still somewhat rain-damp, linen handkerchief she kept tucked in a pocket of her (at that moment) soaked, plastered dress. “No, Vicar. Nothing.”

Mr. Eachan sighed. “You’re quite resolved? Well, at least you had the wisdom to consult with me first—even if you stubbornly refuse all the counsel ye came for.”

Cal smirked (or so it seemed to me). We both knew Miss Johanna had come, not to “consult,” but merely to apprise.

The priest paced a turn or two. “I’ll be questioned, ye know. And the law will follow you to Scotland. Ye’ll ne’er be entirely spared harassment by your father’s creditors until the last of his bills have been settled.”

“I . . . know.”

Another paternal sigh. “Have ye any money at all, child?”

Johanna nodded. “From the sale of the last of our belongings, and what little I took in, beyond our needs for living, through making sewing-repairs and suchlike.”

“Pocket change.” Mr. Eachan shook his head. “Shall I keep your beloved Copernicus in trust for you here?”

“Thank you, no. Mr. MacLachlan says that his own mount, which he expressly brought down to London rather than hiring a job-horse—”

“Aye, so I remember.”

“—must return in roughly the same way it came, and that there will be plenty of room for Copernicus in Fury’s company, whether they together pull a rig, trot alongside, or are shipped by animal-car.”

“I’d be very much doubting,” the priest said, chuckling, “that the beast you’ve described for me in such admiring terms would be permitted, never mind required, to pull his master’s coach.”

Miss Johanna smiled. “Likely not.” She crossed to the window in which Cal and I had stationed ourselves and affectionately stroked my muzzle. “But you wouldn’t mind the yoke and harness at all, would you, Copernicus?”

Mind? I should say I would! After all, I was no ordinary horse—and I’d already heard (and seen) more than enough of the “incomparable” Fury (ha!—hoity-toity!). But I was forced to own—if only to myself, in secret—that should Miss Johanna ask either that or anything else of me, with that engaging light in her hazel eye and that baby-satin warmth to her tone, I would agree in an instant, with neither a murmur of argument nor the barest hint of righteous indignation.

No. None at all!

I supposed I’d happily die for Miss Johanna—though I’d been relieved to hear her swear, not a day before, that she would never part with me to the knackerhouse, even for the money she so sorely needed! “They’ll never make glue or crinolines or cartwright’s grease of you,” she’d said. And good Mr. Eachan had promised that even if he bought me himself—which he would do, rather than hand me over to poor Mr. Lytton’s gaolers or creditors to be hauled away to labour (or the slaughter)—he would never afterward sell me, but would keep me till my death from age, and that Miss Johanna would certainly come to visit me and ride me, every day.

“Well, if there’s naught more to be said,” Mr. Eachan told her, clasping her small, pale hands in his own—liver-spotted but wide as hams and still obviously strong—“Godspeed. Ye’ll be ever in my prayers, my colleen-bawn.”

“I know, sir. Thank you . . . for everything.”

“Out of the gap, there, lads,” he said to Cal and me. “The breeze is that ‘kicked up,’ there begins to be water blowing in on my worn old carpet. Must protect what’s left of it!”

“Here, Calico,” said Johanna, gathering him into her arms and draping him over her shoulder for a caress of his wet-bristled marmalade fur (for, you should know from the outset, Cal wasn’t a true “calico” at all, as the term is more commonly used). “You, too, Puddles. Let’s be off.”

Puddles grinned and panted companionably (collies rarely bark, you know, unless it’s a matter of life or death) and dusted the air with his fernlike tail.

“Now whatever sort of wedding that Scots scoundrel suggests,” Mr. Eachan adjured Johanna, wagging a finger again, “insist he hold it in a proper church, on hallowed ground, with sufficient witnesses. And if he expects you to turn Presbyterian, too, you tell him no—no!—ye’re strictly C of E!”

“Yes, Mr. Eachan,” Johanna said, with an affectionate smile.

“They stand up, ye know, Presbyterians! No pews!”

“Perhaps they’re obliged to stand, to remain awake throughout a Wee Frees sermon!”

Mr. Eachan gaped. “Now, wherever on earth did ye hear them called the Wee Frees?”

But then he shoved my muzzle out into the churchyard and shut the casement against my hearing any more.

Your pardon: it suddenly occurs to me that if I am to relate to you the entire story of Miss Johanna’s plight, I should perhaps do better to begin with—well—the beginning. Naturally I wasn’t present for every scene that unfolded onstage of her life while in London—less often for those played out against the backdrop of the Scottish hills—but I shall strive to relate, with neither prejudice nor exaggeration, the full account as it came down to me, from Miss Johanna herself. She told me, of course, all about the incidents that led to her decision to flee with her brave Highland gentleman, recounting them for me in the most vividly possible colour and drama, the minutest detail!

She tells me everything, you know. . . .

Chapter Two

At the Queen’s Bench Prison, on the topmost storey, on a creaky wooden chair set in the stairwell, Johanna sat outside the cell she shared with her father, awaiting the doctor’s report. A cacophonous chorus of coughs, as of so many country bullfrogs tuning their vocals, sounded from nearly every room, on the Lyttons’ floor and on all those beneath, and—as if vainly keeping time for a coughers’ harmonic afternoon—water from a weeklong rain drip-dripped through an unsightly crack in the ceiling, into a bent metal pail at the head of the flight. Through a small, barred window, otherwise open to the elements without, Johanna heard the coos, dares, and laughter of children, the chatter of debtors’ wives, mild applause from the prison skittle-field, and the strangled cries of infants—colicky, teething, rash-damp under the nappies, or too long ignored and grown fretful—but these were the sounds she had heard every day, since late October 1845; and had so many of them not been heedless, almost happy sounds, entirely out of keeping with her own sober, anxious frame of thought, she would never even have noticed.

