Chapter 1.0: Lacy Mary & Companion Embark

Boom! Boom! Boom! Ba-boom! A drummer passed Weaver’s Hall.

“Read the latest pamphlet on the popish murder spree!” the drummer shouted over the din of traffic. “More bloody papist murders!”

In the flickering light of the Protestant mob’s firebrands, Mistress Silvia Tinnley could barely make out his placard’s lettering. She knew it had something to do with the Popish Plot. But at that moment she was more concerned about her middle-aged, potbellied fiancé who was awkwardly helping rich old Lady Mary Baroness of Sulleigh struggle into her coach.

At the last possible moment before she could fall back in his face, he boosted her rump up and through the coach door.

“It’s kind of you to take Mistress Tinnley away from this madness,” said Henry Thigpen, mercer of Turnbase Lane, through gritted teeth.

Silvia, title-less and of no fixed abode, stood by demurely with her hands concealed inside her white rabbit-fur muff and clasped around a small stiletto knife. Behind the coach, a footman strapped the ladies’ trunks securely to the roof. In front of the coach, the driver struggled to control the four horses, perfectly-matched gray mares. The crowds flooding around them to Smithfield gallows for the Pope-burning festivities unsettled them.

“Death roams the city tonight,” Thigpen shouted up at his fiancée’s benefactress.

“Death roams the city every night,” croaked Lady Mary as she began to arrange her copious, blood-red velvet skirts around her feet.

“I stand corrected,” said Master Thigpen begrudgingly. Though a commoner he was never one to enjoy being contradicted even by a wealthy noblewoman. In 1679 titles no longer impressed middle-class merchants such as he: England had seen a king’s severed head roll in sawdust. Even the current successor to the throne could not show his face in London these days.

Silvia was Lady Mary’s paid traveling companion. But she felt her pay was small compensation for what she was sure to endure on the coming voyage. The lady’s breath was foul, her speech sarcastic, and her fashions—though costly—were hideous. Her face was framed in a copious, heart-shaped gray wig, which—Silvia knew for a fact—covered a bald skull. Her bodice was fashionably long and pointed, but emphasized her skeletal torso. Her neckline was properly low, but revealed far too much blotched, translucent skin through which blue veins shown despite a thick layer of caked powder.

“When faced with dangers they don’t understand, the rabble panic and attack straw effigies,” Lady Mary said to Thigpen, as if tutoring a child.

“It was to those dangers I referred,” he said.

A sharp blast of autumn wind blew the coach door shut. Thigpen opened it again and offered Silvia his hand.

As she stepped up into the coach, she murmured in his ear, “It’s so kind of you to set aside that silk for my trousseau.”

“Nothing’s too good for Henry Thigpen’s bride-to-be,” he said without a smile.

“I’m glad to be gone from London but not from you.” Silvia batted her eyelashes flirtatiously and examined her future husband’s face. His nose drooped, his lips were pinched, his eyes ringed in purple, and his cheeks splotched by spidery veins—a candidate for unexpected Sudden Death, if there ever was one. She prayed silently he would survive at least until the wedding night, after he had written her into his will.

“By the time I return I’m sure my uncle will have forwarded you my dowry,” she said, tucking her hem inside as Thigpen closed the door after her. She understood only too well that Thigpen wanted to marry her capital more than he wanted a wife with pouting lips and plump breasts peeking over her bodice.

“Do you suppose it will be in the form of a bank draught or in gold coinage?” he asked as she leaned out the window.

“Oh, I suppose a bank draught. It’s safer, don’t you think? Does it matter?” She tried to keep her voice low, as if to emphasize their intimacy. Actually, she was worried that Lady Mary would overhear them. The only way to get the money she needed out of Lady Mary was if the old hag had no idea how much she needed it.

Lady Mary hammered on the cab ceiling with her ebony walking stick. The coachman cracked the whip, and the horses surged away from Weaver’s Hall in the direction of Addle Street.

Master Thigpen jumped back out of the way. He saw Silvia’s hand emerge from the window to wave goodbye with a vast, linen handkerchief.It was the mercer’s last glimpse of Silvia Tinnley.

In years to come, he would remember the handkerchief and ponder how odd it was that so many of his fiancées died before the nuptials.