The Harlot's Press

by Helen Pike

Genres: Historical Fantasy; Historical Mysteries; Regency Romance

Synopsis

London, 1820: George IV is to be crowned King at last. But will his estranged wife Caroline be allowed to join him as Queen? The city is in turmoil, as her radical supporters rally to her cause and threaten to overturn the government.

Release date: April 3, 2011

Publisher: Octopus

Print pages: 352

Sample

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN the new King’s bare backside? If you have, it was most likely on a cartoon – unless you are one of the Ladies of the Quality and have been honoured to witness the royal nether parts in the flesh. If Mr Cruikshank and other artists like him have it right, there are quite a number of Royal Mistresses in your ranks – more than there are female printers in London, in fact, which makes me and my inky hands a sight rarer than you and your raised silk skirts. His mistresses all have my condolences, for the King’s girth is now said to be mighty on account of his taste for brandy and beef for breakfast.


For those of us who know him only through the cartoonist’s eye, King George IV is a balloon, or else a rutting stag with cuckold’s horns: all white hair, red face and blue frock-coat, the black lines which ink him in scarcely capable of containing his vastness. Perhaps you own one of these images. More likely, you have seen a poor reproduction in some cheap newspaper; the Twopenny Trash perhaps, before the Government tried to tax it out of existence; or on a card or handbill from a street-seller. If the street-seller was a girl who seemed mute and, from the solemn look she gave you, could have been anything between twelve and a hundred years old, then she might have been my sister. Look carefully at the handbill – if Isaiah Douglas, Friday-street, London EC appears on the back, it might have been printed by me.


Isaiah Douglas was my stepfather, and a hellfire preacher who had set up his own chapel. Too turbulent for Methodism, he saw signs of the Second Coming in every aspect of this city. His preaching occupied more of his energies than his printing or his family, which meant that I spent much of my life working our two presses by myself. Our shop was on a quiet street which runs parallel with Cheapside. We picked up some of that thoroughfare’s passing trade, in the way ditches bear crops from seeds which the sower scattered wide of the furrow. For all its nearness, Friday-street is a different world from Cheapside: so dark that it is scarcely more than an alley, Friday-street at noon resembles Cheapside at dusk, but without the prospect of the illuminated displays in the shop windows which make the Cheapside cobbles glow.

Our neighbour was a shoemaker who kept a cow in his attic. He carried her up there when she was a calf, but soon she was so heavy that he feared his floorboards would give under the weight of her. Still, she produced some milk, and our neighbour said that eventually he would ask my Uncle John the butcher to slaughter her where she stood and throw the meat back down the trapdoor. Many nights I woke to the sound of her shitting, and in the summer it was a wonder the air was not green with her – though while our nostrils were full of cow dung, at least we were not breathing in some of the worse stenches of the city.

In early January 1820, just before the story I shall tell begins, my nose was too full of acid and ink to notice anything else, for we had never been busier. There had not been a good season for the country in the five years since the wars against Napoleon had ended, and this distress was a bounty on political unrest. The images we sold were a chiaroscuro of crimes against the people: desperate men transported for smashing the machines which had destroyed their livelihoods; women and children trampled by Hussars for protesting peacefully; men driven to drink and women to vice by poverty and despair. And now the cartoonists and squib-mongers such as ourselves had an unlikely heroine: Caroline of Brunswick, the estranged wife of the new King, who had signalled her wish to return to England to claim her rights. But George said he would rather divorce her than see her crowned as Queen beside him and a royal divorce was a legal process which threatened to clog up Parliament like cess in the Fleet. As it was, Caroline was being paid enough to feed a hundred thousand journeymen each year to stay on the Continent with her alleged lovers, but this did not prevent the cartoonists from suggesting that her becoming Queen would ensure pies, ale and prosperity for all. Likewise, for men like Isaiah, the King’s desire to keep Caroline from the throne became a symbol of all that was wrong with the nation.