Plunk, plunk, plunk. Drip, drip, drip. The leaks alone, Johanna thought, were enough, in the Queen’s Bench, to drive one to madness and despair.

Then she saw it, downhall: a rat. Fat, grey-brown, beady-eyed and whiptailed. Sniffing, nuzzling, exploring a dingy corner in the corridor and scrabbling at the crack beneath the newest residents’ (Mr. and Mrs. Owings and their three children’s) door. Johanna’s lip tightened and she found herself drawing her heels up from the floor to a broken rung of the old chair, then all the way to the seat beneath her. She stretched her skirts protectively over her bent knees and pinioned the hems close around the straps of her mary-janes, ever keeping the meandering rat in her sights.

Blessedly, it was near the ratcatcher’s usual time. She hoped he hadn’t been delayed. It wouldn’t do, today of all days, for Papa to be unduly disturbed by the likes of that filthy creature, striving to claw its way up his bedclothes! And the two equally filthy men Johanna paid chummage, so that Papa might at least have his cell to himself—his privacy being particularly important now—were always (understandably) less willing to sleep in the passage or on the stair when there were rodents about. The men would come in the night hours, crying “rat,” begging readmittance to the Lyttons’ room—and then they’d charge extra to remain away. The last thing Johanna needed, with Papa so poorly—more money woes!

Both Calico and Puddles were respectable ratters, but at last count, Cal had been blissfully napping and Puddles making sure that Papa received the doctor’s foremost attentions.

Johanna eyed the scrounging rat. “Oh, do come!” she murmured to the absent ratcatcher’s-boy.

Beside her the door swung open. Mr Shaw sidled and skirted through the crack he’d left himself, clutching his black bag close to his legs, as if he were afraid that—permitted to open its maw too broadly—the cell behind might swallow him.

Johanna—the hall rat notwithstanding—leapt to her feet and bit her lower lip, anticipating.

Mr. Shaw pulled the door closed behind him and faced her, his expression discomfiting in its gravity. Then he did what Johanna had perhaps dreaded most: he sighed—one of those forlorn, hopeless sighs with which medical men always seemed to brace themselves, just before lowering the boom on their patients’ families.

“’Tis the pneumonia, Miss Lytton,” he said. “There can nae longer be any doubt of it. I’m sorry.”

“But . . . but you said it was only a headcold! that perhaps it might turn to bronchitis if we didn’t carefully mind it, but that if I kept him warm and dry and continued faithfully dosing him with the cordial you brought—”

Mr. Shaw forestalled any further protestations with a quick nod-nod of his white-bearded chin. “That was before, lass,” he said. “He’s a case of the rales, now.”

“The . . . the rails?” Johanna squinted her incomprehension.

Hmph!—hadn’t Papa already had “a case of the rails” once too often in his forty-odd years?

“A bad way o’ breathin’, lass. A cross between rattles and wheezes. I can hear the sound in his chest.”

“But how, how did he get so bad so quickly?”

“’Tis the damp, miss. I see it all the time, almost moreso in these places than in any others in the city.”

She swallowed. “Is . . . he in danger?”

The lines deepened in Mr. Shaw’s leathery cheeks and around his keen brown eyes. “I’m afraid so.”

“Well . . . well, what do we do?”

“There’s precious little to be done, miss. He should reach a crisis by tonight. We’ll know more then.”

“A . . . a crisis?”

“A turning point in the fever and chills, and in the severity of pain in his lungs.” Mr. Shaw stepped forward and placed a roughened brown hand on Johanna’s shoulder, squeezing firmly, as if to bolster her. “He’ll make it past that point, or he’ll not. That’s all, lass. I wish I had better news for ye . . . but I think it best ye prepare yerself, just in case.”

“Oh, merciful God!”

“Bear up, now. If these are to be yer father’s final hours, he’ll need ye more than ever to be strong and of comfort to him.”

Johanna’s heart flipped and hammered, blood sang in her ears, her mind raced. Meanwhile her feet went numb, and her stomach wrung itself like an old hearthrag. She barely managed a nod.

“I’ll be ’round again directly with a stronger mustard,” said Mr. Shaw.

“Oh, no—no, please! Must we continue with those dreadful plasters? They pain Papa so. Have you looked under the last you dressed him in?—they’re blistering his skin raw! I don’t think he can take much stronger measures!”

“I’m sorry, Miss Lytton. I can well understand yer grief. But burning the sickness out of his chest is yer father’s only chance, now.”

Johanna rubbed at her forehead.

Mr. Shaw turned, bag in hand, and began the tortuous descent to the prison’s lower levels.

“Th-thank you, Mr. Shaw,” she called after him. “I—I can pay you today,” she added.

“Nae need, lass. I’ve been all settled up with.”

“What—? But who—?” Then it dawned on her. Tears welled and stung at her eyes. “Mr. Eachan! Oh, he’s too, too good to us!”

“No,” Mr. Shaw shouted up the stair. “Not Mr. Eachan, miss. Mr. Sowersneade.”

The doctor rounded the landing and continued the long climb down to the turnkey’s lodge, leaving Johanna behind him, first gaping, then tightening her lips and (with a swelled breath) her ribs.

Sowersneade. Again.

It may have been a horrified glance aside, which once more brought into view the scavenging rat near the Owings’ door, that gave Johanna the unwelcome thrill of a bodily shiver—or it may have been the familiar upward plod, the familiar tap of a certain brass-ferruled cane, the familiar voice oiling the handrail--a voice that buoyed up from the stairwell’s hollows, resonating along the stained, chipped walls of the prison:

“Pray, did I hear my name spoken, Miss Lytton?”

