Lawmaking can tether public morality to it and drag it from one place to another, much as we might wish it were the other way round. Literate London was becoming as hungry for Accounts of petty criminals as for traitors, slowly, but surely. That was good for my purse. But hanging crimes – once exclusively in the sphere of treason, heresy, murder, highway robbery – were now the likes of horse-thievery and pick-pocketing. Behavior that should be deterred, but by death?
There had been a condemned that very day, whose name was James Morneau. His crime had been stealing a pair of child’s shoes. Killed for that! Had James Morneau stolen the child herself, he would have faced misdemeanor charges, so long as he didn’t harm her.
It had gone too far. I’d known it for some time, to tell the truth, but seeing James Morneau swing was like a blow to the–
I ducked and sucked in a breath. I’d been struck in the back of the head.
Susan Palmer, the perpetrator, harrumphed and dropped herself heavily into a chair opposite mine.
“Someday,” she seethed, as seethes go whilst speaking with a mouthful of fresh vegetables – there was a bowl of them, one of Mme. Graveau’s earthenware bowls, of carrots, leeks, and I knew not what else, on the table before me. I swear, it had not been there, only moments before – “I will live in an England where it is not appropriate to wallop a girl’s ass as she walks by in a tavern.”
I had never walloped Susan’s ass. Once or twice, when she demanded it, but she implicitly wasn’t talking about that.