And so the wronged Queen of England became the People’s Caroline, as Radicals and revolutionaries of all complexions congregated under the ample tent of her skirts. If Caroline refused to stay abroad, the King wanted a divorce – but his Conservative advisers feared the consequences, arguing that the debate in Parliament which this required would only increase the demands for political change. For if the Lords could pass a Bill permitting the King to put away his adulterous wife of nearly thirty years, why could it not agree to a ten-hour working day for honest men, the repeal of laws which would execute a man for the theft of six shillings, and the vote for men who owned property and had made the country rich through the sweat of their brow?


In the summer of 1820, the House of Lords debated if the Queen had lifted her skirts for sundry Gentlemen. (It was rumoured that she had done a lot more than bare her bosom for at least two of the Lords who were sitting in judgement on her, but this was excluded from the proceedings, as was any mention of treason, though it is treasonable to be unfaithful to the heir to the throne.) This so-called Delicate Investigation centred around evenings spent on a tented deck with a certain Italian Count Bergami. Or at least, so said the servants; for a few weeks in the summer of 1820 it looked as though the Italians who had changed the royal sheets held the keys to the Kingdom.


As for the would-be Queen, Caroline was like London: brash and showy, all glamour above and something reeking unpleasantly below. It is said that the King insisted that she bathed her privates before he would touch her, and that he only did so once, on their wedding night back in 1795. They had a daughter nine months later, and their love for Princess Charlotte was the only thing they ever had in common. She died three years ago, and some say that Caroline travelled Europe and Africa all the more restlessly as a result, while others insist that the loss made her more determined to return to London, which in early June 1820 she did.

I spent many hundreds of hours inking in the Queen’s skirts. We were the envy of many of our rivals for having two presses, which meant that we could do fine copperplate work on one and produce cheap handbills on the other; last summer the market for both was as accommodating as the Queen herself was alleged to be. And in a strange way, just as the domestic and the political were united in her ample figure, so these two arenas collided in our modest shop.

I have done nothing admirable during my seventeen years, and am certain I will go to Hell if I die tomorrow, but I was good at my work. All the same, it is unlikely that you ever bought one of my prints, for we did not have as many customers as the grander establishments such as Tagg’s on Cheapside. Perhaps the reek of cowshit discouraged passing trade, though very few fortunes would be transacted in this city if men allowed their noses to rule their sensibilities, for the Stink of London is as powerful as the Sin of Sodom. If you did come to our shop, the chances are that you would not have met my eye, for most of our customers did not like the idea of a young girl being soiled by the handling of such images. Some requested to be served by Isaiah, and as they handed over their shillings, they remonstrated with him for allowing me into the shop at all. I wonder how many of our customers realised that most of the printing and all of the careful inking-in of the King’s nether parts had been done by me.


Not that I am complaining. I could tell you that I loved my work, but it was more than that: looking back on it, our old press was my truest friend, and the feel of the tympan on my thighs as I closed the lid was the most honest comfort I knew.

Myself, I have seen the Queen once and the King twice – which was more than the Queen had in the three years since they buried their only child. The first time I saw the King was in January of this year: I was on Jermyn-street, and so taken with a cheesemaker’s window on the other side from St James’s Church that I stepped into the road. A stinging crack on my left side, and I was hurled back onto the pavement; a coachman had forced me out of the way with his whip. As the coachman swore that stupider whores were roasting chestnuts in Hell, the sun caught the gold of the King’s livery on the carriage door. A florid face topped with a white wig appeared from behind a red velvet curtain to see what the commotion was. With none of the cartoonists’ strong black lines, the royal face and neck seemed to spill onto its shoulders. The King regarded me with watery blue eyes which had seen at once too much of the world and too little. I now understand this look; I might only be seventeen, but my eyes have something of it too.


And what was a mere printer doing sweeping up her silk skirts on Jermyn-street? you might ask. Well, if you know anything about our city, I’m sure you can guess. The strange thing is, although I invented some lies to explain to my stepfather where I had been for the six months he was imprisoned, and would rather impale myself on the iron railings which surround St Paul’s churchyard than tell him this story, the desire to recount the events of those six months is gaining on me by the minute. At times like this I almost understand the Catholics, for their sacrament of Confession strikes me as a wonderful cure: if I could just tell my story once, not leaving out the worst parts, in fact dwelling on them in the name of absolution, then perhaps I would stop going over and over them in my mind, inventing more and more ways of dressing up my shame in fancy images. The second time I saw the King comes at the end of that story, and will take as much explaining as the day I saw the Queen. I am resigned to having to recount both, if my story is to make any sense.