Johanna clutched at her midriff. Suddenly her stays felt too tight in the laces. Before she could dodge inside, the easily-recognised pie-round face, framed in dripping mustard locks and bedecked in its typical costume—shining nose, a picket fence of overlapping teeth, a perpetual leer—rose into view on the steps. “Did I, Miss Lytton, pray?”

“No—that is—yes, Mr. Sowersneade. Mr. Shaw only just related to me that you had been so—good as to—cover his services to Papa, and—we are most obliged, I’m sure.”

“Tut-tut,” said Sowersneade, continuing to rise as might a stage-demon from the trapdoor of hell. “A trifle, Miss Lytton—a trifle. At your service. No call for thanks amongst friends, I think, Miss Lytton? No. None in the least.”

“I will repay you of course.”

Johanna had her hand on the knob to her and her father’s room, but Sowersneade had reached the top and was tapping his way toward her, stopping only to remove his greasy beaver hat and perform an elaborate bow. He waved away the very notion of accepting reimbursement. “How does your father today, Miss Lytton (if I may make so bold as to ask)? Oh, dear—Mr. Shaw has returned no bad news, I hope?”

Johanna relinquished the knob (frankly, in an effort to keep the gaoler from entering with her) and twisted her hands in despair. “Indeed, sir, he—he—he’s not at all certain—”

“Say no more, Miss Lytton—say no more.” Sowersneade shook his yellow head. “My, my. So it’s come to such a pass as this, has it? I’m that sorry to hear it, Miss Lytton. The sympathies of the entire community are with you, I’m sure.”

Sympathies?

Sympathies?

“Papa’s not gone yet, Mr. Sowersneade.”

“No!—no. Why, now,” he clucked, “did I say—? Did I offend, Miss Lytton? For if I did utter anything in the least amiss, I do most humbly beg your pardon. No harm meant—no harm meant!”

Johanna recalled herself, and her manners. “No. No, I’m sorry. It’s just
that . . . .”

“Tut-tut,” Sowersneade repeated, “say no more! You’ve received ill tidings, Miss Lytton, you’re upset. Anyone with heart to feel or eyes to see, would understand.”

“Thank you.”

“May I pay my respects to your good father, then? Offer a bit o’ cheer? He and I have become such particular friends, you know, Miss Lytton.”

(Johanna bravely tamed a momentary urge to retch.)

“Two years!” Sowersneade went on, with a tsk-tsk and a shake of the mustard locks. “You and your honoured father have been amongst us for the space of two years, to the day, come exactly—” (here he clicked open and glanced at his watch, as if it aided his memory) “—five weeks, three days from this’un, if I ain’t mistaken? Two years, Miss Lytton!—one of the family!”

Johanna indulged in a cleansing breath. “Yes, Mr. Sowersneade. Two years.”

“May I see him, then?”

“He isn’t at all well, sir—”

“No,” said Sowersneade, lowering his voice to a husky whisper, “I daresay. Only a peep, Miss Lytton. I’ll be quiet as a church mouse.”

Johanna sighed, though as discreetly as she might. “Very well. Please come in.”

“Don’t mind if I do, Miss Lytton. Don’t mind if I do.”

She immediately crossed to her father’s cot, where he lay swathed in blankets, and shooed away some fleas she saw leaping atop them. Sowersneade had followed her inside, where he found himself coldly greeted by the family collie—but Puddles had long ago given over outwardly growling at him. The warden’s . . . intrusions (as Puddles saw them—and in those particular views, Puddles was far from alone) were commonplace enough.

The air inside the cell smelled heavily of stale sweat and calid linens, laudanum and cough syrup.

“Papa.” Johanna spoke softly, perching on the edge of his pinstriped ticking and searching the blanketed lumps to find which were his hands, that she might take them into her own. “Here’s Mr. Sowersneade. Do you need anything?”

Mr. Lytton’s eyes, although bloodshot and red-rimmed with fever, were open. He made strange, dry noises in his throat, as if he were striving to find his voice, but settled for shaking his head.

Meanwhile, Sowersneade stood tapping his walking-stick and appeared deep in thought. “Church mouse . . . church mouse,” he muttered. Then he said to Johanna, “You’ll . . . perhaps be wanting your family friend?”

“Family friend?”

“The priest of whom your father is so passing fond.”

Johanna studied her father’s pale, anguished face. “Would you, Papa? Would you like to have Mr. Eachan in to pray with you?”

Mr. Lytton smiled.

“Yes,” Johanna said, with a nod, to Sowersneade, “please, by all means.”

“Shall I send for him, then?”

“That—that would indeed be a kindness in you, sir.”

Sowersneade bowed. “Consider it done, Miss Lytton . . . Mr. Lytton. Quite. Already taken care of.”

Sowersneade tap-tapped his way into the corridor once more and shut the Lyttons’ door behind him, then fell to shouting at the tops of his powerful lungs:

“Fisk! Jem Fisk! Where are ya, you worthless knave?”

Johanna bounced up from the bedside and hurried to the door with a mind to insisting that Mr. Sowersneade considerately lower his voice; then thought better of it and tiptoed closer, to put her ear to the hinge. She could hear Sowersneade stalking down the steps, muttering.

“. . . idiot . . . numbskull . . . where the devil is he when I need him? . . . FISK!”

(He hollered so loudly that Johanna cringed, leapt back, and plugged her ear for a second. Then she crept once more to the doorframe.)

“Eeere,” she heard Fisk growl from the lower landing. The hunchback’s voice was like cartwheels over gravel—unmistakable, and (if possible) even more chilling than his employer’s. Johanna had never liked it.

“Go, you imbecile,” Sowersneade snapped, “run to George Martyr and fetch Father Paddywhack!”

“Ooo, sir?”

“Paddy. Irishman. Parish priest.”

“Izz name’s Aiken, Mr. Sowersneade. Haley Aiken.”

