I must look a fright, C.J. thought as she rose and shook her legs, wincing at their soreness when she placed her feet solidly on the pavement beneath her. She limped over to Pelham’s Bookstore, hoping to view her reflection in the emporium’s convex window. Her makeup had worn off, and glancing about at the ribbon vendors and bakers, the milkmaids and flower sellers, she realized that perhaps it was for the best that she bore no traces of rouge and eyeliner. She managed a self-mocking snicker. Yeah, she blended.
C.J. slid her tongue over her teeth. Her mouth felt as though it were filled with cotton, and she was sure her morning breath was foul. Using Pelham’s window as a looking glass, she removed the delicate linen handkerchief from her reticule and wiped the grime from her face, then took off her bonnet and availed herself of the little silver-backed tortoiseshell comb in an effort to make her hair as presentable as possible.
Muscle spasms in her neck and shoulders shot slivers of pain into her temples. Not only had she slept all wrong, C.J. hadn’t eaten since the night before she’d left the twenty-first century. Her head throbbed from hunger as well as fatigue. This is a hell of a way to lose weight, she thought. In her lightheadedness, she was barely aware of taking an apple off of a heaping pile of fruit from a Stall Street cart. Turning to walk toward Cheap Street, she had all but finished devouring her meager breakfast when she heard a distinct cry of distress.
“Stop, thief!” a man shouted. Barreling toward her was a husky costermonger in a coarse white apron worn directly over his shirtsleeves, which were shoved up past hairy, muscled forearms. Startled out of her confusion, C.J. realized that the apple seller was referring to her as the lightfingers. The coster’s accusation engendered a substantial commotion among the other purveyors, who immediately made a grand show of surveying their wares to ensure that they had not been pilfered as well.
Although a small boy encouraged her to “run!” C.J. was too stunned to take off. Within moments, a shadow was thrown across her path and her upper arm was seized by one of the largest men she had ever seen. The blood drained from her face as she beheld with all the terror of a trapped hare an enormous brute menacing her with a truncheon.
“Take her in, Constable,” the fruit seller cried. His fellow vendors joined the angry demand in a chorus of belligerent catcalls.
Just as she had reacted on the previous afternoon when she had nearly been trampled into pudding by a coach-and-four, C.J. fought to find her voice, unable to either whisper or scream. Finally, she managed to ask how the man in mufti could possibly represent the strong arm of English common law.
The constable laughed, showing irregular, worn-down stubs of tooth, some of which were sepia toned from tobacco stains; others were black with decay. C.J. had forgotten how dreadful the state of dentistry was in Britain in those days. “Uniform?” the barrel-chested brute guffawed. “His Majesty’s officers need no uniforms to discharge our constabulary duties.” He puffed up with pride. “I’ll have you know, missy, I was one of the finest Robin Redbreasts in my youth; you’ve not come across some untrained country-parish idiot.”
“Thank heavens!” C.J. replied, her irony lost on her accoster.
“Name’s Silas Mawl. I was a Bow Street Runner before I decided to seek greener pastures. Yes, indeed, I was quite the sight in my scarlet waistcoat.” Constable Mawl laughed again, displaying his decrepit choppers.
C.J. cast about helplessly, hoping some chivalrous soul or social reformer would come to her rescue. This was no pastoral fantasy, but rather an ordeal of frightening proportions, even for a nightmare. Mawl refused to relinquish his grip. “You’re bruising me, sir,” C.J. protested meekly, but she was greeted with a grin of remarkable self-satisfaction.
“You’re lucky you didn’t get greedy and filch yourself a sackful of apples or you’d be looking at a hemp necklace for sure.”
C.J. shuddered. Could she be hanged in England in 1801 for stealing a peck of apples? What then would the punishment be for taking only one piece of fruit? Shouldn’t she merit merely a stern admonishment not to repeat her thievery—or at the very worst, receive a slap on the wrist?
“I’m very sorry I took the apple, Constable Mawl. I was hungry, and I had not eaten for nearly two days—”
“Tell it to the magistrate,” Mawl gruffly replied. He softened momentarily when he noticed C.J.’s look of abject terror. “I’m only discharging my civic duties under the law, miss. Let’s move it along now.” The behemoth commenced to haul her across town, creating a public spectacle as well attended as any perambulation by the Pied Piper. Clearly, the constable was a well-known figure in the city, and the rough treatment of his prey was not only humiliating and painful, but proclaimed to all who witnessed C.J.’s predicament that she was a wrongdoer.
The route they took was an oddly familiar one. When they reached the Guildhall, the enormous official-looking stone edifice that also housed the grand Banqueting Room in all its gilded Georgian splendor, C.J. remembered that the last time she had visited this building, it was as a curious twenty-first-century tourist, eager to soak up as much “period” atmosphere as possible. She had scarce dreamed that someday she would be presented with a far greater taste of eighteenth-century justice than she had ever expected.
Once inside the Guildhall, Mawl led C.J. down several flights of steps whose surfaces progressed