My brother Tom used to say that it was not good for a poor girl to spend so much time inking in the private parts of the rich. Watching me painting the skirts of Mrs FitzHerbert – the King’s great love – a violet more vivid than anything we ever saw in our small shop, Tom said that my long apprenticeship at my stepfather’s press would make a scarlet woman of me, for I would come to view life as little more than a series of rackety scenes to be coloured as brightly as possible. I laughed and told him that my mind was leaden with the weight of all the Scripture-reading I had done, and my soul was as drab as my pinafore, but he shook his head and said that unless he was mistaken, I would end up with caricatures for brains.


And Tom was not mistaken, as it turned out. He only ever made one mistake that I know of, and he hanged for it.




THE DAY BEFORE TOM’S execution was the longest of my life, and it was made all the longer for it being late June and a Sunday. His crime was to encourage a sorry congregation of men in a rising against the Government. The rising did not occur, but the prospect of it was enough to hang him. There was a chance that he would be pardoned, but we would not know until shortly before he mounted the scaffold. The news would come to Tom in his cell at Newgate, but every time someone walked past the shop I couldn’t help glancing up. To see the way I was carrying on, you’d have thought that every tradesman was a messenger from the Home Secretary himself.


Customers would have been a welcome distraction, though the shop was closed, of course, it being a Sunday. Even if we had been open, I would not have had much to sell them on account of Isaiah’s recent imprisonment for Blasphemy, of which more soon enough.

I had come down at four-thirty, when the cow’s snuffling and stomping had woken me, to find Isaiah wrapping bread in a cloth. This meant he was going out walking in Moorfields, as he often did when faced with difficulty.

He had nailed a notice to the door: the usual Sunday meeting was postponed until the following evening in the expectation of Tom’s return. It was left to me to print the sermon he planned to distribute at the end of that meeting. Based on the text from Samuel, it promised deliverance from our enemies. He had spent all the previous afternoon pacing up and down the chapel while he had crafted it. The language was high-flown even by Isaiah’s standards, as if he hoped to bamboozle the Lord Himself into sparing Tom.


‘What of the power of prayer?’ I had asked him, as he stowed his bread in his pocket. ‘Surely today of all days, you should be praying for Tom’s rescue from the Lion’s Den?’

‘You sound like your mother, may the Lord rest her soul,’ he said.

‘I hope the Lord is resting her, for she had no rest here,’ I replied.

‘You are still distraught, so I will forgive you your sharpness. But I can pray for Tom just as well under an open sky.’ He glanced upwards, in the way he always did when my mother was alive, for she had spent her last months confined to the room above our heads. You cannot bear to be here now that she is not, I thought. Even imprisonment would not have seemed such a punishment, with her recently dead. He was the only printer in the City with perpetual green stains on his britches from his walks in Moorfields, and brown ones from the time he spent in coffee houses, but no inky ones. I would have liked to go walking with him, but I felt I could not ask, after his reproach. And I had work to do.


Soon after eleven, so five hours after Isaiah’s departure, my sister Meg was standing in the middle of the shop, stepping from one foot to the other. This was her latest fancy, that she must be at the very centre of any room, and as far away from any objects as possible. Through all her twelve years, she had never been a child for coddling, and since our mother died she had gone to elaborate lengths to avoid touching anyone, or even brushing against wood, walls – anything that might connect her with the world. In the morning, she’d leap up from the floor as if her damp blanket had stung her awake. She was watching the door in the belief that if she was like the good servant who kept her lamp trimmed for the master’s return, then I would not die like our mother did, Tom would come back soon, Isaiah would not go to prison again, and therefore she would never again be sent to live with our aunt and uncle. If I tried to tell her that we would not leave her, she rolled herself up like a hedgehog.