“Whatever,” muttered Sowersneade in a throwaway fashion.

“I’ve seen it writ. Ee spells it E-A-C-H—”

“Never mind that, you shambling hat rack! Fetch him here—at once, d’ya hear? Old Shaw’s given Lytton his notice, he’ll be off to meet his Maker within the hour, and the daughter’s distressed. Distressed, Fisk. Are you listening to a word I’ve said?”

“Distressed. Yes. I understand you, Mr. Sowersneade.”

“Then begone. Hurry. Mind you don’t come back without the Irishman!”

“Yes, Mr. Sowersneade. Er . . . no, Mr. Sowersneade.”

Johanna heard Fisk limp away and Sowersneade turn to reclimb the stairs to her father’s room, once more mumbling under his breath (“. . . the cheek! . . . and to think it was I who undertook to teach that perversion of Nature some lettering!”). She was just about to gather her skirts and dash back to her father’s bedside, when she heard Sowersneade pull up short and give a loud, angry thump of his cane on the step.

“Damn me! There’ll be nobody on the lock till that oaf returns!”

. . . which remembrance apparently led him to whirl in his place and head downward, tap-and-plod, tap-and-plod, for the lodge and its mazelike string of iron gates.

A weak, tired voice from behind Johanna croaked:

“So, then. Have you sent old Sowsfeet packing?”

“Papa.” She returned to her station at his bedside. “You really shouldn’t call him that, you know.”

“So you keep warning me.”

“Well, one day he’ll hear you.”

Even as the words left her lips Johanna realised her father might no longer have a “one day” to which to look forward.

“A fine and befitting name for him,” her father said, coughing. “The man’s a pig.”

“He doesn’t seem to like Mr. Eachan at all.”

“All the more reason for us not to like him.”

Johanna busied herself resettling her papa’s pillows and blankets. Puddles took the opportunity to near the bed and lick his master’s cheek.

“Oh, Puddles, don’t,” said Johanna. “Not now.”

“It’s all right. Leave him. I rather like it. Especially now.”

“Not you, too!” Johanna said—not to her father, but to Calico, who had chosen that moment to leap from a shelf in a niche on the wall, onto Mr. Lytton’s coverlets, and to make himself comfortable in a furry orange ball between the man’s blanketed knees.

“There, there, Jo,” said her father. “Never you mind it. I want them near me.”

“But Papa, you can scarce breathe as it is. You’ll be covered in cat’s-hairs.”

Mr. Lytton chuckled . . . then coughed . . . and was soon wheezing and grimacing in pain.

“Papa!”

“It’s nothing, Jo. You mustn’t . . . fret so,” he managed between gasps. “And later on, if Puddles should . . . take it into his . . . head to . . . to climb up and
. . . sleep across my legs, you must . . . allow him. It’s good for me, you . . . know. Keeps me warmer.”

Johanna shook her head. “Papa.”

“Is Shaw . . . coming back?”

“Yes, Papa. This evening. Do you need your medicine?”

“Bea—” Mr. Lytton coughed. “—beastly stuff.”

“All the same,” Johanna muttered, pouring a few drops of laudanum into a glass of water already standing by for the purpose and stirring it with a tiny spoon. She aided her father in raising his head long enough to sip the solution.

“I . . . I should have liked . . . to walk in the park once more,” he said.

“Papa, don’t speak so.”

He attempted another light-hearted chuckle. “I should have liked another morning to loiter about ’Change, swapping snuff and gossip. I should have liked another truly fine cup of tea!”

Johanna fought back a tear. “Papa, do stop. You’re going to be well again very soon, you’ll see.”

He smiled. “No one makes so perfect a cup of tea as you do, my darling. Unless of course it was your mother.”

Johanna smiled, too. “I shouldn’t have thought Mother spent much time presiding over teapots.”

“No. No, indeed. She was a firebrand. My wild Scottish lass. No, she much preferred her beloved horses. She could spend all day in a stable or paddock—simply currying, petting, feeding them. Talking to them.”

“You’ve often told me.”

“You’re so like her that way. You and your Copernicus. Never to be parted from him, are you?”

Johanna, still smiling, shook her head. “Not though one even finer should come along.”

“Finer? Than Copernicus? I wouldn’t tell him, my dear, that you so much as believe any such may exist.”

“He is rather vain, isn’t he?”

“He does appear,” Mr. Lytton said, with what levity he could muster, “to have one or two definite notions of the relative magnitude of his own grandeur. But perhaps in those opinions he is justified. I still say he has a wise sort of look about him. And he’s certainly captured your heart. Someday there may be many a young gentleman who will concur that by virtue of that conquest, Copernicus has every right to pride and arrogance.”

“Papa . . . . ”

“I believe the trouble, Jo,” Mr. Lytton said in a conspiratorial murmur, “is that he doesn’t realise he’s only a Yorkshire cob.”

“Cob? I must say, Papa, I think that a bit coarse and unfair.” She laughed.

She almost didn’t hear the low tap at the door.

Giving her father a settling pat, she arose to see who it could be.

Outside stood the ratcatcher’s-boy. The minute Johanna swung open the door, he stepped backward and—bowing his head so that he surely saw more of the toes of Johanna’s slippers than he saw of her face—yanked off his cap and tugged his forelock to her. “Anything today, Miss?”

Always the same question, virtually every afternoon these two long years—“Any for me today, Miss?”—and almost always the same answer: “No, thank you, nothing today, praise goodness!” Occasionally Johanna or her father would be obliged to respond, “Indeed, do come in, we’ve a rash of them, all of the sudden!” or “I believe I did see one, just over in that direction, early this morning.”

Nearly every day for more than twenty months—yet Johanna suddenly felt stricken awkward, and a trifle ashamed: she did not even know the lad’s name (although she supposed her father did).

