Read Online The Original Miss Honeyford by M.C. Beaton - Free Book Online Page B

rising from the Fleet. Alexander Pope’s lines swam through her tipsy head:
    To where Fleet-ditch with disemboguing streams
Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames
    Her servants had forgotten their rigid code of etiquette and were walking along beside her as they went up Ludgate Hill. A great crowd of people were hurrying in the same direction. Jem went over to one and asked where they were all going.
    He came back, his eyes gleaming with excitement.
    “There’s a hanging at the Old Bailey,” he said.
    “A Lunnon hanging,” said Peter. “But would it be right to take Miss?”
    “Course it would,” said Jem, pointing to carriages bearing several finely dressed ladies in the same direction.
    The wine had now hit Honey with even more force and so she was not quite able to understand where they were going or what was happening, and so, before long, she found herself jammed in a swaying, shouting crowd outside the Old Bailey in Newgate.
    Two men were being hanged for murdering a gentleman at the eleven-mile stone on Hounslow Heath, and a woman for stabbing her husband in the eye with a penknife.
    Honey stared up at the gallows and felt sick. She wanted to escape, but she was pressed so tightly by the crowd that she could not move an inch.
    The three condemned mounted the scaffold. Honey shivered, thinking of their plight, thinking of the dreadful night that had just been endured by these wretched people.
    The bellman would have stood outside the condemned hole intoning:
    All you that in the condemned hole do lie,
Prepare you, for tomorrow you shall die.
Watch all, and pray: the hour is drawing near
That you before the Almighty must appear.
Examine well yourselves, in time repent
That you may not to eternal flames be sent.
And when St. Sepulchre’s in the morning tolls,
The Lord above have mercy on your souls.
    They used to take the condemned to Tyburn where they were hanged just outside the gates of Hyde Park. Honey remembered her father telling her that it was quite common to see twenty-one people hanged at once.
    “Boom!” went the great tenor bell of St. Sepulchre’s. Honey groaned and closed her eyes and began to pray.
    Then disaster struck. The crowd, anxious to hear if the prisoners were going to confess, surged forward. At the same time, a cart over-laden with people trying to get a better view, broke and collapsed. People falling from the vehicle were trampled to death. More people fell under the feet of the crowd as panic set in. The screams of the dying and wounded were dreadful. There were cries of, “Murder! Murder!”
    The three prisoners kicked their lives out in the air above the screams and groans and curses of the crowd which surged forward and backward like the waves of some nightmarish sea.
    Honey was separated from her servants. She felt she was being crushed to death. Her head swam. She was terrified of fainting, for she knew once she went down, she would never be allowed to rise again.
    She thought of her father. She thought that all his care and concern were going to go unrewarded as his daughter met her end by being trampled to death at a public hanging.
    “Nonsense!” said Lady Canon. “Gone to a
hanging!
I’ll not believe it. It is too late in the day for a hanging in any case.”
    “This one was delayed, my lady,” said Beecham, “on account of repairs to the scaffold. When Miss Honeyford did not return, I sent John around to the mews to find out what had happened. He learned that she had left with her servants but could not find out where they had gone. Then, after an hour, that groom, Perkins, volunteers the information that they’ve gone to see the beasts at the Tower, and that he had recommended The Cock in Fleet Street as an eating place. I did not like to trouble your ladyship with this until your return because Miss Honeyford was protected, and it seemed an innocent place to go.
    “But just to make sure, I sent John after them, although they had a very good head start