It being just after midsummer, the long day stretched ahead of me like an unpunctuated sentence. I prayed all that day that my brother would be saved from the noose, but I needed to keep my hands busy. Meg was not going to tell Isaiah that I had broken Our Lord’s Commandment to keep the Sabbath while he abandoned his flock, and I knew that this was the least of what the Lord must forgive me, if I am ever to sit at His right hand. I blew the dust off one of our old copperplates and took down a tray to mix some ink.

‘We will need new plates, now that Queen Caroline has just returned to Hammersmith,’ I said to Meg. She did not move, still less answer, and I did not expect her to. The Queen’s house was a garden cottage near the Thames, a few miles outside town. At first, the frenzy surrounding the possible return of the sluttish Caroline had been a disappointment to God-fearing men like Tom and Isaiah; another example of how men were distracted from the true ills of the regime by salacious gossip. But it had not been long before they had seen her as a herald of political change, and one of Biblical proportions. Caroline encouraged her unlikely ragtag of supporters, promising to champion working men’s rights. She gambled that fear of a revolution, as well might happen should these radical supporters of hers be disappointed, could persuade her husband to install her on the throne.


So a happy pairing between Radical and would-be Queen was cemented, and in these god-botherers’ minds, Hammersmith became the Garden of Eden, Westminster and the City Sodom and Gomorrah, and the two political parties, the Whigs and the Tories, identical in their wickedness. In truth, there was not that much between them, except that the Tories tended to favour the King and the Whigs were more wary of his power – particularly since the new King and his father had kept them out of office for close on forty years. As Tom had been fond of pointing out, for all we had a Parliament, we might as well have had a despot for a King, for no one could sniff at governing without his nod, and what sham elections we had involved few voters and changed nothing. But the prospect of a royal divorce pointed a cannon at these political skittles.


Until that Sunday, I would not have believed it was possible to miss my brother as much as I did. ‘There is only one man in London who does not want Caroline, and that is the King!’ Tom used to say. Listening to Tom was like seeing one of the ribbons of speech unfurl on a cartoon of Mr Cruikshank’s, and men had gathered in fields and taverns to hear him. None of his speeches carried any more weight than the ink it took to print them, but on the evidence of a spy employed by the Magistrates he had been arrested for seditious libel and incitement to murder, which in layman’s terms meant spreading lies about the Government in order to destroy it. The Magistrates wanted to make An Example of him: he became an indefinite article, as if he had already ceased to exist the moment he was sentenced. And Isaiah had been released in time to see his rebellious stepson die.


But looking at Meg, it was possible to imagine it was any ordinary Sunday. If it had been the previous summer, then Tom would have been out, for he could scarcely bear to be in the same house as Isaiah. I would have been working, and tending to my mother while she lay dying. I believe that much of the story that follows was my attempt to escape the empty space she left in this house.





My head was bowed over the mixing tray when a customer rattled the door. I ought not to have served him on a Sunday, but then I ought not to have been mixing ink, for that was also work. When added to the dungheap of things I ought not to have done in the months prior to that Sunday, selling a print for a shilling did not seem so sinful. Isaiah was fond of saying that Hell was at the end of a primrose path, though I could find no reference to primroses in the Bible. If such a path exists, I had surely slid down it on my backside long before that morning, and a little printer’s grease was not going to make much difference.

‘Good morning, Miss,’ the customer said, waiting at the door for Meg to move.

‘Come away, Meg,’ I said. The shop was small, and she was blocking the route to what few prints we had. I looked around for a counting job to give her, for it was the only thing that would persuade her from her post.

‘You are our first customer today,’ she said to the gentleman. ‘I am counting.’ There is a flatness to Meg’s voice as if she is dumb, but she hears perfectly well. The Lord only knows what she understands.


‘That is all you ever do,’ I said. ‘Now let the gentleman pass.’ It looked as though she might refuse to move, but she stepped aside, and our customer was in.