“No,” she said out of habit, “no, nothing today.”

The youth ducked his head, again tugged his coppery hair in deference to her, and took another step backward as if to go.

“Wait!—I beg your pardon,” she remembered all at once, “I did see one, a fat one, not an hour ago.”

The lad brightened, looked up with an eager face, and made a move forward as if to enter the Lyttons’ cell.

“Oh!—oh, no, not in here, it was in the corridor beside the Owings’ room.”

“The Owings, Miss?”

“Yes. I’m sorry—they’re new here. Here, let me show you.” Johanna stepped into the dingy passage, pulling the cell door to, behind her. The lad respectfully made way. Johanna led him around the rickety rail that cordoned off the plunging stairwell, past the worn wooden chair in which she had earlier perched, and pointed to a far corner. The rat did not appear to her to be any more in evidence, but the lad, beaming gratefully, nodded to her, and in two swift, practised movements, loosened a coarse burlap sack from the belt at his waist, then slipped a large protective mitt over his left hand and forearm.

“I’ll rout him in a flash, Miss. Much obliged.”

Obliged? What an odd thing to say! Wasn’t it she who ought feel obliged?

Johanna followed him a discreet pace or two nearer the Owings’ door, which was several cells away along the currently-deserted corridor. “You mean they only pay you, on any given day, to clear the prison of rodents if you can prove that you got at least one?”

“No, indeed, Miss. They don’t pay me at all, here.”

Johanna blinked. “Surely you’re bamming.”

“Not in the slightest, Miss.”

“Mr. Sowersneade gives you no money to place traps or to put about poison?”

“No indeed, Miss. But then, I’ve no wish to kill the rats I find—and traps only damage ’em, Miss.”

“D-damage them?”

All the while he spoke, the boy worked to feel along and examine the seam where the walls abutted—the stained, rotted wainscot—the mouldings—cracks along the ceiling. He even flopped flat onto his stomach a moment, studying crannies close by the floor and peering under some of the prisoners’ doors. “Cuts half through their backs, or chops off their tails,” he said with a grunt of effort. “Then there’s no sport in ’em.” A glance at Johanna’s livid expression raised the colour to his own noticeably pale cheeks. “Begging your pardon, Miss.”

“I’m sure I don’t understand. At any rate, I . . . I’m glad you’ve come.”

The lad straightened his back and looked full in her face for what she believed was the first time ever. “Are you really, Miss?”

“Yes. Papa’s terribly ill, you see, and—”

His forehead furrowed into lines born of what seemed genuine concern. “I’m heartily sorry to hear it, Miss.”

She hastily nodded her thanks. “—and I was afraid, sitting in the passage here while waiting for the doctor to conclude his visit, that I might be bitten.”

The young man smiled at her. “No, Miss. I shouldn’t think so. You’d have been quite safe . . . you, in your . . . your pretty yellow gown and all.” He coloured again and lowered his gaze.

It was Johanna’s turn to squirm with embarrassment. She’d felt silly all day long, wearing a pale yellow muslin print in a place like the Queen’s Bench, and in the growing chill of autumn; but she had kept only four dresses, and this was Papa’s favourite. She’d been telling herself all morning that it wouldn’t matter—who, after all, of any social importance or any discerning taste, would see her here? “W-what has my gown to do with it?”

“They doesn’t care for yellow, Miss. The rats. They steers clear of it when they can.”

“You can’t mean it! Whyever do they avoid yellow?”

The lad’s rain-grey eyes sparkled as he answered. Johanna had never before noticed what a friendly smile or eyes he had—but then, she’d never before really spoken with him. This afternoon she felt strangely . . . alone. Alone and in need of companionship, particularly that of someone near her own age—over fifteen, she decided, looking at him, although surely not yet one-and-twenty.

“Could be it’s like the light of day to ’em, Miss,” he said in soft, bashful tones. His gaze roved her gown from shoulder to hem—not in any disrespectful or lascivious fashion, she judged, only in a sort of quick appraisal—and he seemed to approve the effect. “Like sunshine indoors, Miss.”

“Oh. Well . . . why don’t you wear yellow, then?”

The lad chuckled. “I ain’t of mind to scare the little things away, Miss, the business I’m in. I earns more money if they comes to me.”

“But don’t they ever bite you?”

“Lor’ bless you, no, Miss. Not so very often, leastways. Not now I know what I’m about.”

“But . . . they used to do?”

He chuckled again. “All the time, Miss, in the beginning.”

Johanna shivered. She pulled her shawl closer about her shoulders and wrapped her arms around herself, hugging it in place.

The ratcatcher meanwhile raised a pale fist to rap at the Owings’ door. “Think he mighta gone into here, Miss,” he said in an aside to Johanna.

“Yes. Well, good fortune. I do hope you find . . . him.”

“Oh, no doubts there, Miss. I’m on him. He’ll not get past me. Thank you again, Miss, ever so much.”

Johanna nodded to the boy and ducked back into the Lyttons’ room. Papa was resting quietly enough except for a low rattling in his chest each time it rose or fell, but his face was lined, and his cheeks and ears reddened with fever, so she closed the door as soundlessly as she could muster and stepped to the basin to wring a fresh cloth for his forehead.

His eyes remained closed, but he smiled at her touch. “Did he get it?”

“No. Not yet.” She felt her own forehead wrinkle, as well, and when at last her father blinked, he appeared to her to notice her preoccupation. His face expressed his interest—a question as to where her thoughts had wandered. “Papa, is it true that rats are in some way repelled by the colour yellow?”

“I should think that but an old wives’ tale.”

“Still . . . a boy who works with rats all day, as his stock in trade . . . he’d know about such things, wouldn’t he?”

“I suppose he might.” Then her father broke into such a fit of laughter that he choked himself coughing in no time, and was forced by necessity to imbibe another spoonful of tonic.

“What?” Johanna wondered.

“I was only thinking,” he said with a mischievous grin, “that if indeed rats were frightened by the colour yellow, Old Sow's-Knees must live in mortal dread of his own hair.”

Johanna felt moved to laugh with him. “Remember the first day we saw him? You said it looked as if his hair were painted on?”

“And the paint had never dried!”

“Yes, and that it couldn’t possibly be a wig, because no one could reasonably manufacture false locks in that appalling shade!”

“Not until he goes. Then someone can shave him to make a fine set!”

“Perhaps for some poor soul whose work takes him often into the dark and in need of a constant beacon!”

“Like a night-watchman!”

“Better, a lamplighter!”

“There you are! He could simply ignite the evening flares with a touch of his head to the jets!”

The laughter was curative for Johanna . . . but not for her father, she could see. How could she have forgotten, for even a heartbeat, the dread seriousness of his condition? “Papa, you must lie more quietly now. You’re burning with fever. Does your chest hurt awfully?”

He wheezed. “I’ve . . . been better, certainly.”

Another knock at the door, which slowly creaked open a space, and a shaggy grey head inserted itself into the dismal little chamber. “Am I intruding, colleen?” asked Mr. Eachan, peeking in. “How is yer papa? I came as soon as I heard.”

“Thank you ever so much, sir!” Johanna rose to admit him and to place a chair for him beside the bed. “Papa will surely feel easier, now that you’re here. Look, Papa, it’s Mr. Eachan.”

The vicar took the seat proffered him and leaned forward so that he could speak in lowered tones. “How do ye do, Will? They tell me yer cold is much the worse.”

Mr. Lytton managed a weak smile. “Indeed, my friend. So much the worse that in spite of my having requested your presence myself, I perhaps should ask whether this is only a social call?”

Johanna thought that Mr. Eachan might be wondering that himself, and may have been hoping to ascertain the answer after he arrived. She saw him glance at the prayer-book and Bible he’d brought and still held clasped in his hands . . . along with a fringed wad of cloth that appeared to Johanna to be a stole of office. He betrayed no guilt or embarrassment, though, if indeed he felt any—only a hint of sadness. “Prayer never hurts,” he said simply. “Besides, are you going to let Angus Shaw decide whether ye go or stay, or do ye not think that’s rather more God’s province?”

“I was under the assumption that God had already made His choice, and that Mr. Shaw was simply the messenger.”

“Tell me, Will, when you were a wee lad, did ye ne’er ask yer da for aught but what ye were already pretty well convinced he’d grant? Even when ye figured ye would surely be denied, did ye never simply take a chance?”

Mr. Lytton smiled. “I suppose I did, at that. On occasion.”

“And did your da never surprise you? Did he ne’er, having weighed all possibilities—perhaps after discerning a particular eagerness in yer tone, or having noted a special glint of longing in yer eye—give over at the last and agree to yer request? Did he never say yes?”

Mr. Lytton, still smiling—lost in his thoughts for a moment, nostalgic and far away—managed a nod.

“Ye know, I hear it all the time,” said Mr. Eachan. “People say to me, they say, ‘Vicar, if the Lord in His wisdom always gives us only what He deems best for us . . . and if He already knows, not only what we most need but what we most want, before we even ask it of Him . . . then why ask at all?’ I say—and I draw on my own experiences, ye’ll be recalling, as having been a da meself, to five bairns that survived to maturity—I say, because I believe sometimes a father simply likes to be asked! God enjoys surprising us.”

“Are you suggesting, my good fellow, that God both can and occasionally does change His mind?”

Mr. Eachan leaned in closer, as if he were about to impart a great secret, and said in a hushed near-whisper, in tones suggestive both of filial affection and of mortal awe: “All the time.”

At that unfortunate moment, Mr. Lytton erupted into paroxysms of coughing, concluding at last in breathless wheezes, and Johanna, half-panicked, wordlessly accepted Mr. Eachan’s aid in resettling her father against his pillows, calming him as best she could, and dosing him with more of both the cordial and the laudanum.

“Lungs . . . like blazing coals . . . inside,” he said.

His face and neck, to Johanna’s touch, were like burning coals, as well, and she hurriedly wrung another cloth; but the water in her father’s basin was clouded, and flecks of rust had formed a brick-red sediment at the bottom of the bowl. With a veritable roar of anger and despair, she snatched up the basin and dashed its contents out the window.

She stalked into the hall, hauled up the metal bucket under the ceiling leak, and surveyed the runoff it had collected. Her own grimace of disgust became reflected in its surface, for (as she discovered) it was no cleaner.

Sheer rage propelled her back into the room. “Why? Why is there never a drop of pure water to be had, anywhere in London? That—that accursed pump brings up more rust and clay than drink!” She wondered where Mr. Shaw had procured the water for her father’s medicine glass; it looked clear enough.

“Now, now, Jo . . . .”

“Ach, she’s the right of it, ye know,” said Mr. Eachan with a sigh. “Even the barrels I keep by the vicarage snare precious little worth using. The rain seems to bring down half the city’s ash and soot along with it. But . . . ” (he seemed to have hatched an idea) “the church’s well, and the wells at a few of the neighbourhood wayhouses—the Hart, for instance—the Talbot, the Elephant—probably that at the George Inn itself—give tolerably good water, especially if ye give the bucket a deep lowering before ye haul her up. ’Tis not so far a walk to the vicarage, lass, if ye’re of mind to try yer luck there. Ye could visit Copernicus whilst ye’re on the grounds. And if the pail’s too heavy to lug back through the streets, ye can yoke my mule, bring back two pails at once. Or, Copernicus can carry the load, perhaps, and I can lead him back with me, whenever I return home.”