The gentleman approached but did not remove his hat. This was a familiar scene: I had learned from my mother how to serve a gentleman politely without seeming too interested in his face. His coat was of fine quality – a light wool that would not sit too heavily on a day like this – and quite new, to judge by the evenness of the seams and the shape of the pockets. I decided that this was his first visit to a shop such as ours, and shame – or else fear of the Government spies who kept an eye on our transactions – kept his eyes averted. When it came to satirical prints, the line between what was legal and what was not seemed to be redrawn and extended more often than the King’s waistline.


‘Good morning, Sir,’ I said, flustered because we did not have any new lithographs from our finer quality press, prints which are then coloured by hand; it was just our luck that such a man would call now. ‘You would perhaps like to see something from the window, Sir?’

‘Not exactly, Miss,’ he said. ‘I am wondering if your stepfather can procure Convents of Marseilles for me.’ No souvenir for the pious traveller this, but a set of prints so debased that even my eyes widened: the artist imagined the first encounters between sailors fresh off slaving ships, their minds full of the debauched practices which only the French can conjure, and nuns who turn out to be even more ingenious in this respect than the men who invade their houses.


But the most shocking thing was that I recognised the gentleman’s voice. It was this, I realised, which had been familiar to me when he arrived, not his unease as a prospective customer. What had brought to my door the life I had hoped to leave behind, in the figure of Mr Edwards?


As he wandered over to the window and made a show of peering at the prints there, I pondered this. He would be well occupied elsewhere, for he had made it his business to prevent Caroline from securing the crown. He was a friend of the Tories, and how I knew this – and him – is the substance of the first part of this story. Had he not appeared in our shop that Sunday, I might never have had to tell it, but there he was, and so here am I.


He seemed uninterested in me, and for a moment I allowed myself to imagine that his visit was pure chance after all, and it was possible that Mr Edwards would not recognise me in a plain dress and printer’s apron. In fact, I reassured myself, this would be the last place he would expect to see me – he would most likely assume that I was still living like a caged canary in St James’s Square, for news of my departure would be beneath his notice, eclipsed by my companion Hetty’s marriage to Sir Robin Everley and the shock of the death of Sir David, Sir Robin’s cousin.

He turned round, his foot catching Meg as he did so; she curled up and made a keening sound until I shushed her.

‘Mistress Nell,’ he said, ‘I have a proposition for you.’

He saw my alarm, and smiled. ‘Fear not, it is a proposition far less physically onerous, shall we say, than the ones you undertook until recently. Though potentially far more taxing, I fear. It is however beautifully simple: assist me in some small but important matters, or take the noose, as an accessory to murder.’

Click, click click, went Meg’s buttons: bone on bone.


‘Murder?’ I said. ‘Who has been murdered?’

Mr Edwards looked at me, his face momentarily losing its frown of calculating amusement. ‘Why, I almost believe that you have no idea what I am talking about.’

‘I promise you that I do not, Sir,’ I said, and I was not lying.

He stowed the package of writing ink he had settled for in one of his empty pockets, handing me a few coins and a calling card.

‘You will assist me, or you will swing,’ he said. He took his leave, turning as he reached the door. ‘Most likely you do not trust me,’ he said in a low voice. ‘For you do not understand that our cause is the same. Indeed, I did not understand that, the first night we met. You might help me, and I might see you hang anyway; how can you tell? You are caught, Mistress Nell, on a pair of horns. Not the cuckold’s horns of our new King, but the horns of a dilemma.’


I watched him turn left, leaving our bell jangling behind him. As soon as his coat-tail disappeared, I wanted him to return: whatever Mr Edwards’ business was with me, I had to know it.

My fear propelled me out of the shop, with only a passing thought for what Meg would do in the meantime. I threw on my old shawl as I went. I was halfway down Cheapside before I realised that there were more facets to the foolishness of pursuing Mr Edwards than in the paste diamond necklace I was wearing the last time he laid eyes on me. He was unlikely to reveal his purposes to me – after all, such convenient developments only occur in the novels my friend Hetty used to read during the long evenings of waiting for the clatter of returning carriage wheels on St James’s Square.





At St Paul’s churchyard, Mr Edwards slowed, then descended the steps to the crypt. He meant for me to follow him, I was sure.