“The well at the church. Are you sure, sir?”

“That the water’s as nigh clean as it comes, in London, or that ye’re welcome to as much of it as ye can updredge?”

Johanna beamed. “Thank you, sir. I’ll go at once. That is, if . . . . ” Her face fell as she glanced, with no small concern, at her father.

“We’ll be fine,” said Mr. Eachan, “if ye’re willing to entrust yer patient to me for the short while ye’ll be out?”

“I couldn’t consider leaving him with anybody else, but with you, sir—of course. You don’t mind, do you, Papa? You’ll be all right?”

Mr. Lytton’s eyes had closed again, but he managed a feeble smile, and an even feebler nod.

Johanna showed Mr. Eachan where the medicines sat and repeated for him the chemist’s instructions concerning each one. “Mr. Shaw should be by again soon, as a matter of fact, so you may not be watching alone the entire time. Try to discourage Cal and Puddles from pestering Papa overmuch.”

“Aye, aye. Run along, now, whilst ye still can. The darkness comes at an earlier hour with every passing evening, and I’d not have ye out in the night streets alone.”

She again gazed down at her father. “I . . . I won’t be long.” She bent to kiss him. “Mr. Eachan, he’s frightfully hot!”

“Aye. I’ve noticed. Well,” said the vicar, rising, “until ye’ve returned with water more suitable to his care” (he reached for a nearby ewer and began pouring what passed as fresh water into the basin Johanna had emptied), “I think we’d best use what we have to hand.”

Johanna—recalling how, in her fit of pique, she’d discarded so much of what had remained available—could feel herself blushing. “Yes. Thank you. I’ll hurry,” she added, tying on her bonnet and pulling on gloves. She adjusted her shawl more securely and—with a glance between the window-bars at the greying clouds and the dusk oncoming—opted to whirl a light cloak about her shoulders, as well.

********************************************************************************************

It was with grave misgivings that Johanna parted from her papa. After all, by rushing off in search of purer water, even as Mr. Shaw’s prophesied night of crisis inched ever closer, she might be voluntarily relinquishing her rights to their last loving conversations, the last few hours they would ever spend together. But she simply couldn’t abide the thought of bathing a man’s face—his face!—when he was already ill, indeed!—with muddied, probably disease-infested water. Her father deserved better.

And it was true, she hadn’t seen Copernicus all day. She never missed their visits, not even when the weather was too ugly in which for sane folke to contemplate going out, and the streets either completely awash in rain, mud, and filth, or treacherous with snow and ice. What would he think of her?

. . . though she felt quite certain he would understand, when he learned how gravely ill Papa had become, virtually overnight.

The process of departing the prison was, as always, laborious. Johanna was obliged to tarry whilst every barred iron gate was unlocked, then fastidiously resecured. Most tedious of all was the wait to be released from the prison proper, at the largest, strongest gates on the farthest side of the gaolers’ lodge—those that, along with the thirty-foot-high stone walls of the compound, divided the inmates from the outside world and sheltered them from its more normal cares and bustle. At least she managed to avoid any discourse with either Mr. Sowersneade or Mr. Fisk, both of whom seemed to be on other business when she reached the vicinity of the master lock, for guarding the main entry was only old Mr. Peeps, half asleep as usual. While it took a moment to arrest his attention, that he might open the way to the street—a process onto which there was always imposed somewhat of a delay, incurred by Mr. Peeps’ arthritis—nothing more than the baldest syllables and most commonplace pleasantries required exchange.

“Mind you’re back by ten, Miss,” Mr. Peeps grunted—merely by rote and custom. It could not have been as if, after two insufferable years, Johanna didn’t know the prison rules.

“I’ve every intention of returning before full dark, Mr. Peeps.”

He slurred-grunted-groaned something else, which may have been, “As you say, Miss,” or perhaps “Very good, Miss”; Johanna wasn’t precisely sure. She felt safe in judging only that it was too unimportant to ask the fellow to repeat.

The afternoon crowds were comparatively thin for a Wednesday in the Borough, but Johanna kept her tiny reticule close and a watchful eye peeled for fleecers, nonetheless. She well recollected that the throngs of Southwark, thick and rowdy as they sometimes became, were nothing, even at the busiest hours, to what they would have been in the Old City, where Papa had once spent so much of his time, or in the thoroughfares nearby what had once been his club. Here the stench of the unwashed masses mixed with smells from venders’ stalls (mainly overripe vegetables, shellfish and tripe, and ground horsemeat for the area cats) and from the open doors of the High Street’s many public houses (odours of gin and ale, fish and potato soup, and heavy tobacco smoke). Thank heaven for the welcome (if painfully enticing) scent of fresh bread baking in the oven, from someplace not too far away!

But in every quarter of London, one smell always seemed to overpower the others: that of layered horse dung in the roadways. As it happened, that smell had never troubled Johanna. She found it almost comforting, in the associations it had for her of days gone by, on the family’s north-country farm, and of time spent with her devoted Copernicus. There were days she felt she would have given anything to work, as boys could, in a livery or stables, or on a farm, doing what she loved and earning money for it.

It would be so good to pet Copernicus and tell him all her troubles, even if today she could not—did not dare to—spend the time with him she ordinarily would have wished.

It had not occurred to her to carry along with her a vessel from the prison—even one of the Lyttons’ own, brought originally from the farm to Town, and then to the Queen’s Bench from her father’s beautiful house in Hampstead—in which to cart back the water she was off to fetch; nor had she thought to ask Mr. Eachan whether she could borrow a bucket or pitcher from him, or where one such might be kept. There were of course buckets for watering the animals—those should be in his toolshed or in his “wee byre,” as he called it—and there would also be pails and ewers for the housecleaning. Probably Mrs. Algood was still at the vicarage for the day; she’d know what was to be had.

Alas!—another job Johanna would very much have liked: housekeeping at the vicarage, for Mr. Eachan. Why, that wouldn’t be like work at all, but a pleasure of the deepest sort. An honour. How it would thrill her, to be able to do a tenth part, for the kind old gentleman, of what he had done for her and Papa! But the post was already taken, and Mr. Eachan would have it that he had little enough work to keep Mrs. Algood engaged.

Hadn’t it been wonderful in him, though (Johanna thought for the millionth time, at least), to offer to stable Copernicus at the church? The feed and care of an extra animal would have been too much for nearly anyone, of course, and Johanna did not mind using her small wages to pay for Copernicus’ upkeep. It was more than enough that he had a roof over his horsy head. Whenever doubts would surface in Johanna’s mind—and they did, every day—as to whether she should keep Copernicus, when she and Papa also had to eat, and many of Papa’s smaller debts still remained to be cleared before he could be released, even under an Insolvent Act, Papa would become quite stern; adamant on the point. Johanna must never give up the one thing in the world that yet remained to her, that she truly loved (besides her father himself), all because Mr. Lytton had made a financial misstep.

Part of her, frankly, was a tad inclined to agree with him; but part of her—often the greater part—felt sick with guilt.

Certainly reminders of her father’s indiscretion were literally everywhere she looked. Even the walk to the vicarage wasn’t free of those ghosts. If only she didn’t first have to pass, before reaching the Church of St. George, another debtors’ prison close at hand, the Marshalsea, one wall of which actually marked the edge of the graveyard by the vicarage. There was talk that the Marshalsea was so old a structure and in such a dilapidated state of repair that it might finally be closed, within the space of another year or two; but the city would only build a newer one, Johanna supposed. Closing one such facility—even demolishing it—would never diminish the number of residents of the Isles who found themselves, often suddenly and (to them) inexplicably, drowning in financial rivers far too deep for them, and too swiftly sweeping them downcurrent for them to so much as grasp at a passing branch. And London’s finding itself bereft of the Marshalsea would only crowd conditions at the four other gaols designated for the confinement of debtors. In no time there would be no room for families to remain together, clinging to what little was left of their normal lives—only for the convicted debtors themselves. Johanna couldn’t imagine undergoing any more horrible depredations or a more searing heartache than she and her father had been forced to endure, except for the idea that they may have been separated, as well, and that she, then homeless, would have been obliged to beg shelter at a parish alms- or workhouse—perhaps even to go to the treadmill!

The distant screech of a rail whistle, the chug of steam pistons, and the squeal of great spoked wheels on iron rails made her wish to roar aloud with anger—to spit with contempt, in the very street, like a man. “All aboard for ruin,” she muttered to herself.

*********************************************************************************************

But soon she reached St. George the Martyr, the vicarage, and the byre, and that is where I, Copernicus, re-enter ces histoires, not only by virtue of references made to me by others, but in person (as one might say). I pride myself on my perception of human emotion; but I confess that when Miss Johanna (upon spying me from the opened door to the stable) rushed to me, flung her arms about my neck, and wept with a fervour obviously born of more than having sorely missed me for the day just past, it required no more than a potato’s understanding to surmise that things were much amiss.

Your pardon: here I interrupt myself to hope you will have noted, and will readily attest to, my earnest efforts to document Miss Johanna’s story, faithfully and without prejudice. (Cob, indeed! But, that is what Miss Johanna reported to me as having been her father’s very words, and I have—as unflinchingly as I might do, under such trying circumstances—replicated the dialogue exchanged, verbatim. Mr. Lytton was in jest, of course—that goes without saying—but let the record show that I have left nothing out of these accounts as they were given to me, no, not even to spare my own sensibilities! Why, even had he not been attempting but to “get a rise” out of his daughter, as the saying is, I believe the poor gentleman must be excused, for he was, after all, extremely ill. Dangerously fevered. Near-delirious, you know.)

Now where was I? Ah, yes: poor Miss Johanna’s extreme agitation and
grief. . . .

To be continued. . . .

********************************************************************************************
Soon to become a major motion picture
(within the confines of the author's imagination), starring
(in alphabetical order by actors’ last names):

Jamie Bell as The Ratcatcher
Billy Connolly * as the Reverend Mr. Eachan
Michael Kitchen as William Lytton
Sir Ian McKellen as the voice of Copernicus
Timothy Spall as Orham Sowersneade
Emma Watson as Johanna Lytton

and

Michael Wincott as Jem Fisk

Also featuring:

(Scottish character actor from Central Casting, London, as Edinburgh surgeon Mr. Shaw)

(Cockney character actor from Central Casting, London, as turnkey Mr. Peeps)

(Fuzzy the Scene-Chewer as The Prison Rat)

and several other actors in chapters yet to be posted or written.

[* Yes, I know he's a Scot, but it won't be the first time he's been conscripted to portray an Irishman. :-) ]

Author's Language Note: "Colleen-bawn" is merely an Anglicized rendering of the Irish Gael cailin ban, "fair girl" (young woman).

A Note on Setting: Every detail of setting has been meticulously researched for the readers' enjoyment--and I welcome questions about any facet of it--but I ask that everyone please excuse all references to Marshalsea Prison. When I wrote about it, I had planned for the action to take place in 1839; the time has since been switched to 1847. And while the Marshalsea Court endured until '49, the prison was abolished in '42. Thank you all for allowing me to leave my wordcount intact. :-)

Finally: please remember that the social, cultural, political, and religious views expressed by my characters do not necessarily (in fact, hardly ever!) reflect my own attitudes.

THANKS FOR READING! COME AGAIN SOON!
--Carrie