I had not reached the first tomb nor had my eyes adjusted to the gloom before I heard a familiar voice at my ear.

‘Miss Wingfield! For the second time this morning! What a happy coincidence. But these days you are no longer wearing silk, I see – nor lace, I imagine – which is a pity.’


In fact, it was not a pity, but I was not about to tell him how I preferred simple cotton to the catch of lace on my softest parts. These days I am lucky to have a pair of clean bloomers. Like most of the women of London, I am forever worrying about how frequently to wash them: too often, and they will fall apart; not often enough, and I will smell like a fishmonger’s slab. But one thing I know for sure: this is preferable to the itch of fancy undergarments. I think Mr Edwards read something of this in my face, and I looked away: I wanted him to know that I was no longer someone who would sit for hours with a group of girls, fiddling with our curls and pretending to be interested in needlework, while we waited on the arrival of a gentleman’s carriage and with him whatever desires the wine, that evening’s theatre or his idle imagination had stirred in him. Hetty, who had entered that house the same day as me and was my true and constant friend, became so bored some evenings that she used to prick herself with her needle to check that she was still alive. I used to warn her that she would poison herself, but nothing stopped her summoning the red drops and staring at them.


‘What do you want with me, Sir?’ I said, feeling the blood pumping in my neck.

Mr Edwards snorted and nodded to himself, fixing me with a languid stare from under his hooded eyelids. His was a dissolute face, but I knew him to be a man of singularly few passions. He did not drink, paid little attention to the pleasures of the table, showed no carnal interest in men, women or children – and neither did he share the passions of other men (and here I think of Isaiah and Tom) who avoided such things: namely religion and radical politics. All this despite the company he kept – and I suppose it was this that made him so useful to his employers.


‘There will be a coronation here soon,’ Mr Edwards said. ‘Will you come to watch it? Perhaps you will wear your finery for that? You would gain a great many admirers. Or are you saving your satin for the New Jerusalem? If you are, I hope you have invested in some mothballs, for it looks to be a long time in coming.’


‘I am not what you think,’ I said, watching the crowd of people paying their respects at Lord Nelson’s tomb.

‘Ah, I understand,’ he said. ‘You are not a radical, though your brother is condemned as one. He was eloquent in a naive way – yes, I went to hear him; your stepfather is a far more compelling figure, is he not? And you are not a whore, even though you left 14 St James’s Square in a silk dress only a week ago. You remind me of Caroline, our would-be Queen, who insists she is not an adulteress, even though she has shared her bed with half the minor nobles and menservants of Europe. Does your stepfather know of your talents? I wonder,’ he said.


‘I have no talents, Sir – and Isaiah is a good man,’ I said. Two women watched us, one kneading her fur muff in disdain. She would have seen a well-dressed man whispering to a more plainly attired girl, and must have assumed that he was soliciting. When I was a harlot in my blue satin dress, no one looked at me like this – at least, not until I opened my mouth, and sometimes not even then, for a lifetime spent in the back of a chapel gives a girl quite a vocabulary to set her up in life, if nothing else. ‘And I paid for my dress, twice over, again I promise you that. I owed Mother Cooper nothing, but I still left her money.’ It was Hetty’s money I gave her, but Hetty had bought me my freedom just as Isaiah’s father had bought his mother’s. I’d hidden the dress in the chapel, of all places, at the back of a cupboard which only I used because it housed my broom and the printing inks. I knew I ought to get rid of it, but I could not think how to, without drawing attention to where I had been.


Mr Edwards steered me away from the disapproving women, back up the steps and towards a costermonger. Two pyramids of oranges flanked handbills of the new poem by Mr Shelley about an Egyptian king whose name I cannot recall.


‘Isaiah Douglas, a good man? I would not be so sure about that, Miss Nell,’ he said. ‘You must not have read any accounts of how the slave races disport themselves when they are alone in their lodgings, away from the white man’s gaze. Indeed I hope you have not seen them, for you and your imbecile sister would sleep considerably less easily in your beds, and your mother would turn i